A Shrine of Murders Read online

  Kathryn grinned mischievously, her eyes twinkling. ‘I did not know you were such a keen gardener, Master Clerk.’

  Luberon coughed. ‘I am, after a fashion, and Straunge is correct, I have an interest in herbs. But I am not a killer, and yesterday I was working in the Archbishop’s chancery.’ He shook his head. ‘I wondered if they would pounce on me.’

  ‘Oh,’ Kathryn quipped, ‘whenever you put two or three physicians together, you always get into a dispute. But, Master Murtagh, what now?’

  Colum sat slumped in his chair, lost in his own thoughts.

  ‘I have asked the merchants,’ Newington intervened, squinting at the hour-candle winking on its spigot at the corner of the room, ‘those who were with Spurrier when he died, to join us. They’ll arrive at the second hour, but, Master Murtagh, remember you have other business?’

  Colum drummed his fingers on the arms of his chair.

  ‘I know, I know, petty disputes. They do not concern me.’

  ‘You are the King’s Commissioner,’ Newington continued smoothly. ‘You work in the marshalsea of the royal household, and in the circumstances, these matters must be adjudicated by you.’

  Colum made a rude sound with his lips and stared at Kathryn. He saw the flush of excitement high in her cheeks, and if he had had the courage, he would have complimented her on how lovely she was. Strange, he thought, Kathryn could change so quickly. She had struck him as comely, serene and rather withdrawn, but the heated debate with the physicians had sparked something in her and brought a passion to life. Colum looked guiltily away as Kathryn rose.

  ‘I do have some information,’ Kathryn announced, crossing to the door to make sure it was firmly closed. She walked into the centre of the room. ‘I think,’ she began falteringly, ‘I think I know how the murderer selects his victims.’

  The rest stared at her.

  ‘You have heard,’ Kathryn continued more firmly, ‘of the poet Geoffrey Chaucer?’

  Luberon smiled and nodded. Colum looked askance whilst Newington just shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘Chaucer was a poet,’ Kathryn continued, ‘who lived, oh, about a hundred years ago during the reign of Richard the Second. My father was fond of quoting him.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ Newington said. ‘I have heard the name. He wrote a famous poem about Canterbury.’

  ‘The Canterbury Tales,’ Kathryn agreed. ‘They include a prologue, a list of characters, a knight, a nun, a prior, a monk, a summoner. Indeed, virtually every occupation in society. They leave the Tabard Inn in Southwark one April morning to go to Becket’s shrine. On the journey, as is the custom, they each tell a story.’

  Colum still looked puzzled.

  ‘Look,’ Kathryn explained, ‘my father often quoted the poet’s verses. They were written in rhyming couplets very similar to the ones our murderer has left on the cathedral door.’ She sighed and flailed her hands against her side. ‘Can’t you see? Our assassin’s an educated man. He’s read Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. His doggerel verse parodies that of Chaucer, and all the people he has murdered have identical occupations to the characters in Chaucer’s prologue.’

  ‘Too far-fetched,’ Newington said.

  ‘No, it isn’t,’ Luberon spoke up. ‘Mistress Swinbrooke is correct. One of Chaucer’s tags reads “Radix malorum est Cupiditas” – The love of money is the root of all evil. Don’t you remember the assassin’s verse:

  ‘Becket’s tomb all dirt and crass,

  Radix malorum est Cupiditas.’

  Luberon preened himself. ‘I believe it’s a quotation from “The Pardoner’s Tale”.’

  Luberon then stood up and almost did a dance, his little feet shuffling, his pompous face wreathed in a smile. He clapped his hands like a child.

  ‘Oh, very good, Mistress Swinbrooke!’ he chortled. ‘Very good indeed!’

  ‘What use is it?’ Colum asked peevishly. ‘How many characters are in this Chaucer’s Tales?’

  Kathryn made a face. ‘Oh, about twenty to thirty.’

  ‘So what do we do?’ Newington sneered. ‘Find a copy of these tales and ban all such professions from Canterbury? Impossible! We are here to hang a murderer, not hunt for books.’

  Luberon glared at him. ‘No, no, there will be a copy in the cathedral library. The Cardinal Archbishop must own one.’ He picked up his cloak and rearranged it on the back of the chair. ‘When we are finished here, we must go there, Mistress Swinbrooke. All of us, and look at this book.’

  Colum relaxed and winked at Kathryn.

