Crowner's Quest (11 page)

A group of drinkers moved across their field of view, and when they had a sight across the room again the priest had moved away in the company of another girl, with a pallid face but a gaudy kirtle. They went across to the ladder in the corner, which, like the Bush and most other inns, led up to the primitive sleeping accommodation on the floor above.

As they pushed their way through the throng, the blond squire and Rosamunde of Rye went hand in hand towards the street door and vanished. Gwyn of Polruan spent the next hour sitting in the Saracen, drinking his ale and pondering on whether what he had seen had any significance in the case of the murdered canon.

By the next morning, Matilda had thawed sufficiently to appear in the cold light of dawn to join her husband at the breakfast Mary set before them in the bare hall of their house. Over hot bread, cold pork and mulled ale, they sat each side of the long table, silently avoiding the sharing of each other’s thoughts. His wife could sulk for days on end, which de Wolfe found worse than an outright fight – the latter gave a better excuse to flare up and clear off to the Bush, where he could enjoy the pleasant company of his mistress. But when Matilda was merely sullen, he felt that he had to try to wean her back at least to a state of neutrality, for the sake of his own relative peace of mind. Although John did not enjoy her company, even at the best of times in this loveless marriage, he found outright warfare, niggling bickering and silent antipathy about as welcome as a festering open wound.

Unable to leave her, due to the social obligations of a Norman knight and a King’s officer, he had to endure the
status quo
with as good grace as he could muster. Yet although he had ample opportunity to relieve his sensual needs, mainly with Nesta but also with a couple of other ladies around the county, he still had to live in Martin’s Lane with a wife obsessed with her position in the social hierarchy of the county.

De Wolfe was the only coroner in Devon: the mandate from Hubert Walter had required each county to appoint three knights and a clerk, but here only two had been found to accept the unpaid post, and the other, Robert Fitzrogo, had fallen from his horse in the first fortnight and been killed. De Wolfe had been left to cover the huge expanse from Barnstaple on the Severn Sea down to the south coast, with Exmoor and Dartmoor included in a vast tract of country that on horseback took three days to cross.

As he sat chewing the rind on his pig-meat and crunching the crusty bread, he tried to take stock of his own state of contentment. A soldier since the age of seventeen, he was now forty and put out to grass, as far as foreign campaigning was concerned. Although he could have gone to join his beloved Richard Coeur de Lion in France, an old wound in his left hip, from a spear thrust in Palestine, made him wary of long sojourns in the field, living in tents or filthy castle barracks. He had wearied of endless killing, and the massacres in the Third Crusade, from which he had returned two years previously, had sickened him of outright war. When he was young, he had been in the Irish campaigns and often in Normandy and France, but the Holy Land had been a different world. Also, though he hardly admitted it even to himself, he still felt responsible for the King having been captured in Austria. Gwyn and de Wolfe had been part of Richard’s small bodyguard during their attempted journey across the continent after being shipwrecked in the Adriatic. Through no fault of de Wolfe, the Lionheart had been seized while he and Gwyn had escaped. The King spent almost two years in the clutches of Leopold of Austria and Henry of Germany. It had been the huge ransom that England had to pay, a hundred and fifty thousand marks, that had helped to impoverish the country since, and which had driven Justiciar Hubert Walter to squeeze every penny in taxes from the hard-pressed population. Indeed, the creation of coroners had been part of the drive to extract as much money as possible from both rich and poor.

Yet de Wolfe found that he enjoyed the job: it gave him the chance to get out and about on a horse, sometimes to become involved in a fight when things turned nasty – and, above all, to escape from Matilda with a legitimate excuse to be away from home for days on end. She had thought that becoming coroner would give them increased prestige in the county pecking-order, without too much labour, that the coroner would merely officiate at local courts, hobnob with the King’s Justices when they came, and oversee the formalities at inquests. She soon learned, with dismay, that it meant her husband had to spend most of his time away from home on the back of his old warhorse Bran, in company with the red-haired Cornish savage and an evil little gnome, who was both a sexual pervert and a disgraced priest.

