The Awful Secret

Chapter One In which Crowner John mounts his horse

‘At last, Gwyn! I can do it without that bloody box!’

Later, John de Wolfe thought how strange it was that he should be so exultant at such a little thing, which would never have crossed his mind two months ago. Yet, in Martin’s Lane that morning, he was as pleased as a child with a new toy. The two men who watched him seemed just as delighted, but his servant Mary, who watched from the doorway of his house opposite, clucked under her breath at the infantile antics of three grown men.

The ‘bloody box’ was a set of crude wooden steps knocked together by Gwyn of Polruan. It had done sterling service for the past two weeks, in allowing de Wolfe to climb up on to his new horse, Odin. But this morning he had been able to discard Gwyn’s invention and put his whole weight on his injured left leg to lift the other into the stirrup. Now he sat solidly on the back of the patient stallion, a grin spreading across his normally stern face.

‘You’d better carry this crook for the time being, Crowner,’ advised Gwyn, the shaggy red-headed giant of a Cornishman who had been his henchman for almost twenty years. He handed up a walking stick, which de Wolfe had been using since he threw away his crutch three weeks earlier, and the coroner pranced the stallion up and down the lane for a few yards, turning and weaving in pure pleasure. Although he had been riding for the past ten days, the fact that he could now mount his own horse without climbing steps made him feel independent at last.

Mary shook her dark hair in mock despair and vanished into the nether regions of the house to cook the midday meal. Secretly she was as pleased as the men outside that her master was not only almost back to full physical fitness but that he should have lost his snarling frustration at being housebound for so many weeks.

It was in early January that he had broken his leg on the tourney field at Bull Mead. In his dying moments, de Wolfe’s beloved old horse, Bran, had pitched him to the ground. The coroner’s shin-bone had snapped, but thankfully it was a clean break, and Gwyn’s prompt action in lashing the leg to a plank with leather straps had kept it in a good position. The Cornishman had seen this done by the Knights Hospitaller in Palestine, and with the constant help of Brother Saulf, a monk from the little hospital of St John up near Exeter’s East Gate, the leg had mended rapidly. De Wolfe’s tough physique, hardened by years of soldiering, together with his wife Matilda’s relentless if grim-faced nursing, had had him back on his feet in three weeks.

Now, two months later, he was riding his horse again. ‘I’ll take him up to the castle, Gwyn,’ he called, and walked the black stallion up the narrow lane to the high street. His officer trotted alongside, his shaggy hair bouncing over the collar of his frayed leather cape.

As de Wolfe pushed his way through the crowded main street, thronged with people shopping at the stalls on each side and with carts and barrows jostling for passage, he was assailed by greetings, mostly congratulating him on his return to health. An early spring was in the air and, though it was cold, there was a clear pale blue sky overhead while the lack of rain for a week had allowed the usual slush of garbage underfoot to dry to a crumbly paste.

The houses and shops in the main thoroughfare were of all shapes and sizes, mostly wooden, but a few were now built in stone. Most were tall and narrow, crammed together like peas in a pod. Some had straw thatch, some crude turf, some wooden shingle roofs and others stone tiles. Hazy smoke filtered from under the eaves of most dwellings, only a few having new-fangled chimneys.

Suddenly, as he plodded sedately through the crowded street, he felt a prickling of the hairs on the back of his neck. Though not an imaginative man, de Wolfe knew from the experience of many an ambush that he was being watched. It was a sixth sense, an occult gift that had saved his life a few times in the French and Irish campaigns, as well as in Palestine. He had felt it yesterday when coming home from the tavern and had glimpsed a face peering around a wall, the man vanishing almost instantly as John turned in his direction. The features had seemed vaguely familiar, but despite racking his brains, he failed to recall who it might have been.

Now, again, he looked about him and once more the same face gazed fleetingly at him from the steps of St Lawrence. A split second later, the man, enveloped in a dark mantle, turned and vanished into the church. De Wolfe knew that if the fellow had no wish to be accosted he would have melted away by the time he slowly got himself down off Odin. He cudgelled his memory to recall the identity of that face so briefly seen, but still nothing came to mind. He shrugged and urged the stallion on again. It seemed unlikely that the man was an assassin – though there had been a plot against him a couple of months ago. Hopefully that was all over now.

