The Sanctuary Seeker Read online

  ‘I don’t know. The cause of most deaths in a village – or town, for that matter – is plain. Drunken quarrels, violent robberies, strangled rapes, beaten wives … Everyone knows the culprit and the hue-and-cry is hardly needed to catch the felon. But this one …’ He fell silent as the old potman put a new jar in front of him.

  Story-telling had taken John’s mind off fondling her, and Nesta pulled back his hand to her bosom in mock annoyance. ‘You think he’s a nobleman, you said?’ she asked.

  ‘He was certainly no common soldier. Good clothes, fine boots, belt and scabbard – mostly Levantine made. No doubt he’s come recently from Outremer.’ She looked up at his profile, his long jaw pink in the flames from the fire.

  ‘How did he reach the edge of Dartmoor? I’ve heard that Widecombe’s an outlandish place.’

  Like most town-dwellers, to Nesta the countryside was a remote, alien place. She had hardly set foot outside Exeter in the five years since she had come from South Wales. Her late husband, a Welsh archer named Meredydd, had returned from fighting in Touraine with an unexpected bounty and some loot. He landed at Exmouth, took a fancy to the area and bought the Bush Inn, sending home to Gwent for his wife. Within a year, he was dead of the jaundice and Nesta had carried on alone – with unusual success for a widow.

  John pondered her question. ‘He had marks of spurs on his boots, but even those had been stolen from him, along with everything else he possessed except his dagger. It was undoubtedly a robbery, probably by at least two attackers from the wounds he suffered.’

  ‘So, a simple robbery – but why would a Crusader be riding alone along the edge of Dartmoor?’ she persisted, partly to emphasise her interest in his doings and partly to keep his mind away from the spat with his wife.

  ‘Depends where he was headed – some people take the moor track to Tavistock and Plymouth instead of the longer road through the lowlands. Or he might have been going to some manor near Okehampton, or even further into North Cornwall. And we don’t know that he was alone. He may have had a companion or servant – also lying dead now in the forest.’

  Nesta was becoming restive, but she sensed that her man needed to talk himself out of his mood.

  ‘You think it was outlaws that killed him?’

  ‘It seems most likely. The forest and moor abounds in fugitives. The two manor reeves each blamed the other, but I feel their sin is in trying to move the body from their land, rather than murder.’ He thought for a moment, his beetling brows coming down in thought. ‘A man called Nebba was there, too. Not a villager, he had been a soldier, I’ll swear. Two fingers missing.’

  This struck a chord with the shapely innkeeper. ‘An archer, like my poor Meredydd! A barbaric custom, to cut off a man’s fingers with a knife.’

  ‘Not so bad as lopping off other parts, my girl,’ he grunted, giving her thigh a suggestive squeeze.

  After a short silence, his chin dropped on to his chest and he raised his head with a jerk, startling the auburn head next to him.

  ‘Come, Sir Crowner, time you were in bed before you fall asleep across the table.’ Nesta pulled herself away from him and stood up. ‘You’ll stay here this night, John, in my bed – though by the look of you, there’ll be little action other than snoring. Come.’

  She pulled him towards the wooden stair at the back, past the amused glances of the patrons and a chorus of ‘Good night, Sir John.’

  As he lumbered up the steps behind her, John was vaguely uneasy. ‘I’ve not stayed a whole night with you before, Nesta.’

  Holding a tallow candle high, she turned and grinned at him. ‘Afraid I’ll turn into a witch at midnight? You’ve spent many an afternoon and evening enjoying my hospitality, John.’

  ‘They’ll all know where I am,’ he muttered.

  But Nesta scoffed, ‘It’s no secret in Exeter, not even from your wife. So don’t concern yourself, let her stew until the morning. She’ll not petition the Pope for an annulment and lose being Madam Coroner for the county of Devon!’

  CHAPTER FOUR

  In which the Crowner visits a lady, then a corpse

  In spite of his lethargy, Crowner John roused himself sufficiently to give a creditable performance in the arms of his agile mistress before he rolled over and fell sound asleep for the rest of the night.

