Crowner's Quest

by Bernard Knight

  ‘I brought de Boterellis to report on what Bishop Henry learned in Gloucester and Coventry last week,’ began the sheriff. ‘But what happened last night is of more immediate importance to us – and to all who support the just cause, if my damned brother-in-law goes whining to Hubert Walter.’

  De Nonant, the big-boned lord of Totnes, waved a hand towards the bailey outside. ‘We know what happened. Giles Fulford rode in here just before you, as he left Exeter the moment the gates opened. He’s still wheezing from dung-water in his lungs from that horse trough.’ He spat noisily into the fire, perhaps a comment on Fulford’s inability to keep out of trouble.

  De Revelle was put on the defensive, feeling blamed for his inability to control the Exeter end of this conspiracy. ‘How in hell could I foresee that this idiot squire would go straight to his favourite ale-house when I released him from gaol? He should have kept in hiding until he could leave the city, not lay himself open to kidnap. Though that was something no one could have dreamed of – only my devious brother-in-law could have thought up a move like that!’

  Pomeroy’s sour face regarded him with distaste, his drooping moustache following the downturned corners of his flabby lips. ‘For Jesus Christ’s sake, de Revelle, can’t you control that man? You’re the sheriff! Why don’t you lock the bastard up or hang him?’

  Bernard Cheever, ever the conciliator, came to de Revelle’s aid. ‘Come on, Henry, de Wolfe’s the King’s crowner – and he’s married to Richard’s sister! This has to be done with subtlety.’

  The blunt lord of Totnes brought them back to the main issues. ‘The damage is done – no use crying over spilt milk. John de Wolfe guesses there is another rebellion in the wind and that some of us are involved. He has no proof, unless the sheriff here has admitted anything, so we have to make sure that the coroner doesn’t find any further evidence and that he won’t go running to the Justiciar or the King about it.’

  ‘He’s well in with both of them, more’s the pity, since they were all in Palestine,’ muttered Richard. ‘When Hubert Walter was here last month, they had their heads together a great deal – though, thank God, that was before any of our plans were known to de Wolfe.’

  Henri de Nonant turned to the priest, who had been silent until now. ‘What news did the Bishop bring from Gloucester, Precentor?’

  Thomas de Boterellis considered his answer carefully, his small dark eyes peering gimlet-like from the folds of his fat face. ‘Things are moving, but slowly. Your kinsman, Hugh de Nonant, who was deprived of his bishopric in Coventry, is being allowed by the King to purchase a pardon for the sum of two thousand marks.’

  Pomeroy laughed cynically. ‘The Lionheart would sell his grandmother for the price of a quiver of arrows.’

  ‘But not his mother!’ quipped Cheever, and bitterly they all agreed. The old Queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine, was the only person who could control her wayward sons. It was largely due to her rapid return to England, when Richard had been locked up in Germany, that the Prince’s attempt to seize the throne from his elder brother had been demolished.

  The Precentor carried on with his news. ‘Hugh de Nonant thinks it politic to stay in Normandy for the time being, so we lack a strong leader at present.’

  ‘What about another bishop?’ asked Cheever. ‘Henry Marshal of Exeter, for example.’

  Boterellis shook his big head. ‘He’s too timid. If it falls flat again, he doesn’t want to follow the Bishop of Coventry. And he’s in an awkward position as brother to William Marshal, who has always been a King’s man – whichever king it is.’

  Pomeroy glared around at the others. ‘So where are we now? Are we having a rebellion or not?’

  ‘A number of barons about England are once more sympathetic to the Prince’s cause,’ replied the lard-faced priest. ‘We have probably the strongest group here in the south-west. But it is so soon after the fiasco of last winter that many are treading softly. I’m sure that enough will rally eventually to the Count of Mortaigne, but it is too soon to declare openly yet.’

  De Nonant brought them back to the current problem. ‘All the more reason not to let this wayward crowner let the badger out of the bag! What’s to be done?’

  The lord of Berry Pomeroy took the initiative. ‘He must be silenced, either by threats or violence. Why are we so concerned about some piddling pensioned-off ex-Crusader?’

