Crowner's Quest

by Bernard Knight

  The little clerk sat back on his stool in the gloom and pondered his find. It did not seem to help much, as it gave no clue as to where geographically de Hane’s interest might have lain. He turned over the sheets following the marked one and saw that Saewulf’s name was attached to many manors and villages, which he had owned before 1067. There was no indication by any other fresh marginal mark of which of Saewulf’s possessions might be singled out for special attention and, even after another hour of squinting in the flickering illumination of the remaining candles, the coroner’s assistant failed to make any other discoveries.

  Twenty miles from Exeter, another Yuletide celebration was being held that evening in Berry Pomeroy Castle, a square tower perched on the edge of a lonely crag two hundred feet above the Gatcombe brook. Around it on the other three sides was a bailey, protected by a wooden palisade with a central guard-tower and massive wooden gates. Henry de la Pomeroy had invited a number of his more noble neighbours to a banquet, which was in the last stages of preparation in the kitchens outside. In the hall, which occupied the whole of the first floor of the donjon, sixty people were already sitting at long tables being regaled with drink and entertainment from musicians, mummers and jugglers as they waited for the food. The walls were decorated with holly, fir branches and mistletoe, and two huge fires burned in chimneyed hearths to keep at bay the cold wind that moaned up the narrow valley below the castle.

  The upper table was for the host and his most favoured guests, but the three centre chairs remained empty until the meal began. The absentees were in an upper chamber, on the floor divided into solar, chapel and guest rooms. They were drinking wine, standing around a glowing fire in the hearth. This was their host’s first Yuletide as lord of Berry, following the violent death of his father earlier in the year – an incident his guests were careful to avoid mentioning. Henry de la Pomeroy was a thick-set, short-necked man of thirty years, though he looked older. His large, drooping moustache was of the same mousy brown as his long hair, but he sported no beard. Henry wore a permanently aggrieved expression, as if the whole world were conspiring to annoy him. He had worried one wife into an early grave and was working on the second.

  ‘This retaliation you promised to arrange for me, Bernard. You say it is fixed for tomorrow?’ He waved his wine cup at his cousin, Bernard Cheever, who held several manors along the lower reaches of the river Dart. Cheever, a dapper man of more placid nature than Pomeroy, smiled amiably. ‘Don’t fret about it, Henry. I told you days ago that I would arrange it – and I did. It’s not the most important thing you have to worry about.’

  Pomeroy, dressed in a yellow tunic with a short red cloak pinned around his shoulders, still looked unhappy. ‘It was that damned bailiff’s fault, I should have his hand chopped off. I told him to leave a couple of men-at-arms with the felling team, but the idiot took them off after a couple of days because nothing happened.’

  The third member of the group smiled wryly. He was a namesake of the host, Henri de Nonant, Lord of Totnes, whose burly joviality concealed a hard heart and a scheming mind. ‘You sound outraged, friend, yet it’s you who are stealing the man’s land! Are you surprised that he shows his disapproval?’

  Pomeroy threw the dregs of his wine into the fire and picked up a flask from the table to refill all their cups. ‘It’s a moot point, whether that land is his or not, Henri.’

  ‘You mean, we’re not sure which of our families stole it from the Saxons?’ drawled Cheever mischievously.

  ‘Conquest is not stealing, Bernard,’ snapped Pomeroy, who had not a trace of a sense of humour. ‘William the Bastard had a better claim to England than Harold – and he won. So his followers had a right to all the land and William gave this honour to Ralph, our grandfather four times removed.’

  ‘The Domesday commissioners were not at all clear on where his boundaries lay,’ commented de Nonant.

  ‘Then I’ll clarify it for them – at the point of my sword if needs be! If you look at the lie of the land, those three virgates in the valley between Afton and Loventor obviously belong to Afton. Cleared of forest, they make a continuous sweep of ploughland.’

  ‘But William Fitzhamon thinks otherwise – and he says he has four generations of occupation to uphold his claim,’ said Cheever mildly.