  Some hours before dawn Nesta was awakened by an urgent tapping on the rough boards of the bedroom door. The upper part of the timber hostelry was built out over the yard, under which were the kitchen and a shanty for the two servants. It was divided by a partition into one small chamber, where Nesta lived, and a larger room in which four crude beds and some palliasses on the floor provided accommodation for guests at the inn. This night, no one was staying at the Bush, so Nesta knew that the tapping could not be one of the guests wanting to creep into her bed, as sometimes happened.

  She climbed out reluctantly from beneath the woollen blanket and sheepskins. Pulling her nightrobe tightly about her against the raw November morning, she stumbled in the gloom to the door and put her mouth to a crack in the planks.

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Edwin, missus. There’s a man here for the Crowner.’

  ‘Man? What man?’

  Edwin shuffled outside the door and Nesta heard him mutter, ‘Gwyn, his officer, he says. Wants a word with Sir John.’

  ‘Wait there, will you?’

  Sighing, Nesta groped her way back to the bed and shook John. The soldier in him rapidly threw off sleep and he stumbled to the door. Lifting the crude wooden bar that served as a latch, he stuck out his head and saw the figure of his man behind a flickering candle, old Edwin hovering nearby.

  ‘Sorry to disturb you,’ grunted Gwyn, without the trace of a smirk or even a glance into the room where Nesta was again submerged under the bedclothes. ‘There’s been a killing and a wounding during the night. Two fellows have been seized by the sheriff’s men outside the Saracen.’

  The Saracen was a rougher tavern than the Bush. Though not far away on Stripcote Hill, it catered mostly for sailors from the quayside and drovers up from the country.

  ‘How did you know where I was?’ demanded John.

  Gwyn shrugged. ‘Everyone knows where you are. It’s no secret, nor anyone else’s business.’

  John shivered, the chill seeping through the undershirt he wore in bed. ‘How long to first light?’

  ‘About two hours, by the cathedral bell.’

  ‘I’ll come to the castle at dawn. Is that where the corpse lies?’

  ‘It is – but the injured man is still at the tavern. Eadred of Dawlish he is, in Exeter to sell his pigs at yesterday’s market. He may die, he may not,’ the Cornishman added philosophically.

  ‘I’ll be at the Saracen later. Gather enough men for a jury, anyone who was witness to the fight.’

  Gwyn nodded and turned away.

  ‘And get that damned clerk out of bed. No reason for him to rest, if we’ve been roused.’

  He slammed the door and dropped the bar into its slot. Slipping thankfully back under the bed-fleeces, he was immediately seized by a warm naked body: Nesta had peeled off her nightrobe while he had been talking to Gwyn. She pressed her lips against his and slid a sinuous hand up his thigh. ‘One good thing about being woken so early, John, we’ve time for another tumble before the day begins!’

  Nesta climbed on top of him and rode him as energetically as he cantered his grey stallion. When they had first become lovers, her fondness for straddling him had rather offended his masculine need to be dominant. However, she had broken him of the habits of a lifetime with good-humoured persistence until he had come to enjoy it – though often, with a roar of passion, he would roll the pair of them over and hammer her almost through the palliasse to the floorboards beneath. When exhaustion finally overcame them, they lay quietly side by side, his long arms wrapped tenderly around her.

  There was silence for a time. Eventually he asked, ‘Have you heard the Bishop’s bell strike six?’
/>   With no clock nearer than an inventive monastery in Germany, time was measured by graduated candles or a sand-glass in the cathedral and rung out over the city by tolling one of the bells.

  ‘No, though with you panting in my ear, I’d not have heard the roof fall in! But I think we have time yet, until Edwin starts to throw logs on the fire for cooking.’

  After a few more minutes of companionable silence, Nesta asked again about the man in Widecombe. She stroked his belly gently. ‘And you’ve no idea who he is?’

  ‘None at all. Other than he’s Norman of good family.’

  ‘How can you get further, then? The killing of a knight or someone of lordly rank cannot go unpunished. If it were a mere serf or villein, well, life is cheap, but not a gentleman.’

  Sometimes John could not be sure whether she was teasing him or serious. Now he suspected the latter, as the Welshwoman had no love of the Normans’ feudal system. If he had not been half Celtic himself, through his Cornish mother, he suspected she would have never let him into her bed.

