The Sanctuary Seeker Read online

  Thomas scrabbled in the shapeless cloth bag he always carried for a new piece of parchment and his writing implements. As he arranged these on the table between them, the coroner stared at him steadily, as if seeing him for the first time. Though Thomas was the butt of scorn and often ridicule – not least from John and Gwyn of Polruan – John felt flashes of pity for him, in spite of his personal distaste for the man’s character. He was ugly, too, and must have been the runt of his mother’s litter, small and crook-backed with his chinless face and long nose below small beady eyes, one of which had a slight turn when he looked to the right. His lank dark hair was as lustreless as old rope and his face was pitted with the scars of cow-pox. No wonder, thought John, that he had been driven to rape, for surely no woman would ever give herself voluntarily to him.

  ‘Put this in your best Latin. Use your own words, I’ll give you the sense of it.’

  He got up from his stool and paced the width of the small room.

  ‘Whereas on the fourth day of November in Our Lord’s year of eleven hundred and ninety-four, Eadred son of Oswald, freeholder of Dawlish, was found injured near to death, against the King’s peace, by virtue of knife wound in the back, after an affray after midnight outside the Saracen Inn, Stripcote Hill, Exeter, in the County of Devon, allegedly by the hand of …’ He hesitated and wrinkled his face in annoyance. ‘Damnation, I forget who Gwyn told me was the attacker. Just leave a space, you can get it from him when we go down to the town.’

  He carried on with a preamble to the wounding and the death, as recounted to him by his officer. He paused now and then, to let the clerk catch up with his words, which Thomas had to a translate into Latin. In the lower courts, run by the sheriffs and burgesses, English or Norman French was used in speech but anything written, especially for use in the courts of the King’s justices, had to be in Latin.

  Thomas worked slowly, but John had to admit that his rolls were a work of art, even to those who could hardly read the words. The regularity of his script, the faultless spacing and straightness of the lines showed that good could come out of even the most unprepossessing people.

  By the time they had finished, some weak rays of early sun had struck through the rain-clouds and the narrow wall-slits into the chamber.

  The ninth bell had sounded from the cathedral when Gwyn returned. He brought a large loaf from a street baker, and a slab of hard cheese. The three sat round the table and shared it, washed down with beer that John produced from a two-gallon earthenware jar kept in a corner under a cloth. For a time, there was peace, as the three men chewed the fresh bread and odorous cheese, and gulped ale from chipped pottery mugs that were part of the furnishings of the bare room.

  Even Gwyn seemed temporarily to have forgotten to bait the scrawny clerk while they enjoyed their simple snack. His huge body required refuelling at frequent intervals – there was too much of a gap for him between a pre-dawn breakfast and the midday meal. A fiercely independent Cornishman, married to a Cornish wife and with a score of relatives still in Polruan, he had become of necessity a mercenary soldier twenty years ago, and with John de Wolfe, who had had no true squire until Gwyn, he had travelled half the known world as far as Palestine. When his knight had run out of wars, Gwyn had stayed with him as his officer.

  When the last crumbs had been swallowed and the empty pots returned unwashed to a niche in the wall, John returned to business. ‘Did you tell the town crier to ask for information on our Crusading corpse?’ he demanded of Thomas.

  ‘Last evening time, Crowner. He will be shouting it about the city this morning. Five times today he’ll cry it in various streets.’

  ‘If we get nothing by tomorrow, I want you to ride to Cullompton, Crediton, Tiverton and Honiton to get the criers or bailiffs to put about the same message.’

  The clerk groaned. ‘Master, that’s more than a day’s ride for me on that poor beast of mine.’

  The coroner was unsympathetic. ‘That’s your job, clerk. You get free lodging at the Archdeacon’s expense and fourpence a week from me to live. Would you prefer destitution?’ There was no answer to this and Thomas fell silent, though his backside ached already at the thought of a day and a half on a mule’s back.

  ‘If nothing comes of that within a few days, we’ll enquire further afield. From Okehampton to Barnstaple, across to Yeov il, and maybe you’ll have to travel to Southampton, Gwyn, where the ships from Palestine berth.’

