The Poisoned Chalice (3 page)

John snorted. ‘Doubtless why my dear brother-in-law is content to leave them to me. No glory or fame for him in a few wet corpses. Any more details?'

‘Only that this hermit fellow knows most about the matter. His name is Wulfstan and he lives in a cave near Torre. We've heard nothing about it from William de Brewere, the manor lord, or his bailiff.'

The coroner clucked his tongue in annoyance. ‘We'll hear nothing from Lord William, he's always away on his political campaigning – the manors there are run by his son, the younger William.' He smacked a big hand on the table. ‘How I'm supposed to carry out my royal warrant to keep the Pleas of the Crown with such scanty knowledge, God alone knows!'

Gwyn wiped a hand the size of a small ham across his wild moustache, which hung down each side of his mouth and chin like a red curtain. ‘What are we supposed to do about this, Gabriel?'

‘Sir Richard requests that the crowner find this monk and carry on from there. He devoted no more than a couple of heartbeats to the problem.'

De Wolfe rose, his grey-black figure hovering over the scatter of documents on his table. ‘It's now about mid-morning. We can be there before nightfall, so let's go.' He took his heavy wolf-skin riding cloak from a wooden peg hammered between the stones of the wall and picked up his sheathed sword from the floor, then led the way to the stairs.

The winter dusk was falling as the trio trotted along the final mile of coastal track towards the village of Paignton. The coroner was on his massive grey stallion Bran, a pensioned-off warhorse with hairy feet. Just behind him was Gwyn on a big brown mare, while Thomas jogged along side-saddle on a small but wiry pony.

Until the previous week, the little clerk had ridden a semi-derelict mule, but during the de Bonneville case, when they had to ride long distances over Dartmoor, his master had become so exasperated by the beast's lack of speed that he had bought Thomas a cheap pony, using some of the money acquired from hanged felons.

The track wound close to the red cliffs and many combes that formed steep-sided bays along the coast south of the river Teign. To their left was the sea, grey and forbidding, with white foam caps whipped up by the bitter easterly wind across the whole expanse of water.

They now struck inland across the rocky prominence of Torpoint towards the lower, sandy coastline, which carried on around a wide bay, past Paignton to the fishing village of Brixham in the far distance. They were aiming for the hamlet of Torre, a small settlement a quarter of a mile inland from the beach at the northern end of Torbay.

‘Where do we find this damned fellow?' growled Gwyn, pulling his coarse woollen cloak tighter around his neck to keep out the searching wind. He wore a round leather hood with ear-flaps tied under his chin. His bushy moustache helped to shelter his face, but his blue eyes watered and his nose ran in the cold breeze.

‘He must live in that cavern near Torre – the cave where bones of old animals lie in the mud,' replied. John. ‘I visited there as a boy, when I went with my father to buy sheep in Paignton.' He knew this part of Devon well, as he had been born and brought up at Stoke-in-Teignhead, a village between here and the estuary of the Teign, where his mother and brother still held a manor. In fact, they had called there for a quick meal on their journey today.

It was growing dark when they reached Torre, a straggle of huts and cottages belonging to one of the manors of William de Brewere. There was a ramshackle wooden church and a row of crofts, sheltering under the slope of rocky ground that formed the base of the great peninsula of Torpoint. A few hundred yards downhill was a row of fisherman's shacks near the beach, where stretches of coarse red sand lay between low rocky promontories. They reined up in the twilight and Gwyn dismounted to seek out the reeve, to claim a night's lodging. This meant a space on his earthen floor around the fire, where they could roll themselves into their cloaks to sleep – no hardship for old fighting men like Gwyn and his master, although the softer ex-cleric viewed the prospect with distaste.

The Cornishman lumbered back in his ragged brown cloak and climbed back on to his mare. ‘The reeve was down at the beach, but I've told his drab of a daughter that we'll be back later to eat and sleep. She says the cave is something over a mile from here.'

‘I know well enough where it is,' snapped John, wheeling Bran around and setting off up the hill.