  Richard de Revelle was less sanguine about the county coroner. ‘Much as I dislike the bloody man, I have to admit that he is able enough – tenacious, stubborn and cunning! And with that hairy Cornish savage watching his back, he can outfight any two men that I know.’

  ‘Then we’ll send five against him,’ snapped Pomeroy. ‘If he’s a danger to us, get rid of him.’

  ‘Can’t we blackmail him somehow?’ suggested the less bloodthirsty Bernard Cheever. ‘Murdering a coroner, especially one who’s a personal friend of the Archbishop of Canterbury and of the King, is a sure way of calling attention to ourselves.’

  The sheriff responded quickly, anxious to avoid being involved in the assassination of Matilda’s husband. ‘I agree – and there may be a way of keeping his mouth shut. His Achilles’ heel is his fondness for women. I’ve a plan which might just work! I’ll put it into action as soon as I get back to Exeter tonight.’

  Henry de Nonant was scornful of de Revelle’s confidence. ‘This de Wolfe sounds too hard a nut to crack that easily. We must have an absolutely foolproof strategem to keep him silent. What about those two adventurers we hired to recruit and train our mercenaries? De Braose did a good job on Fitzhamon, even if his squire let us down.’

  Pomeroy went round with a flask to refill their wine cups. ‘They’re too fond of private enterprise for my liking. Their foolery with buried treasure led to the killing of that canon of yours, Boterellis, and hence to the crowner dousing Fulford in a trough last night to make him talk. If it wasn’t for that, we wouldn’t have this trouble now.’

  Cheever, a smaller version of Hugh de Relaga in that he was dressed in bright-coloured tunic and mantle, acted as middle man once again. ‘If it was their fault that we have a problem, let’s see if they have any suggestions to put it right.’

  A servant was dispatched to fetch the pair from the hall, and soon they appeared. Jocelin de Braose’s curly russet hair contrasted with the dark green cape he wore over his brown woollen tunic. Thomas de Boterellis, who knew the whole story of the treasure hunt, noticed that his cape was secured at his shoulder with a fine gold brooch of Saxon design.

  Behind him stood Giles Fulford, slimmer and fairer than his master, dressed in a uniform-like leather jerkin and serge breeches. He looked flushed and constantly had to suppress an irritable cough that came from deep in his chest.

  Henry de la Pomeroy had recruited de Braose to find and train a small army of mercenaries for the anticipated revolt, but had not seen him lately. Pomeroy had instigated the murder of Fitzhamon to prevent him telling tales to the Justiciar but had naturally kept well away from the hunting party at Totnes. He was curious as to how it had been achieved. De Braose was quite ready to enlighten him. ‘First we had to get Fitzhamon’s bowman out of the way. Giles here damaged a hamstring on his horse before they left Totnes, so the reeve had to walk it back and leave his master to hunt alone. We tracked him and got ahead of him.’

  ‘How did you get him from his horse?’ demanded Pomeroy.

  ‘Giles lay face down on the ground with an arrow held up in his armpit as if he’d been shot. When Fitzhamon came along the track, he dismounted to see what was wrong. As he bent over the supposed body, I came up behind him and cracked him over the head with a branch. Then we broke his neck while he was unconscious – he didn’t feel a thing,’ he added, with an unpleasant smirk.

  In a hoarse voice, between coughs, Giles Fulford finished the unsavoury story. ‘We carried him back near a tree with a low branch and left him on the ground. I reached up from my saddle, broke off a strip of bark to make it look as if he had struc
k the branch, then smeared some blood from the wound on his head on to the branch.’

  De Revelle sneered at their pride in their ingenuity. ‘And then you fools ruined it all by choosing an oak tree after hitting him with a beech club! And leaving bruises all over his neck!’

  De Braose’s face reddened to match his hair. ‘Would you ever have thought that this damned crowner would notice that? I never heard of such a thing and I’m sure you haven’t!’

  The sheriff looked around at the other faces, almost as if to seek admiration of his brother-in-law’s abilities. ‘I told you what a cunning bastard he was!’ he complained.