  ‘What if he had come by sea to Plymouth?’ asked the clerk, seeing a chance to extend Gwyn’s travels.

  ‘That may well be – so your nag may have to take you there as well, Thomas,’ countered the coroner. ‘But not yet. Let’s see if the local criers get something for us.’

  Gwyn hauled himself to his feet, pulling his frayed leather cape over his shoulders. ‘We should leave for the Saracen to see this wounded man. Maybe you can get a declaration from him before he dies.’

  CHAPTER FIVE

  In which Crowner John attends one wounded man and two hangings

  As they shuffled on their outdoor clothes, for the sun had vanished again in favour of cloud and cold wind, Gwyn reminded him of another routine task for that morning. ‘I put the inquest back an hour as you must attend two hangings at noon.’

  John had forgotten, but now recalled it was Tuesday, one of the two weekdays on which executions were carried out. Sentences of death could be passed in the sheriff’s county court and the mayor’s burgage court of the city, as well as on the rare occasions when king’s judges were in the city. Baronial and manorial courts, too, had power over life and death.

  ‘Who is to be turned off today, Gwyn?’ he asked, as they walked down from the castle to the High Street.

  ‘An old beggar who knocked down a fishmonger and stole his purse, and some lad of thirteen, who made off with a pewter jug.’

  John sighed, with no particular revulsion, for hangings were an everyday occurrence, but from irritation that his presence was still needed, even though the felons had no property to be recorded and confiscated for the royal Treasury. ‘A couple of paupers – not worth a strip of Thomas’s vellum to record the event. Still, the law’s the law.’

  They turned right into the High Street, the main artery of the city, a busy road thronged with stalls. Most of the buildings were wooden, but a few new stone-built dwellings and shops were beginning to appear, belonging to the wealthier burgesses. The many churches were also being reconstructed in stone as the city became wealthier. All the buildings had steeply pitched roofs to throw off the West Country rain, most of which ended in the street to form sludge with the rubbish from the food stalls and the refuse and sewage thrown out of house and shop doorways.

  At least the High Street was cobbled, unlike St Sidwell’s, where Gwyn lived. In the few paved streets, the mire tended to gravitate to the central gully and from there run downhill to the river Exe, but elsewhere the garbage and horse dung stagnated to form a glutinous ooze.

  The tavern named after the Crusaders’ enemies was near the West Gate, in a side lane parallel to the High Street. The lower storey was of stone, with an overhanging wooden upper structure, topped by a steep thatched roof. A low central door led from the cobblestones, flanked by two pairs of shuttered windows. A board nailed to the wall above the door had a crudely painted head supposedly representing a Mohammedan warrior, daubed in garish primary colours.

  A small group of curious onlookers hung about outside and Gwyn pushed through them to enter the inn, bending almost double to pass under the low lintel. The coroner did the same, but their stunted clerk cleared the doorway with inches to spare.

  Inside, the gloom was lightened a little by a roaring fire in the large room that occupied all the ground floor. In the middle stood the landlord, a rough-looking man of Flemish origin. Though he had been in Exeter for twenty years, he was still known as Willem of Bruges. He glared at the new arrivals, hands on hips, his chest and belly covered by a leather apron that protected him when he carried in
barrels of ale from the back yard as easily as if they were flagons. Pouches of lax skin hung below his blue eyes, and much of the rest of his face was covered by a stubble of grey beard that matched his matted hair. ‘Come to see my unwelcome guest, have you?’ he grated. ‘Who will pay for the bed he lies on, one that I could let to a traveller for a penny-halfpenny a night?’

  John ignored his complaint. ‘Where is the man, Willem? Has the apothecary seen him?’

  The burly Fleming jerked a thumb at the wooden steps that led up to the floor above. ‘Up there, bleeding on my palliasse. The leech came two hours ago, put some plaster on his wound, but said there was nothing he could do that God couldn’t do much better.’

  ‘Will he live?’

