The priest bit his lower lip and leaned back on his stool as if the question really puzzled him. "Not much, " he murmured. "The clothes he fled in, his knife and a purse with some money. Why?"
"Nothing, " Corbett smiled back. "Nothing. I simply wondered. Where is the body?" he asked. The priest stared at him.
"Duket's body! Where is it?" he demanded again.
The priest shrugged. "Duket was a suicide and was treated as such. The under-sheriff of the city had the body dragged by the heels on a sheet of ox-hide to a place outside the walls and it was buried in the city ditch. The usual fate for anyone who commits such an act. "
"No one, " Corbett interjected. "No one pleaded for the body?"
"Master Clerk, " Bellet replied, staring at him fixedly across the glowing coals. "Duket was a suicide and the church's teaching on that subject is not a matter for debate!"
Corbett pursed his lips and tried to look baffled about the whole affair. "Can I see inside the church?" The priest pointed out that it was dark and little could be seen. Corbett nodded understandably and promised to return the following day. He then took his leave, glad to be out of that room with its shadowy menace and away from a church which offered little comfort to either the dead or the living.
Corbett wandered back to the tavern that he had passed earlier in the evening and entered its warmth and light. He sat at a trestle table and drank some beefy broth generously garnished with leeks and garlic, as well as a quart of heady ale. He felt warm, relaxed and decided he could not face the journey home so he hired a blanket from the landlord and a space to sleep on the rush-strewn floor. He lay down exhausted but unable to forget that dark church with its sinister priest. Vague memories stirred about stories he had heard or read about St. Mary Le Bow. An unhappy building. But why? Where had he learnt that? His tired brain groped for an answer when he suddenly remembered something disturbing. The priest had expected him, almost as if the King always ordered a high-ranking clerk to investigate every suicide in the city. Corbett was still puzzling about that as he fell into a deep sleep.
Four
The next morning Corbett was awakened by one of the tavern slatterns. He felt drowsy and thick-headed after the previous evening. He warmed himself at one of the cooking fires whilst he consumed a breakfast of ale and coarse rye bread. He then picked up his belongings and made his way down Cheapside, calling into the open-fronted stall of a barber who shaved his upper lip and chin with consummate skill and, at Corbett's gentle questioning, supplied details about the local coroner who carried out the inquest on Lawrence Duket. He was a physician, Roger Padgett, who plied his trade in one of the side alleyways off Cheapside. After he left the barber's stall, Corbett found the house, a modest two-timbered affair with the huge gilt sign of a bowl and pestle hanging over the door.
Padgett was a garrulous little man inflated with his own self-importance as a doctor and a coroner. A small pretentious figure in his scarlet cloak slashed with blue and lined with taffeta, who carefully inspected Corbett's warrant before inviting him into the lower room of his house which served as his surgery. Corbett did not trust doctors and saw their secret arts as trickery. He looked around the room and supposed Padgett was no different. There was a Zodiac map on the floor, and along the walls shelves full of clay jars and clearly marked 'senna', 'henbane', 'foxglove' or 'eel skin'. A huge wooden bowl stood on the table, full of a fine white dust which made him sneeze and cough until the physician covered it with a damp cloth.
Padgett sat himself on the room's one and only chair and, ignoring Corbett's comfort, abruptly asked. "How can I be of assistance, Master Clerk?"
"By telling me about Lawrence Duket, how and where did you find the body?"
The physician slouched in his chair, his fingers clutching the arms while he looked above Corbett's head and talked as if he was reciting a poem. "Lawrence Duket was found hanged in the church of Saint Mary Le Bow shortly after daybreak on fourteenth January. I believe the Rector, the priest Bellet, found the body. " He looked direct at Corbett. "You have met him?" Corbett nodded and Padgett gave him an odd look before continuing:
"Anyway, Bellet cut the body down, and left it lying in the sanctuary. I and a group of witnesses came to inspect the corpse. There were no marks of violence upon it, no rupture of the skin or any other sign of attack. The only wound was a purple red gash round the neck and a large bruise under the right ear, both of these were caused by the noose and knot of the rope mat Duket tied round his throat when he hanged himself. I then investigated the place of death. A large metal bar which juts out from the side of one of the windows in the sanctuary and the Blessed Chair had been pushed under it. Duket apparently used this to stand on, tied the halter around the bar, fastened the noose about his neck and then simply stepped off the chair. The only extraordinary thing were these black silk threads found around the noose. " He handed them over to Corbett, who studied them for a while before slipping them into his own wallet.
The physician then looked at Corbett and grimaced with his small prim mouth. "That is all. There were the usual signs of a hanged person. The bowels and stomach had emptied, the face had turned a blueish-purple, the tongue was swollen and bitten and the eyes protuberant. "
"Nothing else? No sign whatsoever of any violence?" Corbett impatiently interrupted him.