A state of grumbling hostility had developed between de Wolfe and his wife, fuelled mostly on her side by his stubborn obstinacy to carry out his duties with faithful dedication, born of his conviction that it was his duty to his king. Another source of friction was her awareness of his infidelity, though the knowledge that virtually every Norman in the country had a mistress or two made this a lesser evil. Matilda herself had had a flirtation or two with men in the past, when John was away at his wars, but she had done it partly from pique and partly from boredom, rather than any passionate desire. In fact, she had found the affairs embarrassingly sordid and had long been chaste.

Though this morning she had condescended to sit with her husband at the table, the silence was almost palpable enough to be cut with his dagger. His feeble efforts at conversation were met with stony indifference and he soon gave up, with a glowering sense of familiarity with the situation.

As soon as he had finished eating, he threw on his cloak and whistled down the passageway to the yard for Brutus, deciding to give the old hound a walk up to the castle. The snow had stopped overnight, but there was a couple of inches of slush on the ground, dirty and stained in the middle of the lane and in the high street where people threw out their slops. Brutus was not too happy at being brought out of Mary’s warm kitchen to plod through the cold streets, but he faithfully followed his master, enjoying the various smells at each corner and the opportunity to cock his leg every few yards. At the castle gatehouse, he darted ahead of de Wolfe and ran up the twisting stone staircase, knowing that the dog-loving Gwyn would throw him a piece of his breakfast cheese.

Up in the spartan chamber, Thomas de Peyne was in his usual place at the rough table, scribing away at duplicate rolls for the judges when they came to the January Eyre of Assize. Gwyn was perched on his window-ledge, chewing at the remains of a loaf, with Brutus already sitting at his feet staring up hopefully for a share.

De Wolfe settled himself behind his table as Thomas put down his quill pen and waited expectantly. Before he could start telling of his archive researches, Gwyn broke in with his own story about his visit to the Saracen the night before. When he had finished, the coroner leaned forward on the table. ‘Did you learn this fellow’s name?’ he demanded.

The Cornishman nodded. ‘I made it my business to question Willem the Fleming afterwards, miserable devil that he is. He told me that the fair man was named Giles Fulford, squire to a young knight from the Welsh Marches, who is currently living in this county.’

‘Do we know his name as well?’

‘Yes. The Fleming told me grudgingly that it was Jocelin de Braose. His father is a Marcher lord from somewhere near Monmouth.’

John de Wolfe chewed his lip as an aid to memory. ‘I heard of that family when we accompanied Archbishop Baldwin around Wales on his recruiting campaign for the Crusade in ’eighty-eight. They had a bad reputation, as far as I recollect – every Welshman spat on the ground when their name was mentioned.’

Thomas couldn’t resist airing his extensive knowledge of recent history. ‘William de Braose was the one who invited a dozen Welsh chieftains to a banquet at his castle at Abergavenny – and stabbed them all to death!’

Gwyn grunted, to indicate that he saw this as typical Norman behaviour, but forbore to say so in as many words: although his master was half Welsh, he was still a Norman official.

De Wolfe pulled his mind back to the present. ‘So what of this Giles fellow? Why should he be gabbing to a cathedral priest in a low tavern with a doxy at his elbow?’

His officer shrugged. ‘The devil alone knows. Willem said that both he and this Jocelin, whom he serves, are both now mercenaries, hiring their arms for anyone who will pay them.’

The coroner’s eyebrows hauled up his forehead. ‘Mercenaries? I heard some tales of them only yesterday. It seems that they are frequenting Exeter a great deal lately. Are these men former Crusaders like us?’

Gwyn grimaced. ‘I very much doubt it. The Fulford fellow was too pale to have been in Outremer. Probably they’ve been in France for their fighting.’ He threw a piece of stone-hard cheese in the air. Brutus caught it effortlessly and swallowed it in one gulp.

‘What of this black-haired wench who seems to have caught your fancy? Do you think this vicar has her in his bed?’

‘I doubt it. She looked too much of a handful for such a weed as that boy. It was this Giles that had her by the arm. The vicar took some drab of his own up to the loft of the Saracen.’

‘Is this Rosamunde just a common harlot, then?’

‘Not according to Otelin, the leatherman. I gathered she was a camp-follower to these hired soldiers, a cut above an ordinary whore.’

John picked up a parchmentroll and absently looked at Thomas’s inscription under the tape that tied it. His new literacy just allowed him to make out the name of the deceased person to whom it referred, a man who had fallen from a roof a week ago. But his mind was elsewhere.

