Crowner's Quest (5 page)

‘Was it robbery? Some of these prebendaries are rich men,’ asked de Revelle, going off at a tangent.

For answer, de Wolfe waved a hand around the bare room. ‘Not this one. He has a reputation for a modest, even Spartan way of life. There’s little worth killing for here.’

The sheriff seemed to lose interest. ‘We’ll leave it until the morning, then. I must get back to my good wife.’

John straightened his back until his head almost touched the ceiling beams. ‘I’ll walk back to my house with you, then.’

De Revelle pulled on his gloves. ‘Lady Eleanor has gone back to Rougemont. I sent her with an escort when I came here. Your guests have dispersed, I’m afraid.’ He said it with a certain spiteful glee, knowing that his sister would blame her husband stridently for the collapse of her cherished social occasion.

The sheriff was right, for when John arrived in Martin’s Lane ten minutes later, he found the hall deserted, the table scattered forlornly with empty cups, tankards and scraps of food. Brutus still lay before the dying fire and gave him a slow wag from his bushy tail, the only welcome he was to get that night.

When he climbed the wooden stairs from the backyard to the solar chamber, he found a grim-faced Matilda sitting in the only chair. The rabbit-toothed Lucille was unpinning her hair and helping her off with her new kirtle of stiff brocade and laying out her bed-shift.

There was an ominous silence until the ugly Frenchwoman left for her cubicle under the stairs. Then the storm broke. ‘You’ve done it again, husband,’ Matilda snarled. ‘You seem to delight in spoiling every effort I make to increase your standing with the better folk in this city.’

‘Increase my standing, be damned!’ he retorted. ‘I’m the King’s coroner, I don’t need to kiss the arses of any burgesses or bishops. If you want more social life, so be it – but don’t pretend it’s to advance my career for I’m quite content as I am.’

Matilda had never been one to duck a fight and she counter-attacked with relish, her solid, fleshy face as pugnacious as that of a mastiff. ‘You’re content, are you? I should think so! You spend most of your time in taverns or in bed with some strumpet. You use this new job as an excuse to avoid me. You’re away from home for days and nights at a time – God knows what you get up to!’

‘A senior canon of this cathedral has been murdered, Matilda. You’re so thick with the clergy of this city, surely you know what a scandal this will be. Did you expect me to tell the Bishop when he returns that I was sorry I couldn’t attend to it but my wife was having a party?’

They had had this particular argument so often that de Wolfe was bored with it. Her accusations were always the same, and none the less objectionable because there was some truth in them. Married for sixteen years, he had spent as much of that time as he could away from her, campaigning in England and abroad. Now forty years old, he had been a soldier since he was seventeen and rued the day his father had insisted that he marry into the rich de Revelle family. ‘If I’m often away, it’s because the responsibilities of being coroner force it upon me, woman,’ he growled. ‘You were the one who was so insistent on me seeking the appointment. You nearly burst a blood vessel canvassing on my behalf among the burgesses, the priests and your damned brother.’

Had she but known it, her efforts had been unnecessary. Both Justiciar Hubert Walter and Richard Coeur de Lion himself had been more than happy to give the post to a Crusader knight whom they both knew well – in fact, John de Wolfe had been part of the King’s escort on that ill-fated journey home when he was captured in Austria. But once the bit was between her teeth, Matilda wanted no excuses from her saturnine husband. Angrily she flounced on to the low bed and struggled to change from her chemise into her nightshift under the sheepskin covers to hide her naked body from him. This was no punishment for John, who had long given up forcing his husbandly duties upon her. Six years older than him, she had never been keen on consummation, which was perhaps why they had remained childless all these years.

‘Being coroner doesn’t mean you have to live in the saddle of that great stallion of yours – when you’re not riding a two-legged mare, that is,’ she added nastily. Pulling out her thin chemise after wrestling on the nightgown, she threw it at the chair and returned to the fray. ‘My brother is the sheriff of all Devon, yet he doesn’t spend his days tramping across the county. He has men and stewards to do his bidding. But you have to pretend to be needed everywhere, just to get away from home.’

De Wolfe’s thick black brows came together in a scowl. ‘I don’t have a constable and men-at-arms and a castle full of servants at my beck and call like your damned brother! All I have is my officer and a clerk.’

