The Poisoned Chalice (28 page)

Grumbling under his breath, the gaoler unlocked the gate and pulled it open with a screech of rusted hinges. Wheezing with the effort of moving his ponderous body, he tramped back up the dark passage beyond the gate. ‘He's there, on the left,' he grunted, waving his bunch of keys to one side.

Off the passage, half a dozen narrower gates led into tiny cells. At the further end was a larger cage, with about a dozen wretches penned in together. John recognised the reeve and two men from Torre, who stared at him with undiluted hatred.

He waved at the cell on their left. ‘Open it up, damn you!' he commanded, and slowly the gaoler unlocked and pulled back the gate. Inside, Edgar sat dejectedly on a stone slab that served as a bed, below a narrow slit that admitted a sliver of daylight on to the filthy straw on the floor. The only other furniture was a leather bucket.

The apprentice jumped up and ran to embrace his father, then clasped the arm of Eric Picot, whom he looked on as an uncle. There was a torrent of speech between them all, with Edgar loudly declaiming his innocence and the other two denouncing both Richard de Revelle and Fitzosbern.

When the hubbub died down a little, the coroner managed to get in a few words. ‘Did you have anything to do with poisoning Fitzosbern, if that was the cause of his collapse?' he demanded.

Edgar, already dirty and dishevelled from his hours in prison, was hotly indignant. ‘Of course not, Sir John! I wish him dead, I admit, but I would try to kill him openly in a fair fight, not by poison, which is against my apothecary's oath.'

There was more in the same vein and John could not but be impressed by the lanky apprentice's sincerity. Then, rather to the coroner's surprise, there was a clanking of a sword scabbard in the passage and Sergeant Gabriel escorted the sheriff into the cell. ‘I heard you were here. I came to see that no impropriety takes place,' snapped Richard imperiously.

That made little impression on Joseph of Topsham, who stepped up to de Revelle and prodded him in the chest. ‘What nonsense is this, Richard? You have no right even to accuse my son, let alone drag him off to gaol like a common criminal. Where is your proof?'

The sheriff deflated a little, as the ship-owner from Topsham was a powerful man in the merchant community. But he tried to bluster on for a while. ‘He attacked Fitzosbern the other night and has threatened to kill him. Being a puny youth, he could not do it face to face so he used his leech's art to dispose of him by stealth.'

Joseph pushed his grey beard almost into Richard's face. ‘Rubbish! That's pure speculation, to make your task easier. Tell him, John, what the apothecary found.'

De Wolfe explained, not without some satisfaction, that Nicholas had tested the food and wine on animals, had even drunk the rest of the wine himself, all with no ill-effects. ‘Both he and Brother Saulf at St John's Hospital say that it could have been some natural apoplexy,' he concluded.

Richard coloured and huffed and puffed, but then John motioned him outside the cell and took him by the arm to the other side of the dank passage. ‘There is something else, brother-in-law, that they had better not know yet. I now have reason to believe that Nicholas of Bristol is the one who procured the fatal miscarriage on Adele de Courcy. If he committed the one crime, maybe he is a better suspect for the other.' He did not believe this for a moment, but he saw no reason not to use it temporarily to take the pressure off Edgar.

The sheriff stared at John, who could almost hear the wheels going round in his head, as he set this information against the other powerful factions involved, such as the Ferrars and de Courcy. ‘This must be pursued with vigour,' he muttered.

They went back to the cell and immediately Joseph went on the attack again. ‘Unless you release my son, and certainly lift any evil threat of torturing a false confession from him, I will seek out the King, wherever he is. I shall use one of my own ships to go straight to France to petition him – and I will refuse you all my taxes and stop my ships from exporting the wool from Devon, even if it ruins me. It will certainly ruin you, when you have to account to the Westminster Exchequer for the collapse of the county revenues! And I shall seek out the Chief Justiciar to tell him what I have done.'

Richard knew that the senior trader was in deadly earnest. Not only would the taxes collapse if the main cross-channel transport was withdrawn, but Richard would personally lose money as, like John de Wolfe and many others, he had a considerable private stake in the wool-export business, which was the backbone of the local economy. He put the best face on it that he could.

