Figure of Hate Read online

  Though undoubtedly regretting the violent demise of his master, looming unemployment seemed his main concern.

  John, though not lacking in sympathy, had more urgent matters in mind. 'Who was this customer he was to visit in Topsham?'

  The smith gave him a name, but had no address, though this was of little consequence in such a small town as Exeter's seaport.

  Within the hour, the coroner and his two henchmen had gone back to the city to fetch their horses and were on their way down the river road to seek news from the purchaser of Scrope's silverware. Even slowed down by their clerk's awkward riding - for Thomas had reverted to his side saddle in spite of Gwyn's efforts to get him to sit on his steed like a man - they covered the six miles well before mid-morning. The busy quayside was at the end of the single street that straggled past the new church, and here John reined in to sit on his horse Odin, looking at the boats while Gwyn went off to seek William le Bas, the shipman.

  The tide was now out, and he looked across an expanse of mud to the flat marshes on the other side of the river, which widened out into the estuary on his left. In the distance, low hills marched down towards Dawlish on the coast, and for a moment his mind strayed to the woman who lived there, the delectable Hilda, the passion of his younger years and, until recently, still his occasional lover. He wondered idly whether her much older husband, Thorgils the Boatman, was away on a voyage at the moment. Then the image of Nesta floated into his head, and with an almost guilty sigh for days gone by he pulled Odin's great head around and waited for Gwyn to come lumbering back to where Thomas was holding the reins of both their horses.

  'We've had a wasted journey, Crowner,' called the Cornishman, as he came up to his mare. 'I chanced upon the man himself, outside his dwelling. He says he's seen neither hide nor hair of the silversmith and is wondering what's happened to his wife's gift.' De Wolfe cursed under his breath as Gwyn and Thomas hoisted themselves back up on to their steeds. It now seemed obvious that August Scrope had been waylaid on his way down from Exeter and had never reached Topsham. There was nothing to do but return to the city, so he walked Odin across to join the others.

  'What about this servant of his, what can have happened to him?' asked Gwyn, as they weaved between carts and heavily laden porters in the busy main street.

  'God knows! Probably his body lies rotting in the woods alongside the road - unless they threw him into the river along with his master,' replied de Wolfe angrily. He was frustrated by the lack of progress concerning this death, as well as the time wasted in a futile ride to Topsham.

  After a couple of miles, Gwyn's habitual need for food and drink began to plague him and he bemoaned the lack of an alehouse on this stretch of road. John also felt that he could do with a jug of ale.

  'The priory will oblige us, I'm sure,' squeaked Thomas, always eager for the chance to visit any religious establishment. They were just coming up to a side lane which led down to the river where St James' Priory was situated. It was a small Cluniac house, a cell of the Abbey of St Martin in Paris, with only four brothers under a prior. John had had dealings with them before, on one occasion when a sturgeon had been caught near by. As a 'royal fish', along with beached whales, it belonged to the Crown, and as such became the subject of a coroner's inquest to determine its value.

  There were no fish today, but as a mild excuse to seek refreshment, de Wolfe thought they might ask the brothers there whether they had heard of any robbery or assault on the Topsham road. As they turned down the lane that dropped off the low escarpment down to the riverside, he sent Thomas ahead, knowing that he would relish the chance to bob his knee and cross himself in the little chapel.

  For once, the little man scurried away at high speed, with the coroner and Gwyn jogging well behind. It was a surprise, then, to see their clerk pop out of the priory gateway as they approached, apparently in a state of agitation. Behind him appeared a black-robed monk who John recognised as Brother Francis, the infirmarian.

  'Crowner, I think he's here!' babbled Thomas excitedly. 'It sounds like the servant of the silversmith, badly beaten.'

  As de Wolfe and his officer slid from their-horses, the infirmarian, a thin old man with a bad squint, came up to explain.

  'He was found just before noon yesterday by local men attending their fish traps at the edge of the river.

