The Sanctuary Seeker by Bernard Knight Page A

death throes, oblivious of the collapse of his wife into a dead faint.
    The old vagrant died as he had lived, quietly and inconspicuously. A few intermittent twitches lasted for several minutes as his soul left the unhappy body that had sheltered it for sixty years.
    The coroner watched impassively, but with a return of the unease and foreboding that these rituals always generated. What sense could there be in publicly throttling a young lad who had run away with a pot worth twelve pence? Would there ever be a time in England when a better method of dealing with juvenile petty thieves could be devised? He motioned to Thomas and Gwyn as the two corpses made their last nervous twitches on the gallows.
    ‘Come on, Thomas - and you, Gwyn. There’s an inquest to hold, and on the way we’ll hear what this journeyman has to tell us about our mysterious corpse from the edge of Dartmoor.’

Chapter 6,
    In which Crowner John meets a mason
     
    The crowd, their passions satisfied, drifted raggedly back to the town gates, the pedlars still trying to sell and the children still darting about in play.
    The coroner strode out more robustly, overtaking the straggling throng on the muddy roadway, his small clerk almost running to keep up with him.
    Once in the town, they climbed the slope of South Gate Street and turned right into Bear Lane, which led towards the cathedral precinct. This part of Exeter was an island of episcopal independence, outside the jurisdiction of the sheriff and portreeves.
    A narrow entrance - one of six around the precinct - was known as Beargate and carried a door of blackened oak, studded with crude bolt-heads and iron bands. During daylight it lay open and led into the territory of Henry Marshall, Bishop of Exeter, whose diocese stretched from the edge of Somerset to the tip of Cornwall.
    Beyond Beargate, there was a stifling clutter of buildings on twisting lanes. Here lived those of the twenty-four canons who were resident in Exeter, the other ranks of the cathedral hierarchy and the servants, families and hangers-on who made up the considerable population of the religious heart of the city. The lanes were as filthy as those in the rest of the town, composed of trodden mud and refuse.
    The coroner and his hobbling, skipping clerk pushed their way through the ambling pedestrians and walked past the dwellings that clustered against the cloisters to their right. This brought them to the west end of the cathedral and the more open area of the Close.
    Between the north side of the cathedral and the jumble of buildings that lined the High Street beyond were several acres of grass, weeds and bare earth.
    Its saving grace was a number of large trees that provided welcome shade around the edges and along the many trodden paths. The coroner spared it not a single glance - he had been familiar with the Close all his life - but if he had been of a more aesthetic turn of mind, he might have thought it incongruous that such a beautifully crafted house of God should be so closely surrounded by a combination of rubbish-dump, meadow, cemetery, games arena and market place.
    Shop stalls lined the outer paths and youths noisily threw and kicked crude leather balls about. Old and fresh graves lay haphazardly across the ground, with piles of red earth thrown up by the pit-makers and old bones from previous burials, which they took to the charnel house near St Mary Major Church on the further side of the Close. A trench ran across the area, carrying sewage from the canons’ houses down towards the distant river. The all-pervading smell of garbage was as constant here as throughout the rest of Exeter. None of this reached John de Wolfe’s consciousness as he marched the last few yards around the end of the cathedral and back to the North Tower, one of the two massive blocks that flanked each side of the nave and chancel.
    ‘This man was to be here, was he?’ snapped the coroner over his shoulder.
    Panting with the effort of