'You are going to great deal of trouble and discomfort for this Lady Joan,' observed Nesta, with a tightening of her lips which suggested the dawning of disapproval. 'I presume she is pretty? You could never resist a damsel in distress, could you?'
John grabbed her wrist and pulled her down on to the bench alongside him, throwing his arm around her shoulders and hugging her to his chest. 'Jealous, are we?' he growled, planting a smacking kiss on her cheek. 'Yes, she is fair, though not at all my type. You are my type, you Welsh hussy.'
Mollified, Nesta cuddled closer to him, oblivious of the grinning Cornishman opposite and the slightly askance glances of the celibate Thomas.
'Very well, Sir Crowner, as long as you deliver her husband to her and don't get up to any of your tricks with the fair lady.' Like Matilda, Nesta was well aware that John had a roving eye, and though she felt that during the past months he had remained faithful to her, she accepted that like most active men he would have difficulty in resisting temptation if it was placed squarely in his path,
'I'll keep an eye on him,
cariad
,' said Gwyn in the Welsh-Cornish patois they used between them. When Thomas was there, they usually reverted to English, but just to tease him Gwyn sometimes lapsed into the Celtic that was the first tongue of Nesta and himself, and which John had picked up from his mother when a child.
Thomas scowled and in reprisal said something in Latin, which none of them understood, but which sounded sarcastic.
John placated his clerk by telling him how much he depended upon him to look after the coroner's business while they were away. 'You know as much about the system as I do, Thomas. I have no doubt that all will be recorded on your immaculate rolls when we get back.'
'What happens if another guildsman gets murdered, Crowner?' asked the priest rather tremulously.
'Tell the sheriff and Ralph Morin, that's all that can be done. After all, it's their business to chase criminals, not mine. But don't meet trouble halfway, my lad. We've had no problems of that sort for a while, so offer up some spare prayer, in that chapel of yours so that it continues that way.
CHAPTER TWELVE
In which Richard de Revelle goes hunting on Dartmoor
The coroner and his officer made better progress eastwards than they had expected, as the rain had melted away the snow but had stopped before the roads became totally mired. A moderate east wind helped to dry up the tracks and by the early morning of the day after they left Exeter, they were leaving an inn at Bridport and making their way at a brisk trot towards Dorchester.
At dawn that day, men were also on the move many miles to the west, riding out from Berry Pomeroy Castle.
Henry's bailiff Ogerus Coffin and the reeve from Hempston Arundell were at the head of the column, with the two lords behind them. Then came the rest of the men, a collection of castle guards, yeomen and freemen from Berry, seated on a motley collection of horses, ranging from an old destrier to several rounseys, and from a lady's palfrey to a few packhorses taken from a baggage train.
Their armament was equally diverse, the guards having pikes and maces, the lords their swords, and the rest of the men a variety of weapons, including axes, staves and a couple of chipped, dented swords.
One of the posse was the chief huntsman from Berry Pomeroy and he had brought four of his hounds with him, who loped at his horse's heels, when they were not darting off into the bushes to investigate the scent of foxes and badgers.
Altogether, the posse consisted of twenty-two men, some ill at ease with this task, which was far removed from their usual occupation of ditching, thatching and ploughing - and several of them were secretly unhappy at having to harass the rightful inhabitants of Hempston, who they felt had already suffered enough.
One of their leaders was also not all that enamoured of the affair. Sir Richard de Revelle felt that the day would be far better spent in his comfortable manor at Revelstoke, sitting before a large fire with a glass of brandy-wine in his hand, and with another large meal when dinnertime came along. Instead, he was jogging along a winding track alongside the River Dart, shivering inside his riding cloak in spite of the padded gambeson under his chainmail hauberk. He was the only one wearing any form of armour, apart from a few men with iron helmets. Henry de la Pomeroy had a thick tunic of boiled leather under his colourful tabard emblazoned with his family crest, though little of this could be seen for the heavy, fleece-lined serge cape that he wore over the top.
