The Poisoned Chalice (4 page)

The reeve had a vague idea, gleaned from the manor steward, that Justiciar Walter, in the name of the King, had revived the old Saxon office of coroner. In September, the General Eyre of judges in Kent had decreed that, in every county, three knights and a clerk be appointed to ‘keep the Pleas of the Crown'. If he had had the education of Thomas, he would have known that in Latin this was
custos placitorum coronae
, from which sprang the title of ‘coroner'. Keeping these Pleas meant recording all legal events, such as the imposition of fines, seizing of deodands, investigation of sudden and unnatural deaths, taking the confessions of sanctuary seekers, confiscation of the property of hanged felons, and a host of others that were required to be presented to the royal judges, who visited each county periodically to dispense what passed for justice.

Aelfric understood little of this. He was an older man than those who usually held the job of village headman. A widowed freeman, his house was run by a crippled daughter. His two sons cultivated his croft and gave the usual work-service to the manor.

It was the daughter who now brought the coroner's team a meal of broth and coarse bread, which they ate sitting around the fire in the centre of the earthen floor. There was no furniture in the room, but against the walls were heaps of dry bracken and straw covered with rough blankets, doing service as the family's beds.

‘Thought a reeve could have risen to a table and a couple of stools,' muttered Gwyn, as he wolfed down the last of the soup from his warped wooden bowl.

Aelfric had gone out again, allegedly to check on the horses, and the woman had vanished into the lean-to shed attached to the back of the house, which served her as kitchen and dairy. A milking cow was tethered at the other end of the long room, behind a wattle screen that divided the living quarters from the stable, though it failed to divert the strong smell of fresh dung.

Sir John's business-like mind was on other things that his comfort. ‘This miserable village is the nearest to the wreck, so they must be the ones involved,' he said. ‘Thomas, you are the best at ferreting out secrets so get yourself outside when you've finished that crust and see what you can discover.'

The diminutive clerk, flattered at his master's faith in his ability as a spy, swallowed the last crumbs and slid out of the door. His narrow face and long nose were almost quivering at the prospect of doing something useful for the coroner. Though the other two usually treated him with impatient scorn, he felt a loyalty to Sir John born mainly of the gratitude he felt for his master having saved him from shame and destitution. Until two years ago, Thomas de Peyne, the youngest son of a minor knight in Hampshire, had been a teacher-priest at Winchester Cathedral, holding the living of a small parish nearby, which brought him in a regular stipend. Then he was disgraced and dismissed for an alleged indecent assault on one of his young female pupils. Though he steadfastly claimed that the girl had maliciously led him astray, he had been unfrocked and had lost his living and his lodgings. He had remained semi-destitute, eking out a bare existence by scribing letters for merchants, until John took him on as coroner's clerk. Humpbacked he might be, from old phthisis when a child, but a crafty intelligence and undoubted prowess with the written word compensated for his lack of good looks.

After Thomas had left, the drab daughter of the reeve silently limped in with a pitcher of her own brewed ale, together with some misshapen clay drinking pots. The coroner and his officer poured their beer and squatted near the fire, which smouldered in its clay-lined pit in the middle of the room. The only light came from the glowing logs, as the woman had blown out the wick that floated in a dish, to save her precious tallow.

‘Where's this fellow gone?' muttered Gwyn suspiciously. ‘It's a hell of a long time to see to a few horses.'

‘I'm wondering if he's arranging for a few matters to be attended to down at the seashore.' John's black eyebrows came down in a frown as he contemplated the potential misdeeds of his countrymen.

‘I could persuade him to answer a few questions when he comes back,' suggested the Cornish giant, hopefully raising his clenched fist. He had been with Sir John for many years, acting as his bodyguard: he was of too lowly origins for squiredom. Originally a fisherman from the far-western village of Polruan at the mouth of the Fowey river, he had taken service in various wars as a mercenary until John de Wolfe had taken him on.

