Crowner Royal (Crowner John Mysteries) (18 page)

When conversation began to flow, the others were intrigued by her strong Devonshire dialect.

Waspishly, though she had spoken English since infancy, Hawise addressed her in French, assuming she was some country bumpkin and she was chagrined to receive a polite reply in the same language. Though coming from a farm on the de Wolfe manor, Hilda had often travelled across the Channel with her seafaring husband and was proficient in both Norman-French and Flemish.

‘Have you known our respected coroner for long, madam?’ enquired Hawise haughtily, expecting to learn that the blonde was a recent acquisition of his.

‘Only about three-and-thirty years,’ replied Hilda calmly. ‘We grew up together, you see.’

John noticed a grin spread over Renaud’s face – he seemed to relish someone giving his wife as good as she gave.

William Aubrey, who seemed enthralled by the good-looking newcomer, monopolized the conversation for several minutes and Hilda, sensing that John wanted her to appear in the best light possible, adroitly avoided revealing that she was the daughter of a farm reeve and managed to let it be known that she was a widow, who had a stone-built house flanked by pillars in the Breton style.

Hawise made a last effort to gain the upper hand. ‘Surely you cannot relish living out your life in a rural backwater like Devon,’ she said sweetly. ‘Now that you have been to the great city of London, would you not like to stay here? No doubt you could find a rich husband here to support you.’

Hilda gave her a condescending smile in return. ‘I think not, as I have returned only yesterday from Antwerp, which in some ways I feel is as interesting. And as for a rich husband, I have no need of one – but would settle for a man I could love and respect.’

Glowering, Hawise retired from the debate and concentrated on her food and drink, ignoring the smirks of the archdeacon and her damned husband. As soon as she had finished eating, she hauled her maid and husband away from the table and with a last grimace at John, flounced away.

Eventually, de Wolfe prised Hilda away from the attentions of the other men on the table and they strolled back to Long Ditch in the evening sun, with Alice pattering along happily behind.

When she was safely tucked up on her bag of hay in the downstairs chamber, John and Hilda spent another night of lovemaking and slumber, tinged with sadness at the realisation that it would be the last for some time. Naked under a linen sheet in the warm summer night, they talked of many things, but never about the possibility of being wedded. In the early hours, when the blonde’s regular breathing against his shoulder told him she was sound asleep, John pondered long and hard about what could be done. He was here in London, but that was not an insoluble problem. He could give up being a coroner and return home to Exeter, as, financially, it would make no difference. Coroners were obliged to remain unpaid, on pain of dismissal – and he had more than an adequate income from the wool business, as well as a share of the profits of his family’s two manors at Stoke-in-Teignhead and Holcombe which his elder brother managed so efficiently. The other option would be for Hilda to come to live with him in Westminster, but he knew this would be difficult, as she was devoted to her home village, and though she might well manage the short transition to Exeter if circumstances allowed, she would never emigrate to London.

Dawn was creeping through the shutters before he fell asleep again, though a bare hour remained before they had to rise. Even this was delayed for a while by frantic valedictory passion, but soon it was time for a breakfast of oat gruel, eggs fried in butter and barley bread, before Roger Watts arrived to take Hilda back to the ship.

John, Gwyn and Thomas decided to squeeze the last drops of Hilda’s company by riding back with them to the city to where the
St Radegund
was berthed just downstream from the bridge.

The forty-five-foot cog was riding high on the tide when they reached it and soon Hilda and Alice, with their belongings tied in a bundle, were climbing the plank to the deck. John saw them settled in the small cabin on the afterdeck, little more than a tiny hutch with a couple of mattresses inside.

‘There’s a north-easterly breeze,’ declared the shipmaster. ‘So once we get around Kent, we should make good time to the Exe – maybe back there in four days.’

John crawled into the deckhouse to stow Hilda’s bundle and took the opportunity to embrace her and kiss her lips in semi-privacy.

‘I’ll be back in Devon before long, by hook or by crook,’ he promised. ‘If we can get away during this progress of the court to Gloucester, I’ll see you soon, my love. Otherwise, I’ll just ride back to Devon and to hell with them.’

As soon as the tide began to ebb, the mooring ropes were cast off and the single square sail was hoisted. With Roger Watts leaning on the steering oar, the little cog drifted out into the river and began tacking downstream. John, with his officer and clerk, stood on the wharf and watched their link with Devon gradually shrink in size as it went towards the distant sea. The woman and the girl fluttered kerchiefs for a time and John waved back, but soon he turned abruptly on his heel and strode to where they had left their horses.

‘Let’s go, this place stinks of fish,’ he growled, for the quay where the vessel had been moored was near Billingsgate. In pensive silence, he rode back through the city streets, ignoring the press of people and the raucous cries of stallholders and hawkers. In spite of the crowds, London suddenly seemed empty without Hilda of Dawlish.

The good fate which kept John’s time with Hilda free from duties, conveniently expired as soon as she sailed away.

After they reached the palace and handed over their horses to the ostlers, de Wolfe and Gwyn strolled back to their dwelling to wait for their noon dinner, whilst Thomas slid away to attend to his tasks in the abbey library. Walking up the lane at Long Ditch, they saw Aedwulf and his fat wife at the door, talking to a man who John recognised as one of the proctor’s men from the abbey. There were two senior proctors in Westminster’s chapter, clergy who were responsible for legal matters, discipline and order, and they were physically assisted by several lay constables, of which this was one.

‘Can’t be Hilda this time,’ said Gwyn, recalling their similar arrival two days earlier. ‘And what’s going on up there?’

Much further away, beyond where the lane petered out into a path across the marshes, were several more men, tramping about in the reeds and coarse grass as if they were searching for something.

When they reached the house, the proctor’s man, a tall ginger fellow with a long staff that was his badge of office, gravely saluted de Wolfe with a hand to his forehead.

