Crowner's Quest (20 page)

As Fulford scrambled out of the hole, John recovered sufficiently to face de Braose again, but he found that both knight and squire were now coming against him, as the other digger, far from being a menial labourer, showed himself an experienced combatant. Ignoringhis discarded hoe, he seized a long spear lying on the grass and, almost before his feet were out of the excavation, lunged forward with it at Gwyn. Though the officer had his sword at the ready, its reach was far less than that of the spear and the hairy giant had to hop back and chop sideways at the shaft to avoid being skewered. Eric Langton had taken to his heels and was out of sight of the yelling, thrashing group of men, but the battle was not to last long.

As Fulford and de Braose advanced on de Wolfe, Gwyn backed around to try to stand by him, dodging repeated short jabs from the unknown man’s spear. The coroner was now facing a sword and a long-handled spade, waving his own sword slowly from side to side.

For a few seconds, there seemed to be a stand-off, until the canon’s man Wichin, who had been obscured behind Gwyn, gave a great yell, swung his stave over his head and brought it down on the shaft of the spear. He forced it to the ground, but before he could lift his stave again, the spearman had pulled back his weapon and jabbed it into Wichin’s shoulder. The leaf-shaped point dug deeply into the muscle, and blood welled immediately through the leather jacket. Wichin screamed, dropped his staff and, as the lance was pulled out, fell to his knees with the pain and shock.

But the intervention had given Gwyn his opportunity. He reversed his move towards the coroner and, raising his great sword, swung it in a whistling horizontal arc at the spearman. The blade connected with the side of his neck and the man collapsed in a welter of blood and agonal convulsions.

With hardly a glance at the man whose life he had just taken, Gwyn leaped back to John’s side. Within two minutes of the fight beginning, three of the combatants had been eliminated and now it was two against two, all seasoned warriors. However, the coroner and his officer had twice the number of years’ experience on the battlefield than the younger men, and Fulford was armed only with a shovel – his sword lay sheathed on the ground where he had left it to go digging.

‘Give in, both of you,’ yelled de Wolfe. ‘We don’t want to kill you!’

For answer, Jocelin de Braose, his capuchon unwound and fallen down his back, swung his sword back and forth to form a zone of protection in front of him and tried to move forward towards the coroner. That old campaigner dropped his own massive blade at an angle, holding the hilt above waist-level, then suddenly moved it forward into the path of de Braose’s weapon. There was a clang as metal hit metal and when de Wolfe jerked his hands forward again, the other blade was deflected towards the ground. But the younger man leaped backwards and freed his sword before John could make a swing at him.

As this duel was going on, Giles Fulford was attempting to use the longer reach of the shovel to hit Gwyn on his sword arm. One blow landed, but the coroner’s officer merely grunted and waited his opportunity. As the tool swung again, he sidestepped and hacked down on the wooden shaft just above the heart-shaped blade. Though it was too thick and hard to be severed, a deep chop mark appeared, which then split several inches up the centre of the handle. With a roar, Gwyn opened himself deliberately to another blow, which landed with a thwack on his leather-covered ribs. As he had anticipated, the split handle gave up the ghost instantly and the shovel-head fell off on to the ground.

‘I’ve got the bastard!’ he yelled, and dived on Fulford, knowing that the coroner would prefer these two alive rather than dead. As Jocelin and de Wolfe entered another cycle of striking and parrying, Gwyn became over-confident of seizing the squire. He tossed his sword behind him to grab Fulford in a bear-hug. But Giles still had half the shovel-shaft in his hands. With it he gave Gwyn a bone-shattering crack on the temple, which made the big Cornishman stagger and put his hands to his head in a temporary stupor, though he wasn’t knocked out. Fulford put a hand to the back of his belt and whipped out an eight-inch dagger. The flash of the blade caught de Wolfe’s eye. In desperation he brought down his sword with a sledge-hammer of a blow that skidded down de Braose’s weapon and struck the hilt-guard with such force that it was twisted out of his hand. Before the sword had even hit the ground, John made another swing at Fulford, trying to strike his knife arm. He missed as the man jumped aside, but by then Gwyn, though groggy, had recovered enough to grab his attacker’s arms and the pair began to wrestle with the dagger waving dangerously a few inches from Gwyn’s ribs. De Wolfe was trying to watch both adversaries, afraid that Fulford would manage to stab his officer and that de Braose would retrieve his sword and return to the attack while the coroner’s attention was divided.