A hundred yards short of the East Gate, John hauled his steed around to the left and walked him up the slope towards the castle, perched at the top corner of the city. From the ruddy colour of its local sandstone, it was always known as Rougemont, built by the Conqueror in the northern corner of the old Roman walls. Passing through an open gate in a wooden stockade, de Wolfe rode into the large outer ward, where the huts of the soldiers and their families half covered the slope to the inner fortifications. A few yards more and he came to the tall gatehouse where he had a cramped chamber on the top floor.

The solitary guard on the steep drawbridge saluted de Wolfe with a lift of his spear as he passed under the gateway and stopped opposite the low door of the guardroom. Immediately, a man-at-arms with a badge of seniority on his leather jerkin emerged, his craggy face softening into a grin of welcome. ‘Glad to see you, Crowner! How’s the leg today?’

De Wolfe looked down at Gabriel, the sergeant of the castle guard, an old friend and covert sympathiser in his running feud with the sheriff, his brother-in-law, Sir Richard de Revelle. ‘Better and better, Gabriel! For the first time I can mount my horse from the ground.’

To demonstrate his prowess in reverse, John lowered himself carefully from the stallion’s back and, with the stick in his left hand, limped resolutely into the guardroom and across to the foot of the narrow, twisting stairs that led to the upper storey. Gwyn and Gabriel stood behind him, looking anxious as he began the ascent. On the third step he slipped and only Gwyn’s brawny arms saved him from falling backwards out of the stairway entrance.

De Wolfe swore fluently, including a few Saracen oaths in his frustration, but had to admit that he was not yet ready to get up to his chamber. ‘It’s this twice-accursed stick, it gets in the way!’ he fumed. ‘We’ll have to have some other room at ground level.’

Leaving Odin at the guardhouse, he set off across the littered mud of the inner ward towards the keep that sheltered against the far wall. ‘Stay and watch my horse, Gwyn,’ he called over his shoulder. ‘I’m off to badger the sheriff for a new chamber.’

With his stick prodding the earth at every step, his strengthening leg made good progress across the triangular area inside the high, crenellated walls. On his left was the bare stone box of the Shire Hall, the courthouse where he held most of his city inquests, and on his right, the tiny garrison chapel of St Mary. All around the inside of the walls were huts, sheds and lean-to shanties; some were living quarters for soldiers and a few families, others storehouses, stables and cart-sheds. The keep was a squat, two-storey building over an undercroft, which housed the castle gaol. The two upper floors contained the hall, and chambers for the sheriff, the constable, a number of clerks, servants and a few knights and squires.

Richard de Revelle lived here for much of the time, going home to his manors at Revelstoke near Plympton and another near Tiverton, where his sour-faced wife spent all her time, not deigning to reside in the admittedly Spartan quarters of Rougemont. John suspected – indeed, he had had the proof of his own eyes – that his brother-in-law preferred the cold chambers of the castle to the company of his spouse: there, he could indulge his liking for ladies of the town when she was well out of sight.

De Wolfe clumped up the wooden steps to the door of the keep, the man-at-arms on duty giving him a smiling salute. The coroner was a popular man amongst soldiers, both from his reputation as a seasoned Crusader and for being a staunch supporter and personal friend of their king, Richard the Lionheart.

The guard watched him limp through the arched doorway at the head of the steps, a tall, lean figure, always dressed in black or grey. With raven hair down to his shoulders, thick black eyebrows and habitual dark stubble on his beardless face, the soldier could well believe that he had been known as ‘Black John’ by the troops in the Irish wars and the Crusades. With his slight stoop, head pushed forward and the long, lean face with the great hooked nose, he looked like some predatory bird of prey, a crow or raven.

Most of the middle floor of the keep was taken up by the hall, a jostling, bustling vault where clerks and merchants ambled about with their parchments, servants carried food to tables against the walls and others stood around the great hearth, gossiping and scheming. The coroner ignored them and stumped across to a small door, his stick tapping on the flagstones. Another man-at-arms stood sentinel, though this was mainly from the sheriff’s need to show off his own importance rather than for security. Rougemont had not heard a weapon clashed in battle for over fifty years, since the siege in the time of Stephen and Matilda.

Nodding to the guard, John pushed open the door and walked into the sheriff’s office. De Revelle’s private rooms were behind it, but this was his official chamber, where he conducted the business of being the king’s representative for the county of Devon – which job that he was currently hanging on to by the skin of his teeth, since his recent exposure by de Wolfe as having been involved in the abortive rebellion by Prince John against King Richard.

