The Sanctuary Seeker (8 page)

‘No, though with you panting in my ear, I’d not have heard the roof fall in! But I think we have time yet, until Edwin starts to throw logs on the fire for cooking.’

After a few more minutes of companionable silence, Nesta asked again about the man in Widecombe.

She stroked his belly gently. ‘And you’ve no idea who he is?’

‘None at all. Other than he’s Norman of good family.’

‘How can you get further, then? The killing of a knight or someone of lordly rank cannot go unpunished.

If it were a mere serf or villein, well, life is cheap, but not a gentleman.’

Sometimes John could not be sure whether she was teasing him or serious. Now he suspected the latter, as the Welshwoman had no love of the Normans’

feudal system. If he had not been half Celtic himself, through his Cornish mother, he suspected she would have never let him into her bed.

‘I’ll have to make wider enquiries about the county, maybe even further afield. Gwyn and that poxy clerk can get the criers and heralds in each town to broadcast a description and seek any sighting of the man.

But this affray on Stripcote Hill will occupy most of the day, God blast it.’

She bit his shoulder gently. ‘This crowner’s job seems too much for one man.’

Further conversation was interrupted by a crash below: Edwin had dropped a pile of wood on the floor. Almost immediately, they heard the clear notes of a bronze bell chiming in the distance. When they counted to six, Nesta cruelly threw back the covers and jumped out of bed, leaving John lying with his underwear around his neck. ‘Come, Sir Crowner. By the time we get you fed and watered, it’ll be light.’

With a good meal of ham fried in butter, three fresh eggs and several large slabs of wheaten bread inside him, the coroner marched complacently through the streets of Exeter, from the south-west corner across to where the castle stood on the edge of an escarpment.

He passed tradesmen putting up their stalls in the dawn light, setting out baskets of fresh vegetables, bread, meat and fish, ready to sell to the early risers among Exeter’s townsfolk. In the Shambles above Bell Hill in South Gate Street, the butchers were felling cattle on bloodstained cobbles and pigs screamed in their death agony - all part of the morning sounds of a city.

Everywhere he was met with a nod, a greeting or a pulled forelock. Even though Gwyn of Polruan had assured him that they all knew where he had spent the night, he saw not a snigger or a smirk - which was just as well, as he would have had little hesitation in felling any offender with a smack of his brick-sized fist.

His tall, slightly stooped figure strode up the slope to the castle’s open portcullis. He carried his wide brimmed hat, his shoulder-length black hair lifting as he walked. He wore a short black cloak over the grey linen surcoat that came to his shins, tight black breeches with crossgartering below the knees and pointed shoes. He hoped that Mary had cleaned his riding boots, as he suspected that, come the afternoon, he would be in the saddle again.

In the city, he felt no need to buckle on his heavy sword, but his dagger was sheathed on his belt, though in truth, these days, he used it far more for cutting his food than any violent purpose.

The castle, called Rougemont after the red rock upon which it was built, dominated the town from the highest point. A small room had been allotted to John on the first floor of the gatehouse, far removed in distance and importance from his brother-in-law, who lived and officiated in the keep. Unlike many Norman castles, there was no central mound, but a low square tower rose from the middle of the inner ward. It was the first stone keep that William the Bastard had built in England. It was said that in 1068 he had paced out the measurements for the foundations himself. Other fortified buildings were built into the curtain wall, the main ones on the edge of the low cliff that dropped down to Northernhay, the hedged fields below the city wall.

At the gate, two mailed guards banged the stocks of their spears on the cobbles in salute to him. Like most soldiers, they respected John for his military reputation, as well as for his new royal appointment as the second most important law officer in the county.

He passed under the outer arch of the gatehouse and turned left through a low door that led to the spiral stairs to his room. Little security was needed other than a couple of men to keep out beggars, children and madmen. The last time the castle had seen fighting was over fifty years ago, when for three months Baldwin de Redvers had held it for the Empress Matilda against the forces of the King, until lack of water had defeated him.

John’s office was a dark chamber above the guardroom, lit only by a pair of arrow-slits looking down over the city and a narrow window-opening on the adjacent wall. The dawn light penetrated one of these and threw a pallid rectangle on a trestle table covered with parchment rolls scribed by Thomas de Peyne.