But the reflexes of an old soldier and a good share of luck saved the day. De Wolfe jumped towards Fulford and jabbed the tip of his sword forward. At the same time he felt an impact on the sole of his foot. He had trodden on the cross-piece of de Braose’s sword as he pricked Fulford’s upper arm. The big two-handed swords were designed for slashing, not fencing, and the tip was broad and rather blunt, but it penetrated the thick leather of Fulford’s jerkin and made him yell.

All this took no more than a few seconds, but when de Wolfe sensed de Braose trying to pull his sword from under his foot, he swung out with his other leg and caught the man under the chin. De Braose staggered back, gurgling, and the coroner stooped to grab the lost weapon and hurl it away into the nearest bramble thicket.

In spite of the bleeding flesh-wound in his arm, Fulford still grasped the knife and, though Gwyn was holding him by the arms, the crack the officer had received on his head had halved his fighting abilities, especially as blood was pouring down from a cut over his right eye, almost blinding him.

Afraid that Fulford might still slide the dagger between Gwyn’s ribs, John grabbed him from behind and put an arm-lock across his throat, doing all he could to crush his Adam’s apple. He was only too well aware that his back was to de Braose who, like every man, carried a lethal dagger on his belt. He screwed his neck around to look out for the danger but, to his surprise, Jocelin had vanished.

Afraid to release Fulford until Gwyn had recovered, he had no means of pursuing the leader and the trio staggered back and forth in stale-mate for another half-minute, with Fulford beginning to go blue in the face from de Wolfe’s grip on his throat. Gwyn resolved the situation by recovering enough wit to bring up his massive knee into Fulford’s crotch with a blow that almost crushed his genitals. Unable to scream because of the arm-lock, Fulford’s eyes bulged and he went limp. Afraid of some trick, John hung on for a little longer, but almost simultaneously he and Gwyn released their hold and stepped back. Fulford fell in a heap on the ground, gasping and groaning.

De Wolfe picked up the dagger, then turned to Gwyn, who subsided slowly to sit alongside Fulford, wiping the blood from his face with his fingers and holding his head with the other hand.

‘Are you all right, man?’ said the coroner, who had been in tighter scrapes than this one with his officer, but who was still concerned for his head injury.

Gwyn shook his head like a dog coming from water. ‘Yes, I wasn’t fated to be killed over a poxy treasure hunt. But that was a fair whack he gave me with that shovel handle.’ He looked around him, blinking the last of the blood from his eyelids. ‘What happened to de Braose?’

The sound of hoofs on the road was enough answer.

‘He thought escape better than heroism, leaving his squire behind,’ said the coroner, ‘though he was good with a sword, I’ll grant him that.’

Gwyn struggled to his feet and looked down at Fulford. ‘This one will live until he’s hanged, but what about the others?’

They looked round at the mayhem in the area of crushed grass. The groom from the Close was now sitting up, holding his head in his hands, a large blue bruise rapidly appearing around his left ear. ‘I’ll be fine in a while,’ he mumbled. ‘But where’s Wichin?’ The other cathedral servant, who had been wounded in the arm, was found lying on his side behind the nearest large bush. He had lost a lot of blood, but when de Wolfe cut away his jacket, he saw that the wound was now full of clot and that the haemorrhage had stopped.

‘I’ll get him taken to the parish priest,’ said a timid voice. Looking round, de Wolfe saw that Eric Langton, who had kept a safe distance during the fighting, had returned. He went off to find the priest and some help to carry Wichin to a nearby house to recover. David said that he would stay with him until the Archdeacon could send out a leech to see him and bring him back to the cathedral infirmary.

‘What do we do with this fellow?’ asked Gwyn, whose iron head had suffered no lasting ill-effects from the blow.

They looked down at Fulford, who was also recovering from the throttling and the scrotal insult. He had small red blotches in the whites of his eyes and his face was still slightly blue and swollen from de Wolfe’s attempts to strangle him. He sat on the ground, one hand over the small cut in his arm, the other over his aching testicles, but his defiance was returning. ‘Who in Satan’s name are you?’ he croaked. ‘And what right have you to attack us? Don’t you know that that was Sir Jocelin de Braose whom you assaulted and drove away?’