‘This claim of the apothecary, together with other information I have just been told, allows me to be lenient for the moment. You may take your son, but he must not leave Exeter until this matter is finally settled.'

He turned on his heel and marched stiffly away, his pointed beard jutting out like the prow of a ship. As Gabriel followed him, he risked giving John a slow wink.

When the last of the Justiciar's rearguard had vanished over the brow of Magdalen Street, the eastward road out of the city, Exeter seemed to breathe a collective sigh of relief, as life got back to normal. The sheriff and his constable had gone off with half the castle garrison to escort the long cavalcade as far as Honiton, but would be back by nightfall.

In the meantime, the coroner had an unusual function to perform that afternoon, a first for him. The remnants of the cargo of the ship
Mary of the Sea
had been trundled by wagon from Torre and were stored in a warehouse on the quayside, outside the Water Gate.

As coroner, he was also Commissioner of Wrecks and his duty was to view the remains of the stricken vessel, which he had done at Torbay, even though only a few planks were to be seen. Then he had to claim any salvage for the Crown, make a valuation and get a jury to decide where the proceeds were to go – though John had already made up his mind to return it to the obvious owners.

‘What about the killing of those sailors?' asked Gwyn, as they strode down from the Bush to the quayside, Thomas limping along beside them on his short legs.

‘That forms no part of this enquiry,' replied John. ‘That was homicide and as the perpetrators are well-known, I suppose I must let the sheriff have his way, as they are already in his gaol. My only dealings with them will be to record their hanging and confiscate their property, they being felons.'

He was still uneasy about this as, originally, the miscreants from Torre were to be kept in the gaol until the Justices of Assize trundled back to Exeter. Only because of his half-promise to Hubert Walter to try to placate the sheriff was he willing to turn the criminals over to de Revelle. He consoled himself with the certainty that, whatever judicial process was applied, they would inevitably hang.

They reached the quayside and went to inspect the goods. The casks of wine and dried fruit, about forty-three in number, were stacked in a large thatched shed near the tidal landing stage slightly downstream from Exe Island. The port of Exeter was losing out to Topsham in volume of business: it was so far upstream where the river was shallower that it could only be reached by small ships at high tide. Much of the merchandise now came up from Topsham, after being off-loaded from the seagoing vessels into barges.

Gwyn had cajoled a few dozen locals to act as jury although, strictly speaking, they should have been from Torre and district where the wreck had occurred. The only other interested parties were Joseph of Topsham and Eric Picot, who were the sole original consignees of the goods aboard the ill-fated ship.

The proceedings were short and uncomplicated. Gwyn herded the mystified jurors into the shed, where they stood next to the goods under discussion. These were piled at one end, the rest of the large hut being filled with bales of wool, finished worsted cloth and sacks of grain waiting for shipment out of the Exe. Joseph and Eric stood a little away from the common folk, each with some tally sticks in their hands. Neither could read nor write, but they were accustomed to keeping an accurate check on their stock by means of notched sticks, just as a manor reeve would keep tally of all the produce of his village. As a further check, old Leonard, the clerk from Topsham, was also there with written lists of what should have come over from Normandy. De Wolfe wasted no time in getting down to business. ‘All wrecks of the sea within the waters of England belong to King Richard,' he stated, in a loud voice. ‘The wreck itself, if it has any value – and certainly any salvaged fittings or cargo – must be listed and valued. Then a decision is made by the coroner and his jury as to its disposal. Legally, the value should go to the royal treasury, to help the Exchequer of the Realm.'

He looked sternly at the vacant faces of the jurymen, most of them from nearby Bretayne and along the lower streets near the church of All Hallows-on-the-Walls. Bemused, they waited patiently to be told what to do.

‘The vessel was completely destroyed in the gale, so there is no need to consider it further. However, much of the cargo was washed ashore, and it lies behind you.' He waved his hand at the pile of casks, and the jurymen dutifully craned their necks to look at it. ‘All that remains is to prove its origin and, although all the crew perished, that can still be done easily.' He motioned politely for Joseph to step forward. Gwyn lugged the splintered length of ship's timber from a corner and displayed the crude lettering carved into it.