"It was, " Padgett said slowly, "as I have described for you. I think that Duket killed Crepyn, fled to the church and, through fear or remorse, hanged himself. "
"There were no other signs, no marks on the body?" Corbett persisted and raised a hand to placate the physician's evident annoyance, before continuing: "Of course, your report was very complete. The Lord Chancellor himself commented on that but, was there anything that your professional eye noted but dismissed as having nothing to do with the death?"
"Only one thing, " came the quick smug reply. "Duket had bruises on the upper arms but they were probably only bruises, nothing else. "
Corbett smiled. "Thank you, Master Padgett, and if you remember anything please send it to the chancery. " Before the bemused physician could answer, Corbett was through the door striding up the street back towards Cheapside.
A pale sun had broken through a cloudy sky drawing the usual crowds into Cheapside. Scriveners with their portable trays were ready for business. The stalls were up, the shop fronts down and business was very brisk. There were merchants in Flemish beaver hats and leather boots, lawyers with scrolls under their arms, apprentices in surcoats and hose, women of all kinds and every profession. Haughty ladies in their heavy folded dresses, girdled by low-slung, jewelled belts, their heads adorned with linen wimples and their soft bodies protected by their fur-lined cloaks.
The noise and clamour of the street were all the more strident to Corbett, so used to the quiet serenity of the chancery. Merchants and drapers tried to interest him in velvet, silks or lawn. Food stall-owners and bakers offered hot spiced ribs of beef, eel and meat pies garnished with leeks and onions. Two stall-holders fought over a pile of pewter pots. Corbett saw two pockets picked and held his own purse tightly under his cloak, ever vigilant against the legion of thieves in the capital. A string of hapless, convicted felons were led through the crowd by a group of constables taking them from the Tun to Newgate, and these unfortunates were subject to every abuse possible by those who considered themselves lucky not to be one of them. There were two bawds, naked except for their petticoats, doing penance though their bold eyes, saucy looks, as well as the lewd sniggers of some of the spectators, made it obvious they would soon be back at their trade.
At one time the press of people was so great that Corbett panicked for a while, remembering that fatal press of bodies before the royal pavilion in Wales so many years before. The moment, however, passed and he was through, standing once more before the gate leading to Saint Mary Le Bow. Once again he sensed that feeling of desolation and dread that he had experienced before and tried to remember what he knew about the church but the memory escaped him. The place was deserted except for a few gawking onlookers who promptly disappeared as the black-gowned figure of Bellet strode across to meet Corbett. "Ah, Master Clerk, " the priest proffered a bony hand which Corbett clasped, aware that the priest's white gaunt features and sombre dress only enhanced the sinister fear he had experienced on the previous night.
"I have come to view the church, " Corbett announced more abruptly than he had intended. "Now, in the light of day. "
"All will be revealed!" the priest quietly retorted and
Corbett thought Bellet was more confident than he had sounded the night before but he only nodded his assent and allowed Bellet to escort him up to the main door in the church.
Inside, the entrance was dark and smelt of must and damp. Corbett stopped and looked around, his attention was caught by a narrow iron-studded door on his left. He ignored all else and moved across to open it. "It's locked, " Bellet smugly commented. "It has been for months. It leads up to the belfry and the tower roof but, if you want… " His voice trailed off as if he was bored.
"Yes, " Corbett replied testily, "I want. Open it!"
The priest, his lips pursed in a half-smile, fumbled with a heavy bunch of keys which swung from his belt and eventually he unlocked the door. It creaked open, protesting loudly on its rusty hinges. Corbett brushed past the priest and began to climb the wet, mildewed spiral staircase. The belfry was at the top, its great bronze bells now hanging silent. Corbett gave them a cursory glance and, pulling back the heavy iron bolts, began to push and heave at the thick wooden trapdoor above him until it began to creak and lift upwards.
The wind whipped Corbett's face as he emerged from the trapdoor and stood on the tower roof. He approached the short crenellated wall and stared down to where Cheapside lay dizzily small beneath him. The city stretched out on either side, a row of roofs and houses to the south and the brown soil and snow-covered fields to the north beyond Newgate and the old city wall. Corbett looked round the tower. Someone could have lurked there and made their way down into the church itself but the trapdoor, as well as the door to the tower, looked as if they had not been used for years and any intruder who used them would have roused Duket, the ward watch and half of Cheapside.
Corbett shook his head and made his way down to where the priest was waiting for him, a sardonic grin on his sallow features.
"Did you find anything, Master Clerk?" Corbett ignored the sarcasm in his voice and stared round the porch. In one corner, bell ropes dangled down from a small aperture in the ceiling; beneath them, coiled in rough heaps, were other pieces of rope. Some of them new, some old and frayed.
