Crowner Royal (Crowner John Mysteries) (17 page)

‘How was your journey, did you have fair weather?’ John asked them, suddenly at a loss for better words.

‘It was fine, far better than suffering the high roads for days on end!’ said Hilda gaily. ‘I voyaged so much in good weather and foul with Thorgils, that the sea holds no terrors for me – nor for Alice here, who is a true sailor’s daughter.’

They were still all standing in the centre of the room, with Aedwulf peering from the back door at this lovely, elegant woman. His wife Osanna, who had been taking in this drama, suddenly bustled forward.

‘Sir John, what are we thinking of! Your guests have travelled over the seas and need rest and sustenance. Sit you down and I’ll get your dinner, there’s enough to go round for all!’

She hurried towards the back door and yelled at her hen-pecked husband to get ale and wine for the company. The fact that Hilda by her looks and speech was obviously of Saxon blood like themselves, made them particularly hospitable.

John and Gwyn dragged stools and a bench to the table, which they all crowded around – Alice went to crouch in a corner, but the benevolent Gwyn sat her on a milking stool at the table.

As Aedwulf bustled in with ale, cider and a flask of wine, the coroner and his officer were eager to hear news of their home city, and plied both the shipmaster and Hilda with questions, to which she had a few answers.

‘When I knew I was coming to visit you, I made it my business to go to Exeter,’ she said, as John placed a cup of wine before her. ‘I called at the Bush and all is well, Gwyn! Your wife is busy but contented and she told me that business is excellent; she has had to take on an extra skivvy in the kitchen. The boys are well and helping her with the running of the inn. They send their love to you and hope to see you before long.’

Gwyn beamed at the news and vowed that he would visit them soon, even if he had to walk all the way to Devon!

‘I have precious little news for you, I fear, John,’ said Hilda more soberly. ‘I called at your house in Martin’s Lane and spoke to your maid Mary. She is well enough, but unhappy at the long silence, and concerned about your keeping on the empty house. She worries that eventually she will lose her job and her home. She told me to tell you that Brutus is well, though pining for you.’

To John’s surprise a lump came in his throat as he heard of his old hound and his faithful housekeeper. Again he regretted the king’s desire to exile him in this alien place, but there was little he could do about it for now.

‘And have you heard anything of my wife?’ he asked.

Hilda shook her head sadly, a lock of blonde hair escaping from under her white linen headcloth. ‘I knew you would want news, John, so I went up to Polsloe Priory to see what I could learn. I managed to speak to that old nun, Dame Madge, who seems to look upon you with favour, but there was little she could tell me.’

‘You did not get to meet Matilda herself?’ he asked rather ingenuously. Hilda’s finely arched brows lifted in mild surprise.

‘It would have been folly even to try!’ she said. ‘Your wife’s attitude to me for many years past has not been the most cordial.’ She paused to sip from her pewter cup of wine.

‘No, Dame Madge told me that Matilda still refuses to talk either about you or her brother Richard and spends all her time either in prayer or helping in the infirmary.’

‘Has she decided to take her vows and make her stay permanent?’

Hilda gave a delicate shrug. ‘I asked the nun that and she said your wife had still not made up her mind.’

‘Damn the woman,’ murmured John. ‘She is deliberately dangling me on a string. I cannot decide what to do about our house, in case she decides to return there at some time.’

Osanna now bustled in with wooden bowls, platters and bread, while Aedwulf shuffled behind her with a large dish of mutton stew. The housekeeper, usually indifferent and sometimes surly, seemed energised by the presence of these guests and ladled out the surprisingly good stew with exhortations to eat heartily. After the mutton, there was boiled bacon, beans and carrots and the visitors did ample justice to the food, especially after having suffered shipboard rations for over week. Thanks to Gwyn’s encouragement and teasing, Alice overcame her shyness, eating and drinking weak ale with every sign of enjoyment.

There was bread, cheese and nuts to finish and conversation flowed easily. John discussed the affairs of their wool and cloth shipping business with Roger Watts and said that he would get Thomas to write a letter about it for the shipmaster to take back to their active partner, Hugh de Relaga.

