The Poisoned Chalice (5 page)

But Hubert's imminent visit to Exeter was in his capacity as head of the English Church: the King had made him Archbishop of Canterbury as a reward for both his military prowess and his genius as an administrator.

Now the Archbishop was overdue for a tour of his various dioceses so he was coming to visit Henry Marshall, Bishop of Exeter – and brother to William Marshall, the most powerful baron in the land. The occasion would outwardly be ecclesiastical, but politics would be high on the agenda, rather than the cure of souls in that part of the kingdom.

But before John could go over this in his mind for the hundredth time, sleep suddenly overcame him. He began to snore gently, dreaming of the soft arms and plump breasts of Nesta.

At about the time that Sir John was dreaming of his favourite mistress, his stunted clerk was forcing down drink that he did not want, in the hovel that housed the village priest.

In the short time that he had been with the coroner, Thomas had learned that one of the best sources of information about local intrigues was the local priest. These men were often poverty-stricken vicars frequently placed in village churches by absentee prebendaries who held the living and rarely if ever visited their parishes. They preferred to live comfortably in the cathedral cities, paying a pittance to barely literate priests to carry out their duties.

The coroner's clerk had made his way from the reeve's cottage to the church, crossing the muddy track that was the village street. The House of God in Torre was the second largest building, the tithe barn next to it being considerably bigger. Thomas could see the thatched church roof, with its plain wooden cross, silhouetted against a moonlit gap in the fast-moving clouds. As he came closer, he could see that against the rear wall was a lean-to hut, made of the same rough boards as the church itself. A dim flicker of light showed through the cracks of the shuttered window opening, which told him that the incumbent of this rude vicarage was at home.

Stumbling over rubbish strewn on the path, de Peyne groped his way to the door and banged on the boards. There was a lengthy silence and he knocked again. This time he heard mumbling inside, and unsteady footsteps brought the priest to his door. He opened it sufficiently to peep suspiciously through a crack: he was not used to visits from his flock after dark – or at any other time, given the scorn in which he was held.

Thomas had developed a routine for such occasions. He rapidly established his religious status by sententiously delivering a greeting-cum-blessing in good Latin and making the Sign of the Cross. The bewildered pastor, already more than slightly drunk, dragged open the door and mumbled some response that the clerk took to be an invitation to enter.

De Peyne pushed his way inside and looked around the room in the minimal light of the guttering candle, apparently the remains of one from the church altar. As with the reeve's dwelling, there was virtually no furniture, apart from an old milking stool, a slate slab on two stones for a table and a pile of straw covered in rags that served as a bed. The remains of a fire glowed in the central hearth, surrounded by a few dirty pots. The most prominent feature was a large jug near the stool and a mug half filled with red liquid.

Thomas began his patter to dampen any doubts the priest might have, claiming that he was the personal chaplain to the new coroner, who had come to investigate the deaths of the seamen washed up on the beach. The fuddled mind of the local parson was reassured that Thomas had not come to murder him or steal his non-existent possessions. He motioned him hospitably to the stool, pressed another grubby pot into his hand and poured a ruby fluid into it from the jug. Then he subsided with a thump to sit on the floor. ‘Drink, brother and be welcome,' he said thickly.

Thomas had little need to wonder where the poverty-stricken priest would get a limitless supply of good French wine: the answer seemed obvious and already he felt a glow of achievement in his espionage operation for his master. He made a pretence of enthusiastic drinking, though he was not fond of liquor. When his host was not looking, he tipped most of his drink into the tangled rushes on the floor, to keep his head clear so that he could encourage the man to reveal the source of his supplies. The conversation was less productive. The priest, an emaciated wreck with yellow skin and bloodshot eyes, seemed mentally stunted. Whether this was from years incarcerated in a remote village or due to his chronic alcoholism was not clear. Thomas wondered which condition had led to the other – was he a drunk because he was stuck here, or had he been banished here because he was a drunk? Either way, the man seemed intent on slow suicide by alcohol as a means of escape.

