The Sanctuary Seeker Page 18

  The mercenary shook his head. ‘No, not Nebba. Crusading’s not his style, though he’d sell himself to any army that paid the best. He came back from the Vexin a few months ago – he’d been fighting for Richard, but some Frenchmen caught him and deprived him of his fingers. He was lucky to lose them and not his private parts or his head.’

  ‘So what happened to him?’

  Gruffydd chuckled. ‘I’d signed him up to go back to Normandy as a spearman since he could no longer pull a long-bow. While he was waiting for the ship, he ran short of money so he robbed a merchant’s house, here in Southampton. The merchant caught him at it, there was a fight and Nebba stabbed him dead.’

  Gwyn ran a hand through his tangled beard. ‘Stabbed, eh?’

  ‘That’s the usual way of killing people in peacetime,’ guffawed the Welshman. ‘Anyway, he ran like hell ahead of the hue-and-cry and got to St Michael’s Church and claimed sanctuary.’ He stopped for a vast swallow of beer.

  Gwyn looked at him expectantly. ‘What happened then?’

  ‘Oh, he broke out a couple of days later and legged it for the New Forest. The townsfolk guarding the church were pretty half-hearted. They had better things to do than a day-and-night vigil over a thief. So he turned outlaw and vanished into the woods. I lost my penny commission because he missed the boat for France. God alone knows where he is now.’

  Gwyn grunted into his ale. ‘I can tell you where is. He’s hiding out in a village near Dartmoor.’ He pondered in silence for a moment. Could this Nebba have been mixed up in the death of de Bonneville? He had been stabbed and Nebba was a stabber – but Gruffydd was quite right that stabbings were as common as Thomas de Peyne’s habit of crossing himself. Yet it was strange that the archer had turned up in two places associated with Hubert. He gave a mental shrug and took a dismissive swig of beer. ‘The Crowner will be interested to hear about him, but I’m not convinced he could have had anything to do with our present problem.’

  Gwyn could get nothing further from Gruffydd and, after buying the Welshman a last quart of beer and indulging in some more talk of Crusading, he decided to start for home. At least he now knew that de Bonneville had had a henchman, what his name was and that he seemed to have vanished at least a couple of weeks earlier than Bonneville’s death. And Nebba’s name kept cropping up.

  He went back to his lodging to fetch his horse and begin the long trek back to Exeter.

  The Cornishman returned to tell the story to Crowner John two days later, at the end of the afternoon, up in the gatehouse chamber. Wearily, he climbed the narrow stairway to the sounds of chanting drifting up from the little chapel of St Mary just inside the main gate.

  Ralph Morin was already with the coroner and Gwyn listened to what he was saying. ‘I fear for his life – he may not last long enough to be hanged,’ he said. ‘His whole arm is suppurating from shoulder to fingertips. I think that binding it with hay makes it worse – I’m sure there some poison in mouldy grass that produces pus.’

  ‘Is he still in that foul cell?’ asked John.

  ‘He is indeed – and that gross imbecile Stigand has not the faintest notion of how to treat a sick man. Fitzhai is delirious with fever from that septic arm. He’ll be dead in a day or two, barring a miracle. And, of course, de Revelle and the Precentor take it for the judgement of God in proving his guilt – though I think the sheriff would prefer to hang him, rather than lose him to suppuration.’

  The constable turned to leave and John called after him that he would try to get the sick prisoner moved to the care of the nuns, who had at least some idea of hygiene.

  ‘So what news have you found for me, Gwyn? Tell me, while the little fellow is exercising his Latin.’

  Thomas was sitting at the table finishing details of that morning’s hangings on his roll. Unusually, one of the executed criminals had been a fairly rich grain merchant, with land both outside the walls in Southernhay and a manor at Teignmouth. He had been caught out in an established fraud involving short weight in both buying and selling corn. It was rumoured that several prominent burgesses had covered up for him, for a cut of the proceeds, but political power had kept their names out of the scandal, the merchant himself being used as the scapegoat. John had suspicions about Godfrey Fitzosbern, his odious next-door neighbour in St Martin’s Lane, but nothing could be proved. In any event, the county court, spurred by howls of indignation from the Guilds, had sent the man to the gallows, when undoubtedly a number of eminent citizens had breathed a sigh of relief that his mouth was now finally closed. The coroner was keen to see that the value of his goods and land, forefeit to the Crown, reached the Treasury and were not spirited away by others. He therefore had Thomas making a detailed inventory of the merchant’s estate and a full record was being inscribed on the rolls.

