The Sanctuary Seeker (17 page)

They approached the bed, a large palliasse spread on the floor, covered with a heavy bearskin. Crouched diagonally across it, his head pulled down to his left shoulder, was an emaciated figure with grey hair and a stubbled beard. One corner of his mouth drooped and saliva ran from the lax lips. The left arm was above the bed coverings and the thin fingers twitched and picked constantly at the fur.

Arnulph de Bonneville, a shadow of his former self, lay dying in his own excretions. John thought that it would be a Christian mercy if one of his retainers were to hold a pillow over his face finally to extinguish the miserable mockery of a life he now endured. ‘Leave the poor man in peace,’ he murmured, and they moved back into the hall.

Gervaise led the way to benches set near a smouldering fire, where hurrying servants brought them cups of heated wine.

‘Our parish priest spends much of his time here, waiting to shrive him in case he suddenly stops breathing.’

Martyn sighed unhappily.

John sipped his wine. “I have a sad duty to carry out. Until I saw you both, I thought there might be room for doubt, but the similarity of your features tell me that almost certainly your brother is dead.’

There was a stunned silence.

‘You have heard from Palestine, then?’ asked Gervaise, in a hollow voice. ‘But why didn’t the news come straight to us?’

The coroner shook his head. ‘He died not in Palestine but in Devon, not twenty-five miles from here in Widecombe.’

The younger brother looked bewildered, his fresh, ingenuous face uncomprehending. ‘But Hubert is abroad. We had news of him last Eastertide when a soldier returning to Plymouth from Jaffa called upon us with a message from him.’

‘Yes, he said that he was alive and well,’ added Gervaise, ‘and that he hoped to be home within a year or so.’

‘You’ve heard nothing of him since?’

‘Not a word,’ replied the elder brother, sombrely.

‘But neither did we expect to. None of us has the gift of reading or writing, so any message from such distant lands can only come by word of mouth.’

‘But what has happened to him?’ Martyn persisted.

‘What is all this about Widecombe?’

Crowner John explained the whole story as he knew it, the stricken brothers listening silently and Baldwyn edging closer, as if both to hear better and to offer support to his master and to Martyn.

This sudden news was more of a shock than a reason for overwhelming grief but, even so, John realised that it had hit the family hard. Gervaise moved closer to his younger brother and put an arm around his shoulder and they stared silently into each other’s eyes. The squire Baldwyn came nearer, as if to console them with his powerful presence. After a moment, Gervaise turned back to the coroner. ‘What would you have us do about this, sir? As you saw, it is useless trying to tell our father. Unless he improves, which is unlikely, he is incapable of understanding.’

The coroner spread his bony hands in a gesture of regret. ‘I must have a positive identification of the murdered man. We must be sure that it is your brother before I complete the inquest, though I am afraid that I have little doubt. You must ride back with us to Widecombe to view the body, distressing though that might be.’

The brothers murmured together, Baldwyn also putting his head into the discussion. Then Gervaise turned back to John. “I will ride with you, together with my squire. Martyn will remain here as, with our lord so sick, someone must be on hand in case he dies, as well as having to attend to the daily business of running the manor.’

John nodded. ‘I must be back in Exeter by the morning, so we should leave for Widecombe now, to have enough light left for what we have to do there.

You are already dressed for the saddle, so nothing need delay us.’

In which Crowner John attends an exhumation In the churchyard at Widecombe, a heap of fresh earth proved that Thomas de Peyne had carried out his master’s instructions. By the time the coroner and his small party arrived in the mid-afternoon, the clerk had ordered Ralph the reeve to complete the digging and two serfs had removed all the soil from the new grave.

Before he took Gervaise de Bonneville and the squire into the churchyard, John adjourned to the large hut on the other side of the village green, which did service as a tavern. Here, the widow of a freeman crushed to death two years before by a bull supported her three children by brewing beer and selling oat-cakes. Her thatched wattle hut stood in the dip of the track that came down from the moor and led on towards Dunstone. The green was humped, as was most of the land around the village: the church was on one side of the slope and the tavern on the other, the green hillside rising steeply behind.

