Shroud of Dishonour (6 page)

When Roget knocked on the door of the hovel, the former bawd opened the door. She was not the old crone that both men had expected. About fifty years of age, she was extremely thin, but upright in her bearing and even though her face was marked with old scars of some disease, probably the pox, a trace of lingering beauty could be seen in her dark eyes and high cheekbones. Her clothing was shabby, but clean, and the coif she wore over her greying hair was whiter than some of those worn by affluent goodwives in the town.

When Roget told her of Elfreda’s death, tears sprung into her eyes, but she kept her composure and asked them to come in.

Her dwelling place was comprised of only one room on the lower floor of the tumbledown house with a small scullery at the back. The sounds of tapping could be heard coming from above and Terese explained that the noise was being made by a tinker who lived upstairs. “His work consists mainly of repairing household vessels from goodwives in the town,” she said. “Thankfully, he does not labour at night.”

In the chamber were half a dozen children, all female, and ranging in age from about a year old to a child of around nine. Terese pointed to one of the smaller ones, a little girl just past the toddling stage, and told them she was Elfie’s daughter, and was called Ducette. The child was a pretty little thing, her hair startlingly blond, and there were two large dimples in her cheeks.

“She looks just like her mother,” Terese said with a catch in her voice. “I don’t know what will happen to the child now that Elfie is dead. As far as I know, Elfie had no family, not hereabouts, anyway. I can keep Ducette for a little while, but I am not a rich woman, as you can see.”

She gestured around the room, which was sparsely furnished with a pile of skimpy straw pallets and a few wooden bowls and spoons lying on the surface of a rickety table.

“Did Elfie ever mention to you that she knew one of the men from the Templar enclave, mistress?” Bascot asked. “Or that she had any intention of going there?”

Terese shook her head. “I cannot recall her ever speaking about your Order, Sir Bascot, even in passing. But if it was a recent notion, she would not have done so, for I have not seen Elfie since a week past, when she came to pay me the four pennies I charge each mother for the children’s keep. She said nothing to me then that was out of the usual. She played with Ducette for a while and gave her a kiss before she left.”

“One of the women who worked with Elfreda told us that she was expecting to earn a substantial sum of money for her services on the night she left,” Bascot said. “And a well-filled purse was found alongside her body, so we believe it was the promise of monetary reward that lured her to her death.”

“I am sure that is so,” Terese agreed. “The mothers of every one of these children are desperate for money. Harlots do not willingly have babies. It only happens when the medicants we use to prevent such an occurrence fail. We know the fate that awaits our offspring—especially the girls. Most of them will end up in the same trade as their dams. I do my best to keep the little ones clean and fed, and teach them what manners I can, but their destiny, unless there is enough money to save them, is to be harlots. There are a few foundling homes available for such children, but not nearly enough.”

She looked towards the little girls. The eldest was keeping a couple of the younger ones amused by throwing a small coloured ball back and forth, another was drawing in the hard-packed dirt of the floor with a stick while the other two—aged about three or four—were clapping their hands as they repeated a nonsense rhyme in a singsong fashion.

“I do not tend any male children here. All these little ones will have more than enough congress with men once they are past childhood,” Terese said with a catch in her voice. “For a short time, I save them from that fate.”

One of the younger children began to cry and Terese picked her up and soothed her. Her world-weary eyes looked straight into Bascot’s blue one as she held the child against her withered breast. “I am sorry I do not have any knowledge that will help you, lord, but there is only one thing I can tell you for certain, and that is Elfreda would not have been tempted to go into the preceptory for love of a man.”

B
ASCOT AND
R
OGET PARTED OUTSIDE THE FORMER PROSTITUTE’S house, the captain to go to the castle and give his report to the sheriff, and the Templar to return to the preceptory. As Bascot rode up the track outside the city walls, he pondered on the motivation for the murder. On the surface, it appeared that it was an attack on the Templar Order, and intended to expose hidden vices. But his thoughts, although he was not aware of it, soon began to echo those of Nicolaa de la Haye. Reluctant as he was to consider it, he came to the realisation that it could have been someone in the Templar enclave who had murdered the harlot, and also desecrated the chapel, in retaliation for what he saw as an unacceptable sin on the part of one of his brethren.

Viewing the situation dispassionately, he had to admit that there were some in the Order that found the strict dictates of the Rule difficult to obey. Brothers inclined to garrulousness found keeping the Grand Silence during meals irksome; others thought the stricture against hunting a deprivation almost beyond bearing, while some of the knights complained of the forbiddance of adding ornate bridles or reins to the accoutrements of their destriers.

But most of these were viewed as minor inconveniences; it was the need to be chaste, in accordance with the vow they had taken, that a few of the lustier men found extremely difficult to cope with. For that reason, the punishment for this particular transgression was harsh and every care was taken that none of the brothers, denied access to female flesh, lapsed into the sin of sodomy. Every Templar, of whatever rank, was forbidden to disrobe completely, even when he lay down for his night’s rest. Lights were kept burning all night in dormitories, and the lambskin girdle of chastity, which was donned at the time of initiation, must not be removed.

From d’Arderon’s assurance to the sheriff, it was apparent that none of the brothers under the preceptor’s regular command had been punished for such a transgression, but that did not mean that the sin had not been committed and kept hidden, at least from the preceptor.

