The Sanctuary Seeker

by Bernard Knight

  ‘What’s going on?’ he demanded of the boy.

  ‘The master’s passed on, sir. Lord Arnulph died this morning.’ Armed with this news, Sir John climbed the steps to the door of the hall and found silent groups of people within, talking quietly among themselves. There were several clergymen, one in an abbot’s regalia, who he assumed to be from the rich abbey of St Mary and St Rumon in Tavistock. He recognised another as Prior Wulfstan, the fat monk who had entertained him when he had stayed at the abbey on his first visit. He went over to him now and made the platitudes appropriate for a recent bereavement. It seemed that Arnulf de Bonneville had declined steadily over the past few days and eventually had had another massive stroke that had carried him off within hours.

  ‘And what of the sons?’ asked the coroner, guardedly.

  ‘Gervaise has already assumed the lordship, as was to be expected. He had been running the two manors in all but name for months.’

  ‘He will have to get the King’s confirmation to succeed his father,’ observed John. ‘Especially as these are Crown lands since Prince John lost his six counties!’

  ‘A mere formality,’ said Wulfstan, with a benign smile. ‘As our primate is visiting the West very soon, he can confirm him. The King is hardly likely to come back to this country, and I can’t see Gervaise trailing all over France trying to catch Richard without a battleaxe in his hand.’

  John looked around at the subdued knots of people. ‘Where is Gervaise? I don’t see him.’

  ‘Praying at the side of his father’s body, with his brother Martyn and their cousins – who still have ambitions to said part of the estate.’

  ‘I need to see him urgently. This death has complicated my plans.’

  Wulfstan’s overfed face creased into a sad smile. ‘Death has a way of upsetting plans, especially those of the deceased.’

  The coroner had no time for facile comments and looked around the hall again. The curtain to the bedchamber swung aside and the solid figure of Baldwyn of Beer came out. He wore a dark red linen tabard reaching to his knees, laced each side at the waist, with a boar’s head embroidered on the front. A black woollen tunic and black hose with cross-gartering above heavy shoes gave him a dark, powerful appearance. He was buckling on his sword belt as he came.

  John went across to him and put a hand on his shoulder. The coroner was slightly taller than the man from Beer, but not so heavily built. ‘I need a few words with you, Baldwyn – and with your master.’

  Baldwyn frowned, a worried and abstracted look on his face. ‘It’s a difficult time, Crowner, especially for Sir Gervaise. He has to arrange with the abbot and Prior Wulfstan to get his father’s body down to Tavistock to lie at the altar until the burial.’

  John eased him by the shoulder towards the doorway. ‘We can’t speak in here with all these people about. Come outside. This concerns the death of your master’s brother – and his squire.’

  ‘Squire? What squire?’ Baldwyn cast him a puzzled look.

  At the door, they stood on the platform above the stairs, where Gwyn of Polruan waited. John squinted at the man in the red tabard. ‘Doesn’t any news reach you from your neighbouring village, Sampford Spiney? They’re in trouble with me, amerced for concealing a dead body for weeks on end. Not just any dead body, another murdered body.’

  Baldwyn looked blankly at the coroner. ‘I know nothing of this. You said one was squire to Hubert?’

  ‘Yes, a man called Aelfgar. Had you not seen Hubert’s fighting companion?’

  Baldwyn shook his big head, his spade-shaped beard rubbing across his chest. ‘He left here for Outremer with two men-at-arms but he had no squire.’ He looked anxiously over his shoulder into the hall. ‘Sir John, I have much work to do, with the death of our lord. My master needs my services.’

  ‘And I need your master!’ snapped John. ‘I have no wish to interrupt your mourning, but the passing was hardly unexpected. The keeping of the King’s peace has to go on, death or no death. So, please, will you fetch Sir Gervaise to me? I have to speak to him urgently.’

  With a barely concealed scowl, Baldwyn turned and went back into the gloom of the hall, leaving the stone landing to John and his officer. Gwyn, whose eyes were as sharp as his brain, edged up to the coroner and said in a low voice, ‘Did you notice his dagger?’

  John stared at the Cornishman and shook his head. What was he on about now?

  ‘It doesn’t fit the scabbard, it’s too long. And it looks Levantine.’