De Wolfe’s black and grey figure was hunched above him like a great crow. ‘You ask us that, Fulford? I am Sir John de Wolfe, if we are bandying titles. You obviously don’t know the King’s coroner when you see him – and his officer.’

The man’s confidence seemed to increase as the pain in his groin diminished. ‘Coroner? What is this to do with corpses – except those you seem to produce yourself?’ He pointed across at the bloody body lying on the other side of the hole.

Gwyn prodded him none too gently with his foot. ‘Enough of your lip, man. The crowner will ask the questions.’

De Wolfe motioned to his officer to pull the man to his feet. ‘You are a prisoner now. You will be taken back to Rougemont and lodged in the gaol there.’

‘On what charge? You will regret this, Crowner, you are meddling in matters you don’t understand.’

De Wolfe gave him a buffet on the ear. ‘You impertinent devil! You forget your station in life, young man. A squire to some shiftless mercenary is of little account to me. As for dead bodies, you should know that another part of a coroner’s duties is to safeguard finds of treasure trove, to keep them safe for the King from thieves like you.’

At this Giles Fulford remained silent, and Gwyn frogmarched him to the horses that were tied up some distance away at the edge of the little wood.

David had virtually recovered now from his bang on the head, and helped the coroner’s officer to tie Fulford’s hands to the saddle-horn with a spare thong.

‘What about the corpse? Another outlaw, by the looks of his clothing,’ said Gwyn.

Sullenly, the squire confirmed that the dead man was indeed another anonymous ruffian hired for the occasion, though from the quality of his fighting he must once have been a soldier.

‘Let the village bury him here,’ said de Wolfe. ‘This time, I’ll interpret the rules to accept that an outlaw is also outside the crowner’s law and we’ll do without an inquest.’

‘What about the treasure hoard?’ muttered Fulford. ‘Are you going to leave that half-dug hole there for the village to steal whatever is hidden in it?’

At this, de Wolfe took a perverse delight in holding up the parchment, which Eric Langton had returned to him a few minutes ago. Holding it up before the man tied on the horse, he slowly ripped it in half and then in quarters. ‘Written by my clerk the other night, especially for your benefit. There is no treasure, my lad – at least not in that hole!’

Fuming at the deception, and not a little uneasy at what the immediate future might hold, Fulford was led alongside Gwyn’s mare and the cavalcade set off for Exeter.

They delivered their prisoner to Rougemont by late afternoon, giving him into the charge of Stigand, the obese and repulsive gaoler who reigned in the undercroft of the keep. Protesting violently, and promising retribution from on high, Giles Fulford was thrust into a filthy cell that lay off the passage that ran from an iron gate in the basement of the building.

This undercroft was partly below ground, reached by a short flight of steps from the inner bailey. It was divided in half by a dank, fungoid stone wall, the outer cavern being an open space, used for storage and as a torture chamber. There, ordeals, mutilations and the
peine et forte dure
were carried out. The rusted, barred gate was set in the centre of the wall, beyond which lay a dozen small cells and one larger cage.

De Wolfe gave no explanation to Stigand as to the reason why Fulford was to enjoy the sheriff’s hospitality, and the gaoler showed no interest as he pushed a dirty jug of water, half a loaf and a leather bucket for sanitation into the cell with the new prisoner. When Giles demanded the attentions of an apothecary for the wound on his arm, Stigand took a casual look at it, shrugged and walked away.

De Wolfe had already discovered that Richard de Revelle was out of the city until next day, so his intention to discuss the arrest of Fulford and the escape of de Braose was frustrated. Tired from a day in the saddle and the exertions of a fight, John was ready for a good meal, some ale and bed. He walked back across the inner ward of the castle with Gwyn, advising his old henchman to do the same, especially as he had a wide graze and cut on his forehead and was suffering a headache from the blow he had taken.

‘Where will you get a bed tonight?’ he asked, as the gates were shut and the Cornishman could not get back to St Sidwell’s.

‘Gabriel will find me a place in the barracks. I often sleep there if I can’t get home,’ Gwyn answered. ‘I’ll go down to the Bush to eat. I don’t fancy the Saracen after today’s performance.’