‘Sir John, the prior told me to seek you out to tell you that a body has been found. Likely a murder, by the looks of it.’

De Wolfe frowned, instantly suspecting that this might throw up some problems about jurisdiction.

‘Is he connected with the court? I have no power to deal with anyone else.’

The abbey constable shrugged. ‘That’s it, coroner. We don’t yet know who he is, but the corpse is no more than a few hundred paces from here. The prior and the proctors thought it might be best if you had a look, given it’s so near.’ He added an incentive. ‘Of course, it might turn out that he
is
from the palace, after all.’

John pointed towards the distant men trampling the boggy ground. ‘Is that where he is? When was he found?’

‘Not more than two hours since, sir. A shepherd came across him, face down in a reen.’ This was a local word for one of the ditches that drained the marshland.

‘I’ll keep your dinner hot, never fear,’ called Osanna from the doorway, as if she had already decided that he must go about his business. They followed the constable, who said his name was Roland, along the fast-diminishing lane by the Long Ditch and on to a track that went into a wide area of flat, soggy ground lying between the houses on King Street and distant trees that marked the Oxford Road, at least a mile away. It was poor pasture, fit only for sheep and goats – and that only in dry weather, for the many branches of the Tyburn and the Clowson Brook often overflowed and turned the land into a swamp. The path had been made over a crude causeway of brushwood to keep it above the mud, but this ended after a while and John cursed as his shoes squelched into what looked like black porridge.

‘Only the men herding animals come this way, usually,’ said Roland apologetically, ‘but we’ve not far to go now.’

He shouted and waved at the four men who were scattered over the area ahead of them and they began moving back to one spot, towards which they all converged.

‘Here he is, Crowner, just as he was found.’ The constable used his staff to prod the back of a body lying head down in a ditch filled with brackish water. The searchers came to stand in a half-circle before them, looking with ghoulish interest at the corpse in the reen.

‘Who are these people?’ demanded de Wolfe.

‘Two are servants I called from the abbey gardens – the others are local men who volunteered to help look for the weapon,’ answered Roland. ‘That one is the fellow who found the body.’ He pointed to a toothless grey-haired man dressed in a tattered hessian smock and serge breeches.

De Wolfe beckoned him closer. ‘Was the cadaver just like this when you found him?’

The old shepherd nodded vigorously. ‘The water was bloody when I saw it, Crowner, but the flow in the reen must have washed it away. All I did was lift his head for a moment, to make sure he was dead, sir. Wish now I hadn’t, the state he’s in!’ he added in a quavering voice.

John nodded to Gwyn who, well used to the routine, dragged the dead man’s feet back until the head came up out of the water.

It was all too clearly apparent what had upset the shepherd, for across the forehead, just below a fringe of iron-grey hair, was a deep cut the width of a hand, gaping open to expose the shine of the skull, which had several radiating cracks in the depths of the wound. In addition, the face had been battered so badly that his own mother would not have recognised him. He appeared to be of middle age and wore a short belted tunic, over which was a leather apron, both now blackened by peaty water. There was some dried blood on his temples and back of the neck, but as the shepherd had pointed out, the rest had been washed away.

‘That’s a hell of blow, Crowner,’ observed Gwyn, with professional detachment. ‘What caused it, I wonder?’

De Wolfe glared around at the men standing nearby. ‘You found no weapon when you searched, I take it?’

They shook their heads, but the shepherd spoke up again.

‘Begging your pardon, sir, but I reckon he wasn’t killed just here. He’s been dragged for a bit, look at those reeds and grass.’

They all turned to look at where the ragged old man was pointing, across the rough ground away from the path and towards the outer fringes of Westminster. John now noticed a faint track of crushed and bent vegetation running intermittently towards them.

With Gwyn close behind, he strode alongside the indistinct marks, cursing as his feet either twisted between lumpy tussocks of long grass or squelched into pools of mud. The proctor’s constable hurried behind them, but a few hundred paces further on, they all came to a halt.

‘Can’t see the trail any more,’ growled Gwyn. ‘The ground has risen a bit and got firmer.’ As they neared the houses on the western side of the village, they had climbed a couple of feet on to what used to be Thorney Island, the gravel bank that was the very reason for Westminster’s existence. By the same token, the grass became shorter and closer cropped by livestock, so that the trail vanished.

John turned around and looked back along the line they had followed, then swivelled and projected the direction ahead of them. ‘The nearest houses are those,’ he snapped, pointing at a row of huts and two-storeyed buildings a few hundred yards away.

‘That’s the top end of Duck Lane,’ said Roland. ‘Comes off Tothill Street, at the back of the abbey.’

‘Then you had better make some enquiries there, to see if anyone’s missing. Get someone to come and look at the corpse.’

They retraced their steps to the body and the constable sent the two abbey labourers back to Duck Lane as the coroner had ordered. ‘What are we to do with the corpse?’ he asked de Wolfe. ‘You’ve viewed it now, so can we shift the poor fellow back to the abbey dead-house?’

John pondered the matter, aware that it was a delicate situation. If the victim was connected with the palace, then he could assume jurisdiction – and even if he was from the abbey, then Abbot Postard had more or less confirmed that he was content for such cases to be handled by the Coroner of the Verge. But if the fellow were neither of these, then those officious bastards from the city would want to elbow him out of their way.

Gwyn virtually read his mind. ‘They’ll never know in London that this ever happened,’ he said, hopefully.

John shook his head stubbornly. ‘I don’t want to get mixed up in another squabble. It was only the day before yesterday that the Justiciar got the mayor and his sheriffs to compromise. We have to stick to the rules now that they’ve been made.’

‘So what do we do with the body?’ persisted the constable. ‘We can hardly leave it here to rot.’