  ‘And I’ve got five generations that say he’s wrong – so to hell with him!’ retorted Pomeroy. ‘I need a strong arm or two to keep him from interfering again. My reeve says that Fitzhamon used ragged outlaws to assault his team. What does it matter if we kill a few to make our point?’

  Henri de Nonant held up a cautionary hand. ‘Have a care, we don’t want to start a private war here, not at this delicate time.’

  Pomeroy was dismissive. ‘Who’s to censure us, eh? We are the law in these parts. The only one who could cause us problems is the sheriff – and Richard de Revelle’s not going to bother us, is he?’

  ‘What about the new coroner, this former Crusader?’ asked Bernard Cheever.

  ‘That’s John de Wolfe, from over at Stoke-in-Teignhead,’ supplied de Nonant.

  ‘Coroner! Who the devil takes any notice of a coroner?’ said Pomeroy derisively. ‘Just a glorified tax-collector recording the pennies of dead felons for the Exchequer.’

  Henri de Nonant was not so easily convinced. ‘There is talk that this crowner has the ear of both Hubert Walter and even the King.’

  ‘They’ve got a bloody long ears, then,’ cackled Cheever. ‘I wager that Richard will never set foot in England again.’

  The more cautious Nonant shrugged. ‘So be it, then. But be careful – for the sake of a few acres of land, we can’t risk drawing attention to ourselves, until everything is in place.’

  Pomeroy swallowed the rest of his wine and moved towards the door. ‘Let’s go and eat and drink our fill. And, Bernard, I trust I will hear tomorrow that these fellows have done their job. I want that felling completed and the stumps pulled out before the end of January.’

  While Thomas de Peyne was indulging in his lonely labours in the cathedral, Gwyn of Polruan was mixing business with pleasure in another hostelry in the city. Not far from the Bush was a less reputable tavern on Stepcote Hill, called the Saracen. It was run by a fat, surly landlord known as Willem the Fleming and attracted a rougher class of customer, many from the Bretayne district just across Westgate Street, as well as dubious strangers entering the city through that gate.

  However, Willem brewed good ale and it was also the place to pick up criminal gossip, as well the pox from the many harlots who used it as a business address.

  This Christ Mass evening, the burly Cornishman was sitting in the Saracen with a quart pot of best ale, talking to some acquaintances and listening to the buzz of conversation around him. He had already eaten heartily with his wife and two children at her widowed sister’s house in Milk Street. They had left their own small dwelling in St Sidwell’s to spend the festive day there. Gwyn, tiring of women’s gossip in the tiny room, where the children slept on a straw mattress in the corner, had wandered out for a drink and some male company. He knew every tavern in the city, both as a customer and as coroner’s officer, for many of the inns were the scene of fights, assaults and even killings. Only last month the Saracen had been the scene of a fatal robbery for which two men had been hanged – and Willem was still bemoaning the ruination of one of his mattresses from the blood of one of the victims. Gwyn sat on a bench against one wall, sucking the ale from his bushy moustache and listening to one of his companions complain about the cost of living since the King had restarted his campaign against Philip of France. ‘With a pair of working shoes now almost threepence, how can we live?’ he whined, but Gwyn’s attention was suddenly elsewhere.

  He noticed a face across the room that he could not quite place, though he had seen it recently. Then he realised that the young man’s clothing was different from what he had worn that afternoon: his priest’s garb was shrouded in a dun cloak that enveloped him from neck to ankle.
He was one of the vicars from Canons’ Row in the close, who had been at the inquest and had been hovering around on the previous evening when the body was discovered. Gwyn did not know his name or to whom he was a vicar, but certainly he was not Robert de Hane’s: his had been a pasty-faced man with a pug nose; this was a dark fellow with acne scars on his cheeks. He was talking animatedly to a tall young man with very blond hair and beard, and a large sword at his belt. Between them was a very attractive, if bold-looking, woman of about twenty-five, her long dark hair rippling unbound over her shoulders.

