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burned wax, guessing that the lamp had been used by whoever had run away from the building. As he came back down the stairs, the feeble rays of his own lantern showed a pool of drying blood where the head of the proctor had lain, but now he noticed something lying on the flagstones nearby. It must have been concealed by the injured man’s body when he lay there, but now de Wolfe bent and picked it up. It was a thin but heavy book, almost the length of two of his hands and about an inch thick. He brought the lantern close to it and saw that it was covered in worn black leather, with a dozen or so parchment pages inside.
    As he could not read any of it, he put it under his arm and, having satisfied himself that there was nothing else to be seen or done until daylight, he pulled the outer door shut and with a rather subdued Brutus at his heels made his way to Canons’ Row on the north side of the Close, where the houses of a dozen of the most senior clergy stood.
    In one of them lived his friend the Archdeacon of Exeter, one of four archdeacons that served the diocese of Devon and Cornwall under Bishop Henry Marshal. A wiry, grey-haired man, John de Alençon lived a simple, ascetic life, unlike some of his portly fellow canons, and John found that the injured proctor had been laid in the priest’s spartan sleeping room, which contained nothing but a hard cot, a stool and a large wooden cross on the wall.
    ‘How is he?’ asked the coroner as soon as he entered.
    The archdeacon and one of the vicars who had come to the Chapter House were there, standing over the bed with worried expressions on their faces.
    ‘He is very poorly, John. I have sent the other proctor up to St John’s Priory to ask Brother Saulf if he will come down at once,’ replied de Alençon. The nearest thing Exeter had to a hospital was the small priory of St John near the East Gate, which had a sickroom that offered help to the poorer people who could not afford to visit an apothecary. One of the Benedictine monks, a Saxon named Saulf, was skilled in physic and was often called upon in emergencies.
    There was nothing the two Johns could do to help, so they went into another small room, where the archdeacon did his reading and writing. They sat at a table, and de Alençon’s servant brought them a jug of wine and some pewter cups. As they sat and drank while waiting for the monk, John told his friend what had happened and showed him the book that he had found.
    ‘I’m sure this is to do with this accursed treasure fever,’ he said. ‘It looks as if someone was rifling the library and was disturbed by the proctor. Whether he was assaulted or fell downstairs in a scuffle remains to be seen, but either way there is a dangerous man loose somewhere in the city.’
    The archdeacon took the book and looked at it with curiosity. ‘This is very ancient, John. I’ve never seen the like of it.’
    ‘What’s it all about?’ asked the coroner, curious to know what was so important that it may have cost a man his life.
    De Alençon slowly turned the pages, shaking his head slowly in bewilderment. ‘It seems to be a collection of quatrains of some kind. Written in excellent Latin and beautifully penned.’
    ‘What the hell’s a quatrain?’ demanded the coroner. He sometimes tended to act the bluff soldier, partly to cover up his lack of learning.
    ‘It’s a short verse containing four lines, which rhyme alternately. As these are in Latin, they wouldn’t rhyme in our Norman-French, John – but the meaning is still just about understandable.’
    ‘But what’s the subject they concern?’ persisted de Wolfe. ‘Is it a religious tract of some kind? Gospels or prayers?’
    The archdeacon looked wryly at his friend. ‘They seem far removed from prayers – almost the opposite! From the couple I’ve glanced at, they seem like forebodings of catastrophe. God knows what they mean, and I say that most reverently.’
    He turned the yellowed pages over again,