Crowner's Quest (15 page)

Gabriel, a rugged old veteran of many campaigns, was glad of an excuse to visit his friends on the top floor and led the bailiff up the narrow stairs to the small upper chamber. Here, John de Wolfe was silently mouthing the Latin phrases set by his tutor for tomorrow’s lesson. Gwyn was squatting on his window-ledge, peeling an apple with his dagger, and missing the opportunity to bait Thomas, who was still in the Chapter House, searching for the missing parchment.

Gabriel announced Ulf as one of Fitzhamon’s bailiffs, then subsided on to Thomas’s vacant stool to eavesdrop on any news. The bailiff told his story about the sudden descent of the avengers upon Loventor’s attempt to repulse the assart-cutters. ‘Those men were professional soldiers, Crowner. They were well armed and cut down two of our men without warning. Though we wished to teach de la Pomeroy’s woodsmen a lesson, we only intended to cause some sore heads and a few bruises – but these men slew two of ours as you would swat flies.’

‘When did this happen? And what have you done with the bodies?’ demanded de Wolfe.

‘This very morning, sir,’ replied Ulf, a heavily built Saxon with a hoarse voice. ‘Sir William’s steward knew that we have to report such violent deaths to the crowner so he sent me in haste to tell you.’

‘You’ve not buried them?’ growled Gwyn, knowing that the disposal of embarrassing bodies was usually a first priority of villages.

‘Indeed not!’ replied Ulf virtuously. ‘We have put hurdles around them to keep off the dogs, who showed a great interest in the smell of blood.’

‘Do you know who attacked your men?’ asked de Wolfe.

‘I was not there myself, but two reliable men who were leading the outlaws we hired said that one man was Giles Fulford, though the leader was a fellow with red hair, a darker shade than your man here. They did not know his name.’

The coroner looked at Gwyn enquiringly, then back at the bailiff. ‘Does the name Jocelin de Braose mean anything to you?’

Ulf looked blank. ‘No, never heard of him. Our men may have, but not me.’

After a few more questions, John arranged to meet the man early next morning to ride to Loventor, and Gabriel took him away, with the advice to seek a penny bed and meal at the Bush, the best inn in the city.

When they had gone, the coroner pondered the reappearance of Fulford in this incident, but felt it was impossible to relate it to the death of the canon.

‘This red-headed leader, Gwyn,’ he demanded of his officer. ‘We must discover if this man is Jocelin de Braose. Who would know if he has the same coloured thatch?’

The Cornishman lifted a hand to his own unruly ginger hair. ‘There are plenty of us about! But I’ll ask at the Saracen tonight to see if anyone knows him – his squire seems to visit the place often enough.’

As it was getting dusk, before long John trudged home to Martin’s Lane, to spend an evening of sullen silence with his wife, relieved only by mulled wine and dozing by the fire until it was time to stumble to bed.

In the grey light of dawn next day, the coroner rode his great stallion Bran down Fore Street to the West Gate, with Gwyn close behind on a big brown mare. The usual chill wind was blowing from the east, but there was no fresh snow. Both men wore heavy woollen tunics down to mid-calf, divided front and back to allow them to sit in the saddle. De Wolfe had a black leather hood, pointed at the back, over his long riding cloak, while Gwyn had a hessian sack wrapped around his head, the ends tucked into the frayed collar of his thick leather jerkin.

Ulf of Dartington was waiting for them inside the gate, which had just opened for the day. It was a hanging offence for a porter to allow any gate to be opened between dusk and dawn, except in some rare emergency sanctioned by the sheriff.

The three mounted men moved through the gate against a milling crowd pressing the opposite way. These were mainly countryfolk, laden with baskets of vegetables, eggs and chickens or pushing handcarts piled high with such produce. They came to sell to the city-dwellers, setting out their wares on the edge of the street or supplying the established stall-holders with fresh stock.

Once out of the gate, the riders crossed on to Exe Island, the marshy area reclaimed from the river, which supported mean huts clustered around the fulling mills for washing and preparing wool. At the other side of the island, de Wolfe led them into the cold water of the Exe, to splash across the shallows. There was a flimsy wooden bridge for travellers on foot, but the long stone bridge stood unfinished, as the builder, Walter Gervase, had again run out of funds.

