The Sanctuary Seeker (4 page)

Over the years, the malady that had affected his spine had grown worse: although the tuberculous abscess had subsided, the sinews and bone had contracted and shrunk so that his head was pulled slightly to one side and the lopsided lump on his back had become more obvious. His skin had seemed to coarsen and, though he was by no means grotesque, he was far from attractive. Although a prebendary was supposed to be celibate, many had mistresses or even illicit families - some had a whole clutch of bastards, often by different mothers - and although the cathedral precinct, where many canons lived, was forbidden to women, this rule was openly flouted.

Despite his physical shortcomings, Thomas de Peyne had a normal sex drive. He liked women, he desired women and, if he had been like his fellow prebendaries, his lust could easily have been satisfied. If only he had confined his activities to the stews that peppered Winchester - as they did every busy town - life could have carried on in its own humdrum, but comfortable way. But two years ago, one of his reading pupils in the cathedral day school, a fat fourteen-year old girl, had been his nemesis.

Hunched against the cottage wall, with the rough boards cutting into his bent back, Thomas wondered if her obesity and his crookedness had attracted each other - or whether she had been taunting him. For lead him on she certainly did, with requests for an extra hour of reading practice after the other scholars had left, coy looks, fluttering eyelashes and suggestive conversation. Either he misread the signs, from wishful thinking, or was deliberately trapped by her, but his eventual clumsy efforts at seduction in the dingy schoolroom off the cloisters were met with screams that could have drowned the cathedral bells. The proctors came running and he was imprisoned for the next week in a punishment cell under the chapter house.

Thankfully, the whole abortive ravishment had taken place on episcopal premises so no sheriff’s sergeants had been called. If they had, he would probably have been hanged within days for attempted rape.

As it was, he kept his life, but lost almost everything else. After interminable delays, he was hauled before the consistory court of the diocese, found guilty on what he considered perjured evidence by the girl and her family, and stripped of his holy orders by an irate bishop and ejected from the cathedral precincts.

The loss of his priesthood meant little to Thomas, but deprivation of the prebend, his living accommodation and the comfortable ecclesiastical life were a disaster. He was thrown out of the religious community and escaped having to beg for his survival only by scribing letters and bills for tradesmen and tutoring a few youths for rich families.

This went on for a year and half, until his commissions dwindled as he became more and more

dishevelled and despairing. Cut off from his family by the disgrace, he even contemplated suicide, but eventually summoned the last of his courage to walk to Exeter to throw himself on the mercy of his kinsman.

Grudgingly, the Archdeacon agreed to help him, if and when he could, and some months later, when the new coroner system was introduced, he had prevailed on John de Wolfe to take on Thomas as his clerk, recommending strongly his capabilities with pen and parchment.

So here he was, he reflected, a crook-backed ex canon, with no money and few prospects other than tramping the countryside acting as a scribe and spy for King Richard’s new law officer.

He sighed a great sigh and hunkered down into his hooded cloak, trying to submerge his chronic worries in the stupor of sleep.

In which Crowner John opens an inquest Miraculously the rain held off until noon, when the inquest was held outside the great doors of the tithe barn. They now stood open to reveal the body of the murdered man lying inside on a rough bier. The only decent chair in the village had been brought from the church and placed a few yards in front of the entrance. It was a plain high-backed settle, kept in the small chancel in case the Bishop of Exeter ever visited - a penance he had so far managed to avoid.

Sir John de Wolfe sat augustly in the Bishop’s seat.

A motley collection of about thirty men and boys stood in a ragged half-circle before him. They ranged from skinny youths to arthritic grandfathers. The only thing they had in common was a sense of awe and bewilderment as to what this new-fangled ‘Crowner’s quest’ was all about. They looked with interest, tinged with anxiety, at the predatory figure sitting there. To them he was dark and menacing, an almost demoniac messenger from the dimly perceived outer world.

For his part, John felt anything but messianic he was cold, damp and would have killed for a good fire and a decent meal. He was the least introspective of men, practical and unimaginative. Unlike his brother-in-law, the sheriff, he had no sense of his own importance, other than a simple will to be an agent for the King’s peace. In fact, he was a simple man, uncomplicated, lacking subtlety or romanticism.

