The Noble Outlaw (44 page)

He was not sure whether Nesta was being sarcastic, but knowing of her sympathetic nature, he decided she probably meant what she said. In any event, he grumbled his way out of bed and pulled on his clothes, before collecting Brutus from his knuckle bone downstairs and setting off in the freezing evening for home.

Next day, Matilda dragged her husband off to Raden Lane to say farewell to the de Arundells, who were on the eve of leaving for Hempston. They were to meet up next day with all the men who had lived with Nicholas on the moor and were to ride en masse along the River Hems to their manor, which would be their home once again.

Nicholas, his arm in a linen sling, was effusive in his thanks to John de Wolfe and pledged his help in anything that the coroner might need in the future. Lady Joan was tearful in her thanks and, with Matilda watching benignly, even ventured to give him a parting kiss on his bristly black cheek. John wryly wondered what his wife would have said and done if any other woman had done the same in public, especially Nesta - or Hilda of Dawlish. A little cynically, he decided that it took other people's misfortunes to temper their own conflicts, then chided himself for such unkind thoughts when his wife was silently suffering from yet another humiliation caused by her brother.

They left the loving couple and returned to Martin's Lane, where after their noontide dinner Matilda pleaded exhaustion. Indeed, she looked pale and wan, so her usual climb up to her solar was earlier than usual, not even delayed by a cup of wine. John had no duties that afternoon and wandered out into the back yard to seek Mary's company in her kitchen-hut. Flurries of snow were twisting about in the east wind, but there were not enough for snow to settle on the ground. He sat on a stool next to Mary's cooking fire with Brutus at his feet and contentedly sipped from a jar of mulled ale which she had made for him. After talking for a while about the remarkable events in Rougemont the previous day, Mary asked him what would happen to Richard de Revelle now.

'A cat has nothing on my brother-in-law when it comes to nine lives,' he replied cynically. 'He seems to weather every storm, even when they are all of his own making. But after this humiliation, I hope to God he just goes back to his manor and keeps very quiet for a very long time.'

'But he's not long bought a dwelling up on North Gate Street,' objected the raven-haired maid. 'I wonder if he and Lady Eleanor intend to live there some of the time?'

'I doubt he'll want to walk the streets of Exeter for a while, after his shameful exhibition up in Rougemont,' said John with ill-concealed satisfaction. 'If he's any sense of honour, which I doubt, he'll go back to Revelstoke, which is his manor furthest away from this city. If I never see him again, it will be too soon.'

But this uncharitable sentiment was shortly to be confounded.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

In which a hound proves his worth

It might have been Denise's ointment or simply the healing power of nature, but Geoffrey Trove's arm had improved over the past two days. Although it was still throbbing and painful, his fever had subsided - and, best of all, his mistress's constant nagging for him to attend an apothecary had faded with the infection.

The journeyman was still afraid to go out in the daytime, for fear of being recognised, but in the old black cloak with a deep hood - the one he had worn to attack the sister of that swine de Revelle - he had ventured out to a low alehouse the previous evening to eavesdrop on the city gossip.

He heard about the battle up at the castle and gloated that the two objects of his hate had both come to grief in different ways. He sincerely hoped that Pomeroy's seizure would prove fatal, but the news that Nicholas de Arundell had contemptuously spared the life of Richard de Revelle annoyed him greatly. If he had killed him and Pomeroy had also died, then Geoffrey, who was basically very religious in spite of his disregard for some of the Commandments, would have considered that God had smitten the evil-doers on his behalf.

Now that de Revelle was not only unharmed but a free man, Geoffrey decided that it was up to him to complete the task that the Almighty seemed to have overlooked. Denise was out, buying some food at the stalls in High Street. Now that she had given up whoring and he had left his job, he had to support them both from the meagre savings he had accumulated from his pay as a journeyman - another reason for seeking violent revenge against those who had prevented him becoming a rich man with his own business.

He went to his small chest in the corner, one of the few things he had brought from his shack on Exe Island, and took out a duplicate of his master-work. It was the prototype of the one he had left behind in his hut, as he was afraid that some poison on the springs of that one might again contaminate him. This other device was slightly smaller, but equally efficient in firing a bolt.

He had made the second one with greater care and better metal, finishing it off meticulously to display his skill - yet still those hidebound bastards of guild masters had rejected it. He placed it on the table, checked the mechanism, then fired a bolt against the opposite wall, where it stuck quivering in the whitewashed cob, two inches deep into the plaster. Satisfied, he pulled it out and cleaned it, then wrapped the miniature crossbow in a cloth and put it back into the chest before the nosy Denise returned.

Lady Eleanor de Revelle had been quite satisfied with her new town house in Exeter. When her husband was sheriff, she had firmly refused to spend any time in his official residence in the keep of Rougemont, which she considered a bleak, draughty place unfitting for a woman of her station in life. Eleanor was an even greater snob than Matilda - who she despised - and when Richard was living in Exeter castle, she had insisted on living either at their manor in Tiverton or at Revelstoke. She endured his frequent falls from grace with apparent indifference, keeping his professional life at arm's length. However, his dismissal as sheriff and now his ignominious defeat at the hands of Nicholas de Arundell were hard to bear, but she dealt with this latest embarrassment by keeping herself aloof from any of her husband's activities, and often his very company.

A tall, angular woman with an icy personality, she had long regretted her marriage to Richard de Revelle, as she considered that she had married well beneath her.

She was the third daughter of an earl with estates in Somerset and Gloucestershire and, like Matilda, had been married off as one of the least saleable assets of the family to a moderately acceptable young knight. After twenty years of marriage, she had accepted her fate stoically, settling for extravagant creature comforts bought both by Richard's money and, a generous allowance from her own family.
                       