The rest of the men were dressed in an irregular collection of outfits, including leather jerkins and several layers of woollen tunics; almost all wore breeches with cross-gartering on the legs.
'At least that damned frost has gone,' bawled Henry, riding alongside de Revelle. He seemed eager for a fight, having been in several campaigns in France and Ireland in former years. Richard was a reluctant soldier, he had wanted to become a lawyer as a stepping stone to politics, but his Crusader father had insisted that after attending the cathedral school at Wells, he became a squire to a local knight. Richard had managed to avoid any serious fighting, though he had become a hanger-on to several campaigns in northern France, which was where he had come to the attention of John, Count of Mortain.
Now he was trying to look as if he was enjoying this military escapade, having been persuaded by Henry that unless Nicholas was dealt with before the damned coroner persuaded Hubert Walter of the righteousness of de Arundell's claim, they would be in deep trouble.
As the column trotted through Buckfastleigh an hour later, curious stares followed them, as the sight of a troop of armed men riding purposefully along was a disturbing sight. A number of villagers ran inside, bolted their doors and crossed themselves fervently.
On they went, past the great Abbey of Buckfast, and then they began weaving through the valleys and over the downs of the rising ground that led on to the moor.
By noon they had covered another seven miles to Widecombe, where they halted to rest their horses and eat the provisions they had brought in their saddlebags - hard bread, cheese or scraps of meat in the case of the villagers, though the bailiff had carried better fare and a flask of wine for himself and the two manor lords.
'We'll not get back home by tonight, sirs,' he announced, stating the obvious. 'But I've told the innkeeper here that you two gentlemen will need a place to sleep, even if it's only by the firepit. The men can find themselves a barn or a cowshed.' After an hour's rest, they mounted up again and Henry de la Pomeroy conferred again with bailiff Coffin.
'Where do we go from here?' he demanded, being unfamiliar with this remote area of the county.
'Those miscreants are said to be somewhere on the West Webburn, the next valley to the west, Sir Henry. The alehouse keeper here is vague about it, I think he's afraid of vengeance from the outlaws if things go wrong.'
'How good is that information, bailiff?' snapped de Revelle, still unhappy with this whole expedition, especially if there was likely to be any danger to himself.
'Another of my spies from Ashburton says he has heard of Nick o' the Moor being camped somewhere up the vale of the West Webburn stream - though these villains are usually always on the move.'
'Where the devil is that?' brayed de Revelle.
'Widecombe is on the East Webburn brook, so it must be over there somewhere.' Ogerus Coffin waved vaguely to his left, where a misty grey hill obscured the view.
'The innkeeper says we must go back a little way, then cross over the foot of that hill towards Ponsworthy, then follow the next stream northwards.'
With these somewhat imprecise directions, the posse struggled back into the saddle and plodded off in the wake of the bailiff. An hour later, they were moving up a shallow valley, with grey-green slopes on either side and a small stream babbling down between straggling bushes and a few trees. There was no sign of habitation and the path was now reduced almost to a sheep track, forcing them to ride in single file.
Heavy low cloud darkened the day, but there was only a slight mist and no sign of the dense fog that could roll down within minutes and make the moor a dangerous place for travellers. In spite of the reasonably good visibility, none of them noticed a figure high up to their left, peering, over a large slab of moorstone.
Having noted their appearance and numbers, the ginger-headed lookout slipped back over the skyline of the ridge and ran like a hare ahead of them, easily outpacing the horses who were stepping delicately along the stony path, anxious to avoid twisting a hoof.
'Right, everyone take what they can carry and let's clear out.' Nicholas de Arundell spoke urgently, his commanding manner, honed on the battlefields of Palestine, spurring his men to frenzied activity. Peter Cuffe had just sprinted into the compound, bringing news of the approach of many armed men.