‘I must get back to the ship, which is berthed just below London Bridge,’ said Roger when they had eaten their fill. ‘There is work to be done concerning the cargoes and we must catch the noon tide the day after tomorrow. I will come for Hilda and her maid during the morning.’

He had hired a couple of rounseys for the short journey from the city, Alice sitting behind him, and now he took himself to the backyard to collect his horse, leaving the other for Hilda’s use. Gwyn smiled to himself at Roger’s assumption that Hilda would be staying with de Wolfe and then went on to wonder what he himself should do about it. With only two rooms in their cottage, he decided to make himself scarce for a couple of nights.

‘I’ll bed down with the palace guards, Crowner,’ he said quietly. ‘With young Alice here as well, you’ll need some privacy.’

He resisted accompanying this offer with a wink, but John knew that his officer was very happy that Hilda was here to lighten the glum mood that had settled on the coroner. Though the Cornishman had been very fond of Nesta, John’s previous mistress, he had realised that that the liaison was doomed in the long term. Now he trusted that his master’s childhood sweetheart Hilda might be able to fill the void in de Wolfe’s life – only his miserable wife stood in his way. Hilda was the daughter of the Saxon manor reeve in Holcombe, the second of the de Wolfe family’s manors near Teignmouth. Though at forty-one, John was some seven years older, they had grown up together and become lovers by their teens. It would have been impossible for them to marry in those days, as Hilda was merely the daughter of a villein and John the second son of the lord of the manor, but she was now a wealthy widow, there would be no barrier to their marriage – apart from the fact that he already had a wife, albeit one skulking away in a nunnery.

As soon as Roger Watts had left, Gwyn slid away to leave the lovers in peace. Their first task was to arrange the accommodation and it was tacitly assumed by all that John and Hilda would sleep together in the upper room. Although young Alice was there as lady’s maid, her role as chaperone was conveniently ignored and Osanna, rapidly summing up the situation, brought in a hay-filled pallet for the girl and set it in the corner of the main room. With the warm weather, there was no hardship in sleeping in a chamber with a dead firepit.

‘I’ll show you Westminster, Hilda – now the hub of government, even if the king is never here!’ offered John gallantly. They set off arm in arm, with Alice trailing behind, her eyes on stalks as she looked at the grand buildings around them. De Wolfe took them into the great abbey and they stared in wonder at the many altars and side chapels and the tomb of Edward the Confessor – as a Saxon, Hilda was visibly moved by the remnants of this last monarch of her race.

As they were leaving the abbey, John caught sight of Thomas coming from the cloisters and with a great yell attracted his attention. The clerk was surprised and delighted to see someone from Devon and Hilda hugged him to her, much to his delighted embarrassment. Though he had adored Nesta, he knew Hilda from several escapades and was fond of her calm and generous nature. He joined them in their sightseeing and after looking into St Margaret’s Church, the next port of call was the Great Hall of William Rufus. The lady and her maid marvelled at the dimensions of the place, gazing in wonder at the largest roof in Europe. They stood listening for a while to a session of the King’s Bench, who had reclaimed the space at the end of the hall, then John took them up to the coroner’s chamber to show Hilda their spartan place of exile from Devon.

‘It’s a miserable damned room, but the view is good,’ he said, throwing open the shutters and displaying the wide panorama of the Thames. He took them to the Lesser Hall, now quiet between meals and then to the outside of the King’s Chambers, which really impressed Alice, who thought of the king as only a short step down from God himself.

Their tour ended with a walk along the riverbank and back into the little town of Westminster, where Thomas left them with the excuse that he had duties in the abbey scriptorium. They wandered back to Long Ditch, where the percipient Osanna took Alice away to her kitchen in the yard, to feed her warm pastries and tell her tales of her native Essex.

Alone in his living room, John took Hilda into his arms and kissed her passionately. He had known her lips and her body for more than a score of years, but she still excited him so much that he felt dizzy when he clasped her tightly to him.