  ‘So? Plenty of soldiers have Eastern weapons. I’ve got one myself. So did the dead Hubert.’

  Gwyn nodded. ‘But that Aelfgar didn’t. He had an empty scabbard. A long one. I’ve got it in my saddlebag there.’

  The coroner folded his arms, his black cloak flying in the persistent cold wind. ‘You can’t hang a man on the length of his dagger.’

  ‘No, but maybe the sheriff could!’ retorted the red-haired giant. ‘And it’s worth looking at, I reckon.’

  John sighed. One problem at a time was enough for him today.

  ‘All right, go and get the sheath from your horse – and stay down there,’ he commanded, as he saw Baldwyn and Gervaise approaching the door.

  Again he made the appropriate commiserations over the death of the new lord’s father, then launched straight into the strange coincidence of both Hubert and his squire being murdered en route to Peter Tavy.

  Gervaise was shaken by the news. ‘His squire also? I never knew he had one.’

  ‘No Norman of good birth would be campaigning in the Holy Land without one,’ observed John drily.

  ‘Well, we knew nothing of him. What was his name?’

  ‘Aelfgar, a Saxon,’ said John shortly.

  Gervaise turned to the impassive man from Beer. ‘Did you know anything of this, Baldwyn?’

  He shook his head. ‘We’ve heard nothing more of Sir Hubert since that messenger from Palestine came last year. Never knew of any squire, certainly.’

  John had been squinting covertly at the sheath on the squire’s belt, which sat half-way around his waist on the right side. An ornamental knife-hilt sat high above the sheath, with more than an inch of bare blade exposed. On the edge of the dark brown hide, a small white scar of recently torn leather shone like a little star. ‘Will you come down to the undercroft?’ asked the coroner, with deceptive mildness.

  Puzzled, the two men followed him to where the visitors’ horses were tethered to a wooden rail. Gwyn was standing alongside his mare, holding something wrapped in a piece of sacking. As the other three gathered around, he flipped away the hessian and showed them some clothing and an empty dagger sheath. They still smelt of corruption from body-fluids soaked from the Dartmoor corpse, but this was not what intrigued the coroner. He saw another small rip in the top edge of the scabbard, not white, but old and dirty.

  ‘What’s all this about?’ asked Gervaise irritably. ‘I have much to attend to on this very unhappy day, Sir John.’

  ‘It may turn out to be unhappier than you think,’ retorted the coroner gruffly. ‘Would you ask your squire to hand me his dagger for a moment?’

  The two local men looked uneasily at each other and made no movement.

  ‘Come on, if you please,’ John barked. ‘Your knife, Baldwyn!’

  Slowly, the black-bearded man withdrew his dagger and handed it, hilt first, to John, who took it and, with the other hand, raised the sheath from Gwyn’s sacking, sliding the blade smoothly into the leather. The hilt-guard sat perfectly against the top edge of the sheath. The coroner held it out towards Gervaise and his squire.

  ‘It seems to fit this much better than it does your sheath.’

  De Bonneville, flexing his new superiority as lord of the manor, began to turn away.

  ‘I’ve no time for charades, Crowner. Why are you playing such games?’

  ‘This sheath came from the man slain not five miles from here. The man you’ve never heard of.’

  Baldwyn blustered, ‘So my dagger do
esn’t fit my scabbard so well. Little wonder. I bought it from a man who had returned from the East after I broke my own blade.’

  John was ready for this explanation. ‘Indeed? Then look more closely.’ He drew out the dagger again and pointed with a finger at the torn top edge of the sheath, in line with the edge of the blade. On the blade itself, two inches below the hilt, was a deep nick in the metal, where it had been damaged by being struck against something hard. A small tang of steel hooked out from it and when he slid the blade in and out of the scabbard, it was patently obvious that this was the cause of the torn leather.

  ‘Now show me your scabbard, sir,’ he demanded of Baldwyn.

  With three pairs of eyes boring into him, the squire had little option but to slide the now-empty sheath around his belt to the front. John slid the dagger back in and, drawing it up and down, showed that the new tear in the leather was identical with that in the other sheath and caused by the same nick in the blade.

  ‘What have you to say to that?’ John demanded, with a dangerous softness.