De Wolfe, who possessed little sense of humour, shook his head at Gwyn's offer of violence. ‘I'll just get his version of what happened. Then in the morning we'll see for ourselves – though they'll lie through their teeth if it suits them.'

When Aelfric came back some time later, the coroner told him curtly to give him the full story. Hunkering down near the fire, the reeve pulled a ragged sheepskin tighter around his shoulders to keep off some of the draught that whistled through the ill-fitting door and shutters. ‘Three days now, God sent this gale to plague us,' he grumbled, pouring some of his daughter's beer into a pot. ‘The night before last – Sunday that would be, as we went to the church that day – it blew like the end of the world was coming. And in the morning, we found wreckage and bodies on the beach.'

‘How many bodies – and who found them?' demanded John.

‘Three corpses, lying at the high-water mark among a scatter of planks and cordage that spread from the Livermead rocks up the beach. They were first seen by Oswald, a fisherman who lives in a hut down by the water's edge.'

‘I'll need to speak to him, if he was the First Finder, he should have reported it straight away.'

Aelfric looked blankly at him, his loose-lipped mouth gaping to show yellow stumps of rotten teeth.

‘Well, he did! He came and told me right away,' objected the old Saxon.

‘And did you tell your lord or his steward at the manor?'

Under the new arrangements, any failure of individuals or the community to keep to the letter of the law, led to fines that helped to boost the king's sagging finances. One such failure was to neglect to follow the complex procedures about protecting a dead body until the coroner was notified and came to inspect it and hold an inquest.

‘But here you are, Crowner. You were notified as soon as possible.'

‘No thanks to you, reeve! We had to depend on the good offices of a hermit and the White Canons. That may yet cost you and your village a few marks.'

Aelfric groaned. ‘We are poor here – it's bad ground for crops so close to the salt water. And the fishing is not so good as it is at Brixham, across the bay there.'

John ignored the familiar pleas of poverty. Everyone was poor in England since the Lionheart had squeezed them dry for the Crusade and his ransom – and now to pay for the French wars to regain land lost by his brother John while Richard was abroad.

‘How did this hermit get involved?' asked Gwyn, putting another log on the fire.

‘Wulfstan comes down to the beach to collect driftwood and to seek shellfish in the pools. He was there soon after Oswald found the dead 'uns and when we buried them in the sand. As he was there, we thought he may as well say a prayer over them to shrive them, even though he's not in Holy Orders.'

‘Why not get your parish priest to do it? That's what he's there for.'

The reeve shifted uneasily in the gloom. ‘He wasn't well that day, Crowner.'

‘Drunk, you mean,' sneered Gwyn, who had a poor opinion of priests, including Thomas de Peyne.

‘Burying the bodies before I could examine them is also a misdeed that attracts a fine,' observed the coroner sternly.

‘We didn't know that, sir,' grumbled the reeve. ‘And we couldn't let them lie on the beach where we found them. The tides are rising with the moon, for one thing. By today, they'd have been sucked out to sea again.'

John saw the logic of this, but said nothing.

‘How do we know they drowned, then?' demanded Gwyn.

Aelfric looked at him as if he was a simple child. ‘How else should wrecked sailors die?' he asked. ‘And when we lifted them spurts of water came from their mouths.'

‘That's no guide to drowning, man! Drop a dry corpse into a millpond and he'll fill with water. Did you see froth at their noses and mouths?'

The reeve nodded, glad of this leading question. ‘Yes, one of them. A young fellow, little more than a youth.'

John interrupted them. ‘Have you any idea what vessel this might have been?'

Aelfric shook his head, the greasy grey hair swinging about his pinched face. ‘There were planks and rigging all about – and a few broken casks. One of the planks had something carved upon it, but no one can read here except the priest – and I told you he was unwell.'

John's own illiteracy prevented him from commenting on the villager's inability to identify the ship. ‘Any cargo washed up? Were any goods salvaged?'

The village headman held up his hands in the universal gesture of denial. ‘Wreckage only, sir. There was a lot of dried fruit along the water's edge, but it was ruined by salt and sand, not even good enough for us to feed to the swine.'

