The Sanctuary Seeker (2 page)

Though he knew Saxon English well enough, Gwyn of Polruan spoke in his native Cornish, mainly to annoy the third member of the party.

‘Stop complaining, if that’s what you were doing in that barbaric tongue!’ whined the man bringing up the rear. He was half the size of the other two and sat his mule side-saddle, like a woman. An unfrocked priest, Thomas de Peyne was the coroner’s clerk and, in Gwyn’s eyes, as evil a little bastard as ever fouled the soil of Devon.

The weather had frayed their tempers more than usual, though they were ever a quarrelsome band. It was now more than three hours since they had left Exeter and the ceaseless downpour along the eastern edge of Dartmoor was enough to rot a man’s soul.

At last, the coroner’s horse breasted the ridge at the edge of Rippon Tor and Sir John de Wolfe could look down with relief on the wretched hamlet that was their destination. He brushed the rain off his eyebrows and wiped the drops from his hooked nose as he reined in his stallion. A tall, dark, sinewy man, John had a pair of deep-set, brooding eyes surmounting a long face with high cheekbones. It was a face that was not given to much humour - not that his previous soldiering life had offered much to laugh about.

The two other riders stopped alongside him and they sat in a row, gazing down without enthusiasm on the saturated countryside. To their right, a grey slope of bare moorland swept up to the granite crags of Chinkwell Tor and Hameldown Beacon, stark against the skyline. Below, the land canted away to the left, with clumps of trees thickening to forest as the moor gave way in the distance to the Dart valley. Strips of cultivated fields filled the middle foreground, with a dozen mean houses clustered around a wooden church. Further away they could see a band of dense woodland, beyond which drifting smoke indicated the next village, which the coroner thought to be Dunstone, though the few available maps of Dartmoor were a mixture of fact and speculation.

‘Another God-forsaken place,’ complained the hunchbacked clerk, in his irritating high-pitched voice. At frequent intervals he crossed himself nervously, where another man would pick his nose or belch.

John tapped his horse’s belly with his heel. ‘Come on, let’s see what they’ve got for us.’

He led the trio down the slope, their mounts picking their way carefully over the slippery mud and stones of the path down to the village of Widecombe.

A hundred paces from the muddy mound that served as the village green, they were met by a man with a reeve’s staff, who had ambled out of the nearest thatched hut. He was a rough-looking fellow, with unkempt hair plastered to his skull by the rain. Touching his brow in a grudging salute, he approached the grey horse. ‘You this crowner man, then?’ he demanded.

The rider glared down at him from under heavy black eyebrows that matched the dark stubble on his face, for against the fashion of the times he had no beard or moustache. With his black hood and dark riding cloak, he looked like a great raven perched on the horse.

‘Sir John de Wolfe to you, fellow! The King’s coroner in this county - so show some respect, will you?’

Though not a vain man, John was conscious of his new royal appointment, foreign though it might be to most people in this westerly limb of Coeur de Lion’s kingdom.

The manor reeve caught the snap in the coroner’s voice and became vastly more deferential. ‘Yessir, begging your pardon. Ralph the reeve, I am. Come indoors out of the rain, sirs.’

They squelched after him through the cattle-churned mud towards his long-house. Though the best in the village, it was a rickety low structure of frame and wattle, with a roof of tattered straw that sprouted grass and green moss. One end was a byre, from which came the lowing of cattle, most destined soon for the butcher’s knife as few could be kept fed through the coming winter.

The other half of the building was a windowless dwelling, smoke filtering from under the low eaves of the thatch. A puny lad hurried out from somewhere to take the reins of the horses and lead them off to feed.

- The three travellers followed the village headman, the tall figures of John and Gwyn having to stoop under the doorway to enter the house. In the dim light, they saw a bare room with an earthen floor.

A smoky fire burned dully in a clay hearth-pit in the middle, over which a small cauldron hung on a trivet. One crude door led to the cowshed and another to the luxury of an inner room, where two runny nosed barefoot children gaped with round eyes at these visitors from the unknown outer world.

‘Sit yourselves, sirs,’ invited the reeve. He pulled forward a low bench and a milking stool to the fire, virtually the only furniture, then called brusquely to a woman lurking in the darker recesses of the room.