Once up the opposite bank, they took the main highway west towards Plymouth and Cornwall. The going was good as the usual muddy morass had been hardened by the frost into a firm surface. Clipping along at a trot, they reached Chudleigh in less than two hours and turned off the main track southwards, to head towards Totnes on the river Dart.

Another hour or so brought them near the village of Ipplepen, when they branched off again on to tracks through the scrub and forest that lay between the villages. John knew this area well: he had been born and brought up at Stoke-in-Teignhead, a manor in a small valley south of the Teign estuary. Here his mother, brother and sister still lived and he resolved to call upon them on the way back to Exeter. Eventually they reached the hamlet of Loventor, where Ulf led them behind a tithe barn near the small wooden church. A few curious villagers trailed up to them as they slid from their horses and lashed the reins to a fence. Behind the barn, a leaning structure of wattle walls and a thatched roof, was some wasteground on which several hurdles of woven hazel-withies had been stuck in the ground to form a square against the back wall of the barn.

‘We kept them in here for you, Crowner,’ said Ulf proudly, aiming a kick at a scraggy dog sniffing at the enclosure.

The bailiff pulled aside a hurdle and ushered de Wolfe and his henchman inside. On the ground were two bodies, laid side by side. They were dressed in clothing so rough as to be little better than rags. ‘These were outlaws?’ The coroner’s remark was more a statement than a question.

‘They were. We gave them some food and a few pence to teach those woodcutters a lesson. They are always hanging about the villages along the edge of the moor and forest, looking either to rob and steal or to do some occasional work for a pittance.’

De Wolfe well knew that although outlaws were supposed to be hunted like vermin, they often crept back into society, either to perform casual labouring work or even to settle permanently and take up a trade. Officially they were outcasts, usually escaped prisoners, suspects on the run or sanctuary-seekers who had promised to abjure the realm but who had melted away into the forests instead of seeking ship at a port. Anyone could slay an outlaw on sight; in law, they were considered ‘wolves’ heads’, and a bounty of five shillings could be claimed for their amputated head, if brought as proof to the sheriff or coroner.

‘Were all your gang outlaws who attacked the assart-makers?’ snapped de Wolfe.

‘All but two, who were our own men, including the reeve. Sir William decreed it should be done, so his steward found the men.’

De Wolfe bent over the corpses and saw that the right arm of one had been severed at the shoulder – the bloody limb was lying on the grass alongside him. The other had a massive wound in the neck and the coroner unhesitatingly stuck his fingers into the slash to gauge its depth. He looked up at Gwyn. ‘The neck bones are chipped by the blade. It was a good blow, almost took his head off,’ he said conversationally. He considered himself an authority on methods of killing and maiming, after a score of years on a multitude of battlefields. He wiped his fingers on a tuft of frozen grass and stood up. ‘I suppose I must hold an inquest on them, Gwyn.’

The hairy assistant looked dubiously at the still figures on the ground. ‘Is there any need?’ he asked grudgingly. ‘If they are outlaws, they don’t even exist in the eyes of the law. Why bother?’

The coroner rasped a hand over his black stubble – he was due to have his shave tomorrow. ‘I’m not sure. Nor do I think that anyone else knows the answer. The instructions are far from clear as to the duties of coroners.’

The only mandate they had was a single sentence issued by the meeting of the King’s justices held in Kent last September. This merely said that, in every county, three knights and one clerk were to be appointed to ‘keep the pleas of the Crown’, which meant all legal events that took place in the county had to be recorded for presentation to the Justices when they made their visits, which were noted for their infrequency and irregularity. As part of this ‘keeping of the pleas’, the coroner had to investigate all sudden deaths, assaults, rapes, finds of treasure, wrecks, catches of royal fish, such as whales and sturgeon, and perhaps even robberies. He had also to attend all hangings, mutilations, ordeals, trials by combat and any other legal happening that might come along. Yet the instructions for how to deal with such matters were vague in the extreme. De Wolfe knew that if he tried to seek clarification as to whether he need investigate the deaths of non-persons such as outlaws, he would wait months for a response from the royal court, if the judges of the King’s council could be bothered to consider the matter.

‘Let’s do it, to be on the safe side,’ he muttered to his officer. ‘There may be some political aspect to this. I suspect that a couple of dead men are but a symptom of some feud between Henry de la Pomeroy and William Fitzhamon, over land tenure, apart from this assart business.’