  When they brought him here, the poor fellow was almost dead - he must have crawled out of the water and collapsed. He has a problem breathing, from taking in so much dirty water, I suspect.' As they hitched their horses to the rail outside the gate in the wall around the priory, John probed further.

  'Can he speak? Has he said who he is?' Brother Francis shrugged. 'Just managed to gasp his name, which is Terrus, but otherwise he merely wheezes and mumbles, as he has a fever. He was dressed like a serving man and he has wounds upon him, mainly about the head and arms.'

  John was about to upbraid the monk for not reporting a serious assault to him as the law demanded, but then closed his mouth again, thinking it was pointless to antagonise a religious house to no purpose.

  'Let's see him, quickly,' he demanded instead.

  Inside the wall was an area of garden, rows of vegetables being tended by a pair of monks with their habits girt up around their thighs. They stopped hoeing to watch the visitors hurry into the modest buildings, a chapel and a small block containing a refectory, dormitory and workshops. On the ground floor at the back were two cells used as sick quarters, and the infirmarian showed them into one, furnished only with a mattress on the floor, a stool and a wooden cross hanging on the whitewashed wall. In the light from a narrow window opening, they saw a man lying on the pallet, restlessly squirming and muttering to himself between coughs and gasps.

  'You'll get little sense from him, Crowner,' warned the monk. 'But see his face and limbs, he's been badly used.'

  The coroner's team saw that the man, who appeared to be about thirty years of age, had a long, shallow gash across his forehead, still caked with dried blood. Much of the rest of his face was red and purple from overlapping bruises, and his right eyelid was black and swollen, closing the eye completely. Both his arms, which were outside the coarse blanket that covered him, were similarly bruised and scratched.

  'The sides of his chest and loins are also bruised,' commented Francis. 'I think he's had a kicking as well.' John bent over the bed and in a loud clear voice tried to get some answers from the victim, but though the one good eye seemed to focus upon him, no recognisable words came between the wheezing and spluttering from the man's throat.

  'He's got a phlegmatous affliction of his lungs, Sir John,' said the infirmarian. 'He must have been thrown into the river and sucked a fair amount of water down into his vitals, so he's contracted a fever. It may yet carry him off.'

  Undaunted, de Wolfe again crouched by the mattress and this time tried to get a response to simple questions.

  'Your name is Terrus?' The eye swivelled and the rapid wheezing seemed to take on a different note.

  Encouraged, de Wolfe tried again.

  'Was August Scrope your master?' This time Terrus managed a slight nod as well as a variation in his gasping.

  By means of half a dozen leading questions that required only an affirmative answer or an apparent denial, John managed to learn that the man and his employer had been attacked by two mounted men who had followed them down the Topsham road until they reached a place between the trees where no one else was in sight. It seemed that Terrus must have lost conciousness then, as he had no further recollection of anything.

  By the time John had got this far, the victim had collapsed sideways on to his palliasse and was gasping for breath, his one good eye no longer visible. The infirmarian declared that he must be left alone, to either recover or die, and reluctantly the coroner left the cell. They sat in the small deserted refectory, where the cellarer brought them some ale and bread, and discussed the latest turn of events.

  'If they were followed down the road by men
on horseback, then it was not forest outlaws who robbed them,' declared Gwyn, wiping ale from his moustache with the back of his hand.

  'Sounds as if their assailants knew that they had something valuable with them,' observed Thomas reasonably. 'But how could they know that?'

  'From the fair, I suppose,' replied Gwyn. 'A silversmith is always fair game for robbery.'

  De Wolfe shook his head. 'The fair wasn't open on Monday, when they were attacked. The silver goods were not on display until this morning. So it must have been at the New Inn - perhaps someone in the tavern overheard Scrope telling of his trip to Topsham.' They finished off their refreshments and made for the door, to thank the monks for their hospitality.

  'We'll get no more sense out of this Terrus until he recovers - if he recovers!' grunted Gwyn. 'We need some description of these miscreants.'

  John turned to Thomas and said something that gladdened his heart.