‘Martha, bring ale, bread and some bowls for this broth you’ve got warming here.’ His English was thick with the local accent.

The official party shrugged off their sodden outer clothes and the reeve hung them on wooden pegs fixed into the wall-frames. He wondered where Gwyn and the small man fitted into the system. The Cornishman, betrayed by his accent, was even taller and certainly more massive than the crowner, but with his ginger hair and moustache, was a complete contrast to the saturnine blackness of Sir John. Although the man had no beard, his moustache was so profuse that is bushy tails hung down on both sides of his mouth and chin almost to his chest. His unruly shock of hair ran down as sidewhiskers to join his moustache.

Gwyn had been born forty-two years earlier, to a tin-miner who had turned to fishing and moved to the coast at Polruan, on the opposite side of the river entrance to Fowey. Gwyn had followed the fishing trade until he was seventeen, then come to Exeter to be a slaughterman in the Shambles. His huge size brought him an invitation to become bodyguard-cum squire to a local knight off to the wars. Fourteen years ago, in 1180, he had come to Sir John de Wolfe and they had remained together ever since, fighting and travelling in Ireland and to the Third Crusade.

The coroner’s clerk, Ralph saw, was a furtive little man with a dropped shoulder from old spinal disease and a shifty pair of eyes that darted everywhere and missed nothing.

The visitors were served a simple meal by the silent woman, who was pale and toothless though probably no more than thirty. While they slurped meat broth over the edges of wooden bowls and champed at the hard bread, the coroner sat and listened to the story of Ralph the reeve.

‘Found him before milking time, yesterday morning, we did,’ the village overseer said, with a certain morbid relish. Little happened in Widecombe and the finding of a body made an intriguing change from sheep foot-rot and mouldy oats, the only local topics of conversation. ‘Lying on the bank, he was - head in the water. In the little stream that runs into the Webburn, between here and Dunstone, a fair way beyond the old Saxon well.’

Gwyn’s ruddy face followed the story carefully, while the button eyes of the sparrow-like clerk jumped restlessly about the room.

Crowner John held up a large hand, keeping his half-consumed bowl of broth in the other. ‘Wait a minute, man! Whose side of the stream was it on yours or the next village’s?’

The reeve looked shiftily from John to Gwyn and then to the clerk.

‘The truth, man!’ snapped the coroner.

Ralph’s acne-scarred cheeks twitched and the single yellow tooth in his upper jaw stuck out like a spike as he grinned feebly. ‘ ‘T’was on our side, sir … though I’ll swear those damned Dunstone folk put him across in the night.’

The big Cornishman grunted. ‘Why should they do that? And how could you know they did?’

The reeve scratched vigorously at the lice on his head as an aid to thought. ‘To save themselves the trouble of all this new-fangled crowner’s business beggin’

your pardon, sirs,’ he added hastily. ‘That body wasn’t there the night before, for our pig boy was down in that there meadow till dusk.’

‘He could have come there and died during the night, you fool!’ whined Thomas.

Ralph shook his head. ‘His belly was blown up.

Been dead a while - a good few days at least, at this season.’

‘Washed down the stream, then?’ hazarded John.

The reeve rocked his head again. ‘ ‘Tis but a trickle of a brook before it joins the other stream. Not enough to move a badger, let alone a man’s corpse. No, them Dunstone people dumped him on us, so as not to be first finders, that’s for sure.’

The law laid an obligation on those who discovered a body, the so-called ‘First Finders’, to raise the hue-and-cry by immediately rousing the nearest four households and starting a chase for the culprit, as well as notifying the authorities. It was an obligation that carried penalties for errors, and most people made every effort to avoid being involved.

The coroner finished his soup, put the bowl on the floor and stood up, his head all but touching the rough beams above. He moved to stand right over the fire, letting the moisture steam off his worsted breeches and the grey knee-length surcoat, slit back and front for sitting a horse.

‘Any idea who this corpse might be?’ he snapped at the reeve. The battle-scarred veteran of a score of years spent campaigning in Ireland, France and Palestine, John had a demanding manner. A man of few words, he wasted none and, in turn, expected no fancy turns of phrase or beating about the bush.

