Crowner Royal (Crowner John Mysteries) Page 24

  Ranulf was there, with Sir Martin Stanford, the Deputy Marshal of the palace. When Bernard de Montfort came back from the lectern where he had read the lesson, he slid on to the bench next to John. ‘Have to sing for my supper now and then,’ he said jocularly. ‘Though thank heaven there are enough clerics in this place to make it not too often.’

  As they ate their supper and drank their ale and wine, the talk naturally centred around the impending arrival of Eleanor of Aquitaine, as she was still thought of by many of the older folk.

  ‘Why have you not rushed off to Portsmouth to join her procession?’ asked the archdeacon, addressing the men from the Marshalsea.

  ‘I’ve just sent almost half of my contingent down there,’ explained Martin Stanford. ‘The rest I need for organising the move to Gloucester, which is a far bigger operation.’

  He and Ranulf described the complicated procedure of trundling the whole court across the southern half of England. ‘The Purveyors have already been sent out along the route,’ said Stanford. ‘Unwelcome though they are to the population, they have to arrange accommodation and procure food for the travellers and fodder for the livestock.’

  ‘It’ll be something to occupy Hugo de Molis – he certainly doesn’t strain himself when we are here in Westminster,’ observed Ranulf cynically.

  John turned to the genial priest from the Auvergne. ‘What about you, archdeacon? I take it you won’t be travelling with us, given that you are concerned with researching the abbey’s history here?’

  His unfortunate harelip twisted Bernard’s mouth as he smiled.

  ‘Oh no, I’m going down to Canterbury again. I need to consult some obscure manuscripts said to be held in the scriptorium of the cathedral, so I’ll make a visit there while the queen is engaged with her business at Gloucester.’

  ‘Travelling alone can be a dangerous business, sir,’ warned Martin Stanford. ‘Best go with a party of pilgrims, they leave from Southwark almost every day.’

  De Montfort was benignly reassuring. ‘I will have my servant Raoul with me. No doubt you have noticed that he has a frightening look about him, though in fact he is intelligent and can read and write, as well as handle a sword and mace!’

  They ate their way through boiled salmon, roast duck and some slices of venison from the royal forest beyond Twickenham, finishing with a suet pudding studded with French raisins.

  ‘Where is Renaud de Seigneur and his lovely wife tonight?’ asked Ranulf innocently, as he nudged de Wolfe meaningfully beneath the table.

  ‘I understand that Lady Hawise is suffering from some slight indisposition today, so they are keeping to their chambers upstairs,’ confided Bernard de Mont-fort.

  Is the woman lying low in order to avoid meeting him after their frustrated encounter? thought John. On consideration, he felt it was unlikely, given the brazen nature of Hawise. Relieved, but also disappointed at her absence, he turned the conversation back to the main topic.

  ‘So, Ranulf, when are we setting off on this crusade to the West Country?’

  ‘The queen is likely to arrive here at the end of this week. Give her a few days to rest, which will include Hubert Walter’s welcoming feast in the Great Hall, then I expect our wagons will start rolling towards the middle of next week.’

  Another week of inaction, sighed de Wolfe, but at least he now had a date to look forward to, which might lead to a quick visit to Exeter – and perhaps even to Dawlish.

  John left the Lesser Hall after supper and strolled towards the Deacon tavern, where he was confident of finding Gwyn behind a quart pot. He was surprised to see a small figure in a black cassock lurking uneasily outside the alehouse door.

  ‘What brings you here, Thomas? Have you taken up drink at last?’

  His clerk squirmed with embarrassment, but jerked a finger at the door. ‘I guessed that Cornish barbarian would be in there, Crowner. But it’s you I wanted to find and Gwyn said that you would probably call in after your supper.’

  The priest’s pinched face was glowing with suppressed excitement at being able to once again bring his master some information. ‘That secondary, Robin Byard, the one who told us about Basil’s fears of overhearing some conspirators, spoke to me again in the abbey refectory tonight.’

  John waited impatiently for Thomas to be more specific.

  ‘He said that when Basil was in fear of his life, he told him that if anything happened to him, he wanted Robin to have the only book he possessed, a small copy of the Gospel of St Luke.’

