The Witch Hunter (16 page)

‘We’ve got a drowned rat, Crowner!’ cackled Gwyn from his usual seat on the window ledge. ‘For Christ’s sake take those wet clothes off, or you’ll catch the ague.’

Thomas pulled his black cassock-like garment over his head and stood shivering in his patched undershirt. The rain had brought welcome relief from the heat, but his soaked body now felt cold.

‘You’d better take it all off, Thomas,’ recommended de Wolfe, from behind his table.

‘We’ve seen naked bodies before, lad,’ said Gwyn. ‘I doubt that yours will drive us crazy with lust!’

Thomas blushed and refused to undress altogether, his modest upbringing at odds with their rough military humour. Gwyn, whose teasing of their little clerk was a mask for his kindliness, took an old riding mantle from a wooden peg driven between the stones of the wall and draped it over Thomas’s shoulders.

‘There’s been quite a commotion in the lower town, Crowner,’ said the clerk, as he perched himself on his stool at the table. ‘Canon Gilbert has had a witch locked up in the proctors’ cells, after Osric the constable refused to arrest her.’ Thomas was exceptionally well connected with the city grapevine and seemed to hear gossip ahead of anyone else. His remarkable gift for intelligence-gathering was another reason why he was so valuable as a coroner’s assistant, apart from his talents in reading and writing.

De Wolfe’s ears pricked up at this latest titbit and he rapidly drew out from Thomas all that he knew about the affair in Rock Lane.

‘So that damned apothecary and the de Pridias widow were there with that interfering canon!’ he grunted. ‘That seems too much of a coincidence. I smell some sort of conspiracy in this.’

‘What can you do about it, Crowner?’ asked Gwyn, tugging at one side of his drooping moustache.

John shrugged helplessly. ‘Not a thing, as it stands. I’ve no jurisdiction over allegations of sorcery. Osric was right for once, refusing to have anything to do with it. If there was no violence or damage to property, then it’s none of the business of the law officers.’

He looked at the hunched figure of his clerk, swathed in the oversized brown cloak. ‘You’re the authority on matters ecclesiastical, Thomas. Has a canon the right to drag some poor wretch from her home and incarcerate her in the church dungeons?’

Thomas looked up with a rather hang-dog expression. He felt guilty on the rare occasions when he was unable to be of help to his master. ‘The matter has never arisen before, to the best of my knowledge,’ he admitted. ‘Though there is a clear admonition in the Book of Exodus that witches should be put to death, the Church has never enforced it in living memory. In fact, I doubt if it has even addressed the problem.’

‘Looks as if this bloody canon is stirring it up for his own ends,’ growled Gwyn, in his usual blunt fashion.

John sighed as he uncoiled himself from his stool. ‘I’m sorry for the poor dame, but there’s nothing I can do at the moment. I’ll seek out the archdeacon later and see what he feels about it. I know he was unhappy with Gilbert de Bosco’s performance last week.’

He stretched his long arms and straightened his back after being hunched over his Latin lessons for the past hour. Going to the window opening, he peered out at the rain.

‘Easing off a little, Crowner,’ observed Gwyn. ‘But still coming down steadily enough. It’ll last all day, a poor look-out for the harvest if it keeps on.’

‘If you’re right, we’re going to get a wetting this afternoon. We have to ride to Cadbury, whatever the weather.’

Usually it was Gwyn who brought new cases to John’s attention, as the castle guards normally directed reeves and bailiffs to his officer when they arrived at the castle to report deaths, assaults, rapes and other assorted disasters. This time, de Wolfe happened to be coming out of the keep when he heard a dusty rider asking for the coroner. He made himself known to the man and found that, unusually, this was no murder or mayhem, but a discovery of treasure trove, another event that fell under the jurisdiction of the coroner. The man was the manor-reeve of Cadbury, a small village eight miles north of Exeter, about halfway to Tiverton. John listened to his brief story, then sent him off to feed and water both himself and his horse, with instructions to meet them at the North Gate soon after the cathedral bells tolled for vespers, which was a couple of hours after noon.