Richard de Revelle raised his eyes from the parchments on his table and scowled when he saw who had entered. A slight, neat, rather dandified man, he was in no position to antagonize his brother-in-law who, together with the powerful loyalist faction in the county, was keeping a close eye on him. After a muttered greeting, which failed to include any enquiry as to the state of de Wolfe’s leg, the sheriff threw a curled piece of vellum across the trestle towards him. ‘What do you think of that, Crowner?’ he snapped, his small pointed beard jutting forwards pugnaciously.

De Wolfe knew that the other had not the slightest interest in his opinion on the document and that he was merely trying to score a petty advantage: the sheriff could read and write fluently, whilst the soldier-coroner had never been to school. But for the first time, he was able to turn the tables on his unpleasant brother-in-law. He picked up the parchment with studied nonchalance and scanned it. Though half guessing, he was soon able to throw down the sheet and turn his deep-set dark eyes to the other man’s face. ‘Nothing new in that! They’ve tried before to take possession of the island, but were repulsed. No one can get a foothold there without an army, not even the Templars.’

The sheriff scowled again, his narrow face growing rather pink above his thin moustache. ‘Well done, John! I had heard you were having lessons from the cathedral canons,’ he said patronizingly.

De Wolfe grinned. ‘Being housebound for nearly two months gave my clerk the chance he’d been waiting for – daily lessons in reading and writing.’

De Revelle jabbed a ringed finger towards the parchment. ‘You must have known these Knights of the Temple better than most when you were in Outremer. Are they going to let William de Marisco thumb his nose at them for ever? They’ve been granted Lundy for years, but the bastard repels them every time they try to land.’

The coroner sat on the edge of the sheriff’s table, to take the weight off his leg. ‘They’re a mixed bunch, the Templars. Many are obsessional fighters, like the Lionheart himself, which is why he respects them so much. A few are mad, I think. They can be reckless to the point of insanity, just like some of the Muhammadans they admire, even though we’re enemies.’

He shifted his stick on the flags, his mind far away in the dust of the Holy Land. ‘I have seen them act as if they actually sought a glorious death, in suicidal attacks, sometimes unnecessary. Yet more and more of the Templars have become soft, especially those who remain in Europe and never venture to the Levant.’

On safe ground, away from the sensitive topic of Prince John, the sheriff nodded sagely. ‘They’ve moved a long way from their origins as Poor Knights of Christ and the Temple of Solomon. Now they’re the richest Order in Christendom, with huge estates and able to lend money to kings.’

De Wolfe shrugged, a favourite response: he was the most taciturn of men.

His brother-in-law picked up the document and read it again gloomily. ‘I hope they don’t expect me to do anything about this. I don’t fancy sending a few men in small boats to try to winkle de Marisco from his rock.’

‘Let the bloody Templars do their own dirty work,’ advised the coroner gruffly. ‘If the king has granted them Lundy, it’s up to them to install themselves.’ He cleared his throat, another mannerism, which heralded a change of subject. ‘I need another chamber, Richard, for my official business. I can’t get up to the top of that cursed gatehouse until my leg improves even more. You must have space somewhere lower down.’

It took five minutes of arguing and demanding before the reluctant sheriff, pleading shortage of accommodation in the crowded garrison, conceded him a small storeroom in the undercroft, on condition it was strictly a temporary lease. The coroner’s original room in the gatehouse had been as inconvenient as de Revelle could make it, a token of his disapproval of the introduction of de Wolfe’s appointment six months before. Previously, he had had absolute authority over every aspect of the law in Devon, which had given him ample opportunity for dishonesty and corruption. Like most of his fellow sheriffs, he strongly resented having another senior law officer poking his nose into his business and taking away both part of his power and the financial pickings that went with it. But the coroners had been appointed on behalf of the Lionheart by his wily Chief Justiciar, Hubert Walter, for the very purpose of collecting every penny for the royal treasury, impoverished by Richard’s costly wars. Much of this money-gathering was to be achieved by combating the rapacity of the sheriffs and de Revelle had had no choice but to accept the royal command. He had supported the appointment of his sister’s husband, partly because of her nagging but also because he thought that he would be able to keep his relative-by-marriage under his thumb – a hope that proved very much in error.