Clouds were flying rapidly overhead, driven by the remnants of the south-easterly gale that had blown for three days. They picked their way in the fading daylight past strip fields, until they came to the scrubby virgin woods that covered the headland, except where the wind allowed only gorse and bracken to survive. Now a well-trodden path led through the gloom and John, who remembered the geography fairly well from his youth, was able to lead them to a small valley running down towards the sea on the eastern side of the headland. A glimmer of light led them to the foot of a low cliff, the face of which was rent by a rock shelter that hid access to deep caves in the hillside.
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As they approached through the scrubby undergrowth, Gwyn called out, in a voice like an angry bull, to attract the hermit's attention. The shout echoed against the cliff, then an answering cry came wavering back. A dark figure came stumbling down the slope from the cave.

‘Are you Wulfstan, who knows about some corpses?' called the coroner.

The hermit, who in the fading light appeared as a frail, dishevelled old man, came up close to the grey stallion. ‘Come up to my dwelling, out of this keen wind, and I'll tell you what I know.' He waved his staff at the cliff and hobbled off again.

They dismounted and tied their steeds to the bushes that grew on the muddy slope below the rock shelter, then trudged up behind the loping figure of Wulfstan. Just inside the cave mouth, the recluse had built a rough dry-stone wall, behind which he dwelt in utter squalor. Though John was far from particular about his own personal comfort, even he was glad that the gloom concealed Wulfstan's living conditions, though the smell was suggestive enough.

A tallow dip flicked on the pile of flat rocks that served as a table, sufficient only to reveal the hermit's face as he squatted down nearby. This was almost hidden by unkempt hair and beard, all of a dirty brown streaked with grey. He wore a long, shapeless garment of rough wool, tied around the waist with a frayed rope, which smelt as if its last wash had been at about the time of Becket's martyrdom.

‘Well, holy man, what's all this about?' Sir John was anxious to get out of this dirty hole as soon as possible.

‘Dead men, Crowner. I saw three, but I'm sure there are more.' He pulled his fingers through his hair in a futile attempt to remove some of the tangles. ‘I was at the beach near Torre yesterday morning, seeking shellfish in the pools, when I saw men from the village gathering planks from the tide-line. When I approached, others were burying three bodies just above the high-water mark.'

Wulfstan's voice was gentle and mellow, at variance with his wild and neglected appearance. The more sensitive Thomas wondered what had happened to him in the past to drive him into this miserable exile.

Gwyn's mind was on more immediate matters. ‘They were drowned men, then?'

‘I think two of them were. It was obviously a shipwreck, from the profusion of wood and spars about the sands. But one had injuries on him that I thought were from a grievous assault.'

‘Why so?' asked John.

‘Blood was caked on his hair and there were wounds on his temple.'

De Peyne, always keen to show off his knowledge, interrupted the hermit. ‘He may have struck his head on the rocks when pitched from the wreck or pounded by the surf.'

Wulfstan smiled. ‘Then the water would have washed away the blood – but this was thick on his head, so he must have bled ashore, out of the water.'

The clerk, somewhat abashed, crossed himself for no particular reason.

‘Why did you take the trouble to report this to these priests and not to the steward or bailiff, as you should?' asked the coroner, suspicious of any co-operation from the public.

The recluse looked troubled. ‘Not only because of the wounds, brother, but those villagers of Torre are a bad lot. Yesterday they appeared even more shifty than usual and tried to get me off the beach as soon as I began to show an interest in what they were doing.'

‘In what way?'

‘I saw some casks hidden under bushes above the sand – and an ox-cart was taking away a load of planks covering something underneath. After they chased me away, my conscience troubled me over the dead men and I sought the advice of my brothers in God who are settled nearby. They took me seriously and sent a messenger to the sheriff.'

‘Who are these brothers?' asked Thomas, his religious curiosity aroused. Though so ignominiously ejected from the clergy, he still hankered after his old life and pathetically sought out every ecclesiastical contact within his reach.

‘They are a small party of White Canons, invited by Lord William to establish an abbey on ground that he is to give them above the beach. This is an advance party, living in wooden cells, but their Order, the Premonstratensians, hopes to build an abbey in a year or two on that spot.'

‘Never heard of them!' said Gwyn gruffly. He had no fondness for priests or monks.

