The Sanctuary Seeker (24 page)

Between their gossiping, the little man in the grey habit managed to slip in a few of his own questions and when Thomas, for of course it was he, bedded down on some clean straw in a corner of the undercroft later that evening, he was satisfied with his intelligence seeking. He lay wrapped in the monk’s thick garment, worn over his own clothes, and felt warmer than he had for two days, especially as a glowing charcoal fire burned in the centre of the undercroft. A dozen other men and some children slept or talked around him, mostly house-serfs or manor workers who had no dwellings of their own.

Thomas stared out of one of the openings in the wall at the starlit sky, brilliantly clear in the threatened first frost of the year, and rehearsed the tale he would tell Crowner John when he returned to Exeter tomorrow.

At Sampford Spiney he had sought out the local priest, a fat, indolent man whose main interest was ale and cider rather than his pastoral duties. Thomas had claimed to be a priest on his way to take up a church in a remote part of Cornwall, posted there by the Bishop of Exeter. Knowing all the personalities and the ways of the Church, it was easy for him to get away with this fabrication to a largely ignorant and certainly uninterested colleague.

He wheedled a night’s lodging, which entailed having little food but an excess of drink, which loosened the tongue of his host to a satisfactory degree.

Before they fell on to their hay-filled pallets in the single-roomed house attached to the wooden church, Thomas had extracted all that was known in Sampford Spiney about the dead man Aelfgar.

‘He came here more than a month back,’ said the priest thickly, belching out the gas from three quarts of cider. ‘Came on a good big horse late in the evening, when the days were longer. Said he was making for Peter Tavy, and asked for directions. He decided he wouldn’t get there in daylight, as his horse had gone lame. The hag that brews the beer keeps the nearest thing to a tavern in this place - and she has a pallet for the few travellers that may pass through, so he stayed there.’

‘Why didn’t anyone, especially the reeve, tell this to the Crowner when he was here after the corpse was discovered?’ asked Thomas. The priest was too fuddled with drink to wonder how his visitor knew what the coroner had been told. John de Wolfe had come briefly to the village with his clerk to hold a cursory inquest, but the priest had not been around that day to recognise his present visitor as the same clerk.

‘What? Get the village amerced for keeping quiet about it? Not on your life! He played dumb about everything.’ He sniggered drunkenly. ‘The fellow left after two nights and rode away quite alive. How were we to know that he got himself killed a few miles up the track?’

‘But when your shepherds found the body, didn’t they know whose it was? And what happened to his horse?’

The fat churchman had taken another great mouthful of turbid cider. ‘God alone knows where his horse went - we certainly never saw it again. And as for finding the body, we knew nothing about this new crowner business, nobody ever told us. Let sleeping dogs lie, I say - and dead men, eh?’

He had cackled with laughter and swayed dangerously on his stool, the only furniture in the room apart from a rickety table.

Now, as Thomas lay on his straw in the undercroft, his mind moved on to today, when he had come from Sampford Spiney to Peter Tavy. Although there was little communication between villages, he couldn’t keep using the parish-priest network, so a few miles out of the village, he tethered his mule deep in the trees, on a long rope that would allow him plenty of grazing for a day. From his saddlebag he produced the robe he had acquired a long time ago, after the funeral of a Cistercian in Winchester. Cutting a staff from the forest, he walked into Peter Tavy, hoping that no one would comment on the fresh white wood at the cut end - or his lack of a monk’s tonsure. If asked about his long hair, he was ready to say that it had grown back during the three-month pilgrimage to St David’s and that he had vowed not to restore it until he reached his home monastery near Plymouth. As it turned out, no one had been the slightest bit curious, wanting only to hear about the big wide world beyond their constricted horizons.

He lay watching the night sky, and recalled the information he had gleaned from the kitchen staff, the grooms and a few old men who sat around the fire in the undercroft, too arthritic to work any longer in the field strips.

