Crowner's Quest (26 page)

‘How did you get him from his horse?’ demanded Pomeroy.

‘Giles lay face down on the ground with an arrow held up in his armpit as if he’d been shot. When Fitzhamon came along the track, he dismounted to see what was wrong. As he bent over the supposed body, I came up behind him and cracked him over the head with a branch. Then we broke his neck while he was unconscious – he didn’t feel a thing,’ he added, with an unpleasant smirk.

In a hoarse voice, between coughs, Giles Fulford finished the unsavoury story. ‘We carried him back near a tree with a low branch and left him on the ground. I reached up from my saddle, broke off a strip of bark to make it look as if he had struck the branch, then smeared some blood from the wound on his head on to the branch.’

De Revelle sneered at their pride in their ingenuity. ‘And then you fools ruined it all by choosing an oak tree after hitting him with a beech club! And leaving bruises all over his neck!’

De Braose’s face reddened to match his hair. ‘Would you ever have thought that this damned crowner would notice that? I never heard of such a thing and I’m sure you haven’t!’

The sheriff looked around at the other faces, almost as if to seek admiration of his brother-in-law’s abilities. ‘I told you what a cunning bastard he was!’ he complained.

De Nonant brought them back to the present. ‘We need to prevent de Wolfe from running to tell tales to Winchester or London. The sheriff is averse for some reason to slitting his throat, so we need to try a less fatal means. Have either of you young bucks any ideas?’

The conversation went to and fro for some time, with heads together and the wine flask circulating freely. Eventually, they pulled apart and de Braose and his squire left, the latter still coughing and wheezing like a broken-winded horse.

Soon, the precentor and the sheriff prepared to go, to reach Exeter before dark. As he left, Richard de Revelle said uneasily, ‘I don’t like it, but it may have to be done. But only if my suggestion fails to work.’

As soon as he was out of the door, Henry de la Pomeroy muttered to his cousin Bernard Cheever, ‘And if they both fail, then three feet of steel in a dark alley will have to be the answer.’

That Sabbath day was a busy one for the coroner. After spending the morning down on the river at St James, he was called again in the afternoon to Exe Island, just outside the walls, where a body had been recovered from beneath the wheel of a mill. The coroner and Gwyn went to the edge of the leat, a narrow canal dug from the river upstream that brought water down to the mill via a crude wooden sluice-gate. The wheel was of the undershot type, where the water pushed against the lower edges of the large vanes, rather than dropped upon it from a chute above. During the morning, the wheel that drove a fulling mill inside the wooden building had ground to a halt, which often happened when debris, usually branches or the occasional dead sheep washed down from Exmoor, became jammed in it. This time, the miller’s men had found a human obstruction and dragged it out on to the bank.

When the coroner arrived, the corpse had already been identified as a middle-aged man living in a hovel in Frog Lane on the island. He had been seen last on the previous afternoon, leaving a tavern in Fore Street, already drunk, but clutching a gallon jar of cider.

‘A real tippler, he was,’ said the miller to John de Wolfe. ‘He used to work here, but he was never sober so he was thrown out. God knows how he lived – begging and stealing, I suspect.’

There was little to see on the body, except a few scratches where the skin had rubbed against the rough wood of the wheel. Gwyn tried his drowning test, which he had used successfully a few weeks earlier at a shipwreck at Torbay. As the body lay on the frozen grass alongside the leat, he pressed hard with two large hands on the chest and was gratified to see a gout of fine foam exude from the nostrils and mouth.

Satisfied that it had been a simple drowning, de Wolfe held an inquest there and then. The man had been a widower, but a twenty-year-old son was discovered to make presentment of Englishry by swearing that his father had been a Saxon, so there was no question of a murdrum fine. The miller and his two assistants, who had recovered the body, half a dozen workmen and a few locals from the mean shacks on Exe Island were rounded up by Gwyn for a jury, and within half an hour the inquest had been convened and concluded. The verdict was accidental death, it being assumed quite reasonably that the drunken man had fallen into the river further upstream and drowned, his body being washed later into the leat when the sluice was opened.