‘They are followers of Saint Norbert, and are come to pray for the souls of old King Henry and his son, our present Richard Coeur de Lion.'

‘He's not dead yet, thank Christ,' objected John.

Wulfstan again smiled his gentle smile. ‘It comes to us all, my son. William de Brewere is being generous with his land for the sake of his own soul and to give thanks for the safe return of his son from durance in Germany.'

William the Younger had been one of the hostages sent as surety for the payment of the huge ransom of a hundred and fifty thousand marks for the release of King Richard, whose capture near Vienna still troubled John's conscience: he and Gwyn had been part of the royal bodyguard, yet had been unable to save him from seizure. But this was far from the problem now in hand.

Gwyn pulled off his leather helmet to scratch his ruddy thatch. ‘You think they were pillaging the wreck of a vessel, then?'

Wulfstan nodded. ‘Maybe not only pillaging it but getting rid of witnesses. I wouldn't put it past them to wreck a ship deliberately, with false beacons, though the weather was foul enough for a ship to founder anyway, on that lee shore with an easterly gale.'

‘Have you any notion of what vessel it might have been?' asked the coroner.

The older man shook his head, and Thomas stood back hastily in case any lice were flung off in his direction. ‘I saw nothing except shattered timbers on the sand.'

There seemed little more to learn from Wulfstan and, with some relief, the coroner led the way down to their horses. By this time the daylight had almost gone, and they rode slowly back along the track to the village, lit fitfully by a moon that constantly dodged in and out of the rapidly scudding clouds.

‘The man seems definite about this, for all that he's an odd character,' Gwyn grunted, in his deep bass voice, his usual way of communicating.

‘He is obviously at odds with the villagers – probably some old feud between them. But his story had a ring of truth,' replied John, his grey form almost invisible in the gloom.

Thomas, unwilling to be left out of the big men's discussion, piped up from the rear. ‘The coroner's writ is doubly valid in this,' he offered.

‘What are you on about, dwarf?' growled Gwyn. He pretended to despise the ex-priest, though he would have defended him to the death.

‘A possible killing, and a definite wreck of the sea,' pointed out the clerk. ‘Both well within the crowner's jurisdiction.'

‘That had occurred to me already,' snapped de Wolfe sarcastically.

‘Why are you charged with investigating wrecks, for Mary's sake?' demanded the Cornishman.

‘All part of Hubert Walter's plan to revive the royal treasury. Too much money due to the King has been lost these past few years. Crooked sheriffs and manorial lords have all helped to impoverish the royal purse.'

‘So why wrecks?'

‘Everything washed up on the shores of the kingdom has traditionally belonged to the Crown.'

‘Including the Royal Fish – the whale and the sturgeon,' chipped in the know-all Thomas.

‘Damn the fish! It's these thieving villagers stealing everything from a wrecked ship, valuables that should have gone to the King's coffers. The sheriff said nothing about that, I notice, only about corpses that have no value.'

‘Maybe he didn't know,' observed Gwyn reasonably.

Just then, the moon appeared through a wide gap in the clouds and they took the opportunity to speed up to a trot along the track. Here, so near the sea, the forest was thin and low, bent by the Channel winds that blew salt air across the land. Within minutes, they reached Torre again, a few glimmers of light escaping from the unglazed windows crudely shuttered against the keening wind.

‘Too late to do anything now, with the daylight gone,' grumbled John. ‘May as well settle for the night and make a start early in the morning.'

Gwyn led them along the double row of huts that was the village, the church and tithe barn the only larger buildings visible in the fleeting moonlight. Opposite the barn was a dwelling slightly larger than the rest, but with the same steep thatched roof, grass and moss growing from the old straw. There was no chimney and smoke drifted out from under the eaves.

The sound of their horses' hoofs brought Aelfric, the Saxon manor reeve, to his door. His youngest son was sent out to take the mounts to a shed at the back, where they were unharnessed, fed and watered. The arrival of a king's officer, however unwelcome, demanded automatic hospitality from the agent of the lord of the manor, even though the function of his new-fangled post of coroner was poorly understood.