The coroner sat on a hard stool behind the table and picked up the nearest roll, squinting at the penned words on the outside without untying the cord that held it closed. With difficulty, he slowly read the name, mouthing the Latin laboriously with moving lips.

John knew the alphabet fairly well and was taking secret lessons every week from a junior deacon in the priory. He was too proud - or too arrogant - to ask his own clerk for tuition, though Thomas knew that his master was almost illiterate.

John identified the name on the document: he had levied an amercement on a cottager in Cheriton for burying the body of his wife, who had hanged herself from an apple tree, without informing the coroner.

Feet were stumping up the stone stairway and Gwyn’s head came round the open door, bright eyes peering through the forest of red hair and whiskers.

‘The dead ‘un lies in the cart shed, if you want to see him.’

‘What about the wounded fellow from Dawlish?’

‘He’s bleeding into a bed in the Saracen. Too ill to be moved, they reckon. Willem, the innkeeper, is fit to be tied over it, asking who’s going to pay for a new mattress and blanket.’

John followed his lieutenant down to the inner bailey, the large area within the curtain walls that was parade-ground, horse-corral and main street of the castle. Around the inside walls, there were lean-to huts of all shapes and sizes. Some, kitchens, blacksmiths or forges, had smoke coming from their eaves. Others were barracks for the constable’s troops. Women and children hung about, though the quarters for married soldiers and castle servants were in the lower ward.

The ground had hardly a blade of grass left on it, being mostly churned mud, horse droppings and rubbish. Even at that early hour, the whole place was a hive of activity, morning meals being eaten outside the huts, horses being saddled or coaxed into cart-shafts and other wagons trundling in and out of the main gate.

Used to such scenes all his life, John spared it hardly a glance but ploughed through the muck, following Gwyn towards a large, dilapidated shed inside the west wall. The doors had long since fallen off and been used for firewood by the castle residents. It housed the half-dozen big-wheeled carts that carried provisions and fodder. Right at the back, against the ruddy sandstone of the wall, lay an ominous long shape under an old cart-cover.

‘I had the bailiffs bring him up here. No point in leaving him in the street for all to gawp at.’

‘Do we know who he is?’ asked the coroner.

‘Willem the innkeeper knew him. He’s Osric, a carter from Rock Lane.’

Gwyn stooped and flicked off the canvas sheet to reveal a body with a bloody mass where the man’s head had been.

John’s black eyebrows rose. He was impressed by the destruction that had been wrought on the victim’s face, scalp and skull.

‘They used a ball on him?’ he suggested.

Gwyn nodded, quietly proud of his master’s instant and accurate diagnosis. ‘A chain mace, with a ball the size of a turnip. Beat his head to a pulp.’

He tossed back the cover over the gruesome sight and wiped some blood from his hand on the weeds that grew at the foot of the wall.

They walked out into the grey light of the bailey.

‘What about the other man?’

‘He had a dagger thrust into the back of the shoulder. But he’s lost a mortal amount of blood.

If it turns purulent, then he’s a dead man as well.’

The coroner jerked a thumb back towards the shed and its cadaver. ‘Get some of the inquest jury up here to view the body. No point in clogging the place up with half the town, ten men will suffice. And have the felons sent down to the Saracen - if the sheriff can find a couple of guards who’ll not let them escape on the way,’ he added ironically.

While he went back to his office to practise his reading, Gwyn went about his errands, one of which was to chase their clerk away from the food stall in the cathedral close where he was finishing his breakfast and up to the castle.

John sat for a time with a vellum roll in his hands, but his mind was not on deciphering the Latin script.

He thought about last night and the calm companionship, as well as the healthy lust, of Nesta, both of which were so different from the petulant frigidity of Matilda.

From there his mind wandered to the unknown man at Widecombe.

Virtually all coroner’s cases were straightforward: any difficulties were due to the ignorance or obstinacy of the public, or obstacles raised by the sheriff and his men. During the first two months of his duties mysteries had been almost unknown, so this problem was new and intriguing, especially as the dead man seemed to be a Crusader. John began to assemble a plan of action and, not for the first time, wished that he could write well enough to list things with a quill, rather than have to carry everything in his head.