The travellers sat outside the door on a large log that served as a bench, while the toothless young widow brought them bread and ale, to which John added the remains of Mary’s ham and some hard cheese.

For a few moments they ate and drank, Gervaise and Baldwyn uneasy as they anticipated the moment of truth at the graveside.

John looked across the open green space to the low dry-stone wall of the churchyard, from where he could hear the final sounds of the raising of the coffin. The rise of the land prevented him seeing their activities and, as he chewed the rough bread, his eye fell instead on three straw mats, held up vertically on poles stuck into the ground at the further end of the green.

‘They seem keen archers in this place,’ he commented to Gwyn.

The woman, refilling his beer mug, grinned a gummy smile. ‘Good for my business. Shooting at those targets is thirsty work. The lord of our manor, FitzRalph, insists that every man above fourteen practises with the bow at least once a week. He wants plenty of good shots if he has to raise men for an army.’

When the food was finished, the coroner got down to business. ‘Show them the effects of the dead man, Gwyn,’ he commanded.

The cornishman went to his tethered horse and took a hessian-wrapped bundle from a pannier. He unrolled it on the ground before then and displayed the ornate sword belt, the empty scabbard and sheathed dagger.

The two men leaned over to study and then handle the objects. Gervaise sank back on to the log. ‘I’ve not seen these before, but they are undoubtedly foreign so it means little. If they were Hubert’s then he must have obtained them in the East.’ Baldwyn nodded in silent agreement.

‘What about this, then?’ asked John, unrolling a green surcoat from the bundle. It had been washed, but the tear in the back was still obvious.

Gervaise and Baldwyn looked doubtfully at each other. ‘Certainly Hubert had some green clothing he was fond of the colour. But so are half the men in England,’ Gervaise said.

‘There’s nothing special about this one,’ added Baldwyn. ‘It would be about his size, but there are thousands of men it would fit.’

John motioned to Gwyn to roll up the artefacts again, and they all rose to their feet. “Then it remains only to view the body, painful though that might be to you.’

He led the way across the green to the church. It was a poor structure of old wood, with peeling whitewash, dating back to Saxon days, but a new tower had been built in stone during the past decade, presumably a gift from the manorial lord.

Thomas was waiting at the gap in the wall, standing with bowed head, his hands together before him, and turned to lead the procession solemnly to the graveside, as if he was still a priest and conducting a funeral. At the heap of earth - grey here, not red like Exeter - Thomas turned and crossed himself. ‘The box is ready to open, Crowner,’ he said sonorously.

The two village men, one of whom habitually acted as sexton, stood by the crude coffin, which rested at the end of the hole. The parish priest, a thin soul with a furtive, hunted look, stood well back against the church wall, as if to distance himself from these unwelcome goings-on in his churchyard.

‘Open it, man,’ snapped John, as they stood in a ragged half-circle around the gaping grave.

The sexton took an old rusty sword with a broken blade and rammed it into the joint of the coffin lid.

He levered up and, with some cracking and splintering of wood, the two rough planks were torn off. Thomas hopped back like a frightened sparrow, his hand to his mouth, while the others looked on impassively, Gervaise’s face pallid.

An aura of sweet-sour corruption wafted from the box, but soon drifted away on the slight breeze. Within the coffin was a crude cross, made of two sticks lashed with cord. This lay on a length of soiled linen that covered the body, the fabric marred by greenish yellow patches where it lay over the face, chest and belly. Without ceremony or hesitation, Gwyn stepped forward, took out the cross and whipped off the cloth, revealing the victim’s naked body.

In spite of Thomas’s apprehensions, the corpse was not much changed from the day of the inquest.

The skin was more tense, moist and slimy, and was beginning to peel in places. Along the flanks were large blisters filled with bloody fluid and the abdomen and genitals were grossly swollen and green. The face, though, was only moderately puffy and blurred.

‘Cover him, for decency’s sake!’ grated Baldwyn tensely. Gwyn spread the linen over the lower half of the cadaver and turned to look inquiringly at Gervaise de Bonneville. The coroner’s eyes also swivelled to the young man. ‘Well, sir, is this your brother or not?’

