Fear in the Forest (32 page)

Sympathetic though he was, Ralph could see no way in which he could help in this.

‘Without the sheriff’s agreement – which he’ll never give me – I can’t take troops out of here, except in a dire emergency. Though we’ve had no trouble for fifty years, I’m sure it’s a hanging offence leaving a royal castle undefended.’

John reluctantly agreed with his point of view, but tried a compromise.

‘Just a few men, together with Gwyn and myself, could surely take those forester bastards and their pages?’

‘I’ve no doubt we could, John – but without Richard de Revelle’s consent, think what the consequences would be! One set of king’s men arresting or even slaying another set of royal officials. No, I’m sorry, I can’t risk either my job or my neck, even for you.’

The coroner sighed. ‘You’re right, Ralph. The only way is for me to get Hubert Walter to authorise a foray against all this unrest. Even then, he’ll take some persuading, as it looks as if a couple of bishops and their Prince John allies have a finger in this pie.’

The castellan nodded. ‘Finding the Justiciar is the problem. He’s so often away from Winchester or Westminster. I heard that he was visiting the King in Normandy some weeks ago, but whether he’s back or not, I can’t tell.’

‘It’s a long ride to Winchester, if it’s for nothing,’ agreed John glumly. ‘But I’ll have to do it soon, after I’ve spoken again to some of the barons like Ferrars and de Courcy.’

He had hoped that the atmosphere might have improved down at Idle Lane, but when he arrived at the inn he found Nesta still in the same apathetic state. As always, she got her maids to provide him with a good meal and sat quietly with him as he ate, but she was downcast and had little to say for herself. He gave her a detailed account of his visit to Manaton and the Woodmote, partly in an attempt to fill in as much of the silence as possible. Then he launched into his intention to ride to the seat of England’s government, wherever he could find it, to seek out his old commander in Palestine, the Chief Justiciar.

Nesta responded with little more than monosyllables and sighs, until John pulled her to him on the bench behind the screen and tried to get at the root of the trouble. He had little success, however, as she dissolved into quiet weeping again, which both embarrassed and terrified him. Peering over the top of the hurdle, he looked to see if the patrons were eavesdropping, but the relatively few drinkers were either unaware or were studiously pretending not to notice. John wished that they were upstairs in the privacy of her room, but for her to stumble across the taproom, red eyed and sniffling, would be worse than sitting tight. He wondered whether he really wanted to ask her whether he should stay the night – and immediately felt disloyal for preferring even his empty house to the prospect of endlessly trying to break through the barrier that had sprung up between them.

For her part, Nesta knew that nothing had changed, but that some kind of nemesis was fast approaching. Try as she would, she could not bring her to tell him that he was not the father of this creature in her womb, as she had begun to think of it. She knew well enough that this big, awkward, craggy man was doing his utmost to be kind and gentle to her, but the great lie that she was living prevented her from responding.

Eventually, as the evening wore on, she did invite him to stay, managing to reason that she might as well lie passively in his arms all night as suffer alone. John took this as Fate’s rebuff to his previous reluctance to share her bed and, as the daylight faded, the sad pair climbed the ladder to her tiny chamber.

The following day, John was called to the port of Topsham, some four miles downriver, to deal with two deaths on a trading ship. The vessel had been beached on the mud alongside the wharf for unloading, but when the tide came back in the hull suddenly tilted over, as the uneven removal of a few tons of cargo had made her unstable. One stevedore was crushed between the ship’s side and the wharf, while a sailor who had been mending rigging was tossed into the swirling flood tide, his drowned body being recovered a quarter of a mile upstream.

The examination of the scene and witnesses, followed by an acrimonious inquest, in which de Wolfe accused the ship-master and the wharf-owner of negligence in discharging the cargo, lasted much of the day, and it was early evening when he returned to Exeter.

He went straight to Martin’s Lane and sat quietly in his echoing hall with his dog and a quart of cider for an hour, trying to deny to himself that he was reluctant to go to the Bush and face his mistress’s misery. Mary came to refill his pot and then stood looking down at him sternly, one fist on her hip, her handsome face creased in a frown.