His reverie was broken by the shuffle of feet on the stairs and the head of his clerk appearing round the door. With an obsequious bow, the little ex-cleric sidled into the room and slid on to a stool opposite the Coroner.

‘I’ve had a busy night, Thomas,’ John snapped, with an ambiguity lost on the other man. ‘A killing and a near-mortal wounding. There’s an inquest at noon, but you’d better start entering details on your roll about the injured man, in case he doesn’t die, so that his aggressor may be hauled up before the justices.’

Thomas scrabbled in the shapeless cloth bag he always carried for a new piece of parchment and his writing implements. As he arranged these on the table between them, the coroner stared at him steadily, as if seeing him for the first time. Though Thomas was the butt of scorn and often ridicule - not least from John and Gwyn of Polruan - John felt flashes of pity for him, in spite of his personal distaste for the man’s character. He was ugly, too, and must have been the runt of his mother’s litter, small and crook-backed with his chinless face and long nose below small beady eyes, one of which had a slight turn when he looked to the right. His lank dark hair was as lustreless as old rope and his face was pitted with the scars of cow-pox. No wonder, thought John, that he had been driven to rape, for surely no woman would ever give herself voluntarily to him.

‘Put this in your best Latin. Use your own words, I’ll give you the sense of it.’

He got up from his stool and paced the width of the small room.

‘Whereas on the fourth day of November in Our Lord’s year of eleven hundred and ninety-four, Eadred son of Oswald, freeholder of Dawlish, was found injured near to death, against the King’s peace, by virtue of knife wound in the back, after an affray after midnight outside the Saracen Inn, Stripcote Hill, Exeter, in the County’ of Devon, allegedly by the hand of …’ He hesitated and wrinkled his face in annoyance. ‘Damnation, I forget who Gwyn told me was the attacker. Just leave a space, you can get it from him when we go down to the town.’

He carried on with a preamble to the wounding and the death, as recounted to him by his officer. He paused now and then, to let the clerk catch up with his words, which Thomas had to a translate into Latin.

In the lower courts, run by the sheriffs and burgesses, English or Norman French was used in speech but anything written, especially for use in the courts of the King’s justices, had to be in Latin.

Thomas worked slowly, but John had to admit that his rolls were a work of art, even to those who could hardly read the words. The regularity of his script, the faultless spacing and straightness of the lines showed that good could come out of even the most unprepossessing people.

By the time they had finished, some weak rays of early sun had struck through the rain-clouds and the narrow wall-slits into the chamber.

The ninth bell had sounded from the cathedral when Gwyn returned. He brought a large loaf from a street baker, and a slab of hard cheese. The three sat round the table and shared it, washed down with beer that John produced from a two-gallon earthenware jar kept in a corner under a cloth. For a time, there was peace, as the three men chewed the fresh bread and odorous cheese, and gulped ale from chipped pottery mugs that were part of the furnishings of the bare room.

Even Gwyn seemed temporarily to have forgotten to bait the scrawny clerk while they enjoyed their simple snack. His huge body required refuelling at frequent intervals - there was too much of a gap for him between a pre-dawn breakfast and the midday meal. A fiercely independent Cornishman, married to a Cornish wife and with a score of relatives still in Polruan, he had become of necessity a mercenary soldier twenty years ago, and with John de Wolfe, who had had no true squire until Gwyn, he had travelled half the known world as far as Palestine. When his knight had run out of wars, Gwyn had stayed with him as his officer.

When the last crumbs had been swallowed and the empty pots returned unwashed to a niche in the wall, John returned to business. ‘Did you tell the town crier to ask for information on our Crusading corpse?’ he demanded of Thomas.

‘Last evening time, Crowner. He will be shouting it about the city this morning. Five times today he’ll cry it in various streets.’

‘If we get nothing by tomorrow, I want you to ride to Cullompton, Crediton, Tiverton and Honiton to get the criers or bailiffs to put about the same message.’