Thomas tried to get details from him of the wreck and the drowned men, but the priest, whose name he never discovered, had been ‘indisposed' on that day. He knew nothing of the matter and had not even been asked to say a few words of prayer over the corpses as they were buried under the sand. Asked if he knew anything of the identity of the ship, he muttered that the reeve had brought in a plank with words carved upon it, but he admitted that he could not read well enough to decipher it. Thomas was not surprised at the admitted illiteracy of a man in Holy Orders – although priests were supposed to be able to read and write, many could barely scratch their own name.

The man soon tired of de Peyne's questions and rose unsteadily from where he squatted on the floor, picking up his now empty jug. He tottered off to a hole in the rear wall, which led into a cupboard-like extension built on to the back of the hut. He stooped into this and leaned around the corner, clumsily fiddling with something out of sight. Thomas padded across the rushes behind him and peered around the corner of the alcove. He saw a small cask standing on end, probably the cleanest object in the hut. The top had been stove in and the priest was dipping his jug into the dark red contents.

Suddenly he became aware of the clerk at his shoulder and his hollow face split into a guilty grin. ‘A gift from my parishioners.' He giggled, his shaking hand spilling some of the wine on to the floor. ‘And plenty more where that came from!' he added, with a wink.

He shuffled out with his jug and, again, Thomas had to go through the charade of drinking with him.

The vicar's boast that more wine was hidden somewhere stimulated Thomas's new-found detective skills. As soon as he could he escaped and decided to investigate further.

Outside, in the cold darkness, he stood for a moment to consider where stolen goods might be hidden. The obvious place – almost too obvious – was the tithe barn, where a tenth of all the produce of the manor's efforts was kept for the Church.

The barn was next to the priest's hovel, looming above him, and Thomas felt his way carefully towards it: the moon was now temporarily hidden behind the clouds. The rough boards and wattle of the walls were under his hands as he felt his way towards the tall entrance, high enough to admit ox-carts piled with hay, corn and roots.

He found the bar that held the two shaky doors closed and lifted it out of its sockets. The whistle of the wind hid the creaking noise as he opened one door just far enough to slip through. It was pitch black inside and he had to feel his way forwards, hands held out in front of him. The oats had long ago gone to market and only hay and root crops remained for animal feed, although the villagers, often on the verge of starvation at the end of the winter, might well be driven to living on turnips by February.

When he reached the stack of hay piled above his head, the clerk felt blindly about him until, as if in answer to his unspoken prayer, the moon came out again. The walls of the barn were riddled with splits and gaps between the wattle panels, letting the pale lunar gleam light up the interior. Thomas's eyes were by now fully accustomed to the gloom and he dived at the sweet-smelling hay, plunging his hands deeply into it, moving rapidly from one place to another. At the side of the stack, against the wall, his fingers came upon something solid. He soon traced a line of casks and boxes, of differing shapes and sizes, tucked against the wall and thinly concealed with a scattering of hay. He counted at least a dozen, including some square wooden crates.

The moon still glinted and he ran to the mound of turnips, but it was impossible to feel underneath them without a great deal of labour in moving them.

Then the light failed as quickly as it had appeared and he had to give up his quest, well pleased with his discovery, which should increase his standing with the stern, critical coroner. He pulled the hay back over the casks to conceal his snooping, slipped out of the barn and picked his way back to the reeve's cottage.

At dawn next morning, the coroner's team was on the beach. After hot gruel and cold beer in the reeve's cottage, they had walked the short distance through the scrubby pasture to the sea, where a few flimsy fishermen's huts were built on the low bank above the high-water mark. Aelfric loped ahead, turning left at the edge of the beach to walk northwards towards the rise of ground that sloped up to the start of the rocky cliffs.

The worst of the gale was over, but there was still a strong south-easterly that blew scuds of foam off the white-capped waves that crashed and boomed part-way down the beach. The tide was ebbing, leaving a smooth expanse of sand, unmarked by footprints.