  De Nonant brought them back to the present. ‘We need to prevent de Wolfe from running to tell tales to Winchester or London. The sheriff is averse for some reason to slitting his throat, so we need to try a less fatal means. Have either of you young bucks any ideas?’

  The conversation went to and fro for some time, with heads together and the wine flask circulating freely. Eventually, they pulled apart and de Braose and his squire left, the latter still coughing and wheezing like a broken-winded horse.

  Soon, the precentor and the sheriff prepared to go, to reach Exeter before dark. As he left, Richard de Revelle said uneasily, ‘I don’t like it, but it may have to be done. But only if my suggestion fails to work.’

  As soon as he was out of the door, Henry de la Pomeroy muttered to his cousin Bernard Cheever, ‘And if they both fail, then three feet of steel in a dark alley will have to be the answer.’

  That Sabbath day was a busy one for the coroner. After spending the morning down on the river at St James, he was called again in the afternoon to Exe Island, just outside the walls, where a body had been recovered from beneath the wheel of a mill. The coroner and Gwyn went to the edge of the leat, a narrow canal dug from the river upstream that brought water down to the mill via a crude wooden sluice-gate. The wheel was of the undershot type, where the water pushed against the lower edges of the large vanes, rather than dropped upon it from a chute above. During the morning, the wheel that drove a fulling mill inside the wooden building had ground to a halt, which often happened when debris, usually branches or the occasional dead sheep washed down from Exmoor, became jammed in it. This time, the miller’s men had found a human obstruction and dragged it out on to the bank.

  When the coroner arrived, the corpse had already been identified as a middle-aged man living in a hovel in Frog Lane on the island. He had been seen last on the previous afternoon, leaving a tavern in Fore Street, already drunk, but clutching a gallon jar of cider.

  ‘A real tippler, he was,’ said the miller to John de Wolfe. ‘He used to work here, but he was never sober so he was thrown out. God knows how he lived – begging and stealing, I suspect.’

  There was little to see on the body, except a few scratches where the skin had rubbed against the rough wood of the wheel. Gwyn tried his drowning test, which he had used successfully a few weeks earlier at a shipwreck at Torbay. As the body lay on the frozen grass alongside the leat, he pressed hard with two large hands on the chest and was gratified to see a gout of fine foam exude from the nostrils and mouth.

  Satisfied that it had been a simple drowning, de Wolfe held an inquest there and then. The man had been a widower, but a twenty-year-old son was discovered to make presentment of Englishry by swearing that his father had been a Saxon, so there was no question of a murdrum fine. The miller and his two assistants, who had recovered the body, half a dozen workmen and a few locals from the mean shacks on Exe Island were rounded up by Gwyn for a jury, and within half an hour the inquest had been convened and concluded. The verdict was accidental death, it being assumed quite reasonably that the drunken man had fallen into the river further upstream and drowned, his body being washed later into the leat when the sluice was opened.

  ‘There is no question of the wheel being deodand,’ declared the coroner to the mystified jury. ‘The wheel was not the object that caused death, it was merely the obstruction that trapped the dead body.’

  One member of the jury – the miller – understood the significance of this and breathed a sigh of relief. Anything that caused death, such as a dagger or even a runaway horse, could be declared deodand by the coroner and confiscated for the Crown. Carts, or even a single wheel from a cart, might be confiscated, leaving the owner without a means to earn a living. The miller had heard of instances where a mill wheel had been confiscated and sold, if a live person had been crushed or drowned by it.

  Having handed over the body to the son for burial, John and Gwyn walked back to the Bush for a drink and a gossip. Though tempted to stay with Nesta for the evening, the coroner decided that he had better go home and make an effort to keep Matilda in a moderately tolerable state of mind.

  CHAPTER TEN

  In which Crowner John meets a woman in distress

  The forecast of the two soldiers at Berry Pomeroy that there would be no snow was correct – but they had not anticipated the rain that came down the next morning. In the early hours of the first Monday of the year, the frost was washed away by steady rain. The streets of Exeter became a slime of mud and rubbish with slippery cobbles exposed here and there.

