Crowner's Crusade

by Bernard Knight

  A dozen burly butchers and slaughterers stood around, drinking and gossiping noisily, some giving John sidelong glances as they wondered why such a well-known knight and Crusader was drinking in such a miserable place.

  He found an empty bench in a corner and sat in solitude with his quart, his anger slowly cooling into gloom. Though his wife’s taunts about his other infidelities were true, she had known about them for years – it was the unfounded accusations about Nesta, combined with her usual loathing for anyone with Celtic blood, that had riled him most. He was not particularly concerned about them falling out and hurling insults at each other – that was commonplace whenever they had been together for any length of time. It was the complication that the house in St Martin’s Lane was almost ready for them to move in and having spent a considerable part of his ready cash on it, he wondered whether she would now refuse to live there, just to spite him. However, as he slowly drank the sour ale, his temper subsided and he could look more calmly on the situation. Firstly, he was stuck with Matilda as a wife – much as they disliked each other, there was no way in which their marriage could be ended – unless he strangled her! Divorce was virtually unknown and after some sixteen years, he could hardly plead for an annulment on the grounds of consanguinity, which did not exist, except for the devious nobility who might have the ear of the Pope. Neither after all this time, could he claim that the marriage was void because of lack of consummation – though that particular activity had been notably absent for a dozen years.

  So what about this damned house, he wondered? On reflection, he thought that there was little chance of her declining the opportunity to live in such a prestigious spot, right next to her beloved cathedral, especially as it now had a unique hearth and chimney, flagged floors and a new solar. Matilda could flaunt these, together with a lady’s maid and two other servants, before her snobbish friends who made up the upper middle-class in the city, mostly wives of the richer merchants and few priests and canons. One such was Julian Fulk, the fat, oily parish priest of St Olave’s, who Matilda seemed to think was on a par with St Peter himself. If he had not known of her frigidity, he would have suspected her of being his lover, from the simpering deference she showed Fulk and her endless attendance at his miserable church.

  De Wolfe finished his ale and, feeling somewhat better for his cogitation, he marched out into the crisp autumn air. Some kind of religious procession was winding its way down the High Street, choristers singing and others playing instruments. It reminded him that this was celebrating the Feast of St Cecilia, the patron saint of music, so it must be the twenty-second day of November already.

  As he walked down towards the Bush, he wondered where the Lionheart was now, doubtless somewhere in Germany fretting about his release. Ralph Morin had had news from a herald passing through from London, that though much of the huge ransom had now been collected, there was still a long way to go and there were worries that Emperor Henry and Duke Leopold would become impatient and sell the king to Philip, to cut their losses.

  This train of thought brought him to Hubert Walter, the man who was so desperately trying to wring the money from an already impoverished England. John felt guilty that he had been unable to advance the task that Hubert had given him, to find any evidence of Prince John’s treachery, but he could not see any way of seeking such information. The killing of Roger Smale was the only possible clue, but it also seemed a dead end.

  With a sigh, he strode across Southgate Street and down Priest Street, heading for the Bush and a decent pot of ale. As he neared Idle Lane, he decided not to mention Matilda’s accusations to Nesta – though knowing how fast gossip spread within Exeter, it was only staving off the inevitable for a time.

  SEVENTEEN

  The following week, now almost into December, Ralph Morin and his fellow vigilantes took a patrol of six mounted soldiers up the main road eastwards, along the highway that went via Honiton towards Ilminster and thence to Bristol and London. Though there was no continuous forest very near Exeter, there were substantial patches where the road passed through dense woods for several miles. Although the trees were supposed to be cut back for a distance of a bow shot each side, this was rarely done and in places, the track almost ran through tunnels, where the large trees arched overhead.

  With Morin and de Wolfe at their head and Gwyn and Gabriel bringing up the rear, they trotted along, intent on showing themselves to any prying eyes that might be lurking in the fringes of the forest. As they came around a bend in one of the narrower sections, a violent scene suddenly presented itself.