She laughed scornfully. ‘That hairy Cornish savage and a poxy little priest! They were your choice. Richard would have given you two better men, if you’d accepted them.’

‘I owe my life to Gwyn, several times over. There’s no more trustworthy man in England. As for Thomas, he writes a better hand than anyone in this city – and you know damned well that I was obliging the Archdeacon when I took him on, for John de Alencon is his uncle.’

Sitting up in bed, the heavy fleeces clutched to her breasts, Matilda glowered at him. With that white linen cloth wound around her hair like a turban, she reminded him of a Moorish warrior he had fought hand-to-hand at the battle of Arsouf.

Also like the Moor, she threw something at him suddenly, not a spear but a half-eaten apple that had been on the floor alongside the mattress. ‘Oh, go to hell, you miserable devil!’ And with those final words, she slid down the bed and violently pulled the sheepskins over her head.

Slowly de Wolfe took off his own outer clothes, blew out the tallow dip that lit the room, then slid into the opposite side of the large bed. Lying back to back, there was only a yard between their bodies, but a mile between their souls.

Listening to her regular breathing, as she feigned sleep, he sighed. ‘And a merry Christ Mass to you, too!’ he muttered bitterly.

Unless occupied with other duties, it was the habit of Sir John de Wolfe to enjoy a second breakfast with his two retainers at about the ninth hour, after the cathedral bell had tolled for the services of terce, sext and nones, which preceded high mass. He had already eaten at seven that morning, alone in the dank, empty hall in Martin’s Lane. Mary had given him hot oaten porridge, to keep out the winter cold, followed by slices of salt beef and two duck eggs on barley bread. She was a buxom, dark-haired woman of twenty-five, born of a Saxon mother and a Norman soldier who had not stayed for the birth.

As she stood near de Wolfe to pour him more ale, he absently laid a hand on her rounded bottom, more for comfort than in lust. In the past, they had enjoyed more than a few romps together in the hut she occupied in the backyard. But Mary, keen to keep her job, had refused him for some time past, sensing that her arch-enemy Lucille was suspicious of them. ‘I’m in disfavour again, Mary,’ he announced in a low voice, looking up furtively at the narrow window high on the inner wall that connected the hall to the solar.

‘She had her heart set on that party last night being a great event,’ murmured the maid. ‘When you left with the Archdeacon – and especially when her brother followed you – the whole thing went flat and they all drifted away. She’ll not forgive you that for a long while yet.’

Matilda pointedly failed to appear at the table, and after his breakfast and a visit to the privy, John had a perfunctory wash in a leather bucket of cold water in the yard: it was Saturday, his day for such ablutions, though not for his twice-weekly shave. Mary had set out his weekly change of clothing in front of the smouldering fire and he slowly climbed into a linen undershirt and a plain grey serge tunic that reached below his knees. Thick woollen hose came up to his thighs – he wore no breeches or pants unless he was going to ride a horse – and a pair of pointed shoes reached to his ankles. Buckling on a wide belt that carried his dagger – no sword was needed in the city streets – he swung a mottled grey wolfskin cloak over his shoulders and pulled on a basin-shaped cap of black felt, with ear-flaps that tied under his chin. Then, yelling farewell to Mary, he left for the castle, where the sheriff had grudgingly given him a tiny room above the gatehouse for an office.

At the drawbridge of Rougemont, the solitary sentry greeted him by banging the stock of his lance on the ground, a respectful salute for a knight whom every soldier knew had been a gallant Crusader and a companion of the Lionheart himself.

He climbed the narrow stairs to the upper floor of the tall gatehouse, which had been built, like the rest of the castle, soon after the Conquest, by King William the Bastard, who had demolished fifty-one Saxon houses to make space for it. His office was a bare attic under the roof-beams, bleak and draughty, with a curtain of rough sacking over the doorless entrance at the top of the stairs. There was no fireplace and the miserable chamber reflected the scorn with which Richard de Revelle regarded this new-fangled office of coroner. He considered it a slight on his monopoly of law enforcement in the county – a view shared by most sheriffs across England.