  While the clerk was busy with his quill and ink, John heard Gwyn’s account of his fortunate encounter with the Welshman in Southampton. ‘At least we know there was a squire and that he was sent on ahead of de Bonneville to announce his master’s coming,’ concluded the coroner’s officer. ‘And this man Nebba seems to flit in and out of our sight, but how he could be involved I can’t tell.’

  John pondered the news, the lines running down from the corners of his mouth deepening as he concentrated. At length, he said, ‘One question leads to even more problems. First, is this stabbed and cut-throated corpse really Aelfgar? And why did no one from Peter Tavy enquire about Hubert’s squire?’

  Squatting in his favourite place on the sill of the window-slit, the Cornishman ran his fingers through his red moustache. ‘The last question is easy to answer. As far as I know, they knew nothing of Aelfgar’s existence. When he left for the Crusades, he joined a few men from the Tavistock area who had taken the cross and journeyed in a group to take ship across the Channel. Hubert could have met Aelfgar anywhere between here and Acre.’

  John accepted the explanation. ‘But that means that they would have no means of identifying the body, even if it was in good enough a condition still to show his features. So how the devil are we going to know if it’s this man or not?’

  ‘He’s from Totnes,’ said Gwyn reasonably. ‘Enquiries there will no doubt confirm it. The problem is that, unlike Hubert, he’s beyond recognition from putrefaction by now. Even his own mother wouldn’t know him.’

  ‘And his clothing and effects are useless, if he’s been a year or two in the Levant … But wait a moment – what about that strange crucifix?’

  Gwyn got up and went to the rough wooden chest in the corner where oddments were kept. He rummaged inside and took out the crude ornament that had hung around the dead man’s neck, together with the empty dagger scabbard. ‘But this may have come from Palestine too,’ he objected.

  John took the little cross from him and looked at it, turning it over in his powerful fingers. ‘No, it’s almost pure tin. Most of the tin in the world comes from Devon and Cornwall, so maybe he took it to Outremer to remind him of home. Someone might recognise it – I’ve not seen anything like it before.’

  He snapped his fingers at the clerk. ‘Up at dawn in the morning, Thomas. You can goad that mangy mule of yours across to Totnes, then on up to Dartmoor, to see what you can discover about this Aelfgar.’

  Thomas groaned and Gwyn, hugely amused by his dejection, snatched the feathered quill from his fingers and stuck it behind Thomas’s ear.

  ‘Cheer up, priest. Totnes is famed for its pretty girls. You’ll be a real hit with them – better than goosing novice nuns, eh?’

  If the clerk’s crooked eye could have killed, Gwyn of Polruan would have dropped dead on the spot.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  In which Thomas de Peyne plays the spy on Dartmoor

  The following day, even though a chill easterly wind was whirling the autumn leaves from the trees, a slight thaw was noticeable in St Martin’s Lane. While John was eating breakfast in solitary state in the gloomy hall, Matilda suddenly appeared and sat down at her place at the oppos
ite end of the long table.

  No words were spoken and she ignored him, but this was at least a start in the peace process after a whole week’s hostilities. Mary came in and quietly set some food and a cup of hot wine in front of her mistress, winking at John over the folded white linen of Matilda’s headdress.

  The coroner murmured a greeting, which his wife seemed not to hear, then maintained a discreet silence, hoping to avoid any careless remark that might reopen the battle.

  At the end of this strained meal, Matilda rose and stalked to the door. John, with uncharacteristic gallantry, hurried to open it for her and was rewarded with a murmur that he assumed was thanks, before she vanished to the seclusion of the solar.

  ‘Things are looking up, Sir John,’ observed Mary, cheerily, as she bustled in to clear the debris on the table.