  'Our good clerk here is the best link to any religious house. He can keep in touch with this place and discover if and when the man gets his wits back.

  Meanwhile, there's plenty for us to do back in the city.'

  Chapter Three

  In which Crowner John acts as an umpire

  When John arrived at his house in Martin's Lane, he again found his wife missing. He was too late for their noontide dinner, the main meal of the day, and obviously Matilda had not waited for him.

  'She's gone to her cousin in Fore Street,' announced Mary briskly, as she hurried in with a tray of bread, cheese and cold meat for him. He sat in the cheerless hall, perched on a stool at the end of the long oaken table, glaring at the faded tapestries that tried to conceal the bleakness of the timber walls. His maid-of-all-work banged a quart pot of ale in front of him. 'But she said she'll be back in time for supper - and that her brother will be coming to join you at the meal!' De Wolfe swore out loud. 'What in hell is that scoundrel coming for? That's spoiled my appetite already!' he exclaimed, immediately giving the lie to his words by energetically attacking a slice of mutton with his dagger, as if it were Richard de Revelle's gizzard. As the thoaaght of his brother-in-law invading his house and his privacy spread deeper into his mind, he threw down the knife and grabbed his tankard angrily.

  'To hell with him, I'll not sit down at table with that traitor and thief!' He sucked down some ale and banged the pot down again. 'I'll be eating supper at the Bush tonight, Mary. At least there I can choose what company I keep!'

  His cook-maid shrugged as she picked up his cloak from the floor where he had thrown it on coming in.

  'It's your house, Crowner - but the mistress will give you a hard time if you don't turn up.'

  'Ha! What's new about that, girl? She hardly speaks to me as it is.'

  Mary made for the door, muttering something under her breath as she went. Usually she supported John against his wife, as far as it was possible without jeopardising her job, but sometimes he felt that she had joined the legion of women who conspired to make his life miserable. Even the usually amiable Nesta had her moments of provoking annoyance and aggravation, though admittedly, since taking up with John, she had suffered enough distressing events to give her good cause.

  He sat alone, champing his way through the food that had been set before him, pouring more ale from the pitcher Mary had left on the table. Now that it was October, a pile of logs glowed in the hearth, below the conical chimney that was his pride and joy. The only part of the house that was built of stone, it took the smoke up through the roof, a fairly novel idea for Exeter and one that he had had copied after seeing a similar device in Brittany.

  John took his last pot of ale to sit in one the cowled monk's chairs near the fire, where Brutus was already stretched out to enjoy the warmth. As he slowly savoured the last of his drink, he thought about what he had to do for the rest of the day. He should tell the portreeves about the murder of one of the stall-holders, as they were the main sponsors of the fair that had brought August Scrope to Exeter. They were also both senior men in the city's merchant guilds, and given that one of the prime purposes of these organisations was the well-being of members and their families, no doubt they would help in getting the silversmith's body back to Totnes and seeing that the local guild attended to his affairs, though as he was said to be a widower with a new mistress, perhaps that was not such an urgent issue. De Wolfe decided that he would have to keep the new sheriff informed of what was going on not only telling him about the killing, but reassuring him that all seemed in order at the tourney field. It was a sensitive topic for all towns that had scores of high-spirited knights and squires assembling for what was essentially a battle. Even if the sport was not meant to be lethal, the combination of pent-up excitement and aggression, fuelled by excessive drinking among volatile young men, was an inflammable situation which could easily be ignited by a spark from some personal quarrel.

  John decided that he would also have a word with his good friend Ralph Morin, the castle constable, to ensure that as many men-at-arms as could be spared were sent to Bull Mead the next day. The fair itself could be left to the constables and the stewards, though after dark the main trouble would be in the city streets, where thieves and cut-purses would have been attracted by the crowds, and where the taverns would be bursting at the seams with rowdy drinkers looking for a fight.