  ‘Mistress Swinbrooke, accept our congratulations. I do not wish to appear churlish; you may well have established one strand in our sorry tale. So we are looking for a murderer with a grievance against the shrine, who has read and studied this poet Chaucer. He may even possess a copy of his work? Master Luberon will take us to see this book?’

  ‘Well, we can’t go now,’ Newington interrupted. He pointed to the hour-candle, where the winking flame had reached the ring marking the second hour. ‘Let’s finish our business here,’ he grumbled. ‘Mistress Kathryn, you need not stay, though this should not take long.’

  He had hardly finished speaking when a tipstaff dressed in the city livery and carrying a silver-topped staff entered the room. He bent over the table and whispered to Colum and Luberon. The Irishman shrugged. Luberon cleared the papers from the table and gestured at Newington to join them. Kathryn went to join Thomasina, who sat in the window-seat pretending to doze.

  ‘A great deal of chatter,’ Thomasina murmured. ‘If men were as good with their promises as they are with their mouths, the world would be a happier place.’ She smiled and nudged Kathryn gently. ‘You held your own well there,’ she whispered. ‘Look at Luberon! He’s taken a liking to you! The Irishman’s still a closed book whilst Master Chaddedon . . .’ Thomasina drew back mockingly. ‘A conquest there, yes, Mistress?’

  ‘Be still!’ hissed Kathryn, trying to hide her embarrassment and silence her loud-mouthed maid.

  ‘If I was taking a wager,’ Thomasina continued blithely, ‘I would say you have met your murderer.’ She nudged Kathryn again. ‘Look at Alderman John Newington, he’s a morose bastard!’

  Kathryn looked across the table, where Luberon and Newington now sat on either side of Colum.

  ‘He’s always been miserable,’ Thomasina said. ‘He’s not Canterbury-born, you know. He came here as a young man and built himself up as a cloth merchant. Very little family. His wife died years ago, but he has a married daughter.’

  Thomasina drew in her breath to continue her report when the door was flung open and the tipstaff reentered. He banged his staff noisily on the floor, and Thomasina cursed.

  ‘Silence!’ the official shouted. ‘So those who have business before the King’s Commissioner may draw near and have their petitions redressed!’

  ‘Oh, shut up, you pompous peacock!’ Thomasina hissed in a loud whisper.

  The tipstaff glared at her, banged his staff noisily again and a group of men entered the room. Kathryn must have sat for an hour watching Murtagh, the King’s Commissioner in Canterbury, deal with petty civic affairs. The Bowyers’ Guild had sent representatives claiming that bow staffs should be three inches thick, squared, and seven feet long, the wood to be well polished and without knots. They loudly protested how others were selling inferior, cheaper staffs. Colum quietly heard them out and ordered the market beadles to make a search. A dispute between the Guild of Black Bread Bakers and the Guild of White Bread Bakers was summarily dismissed. Avery Sabine was fined for keeping hogs in the churchyard; Goodman Trench for driving posts into the King’s highway; Thomas Court for selling watery beer in wooden pots; Potterman, a barber-surgeon of St Peter’s, was fined twopence for shaving a man on Sunday. Other petty cases followed, most of them settled in a few minutes. Kathryn admired Murtagh’s cool detachment and the professional manner in which he dealt with these matters.

  He’s an actor, Kathryn thought, whether riding a horse, hearing a ca
se, administering the stables. What he does, he does well. But when his mask slips, what sort of man lies beneath? She watched the flame on the hour-candle move from the second to the third ring. At last Luberon announced the Court of Petty Sessions was over. Newington, crouching beside Colum, whispering advice on civic matters, agreed. The tipstaff went down the passageway and noisily informed the other plaintiffs to return another day.

  ‘What now?’ Thomasina moaned. She moved her large bottom on the window-seat.

  ‘Don’t wait,’ Kathryn replied. ‘This is taking longer than I thought. Go to the Rushmarket near Ridinggate. Buy fresh sheaves for the kitchen and I’ll meet you at home.’

  Thomasina gratefully stumped out whilst Colum waved Kathryn back to the table.

  ‘You found that fascinating, Mistress Swinbrooke?’

  ‘Not quite as much as you did.’

  Colum shrugged. ‘Between battles and horses, such was my task: Which member of the royal household could claim privilege? Who had been helping themselves in the pantry? Which of the royal scullions had cut meat from the spits?’ Colum smiled and stretched. ‘You English have a passion for the law.’