'I reckon we've got about half an hour before they're within sight,' he panted, as he seized a bow and bag of arrows that had been propped against the wall near the pile of ferns that was his mattress. The other men ran to the other two huts and collected their arms, as well as a few treasured possessions. Robert Hereward took the time to dump a bucket of earth on the fire, in the faint hope that the smoke would not give away the position of the ruined village. Others grabbed the best parts of their food supplies, a haunch of venison, some bread and two dead coneys.
Within minutes, they had assembled within the stone walls that marked the yard, ready to flee from the place that had been their home for many months.
'Who d'you reckon it is, Peter?' snapped Nicholas as he stared down the valley.
'Too far away to see, but I'm sure there were two destriers carrying men in long riding cloaks. The rest were a mixed bunch, at least twenty armed men.'
'Those bastards Henry Pomeroy and Richard Revelle, I'll wager,' snarled Hereward. 'Thinking they'll catch us unawares.'
'They want to finish us off,' growled Philip Girard.
'Maybe they've had wind of the coroner's promise to plead our case with the king?'
Nicholas tore his eyes away from the distant opening into the valley and turned to face the bleaker hills to the north.
'Let's go, we can talk about it later. Did you see any bowmen amongst them, Peter?'
The red-headed youth shrugged. 'Hard to tell, but I don't think so. They seemed a ragged lot, except for a few who may have been from a castle guard.' As they spoke, Nicholas led the dozen men towards the gap in the wall that led up on to the moor on the western side of the valley.
'We'll get up high and walk along the crest of the down, then cross the valley at Headland Warren, up on to Hookney Tor.'
As he left the compound, he cast a regretful glance at the tumbledown huts that had been their home. He wondered how many times it had been abandoned like this since men first came to Dartmoor. As they were filing through in orderly haste, the last man, Robert Hereward, suddenly stopped. 'Gunilda. What about Gunilda?' he exclaimed.
The others halted in their tracks and stared at each other. 'She went to the other side of the valley to set rabbit snares,' said one of the men. 'That was a couple of hours ago.'
'We can't leave her,' said Peter Cuffe, to whom the old woman had become a second mother.
'She'll hear these swine coming,' said Girard.
'Gunilda's a tough old bird, she'll go to ground until they're past.'
Nicholas swore all the oaths he had picked up in years of soldiering.
'We can't go looking for her now, we'd walk right into the path of these bastards.'
There was a hurried debate and though opinions were divided, de Arundell was forced to make a quick decision. 'We have to leave her or we'll all be caught down here in the open. I'm sure she'll hide out somewhere. God knows there are enough holes in the ground around here.'
Reluctantly, they began hurrying up the hillside, half a dozen of them carrying long yew bows over their shoulders. Within ten minutes, Challacombe Down looked as deserted as on the Day of Creation, the outlaws having vanished into the grey-green void that was the moor in winter.
The solitude did not last long, however: before long a faint jingle of harness and soft thud of hoofs could be heard as the intruders came tentatively into the valley of the West Webburn stream. Richard de Revelle did not like the feel of this country, he was tense and his eyes roved ceaselessly from side to side, in spite of Henry's brash assurances that they would wipe out these outlaws like a pack of rats. Once again, Richard earnestly wished that he was back in his hall at Revelstoke instead of sitting on a horse in the cold damp of Dartmoor, where violence and mayhem might break out at any moment.
'God's teeth, where are those swine hiding themselves?' growled Henry, his square head swivelling back and forth as he surveyed the bare hills and the scrubby trees along the stream. 'Ogerus, come here,' he yelled and the bailiff wheeled his horse around and walked back to his master.
'Do none of your men know this damned place?' he demanded. 'Where are we supposed to be looking for the bastards?'
Ogerus Coffin shook his head. 'We are all from down south, sire, this is a foreign land to us. But according to that man who gave the information, there is a ruined village here where the outlaws set up one of their camps.' Half a mile further on, he was proved to be right, for one of the men-at-arms from Berry Castle gave a shout and pointed over to the left. 'There are some buildings of sorts, across the stream, my lord,'