De Wolfe hauled himself from the table and tapped his way to the door. ‘I’ll go down to inspect this closet you’ve so graciously offered me,’ he grunted sarcastically. ‘Gwyn and Gabriel can move my table and stool down there. It’s all the furniture the King’s coroner possesses for his duties!’

With that parting sally, he limped out of the chamber, leaving the sheriff smarting with annoyance, but impotent to protest, in his present fragile state of probation.

After telling the hairy Cornishman to get their chattels and documents moved to the miserable cell under the keep, John remounted Odin and walked him down through the town again. It was not yet mid-morning and the meal that Mary was preparing would not be ready for a couple of hours.

He decided to amble down to the Bush tavern and have a quart of ale with Nesta, his mistress and landlady of the inn. He knew that Matilda would be busy with her devotions for the rest of the morning at the little church of St Olave’s in Fore Street. He suspected – almost hoped – that she was enamoured of the parish priest there, a fat pompous cleric. She visited there several times a week for various obscure Masses and this gave de Wolfe the opportunity for daytime visits to his Welsh lover.

The Bush was not far from St Olave’s and, though it was unlikely that his wife would come out of the church during the service, he was cautious enough to work his way through the cathedral Close and then take the back lanes of the lower town to reach the tavern. As he came out of the Close through the Bear Gate and skirted the Shambles, where sheep, pigs and cattle were being slaughtered amid blood and screams, he again had the feeling of being watched. Perhaps sensitive to the proximity of his wife, he looked down from his stallion’s back at the crowded street and, from the corner of his eye, momentarily saw a man staring at him from the end of a booth that sold hot pies. A second later he had disappeared amongst the crowd, but de Wolfe knew that it had been the face he had seen twice before, once yesterday and again an hour ago, when he went up to Rougemont.

Exasperated both at the antics of the man and also his own inability to remember the name, de Wolfe urged Odin down the slope of Priest Street,[1] where many of the vicars and secondaries from the cathedral lodged. At the bottom was the lane that ran around the inside of the city wall, with the quayside and the river Exe beyond, but the coroner turned right half-way down the street of irregular wooden houses, into Idle Lane. This took its name from the bare wasteground in which sat the Bush Inn, its steep thatched roof perched on a low stone building pierced by a doorway and four shuttered window openings.

John hitched Odin’s reins to a bar at the side of the inn where several other horses were secured, and went round to the front door, into the large, low room, hazy with smoke from the fire in the wide stone hearth. He went across to his favourite table near the fire and, such was his prestige in the Bush, before he had even lowered himself to a rough bench, a stone quart jar of ale was banged down in front of him by old Edwin, the one-eyed pot man. Seconds later, the smooth form of the landlady slid alongside him and pressed affectionately against his sound leg.

Nesta was a redhead of twenty-eight years, with a high forehead, a snub nose and a body like an hourglass. The widow of a Welsh archer de Wolfe had known in the Waterford campaign years before, she was now his favourite mistress – although, as both she and Matilda well knew, she was not the only object of his considerable passionate appetite. Dressed in a green gown beneath a linen apron, her russet curls peeping from under her white headcloth, Nesta slid her arm through his and prodded his opposite thigh with her finger. ‘And how is your lower member today, John?’ she asked, with mischievous ambiguity.

He gave her one of his rare lopsided grins as he slipped an arm around her shoulders. ‘A little stiff in the mornings, thank you – probably from lack of exercise during the night.’

They spoke in Welsh, as he had learned this at his mother’s knee and had kept fluent over the years by talking to Gwyn in his native Cornish, which was virtually identical. After some affectionate banter, which only a woman like Nesta could have drawn from the normally grim coroner, the talk turned to more general matters. After telling her about his new cubbyhole of an office in the castle, and the rapid improvement in his ‘lower member’ which had allowed him to mount his horse, de Wolfe mentioned the annoyance of the face that kept peering at him from around corners. ‘You hear of every single thing that happens in Exeter, madam! Do you know of any stranger recently arrived who might wish to stalk me?’

Immediately Nesta became serious, worried at anything that might be a potential danger to her man. Her big grey-green eyes widened as she looked at him in concern. ‘Men are coming and going all the time, many of them through this tavern, John. Merchants, sailors, pilgrims, soldiers, thieves – must be scores every day. What does he look like?’

De Wolfe shrugged. ‘I can’t describe his face – he keeps it part shaded by a wide-brimmed hat – but it has nothing out of the ordinary, as far as I could tell from the instant it was on view. About my age, I would suggest.’