  Gervaise de Bonneville jumped in defensively. ‘This is nonsense! Every man in England has a knife. Thousands of them have come back with the Crusading armies … and many knives are damaged. You are building a false story out of trivial coincidences.’

  John ignored his intervention, continuing to stare at Baldwyn. ‘I asked you, what do you have to say?’

  Hard black eyes bored back at him from an obstinate face. ‘As my master says, it is ridiculous. I have had that dagger for at least two years.’

  He took it back into his hand and studied it closely.

  John was unperturbed. ‘I doubt if you can produce witnesses to prove that?’ His voice rose in an accusing crescendo. ‘I say it is the weapon of Hubert’s man, Aelfgar!’

  By now, a few people had stopped at a discreet distance to wonder what was going on.

  Baldwyn, his face above the jet beard becoming reddened in anger, shouted back, ‘I tell you the knife is mine! How can it belong to this dead man? I told you, I’ve never heard of Aelfgar of Totnes!’

  There was a dead silence. Then John spoke, with a sinister restraint after his previous roar. ‘Totnes? Who said anything about Totnes?’

  Baldwyn stood, his head lowered, looking from one to the other like a baited bull between two dogs.

  Gervaise opened his mouth to speak, but before he could attempt to defend his squire the dark man gave a snarl and pushed the coroner in the chest.

  Caught unawares, John staggered back and Baldwyn ran towards the stables. Gwyn leaped after him and before he had gone five paces, jumped on his back and brought him crashing to the ground. Gervaise stood transfixed, but John had regained his balance and rushed to help Gwyn secure the runaway.

  As he got to the heap of flailing bodies, Gwyn gave a roar and grabbed his own upper arm, where blood was flowing through his fingers. ‘The bastard’s stabbed me!’ he yelled, and ducked as the same blade that they had just been examining, flashed past his ear.

  Not for nothing had the two from Exeter been fighting-partners for a dozen years. Trapped because his legs were intertwined with the fugitive’s, Gwyn made sure that he dodged the knife, confident that his master would speedily settle the affair. He was right. With a metallic rattle, John drew out his sword and, using the flat of the blade, crashed it down on the black hair of the knife-wielder. Baldwyn had no protection on his head and, though the sword was not a full-size battle weapon, its thirty inches of steel was heavy enough to stun him.

  Gwyn clambered up and brushed the dirt from his front.

  ‘Are you badly cut?’ asked John.

  His officer looked into the rip in the sleeve of his woollen jacket. He dipped a finger in and examined the blood that came out. ‘No, nothing but a prick. My fault. I didn’t expect him to knife me, the swine.’ He aimed a kick at the prostrate body, which was beginning to groan and show signs of revival.

  ‘Tie him, we’re going back to Exeter with him.’

  While Gwyn lashed the wrists of the groaning Baldwyn, using the belt of the dead man as an appropriate form of bondage, the coroner went back to the new lord of Peter Tavy, who stood white-faced and almost paralysed at the turn of events.

  ‘I think your squire killed your brother and his henchman, this Aelfgar – or if he didn’t kill them himself, he was present when it happened.’

  De Bonneville pulled himself together and regained his haughty poise. ‘Well, I do not. And this business of the dagger is rubbish. You come here, on our day of grief, disrupt the mourning, interrupt the preparations for the funeral of one of the most respected lords in the West Country and then you make accusations against my squire, who is a friend as well as a servant.’

  Gervaise was made of sterner stuff than John had thought and rapidly recovered his composure to turn defence into attack. ‘My brother must have been killed by some damned outlaws on his way home. And you’ll regret hinting otherwise, Coroner. I have influential friends, from the Bishop to the sheriff, and from our abbot here to others in Winchester. Release my squire at once. Perhaps I will then take a more lenient view of your over-enthusiasm.’

  John bared his teeth in a sarcastic leer. ‘A good try, young man. But explain to me how your Baldwyn has a dagger belonging to a murdered man and how he knew he was from Totnes, when he claimed never to have heard of him?’

  ‘I cannot speak for what Baldwyn knows or doesn’t know – or what he may or may not have done. But I cannot believe he is an evil man.’