It was midday now and John announced that he was seeking his dinner at the Bush, as Matilda was spending the day with her sickly cousin in Fore Street. It was an opportunity for him to sneak away to his mistress without suffering the abrasive recriminations of his wife. Thomas decided to stay in the chamber and dry off, claiming he had some cases to copy on to the parchment rolls that must be presented to the justices when they came to the Assize of Gaol Delivery in a couple of months’ time. John privately thought that the clerk relished the chance of his own company and the opportunity to read in peace from his precious Vulgate. He lived on sufferance in one of the canons’ houses in the Close, sleeping on a straw mattress in the passageway of the servants’ quarters, where there was no privacy at all.

Gwyn went off to eat, drink and play dice with the off-duty men-at-arms in the guardroom below and the coroner strode off towards Idle Lane. It was raining steadily, but not the drenching downpour that had soaked Thomas. He had borrowed Gwyn’s tattered shoulder-cape with the pointed hood, the worn leather keeping most of the rain off, though the skirt of his long grey tunic and his boots were soon wet and muddied.

At the tavern, he found that Edwin the potman had just lit a fire in the stone hearth, as a number of other patrons were in varying stages of dampness and needed to dry off, even though the summer afternoon was still warm, in spite of the change in the weather.

John stretched out his legs to the blazing logs and watched as steam began to wreathe up from his clothing. Almost immediately, Nesta appeared with a jug of ale and sat down on the bench alongside him. ‘Your boots will split if you dry them too quickly!’ she warned, giving him a quick kiss on his stubbled cheek.

‘It’s a waste of time anyway, they’ll be wet again soon enough.’

He explained about the journey to Cadbury that afternoon, to examine an alleged find of coins. After assuring him that his dinner was on its way, she asked him to explain about treasure trove. Nesta was an intelligent woman, with a healthy curiosity about a whole range of matters and John delighted in pandering to her inquisitiveness.

‘Why should a coroner be involved?’ she asked. ‘I thought your task was to investigate deaths and evil things like that.’

He took a pull at his ale and shook his head. ‘It’s mainly about money, good woman. Though it’s true that death and injury is a big part of the work, that’s because there’s silver to be gained out of it for the King.’

He explained again that Richard the Lionheart was always short of money, especially since Henry of Germany had demanded the vast ransom of a hundred and fifty thousand marks for Richard’s release from capture. John still felt guilty about this, as he had been one of the small bodyguard that had travelled with the King through Austria, when their ship had been wrecked on the shores of Dalmatia, coming back from the Holy Land. They had been ambushed at an inn in Erdberg and John had never forgiven himself for having been absent, looking for fresh horses, when the Mayor of Vienna had burst in with his men and captured Richard.

‘So the Chief Justiciar, Hubert Walter, was given the job of raising the money – and he has to keep on finding it, now that the King wages these incessant campaigns against Philip of France. One of the ways he invented – apart from taxing the barons, the Church and everyone else – was to bring back the old Saxon office of coroner, to drive more cases into the royal courts, instead of them going to the county courts, the manor courts and the rest. And as you well know, any fault in the process of dealing with the legal process leads to fines, all of which goes into the King’s treasury.’

Nesta had heard most of this before, but still wanted to know more about treasure trove. Just then, one of her maids arrived at the trestle with a wooden board on which was a thick trencher of yesterday’s bread supporting a slab of boiled bacon, with two fried eggs on top. A wooden bowl contained cooked beans and peas, which John heaped on to slices of the meat which he cut off with his dagger. Between chewing and swallowing ale to wash it down, he explained about finds of treasure.

‘There’s a great deal of valuable metal hidden about the countryside, especially since the Battle of Hastings. Very many Saxons hid their wealth to keep it from us Normans – then they were either killed or died before they could recover it.’

He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth to remove the bacon fat.

‘I have heard of much older coinage being found, even going back to the Romans. But whatever it is, it has to be either gold or silver to be reckoned as treasure trove. Jewel stones don’t count, unless they are set in precious metal.’

‘But who does it belong to?’ persisted Nesta, her big eyes round as she looked up at her dark and angular lover.

‘That’s why there must be an inquest on the finds, to decide if the finder or the owner of the land or the King gets the value. There are rules, but I rely on Thomas to put me right on the details. You know what a mine of information he is, I’d be lost without him when it comes to fiddling details.’

Some ripe plums and an apple rounded off the meal and as there was no time to climb the ladder for a dalliance in the loft, he had to be satisfied with another quart of ale and a relaxed gossip with his mistress – though she was constantly interrupted by either Edwin or the maids to settle some dispute in the kitchen or a problem among the patrons.