‘There is no question of the wheel being deodand,’ declared the coroner to the mystified jury. ‘The wheel was not the object that caused death, it was merely the obstruction that trapped the dead body.’

One member of the jury – the miller – understood the significance of this and breathed a sigh of relief. Anything that caused death, such as a dagger or even a runaway horse, could be declared deodand by the coroner and confiscated for the Crown. Carts, or even a single wheel from a cart, might be confiscated, leaving the owner without a means to earn a living. The miller had heard of instances where a mill wheel had been confiscated and sold, if a live person had been crushed or drowned by it.

Having handed over the body to the son for burial, John and Gwyn walked back to the Bush for a drink and a gossip. Though tempted to stay with Nesta for the evening, the coroner decided that he had better go home and make an effort to keep Matilda in a moderately tolerable state of mind.

The forecast of the two soldiers at Berry Pomeroy that there would be no snow was correct – but they had not anticipated the rain that came down the next morning. In the early hours of the first Monday of the year, the frost was washed away by steady rain. The streets of Exeter became a slime of mud and rubbish with slippery cobbles exposed here and there.

As Crowner John made his way up to the castle, a torrent of dirty water ran down the hill towards him from the gateway. It trickled into the outer ward to add to the morass of churned mud that covered the wide space between the high castle walls and the wooden stockade that enclosed the outer bailey. As he looked to his left on the way up to the drawbridge, he saw the residents of the outer zone squelching between the huts and lean-to shanties that housed the men-at-arms and their families. Urchins ran around semi-naked with mud up to the knees, and women muffled in shawls tried to keep their firewood dry as they stoked their cooking stoves in the doorways of the flimsy shelters. Oxen and horses plodded through the mire, some pulling large-wheeled carts, adding to the chaos of what was a military camp combined with an inner-city village. Ignoring the rain that began to trickle down his face and off the end of his big nose, de Wolfe strode the last few yards to the shelter of the tall gatehouse.

As he was about to climb up the narrow stairs to his chamber, Sergeant Gabriel appeared at the guardroom door and saluted.

‘Sir John, the sheriff wants you to attend on him as soon as you arrive.’ He coughed diplomatically. ‘By the way he said it, sir, I reckon it’s urgent.’

De Wolfe grunted and walked out into the rain again. The inner ward was filthy too: all the rubbish frozen into the ground these past two weeks had now floated to the surface. He trudged moistly across to the keep and reached the hall with some relief, although entering feet had made the floor within the entrance almost as muddy as it was outside.

Ignoring the noisy throng milling around, he loped to the sheriff’s door and nodded to the guard as he went in. A clerk and a steward were in the chamber, talking to Richard de Revelle and thrusting parchments under his eyes. For once, instead of making the coroner wait, as soon as the sheriff laid eyes on him, he hustled the other two out and commanded the guard not to admit anyone on pain of death. He slammed the door shut and walked over to the window embrasure, the furthest point from the door and the least likely place to be overheard. Here two wooden seats, like shelves, had been built into the thickness of the rough wall below the window-slit. De Revelle sat down heavily on one and pointed to the other. De Wolfe lowered himself and the two men sat hunched towards each other.

‘John, we have some serious talking to do. We parted at cross purposes last time.’

‘Matters seemed very clear to me, Richard. You confessed to treachery against the King and conspiring with rebels.’

‘I did nothing of the sort! Listen, you are my sister’s husband and for that I feel a considerable obligation towards you. Especially that of trying to keep you alive.’

‘Keep me alive? More likely the other way round.’

‘I think not, John. The danger to you is much more immediate.’

‘Is that a threat, Sheriff?’ asked de Wolfe darkly.

‘Not from me, no. But from now on you are in considerable peril. Probably more so than on your precious Crusades and foreign wars.’ He changed his tone, attempting a reasonable, wheedling persuasiveness. ‘Look, you always proclaim yourself a true servant of the King. I feel exactly the same.’

‘You have a strange way of showing it,’ observed John sarcastically. ‘You came pretty near hanging last year. You almost never became sheriff and now you’re setting off along the same dangerous track again.’