‘Joseph of Topsham, do you recognise this plank?'

The grey beard wagged as he nodded. ‘I do indeed. It is from my own vessel,
Mary of the Sea
, which was sailing from Barfleur in Normandy to Topsham.'

‘And was that some of the cargo she carried?' asked John, again waving a finger.

‘It was, some of it my own goods being imported. The rest belongs to Eric Picot here.'

‘How much was there?'

Both merchants consulted their tally sticks again.

‘I had forty-six casks and ten crates of dried fruit ordered from my suppliers in Cotentin. Only twenty-two seem to have survived,' said Joseph.

The coroner turned to Picot, and gestured for him to speak. ‘Like Joseph, my imports of wine come regularly from across the Channel. This shipment would have been' – he looked down again at his tally – ‘sixty barrels, of which only twenty-one are here.'

John rubbed his chin. ‘So even if the goods are returned to you, you will both have lost over half your investment?'

The two traders concurred glumly. ‘It will put up the price of fruit and wine this winter, I fear,' said Joseph. ‘We have to make good the loss somehow.'

‘And if the salvage goes to the Crown?'

Picot rolled up his eyes in his handsome dark face. ‘It may not ruin me, but the loss of profit on even the twenty-two remaining casks will prevent me from being able to purchase a full cargo again for a long time.'

Joseph echoed his sentiments and John turned to the jury. ‘The issue seems a matter of natural justice. These two honest merchants had goods on their way to harbour, when an Act of God, a gale, threw their ship and its cargo on to the rocks. More than half was destroyed and the rest washed ashore. My opinion, which I commend to you, is that the casks have never left the ownership of Joseph and Eric. Even the thieving antics of the villagers of Torre were but an illegal and temporary diversion.' He paused to marshal his thoughts. ‘It would be different if unknown goods from an unknown wreck were scattered along the coastline. Then the crown could legitimately claim them. But here we have a known ship, every dead crewman named and the cargo patently identified. How can it be other than their property, as it never left their ownership?' He glared along the sheepish line of jurors. ‘What say you?' he demanded, fixing his eye on a large man at the end of the front row.

The impromptu foreman shuffled to his feet awkwardly and gave a quick look along the line and over his shoulder at his fellows. Without waiting for a response, he said, ‘We agree, Crowner.'

Before there could be any discussion or second thoughts, Gwyn herded out the jurors like a sheepdog behind a flock. Joseph and Eric came over to thank John for his efficiency and they, too, left the warehouse, after making arrangements with the custodian for the goods to be collected later. They walked back to the town gate with John, Gwyn and the coroner's clerk following behind.

The conversation moved to other matters. ‘Edgar told me that he had been discussing the awful events of last week with Christina,' began Joseph. ‘She is much recovered in her mind, thank God, being a resilient young woman. He suggested to her that she might still be able to recognise her assailant by voice or some mannerism, if she confronted him.'

John looked doubtful. ‘She has always steadfastly denied any clue as to who the villain might have been.'

The ship-owner sighed. ‘I know, and probably that is the case. But Edgar is desperate to make some breakthrough in this tragedy, both for her sake and to lift this suspicion off his own shoulders about attempting to kill Fitzosbern.'

‘So what does he propose?' asked Picot, as they climbed Rack Lane to Southgate Street.

‘That Christina confronts Godfrey Fitzosbern, to see if the meeting triggers off any memory.'

‘He may not agree to that,' objected Eric.

‘Agree be damned!' retorted Joseph. ‘He must be, made to agree. As a law officer, you surely have that power, de Wolfe?'

John considered the proposition for a moment. ‘I don't know if I have or not,' he said frankly. ‘But, by the same token, neither does Fitzosbern know so I could bluff my way to doing it.'

‘What about the sheriffs approval?' asked Eric.

‘To hell with him. He does his best to shelter the man because of his prominence in the guild and among the burgesses,' replied John. ‘I don't see that he's in a position either to offer or refuse his consent.'