As if some heavenly ear had overheard him, a diversion occurred. Gwyn’s head went up and he almost sniffed the air. ‘Horsemen, coming this way – at least three of them,’ he said.

It was a minute or so before de Wolfe’s less keen ear heard the hoofs, but soon horses appeared at the end of the track through the village and four riders cantered up to the tithe barn. ‘It’s Sir William Fitzhamon,’ said Ulf, hurrying out of the hurdles to pull his forelock to his master.

The leading horseman was a thin, erect man whom John had met somewhere in the past, but with whom he was barely acquainted. Fitzhamon dismounted, walked across to the coroner and greeted him abruptly, giving hardly a glance at the bloody cadavers on the ground. ‘This is my son, Robert,’ he said jerking his head at the lad, who had also slid from his horse, leaving two squires mounted to guard their rear. ‘I assumed rightly that you would come here this morning, in response to the message I sent with my bailiff,’ he said, with a touch of arrogance that irritated John. ‘These dead rogues are of no account in themselves, but I wanted official recognition of the harm and insult that Pomeroy has done to my estate.’

De Wolfe, half a head taller than Fitzhamon, glowered at the older man. ‘I gather this comes about from some land dispute?’

‘There is no dispute, Sir John. The land is mine and has been in our family for generations. It is flagrant robbery on the part of Pomeroy, who is trying to push back my boundary by several hides, hacking and burning my part of the forest where it abuts on to his land, between this village and Afton.’ He smacked his leg in anger with a riding crop. ‘It’s not the first time he’s tried this.’

He took the coroner by the elbow and pulled him away from the others, while his son followed uncertainly behind him. ‘I have a number of manors scattered over the western counties and I cannot be everywhere at once. But this has gone too far. I have threatened Pomeroy that I will petition the King if he does not stop cutting my trees and withdraw back to his own boundaries.’

‘The King is a hard man to petition, these days. He is ever abroad,’ observed de Wolfe, though without any hint of criticism of Richard the Lionheart’s disregard for England.

‘I know that, and resign myself to not seeing him in person – though I wish I was still young enough to assist him in his war against that milk-sop in France, the unspeakable Philip.’

De Wolfe’s heart began to warm to Fitzhamon, after their first cool encounter. Anyone who was such a staunch supporter of the King was a man to admire, in his eyes.

‘I can – and will – go to see the Justiciar over this,’ continued Fitzhamon. ‘I regret that I missed the chance to meet him last month when he was in Exeter, but I had a week of the bloody flux and could not get from my bed or the privy.’

‘Hubert Walter is a fair-minded man and would consider your complaints seriously,’ advised de Wolfe.

Fitzhamon gave a quick look over his shoulder. ‘I could tell him a few other things as well, beyond my complaints about my land boundaries, if I had a mind. Things he might well pass on to our sovereign.’

Intrigued, John tried to lead him into more detail, but Fitzhamon seemed to feel that he had said too much already and would not be drawn further. They walked back to the barn and Fitzhamon prepared to remount his horse. ‘I wished to bring these deaths to your notice in the proper manner, Crowner, so that Henry de la Pomeroy is in no doubt that he has done wrong in setting a pack of rogues upon my own men who are defending my land.’

As he swung himself into the saddle, de Wolfe went up to him. ‘Your bailiff said that a man called Giles Fulford was among those who attacked your men, but that the leader was a red-headed fellow. Have you any idea who that might be?’

Fitzhamon shook his head. ‘I am not acquainted with the mercenaries of this county, sir. I know that many hot-blooded young men are putting themselves at the disposal of those who need strong arms and long swords to further their ambitions. I myself was invited to join them, but I considered it infamous! But, as to names, I can’t help you. I leave that to my servants.’ With this arrogant snub, he swung his horse round and cantered off, his silent son and two guards close behind him.

The coroner stared after them, until they vanished around a bend in the track. ‘I wonder what it was he almost told me,’ he mused.

The inquest that followed was a simple, hurried affair. Gwyn rounded up the two Loventor men who had accompanied the outlaw pack that had attacked the woodcutters. The surviving outlaws had vanished: no forest-dweller was going to risk being in the proximity of the King’s coroner if he wanted to keep his head on his shoulders.