The Sanctuary Seeker by Bernard Knight

she scrabbled at the side of the wagon. He was a thin waif of thirteen, his red hair heightening the pallor of his face, a white mask with red-rimmed eyes, from which tears dribbled down his sallow cheeks.
    The babble and screams of the woman, herself less than thirty years old, were almost incoherent, but John picked out repeated exhortations to God to save her only son.
    As soon as the cart stopped, one of the soldiers walking behind it pulled her away. ‘Come on, Mother, there’s nothing you can do.’
    She fell to her knees in the muddy earth and clasped his legs, her terror-racked face upturned to him in agony worse than that her child was soon to suffer.
    ‘My son! Save him! Let him go, sir!’
    More embarrassed than angry, the sergeant-at-arms pulled his feet away and she fell to her face in the wet soil. A yeoman, obviously her husband, pulled her gently to her feet and led her away towards the edge of the crowd, as she continued alternately to sob and howl.
    The soldier motioned the carter to move directly under the gallows, while he walked up to the coroner and raised a hand to his chest in a perfunctory salute.
    ‘You need the names of these felons, Sir John?’
    ‘And their place of abode, if you know them, sergeant.’ He turned to point at Thomas, who was still leaning against the other side of the unused wagon.
    ‘Give them to my clerk there, to record on his roll.’
    The soldier hesitated. ‘There was also a message I was to give you, Crowner. The town crier may have some news of the man found dead in Widecombe.’
    News travelled fast within the closed community of Exeter, where every citizen was a professional gossip.
    They all knew about the man lying stabbed in the stream, fifteen miles from the city.
    ‘What news, man?’ demanded John.
    ‘I don’t know, sir. But a journeyman mason told the crier that he wished to speak to you. He is working at the cathedral.’ He turned on his heel and went about his business.
    As John pondered the development in the Widecombe affair, the last act of the drama before him was being played out.
    The hangman, who on days other than Tuesday or Friday, ran a butcher’s trade in the Shambles, climbed a rough ladder resting against the gallows crossbar and pulled down two nooses that had been wrapped around the timber. Then he slid a plank deftly across the width of the wagon under the side-rails and climbed aboard. John sensed the hubbub of the crowd damping down, as the man untied the ropes that lashed the two victims to the cart, leaving their wrists tied. The old man he urged up to stand on the plank and the boy he lifted on to it. The child was keening softly, staring at his mother and father on the edge of the crowd in mixed supplication and incomprehension.
    With the soldiers had come a priest, and he now began to read some unintelligible dirge in Latin from a book held before him, his tone suggesting that this was an unwelcome chore with which someone from the diocese was stuck every Tuesday and Friday. The hangman slipped the rope over the old man’s head and pulled it firm. Then he did the same to the boy, who began to screaming, his wails matched by heartrending cries from his mother. The crowd was silent, but as the executioner leaped from the wagon and smacked the horse’s flank, a low animal growl rose from the throng.
    The mare, as well accustomed as the priest to what was required, moved forward with a jerk. The noise from the crowd swelled and, as the two victims tumbled first from the plank and then from the back of the moving wagon as it cleared the gallows, an orgasmal groan spread across the meadows.
    The screeching of the boy was strangled into a gargling croak as the noose tightened around his neck and he began to kick furiously, constantly at first, then in spasmodic jerks. With a cry of despair, his father broke from the crowd and raced to the gallows. He flung himself around his son’s legs and pulled as hard as he could to shorten the