It seemed certain that Aelfgar of Totnes had never arrived at Peter Tavy, even though he had set out from Sampford Spiney with the stated intention of making that his next destination. It was only five miles away, little more than a hour’s journey even on a plodding horse, but he had ended up as a mouldering corpse on Heckwood Tor, about half-way between the two villages. No one in the manor had ever heard of Aelfgar, which tallied with the story of the Totnes priest, who said that the man had had no link with Hubert de Bonneville when he left his own village.

Having drawn a blank on the Saxon squire, the clerk had soaked up as much local gossip as possible. It seemed that the dying lord of the manor, Sir Arnulph, had been popular among the freemen and serfs alike.

He had been a relatively easy-going master, firm but fair, and the village had prospered for years without fighting or famine. They did not seem so complacent about the rest of the family.

‘That Hubert was a painful fellow,’ confided one old man, between the fits of bronchitic coughing that racked his body every few minutes. ‘He thought he was lord long before our master had his seizure, throwing his weight about and altering the way we’d done things for years back.’

Another rheumy old fellow nodded agreement.

‘A cold fish he was, full of religion and morals.

Should have been a priest - begging your own pardon, Brother. That’s what decided him to take the Cross and go off to the Holy Land against his father’s desires.’

‘Good riddance, some of us said,’ added the first old man, reckless in his old age. “I never wished him dead like this, but we were glad to see him go away. Though he left a brood of brothers and cousins behind him who have prospered since Sir Arnulph suffered his apoplexy.’

Thomas gathered that Gervaise de Bonneville was more popular than his slain brother, and the younger brother, Martyn, was looked upon as a child by the villagers, overshadowed by Gervaise. But there were three cousins, adult sons of a dead elder brother of Arnulph, who had designs on the two manors. They were maneuvering with Winchester to be given a share of the land when Arnulph died, as the Crown now held the ultimate overlordship.

‘Them cousins would like to see the other two brothers dead, as well as Hubert,’ cackled the second old man. ‘Wouldn’t be surprised if Gervaise has a nasty accident in the forest before long.’

This started a heated argument among the grandfathers around the fire, some slandering the cousins, others defending them, but there was no more hard information for Thomas to mull over. He pulled his disguise more closely about him and composed himself for sleep.

In which Crowner John makes an arrest While his clerk was wandering the cold wastes of Dartmoor, Sir John de Wolfe had been consolidating his improved relations with his wife. As the maid had predicted, the solar door had been left open for him the previous night and he regained his place in the connubial bed, even if it was on the edge furthest away from his wife.

The next evening, he returned home early from a day spent at three hangings and an inquest on a child who had drowned in a well in St Sidwell’s. Matilda was sitting by the fire and gave him a subdued but civil greeting. John carefully launched into a neutral conversation, which developed into a discussion about a donation she wished him to make to her favourite church, St Olave’s. John thought that her excessive show of piety and devotion to the church was more a social charade than true religious belief, but for the sake of peace he would have been willing to offer a gift to Saladin’s revered mosque. By the time Mary arrived with the evening meal, they were talking together in a stilted but formally polite manner.

As things seemed to be going uncommonly well, John decided to consolidate the truce by asking Matilda’s opinion on his current investigation. He recounted all that had happened in the past week or so, carefully avoiding any criticism of her brother.

‘So at least now we know who the two dead men are - the eldest son of a Norman lord and his squire, both recently returned from the Holy Land. But the question is, why were they killed?’

The square face of his wife looked into the flickering fire as if to gain inspiration.’ Do you think it was by the same hand, John?’ she asked, with a studied politeness the equal of his own restrained tones.

He bent forward in his monk’s chair, his hands cupped around a glass of mulled wine. ‘More than one hand, that’s for sure. Both were assaulted by at least a pair of assassins. The wounds were similar in some ways, both stabbed in the back. But that is such a common type of murderous wound that it doesn’t signify a great deal. And one had his throat cut, the other had limb wounds typical of a sword fight.’

‘What does that tell you?’

‘Not a lot, I’m afraid,’ replied John ruefully.

Matilda tucked her heavy skirt closer around her legs as a sudden draught sighed across the floor from the east wind gusting outside. ‘If the knight and his squire had been travelling together, I can see it could have been a casual robbery by outlaws,’ she observed carefully. ‘But the two men were ambushed weeks apart and in different places. That seems too much to be a coincidence.’