‘What about these casks?' demanded John.

The reeve took a deep swallow of his ale before answering. ‘I've never seen wine barrels, Crowner, but I know our manor lord had one at Christmas two years ago. These bent staves could have been from shattered casks – though I have heard that this Frenchy fruit do get transported in barrels, too.'

There was little else that Aelfric could – or would – tell them, and soon they were sleeping on the piles of bracken, the reeve with his daughter and sons along one wall, Sir John and his officer along the other, furthest from the stench of the cow-byre.

Before he slept, the coroner's mind wandered over a variety of problems. He wondered if his clerk was worming out any better information than they had squeezed from the reeve. John respected the intelligence of the former priest, just as he envied his prowess with book and quill, but the soldier in him could not fail to feel derision for the puny body and craven timidity of the little clerk. He had taken him in at the express pleading of his friend John de Alecon, one of the few senior churchmen for whom he had any respect.

‘He's my nephew, God forgive me,' the priest had said. ‘My sister will never speak to me again if I let the damned fellow starve. He's a genius with pen and parchment, even if he's over-fond of putting his hand up young girls' skirts.'

The opportunity arose to hire someone who could read and write properly, rather than painfully scrawl a signature, it had seemed too good to miss. Now Thomas was on a stipend of twopence a day and had a pallet to sleep on in the servant's quarters of a canon's house in the cathedral Close.

The coroner's thoughts drifted on to the perennial problem of his snobbish wife Matilda, sister to the sheriff. Married for sixteen years, he had achieved domestic harmony by being absent at the wars for most of that time. But since he had returned from the Holy Land last year, after accompanying Coeur de Lion on his ill-fated journey home, he had been stuck in Exeter with Matilda.

With faults on both sides, their relationship had gone steadily downhill: now they hardly spoke to each other except to exchange recriminations. Yet Matilda had energetically campaigned for John's appointment as coroner, using her family influence with her reluctant brother and his high ecclesiastical friends – although mainly to further her own social ambitions to be the wife of an important royal official.

John had been in two minds about taking the post, even though his strong military links with both the King and his soldier-Justiciar Hubert Walter made him a strong favourite for the job. However, as the coronership was officially elected by the burgesses of Exeter, influenced by the sheriff of Devon, Matilda made sure that her brother overcame his dislike of her husband sufficiently to support his appointment. De Revelle had himself only just been reinstated as sheriff, after being put out of office for months because of his links with Prince John's rebellion. The crafty young brother of King Richard had taken the opportunity of the Lionheart's incarceration in Austria, to try to seize the throne, but the attempt had been a dismal failure.

There should have been three coroners established in Devonshire, but in September only two could be found. This was partly due to the arduous nature of the post in such a large and wild area, especially as it was unpaid. In fact, the Justiciar had decreed that only knights with an income of at least twenty pounds a year could be coroners. The assumption was that if they were sufficiently well-off they would not need to milk the system, as did most sheriffs, by embezzling funds intended for the royal treasury.

The other knight was Robert Fitzrogo, who was meant to have jurisdiction over much of the rural area, especially in the north and west of the county while John covered Exeter and the more populous south. But within a fortnight of taking office, Fitzrogo had had a riding accident, and died, leaving John to deal with the whole of Devon.

Though Matilda had succeeded in getting her husband into the upper ranks of county society, she now complained that his duties kept him out of their house and her company on an almost permanent basis. John had soon discovered that he liked the work and, even more, that it kept him away from his wife almost as much as he had been when he was campaigning at the wars. It also gave him ample opportunity to visit his several mistresses, especially Nesta, the vivacious Welsh widow who kept the Bush tavern in Exeter.

His final rumination, before sleep overcame him in this odorous dwelling, was about the forthcoming visitation of the Chief Justiciar to Exeter within the next few days. He knew him well, as Hubert Walter had been Richard the Lionheart's second-in-command in Palestine and had been left in charge of the English army when the King sailed for home, with John as one of his escorts.