  With a sigh, he hauled himself from his chair and, forsaking the warmth of the fire, went around to the back yard to see Mary. He found her sitting in her cook house, talking to Lucille, his wife's maid. Mary was wary of the skinny girl, as she knew she carried every bit of tittle-tattle back to her mistress, but she felt sorry for her. Lucille was a refugee from the Vexin, a part of Normandy north of the Seine which was fought over endlessly by Richard and Philip of France. Her parents were dead and she had been palmed off on Matilda by the latter's Norman cousins, of whom Matilda was inordinately proud, as they validated her own ancestry.

  Though she had been born in Devon and had spent barely a couple of months visiting across the Channel, she acted to her friends in the town almost as if she were a direct descendant of William the Bastard himself. John hardly ever said a word to Lucille and she was obviously in awe of him, bobbing her knee and running off to her box under the solar steps as soon as he came into view.

  'Anyone would think that I was going to eat that bloody girl,' he growled to Mary. 'I'm off to Rougemont and then I'll be going down to the Bush, so you can tell my dear wife that I'll not be sitting at table with her and her damned brother!'

  He stalked away and minutes later was in the Guildhall, just around the corner from his house. Here he found his friend Hugh de Relaga fussing with final details of the finances of the fair and of the arrangements for the guild pageants that would help to entertain the crowds over the next three days. With clerks scurrying around him with parchments, John had difficulty in catching his attention and when he managed to tell him that he had lost one of his stall-holders, the Portreeve was too distracted to take much notice, apart from clucking in sympathy and putting a line through August Scrope's rental payment on a document.

  De Wolfe abandoned him to his duties and went back up High Street and turned left before the East Gate, climbing the steep lane to cross the drawbridge into the castle at the top end of the city. The weather was overcast but dry and the mud in the inner ward was setting into a hard red crust, crunching under his feet as he walked across to the squat keep on the other side. There was the usual bustle in the hall, which served as a meeting place, refectory and business office for the mixture of soldiers, clerks, merchants and supplicants to the Sheriff that normally milled around inside its sombre walls.

  The first door on the left led to the sheriff's chambers and he nodded curtly to the man-at-arms who stood guard upon it. As he opened the door, he thought how strange it was that he was not going in for his usual confrontation and shouting-match with Richard de Revelle, who had occupied these rooms ever since John had been coroner. He gave a rare grin as he decided he
would be unlikely to surprise the new man in his shirt or dressing robe, with a whore in the bedchamber beyond, as he had with his brother-in-law on two previous occasions.

  Inside the room, he found that he was right, as Henry de Furnellis was sitting behind a table with his exasperated chief clerk, Elias Pulein, who was trying to explain the contents of a parchment roll spread out before them. Like John, the new sheriff was virtually illiterate, barely able to write his name, whereas de Revelle, for all his many faults, had been an educated man. Now de Furnellis, once more sitting in this chamber as sheriff, was again dependent upon his clerks and scribes to guide him through the intricate task of running the county of Devon, especially overseeing the collection and delivery of 'the farm', the twice-yearly submission of taxes to the treasury in Winchester. Though getting old and weary, Henry was no fool, and had sufficient wealth and lack of ambition to disdain corruption and embezzlement.

  He looked up as John entered and, with a sigh of relief, used his arrival as an excuse to dismiss his irritaring clerk and reach for a jug of wine and two cups.

  His somewhat haggard face creased into a weak smile as he motioned to John to sit down on a stool on the opposite side of the table.

  'I've managed to survive the first day without clouting that damned Elias across the head, in spite of his sneering at my lack of understanding of these blasted accounts!' he said, raising a fist that could have laid a larger man than the clerk flat on the floor. John knew that the older man had been a doughty fighter in his day - he had been with Strongbow, Earl of Pembroke, on the first invasion of Ireland a quarter of a century earlier, and even some years later, when de Wolfe and Gwyn had been fighting there, Henry de Furnellis was still a well-known figure in that bloody campaign.

  The coroner took a sip of wine and found it to be a good Bordeaux red - the new sheriff was not one to drink common gut-rot and he could well afford to have the superior stuff brought from his town house near the East Gate, where he lived when he was not at his manor near Crediton.