Gervaise stood transfixed, staring at the putrefying body in the splintered box. For a long moment he was as motionless as the corpse, then he turned slowly to the coroner, his face even paler than it had been before.

‘It is Hubert, God rest his soul.’ His voice cracked and his squire took his arm.

Thomas edged forward, made the sign of the cross in the air over the open box and began to mutter some incantation in Latin.

The coroner turned to Baldwyn of Beer. ‘You must have known him well. Do you agree that this is your master’s kin?’

Baldwyn dropped his hand from Gervaise’s shoulder, stepped forward and bent to look more closely at the cadaver. Like John and Gwyn, he seemed immune to the sights and odours of death.

‘There is no doubt, sir. Though the face is swollen and the eyes squeezed shut, it is certainly Hubert.

The build, the hair, the features and, above all, that disfigurement he was born with, they all prove it.’

He pointed at the raised brown mark on the side of the dead man’s neck, its colour and hair virtually unchanged, though it now sat on a slimed waxy bed of mottled skin.

John waved a hand imperiously at the sexton. ‘Seal the box and put him to rest.’

He turned to Thomas. ‘See to it that everything is done decorously - and tell that lurking priest to say a few words over the grave.’

As the party turned from the graveside, Gwyn nudged the coroner and pointed into the crude coffin. ‘Those bruises on the arms have come out since we last saw the corpse,’ he muttered.

John squatted to looked at the greening skin between each elbow and shoulder. On either side, three or four reddish purple marks, the size of a thumbnail, were now prominent on the shiny, peeling surface.

‘Grip

marks, where fingers have pinioned his arms,’

he said.

‘Held by one man, while another stabbed him in the back, already disarmed by a slash into his sword arm,’ completed the Cornishman.

The coroner rose and shrugged at his henchman.

‘Nothing we didn’t know before, but it confirms that he was ambushed by more than one assailant.’ He led the way out of the churchyard and back to the ale-house, his black cloak billowing behind him.

Waiting for him was Ralph the reeve, who had been out in the fields when they arrived. He had been supervising the villeins as they ploughed some of the harvest stubble ready for next year’s crop, leaving the rest fallow as part of the rotation system that he had to organise.

Immediately John put him to work again. ‘Collect as many men from the village as you can muster for an inquest jury. Especially find those who were at the first inquiry a few days back.’

Ralph’s mouth opened in surprise. ‘What, now?’

John dropped heavily on to the log outside the tavern door and sat with his hands planted aggressively on his parted knees. ‘Yes, now! And hurry, it will be dark in a couple of hours, too late to ride back either to Exeter or to Peter Tavy, so we must sleep here tonight.

We may as well use the remaining daylight to complete the inquest formalities and make an early start in the morning.’

Muttering under his breath, Ralph hurried off, shouting at every villager he saw to assemble at the tithe barn, set just beyond the church. As he went, Gwyn’s bright blue observant eyes lit on something else, this time at a distance. He tappedjohn’s shoulder.

‘Look over there, in the reeve’s croft,’ he said.

John followed his man’s pointing finger to where a horse was contently cropping the thin winter grass in the fenced plot of land that lay behind the hut. He yelled after the reeve, in a voice that could be heard up on the moor, ‘Come back here, damn you!’

Ralph, who had been giving orders to a couple of villagers to gather up a jury, plodded back to the coroner and his officer.

John grabbed him by the arm of his coarse tunic and turned him round, none too gently, so that he faced his own house. ‘Is that your dwelling there?’ he boomed, gesturing with his free hand.

Ralph looked surprised. ‘Of course it is - you ate and rested there last week.’

‘And is that your croft behind it?’ John indicated the patch of grass between the back of the house and the cultivated strip that stretched towards the field system.

‘It is … yes.’ The reeve was more puzzled than ever and apprehension crept into his voice.

‘And is that your horse?’

There was a slight hesitation, but Ralph had to admit that the beast tethered to a peg in the plot behind his house belonged to him.

‘A dappled grey mare with a singular black ring around her right eye!’ said John, with a rising note of triumphant accusation in his voice.

‘What of it? It’s just a horse,’ retorted Ralph, with tremulous defiance.