  Ahead of them, a number of horses and people were jostling in the road, shouts and screams being mixed with the clash of weapons. Spurring Bran forward, with the castellan alongside him, John galloped down the few hundred paces that separated them from the melee, closely followed by the other men. As John hammered along, already drawing his sword in readiness, he saw that a pair of horses had fallen, overturning the litter that had been carried between them. Two women were crouched in the road, screaming at the tops of their voices. Half a dozen attackers were obviously gaining the upper hand over the same number of men trying to defend themselves and the ladies. Two of the travelling party were lying in the road, one ominously still and the other writhing in agony.

  The battle was short and vicious, as the military contingent thundered up to the scene of the ambush. At the first sight of the soldiers, the outlaws abandoned their attack and fled for the cover of the trees, but one who was still fighting a member of the escort, was felled by a blow from the man’s sword as he turned away.

  ‘Archers, dismount and get after them!’ bellowed Ralph Morin, as the attackers began vanishing into the undergrowth at the side of the road. With John and Gwyn alongside him, they hauled their horses around and charged off the track as two soldiers were stringing their bows and firing off a volley after the retreating ruffians. Within a few yards, the mounted men had to slide off their steeds, as dense saplings and brambles made it impossible to ride any deeper into the forest at anything other than a walking pace. Scrambling after the assailants, Gwyn tripped over one, who lay groaning with an arrow shaft sticking from his back. Within a couple of minutes, Ralph and John realized that it was fruitless to continue the chase, as the remaining fugitives had already gained too great a distance on them and had faded into the trees.

  ‘Back to the road, they may need our help!’ yelled the constable and when they had recovered their horses, they walked out on to the road, Gwyn dragging the wounded man by his arms, to dump him at the side of the track.

  There was confusion at the scene of the ambush, as the men-at-arms were pacifying the frightened horses and trying to attend to the wounded travellers. John now saw that the two females were nuns and that the immobile figure in the road, who appeared to be dead, was a priest. The tall man who had struck one of the attackers – who now lay whining in the dust, clutching his bleeding shoulder – stumbled across to Ralph.

  ‘Thank God you came in time, sir!’ he panted. ‘I am Justin, one of the proctor’s men from the cathedral. I must attend to those poor ladies!’

  John and Ralph went with him to assist the pair of nuns, who were clutching each other as they sat in the dirt. One was elderly and was muttering prayers with her eyes firmly shut, while her companion was a much younger woman, doing her best to console her sister-in-God.

  ‘Are you hurt, ladies?’ asked John gently, looking at their torn habits and the dirt on their white wimples.

  The younger one smiled bravely and shook her head. ‘Thank you, sir, not wounded, but bruised and shaken from being pitched from that litter.’

  The soldiers had now managed to force the fallen horses to their feet and as they struggled up, the covered litter, supported by long poles slung between the harnesses, righted itself. Leaving Justin and two of the other servants to get the two nuns back aboard, John and Ralph went to assess the damage to the ecclesiastical party.

  ‘The priest is stone dead,
I fear,’ growled Gwyn, who was standing over the inert shape of a fat, middle-aged cleric. ‘He’s had a blow on the head that’s stove in his skull.’

  The other injured man was one of the cathedral servants, who had suffered a severe blow from a mace to his shoulder and chest. ‘His arm’s broken and I think some ribs are stove in,’ announced Gabriel. ‘But he should live, if we get him back to the cathedral infirmary.’

  Gwyn had appointed himself gaoler to the two injured robbers, as he had grabbed the one with the broken shoulder and dragged him across to lie in the weeds of the verge, alongside the man with the arrow still projecting from his chest. This one was already in extremis, being semi-conscious and gasping for breath as blood began bubbling from his mouth. The other one was bleeding from a wound across the top of his shoulder. He was moaning with pain, but Gwyn felt that his shifty eyes were looking for a chance to leap up and make a run for the trees.

  Meanwhile, John went across to the litter to see how the two nuns were faring. They had been helped back into the long, hammock-like device which had a tent-like roof and side curtains. The younger one, who sat behind the one with the thin, lined face, again thanked their rescuers, but was herself crying at the death of their priestly colleague.