‘Exactly what I think,’ said John, eager to agree with her. If he had to live with her - and the alternative posed many difficulties - then he may as well try to avoid eternal daily strife.

‘Who knew about them travelling westwards from Southampton?’ she asked, detective fever beginning to stir in her voluminous breast.

‘Many of those returning from Palestine, I suppose,’

he answered slowly. ‘And that Nebba fellow, who keeps cropping up. And, of course, Alan Fitzhai.’

His wife steepled her fingers in a judicial gesture.

‘This Fitzhai certainly seems the most likely candidate.

He had an admitted feud with de Bonneville and you have only his word as to when he was travelling back from Plymouth, which puts him within striking distance of Widecombe.’

The coroner nodded, though he was reluctant to abandon his own illogical prejudice that Alan Fitzhai was not the man they sought. ‘He could have been there for de Bonneville’s killing, admittedly - but if the slaying of his squire is linked with it, he could not have been on Heckwood Tor weeks before as he was known to have been in Southampton at that time.’

Matilda was equally unwilling to concede a point against her own theory. ‘He could have used an agent, some footpad he could have paid to follow the squire fellow - God knows, there’s no lack of hired killers about these days. I don’t know what the world’s coming to with all this violence.’

Her husband grunted, torn between argument and his desire for peace. ‘There’s also this Saxon archer, this Nebba?’ he suggested.

‘Does he have an alibi for either killing?’ demanded Matilda, reluctant to give up Fitzhai as her prime suspect.

John shook his head, his black locks swirling about his neck. ‘The timing is too vague for that. This Welsh archer Gwyn found in Southampton, he had no real idea of when the fellow vanished. Nebba could have been involved in either of the murders. But why, in God’s name, should he be?’

‘He’s a mercenary and an outlaw, so you say. Just the type to be hired for a killing. What if this Fitzhai paid him to follow the squire and dispatch him?’

‘There must have been more than one. The squire was an experienced fighter, fresh home from the wars.’

‘So? There are plenty of ruffians eager to kill for a mark or two.’

Her tone was becoming more triumphant and was beginning to weaken his hunch about Fitzhai’s innocence - she could destroy every objection he put up.

“I think the answer lies at the Dartmoor end, rather than in Southampton or France,’John said doggedly.

‘It might be both, husband. They were killed out west, surely, but the cause may be elsewhere. If Nebba sold de Bonneville’s horse to the Widecombe reeve, can you really believe that he came upon it innocently, wandering in the forest?’

She smoothed her skirt in a preening fashion. ‘If I were you, I’d find this eight-fingered bowman and put him to the Ordeal too.’

As Thomas de Peyne was away for almost three days, the affair of the slain Crusaders fell into abeyance and the coroner relapsed into his usual routine.

Gwyn reported that, contrary to pessimistic forecasts, Alan Fitzhai was surviving and that his fever was abating, in spite of the adverse ministrations of the ignorant gaol-keeper.

John had tried to get the man moved to the convent, but the sheriff had resolutely forbidden this. The coroner cynically suspected that his brother-in-law hoped that Fitzhai would die of blood-poisoning and so solve the awkward dilemma of whether to try him in the county court, then hang him, or leave him to the Justices in Eyre and then hang him.

Gwyn also reported that Eadred of Dawlish, the pig keeper stabbed outside the Saracen tavern, had died in spite of the frantic ministrations of his young assailant to keep him alive. Another arrest and hanging seemed imminent.

In the late afternoon of the third day, the coroner and his officer were in the gatehouse chamber when a weary Thomas limped up the stairs, having left his even wearier mule in the castle stables.

John was sitting at his trestle, silently and laboriously mouthing the Latin exercises given to him that morning by his tutor at the cathedral. Gwyn was idly sharpening the blade of his dagger on the soft red stone of the window-sill, but stopped to make a ribald comment about the bedraggled clerk who appeared in the doorway. However, with actions belying his words, he rose to get the little man a hunk of bread and cheese from their wall-shelf and pushed him onto a stool while he poured him a mug of cider, knowing his dislike of beer.