The Awful Secret by Bernard Knight Read Free Book Online

shoulders, he gave her a quick kiss. ‘I’m still young enough to creep under your blanket tonight, if you’d let me!’ She pushed him away with mock annoyance, fearful that Matilda or her maid might appear, but de Wolfe pulled open the iron-banded front door and stepped into the narrow street.
    A few minutes later, he was riding Odin sedately through the Close around the cathedral, picking his way along the criss-crossing paths between the piles of rubbish and earth from new graves that made such an unsightly contrast to the soaring church with its two great towers. Urchins ran around yelling or playing ball and hawkers touted shrivelled apples and meat pies to the loungers and gossipers who stood or squatted around the untidy precinct. He came out through Bear Gate into Southgate Street and pushed his way past the throng around the butcher’s stalls, where more hawkers squatted behind their baskets of produce. With almost a sense of adventure, he passed under the arch of the South Gate, with its prison cells in the towers on each side, and emerged from the city for the first time in many weeks. Ahead of him, past the small houses, huts and shacks that had sprung up outside the walls, the road forked into Holloway and Magdalen Street, leading to Honiton, Yeovil and, eventually, distant Winchester and London, which to most residents of Exeter were as remote as the moon.
    De Wolfe turned right and followed the city wall steeply down towards the river, where a number of small vessels were beached on the muddy banks. A stone quay and some thatched storehouses lay at the corner of the walls, where the line of the ancient Roman defences turned towards the West Gate and the road to South Devon and Cornwall. He plodded along slowly, taking in the familiar sight of the broad, shallow river, which meandered through the swampy islands that carried the mean shacks of the workers from the fulling mills which processed the wool that was the prime wealth of England.
    Reining in Odin at the edge of one of the broad reens of muddy water that separated Exe Island from the bank, he watched the traffic coming out of the West Gate. Those on foot or with small handcarts, even some on a donkey or pony, used the rickety wooden footbridge that spanned the river and the grassy mud to reach the further bank. Large vehicles, like the ox-carts with their huge wooden wheels, and anyone on horseback had to ford the river, which here was just at the upper limit of the tidal reach.
    His gaze travelled to the stone bridge, the huge project still less than half finished. The builders, Nicholas Gervase and his son Walter, had completed seven of the eighteen arches needed to span the marshy river, but even though they were wealthy mill-owners, their funds had run out. Until they could raise more from the burgesses and churchmen of Devon, travellers would still have to clamber or wade across the Exe. Even though it was incomplete, the city end of the bridge already had a chapel built on it, with a resident priest, a token of Nicholas’s beholdenment to his ecclesiastical paymasters.
    As John de Wolfe sat taking his ease on the broad back of his stallion, watching life go by with almost lazy contentment, he became aware of another horse coming up behind him at a trot. Without needing to turn, he knew from the clip of the hoofs that it was Gwyn’s big brown mare and a twinge of annoyance came over him at the idea that he needed a nursemaid on such a short jaunt as this.
    Then he wondered whether the Cornishman had managed to seize his mysterious stalker, but as his officer stopped alongside, he found that he was wrong on both counts.
    ‘Mary told me you’d be somewhere outside the walls,’ grunted Gwyn. ‘I thought I’d best find you now, in case you wanted to make some arrangements for the morning.’
    De Wolfe’s black eyebrows rose up his forehead. ‘What arrangements?’
    ‘A rider has just come to Rougemont from Oliver de Tracey’s bailiff at