  De Wolfe scowled at his clerk.

  ‘What’s this got to do with anything, for God’s sake?’

  At the mention of the ultimate name, Thomas jerked automatically into crossing himself, but then ploughed on with his explanation. ‘Robin has just found a scrap of parchment tucked behind the back cover of the book, which has worried him so much that he feels it should be shown to someone in authority.’

  ‘What does this scrap reveal?’

  Thomas turned up his hands in a gesture of ignorance. ‘I’ve not seen it, Crowner. Robin, who is quite solicitous about my welfare, says he doesn’t want to put me in any danger by involving me. But I told him he must show it to you, so he’s bringing it over to our chamber in the palace tomorrow morning after Lauds.’

  The expected revelation turned out to be a disappointment.

  When the aspiring young priest arrived at their office next day, he was clutching a small, tattered book as if it was the Holy Grail. The illiterate coroner motioned to Thomas to have a look at it and whilst he was doing so de Wolfe had a question for Robin Byard.

  ‘Did Basil say anything to you about this loose page in the book?’

  The young fellow shook his head miserably. ‘Not a word! I feel sure that he came across it after he had told me of overhearing this seditious conversation. In fact, I think he found it shortly before he was so cruelly killed.’ He promptly burst into tears, to John’s profound discomfiture, so the coroner turned back to his clerk.

  ‘Well, what do you make of it?’ he demanded.

  ‘It’s a well-used copy of a Gospel, one of a cheap version turned out for sale by the hundred in monastery scriptoria.’

  ‘I don’t care about the damned Gospel,’ snapped John blasphemously. ‘What about this message?’

  Thomas held up a ragged square of parchment, the size of his palm. ‘Not very exciting,’ he said with a crestfallen expression.

  ‘It has some names and numbers and a date at the top, that’s about all.’

  The coroner snatched it from his fingers and though he could not read the words, he could decipher the numerals written on the cured sheepskin. Even to his inexpert eyes, the inked letters seemed fresh and crisp. It was obviously not a letter or a message, the words being scattered about the page almost at random. He handed it back to Thomas.

  ‘So what do you make of it?’

  Thomas peered again at the parchment, moving it up and down until his long nose almost touched the surface.

  ‘It was recently written, as it starts with a date. The eighteenth day of June in the seventh year of the reign of King Richard.’

  John frowned. ‘That suggests that whoever wrote it was not a subject of our Crown. It is usual for words such as “our Sovereign Lord King Richard” to be used.’

  Thomas nodded his agreement, though privately he felt that this was not a very safe assumption in informal documents.

  ‘It then has various words dotted around the page, as if they were written hurriedly or in difficult circumstances. They make little sense to me, but some are placenames. There is Sandwich, Dover, Rye and Saltwood. Some have numbers after them, including one-hundred, two-hundred, and one of five hundred. But after Dover there is only the word “twelve”.’

  ‘What are the other words?’

  ‘They seem to be personal names – Arundel, de Montfort, Mowbray, fitz Gilbert.’

  There was silence as they all digested these obscure facts.

  ‘Robin, ar
e those words written in your friend’s hand?’ asked de Wolfe.

  The secondary immediately shook his head. Sniffing back his tears, he said, ‘Nothing like it, sir. He had immaculate script, of which he was proud. These are just scribbles compared to his.’

  Gwyn, with his maritime knowledge from his time as a fisherman, pointed out the obvious. ‘All those places are on the coast, most of them actual ports.’

  ‘And on the coast of Kent or Sussex,’ added Thomas, not to be outdone by a Cornish barbarian. ‘And the names sound as if they could be manor-lords.’

  De Wolfe rubbed his chin, missing the stubble that he had recently removed. ‘It’s suggestive of some interest in the coast facing France,’ he admitted. ‘But what do the numbers mean?’

  ‘Could they be ships of war?’ said Gwyn. ‘There are twelve at Dover.’

  ‘There would hardly be five hundred ships at Rye!’ objected Thomas.