He considered the characters of the men who lived in the enclave on a regular basis, not even pausing to include d’Arderon, Hamo, Emilius or the priest, Brother John, in his reflections. The preceptor was a man of strict honour and the serjeant the same. Both would rather sacrifice their lives than betray the brotherhood. As for Draper Emilius, even though Bascot felt his probity, too, was beyond question, his withered arm precluded him from suspicion. It would have taken two strong hands to overcome and strangle the young prostitute, a physical ability that Emilius did not have. And it was most unlikely that Brother John, a devout and elderly priest, had gone publicly into town to lure a harlot to her death.

Apart from these brothers, there were seven men-at-arms who, during the last few years, had been posted more or less permanently in Lincoln. All were veterans who had served in the Holy Land and sent to the Lincoln enclave to man the garrison and help train newly initiated brothers. Bascot knew them all well and found it hard to believe any of them had broken their vow to remain chaste.

The same could be said of the lay brothers and servants in the enclave. The lay brothers were few in number, comprised of the blacksmith, the elderly cook who prepared the meals they ate, and a widower with carpentry skills that had joined the enclave a few years before, shortly after his wife died. All of them had been in the Lincoln commandery for some time. It seemed improbable that, after so many years of faithful service, one of them would have erred.

As for the lay servants, menials hired to attend to some of the more tedious tasks in the enclave, again, it was doubtful that any of them could be responsible for the outrage. There were a few grooms who mucked out the stables, a spotty-faced lad who assisted the cook and ran errands, and a young man who had suffered the misfortune of being born with a twisted spine but who, despite his disability, swept out the bail, dusted sleeping pallets with crushed penny-royal to deter fleas and cleaned out the midden. All of them were biddable and seemed content with their lot. None had ever, to Bascot’s knowledge, given cause to be suspected of lasciviousness.

If his judgements of all those within the Lincoln enclave were correct and, as d’Arderon believed, none guilty of forbidden congress with women, then it followed that it could not have been one of them that had inspired the deep outrage that had prompted this terrible crime.

That left only the men who had passed through the enclave in the weeks since Eastertide to be considered. Nearly all of them, both those still in the commandery and the men forming the contingent that had recently left, were from commanderies far to the north of Lincoln, from York and another preceptory at Penhill, high in the Yorkshire Moors. Only a couple of the men that were still in the Lincoln commandery were from a closer enclave, the one located at Temple Hirst, a few miles to the northwest in South Yorkshire. But was it reasonable to consider any of these men, all of whom had been in Lincoln for only a short period, and would not be familiar with the location of the numerous brothels in the town?

Bascot was about to dismiss all of the transient brothers as likely suspects when the thought struck him that one of them could have witnessed lewd behaviour in the commandery he had just left. If so, was it possible he had contained his rage at the immorality until he was on a journey that would take him out of the country, and so free him from discovery, before seeking a way to relieve the poisonous envy that was festering in his soul?

The Templar shook his head to clear it. These speculations were wild and fanciful. He must look for solid facts before forming any hypothesis about the murderer’s motivation. He had yet to speak to the three young men Hamo had hired to help with caring for the horses in the preceptory. They had reported for their duties at Prime on the morning that Elfreda and her companion had been admitted to the preceptory. That was not long after the time she must have been killed. It may be that one of them had seen someone leaving the enclave and could identify him.

His musings had taken him almost to the gates of the commandery and he gave the gateward a salute as he approached the entrance. Before he went any further with the investigation, he needed to make a report to Preceptor d’Arderon about what he and Roget had learned at the brothel. It would make disappointing news.

T
HE NEXT DAY, AS NEWS OF THE MURDER SPREAD THROUGHOUT the town, the reaction was mainly one of shock, but there were a few who, envious of the wealth that had been donated to the Order, voiced the opinion that the prostitute’s death was certain to be connected to a Templar brother’s licentious behaviour. During the daily services in the numerous churches throughout Lincoln, priests sent up a plea for heavenly aid in catching the murderer, and one or two of the more sanctimonious prelates begged God not to take vengeance on the town for the desecration of a chapel that was not attended by any of its citizens.

Bascot and Roget went into Lincoln, intending to speak to the three young lads Hamo had hired to assist the enclave’s grooms and then question the men Verlain had said were regular customers of Elfreda. None of the former had turned up for work that morning, probably because the boys, or their parents, were fearful of them returning to a place where a murder, with its terrible overtones of sacrilege, had taken place. It had been through the agency of the town bailiff, Henry Stoyle, that Hamo had hired the lads, and so they would need to go to the guildhall, where the bailiff spent most of his working day, and ask him where the boys could be found.

Both Bascot and the captain doubted whether any of the three lads had been involved in the murder, because the man-at-arms on the gate at the time Elfreda and her companion had been admitted to the enclave had been adamant that no one else had either entered, or left, the preceptory before the young townsmen turned up for work over an hour later. Since the other gate into the commandery, the one out onto the hillside, had been locked and barred, it would have been impossible for any of the three to have gained early access to the commandery, killed Elfreda, and then reappeared outside the walls at the hour they had been told to report for duty. But Bascot was hoping that when the youngsters had been on their way to the enclave they might have seen the person responsible for the crime. Unless it was a Templar brother who had committed the murder, whoever had carried out the deed must have hidden somewhere in the preceptory until the inmates were astir, and then slipped out through the hillside gate when the horses were led out for exercise. There was a slim chance that one, or all, of the boys had seen him on the streets as he made his way back to town.