Devotion to his leader, King Richard, was enough for him; it was at the heart of a code of loyalty by which he had lived since he had become a fighting man, more than twenty years ago. Now forty and getting too old for battlefields, he had welcomed this chance to uphold the Lionheart’s kingdom by doggedly and single-mindedly enforcing the royal laws as best he could. Whereas other more sophisticated minds might see that the King’s feet were at least partly made of clay, John de Wolfe saw him in the same light as others held religion: to be revered and obeyed with blind faith. Now, though, none of this was going through his mind as he sat in the Bishop’s seat and wished himself back in the warmth of the Bush tavern in Exeter with a jar of good ale in his hand, instead of in this miserable hamlet with its boggy soil and sodden inhabitants.

The burly Gwyn opened the proceedings by bawling in a voice that could have been heard far up on the moors ‘AH ye who have anything to do before the King’s coroner for the county of Devon, draw near and give your attendance!’

There was some shuffling of feet as the gathering waited expectantly for something to happen. The women of the village, excluded from the menfolk’s participation, loitered in the background, whispering behind their hands at this unexpected entertainment in their drab lives.

‘The first finders - they who discovered the body step forward,’ commanded the coroner.

With a jostling of neighbours’ elbows, a young man with curly blond hair stepped out reluctantly and made a diffident nod of obeisance before the coroner. He had a bad cold and his nose was running like a tap.

A rough hessian smock, with a knotted rope for a belt, left his arms bare, which like his face, had many bramble scratches, some still bleeding.

‘Give your name and age to the clerk.’

Thomas was crouched on a milking stool at John’s right hand, his parchments and inks spread on a small bench before him. His quill moved rapidly.

‘Cerdic, of this village, sir,’ he muttered, between sniffs. ‘English, I am,’ he added, superfluously as, with a name like his, he could be neither Norman nor Celt.

‘Your age, boy?’

‘Seventeen … I think,’ he added uncertainly.

Crowner John ignored the muffled titter that came from the women at the back. ‘And this body - tell us how you found it.’

The lad drew a brawny arm across his nose to wipe away a dribble. ‘On my way to the bottom wood to cut withies, I was. Down the path by the brook, I saw this here body, lying face down in the water, his head on our side.’

The clerk scribbled away furiously, as the coroner sought more detail. ‘What time was this, boy?’

‘Just after dawn, sir. A bite to eat and I was out.

First up in the village, I reckon.’

‘What did you do then, boy?’ rasped John.

Cerdic ran a forearm across his nose, then spat noisily onto the ground. “I met Nebba when I was running back to the village. I told him, and he came back with me to look at the dead man. Then we both went to find Ralph.’

John pressed him for more facts of how the body lay and what wounds he had seen, but nothing new emerged. The young man was allowed to step back into the village ranks, which he did with obvious relief.

The next witness was a small boy, who had been tending the pigs the night before. He was marched forward by his mother, a formidable woman of extreme ugliness, who gripped her reluctant son by the shoulder to propel him before the Bishop’s chair. Wide-eyed and overawed, all he could stammer out was a vow that there had been no body in the stream late the previous evening when he had scoured the area for a roaming pig.

After the child had been dragged away by his mother, John turned to the manor reeve. ‘Who’s this Nebba that the first witness mentioned?’

Ralph looked uneasy and shifted his feet about on the wet earth. ‘He’s a stranger in the village, Crowner.

Been here a month or so.’

‘Let’s hear from him, then,’ snapped John.

There was much gabbling and moving among the onlookers, many of whom turned round to look across the village green. A man, whom the coroner had noticed earlier at the back of the crowd, was walking quickly away.

Gwyn yelled at him to come back and, when the fellow took no notice, strode after him. Immediately, the man began to run, but he was no match for Gwyn’s long legs. Although the cornishman was built like a bull, he could move fast over short distances and before the fugitive had gone fifty yards, he had him by the neck and was dragging him back to the inquest, his heels scraping along the ground.

Pushing his way through the ring of villagers, Gwyn shoved the man before the coroner.