  Willem shrugged indifferently. ‘Ask me in a week, though I’ll not suffer him here that long without payment. Find me his family, Crowner, for I must dun them for his keep.’

  He turned to picking an empty hogshead and carried it to a door at the back. ‘The criminals are out here, if you want them – unless de Revelle’s men have let them run off.’

  This was a stock local joke and, indeed, over most of England, for the expense of keeping prisoners fed and guarded in the gaols fell on the local community. Many would have preferred the felons to melt away and become outlaws in the woods rather than pay yet more taxes to house them until they were either hanged or brought before the judges at the General Eyre. Guards, gaolers and men-at-arms were often bribed to turn a blind eye and let prisoners escape.

  Willem pushed through the back door with his load and let it slam behind him, leaving Sir John and Gwyn to clamber up the stairs, which were little more than a stout ladder set against a hole in the floor above.

  Unlike the Bush, the upper floor was divided by rush or wattle screens into a series of cubicles. These were set against the walls, all open towards the centre of the large room. The more desirable ones contained a palliasse stuffed with dry ferns, and a few even had a low bed-frame. Most, though, had merely a pile of straw on the floor, at a penny a night.

  Only one of the stalls was occupied and the coroner walked over to its entrance. On a pallet on the floor lay the still figure of a man, covered with a rough grey blanket. Sitting on a three-legged stool alongside him was an elderly nun, holding his pale hand and pressing a wet cloth against his brow. She looked up as John came near, her lined old face placid, resigned to a lifetime of dealing with man’s cruelty.

  ‘Good day, Sir Crowner. I don’t know yet if this man will come to one of your inquests. It will be a near thing if he doesn’t.’

  John had great respect for the sisters of the healing orders, whom he had seen care for hundreds of sick and wounded in campaigns both at home and abroad. ‘God be with you, Sister. How did you come to find this fellow so soon?’

  ‘Your big man Gwyn there, he sent a pot-boy down to the priory soon after the fight. They called us straightway, but he had lost much blood even before I arrived.’ She added, as an afterthought, ‘He told me earlier that his name was Eadred, that he was a free-holder from Dawlish, here to sell his pigs.’

  John went to the other side of the pallet. He bent down to bring his dark head nearer to the victim.

  The man’s eyes were closed, the skin of his face stretched over his pallid cheekbones.

  ‘Is he awake, Sister?’

  The man answered, not the nun, in a voice that seemed to whisper from the floorboards rather than from his throat. ‘Who is that? Who are you?’

  ‘The Crowner, come to see how you are – and if you can tell me anything. Who did this hurt to you, eh?’

  The man made no reply, but panted almost silently.

  ‘Can you show me his wound, Sister?’

  Somewhat reluctantly the nun pulled down the blanket and exposed the man’s left shoulder and upper chest. A pad of clean rags lay across the front of the armpit, the centre soaked with blood, which had run down into the pallet.

  When the cowled nurse pulled away the dressing, a small, almost circular hole, the size of an acorn, could be seen in the bloodstained skin of the man’s chest, below the fold of muscle across the armpit.

  ‘It must have gone into the upper part of the lung. He has bled much outside, but I fear that a great deal has drained into the inside of the chest.’

  The coroner looked at the wound with professional detachment. ‘Gwyn, an unusual wound from a poniard. A round hole, not a slit.’

  The big Cornishman leaned over his shoulder to look. ‘Like a sharpening steel, more than knife. Yet I have seen misericords like that, mostly Italian made.’

  A misericord was a sheathed dagger, carried by noble warriors, for jabbing between the joints of plate-armour and also for administering the coup de grâce to vanquished opponents. Their interest was more than academic, as a characteristic wound from an unusual weapon could help to identify the offending knife and its owner.

  ‘He’s awake again,’ observed the nun, as she covered up the injury.

  John turned to speak to the man once more. ‘You may die, fellow, though perhaps this good lady and the God she serves may save you. But in case they don’t, your declaration to me may help bring you revenge and justice to the people … and reparation for your family.’