‘What’s to become of me, Crowner?’ she demanded. ‘I’ve not cooked a meal for days, I’ve hardly seen you and you’ve slept here one night since your wife left. Should I look around for another master? – though God knows where I’ll find one.’

‘Mary! Don’t talk like that. I’ve told you everything will go on as before,’ he said placatingly. ‘Whether Matilda comes home or stays away, I have to live somewhere, break my fast, have my shirts and tunics washed and my fire made up in winter.’

‘And what if your Welsh lady decides to do all that, where will I be then?’

‘That seems very unlikely, good Mary. I just don’t know what’s going to happen between us.’

He looked so crestfallen that she softened immediately, as she had done so often in the past. Crouching down beside him, she listened while he poured out his tale of woe concerning Nesta.

‘She’s lonely and frightened, John. Afraid of losing you and of a hopeless future for herself.’

He waved his hands in desperation. ‘I’ve told her over and over, I’m glad about the child and will stand by her. Why won’t she listen?’

Mary stood up, shaking her head helplessly. ‘You men will never understand, will you? A pregnant woman, especially one in her position, is uncertain, bewildered, vulnerable – not that I’ve been like that myself, but I’ve seen it in a few.’

Unable to help him any more, she took herself off to her kitchen to make him some supper, for he guiltily decided to delay going down to the Bush until later. As fate decided, he was destined not to visit the inn that evening, for a couple of hours later, as the sun was setting, Gwyn turned up at his front door. Usually, his blustery arrival was a summons to some new death, assault or rape, but this evening he had more interesting news.

‘I’ve been having a few jugs in the White Hart,’ he announced, mentioning an alehouse in Southgate Street. ‘There’s been a horse market on Bull Mead today and some of the buyers and dealers were in the tavern. I saw that little fellow again, the one the outlaw was talking to in the alehouse at Ashburton.’

De Wolfe waved him to a chair and filled a pot for him from his ale-jug. Normally Gwyn would never come into the hall if he could help it, in case Matilda was there, as she thought him a Celtic barbarian and made her feelings painfully clear.

‘You mean the man who seemed to have some dealings with … what was his name, Martin Angot?’

‘That’s him! Now tonight I did some eavesdropping and found that this fellow’s a horse-trader,’ explained Gwyn, pleased with his spying activities. ‘I even got his name, listening to people who were either contented or complaining about what they had bought or sold. They’d all been drinking a fair amount, so they weren’t speaking in whispers, by any means.’

John was used to his officer’s long-windedness. ‘So what was his name?’ he asked patiently.

‘They called him ‘Stephen’ and ‘Cruch’, so I reckon he’s Stephen Cruch,’ he grinned, wiping ale from his huge moustache. ‘I gathered from the potman that he was sleeping tonight in the loft of the White Hart – but I also heard him tell some fellow that he was leaving early in the morning for Ashburton.’

‘Our Thomas said that he had come across a horse-dealer in Buckfast who had dealings with this priest, Edmund Treipas. What shall we do about this, Gwyn?’ pondered de Wolfe.

‘We could jump him and beat some truth from the fellow. I could take him blindfold, with one hand in my pouch!’

John grinned at his henchman’s enthusiasm. ‘Would he recognise you, if he saw you?’ he asked.

Gwyn shook his shaggy head. ‘I very much doubt it. I kept well back in the tavern in Ashburton and didn’t approach Martin Angot until this Cruch fellow left. There’s no reason for him to have remembered me from a crowded taproom. And he certainly wouldn’t have seen me tonight. I kept well down on a stool among the throng that was there.’

De Wolfe thought about this for a moment.

‘He’s never seen me, to my knowledge. Tomorrow, could we not follow him discreetly to see if he gets up to anything near Ashburton?’

The Cornishman readily agreed. ‘Surely, if we keep well back, he’ll not notice us on the main west road. There are always travellers going back and forth.’

The coroner hawked and spat into his empty fireplace. ‘It would be good to catch him meeting up with an outlaw again. Then we could seize the pair of them and make them talk.’

It was agreed that they should ride out of the West Gate as soon as it opened in the morning, keeping a sharp eye open for the horse-dealer. They would ride a few miles along the Plymouth road and hide in the trees to await his passing, then follow him at a distance.