  ‘The mistress seems to be coming round slowly,’ he whispered, always conscious of the solar window high in the wall above. The maid clattered together the two platters and mugs and brushed the remaining crusts to the floor for Brutus to chew.

  ‘You’ve been a good boy the last few days, coming home every night and not spending too much time in the Bush,’ she murmured. ‘I reckon you’ll get your bed back tonight and not have to sleep in front of the fire.’

  As she went out of the door with the dishes, he reached out a hand to pat her curvaceous bottom, but she swerved to evade him and wagged a forefinger in admonishment.

  He grinned, which was rare these days, then took his dagger belt and short cloak from the vestibule before setting off in the biting wind for his chamber at the castle.

  The same wind, bringing an occasional flurry of sleet, had chilled Thomas de Peyne for much of the day as he travelled from Exeter to Totnes and then up to the bleaker wastes of Dartmoor.

  Although Gwyn of Polruan sneered endlessly at Thomas’s mule – and even the coroner had hinted at providing him with a horse – the sturdy beast had kept up a steady trot all day. Although slow compared to the great animals that the other men possessed, the animal never seemed to tire and his daily mileage was almost as good as that of the horses.

  Thomas reached Totnes about three hours after dawn and soon completed the first part of his business. Although unfrocked, he still had a rapport with his brother clergy, especially if they were unaware of his unfortunate history, so he usually made one of the parish priests his first port of call.

  Over a jar of weak ale – which Thomas disliked, though there was little else to drink apart from cider and water – he soon learned that Aelfgar had indeed been a native of Totnes. He had been born there and his mother and sister still worked as laundry-maids in the manor house. They were pure Saxons, the mother’s grandfather having been dispossessed of his considerable estate by the Normans soon after the Domesday survey that had followed the Conquest. The priest, himself half-Saxon, said this bitterly, but the thrust of his information was that Aelfgar, a professional man-at-arms, had gone away some five years earlier and had not been heard of since. It was assumed that either he had been killed in battle or he was in some distant land, fighting as a mercenary. The priest’s only description of him as a ‘fair-haired man’ was all but useless, but when Thomas fished in his scrip and pulled out the twisted tin crucifix, the cleric uttered a cry of surprise. ‘I gave him that myself! He did me a service not long before he left. I fell from my donkey on the road to Paignton and broke my ankle. Aelfgar found me and brought me back home to safety so I gave him this cross as a token. My father is a tin-miner in Chagford and used to make these as a pastime.’

  Having now established that the mummified body on Hackford Tor was that of Aelfgar, the coroner’s clerk set off for Sampford Spiney, complacently satisfied with the first part of his mission. This small village was the nearest to where the corpse had lain and the coroner had ordered his clerk to inquire covertly as to whether Aelfgar had been seen there in the recent past.

  Thomas took directions from the priest in Totnes and rode north to Buckfastleigh, where he claimed a meal in the abbey, and carried on north-west over the most remote part of southern Dartmoor. Following further advice from the abbey cellarer, a locally born monk, he followed an ancient trackway known as the Abbot’s Way, which wound through a brown, desolate wilderness of dying bracken, heather and rock. All afternoon, the lonely little man rode up and down hillocks, through scrub-covered valleys and across bare plateaux of withered grass, keeping to an ill-defined pathway worn by shepherds and rare travellers such as himself.

  Before the track reached the road across the moor from the Widecombe direction to Tavistock, he took the cellarer’s advice and turned west to cross Walkhampton Common. There were no signs or markers, apart from occasional stone cairns at intersections of pathways, and navigation was almost as difficult as on the sea, even in this clear weather. Twice he was lucky enough to come across a shepherd who gave directions, vague though they were, as most inhabitants of the county spent their lifetimes without going outside the boundaries of their own manor.

  The wind, relentlessly whistling across from eastern England and the northern sea beyond, cut through his threadbare cloak and the nondescript garments underneath. He had a sack wound round his chest, tied on with cord, but his hands and feet were perished by the time he skirted Ingra Tor and came to the edge of a wooded valley that looked across to the hamlet of Sampford Spiney on the other side.