  ‘I’ll have to make wider enquiries about the county, maybe even further afield. Gwyn and that poxy clerk can get the criers and heralds in each town to broadcast a description and seek any sighting of the man. But this affray on Stripcote Hill will occupy most of the day, God blast it.’

  She bit his shoulder gently. ‘This crowner’s job seems too much for one man.’

  Further conversation was interrupted by a crash below: Edwin had dropped a pile of wood on the floor. Almost immediately, they heard the clear notes of a bronze bell chiming in the distance. When they counted to six, Nesta cruelly threw back the covers and jumped out of bed, leaving John lying with his underwear around his neck. ‘Come, Sir Crowner. By the time we get you fed and watered, it’ll be light.’

  With a good meal of ham fried in butter, three fresh eggs and several large slabs of wheaten bread inside him, the coroner marched complacently through the streets of Exeter, from the south-west corner across to where the castle stood on the edge of an escarpment.

  He passed tradesmen putting up their stalls in the dawn light, setting out baskets of fresh vegetables, bread, meat and fish, ready to sell to the early risers among Exeter’s townsfolk. In the Shambles above Bell Hill in South Gate Street, the butchers were felling cattle on bloodstained cobbles and pigs screamed in their death agony – all part of the morning sounds of a city.

  Everywhere he was met with a nod, a greeting or a pulled forelock. Even though Gwyn of Polruan had assured him that they all knew where he had spent the night, he saw not a snigger or a smirk – which was just as well, as he would have had little hesitation in felling any offender with a smack of his brick-sized fist.

  His tall, slightly stooped figure strode up the slope to the castle’s open portcullis. He carried his wide-brimmed hat, his shoulder-length black hair lifting as he walked. He wore a short black cloak over the grey linen surcoat that came to his shins, tight black breeches with cross-gartering below the knees and pointed shoes. He hoped that Mary had cleaned his riding boots, as he suspected that, come the afternoon, he would be in the saddle again.

  In the city, he felt no need to buckle on his heavy sword, but his dagger was sheathed on his belt, though in truth, these days, he used it far more for cutting his food than any violent purpose.

  The castle, called Rougemont after the red rock upon which it was built, dominated the town from the highest point. A small room had been allotted to John on the first floor of the gatehouse, far removed in distance and importance from his brother-in-law, who lived and officiated in the keep. Unlike many Norman castles, there was no central mound, but a low square tower rose from the middle of the inner ward. It was the first stone keep that William the Bastard had built in England. It was said that in 1068 he had paced out the measurements for the foundations himself. Other fortified buildings were built into the curtain wall, the main ones on the edge of the low cliff that dropped down to Northernhay, the hedged fields below the city wall.

  At the gate, two mailed guards banged the stocks of their spears on the cobbles in salute to him. Like most soldiers, they respected John for his military reputation, as well as for his new royal appointment as the second most important law officer in the county.

  He passed under the outer arch of the gatehouse and turned left through a low door that led to the spiral stairs to his room. Little security was needed other than a couple of men to keep out beggars, children and madmen. The last time the castle had seen fighting was over fifty years ago, when for three months Baldwin de Redvers had held it for the Empress Matilda against the forces of the King, until lack of water had defeated him.

  John’s office was a dark chamber above the guardroom, lit only by a pair of arrow-slits looking down over the city and a narrow window-opening on the adjacent wall. The dawn light penetrated one of these and threw a pallid rectangle on a trestle table covered with parchment rolls scribed by Thomas de Peyne. The coroner sat on a hard stool behind the table and picked up the nearest roll, squinting at the penned words on the outside without untying the cord that held it closed. With difficulty, he slowly read the name, mouthing the Latin laboriously with moving lips.

  John knew the alphabet fairly well and was taking secret lessons every week from a junior deacon in the priory. He was too proud – or too arrogant – to ask his own clerk for tuition, though Thomas knew that his master was almost illiterate.

  John identified the name on the document: he had levied an amercement on a cottager in Cheriton for burying the body of his wife, who had hanged herself from an apple tree, without informing the coroner.