Ralph shook his head again. ‘No one from these parts, Crowner. Not a serf nor villein, neither. More a gentleman, by his garments.’

John’s eyebrows rose a little, crinkling the forehead scar he had won from a Saracen sword outside Acre.

‘A gentleman? We’ll see about that. Where’ve you got him?’

The abruptness of his deep voice sent Ralph scurrying to get their cloaks, still dripping on the wall hooks. ‘In the tithe barn, just inside the entrance.

Starting to smell a bit, he is.’

They trooped outside to find that the rain had eased to a fine drizzle. The sodden village sat dejected in its valley and now a pall of white mist had settled on the moor above, heightening the feeling of isolation from the rest of the world. A few curious souls watched covertly from the doorways of their cottages as the procession left the reeve’s dwelling.

‘Over this way, sirs,’ called Ralph, splashing ahead towards the small church and larger barn that sat slightly below the crest of the village green.

John saw that the hamlet, set in a valley, was all slopes and mounds, but fertile from the soil washed down from the moors over aeons of time.

‘We called you right away, Crowner, just as we should,’ said Ralph virtuously. His initial truculence had long vanished, now that he realised that under the new law Sir John de Wolfe was a force to be reckoned with.

It was only a month since his own lord, Hugh FitzRalph, had assembled his six manor reeves and told them of various new laws that had filtered down from the royal court, where the King’s justiciar, Archbishop Hubert Walter, was ruling England now that Richard had returned to France.

One new regulation had come from the General Eyre, sitting in the county of Kent: in September, it had revived the ancient Saxon post of coroner.

To the ignorant reeves, including Ralph, Kent was as remote as the moon and coroners were equally incomprehensible. They had gathered that the new men would record illegal events and enquire into dead bodies, but their interest waned rapidly as FitzRalph’s clerk, the only man in the manor who could read, droned on. All that Ralph remembered was that if a death occurred violently or unexpectedly, a runner had to be sent straight away to Exeter to notify the sheriff and this new official - otherwise the village would be amerced, which meant a heavy fine. As he heaved at the tall, rickety door of the barn, it occurred to Ralph that if he wanted to keep the perquisites of his job as village reeve, he had better find out a little more about coroners and stick to the rules: if this hawkish black beanpole was crossed, he might prove a handful of trouble. As he wrestled with the door Ralph looked covertly at Sir John de Wolfe and decided that the stern, sallow face, with the deep furrows running down to the corners of the mouth, was that of a hard man. His great height and slightly hunched shoulders gave him the appearance of a bird of prey, ready to swoop on any wrongdoer. De Wolfe’s lips, though, made Ralph wonder if the new crowner made himself more agreeable to the ladies than he did to men: they had a full sensuality at odds with the man’s otherwise flinty appearance.

He jerked his mind back to reality and pushed the door wider, aiming a kick at several small boys who had followed them across the green. Three other men came and stood a respectful distance from the group.

‘Here we are, Crowner, I threw this sack over him for decency.’ He flicked off the rough hessian from the still shape on the ground and stood at the head of the cadaver with an almost proprietorial air.

John de Wolfe and Gwyn stood each side of the corpse and bent to view it more closely, while the clerk crossed himself and stood further away, holding a grubby cloth over his nose.

‘Smells a bit, don’t he?’ muttered Gwyn. It was merely an observation.

‘Told you he was corrupt,’ said the reeve, triumphantly.

‘He never died in our stream night ‘fore last, that’s for sure.’

John tilted his scabbard out of the way and squatted at the side of the body.

The front of the tunic and undershirt were ripped open and greenish-red veins could be seen across the swollen belly, making it look like marble. The face was slightly puffy and the open, sightless eyes were sunken and clouded.

‘His features are still fairly good, if we had someone who knew him,’ remained Gwyn.

‘They won’t be for long, though. Another few days above ground and his own mother wouldn’t recognise him.’ The coroner was an expert in corpses; he had seen thousands in all states of decay in the Holy Land and other campaigns. He prodded the flank with a finger, feeling the bubbling tenseness of the gas within.

‘Good clothing, as you said, reeve. Worn and dirty, but fair material. Looks French in style.’

‘What did he die of?’ grunted the ever-practical Gwyn, crouching on his large haunches alongside his master.