Crowner Royal (Crowner John Mysteries) (34 page)

The exotic dishes favoured by what John considered posturing courtiers, held no attraction for them and they were content to do without braised lark’s tongues or swans stuffed with chestnuts and hard-boiled eggs.

Gwyn, used to Black John’s dark moods after twenty years’ companionship, made no effort to interrupt his master’s reverie and devoted himself to eating and drinking. Eventually, when Osanna waddled in to remove the bowls and horn spoons, de Wolfe lifted himself from his silent contemplation and reached over the table to refill his officer’s ale jar.

‘We should be out of this miserable village soon, Gwyn!’ he said with an almost cheerful change of mood. ‘Not for long, unfortunately, but it’ll be a change of scenery, especially if we manage to slip away to Exeter.’

The Cornishman’s blue eyes twinkled in his ruddy face as he sucked ale from his red moustache. ‘Maybe you can have a little trip down to Dawlish while we’re there!’ he said mischievously.

‘And another up to bloody Polsloe to try to see my wife,’ added John, with a scowl. ‘The house in Martin’s Lane worries me. Poor Mary is marooned there alone and I have no idea what to do about it. It can’t stay empty for ever.’

Gwyn shifted uncomfortably on his seat. ‘Are you stuck in Westminster with no hope of relief,’ he asked tentatively. ‘The last thing I want is to desert you after all these years, but I can’t bear this place and I miss my wife and sons more than I thought.’

This was the first time that his old friend had even hinted at a possible parting of the ways and it gave John more food for thought. But there was nothing to be done about it for some time to come. The pressing matters were the solution to the theft of the treasure and the coming perambulation of the court to Gloucester.

‘I spoke to the Justiciar this morning about the possible involvement of Simon Basset in the robbery,’ he said, as they were leaving the table. ‘I said there was no sign of the treasure in his house, but we spoke about the possibility of it being buried somewhere on the marshes behind his dwelling.’

‘Do you want me to have another look around?’ asked Gwyn. ‘After all that rain during the storm, maybe something has been washed clear and exposed by those leats and reens. I’ll have a walk up there now and poke about a bit.’

De Wolfe agreed and they parted outside the door, the coroner’s officer going up the lane alongside the Long Ditch to follow the track across the marsh, which eventually led to the back of the Royal Way.

John loped back to the palace, thankful that the torrid heat had moderated to a pleasant summer’s day. He found Thomas at work in his chamber, writing out some text related to his duties in the archives of the abbey, rather than anything to do with coroner’s cases.

‘There is nothing outstanding for me to deal with,’ he explained apologetically. ‘We have had so few deaths to record that I have been up to date for some time.’

‘You carry on, Thomas,’ said John, reassuringly. ‘Maybe business will improve when we get on the road to Gloucester next week.’

He sat behind his table and half-heartedly unrolled the parchment which carried his last lesson in Latin comprehension.

He could read and write his own name now and make some sense of the Lord’s Prayer, but his attention kept wandering. He looked across at his clerk, whose thin face stared down at the document he was writing, his tongue projecting slightly from the corner of his thin lips as he concentrated on scribing perfect letters with the quill in his right hand. His lank brown hair hung down in a fringe all around the shaved circle on top of his scalp, which denoted his clerical status. John almost envied his clerk’s single-minded devotion to his faith and his scholarship, the Church being the very engine of his life.

This placid scene was eventually broken by an interruption – a tap on the door heralded a young head being poked around it. It was the same cheeky page that had brought the previous message and he now had yet another.

‘Sir John, a man wishes to speak to you about a matter of importance, so he says.’

‘Come in and tell me properly!’ snapped de Wolfe, who was used to a little more deference from messengers who were little more than children. The page slid through the door and stood before him, his tousled fair hair contrasting with the green tabard that carried the three royal lions across his breast.

‘It was a man in the corridor below, sir,’ he gabbled. ‘He gave me a whole half-penny to bring you the message.’