John glared at him. ‘What’s going on? Why did you run away, knave?’

Nebba was thin, with tangled blond hair and moustache.

He wore a dirty, torn tunic down to his knees, held by a worn leather belt that must once have been of good quality. His face was set in an expression of defiance rather than fear. ‘I don’t want to be mixed up with the law. All I did was go and look at some poxy corpse when that daft lad asked me to see it.’

Gwyn, who still held the man firmly by one shoulder, suddenly grabbed his right hand and pulled it up to show the coroner.

John leaned forward in his chair to see that the index and middle fingers were missing, old healed scars covering the stumps. ‘Ah, Master Bowman, where did you lose those, then?’ he grated. If a captured archer escaped hanging or having his throat cut, the two fingers that drew back the bowstring were chopped off, so that he could no longer practise his deadly profession.

Nebba scowled and remained silent, until Gwyn shook him until his yellow teeth rattled. ‘Answer the coroner, damn you!’

‘In Le Mans in ‘eighty-eight,’ he muttered sullenly.

The coroner’s forehead scar crinkled as his brows rose in surprise. ‘You fought with the old King?’ He meant one of the last battles of Henry II, in which his rebellious sons Richard and John had combined with Philip of France both to defeat their father and break his heart.

Nebba nodded. ‘That’s why I didn’t want to get mixed up with you. You’re one of Richard’s men.’

John gave one of his rare laughs, a bellow of incredulity.

‘Do you think I’d hold it against a man for being faithful to Henry, you fool?’ he snapped. ‘I’m not proud that Richard turned against his father, even though he was provoked by the old man’s indulgence of John.’

The crowd was silent, mainly because they had no idea what Nebba and the coroner were talking about, but Thomas and Gwyn were well aware that Nebba was no ordinary villager. He was more likely a soldier on the run from justice.

‘I know nothing of this dead one, sir. All I can say is that he lay in that bloody brook with his face in the water.’

‘You had never seen him before?’

‘Never. Neither do I know his name nor anything about him. I just want to be left in peace.’

John stared at him, suspicion competing with respect for a soldier who had been maimed for fighting for his king. ‘This is not your village? You have a strange accent.’

Nebba shook his dirty locks. ‘I have no village. I wandered here and work for my keep in the fields, sleep in the cow byre, until I move on.’

Like Gwyn, the coroner had suspected that Nebba was an outlaw who had tired of an almost animal life in the forest and who was trying to slip back into conventional life, even at risk of summary beheading.

Nebba was questioned further, but stubbornly maintained that he knew nothing about the corpse in the stream. The coroner persisted for a time, but could think of no reason why a former bowman should have been involved in the death of a young Norman, other than robbery. But if that were the case, reasoned John, why should he hang around the village?

He beckoned to Gwyn and muttered to him, ‘What d’you think of the fellow? He’s patently a runaway, beyond the law.’

Gwyn felt the same grudging sympathy for a former soldier down on his luck. ‘No doubt he’s a man of the forest, not bound to any lord or manor now. We could slice his head off his shoulders if we wished, but what good would that do? The woods of Devon hold a thousand more like him.’

John nodded. As usual, his man was thinking along similar lines to himself. ‘I suspect he’s working his way nearer a borough, probably Exeter, to try to get his twelve months within the walls.’ Serfs and villeins could claim their freedom if they escaped their manor and resided in a borough for at least a year and a day, without being recaptured by their lord. Some outlaws impersonated villeins on the run and some even regained wealth and positions of importance. If Nebba could achieve this, the coroner had no desire to prevent him, so long as there was no proof that he had been involved in this killing.

John dismissed him, and the Saxon archer melted away into the crowd. The coroner shifted on the hard chair, aware that his investigation was getting nowhere.

Gwyn motioned for Ralph the reeve to step forward.

As a gesture to the occasion, he had washed his face and tied his long hair back with a piece of twine. ‘The lad Cerdic and that Nebba called me when they found the corpse. I took a couple of men and pulled him out of the stream on to the bank. We carried him up here to the barn, then I sent word to the manor bailiff at North Hall.’