  Weakly, the lips moved to frame words. ‘Robbed, we were … as we left the inn. Two men fell on us.’ Heaving breaths punctuated the story. ‘One was hairy – black frizz of beard and long, ragged hair. Very hairy.’ He gasped into silence. Then, ‘He struck down my friend as we turned the corner. The one who stabbed me was younger and fair – must have been Saxon.’

  John motioned to his clerk to write as they spoke. ‘You knew them – or their names?’

  ‘I have seen the hairy one around the town – but I don’t know his name.’ Again he sucked in air in a spasmodic gulp. ‘The young one was a stranger to me.’

  Exhausted, the man’s head fell back and his eyes rolled up. His breathing grew laboured and the coroner could see that he would get nothing more from him. The nun pulled up the covers. With a farewell nod to the old lady, John moved out of the cubicle and waited for Thomas to finish his note. Then he said, ‘Let us see who is downstairs.’

  The Flemish landlord opened the back door for them and they passed out into a filthy yard, where chickens and a few ducks competed in the mud with the cook, who made meals for the inn in a lean-to shed with a tattered thatched roof. Opposite this was an open stable, where the hostelry guests tethered their horses, and a pig-sty, from which came a cacophony of grunts and a terrible stench.

  Directly opposite the back door was a rickety gateway that opened into the lane behind the inn. Tethered to it were two dejected-looking men, their hands lashed behind their backs with ropes that were tied to the gatepost. At the other side lounged two castle guards, wearing round helmets with nose protectors, but no mailed hauberks in the relaxed military conditions of the town. They hauled themselves languidly upright when they saw the coroner emerge from the inn. They knew the man’s office was held in mild contempt by Sheriff de Revelle, and rumour had spread of the rivalry and competition between the two men. They did not know what respect they should afford him.

  John left them in no doubt. ‘Is this how you stand guard?’ he snarled. ‘You are paid to be soldiers, so stand alert, especially when a King’s officer comes among you.’

  The pair glowered at him, but straightened their backs and rammed the stocks of their lances onto the ground in some semblance of a salute.

  ‘You’d have had your throat slit by a Mohammedan on the first day in Palestine if you’d been as slack as this,’ John grumbled, but his interest had already turned to the two wretches bound to the other gatepost.

  One was a large, bulky man in middle age, with wild black hair and an untamed beard. His smock was torn almost to the waist and his barrel-like chest was a mat of dark bristle and John was reminded of the apes he had seen chained on the Continent, brought from Africa to be cruelly exhibited by mountebanks at fairs. The other f
ellow was much younger and, in stark contrast, a typical Saxon blond. They stared at him, like animals awaiting slaughter – which was almost certainly their eventual fate.

  ‘I am the King’s coroner, charged with investigating your crimes.’

  The hairy one spat contemptuously into the mud, just missing Gwyn’s feet. The Cornishman growled ominously, but John put out a restraining hand.

  ‘The injured man swears you killed his companion. What have you to say to that?’

  ‘I did not. I know nothing,’ said the hairy one. With nothing else between him and being hanged, flat denial was the only option.

  ‘Liar! I have six men who will say they saw you strike the victim with a chain mace!’ Gwyn had little time for ruffians who spat at his feet so had no qualms about exaggerating the evidence: only two witnesses of the affray had come forward.

  The bearded man looked away sullenly, tugging at his wrist bonds.

  The coroner turned to the younger man. ‘And you, what have you to say for yourself?’

  Less truculent than his accomplice, the fair man trembled at the prospect of a noose around his neck, but tried to remain defiant. ‘I know nothing of it. I was but one in the crowd outside the inn when a fight broke out.’

  Gwyn pushed him roughly in the shoulder, making him stagger. ‘A pair of liars, then! We have a dying declaration to say that you stabbed the man mortally in the chest.’

  He was again stretching the truth, but it had the desired effect. The Saxon, who was no more than nineteen, sagged into the mud, held up only by his wrists bound to the post behind him. ‘It was an accident,’ he sobbed. ‘The man was pushed on to my knife. I was holding it out to protect myself.’

  Gwyn grunted. ‘A likely story!’