  Feet were stumping up the stone stairway and Gwyn’s head came round the open door, bright eyes peering through the forest of red hair and whiskers.

  ‘The dead ’un lies in the cart shed, if you want to see him.’

  ‘What about the wounded fellow from Dawlish?’

  ‘He’s bleeding into a bed in the Saracen. Too ill to be moved, they reckon. Willem, the innkeeper, is fit to be tied over it, asking who’s going to pay for a new mattress and blanket.’

  John followed his lieutenant down to the inner bailey, the large area within the curtain walls that was parade-ground, horse-corral and main street of the castle. Around the inside walls, there were lean-to huts of all shapes and sizes. Some, kitchens, blacksmiths or forges, had smoke coming from their eaves. Others were barracks for the constable’s troops. Women and children hung about, though the quarters for married soldiers and castle servants were in the lower ward.

  The ground had hardly a blade of grass left on it, being mostly churned mud, horse droppings and rubbish. Even at that early hour, the whole place was a hive of activity, morning meals being eaten outside the huts, horses being saddled or coaxed into cart-shafts and other wagons trundling in and out of the main gate.

  Used to such scenes all his life, John spared it hardly a glance but ploughed through the muck, following Gwyn towards a large, dilapidated shed inside the west wall. The doors had long since fallen off and been used for firewood by the castle residents. It housed the half-dozen big-wheeled carts that carried provisions and fodder. Right at the back, against the ruddy sandstone of the wall, lay an ominous long shape under an old cart-cover.

  ‘I had the bailiffs bring him up here. No point in leaving him in the street for all to gawp at.’

  ‘Do we know who he is?’ asked the coroner.

  ‘Willem the inn-keeper knew him. He’s Osric, a carter from Rock Lane.’

  Gwyn stooped and flicked off the canvas sheet to reveal a body with a bloody mass where the man’s head had been.

  John’s black eyebrows rose. He was impressed by the destruction that had been wrought on the victim’s face, scalp and skull.

  ‘They used a ball on him?’ he suggested.

  Gwyn nodded, quietly proud of his master’s instant and accurate diagnosis. ‘A chain mace, with a ball the size of a turnip. Beat his head to a pulp.’

  He tossed back th
e cover over the gruesome sight and wiped some blood from his hand on the weeds that grew at the foot of the wall.

  They walked out into the grey light of the bailey.

  ‘What about the other man?’

  ‘He had a dagger thrust into the back of the shoulder. But he’s lost a mortal amount of blood. If it turns purulent, then he’s a dead man as well.’

  The coroner jerked a thumb back towards the shed and its cadaver. ‘Get some of the inquest jury up here to view the body. No point in clogging the place up with half the town, ten men will suffice. And have the felons sent down to the Saracen – if the sheriff can find a couple of guards who’ll not let them escape on the way,’ he added ironically.

  While he went back to his office to practise his reading, Gwyn went about his errands, one of which was to chase their clerk away from the food stall in the cathedral close where he was finishing his breakfast and up to the castle.

  John sat for a time with a vellum roll in his hands, but his mind was not on deciphering the Latin script. He thought about last night and the calm companionship, as well as the healthy lust, of Nesta, both of which were so different from the petulant frigidity of Matilda. From there his mind wandered to the unknown man at Widecombe.

  Virtually all coroner’s cases were straightforward: any difficulties were due to the ignorance or obstinacy of the public, or obstacles raised by the sheriff and his men. During the first two months of his duties mysteries had been almost unknown, so this problem was new and intriguing, especially as the dead man seemed to be a Crusader. John began to assemble a plan of action and, not for the first time, wished that he could write well enough to list things with a quill, rather than have to carry everything in his head.

  His reverie was broken by the shuffle of feet on the stairs and the head of his clerk appearing round the door. With an obsequious bow, the little ex-cleric sidled into the room and slid on to a stool opposite the Coroner.

  ‘I’ve had a busy night, Thomas,’ John snapped, with an ambiguity lost on the other man. ‘A killing and a near-mortal wounding. There’s an inquest at noon, but you’d better start entering details on your roll about the injured man, in case he doesn’t die, so that his aggressor may be hauled up before the justices.’