  ‘Then ships or men-at-arms,’ suggested Gwyn, determined not to be bested by the priest.

  The coroner ignored their banter, but agreed that this could be some form of intelligence about coastal defences. ‘But where did this Basil fellow get it? And more importantly, who wrote it?’

  ‘Given what he said to me about overhearing suspicious conversation, and the fact that he spent almost all his time in the palace guest chambers, that seems the most likely place for him to have found it,’ offered Robin Byard.

  As Thomas handed him back the precious Gospel, John carefully folded the piece of parchment into his scrip. ‘I’ll have to show this to Hubert Walter, though I’m sure he has other things on his mind at the moment.’ As he did up the buckle to his pouch, another possibility occurred to him.

  ‘And maybe I’ll use it as a bluff to flush out the culprits!’

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  In which Crowner John suffers a blow

  De Wolfe was unable to consult the Chief Justiciar that day, as Hubert had gone early into the city and according to one of his secretaries, would spend the night at the Tower. John thought facetiously that he might be putting Herbert de Mandeville to the torture, to get him to confess to the theft of the treasure, but in reality he knew that Herbert was an unlikely culprit.

  Late in the afternoon, as John was crossing New Palace Yard, he stopped to contemplate the small landing stage and to wonder whether he would ever discover who killed Basil of Reigate there. A moment later, he realized that a wherry was landing two familiar figures, Renaud de Seigneur and his beautiful wife.

  His instinct was to walk quickly away, but he was too late as Hawise waved gaily to him and John had to stand his ground until they came up to him. In the cooler weather since the storm, she was wearing a light mantle over her gown of cream linen. Her dark hair was confined by a silver net into tight coils over each ear, over which was thrown a diaphanous veil of white samite.

  He bowed his head in greeting as they approached. ‘I trust you are recovered, lady,’ he said stiffly. ‘We heard at supper last evening that you were indisposed.’

  Hawise gave him a dazzling smile, which banished any awkwardness that John had feared. ‘I am quite well, Sir John, thank you. My husband has taken me on a trip on the river today, for the fresh air to banish any remnants of my problems.’

  John hoped silently that for her sake they had gone upriver, as the Thames was strikingly short of fresh air where it passed through the odorous city.

  Out of courtesy, he walked with them across the busy yard towards the main doors into the palace, behind the Great Hall. Renaud was full of the visit of the old queen and of their impending departure for Gloucester. Hawise walked between the two men and was able to give John sultry looks without de Seigneur noticing – or if he did, he chose to ignore them. De Wolfe remained polite but wooden-faced and when they reached the crowded main ground-floor passage, she managed to drop back a little and whisper to him.

  ‘John, I need you! I’m desperate for your arms, we must meet!’

  Thankfully, they were now at the foot of the stairs leading up to his chamber and he adroitly turned sideways on to the lower steps. ‘I trust you will be in the Lesser Hall this evening,’ he said in a loud voice and Renaud turned to wave at him. John could not resist winking at Hawise and was rewarded with a brilliant smile. His feet seemed lighter as he climbed the stairs, but again, that cautious voice deep within him told him not to be such a silly old fool.

  At supper that evening, all the usual patrons were there, except for a few like Aubrey, who had gone off to Portsmouth. The lesson and grace were said by another priest, so Bernard de Montfort sat with them from the start. Renaud plodded in ahead of his wife, who had dressed herself with even greater care to enhance her undoubted beauty, her glossy hair encased in silvered crespines. John was sandwiched between the archdeacon and Ranulf, so she had to sit opposite with her husband, unable to press her shapely thigh against John’s.

  A somewhat uninspired potage of leeks, beans and oatmeal was followed by a choice of boiled fowl, roast partridge and eels to lay on their trenchers. All through the meal, Hawise covertly made ‘cow’s eyes’ at John, raising her long lashes with her head demurely lowered, but he resolutely declined to respond and carried on with whatever conversation was in progress. Much of the talk was as usual about Eleanor’s arrival, though the subject of Canon Basset’s sudden demise cropped up again. Most of them knew him, as he had often supped in the hall when business kept him late at the Exchequer. They all knew the meagre facts divulged at the short inquest and were eager for more details from ‘the horse’s mouth’, the nag in question being John de Wolfe.