De Revelle scowled, but managed to keep his temper. ‘I said I was a loyal king’s man, like you. But which king? Last year, we all thought Richard was either dead or soon would be. It was doubtful, even after the ransom was paid, whether Henry of Germany would let him go. After his release, they tried to recapture him and only missed his ship out of Antwerp by hours. We were getting ready to put John on the throne, as it was a reasonable expectation that Richard would never get back.’

De Wolfe glowered at his brother-in-law. ‘Well, you were all very much mistaken, weren’t you? What’s this to do with me?’

De Revelle reached out and grasped the coroner’s forearm. ‘John is going to be the next king – it’s only a matter of how soon. Join us, and use this great loyalty of yours for the right sovereign!’ The sheriff became more animated as he warmed to his theme. ‘Richard has never taken the slightest interest in England. He’s spent only a few months here since he was crowned. All he does is screw taxes from the people to support Normandy and his vendetta against Philip of France – England is nothing but a colony! Prince John would change all that, be a true king of England. And you would have someone better to whom to offer your allegiance.’

De Wolfe pulled away his arm sharply. He was angry, and his anger was the worse because he knew there was a core of truth in what the sheriff said. ‘The King is the King, damn you!’ he shouted. ‘Richard is the man crowned and blessed by God as sovereign lord of England. Both of us swore knights’ oaths to serve him to the death. Until he dies, or willingly hands the Crown to someone else, he is our one and only king. Any deviation from our loyalty is treason!’

De Revelle sighed. ‘You’re a fool and it will be the end of you! Is that your last word?’

‘I’ll see you dead – I’d slay you myself – before I’d let you talk me into treachery, damn you!’ snarled the coroner.

De Revelle stood up and looked down at him, his narrow face working with emotion. His pointed beard jerked like a dagger as he spoke rapidly and spitefully. ‘Then it must be done another way, John. If I am to try to save your life, you must give up any notion of riding off to Winchester with your rumours of rebellion and other gossip. Do you understand?’

De Wolfe looked at him in amazement. ‘Go to hell, Richard! I’ll do exactly what I think is right. How do you imagine you can stop me? With your little sword?’

De Revelle flushed and swallowed hard to control himself. His lack of prowess in all things martial was well known and he was excruciatingly sensitive about it. He had always wanted to be a courtier, in the political arena, not a warrior. But de Wolfe’s insult made it easier for him to spit out his ultimatum.

‘Your scandalous private life is well known, especially to my spies. If you do not agree to keep quiet, I’ll see to it that Matilda is told not only about that drab you visit in the tavern, but also about Hilda, wife of Thorgils. And, for good measure, that Welsh woman will also be told about her rival in Dawlish!’

De Wolfe jumped to his feet and looked down at his brother-in-law in amazement. Then he did something that the sheriff had not expected. He began laughing uproariously, and was still laughing as he passed the astonished guard at the door.

That afternoon, de Wolfe attended the funeral of Canon Robert de Hane. Although it was over a week since his death, the cathedral Chapter had waited this unusually long time before burial because of the absence of the Bishop, who was to conduct the mass for the dead. The freezing weather had allowed the body to lie in its coffin without putrefaction.

As he watched it lowered into a deep hole below a paving slab in the apse behind the high altar, the coroner cursed the sheriff for not arresting the two men who had killed de Hane. He had no idea where Jocelin de Braose and his squire were at present, but suspected that they were being sheltered somewhere in the west of the county, probably at Totnes or Berry Pomeroy. As coroner, he had no legal power to seize them, so there was little that he and Gwyn could do except by subterfuge, as at the ambush in Dunsford, which could hardly be repeated.

After the funeral, he met John de Alencon briefly in the nave. The other canons passed them on the way out and most nodded a greeting, except Thomas de Boterellis, who studiously ignored them. In the distance, de Wolfe saw the remote figure of the Bishop making his way back to his palace and he wondered how deeply Henry Marshal was involved in the budding rebellion.

He told the Archdeacon about the sheriff’s attempt to suborn him into the conspiracy and his ludicrous threat of blackmail. De Alencon smiled wryly at these venal matters, which were outwith the experience of a truly celibate priest. ‘I gather that your amorous affairs are an insufficient threat to you, John?’