‘Is any of this at all to do with our dead canon?’ he muttered. ‘Only the presence of the next-door vicar has the slightest possible connection.’

‘He is the deputy for Roger de Limesi,’ the astute Thomas reminded him. ‘That might be a slight strengthening of the connection, as there are twenty-one other canons who have nothing to do with the archives.’

Having got a word in between the two bigger men, he continued by telling of his sole discovery of the fresh cross against Saewulf in Robert de Hane’s parchments. His announcement was met with blank silence by the other two in the chamber. Abashed, he murmured, ‘I know nothing of this Saxon, but I will find out. It may be a pointer to something, as the mark was made in the same colour ink as that on the canon’s desk in the Chapter House.’

Gwyn snorted, which made Brutus recoil. ‘A mark on a roll of sheepskin! Is that all your night’s labour can turn up, midget?’

De Wolfe held up his hand to forestall a squabble between his assistants. ‘No matter! The next task is to shake some information from this vicar, but first I’ll see what’s to be learned about Jocelin de Braose and his squire.’

A few moments later, having left Brutus in the safe hands of his officer, the coroner was in the sheriff’s chamber. This time, the sharp-faced Lady Eleanor was there, dressed for travelling, an elderly handmaiden hovering behind her. A harassed-looking Richard de Revelle was shouting orders at a steward and at Sergeant Gabriel, who was leading a small escort for his wife on her journey back to Revelstoke.

The coroner greeted the woman civilly. She replied with cold ill-grace, and de Wolfe retired into the shadows of the room until his brother-in-law had ushered the party out and had seen them depart from the keep of Rougemont on their slow four-hour journey to his main country residence near Plympton.

On his return, Richard was almost affable in his relief at having seen the back of his wife for a week or more. ‘Wives are all very well in their place,’ he said cheerfully, ‘as long as that place is a long way from their husbands.’ He sat behind the heavy oak table that served as his desk. ‘Now, what can I do for you, John?’

The coroner came straight to the point. ‘What do you know of a man called Jocelin de Braose? And his squire, for that matter.’

De Revelle looked warily at his brother-in-law. ‘Almost nothing – why?’

‘Just tell me, man. Do you know of him at all?’

The sheriff, dressed in his favourite pale green, pulled rather nervously at his beard. ‘I know his name, of course, and generally of his family. But I’ve never met him, that I can recollect. Again, why do you want to know?’

De Wolfe had a distinct feeling that the other man was being evasive, if not actually lying, and wondered why this should be. ‘He may be involved in the death of our old prebendary. It’s only the faintest of possibilities as yet, but any glimmer of light is welcome in this obscure affair.’ He related Gwyn’s story of the meeting with Canon de Limesi’s vicar, feeling that it had only the most tenuous connection with Robert de Hane.

His brother-in-law was obviously of the same mind: he scoffed at the idea. ‘For God’s sake, John, how can you make a conspiracy out of this? The damned priest was probably trying to buy a night’s lechery from this squire’s woman. You know what some of these clerics are like – their celibacy is the biggest joke in the city.’

De Wolfe had to admit that he was probably right but, like a dog with a bone, he wouldn’t give up worrying the matter yet. ‘This Jocelin fellow, I hear he is one of those who sells his sword to the highest bidder.’

‘There are plenty of them about, John. Think of all your Crusader comrades who have returned home to find nothing to occupy them or fill their purses. They can’t all find wars in France.’

‘So this man is one of those hired warriors, then,’ persisted the coroner. ‘I have heard that they have even formed some sort of confederation in these western counties.’

The sheriff became cautious at once. ‘I know nothing of that. Any baron or manorial lord is entitled to employ men in his service, be they cooks or men-at-arms. It has always been so.’

He refused to be drawn further and John changed the subject slightly. ‘What about this Rosamunde wench? Is anything known of her?’

Richard de Revelle’s narrow face twisted into a leer. ‘I’ve certainly heard of her – she has a reputation as the most talented doxy between Penzance and Dover. Not that I have any personal knowledge of that,’ he added, with such haste that de Wolfe knew he was lying. It was little more than a month since he had caught his brother-in-law in bed with a harlot in the very next room.