John suggested that, as they would both be up before dawn, they had better get a good night’s sleep, a rather shamefaced excuse not to go down to the Bush that evening.

‘We’re not taking the little fellow with us, I hope?’ grunted Gwyn.

‘No damned fear. He’d stand out like a sore thumb, sitting sideways on that old nag! If there were a chase, he couldn’t keep up.’

‘And if there were a fight, he’d wet himself and run!’ chortled Gwyn, not without some affection for the timid clerk.

In the early light the following day, they sat waiting for the city gate to open, lurking up the street towards the little church of All Hallows-on-the-Wall, whose priest had come to a nasty end a few weeks earlier.

De Wolfe watched the crowd clustered inside the gate, in case Stephen Cruch had also risen early, but there was no sign of him as the stout iron-bound gates swung apart. They waited for the confused thrusting and shoving to abate, as the people going out pushed past the traders and herdsmen coming in to market, driving sheep, calves and pigs before them, followed by a cavalcade of country folk carrying baskets of vegetables, poultry, eggs and everything else to satisfy the hunger of the citizens of Exeter.

Once the road was clear, they trotted out and forded the river, de Wolfe’s legs getting wetter than usual as he had borrowed a smaller mare from Andrew the farrier, the huge destrier Odin being too conspicuous for a surveillance exploit. As they clipped down the road that led to Cornwall, John decided to increase the distance before they turned aside to wait for the horse-dealer.

‘If he’s going to meet anyone, I doubt it’ll be much before Ashburton, as it’s too far away from your outlaw’s hideout. So we’ll put a good ten miles between us to avoid having to follow him too far.’

He silently hoped that Cruch was going to ride out that day and not decide to sleep off his drinking on his mattress in the city. It was pure speculation that he might be meeting anyone, other than in the course of his legitimate business.

An hour and a half later, John decided that they had gone far enough and turned off on a stretch of track where the trees came close to the edge of the dusty, rutted road. They found a place where some blackthorn bushes gave cover, then put their mounts on head-ropes farther back in the trees, where a small clearing offered them some grass to crop.

From where they sat on the ground behind the bushes, they could just glimpse the road, enough to see who was passing. Gwyn had taken the inevitable bread and hard cheese from his saddle pouch, along with a flask of cider, and they waited in comfort for over half an hour.

As Gwyn had prophesied, there was a constant trickle of traffic along what was the busiest road in this most western part of England. Ox-carts laden with goods, bands of pilgrims on their long journey to Canterbury, drovers with cattle and sheep, merchants on horseback and lesser folk on foot – all passed the gap in the blackthorn bushes. Only priests and the poorest folk travelled alone, having nothing worth stealing, the rest being in groups for mutual protection. A couple of clumsy horse-drawn carriages bore manor-lords or their wives and had an armed escort of a few men with pikes and swords against possible attack by footpads and outlaws.

After three-quarters of an hour, when all the cider had gone, Gwyn began to get restive. ‘D’you think the bloody man isn’t coming? Maybe I misheard what was said. I couldn’t get too near.’

‘Have patience!’ muttered De Wolfe. ‘Though if he’s a horse-dealer, he should have a good mount, which should have got here quicker than we did.’

Another ten minutes went by until Gwyn hissed in his ear.

‘That’s him, the fellow on the white stallion!’

John peered through another gap in the bushes and saw a rider trotting past on a big, good-looking horse. He was a small man in a brown tunic and breeches, with a floppy woollen cap on his head. As soon as he had passed, Gwyn jumped up and collected their own mounts, coiling the head-ropes on to his saddle bow.

The coroner climbed on to his chestnut mare. ‘There’s no great hurry. We don’t want to get too near. That big white steed’s all too conspicuous.’

They waited until a pair of merchants with two well-armed servants passed, then swung behind them and tried to keep Stephen Cruch in view. All was well for a mile or two, but the horse-trader was riding slightly more quickly than the merchants and was pulling ahead, so eventually the coroner and his officer had to risk overtaking.

Thankfully, a few minutes later two other riders came out of a sidetrack just behind Cruch and gave cover for another couple of miles until once again John and Gwyn were obliged to pass them.

‘This is getting difficult,’ growled John. ‘Try to make yourself look smaller!’ he added facetiously to the great red-haired lump.