  It was near dusk and he had been riding since dawn, apart from his brief rests at Totnes and Buckfastleigh. The fatigue ached through his bones and his backside was sore from sitting side-saddle on the back of the indefatigable mule.

  He stopped for a moment, before setting the beast to scramble down the valley, through the little Walkham river and up the other side to the village. ‘What am I doing here?’ he asked himself, plaintively. A man with a good brain, who could read and write well, had been ordained as a priest and capable of high office in the Church, was now sitting in cold misery on the back of a flea-bitten mule in one of the most remote parts of England. All because of a momentary weakness of the flesh in Winchester, when the urge of his loins and the treachery of a female had ruined his life in a flash. He had no illusions about his physical failings, the crook back, the lazy eye and the bandy legs, but did God have to hand him losing cards every time? Was there nothing in him that was worthy of some commendation, at least a little comfort? Why was he always the butt of jokes, being pushed aside by Gwyn and peremptorily ordered about by John de Wolfe?

  He was a good clerk – who else could write as fast or with such clarity? He was not evil, however unprepossessing he might look. He hated violence, he loved God and his Church, though not to excess. He even liked children and beasts, rare virtues in such a cruel and violent age – and yet he was treated like a leper or a beggar by most who knew him.

  Sometimes he contemplated suicide, but knew he would never do it – not only because it would be a sin against God and lead to everlasting damnation, but because he was too squeamish to carry out any violent act.

  All these were familiar thoughts, which came to him every day or two. He tried to be positive and look on the credit side. At least Crowner John had been persuaded to take him on as his clerk and not let him starve in the street. Also he had the benefit of sharing a mean lodging in the cathedral close, thanks to the Archdeacon’s influence.

  Thomas sighed and kicked the old mule into motion, letting it pick its way down through the trees to splash through the river towards Sampford Spiney and the next stage of their investigation.

  The next afternoon, a figure in the grey-white habit of a Cistercian monk walked slowly into the village of Peter Tavy. He had a long staff, recently cut from a hazel thicket, and when he begged food and a night’s lodging at the manor house, he said that he was returning to Sutton, near Plymouth, from a pilgrimage to St David’s in Wales.

  The seneschal, the household bailiff, sent him over to one of the lean-to sheds against the tattered palisade, which housed the kitchen. He thought i
t odd that a monk should seek hospitality in a manor, when the huge monastery of St Mary and St Rumon was only an hour’s walk down the valley at Tavistock, but soon dismissed it from his mind, thinking that perhaps Cistercians had some dispute with the Benedictines.

  In the kitchen, a lame young man and two giggling girls were preparing food for the evening meal in the hall. They were amiable enough and gave the monk generous helpings of boiled vegetables, coarse bread and slices of salt ham, washed down with the inevitable watery beer.

  Always curious about travellers and eager for any news of the unknown world beyond their village, the cooks plied him with questions about his journey. Blessed with a fertile imagination, he lied endlessly to satisfy their curiosity, for he had never been nearer St David’s than Glastonbury.

  Between their gossiping, the little man in the grey habit managed to slip in a few of his own questions and when Thomas, for of course it was he, bedded down on some clean straw in a corner of the undercroft later that evening, he was satisfied with his intelligence-seeking. He lay wrapped in the monk’s thick garment, worn over his own clothes, and felt warmer than he had for two days, especially as a glowing charcoal fire burned in the centre of the undercroft. A dozen other men and some children slept or talked around him, mostly house-serfs or manor workers who had no dwellings of their own.

  Thomas stared out of one of the openings in the wall at the starlit sky, brilliantly clear in the threatened first frost of the year, and rehearsed the tale he would tell Crowner John when he returned to Exeter tomorrow.

  At Sampford Spiney he had sought out the local priest, a fat, indolent man whose main interest was ale and cider rather than his pastoral duties. Thomas had claimed to be a priest on his way to take up a church in a remote part of Cornwall, posted there by the Bishop of Exeter. Knowing all the personalities and the ways of the Church, it was easy for him to get away with this fabrication to a largely ignorant and certainly uninterested colleague.