‘Which is what?’ demanded the coroner, glaring at the mercenary young lad.

‘He said if you wish to know more about a bunch of keys, you must meet him in the crypt of St Stephen’s within the hour. He said you would know what he meant.’

‘Is that all he said?’ snapped de Wolfe.

The boy nodded rapidly. ‘Just that you must come alone. Then he vanished.’

‘What do you mean – vanished? Who was he, damn it?’

‘It was in a crowded corridor downstairs, sire. He pressed a coin into my hand and whispered his message, then slipped away into the crowd of clerks that were jostling along there.’

‘What did he look like? Have you seen him before?’

The boy shook his head again, his hair bouncing. ‘Never, Sir John! He was a big man in a poor brown tunic, a short one belted over breeches. He was no nobleman, that’s for sure.’

‘His face, you say you had never seen it before about the palace?’

‘Never, nor about the town. He was rough-featured, no beard and his hair was cropped to brown bristles. He could have been anything, a peasant or a carter.’

De Wolfe could get nothing more from the boy and he was dismissed, looking disappointed at not getting the other half of his expected penny.

‘That sounds very odd, Crowner,’ ventured Thomas. ‘Why should a common man wish to tell you about keys?’

‘The obvious reason is that he knows something about the keys to the treasure chest. No doubt he hopes to sell some information.’

‘Will you go, master?’ asked Thomas, with a worried look on his sharp face.

‘Of course I’ll go! Nothing to be lost and possibly something to be gained. Maybe it’s one of a gang who carried out the theft, hoping to save his neck by turning approver.’ An approver was a miscreant who sought leniency or even a pardon by betraying his fellow conspirators and it was one of a coroner’s many legal duties to take confessions from such persons.

John rose from his table, pushing aside his Latin lesson with some relief. ‘Don’t look so worried, Thomas, whoever it is can hardly force foxglove down my throat this time.’ He reached for his sword belt and baldric which hung on the wall. He did not normally wear his sword about the palace, but to be on the safe side, decided to buckle it around him this time.

‘There, that should satisfy you that I shall remain safe – though it seems unlikely that I might be assassinated within the Palace of Westminster!’

As he left the chamber, Thomas murmured worriedly to himself. ‘That may well have been what Basil of Reigate thought!’

There were two chapels in the palace, one in the Royal Apartments for the use of the king and his family, and another one for the use of the courtiers and their officers. This had been built by King Stephen during his disastrous reign some half-century earlier, and his small chapel was placed at right angles to the main axis of the palace, jutting out towards the Thames immediately behind the Great Hall. It had a plain nave with no separate chancel and beneath it was a pillared crypt, kept quite shallow to avoid the water table of the nearby river.

John de Wolfe knew how to reach the chapel, as he had been taken there soon after coming to Westminster, Thomas eagerly wishing to show him the religious sights of the palace. John had even attended Mass on one occasion, as although he was an unenthu-siastic communicant, habits ingrained from childhood gave him a desultory desire to avoid purgatory and the fires of hell.

The entrance to the chapel was in a covered way that joined the rear of the Great Hall to the end of the Lesser Hall, but there was also a door on each side of the chapel which led out on to the strip of land alongside the river. Within the vestibule at the entrance to the chapel, another door led down a short flight of stone steps into the crypt, which was dimly lit by small slits just above the outside ground level, as the crypt was more of an undercroft, only partly below the surface. His hand on his sword-hilt, John descended the steps into the dank space, where two lines of thick, stumpy pillars stretched ahead, supporting the chapel above. As his eyes became accustomed to the gloom, he searched ahead and to each side, where alcoves contained musty boxes and abandoned furniture, as well as devotional objects. There were some tarnished altar candlesticks, a broken plaster statue of the Virgin and a large processional cross with a bent arm. He advanced further, but saw no one waiting for him.