  ‘Father Edward was escorting us to Glastonbury, where we are to join the community of sisters at the abbey,’ she sniffed. ‘We have come from Tavistock, stopping at Buckfast Abbey and Polsloe Priory in Exeter. We left there several hours ago, with a new escort kindly arranged by the Archdeacon.’

  Justin, the man from the cathedral, told John that Father Edward was a canon of Tavistock Abbey and had been killed when he tried to stop one of the outlaws seizing the purse of silver he carried for expenses on the journey.

  Within a quarter of an hour, order had been restored and Ralph Morin announced that he would take the travellers back to Exeter, escorted by his men. ‘We can take the ladies to Polsloe, where the injured fellow can be treated.’

  Polsloe was a small convent a mile outside the city, run by a few sisters whose main function was medical care, especially of women’s ailments. John said that he would stay with Gwyn and deal with the two remnants of the robber band, one dead, one alive. After the cavalcade had gone, they went to stand over the survivor, a skinny fellow of about thirty, dressed in a dirty red tunic with gold embroidery, obviously stolen from a previous victim. He had a few blackened teeth in his mouth, visible when he cursed both of them, using some of the foulest language that even the campaign-hardened de Wolfe had ever heard.

  Gwyn gave him a hefty kick in the ribs as he lay in the grass. ‘Keep that filthy tongue in your head, you murdering bastard!’ he growled. ‘Or use it to say your last prayers for killing a priest and attacking nuns!’

  ‘Are you going to kill me here and now?’ snarled the man.

  John looked down at him with distaste. ‘You’re going to die, that’s for sure – either at the end of a rope or having your head taken off.’

  ‘That’s the best way,’ said Gwyn. ‘We can get five shillings bounty for it if we take it to the sheriff.’ In an undertone, he added: ‘If we had a sheriff.’

  John knew he could not bring himself to kill the man in cold blood. Since Acre, where he had seen several thousand Saracen prisoners beheaded in a mass execution, he could not contemplate the act, even though it was perfectly legal for anyone to kill an outlaw on sight. ‘There’s some rope on my saddlebow, Gwyn. Tie his hands and he can walk back to Rougemont behind your horse. If he can’t keep up, just drag him along, it’s far less than he deserves.’

  ‘What about the corpsed one?’ asked Gwyn, as the arrowed victim was now well and truly dead.

  ‘Leave him, like the ones in Haldon Forest. Our furry friends will soon get rid of him.’

  In spite of their threats, the two horsemen went at a sedate pace back to Exeter, so that the prisoner could keep up with them without falling down and being dragged. Exhausted, he toiled up the slope to the castle and was hauled over to the keep, where the prison was situated in the undercroft. This was the basement, partly underground and completely separated from the upper levels. The only entrance to the keep itself was up the wooden stairs to the main door on the first floor, a safety measure in case of siege.

  The warder was an evil, obese Saxon called Stigand, a sadistic man of low mentality who was both gaoler, torturer and storeman. The undercroft, a gloomy vault bounded by the slimy stone arches that supported the upper storeys, was divided in half by a rusty iron fence into an area which held the stinking cells, the rest being storage. Stigand lived here, in a foul nest under one of the arches, where a mattress accompanied a brazier that both cooked his food and heated the branding irons and ploughshares for Ordeals.

  Gwyn untied his prisoner, who claimed to be Arnulf of Devizes, and prodded him down the few steps that led from the inner ward into the semi-darkness of the undercroft.

  Stigand appeared from his den, his waxy face and piggy eyes gloating with anticipation. ‘I heard from the others who came back just now, that you were bringing an outlaw. Is he to hang straight away or do you want me to first make him suffer a little?’

  ‘Just put him in a cell until we know what’s to happen to him,’ snapped de Wolfe, who could not stand the sight of the foul custodian.

  Before Arnulf was pulled away towards a gate in the iron stockade, he pointed a finger of his uninjured arm at John’s belt. ‘How did you get hold of that, then?’ he croaked. ‘I’ve only seen one like that before, a dragon in a circle.’