The coroner’s team gathered here every morning to discover what calamities had occurred overnight, and today, though it was Yuletide and a religious holiday, the death of Canon Robert de Hane was high on the agenda.

De Wolfe sat himself on the bench behind his crude trestle table, with Thomas hunched on a stool at one end. The clerk was carefully copying a list of last week’s executed felons on to another parchment, his quill pen almost touching his thin, pointed nose as he scribed the Latin words in an elegant script, his tongue protruding as he concentrated.

Gwyn of Polruan, named after the Cornish fishing village where he was born, perched in his favourite place, on the stone sill of the small window opening. As he looked down at the narrow street that led to the steep drawbridge below, he cleaned his fingernails absently with the point of his dagger.

The coroner sat with his long dark face cupped in his hands, elbows on the table. He usually spent this time of the morning struggling with his Latin grammar, as belatedly he was learning to read and write, under the tuition of one of the senior cathedral priests. But today his mind was on other ecclesiastical matters, trying to fathom who would want to kill an apparently innocuous old scholar.

‘Thomas, you know much of what goes on in the Close,’ he said suddenly, in his deep, sonorous voice. ‘Have there been any whispers or scandals there recently?’

The clerk, always eager to air his eccelesiastical knowledge, put down his quill. His bright button eyes fixed on the coroner and his head tilted like a bird. Like his master, he always wore black or grey, though his long tube-like tunic was shabby and worn, as he was poorer than the most penurious church mouse. ‘Nothing about Robert de Hane, Crowner. He was the quietest of all the canons. He had no mistress or secret family placed in a distant village, like some of his fellows.’

‘As far as you know, toad,’ trumpeted Gwyn. ‘I wouldn’t trust any priest out of my sight with half a penny – or with my wife!’

De Wolfe had never discovered the cause of the Cornishman’s antipathy to the clergy, in spite of being daily in his company for the past twenty years. ‘Is there nothing these days to set tongues clacking about the cathedral?’ persisted the coroner. ‘With all those servants, vicars, secondaries, choristers, surely there must be some jealousies and intrigues afoot!’

Thomas racked his brains to dredge up some scandal to satisfy his master and bolster his own reputation as a source of inside information. He slept rent-free on a straw mattress in a servants’ hut behind one of the canon’s houses, thanks to the intercession of his uncle, the Archdeacon. He ate sparingly, either at food stalls in the streets or sometimes cooked a little of his own food in the kitchen hut in the backyard. On a salary of twopence a day, which came from the coroner’s own purse, he would never get rich, but at least he would survive. That was more than he could have said of the previous two years, when he had almost starved to death in Winchester. The youngest son of a Hampshire knight, his spine and hip had been afflicted as a child by the disease that had killed his mother, but an aptitude for learning had directed him into the Church. After ordination, he had become a diocesan clerk and junior teacher at Winchester, where he had become valuable as an excellent writer of Latin. His teaching duties had been his downfall, as his pupils included some young girl novices from the nunnery. His physical faults, such as the bent back, the limp and the lazy eye, had made him so unattractive to women that he had no experience of them at all. When one precocious novice amused herself by making eyes at him, his clumsy attempts to embrace her had resulted in a charge of attempted rape. Poor Thomas had been arrested by the cathedral proctors and only the fact that he was a priest and that the alleged offence had occurred in the precinct saved him from the sheriff’s justice and a probable hanging. As it was, the Consistory Court had tried him and summarily ejected him from the priesthood, which meant that his stipend and lodgings vanished. He had tried to eke out an existence by writing letters for tradesmen, but after a year or so, he had been virtually in rags and starving.

Desperate, he had walked to Exeter to throw himself on the mercy of his father’s brother, Archdeacon John of Alencon. His uncle gave him a little money to keep him alive and promised to look out for some suitable employment. In September, the newly appointed coroner had needed a clerk to keep his inquest rolls and the Archdeacon had prevailed upon his friend John de Wolfe to take the disgraced priest on probation. In spite of the largely assumed scorn with which the two big fighting men treated the stunted clerk, the arrangement worked well and Thomas’s undoubted skill with a pen was reinforced by his value as a seeker-out of information. He was incurably inquisitive and had a knack of worming information from people and sifting gossip, which the coroner had found invaluable in the tightly knit communities of Devonshire.