‘Show yourself, if anyone is there!’ he commanded in a loud voice, beginning to feel as if he was the victim of a hoax and that whoever had given the page a halfpenny had wasted his money.

The next second, he felt a violent blow on the back of his head and he pitched forward to the damp earthen floor. De Wolfe had a thick skull and had suffered blows upon it a number of times during his violent career. He did not lose consciousness, but was rendered so groggy that he was unable to utter the stream of blasphemies and obscenities that swirled around his stunned mind. He began to recover and pushed against the ground with his hands, trying to get to his knees to wreak vengeance with his sword. However, a thin noose was whipped over his head and dragged tightly against his throat. This was new to John and was an experience he would gladly have done without, as his breath was cut off, his vision became blurred and his head felt as if it was about to burst.

He began spiralling down into unconsciousness, with a gripping fear of impending death, unable to fight back since there was a knee in the small of his back.

As his hands gave way and he fell face down on to the earth, his last thoughts were, of all things, of his old dog Brutus.

An hour later, de Wolfe was lying on a low bed in the abbey infirmarium, surrounded by a circle of anxious faces. He had a vague memory of being manhandled on to some kind of stretcher and of severe discomfort as he was bumped along at jogging pace across the few hundred yards of Palace Yard to the monks’ hospital behind the cloisters.

His wits only fully returned when he was on this palliasse, but his return to full consciousness brought with it a burning soreness in his neck and throat. His first attempts at speech sounded like a combination of a duck and a rusty file, which prompted Gwyn to lean over him solicitously.

‘Don’t try to talk, Crowner! That throat of yours will need a bit of rest after the squeezing it suffered!’

Gwyn’s hairy face was replaced in his field of vision by Thomas’s anxious features. ‘The infirmarian has sent for poultices and warmed wine with honey, which will help ease the soreness.’

John struggled to a half-sitting position and saw that in addition to his two faithful retainers, his audience consisted of a grey-haired monk, a younger novitiate, a sergeant from the palace guard, another priest who looked familiar, and Ranulf of Abingdon.

He tried to speak again, but rapidly changed it to a whisper, which seemed to come out more clearly. ‘What the hell happened, for Christ’s sake? Who did this to me?’

‘You were ambushed, but he got away,’ growled Gwyn. ‘When I catch him, I’ll tear his liver out with my teeth!’

The older Benedictine laid a hand gently on the coroner’s shoulder. ‘Don’t try to talk until this bruising of your voicebox wears off, my son. We’ll give you some potions to ease it, as your clerk said.’

John reached up tentatively to feel the back of his head, as he was aware of an ache there.

‘Yes, you have a lump there too, John, some bastard gave you a nasty whack!’ said Ranulf cheerfully. ‘But it’s your clerk to whom you should be grateful, he was the hero of the hour!’

De Wolfe’s bloodshot eyes swivelled to look at Thomas de Peyne, though he took the advice to avoid speaking.

‘The little fellow probably saved your life,’ chortled Gwyn. ‘That’s usually my job, but he beat me to it this time.’

John risked some gargling noises which were obviously a demand for more explanation and the Cornishman began it.

‘Just before I returned from a wasted search on the marshes behind the canon’s house, Thomas here said he was uneasy about you going off to meet some mysterious informant, so he decided to follow you down to that chapel place.’

He nudged the priest to get him to continue and Thomas, wriggling with embarrassment, reluctantly described what happened.

‘I was concerned that you went alone to meet this unknown person, Crowner, even though you took your sword. There might have been half a dozen Brabançons waiting to jump on you.’

He paused and shivered at the memory of his own desperate intervention. ‘So I followed a couple of minutes later and was in time to see this evil man strike you down with a club, then slip a cord around your neck and start strangling you.’

Gwyn guffawed and slapped Thomas on the back. ‘Damn me if the little devil didn’t attack the assailant, though he was twice his size, according to Thomas!’