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easily panic could spread in a closed city like Exeter, where more than four thousand people were packed together inside a few acres within the walls. He downed the rest of his ale and got to his feet.
    ‘Perhaps that’s good advice, Gwyn,’ he said. ‘Keep your boys at home for now, until we hear whether this is just some false rumour.’
    He realised that it was a rather futile gesture, given that Gwyn and his family lived in one of the most popular taverns in the city, where outsiders and strangers were coming and going all the time, possibly bringing contagion with them. Something Hugh de Relaga had said that morning came back to him.
    ‘Maybe I will have a word with that quack who’s come to live as my neighbour,’ he muttered as he swung his cloak about his shoulders and went out into the city streets, which suddenly seemed to have a menacing feel about them.
    Meal-times had never been a very cheerful occasion in the de Wolfe household, but since John had returned from Westminster they had all the charm of a funeral. Matilda, already in a chronic state of sulky depression, had been bitterly disappointed when her husband had voluntarily given up his appointment as Coroner of the Verge. At a stroke, she had been deprived of the chance to live at court and flaunt John’s position as coroner to the Royal Household, a position granted to him personally by King Richard – though John would have considered ‘thrust upon him’ more accurate than ‘granted’. Now, as they sat in the gloomy hall which occupied almost all of the high, narrow house in Martin’s Lane, she tried to behave as if her husband did not exist. Each sat at the opposite ends of the long oaken table, concentrating on the food brought in by Mary, the dark-haired young woman who was their cook and maid of all work about the house. Matilda had her own personal handmaiden, if such a title could be used for Lucille, a skinny, snivelling girl from the Vexin in northern Normandy.
    As Mary placed a wooden bowl of mutton stew in front of her master, she gave him a surreptitious wink, for she was more of a wife to him than Matilda. She cooked his food, washed his clothes, cleaned his house, listened to his woes – and in the past, on occasion, had even lain with him.
    When she left the hall to go through the small vestibule and around the outside passage to her cookhouse in the backyard, the only sound left was the steady champing of jaws, for Matilda’s moods never seemed to affect her appetite. John now and then attempted to start a conversation, though his wife usually only opened her mouth to complain or to deride him.
    He had almost given up trying to revive any intercourse between them, as his efforts were usually met with a snub or ridicule – or more often just stony silence. De Wolfe knew full well that she had a long-term strategy to punish him, not only for his infidelities, but for his destruction of her adoration of her brother Richard. John had, in the course of his duties as a law officer, repeatedly exposed de Revelle as a charlatan and traitor, until eventually he was ignominiously dismissed as sheriff of Devon. And now, of course, the final indignity was his depriving her of her moment of glory as wife of the coroner to the king’s court.
    Mary returned to clear away the bowls and place before each of them a thick trencher of yesterday’s bread carrying a trout grilled with almonds. When she had refilled their pewter cups from a jug of Burgundian wine and departed through the draught-screen, John made a new effort to break the oppressive silence, this time at least with some useful motive in mind.
    ‘There is talk of the yellow distemper arriving in the city,’ he began. ‘I hear that a family in Bretayne may be affected, so perhaps it might be wise if you kept clear of St Olave’s until more definite news is known.’
    Matilda’s favourite church was on the edge of Bretayne, the worst slum area of Exeter. It was so named