"This was where Duket took the rope from?"
The priest nodded. "Yes, " he replied, "he must have come down here to collect the rope and then gone back to the sanctuary. "
"In the dark?" Corbett asked.
"What do you mean?" was the surly reply.
"I mean, " Corbett said slowly, "that Duket sat here in the sanctuary in the dark and then quietly made his way down into the gloom to collect a piece of rope to kill himself?"
"He had a candle, " the priest answered quickly.
"If he did, " Corbett commented, waving his hand round the porch, "then he did not use it. There is no trace of fresh wax on the floor!" He looked at Bellet, pleased to see the sardonic grin disappear from his face. "An agitated man, " Corbett continued, "carrying a candle, stumbling around in the dark. His hand would shake. " Corbett scuffed the floor with the toe of his boot. "There would be more wax here than dirt!"
Corbett turned and walked into the nave of the church, a large paved area which stretched down to the rood screen, a wooden trellised partition with a huge door in the centre which led into the sanctuary and the stairs to the high altar. There was a row of stout squat pillars down either side of the nave. Each of the transepts looked black and empty except for the stacked wooden benches and the faded frescoes on the dirty whitewashed walls. High above each transept was a row of small oval-shaped windows. Corbett stared up at them, they were all firmly shuttered both inside and out except for one where the shutters hung loose, though still too small for any man to get through unnoticed by either Duket or the ward watch.
Corbett pulled his cloak around him and walked further down the nave, noting even how his leather-soled boots echoed like drumbeats round the church. He could hear the priest slithering behind him like some rat creeping along a pipe. Corbett walked into the sanctuary. The Blessed Chair, thick heavy and wooden, sat like a throne at the bottom of the white stone altar. There was nothing to see, though Corbett realized that he had never been in such a stark, lonely sanctuary. The high altar rose above him, lonely and impassive, its marble ledge unadorned by flowers or linen cloths. Behind it was a reredos, a blank screen with a faded fresco and above it a lonely red sanctuary lamp gleamed and winked in the gloom. There were benches at either side. Corbett turned and looked up, there was a trefoil window meshed with wire and horn above the high altar, which provided most of the light, flanked by a row of shuttered windows as in the rest of the church.
He walked over to the right of the sanctuary and looked up at the iron bar jutting out beside the large, wooden shuttered window. "Is that the bar?"
The priest, standing behind him, one hand on the arm of the Blessed Chair, nodded. "Yes, " he replied slowly. "The chair had been moved by Duket. He must have used it to fasten the rope round the bar. "
Corbett turned, looked directly at Bellet and shook his head. "I would not be too sure about that, " he replied and, not waiting for a reply, walked back down the nave of the church.
Corbett left the church and turned into the area below
Friday Street occupied by foreign tanners. The place was now a scene of frenetic building activity as workmen were engaged in constructing a huge cistern or conduit which would hold water run through elm. pipes from the Tyburn Stream. It was also the gallows ground and two bodies, fresh carrion by the look of them, hung twirling by their necks from the crude crossbeam of the scaffold. At any other time Corbett would have quickly passed such a scene but now, with the image of Lawrence Duket hanging by his neck at Saint Mary Le Bow fresh in his mind, Corbett went up and closely studied the bodies. Impervious to the smell and the horror of the grisly corpses, Corbett stayed till he was satisfied and then moved away to ask the whereabouts of Duket's house. His enquiries usually drew dark looks or blank stares but at last he was directed to a house on the corner of Bread Street.
A modest, two-storeyed building, Corbett thought it was deserted for the front door was secured tightly as were all the shutters. Corbett, however, pounded on the door, shouting for it to be opened "on the King's business". He heard footsteps, the bolts drawn and the door was opened by a small slim woman of medium height with auburn hair caught up in a wimple, the air of sobriety and mourning completed by a long, black dress. The only concession to fashion was a filigree gold chain round her waist and fresh white lace round the cuffs and long slim neck. Her face was severe with petulant lips and arrogant grey eyes. Corbett offered his warrant, the woman took it and read it quietly, her lips moving slowly over the words, she returned it and beckoned Corbett into the lower room, opening the shutters to allow in some air and light. The place was bereft of furniture except for leather trunks and heaps of clothing.
The woman watched Corbett for a while. "I am Jean Duket, " she said softly. "What do you want with me?" The words had a faint suggestive tone which Corbett ignored as he described his interest in Lawrence Duket's death. Although the woman was in mourning weeds, she seemed little disturbed by her brother's death. Only when Corbett mentioned Crepyn's name did Jean's eyes narrow, the colour rising in her cheeks.