  He was about to continue when the door was again flung open and the tipstaff led in a group of merchants. They were portly, well-dressed in their beaver hats, quilted doublets, costly hose and expensive leather boots, but they clung together like a group of frightened children, appalled by the sudden murder of their colleague. They all had one desire: to leave Canterbury as quickly as possible. Colum questioned them gently, but it was like trying to draw blood from a stone. The merchants knew of no one in Canterbury who had a grievance against the dead Spurrier. They had seen or heard nothing untoward.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ one of them confessed. ‘We saw the stranger, but we thought he was a monk; he was hooded and cowled, and then he disappeared.’

  The rest of the group chorused agreement. Colum asked a few further questions, then courteously dismissed them. Once the merchants were gone, Kathryn, who had remained silent throughout the interrogation, stood and collected her cloak.

  ‘There’s nothing more we can do here.’ She sighed. ‘Master Luberon, the Chaucer manuscript?’

  ‘I must go too,’ Newington put in. He smiled sheepishly. ‘I have to make my peace with my son-in-law and daughter. There’s really no point in disturbing his Grace the Archbishop.’ He tapped the small clerk on the shoulder. ‘Luberon, you know more of libraries than I do. Ask his Grace the Cardinal if he has a copy of Chaucer’s poem and have it sent to Mistress Swinbrooke’s house in Ottemelle Lane.’

  The clerk agreed, hurriedly collected his papers, quill and inkpot, put them in a leather bag and followed Newington out of the chamber. Kathryn and Murtagh left a few minutes later. As they walked down the sun-lit steps of the Guildhall, they had to shield their eyes against the bright glare of the afternoon sun. Colum patted his stomach.

  ‘I am hungry, Mistress Swinbrooke. A bite to eat? Let me be your host.’

  ‘I thought you didn’t like taverns?’

  ‘Mistress Swinbrooke, my throat is dry and my belly empty. If Thomasina was here, I’d eat her!’

  Kathryn smiled and led him down into the High Street, now thronged with townspeople moving amongst the stalls. At the bottom of the Guildhall steps a man had been placed in a pillory, his ears pinned to the wooden slats on either side with a scrawled notice round his neck proclaiming that he had spoken contumaciously against the King. A group of nuns dressed in the black garb of the Order of the Holy Sepulchre were ministering to him, wiping the blood and sweat from his face and trying to make him sip from the cup of wine they held to the injured man’s bloodied lips. Kathryn looked away.

  ‘I wish people would keep a still tongue in their heads,’ she murmured.

  Colum guided her by the elbow through the busy market.

  ‘Aye, Mistress, as they say in Ireland, many a man’s tongue has cost him his head!’

  They stood aside to let a funeral procession pass, the coffin bobbing on the shoulders of the drunken pallbearers. Four men carrying lighted tapers on either side were just as deep in their cups, so it looked more of a mummer’s play than a funeral cortège.

  ‘In the midst of life we are in death,’ Kathryn observed.

  ‘Live life to the full and see the days,’ Colum retorted. ‘Mistress Swinbrooke, I have visited the cathedral on many an occasion, but the city I don’t really know. A good tavern?’

  ‘The Lion in the Mercery,’ Kathryn replied and moved to the right, past the Chequers Tavern, called the ‘Inn of a Hundred Beds’, where pilgrims thronged in the wide portico. Some were preparing to leave the city, the metal badge depicting the head of St Thomas à Becket fastened to their coats or hats. Others had just arrived, pushing through the gateway into the yard, shouting for ostlers and gazing about in wide-eyed wonderment.

  ‘If they only knew,’ Kathryn whispered.

  Suddenly, from the inn-yard, an Irish voice shouted, the words indistinct. Colum whirled round, his hand going to his knife, the other wrapping his thick woollen cloak shield, or buckler, round his arm. Kathryn gazed in amazement. Colum was no longer the graceful, sauntering Irishman but a fighter ready to strike and kill. He ignored Kathryn completely and gazed stony-eyed into the crowds thronging the great yard of the Chequers Tavern, as if expecting some enemy to attack.

  Kathryn moved towards him but Colum drew his knife and pushed her gently aside.

  ‘For God’s sake, man!’ Kathryn said.

  Colum blinked and looked at her. ‘You heard it!’ he snapped. ‘The Irish voice!’