  Though some priests were dissolute, both in drink and womanising, they were usually discreet in the cathedral city and did not publicly flaunt their lifestyle: normally they kept their mistresses indoors and did their drinking in relative privacy. It was strange to see a vicar, even in plain clothing, in a seedy tavern like the Saracen, especially in the company of a woman who looked as if she might be ‘of a certain character’.

  Gwyn watched them for a few moments, heedless of the continuing complaints of the man sitting next to him. He saw the vicar talking quickly to the fair man, his head close to the other’s in an attitude of confidentiality. His hands waved in nervous gestures and he darted frequent glances about the large room as if suspicious of an eavesdropper. The coroner’s officer dropped his head and looked across the inn from under his bushy red brows, not wanting to be recognised. The low, smoky chamber was full of people, drinking and talking loudly, so there was not too much chance of the vicar spotting him – even though Gwyn was a giant of a man, he was sitting behind a shifting throng.

  The blond fellow was listening attentively to the priest, nodding every now and then but saying little. The woman’s handsome face looked from one to the other, her full red lips pursed in a somewhat anxious expression. Gwyn recalled having seen her about the town before – he had a healthy appreciation for an attractive woman – but he did not know her name. She was not a common whore, as far as he knew, but there something about her manner that spoke of easy sensuality.

  He interrupted his companion, a leather-worker from Curre Street, who was still prattling on about the cost of living. ‘Who’s that good-looking dame there, Otelin?’ he asked.

  The man lowered his jar from his lips and craned his head around a bystander to see across the smoky room. ‘The woman with the big dugs? That’s Rosamunde of Rye, who’s no better than she should be – but, like most of the men in Exeter, I’d not kick her out of my bed.’ Otelin licked his lips with futile desire.

  ‘Is she from the city? And who is the man with her?’ demanded the coroner’s lieutenant.

  ‘She follows the younger knights and squires about the country, so I hear,’ Otelin answered. ‘The likes of you and me wouldn’t get a hand into her bodice – she fancies the bright young fighting men, and some of the older ones, too. No doubt that yellow-haired fellow is one of them, by the way he flaunts his broadsword.’ Otelin peered across the inn again. The tall young man was now taking over the discussion, the priest and raven-haired woman listening intently. ‘I don’t know his name,’ he said, ‘but I’ve seen him with others of the same type. I think he is squire to one of those mercenaries, from down Totnes way.’

  A group of drinkers moved across their field of view, and when they had a sight across the room again the priest had moved away in the company of another girl, with a pallid face but a gaudy kirtle. They went across to the ladder in the corner, which, like the Bush and most other inns, led up to the primitive sleeping accommodation on the floor above.

  As they pushed their way through the throng, the blond squire and Rosamunde of Rye went hand in hand towards the street door and vanished. Gwyn of Polruan spent the next hour sitting in the Saracen, drinking his ale and pondering on whether what he had seen had any significance in the case of the murdered canon.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  In which Crowner John learns some history

  By the next morning, Matilda had thawed sufficiently to appear in the cold light of dawn to join her husband at the breakfast Mary set before them in the bare hall of their house. Over hot bread, cold pork and mulled ale, they sat each side of the long table, silently avoiding the sharing of each other’s thoughts. His wife could sulk for days on end, which de Wolfe found worse than an outright fight – the latter gave a better excuse to flare up and clear off to the Bush, where he could enjoy the pleasant company of his mistress. But when Matilda was merely sullen, he felt that he had to try to wean her back at least to a state of neutrality, for the sake of his own relative peace of mind. Although John did not enjoy her company, even at the best of times in this loveless marriage, he found outright warfare, niggling bickering and silent antipathy about as welcome as a festering open wound.

  Unable to leave her, due to the social obligations of a Norman knight and a King’s officer, he had to endure the status quo with as good grace as he could muster. Yet although he had ample opportunity to relieve his sensual needs, mainly with Nesta but also with a couple of other ladies around the county, he still had to live in Martin’s Lane with a wife obsessed with her position in the social hierarchy of the county.