As they walked, with half a dozen curious villagers trailing behind, the reeve bent down and scooped up a handful of sand from the high-tide mark, not far below the brown rocks that marked the upper margin of the beach. ‘See? There is fruit all along here.' He held out his hand and John could see, among the shingle grains, some soggy raisins and a fig.

Mindful of what Thomas had covertly told him about the wine casks, he asked innocently, ‘But no chests or casks from the cargo?'

Aelfric shook his head virtuously. ‘Never a one, sir. Only broken staves and timber that will help a poor village like ours mend our houses and feed our fires this winter.'

Your poor village will be a damned sight poorer when I've finished amercing you, thought John grimly, but for now he held his tongue.

They reached a point a few hundred yards from the start of the low cliffs. Ahead of them on the left, the ground began to rise, ending in another line of cliffs that marched higher until it was broken by a small valley. The coastline on the further side of this combe was much higher and turned through a right-angle, so that more cliffs faced them, ending in the blunt promontory of Torpoint.

Aelfric stopped and beckoned to a couple of the village men. They carried wooden shovels and, without a word, went to the drier, shingly sand above the high-tide line where three crude crosses were standing, each just two sticks bound with cord.

John and Gwyn stood huddled in their riding clothes, their backs to the gusting wind, as they watched the men digging. Within minutes they had scooped out two feet of sand and the first body began to appear. One of the peasants dropped his spade and knelt to scrape away more sand with his hands. As soon as a leg and an arm were visible, he and his companion heaved on them and slid the body up on to the surface. As they moved to do the same for the other two corpses, the coroner and his officer bent over the first to examine it.

Thomas hung back, busily crossing himself in the presence of death. Strangely, for a man steeped in the belief of resurrection and everlasting life thereafter, he was morbidly afraid of death, especially his own. Notwithstanding his damaged body, ravaged by old disease, he was greatly attached to life. His fertile imagination caused him a great deal of torment as he anticipated his own demise. Sometimes, especially since he had begun his work for the coroner, dealing daily with corpses, Thomas would stare at his own hand and imagine the flesh decaying and shrivelling in putrefaction as he lay in a wooden box under the damp soil. Now he tried to shake off these morbid thoughts as his companions went about their business with apparent indifference.

‘A young man, looks about twenty,' observed Gwyn, wiping the sand from the cadaver's face.

The body was fresh, having kept well during two cold December days. The face was peaceful enough, eyes closed and the mouth relaxed. When John lifted a lid, the front of the eye was beginning to cloud over. The man was dressed in typical sailor's clothing of a tightly belted tunic over thick serge braies to the knees, below which the legs were bare, as were the calloused feet.

The coroner turned his attention to the mouth and turned down the lower lip to look at the teeth, still tightly clenched in rigor mortis.

Gwyn, the former fisherman, was better acquainted with drowning than John de Wolfe, whose considerable experience of death was mainly centred around battle casualties. He said, ‘If you're looking for froth at the lips, it disperses soon after the body is taken from the water – the bubbles burst and dissolve away in a few hours.'

Having delivered this lecture, for he was usually a man of few words, Gwyn knelt, placed a massive palm on the dead man's chest and pressed forcibly downwards. The young sailor made his last sound on this earth as air was squeezed from his lungs – and with the macabre gasp came a gout of white foam from his nostrils, seeping down over his lips. The Cornishman stood up and dusted the sand from his hands. ‘That sometimes works for a day or two, though you get more from bodies drowned in rivers or ponds than in this salt sea.' He sounded satisfied that, for once, he had outdone his master in knowledge of the ways of death.

The other two victims were rapidly unearthed and examined by the coroner and his henchman. One was that of a thin, grey-haired man, probably in his fifties, the other a fat fellow of indeterminate age, with a sodden thatch of yellow hair. He failed Gwyn's chest pressure test, but the older man produced a little blood-tinged spume from his mouth.

At John's command, his officer pulled off their belts and rolled the three corpses on to their faces. He lifted their tunics and undershirts to examine the back of each body, but nothing was to be seen, except the lividity of the skin, where gravity had caused the blood to run down after death.