  ‘I cannot credit the fact that he was murdered,’ said de Montfort. ‘Though I cannot deny the verdict of your jury, Sir John, I feel sure there must be some other explanation.’

  De Wolfe shook his head emphatically. ‘There can be no other explanation, I fear. The canon certainly did not kill himself, both the obvious facts against that and others that I cannot divulge make suicide an impossibility. And to suggest accidental foxglove poisoning in the centre of London is equally untenable!’

  ‘Facts you cannot divulge!’ trilled Hawise excitedly. ‘You are a man of mystery, coroner, but surely you can give us some hint as to what they may be?’

  ‘Sir John is a law officer, my dear,’ said Renaud. ‘You must not press him further.’

  De Wolfe would not have been averse to being pressed by the delectable Hawise, but this was not the time or place.

  ‘No doubt our coroner’s reticence is related to the notorious theft of that gold,’ suggested the archdeacon, leaning forward to spear a small partridge and place it on the slab of bread in front of him. ‘It surely can be no coincidence that after a long and blameless life, Simon Basset’s death took place within days of an audacious crime, in which, inevitably, he must have been a suspect.’

  There was a silence in which his listeners looked at each other uneasily. Though what Bernard had said was what all of them must have considered, no one had voiced it so outspokenly.

  ‘We cannot even hint at guilt in such a pious and upright man,’ said Renaud severely, though he could not have been acquainted with the canon for more than a few weeks.

  ‘A hell of a coincidence, though!’ muttered Ranulf, half to himself. The discussion went back and forth for a time, but covering the same ground that John and his two assistants had ploughed endlessly these past few days. Eventually, de Wolfe turned to another killing, this time intent on dropping some misinformation into the Westminster gossip machine, to see if anything was flushed out.

  ‘Talking of murder, I have had some intelligence that throws light on the death of that unfortunate clerk in your guest chambers, de Seigneur!’ he said casually. ‘Again, I cannot reveal its nature, but it gives me hope of soon being able to unmask the villain who was responsible.’

  This set off another round of questions and pleas for more enlightenment, which John resisted easily, as in truth he had no information to provide. The parchment
which Robin Byard had found was of no use without either an interpretation of its meaning or some clue as to who wrote it. Hawise d’Ayncourt was again giving her performance of hero-worship as she gave John looks of melting adoration and, in spite of himself, he could not avoid enjoying the sensation, even with her husband sitting almost within arm’s length. But wisely, he sat firmly on his bench until after Renaud had finished his meal and dragged Hawise off to their quarters, avoiding any dallying and possible embarrassment outside the hall.

  He stayed on with the men from the Marshalsea and Bernard de Montfort, taking their time over the ale and remaining wine. They talked again about the imminent arrival of Queen Eleanor.

  ‘So she should be here within a few days, you think?’ asked Bernard. ‘I would have thought that the Justiciar would have gone to Portsmouth to escort her here himself.’

  Martin Stanford, the most senior of the marshals, shook his head. ‘It was mooted, but Hubert Walter decided that he had more pressing business here – and, anyway, she will be accompanied from Normandy by William Marshal himself, who is almost the equal of the Justiciar in rank.’

  The doughty old Marshal, who had already served two kings, was well known to de Wolfe, both from campaigns and even a visit to Devon not long ago. John was reminded that William’s main possession was Chepstow Castle, very near where Nesta had returned with her new husband.

  He pulled his attention back to the Deputy Marshal, who was still speaking. ‘… so a welcoming party will be sent out to meet the cavalcade from Portsmouth and escort it back to Westminster. Many of the members of the Royal Council will form part of it and I think Hubert will want you included, de Wolfe, as Coroner of the Verge.’

  John nodded, he was not averse to a ride in the countryside, with all the panoply of a royal procession.

  ‘Which day will that be?’ he asked.

  ‘I have fast riders coming ahead to warn me,’ replied Martin Stanford. ‘Probably by Tuesday, but we will have sufficient notice to get ready.’