He asked her whether she had heard anything about the strange arrest of Alice Ailward by the cathedral proctors, but Nesta had no more information than himself. ‘It will be a dismal day if any good-wife who gives a potion or a poultice to a neighbour, gets herself locked up for it.’

She sounded worried, and John wondered whether her own activities in that direction were more extensive than she had admitted to him. Nesta was a tender-hearted soul and he knew that she often went out of her way to help those less fortunate than herself. Beggars were often to be found around the back gate, where she unfailingly let them have the old trenchers and scraps of food left over from the kitchen. He suspected that the families in nearby Smythen Street and the upper part of Priest Street were quite familiar with her Welsh folk cures for a wide range of illnesses.

‘You be careful yourself,’ he admonished her. ‘Lay low with your cunning-woman activities, until this stupidity has blown over.’

He left the alehouse before the vesper bell and was helping Andrew the farrier to saddle up his great horse Odin when it finally pealed out from the cathedral tower. The rain was now an intermittent drizzle and there were gaps in the cloud where scraps of blue sky suggested that maybe it would clear up towards evening.

When he reached the North Gate, Gwyn was waiting on his big brown mare and, just outside, Thomas was perched side-saddle on a small cob, all Gwyn’s efforts to get him to ride like a man having failed. Alongside him was Henry Stork, the reeve from Cadbury, a leathery, taciturn man of about fifty, who spoke only when it was absolutely necessary. He had said little about the discovery, other than it was on the land of Robert Hereward and had been found in a mound by one of Robert’s villeins.

The four set off northwards along the road to Crediton, the rain causing little problem to men used to travelling in all weathers. The main problem was the surface of the track, which after a couple of weeks of drought, had now been converted into a sticky red paste by the recent downpour. The mud was not yet deep but was slippery and occasionally one of the horses would slide and lose its footing in the rutted surface. Even at a cautious trot, the eight miles did not take long to cover. They left the Crediton road soon after leaving the city and followed narrow tracks to the village of Thorveton, then on through mixed forest and cultivated land to Cadbury, a small hamlet in deeply undulating country just west of the River Exe.

The rain had stopped by the time they arrived and broken cloud allowed shafts of sunlight to draw steaming wreaths of vapour from the pasture land around the village.

‘It’s but a small place, Crowner,’ grunted Henry Stork, as they walked their horses into the grassy area in the middle of the hamlet, where the track divided into two, the right-hand one going on to Tiverton, a few miles farther on.

‘You say the manor is held by Robert Hereward?’ asked de Wolfe, as he slid from Odin’s high back.

‘Indeed, but he doesn’t own the land. He has Saxon blood on his grandmother’s side, they used to hold it. But they became Norman when William de Pouilly’s son married into the family a century ago.’

‘So who owns the freehold?’ persisted the coroner. This was not just idle curiosity; the resolution of a find of treasure trove needed all the information available. His black eyebrows went up sharply when the reeve told him that the ultimate landlord was Sir Richard de Revelle, sheriff of the county and a substantial landowner around Tiverton. His wife, the glacial Lady Eleanor, lived in his main manor near there, refusing to stay with her husband in the grim and draughty castle of Rougemont.

‘Does the sheriff know of this find?’ he asked curtly.

Henry shook his head. ‘I was charged by Sir Robert’s bailiff to give him a message, but at Rougemont I was told that he had just left Exeter for Revelstoke and will be away for at least four days.’

Revelstoke was one of Richard’s manors near Plympton, on the coast in the far west of Devon.

They had stopped outside a small alehouse, a hut of wattle and daub with a ragged thatched roof, slightly larger than the dozen tofts clustered around the centre of the village. A steep hill rose behind, with some ancient walls hidden in the turf at the top. On each side, strip fields ran up the sloping sides of the valley, the oats and rye beginning to brown up after a week of hot sun, though still not ripened sufficiently for harvesting. Strips of green alternated with the grain, where beans and peas were looking healthier. As John stretched his aching back, his gaze travelled around the horizon, where dark forest began beyond the waste ground that surrounded the cultivated areas. About a quarter of a mile to his left, he saw a hump in the pasture, just before the trees began. It was about the height of a cottage, smooth and covered in grass.