  De Wolfe was the only coroner in Devon: the mandate from Hubert Walter had required each county to appoint three knights and a clerk, but here only two had been found to accept the unpaid post, and the other, Robert Fitzrogo, had fallen from his horse in the first fortnight and been killed. De Wolfe had been left to cover the huge expanse from Barnstaple on the Severn Sea down to the south coast, with Exmoor and Dartmoor included in a vast tract of country that on horseback took three days to cross.

  As he sat chewing the rind on his pig-meat and crunching the crusty bread, he tried to take stock of his own state of contentment. A soldier since the age of seventeen, he was now forty and put out to grass, as far as foreign campaigning was concerned. Although he could have gone to join his beloved Richard Coeur de Lion in France, an old wound in his left hip, from a spear thrust in Palestine, made him wary of long sojourns in the field, living in tents or filthy castle barracks. He had wearied of endless killing, and the massacres in the Third Crusade, from which he had returned two years previously, had sickened him of outright war. When he was young, he had been in the Irish campaigns and often in Normandy and France, but the Holy Land had been a different world. Also, though he hardly admitted it even to himself, he still felt responsible for the King having been captured in Austria. Gwyn and de Wolfe had been part of Richard’s small bodyguard during their attempted journey across the continent after being shipwrecked in the Adriatic. Through no fault of de Wolfe, the Lionheart had been seized while he and Gwyn had escaped. The King spent almost two years in the clutches of Leopold of Austria and Henry of Germany. It had been the huge ransom that England had to pay, a hundred and fifty thousand marks, that had helped to impoverish the country since, and which had driven Justiciar Hubert Walter to squeeze every penny in taxes from the hard-pressed population. Indeed, the creation of coroners had been part of the drive to extract as much money as possible from both rich and poor.

  Yet de Wolfe found that he enjoyed the job: it gave him the chance to get out and about on a horse, sometimes to become involved in a fight when things turned nasty – and, above all, to escape from Matilda with a legitimate excuse to be away from home for days on end. She had thought that becoming coroner would give them increased prestige in the county pecking-order, without too much labour, that the coroner would merely officiate at local courts, hobnob with the King’s Justices when they came, and oversee the formalities at inquests. She soon learned, with dismay, that it meant her husband had to spend most of his time away from home on the back of his old warhorse Bran, in company with the red-haired Cornish savage and an evil little gnome, who was both a sexual pervert and a disgraced priest.

  A state of grumbling hostility had developed between de Wolfe and his wife, fuelled mostly on her side by his stubborn obstinacy to carry out his duties with faithful dedication, born of his conviction that it was his du
ty to his king. Another source of friction was her awareness of his infidelity, though the knowledge that virtually every Norman in the country had a mistress or two made this a lesser evil. Matilda herself had had a flirtation or two with men in the past, when John was away at his wars, but she had done it partly from pique and partly from boredom, rather than any passionate desire. In fact, she had found the affairs embarrassingly sordid and had long been chaste.

  Though this morning she had condescended to sit with her husband at the table, the silence was almost palpable enough to be cut with his dagger. His feeble efforts at conversation were met with stony indifference and he soon gave up, with a glowering sense of familiarity with the situation.

  As soon as he had finished eating, he threw on his cloak and whistled down the passageway to the yard for Brutus, deciding to give the old hound a walk up to the castle. The snow had stopped overnight, but there was a couple of inches of slush on the ground, dirty and stained in the middle of the lane and in the high street where people threw out their slops. Brutus was not too happy at being brought out of Mary’s warm kitchen to plod through the cold streets, but he faithfully followed his master, enjoying the various smells at each corner and the opportunity to cock his leg every few yards. At the castle gatehouse, he darted ahead of de Wolfe and ran up the twisting stone staircase, knowing that the dog-loving Gwyn would throw him a piece of his breakfast cheese.