  However, banking on the influence of his powerful friends in high places, Gervaise made no further objection to the coroner continuing with his legal processes. ‘You are making an error, sir, but if you have to seek better counsel over this in Exeter, I cannot stand in your way.’

  Amid increasing confusion and excitement, the near hysterical Martyn now rushed out from his father’s death-bed. While his brother attempted to explain and to reassure him, the groggy Baldwyn was hauled on to a horse, tied to the saddle horns and led away, roped to Gwyn’s mare, for the first lap of the long journey, via a night’s stop at Sampford Spiney.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  In which Crowner John attends a trial

  The next afternoon, Gwyn lodged Baldwyn safely in the castle gaol, under the tender care of Stigand. He was lodged in a cell next to Alan Fitzhai, where he could hear the groans and curses of the mercenary, who though apparently now out of danger of death, was in constant pain and misery from his septic scalded arm.

  The squire from Peter Tavy maintained a sullen, smouldering silence, as if he was bottling up his anger for a vengeful explosion once he was released – his master had promised that the full force of nepotism and undue influence would be mobilised for him, if this mad coroner persisted in trying to hang a murder charge on him.

  The same mad coroner reached home and, to keep Matilda safely in her new state of tolerable temper, told her the whole story of the last two days’ events.

  Matilda listened to his tale in silence. Then she asked, ‘You’ve arrested this squire. Now what are you going to do with him? And what of Gervaise de Bonneville? With his family connections, it’s surely very dangerous even to suggest that he was aware of what his squire might have done?’ He was strangely pleased that she took such a perceptive interest in his activities – he had been afraid that she would fly into an indignant tantrum at his audacity in tampering with the affairs of a notable county family.

  ‘This Baldwyn has accused himself, with his stolen dagger, the slip over Totnes – and, most of all, his attempt to run.’

  ‘But what about Gervaise? He had no dagger and he didn’t attempt to escape. You’ve no reason to suspect him.’

  John imitated his brother-in-law’s nose-tapping routine. ‘Motive, Matilda, motive! Baldwyn had no reason to kill either of the two men except on the orders of his master who, with his elder brother dead, now inherits the whole of the de Bonneville estate.’

  Matilda shook her head slowly.
‘You be careful, John. I know that house, they have powerful friends. They can make things difficult for you.’

  Before he could show any appreciation for her rare concern, those difficulties began in earnest. There was a loud knocking on the street door, and before a flurried Mary could reach it from the yard, there was the sound of feet in the vestibule. The inner door to the hall was thrown open and Richard de Revelle burst in, closely followed by Precentor Thomas de Boterellis and Portreeve Henry Rifford. ‘Matilda, forgive us, but we must speak urgently to this husband of yours!’ The sheriff’s normally urbane voice was tense with rage and apprehension.

  ‘The Bishop is extremely distressed!’ brayed de Boterellis and, not to be outdone, the portreeve huffed and puffed about the outrage felt among the town’s burgesses.

  John got up from his chair and stood between the visitors and the fire, as if protecting his hearth from the intrusion. ‘Couldn’t this wait until the morning, sirs?’ he grated. ‘I am taking my ease in my own home, not holding a public meeting.’

  The sheriff crossed the flagstones ahead of the other men and wagged a long finger under John’s nose. ‘You’ve gone too far this time, de Wolfe! Starting a sword fight outside a death chamber and dragging an innocent squire away in bonds. Even worse, you pull the lord of a manor from his dead father’s side before the body is even cold to insinuate that he has knowledge of this killing!’

  The other two twittered in the background, the words ‘scandal’, ‘Bishop’, ‘outrageous’, ‘city fathers’, ‘insane’ and ‘poor Arnulph’ figuring frequently.

  The lean, dark figure before the hearth listened for a moment or two, then flung up his arms above his shoulders. ‘Be quiet, all of you, damn your eyes!’

  The sudden eruption of this gaunt figure, who looked like some Old Testament prophet putting a curse on the Amalachites, instantly silenced the trio. ‘I presume you burst into my house to complain about my arresting Baldwyn of Beer? Well, I see it my duty to take on the tasks that the sheriff of this county should be performing in apprehending criminals. This man tried to flee when accused and wounded my own officer in the attempt. His actions betray his guilt and he must be tried for his crime.’