As his hands roved over her back, her buttocks and her breasts, she responded avidly and though it was barely late afternoon, they stumbled together to the ladder. A moment later, they had collapsed on to the thick feather mattress that lay on the floor of his sleeping chamber. All the pent-up frustrations of the past couple of months were released in an explosion of passion that repeated itself over and over until delicious exhaustion overtook them both. Then, satiated, they slept in each other’s arms, just as they had done in a Devon hayloft, long, long ago.

If de Wolfe had been pining for more work these past weeks, the next day he fervently hoped for the opposite – that there would be no slaying, fires, ravishment or other forms of mayhem to interrupt his time with Hilda. Most of the day was spent sightseeing and both Gwyn and Thomas came with them. The Cornishman had Alice clinging behind him on his mare, as he had become virtually a father figure to the little maid. Thomas was his usual erudite self, surprising even John with his detailed knowledge of London’s sights and history. They jogged slowly up the Royal Way to Charing and then along the Strand, the clerk pointing out the great houses of bishops, magnates and barons.

‘That’s the new preceptory of the Knights Templar built for the English master,’ he explained, pointing to the grand church and buildings at the top of the slope leading down to the river’s edge. Inside the city, they marvelled at the great cathedral of St Paul, Thomas explaining that the original church had been established almost six hundred years earlier, when the rest of London was an abandoned Roman ruin, shunned by the Saxons for centuries until the great King Alfred revitalised it.

The main thoroughfare of Cheapside and the markets at Poultry were like a magnet to Hilda and Alice, who spent over an hour wandering the stalls and booths, de Wolfe walking behind them as an escort, with that bemused look that men assume when forced to parade past endless rolls of linen and silk, or displays of brooches and necklets.

In Southwark, on the other side of the bridge, they stopped for food at a large tavern in the high street, opposite the large church of St Saviour’s.

‘That palace behind it belongs to the Bishop of Winchester,’ said Thomas, with an almost proprietorial air. ‘Southwark is not part of the city and actually belongs to the bishop.’ He omitted to tell her that even the noted Southwark brothels belonged to the bishop, who derived a useful income from them.

They stared at the Conqueror’s Tower and King Richard’s new fortifications around it, then after riding to Smithfield, just outside the city wall, to see the great church of St Bartholomew and its famous hospital, they made their way back to Westminster.

That evening, John decided to take Hilda to the Lesser Hall for supper, partly to show her some of the lifestyle of the palace, but also to meet a few of the people he had been describing to her. He also had a sneaking desire to show her off to them, especially Hawise d’Ayncourt. Though women were not usually present in the hall, he perversely decided that if the raven-haired beauty from Blois could be there, why not his English blonde?

No one was going to challenge the king’s coroner’s right to bring a guest and he was sure that Hilda would more than hold her own with any of the others in the circle that supped there.

When he told her, she delved into the large cloth bundle that she had brought from the ship and arrayed herself in a simple, but elegant, gown of pale-blue silk, under a light surcoat of white linen that matched her cover-chief and wimple. The meal had already begun when they arrived at the palace and their appearance caused a minor sensation at the table where their group habitually sat. With an awestruck Alice trailing behind as a chaperone, the men stumbled to their feet as John handed Hilda on to the end of a bench, then sat alongside her, with Alice opposite, next to Hawise’s maid.

John mischievously introduced Hilda as his ‘business partner from Devon’ just arrived on one of their own vessels, which raised a few disbelieving eyebrows, especially from Mistress d’Ayncourt.

‘Can I also join this business, if the partners are all like this exquisite lady?’ asked Ranulf gallantly, earning himself a poisonous glance from Hawise.

William Aubrey, Renaud de Seigneur and even the celibate Bernard de Montfort became benign and attentive as they beamed at the delectable woman from the far west. They snapped their fingers at the serving boys to bring more food and wine and though it was John’s prerogative to place the choicest morsels on her trencher, Renaud insisted on filling her wine cup from the special flask of Anjou wine that he habitually brought to the table.