  Surprised, John held up a hand to stop Stigand tugging at the prisoner. ‘Where did you see it?’ he demanded, putting a thumb behind his belt to push Roger Smale’s buckle forwards.

  Arnulf shrugged indifferently, with the desperate bravado of a man already marked for execution. ‘I’m going to be hanged whatever happens, so I may as well tell you. It was on the belt of a man we slew, up Crediton way. Never seen a design like that before.’

  ‘When was this? Another highway robbery?’

  Arnulf shook his head wearily. ‘No, it was a bit unusual, that killing. A month or two back, our leader, Walter Hamelin, was paid to ambush a certain man, kill him and steal any parchments he might be carrying.’

  Gwyn gave the man a hefty push in the chest, which made him howl, as his arm was dangling uselessly by his side. ‘Are you spinning us some bloody yarn?’ growled the Cornishman. ‘It sounds like a pack of lies. Who would pay for such a killing?’

  Arnulf cringed as Gwyn raised his fist again. ‘It’s the truth, I tell you. On my dear mother’s grave, I swear it! Walter was told a few days before that this man would be travelling alone down from Crediton and we were to lie in wait for him and slay him. He described him as a fair-headed fellow, riding a big strawberry roan.’

  ‘So who ordered it and what happened to any documents you found?’ demanded John. ‘How did he know how to meet your leader, this bastard Walter you speak of?’

  ‘I don’t know, it was privy to Walter and this young man who ordered it. Walter got a bag of silver, that I do recollect, for he gave the rest of us each five pence as our share, though it was Walter himself as cut his throat. We just grabbed him off his horse and threw his body into the river.’

  ‘So who was this young man you speak of, you cold-blooded swine?’ persisted John, glowering at the self-confessed murderer’s accomplice.

  Arnulf sagged, seeing any hope of earning himself a reprieve fading. ‘Some smart fellow, looked like a knight’s squire. He met Walter at some arranged place on the road, but I know that Walter had seen him before in Crediton. Though an outlaw like the rest of us, he was always sloping off into town.’

  ‘Do you know this squire’s name or where he was from?’ shouted Gwyn, thrusting his ferocious face towards the man.

  ‘Never heard his name, but I did catch that he had to take these bits of written parchment back to Berry when he came again to see if Walter had carried out his task.’

  ‘Berry? You mean
Pomeroy’s castle near Totnes?’ snapped John, alert now that names were being named.

  Arnulf tried to shrug, but his shoulder was too painful. ‘I don’t know, it was no concern of mine. I got my few pence, that’s all I cared about.’

  More questions drew nothing useful and the doomed man was dragged off by Stigand to spend the short remainder of his miserable life in a rat-infested cell with a slate slab as a bed and leather bucket for his ablutions.

  John and Gwyn went up to the floor above and sought out Ralph Morin, who was eating and drinking to fortify himself after their escapade at the forest’s edge. John told him of what Arnulf had said and the castellan whistled through his beard at its significance.

  ‘So now you’ve got something you can tell Hubert Walter! If that squire was from Berry, then it incriminates Henry de la Pomeroy, which is no great surprise.’

  The de la Pomeroys were a widespread dynasty named after their apple orchards in Normandy, whose early members had come over to fight with William of Falaise at the Battle of Hastings and as a reward, had vast tracts of land given them in several parts of England. The present lord in the south-west was Henry, whose main residence was at Berry Pomeroy Castle, twenty miles south-west of Exeter. He was known to be a keen supporter of the Count of Mortain and had fortified the island of St Michael’s Mount at the extreme end of Cornwall, to act as one of the prince’s strongholds.

  ‘The Justiciar will already be well aware of Henry’s partiality to John,’ observed de Wolfe. ‘But for him to slay a king’s servant and steal his dispatches must surely be a new development, suggesting that the prince is contemplating open revolt again.’

  The constable agreed and said that he would get an urgent report drafted by his clerk and send it to Hubert Walter by a herald who was due to return to Winchester in the next few days.

  ‘What about this Walter Hamelin, who was the actual killer, according to that piece of scum down below?’ asked Gwyn.