  As Crowner John made his way up to the castle, a torrent of dirty water ran down the hill towards him from the gateway. It trickled into the outer ward to add to the morass of churned mud that covered the wide space between the high castle walls and the wooden stockade that enclosed the outer bailey. As he looked to his left on the way up to the drawbridge, he saw the residents of the outer zone squelching between the huts and lean-to shanties that housed the men-at-arms and their families. Urchins ran around semi-naked with mud up to the knees, and women muffled in shawls tried to keep their firewood dry as they stoked their cooking stoves in the doorways of the flimsy shelters. Oxen and horses plodded through the mire, some pulling large-wheeled carts, adding to the chaos of what was a military camp combined with an inner-city village. Ignoring the rain that began to trickle down his face and off the end of his big nose, de Wolfe strode the last few yards to the shelter of the tall gatehouse.

  As he was about to climb up the narrow stairs to his chamber, Sergeant Gabriel appeared at the guardroom door and saluted.

  ‘Sir John, the sheriff wants you to attend on him as soon as you arrive.’ He coughed diplomatically. ‘By the way he said it, sir, I reckon it’s urgent.’

  De Wolfe grunted and walked out into the rain again. The inner ward was filthy too: all the rubbish frozen into the ground these past two weeks had now floated to the surface. He trudged moistly across to the keep and reached the hall with some relief, although entering feet had made the floor within the entrance almost as muddy as it was outside.

  Ignoring the noisy throng milling around, he loped to the sheriff’s door and nodded to the guard as he went in. A clerk and a steward were in the chamber, talking to Richard de Revelle and thrusting parchments under his eyes. For once, instead of making the coroner wait, as soon as the sheriff laid eyes on him, he hustled the other two out and commanded the guard not to admit anyone on pain of death. He slammed the door shut and walked over to the window embrasure, the furthest point from the door and the least likely place to be overheard. Here two wooden seats, like shelves, had been built into the thickness of the rough wall below the window-slit. De Revelle sat down heavily on one and pointed to the other. De Wolfe lowered himself and the two men sat hunched towards each other.

  ‘John, we have some serious talking to do. We parted at cross purposes last time.’

  ‘Matters seemed very clear to me, Richard. You confessed to treachery against the King and conspiring with rebels.’

  ‘I did nothing of the sort! Listen, you are my sister’s husband and for that I feel a considerable obligation towards you. Especially that of trying to keep you alive.’

  ‘Keep me alive? More likely the other way round.’

  ‘I think not, John. The danger to you is much more immediate.’

  ‘Is that
a threat, Sheriff?’ asked de Wolfe darkly.

  ‘Not from me, no. But from now on you are in considerable peril. Probably more so than on your precious Crusades and foreign wars.’ He changed his tone, attempting a reasonable, wheedling persuasiveness. ‘Look, you always proclaim yourself a true servant of the King. I feel exactly the same.’

  ‘You have a strange way of showing it,’ observed John sarcastically. ‘You came pretty near hanging last year. You almost never became sheriff and now you’re setting off along the same dangerous track again.’

  De Revelle scowled, but managed to keep his temper. ‘I said I was a loyal king’s man, like you. But which king? Last year, we all thought Richard was either dead or soon would be. It was doubtful, even after the ransom was paid, whether Henry of Germany would let him go. After his release, they tried to recapture him and only missed his ship out of Antwerp by hours. We were getting ready to put John on the throne, as it was a reasonable expectation that Richard would never get back.’

  De Wolfe glowered at his brother-in-law. ‘Well, you were all very much mistaken, weren’t you? What’s this to do with me?’

  De Revelle reached out and grasped the coroner’s forearm. ‘John is going to be the next king – it’s only a matter of how soon. Join us, and use this great loyalty of yours for the right sovereign!’ The sheriff became more animated as he warmed to his theme. ‘Richard has never taken the slightest interest in England. He’s spent only a few months here since he was crowned. All he does is screw taxes from the people to support Normandy and his vendetta against Philip of France – England is nothing but a colony! Prince John would change all that, be a true king of England. And you would have someone better to whom to offer your allegiance.’