It was Eleanor who had prodded her husband into purchasing the house in North Gate Street, partly with the excuse that if he was entering into this respectable venture to establish a college in Smythen Street, then he needed to be much nearer to it than either of their manors at opposite ends of the large county. The house gave her an opportunity to spend as much time as she wished in a city where there were greater market facilities and frequent fairs and festivals, a welcome change from the boring isolation of their manors.

Though she had little affection for her husband, she had become used to him and had no desire to lose him either to another woman or to death - though his neck had come perilously close to the hangman's noose on several occasions. Eleanor was well aware of his predilection for harlots, though she never admitted to herself that it was her own frigidity that was the main reason for this behaviour. As long as he did not shame her over his amorous activities, she was prepared to pretend this situation did not exist.

Thus that evening, when he gruffly told her that he was going out to meet a friend in the New Inn, Eleanor was indifferent to the news, suspecting that he would probably end up in one of the brothels that abounded in the back streets. She retired early, going to the upstairs solar with her tire-maid to prepare for bed. Waking some time during the night, she found that her husband was absent from his side of the large feather palliasse they shared.

Again, this was no novelty and she turned over under her blankets and bearskin and went back to sleep.

However, in the morning, there was still no sign of Richard de Revelle and he failed to arrive when their servants brought bread, sweet gruel and coddled eggs to break their fast. This was unusual, as he was fond of his early-morning victuals, but questioning of the three servants they employed threw no light on de Revelle's absence.

Irritated rather than worried, she had herself dressed and went with her maid to morning Mass at the nearby church of St Keryans, for rather like Matilda, attending frequent services was one way of filling the empty life of a gentlewoman. On her return, she was approached deferentially by Matthew, the bottler who took on the role of their steward in that small household.

'My lady, I am becoming concerned about Sir Richard,' he said hesitantly, as his mistress had a sharp tongue when dealing with her servants. 'He has still not returned and the old man who comes to chop kindling and draw water from the well found these in the yard behind the house.' He held out a floppy velvet hat with a crumpled feather and a rusty iron rod longer than his arm.

'That is my husband's hat,' snapped Eleanor, snatching it from him and turning it around in her hands.

'And this is another bar pulled from our back gate, a twin to the one the master told us about - the one that was used to slay some guildsman in a churchyard.' As Eleanor stared at him with mounting concern, Matthew added, 'And both are stained with blood.'

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'This small amount of blood is not from a stabbing, Eleanor. The smears both on the rod and the hat suggest that he has been struck a blow on the head and this is bleeding from his scalp.'

John de Wolfe tried to make this sound like good news, not mentioning the possibility that Richard's skull might have been cracked like an egg.

He was standing in the yard behind the house in North Gate Street, with Gwyn busy examining the back gate, which now had two of its half-dozen bars missing. The lady of the house was listening to him tight-lipped, with Matilda hovering anxiously behind her, common adversity driving these two women into an attempt to be friendly and supportive to each other. In fact Matilda, for all her recent antagonism to her brother, seemed the more upset, though Eleanor's usual glacial manner might have concealed more concern than was apparent.

'Did he not return home last night?' Matilda asked anxiously. 'Where can he have been?'

Her sister-in-law was not anxious to answer that last question, as she suspected that she knew what had taken her husband out into the dark streets.

'He was not in his bed at all. This accident must have occurred late last evening, after I had retired.'
 

She had responded to de Wolfe's routine questions with some reluctance, as she thought him little better than an ill-mannered soldier, but the evidence that Matthew had found had left her with little option but to send a message to Richard's sister, since her husband was a senior law officer - albeit one she blamed for Richard's repeated falls from grace,

'I fear this can be no accident, lady,' said John, as gently as he could. 'No one strikes themselves on the head hard enough to draw blood. And the use of this iron rod makes it impossible to believe that the petpetrator is anyone other than the assassin who killed those other men.'

Eleanor de Revelle drew her thin body stiffly upright and fixed him with her pale blue eyes. 'So you think Richard is dead, John?' she asked tonelessly. Already she was readjusting herself to the role of widow and wondering if it might not be preferable to being married to an inveterate scoundrel.

But de Wolfe was not yet ready to go along with her speculations. Strangely, he admitted to himself, though he had often wished his brother-in-law in hell, under these circumstances he ardently hoped that the man was still alive and not another victim of this murdering bastard. If Richard was to forfeit his life, it should be legally at the end of a rope, not by being slain by some crazed journeyman.

'He may well be alive, Eleanor,' he reassured her.

'This spike, whose partner was used to kill another man, has not been used other than as a club.' He hefted the rod in his hand to assess its weight. 'I think Richard was struck to deprive him of his wits and has been carried off somewhere. Maybe he is being held as a hostage, as we have been seeking this Geoffrey Trove all over the city. At least we know who the villain is that attacked your husband.'

The wife scowled at the coroner. 'And what good is knowing his name, if you cannot find him - or where he has taken my husband?'

Matilda, who cared for her sister-in-law about as much as the Lionheart cared for Philip of France, came to her husband's defence.

'John is doing all he can, Eleanor! This killer has led everyone a merry dance for weeks - as I know to my cost, as he half-killed me in the cathedral Close.' De Wolfe decided to leave his wife to bandy words with Richard's haughty wife and walked across the muddy yard to where Gwyn was peering at the ground near the gate, which led into a short side lane leading out to North Gate Street.
 

'There's a real mess of footprints around here, Crowner, but nothing of any use, with so many people in and out of here every day.'