  ‘Of course, and there are Welsh, French, Bretons, visitors from Calais. Colum, what is the matter?’

  At the tavern gate others were now looking towards the wild-eyed Irishman with his knife drawn. Kathryn heard the Irish voice calling, a man demanding service and cursing the ostler. Colum relaxed and resheathed his dagger. Kathryn took him gently by the wrist.

  ‘Colum, you are fine?’

  Colum grinned weakly.

  ‘Aye, woman, nothing but ghosts from my past.’

  Chapter 7

  Kathryn and Colum moved farther down the Mercery, where the houses of the rich and poor stood cheek by jowl. The cottages of the artisans were nothing more than wooden huts with roofs of straw or rushes, low squat buildings with overhanging roofs which continually dripped water. The mansions of the rich, however, were built of stout beams and plaster, their roofs supported by columns formed into grotesque figures of goblins or grinning monsters and covered with knots, scrolls and other bizarre designs. Colum stared up at the narrow wedge of blue sky between the houses.

  ‘I have never liked the city,’ he muttered. He was still restless and kept his hand on his dagger. He peered down the narrow gloomy lanes which ran off the Mercery, so dark that, even during the day, lantern-horns had been lit and placed on hooks outside the doors. At last they entered the Lion. The taproom was hot and sweltering; at the far end a great fire roared beneath three or four spits which were being turned by grimy-faced lads. Kathryn and Colum took a table near the window. A sweat-soaked slattern served them pork from pigs fed on the tenderest of acorns, and slices of carp, sharp in their tangy sauce, as well as watered wine in wooden bowls. Down the middle of the tavern was a great grease-covered table where the rest of the customers, most of them pilgrims, waited for the cook to bring down the meat on the spit so they could cut off slices. Colum watched this for a while. Now and again he glanced at Kathryn, noticing how deftly and delicately she cut her meat and popped small morsels into her mouth, afterwards washing her fingers daintily in a bowl of water and dabbing them on a napkin. She would do well at court, Colum thought. Kathryn looked up.

  ‘What are you thinking about, Irishman?’

  ‘I am sorry I lost my temper over Brantam.’ Colum sipped from his wine-bowl. ‘I must remember I am not in camp.’ He stared at her. ‘I am inconsiderate; it must be difficult being a woman physician. I mean with people like Co
tterell!’

  ‘Such people have the difficulty. I have none at all.’

  ‘Why did you forsake your husband’s name?’

  Kathryn shrugged. ‘Why does everyone ask me that?’ She stared down the tavern, where two cats were fighting over a rat they had caught. ‘My husband’s gone. I am a widow.’ Kathryn sighed. ‘Well, to all intents and purposes, I am.’

  ‘Though his body has never been found?’

  Kathryn looked at him and Colum knew he had touched her to the quick, for her eyes were guarded.

  ‘Let’s leave that matter, Colum,’ she replied.

  ‘The business at the Guildhall,’ Colum continued, so as to hide his embarrassment. ‘Do you have any suspicions?’

  Kathryn leaned back against the wall. She felt hot and tired. She wanted to return to Ottemelle Lane rather than sit in this sweltering tavern, with the cloth of her gown clinging to her body.

  ‘The murderer is an educated man,’ she said, ‘who knows Canterbury and has a grievance against the shrine. But what happens if we are wrong about the rest, eh, Irishman? What if he’s a physician not on Newington’s list?’

  ‘Newington is thorough.’

  ‘Fine, fine, but what happens if it is someone who simply has access to medicines and potions?’ Kathryn picked up her wine-bowl. ‘It might be easier if we hired men to watch all our suspects.’

  ‘That’s impossible,’ Colum said. ‘We have no right to do so, and we would be levelling an accusation against them which we can’t prove. As physicians they can go where they wish. As you said, even at night they have keys to the postern gates. If they are determined enough, they could give any spy the slip, so that would avail us nothing.’

  Colum leaned over and squeezed her hand. ‘You have already earned your fee, Mistress Swinbrooke, with this business of the poet Chaucer.’

  ‘We shall take it further,’ Kathryn returned, ‘when Luberon sends the Archbishop’s copy to my house. Which reminds me, Irishman, I should be grateful if you would ask them to send me a copy of the indenture and the fee the Corporation owes me.’ Kathryn cleaned her fingers with the napkin. ‘A poor patient not paying his fee is one thing, the Corporation of Canterbury is another! Now I must go.’