‘Oh, you mean an old man – was he bent and tottery and used a stick?’ she gibed, getting a hard pinch on her plump thigh for her impudence.

‘I know that I have met the fellow, but I just can’t place him,’ he said testily, banging the table with a hard fist.

Nesta thought it best to change the subject, before his temper rose with frustration.

‘How is your dear wife, these days? Does she still mop your fevered brow?’ Nesta, though a kind and open-hearted woman, sometimes failed to conceal her jealousy of Matilda, who as of right shared house, bed and board with the dark man Nesta loved. The Welsh woman knew that her own station in life was far too distant from that of a Norman knight ever to dream of being more than his paramour, even though she knew that John de Wolfe had a genuine deep affection for her. Though it seemed that he and his wife were always at loggerheads, the rigid conventions of feudal and religious life had forced them into an indissoluble bond. Although Matilda had temporarily left her husband two months ago, his broken leg had driven them together again: Matilda had grimly announced her intention of nursing him back to health, and had done so with the icy determination of a Benedictine nun turned gaoler.

‘She’s drifted back to being the same old Matilda,’ he admitted sadly. ‘At first, she never spoke to me, except to tell me to sit or lie down or crawl to the privy pot. Then her old manner slowly returned and she treated me at first like a naughty schoolboy, then like one of Gabriel’s new recruits.’ He stared thoughtfully into the leaping flames in the hearth. ‘But by God’s white beard, she was efficient! She stuffed food down me like a fattening goose to mend my leg, and even suffered Gwyn in the house when it came to him helping me to stumble about to strengthen my limbs. She even put up with poor Thomas, whom she hates like poison, when he came to divert me with his reading lessons.’

Nesta hugged his arm, then reached over to take a drink from his earthenware pot. ‘You sound quite fond of her, Sir Crowner,’ she said, with a tinge of wistfulness.

De Wolfe shook his black locks vigorously. ‘Fond, no! Sorry for her, no doubt. I did her a wrong when I let her be humiliated over you and Hilda – though that was no fault of mine. It was that sleek bastard de Revelle who took a delight in shaming his own sister. But I evened up the score when I interceded on her behalf for him.’

‘It must have cost her pride a great deal, having to plead with you for him, especially at a time like that.’ Nesta felt sorry for her rival, as she often did. Much as she loved him, she was realistic enough to know that being married to John de Wolfe would be no bed of roses.

The coroner swallowed the rest of his ale and waved Edwin away as he threatened a second refill from his big pitcher. ‘I must get home and eat Mary’s boiled pork and cabbage. And Thomas is coming afterwards with his parchments, I must get back to my duties as soon as I can.’

As he rode slowly home, he planned how to deal with the numerous tasks that a coroner had to carry out – tasks that had been largely neglected in the past two months, though for a few weeks now, he had managed to deal with some cases in the city and nearby villages. Further afield, deaths had had to remain uninvestigated, and assaults, a rape and numerous administrative tasks had gone by default. His brother-in-law had taken delight in pointing out that they had managed very well for centuries without a coroner until last September and that they could, no doubt, manage just as well in the future, which had made de Wolfe all the more anxious to get back to work.

He had no assistant or deputy, though the edicts of the Curia Regis had ordered that three knights should be appointed as coroners in each county. The duties were so onerous – as well as unpaid – that only one other had been found willing to officiate in North Devon, and he had fallen from his horse a few weeks later, then died of a broken back. As no replacement could be found, de Wolfe had the whole of the huge county, one of the biggest in England, to look after alone. It was sometimes physically impossible for him to travel the long distances to cover all of his multifarious duties, but until he had broken his leg at the New Year, he had managed to get to almost every suspected homicide and serious assault, as well as to most hangings and sanctuary-seekers.

He reached Martin’s Lane and slowly dismounted, leaving Odin in the farrier’s care. His left leg pained him as he walked across to his house, reminding him that he was not yet back to normal. Pushing open the street door of blackened oak, he went into the vestibule where he hung up his grey cloak and pulled off his riding boots. His old hound Brutus ambled through the covered passage to the back yard, where in one of the servants’ huts Mary had her kitchen and her bed. The maid bustled after the dog, who nuzzled de Wolfe in greeting. Wiping her hands on her apron, she announced that dinner was ready. ‘And she’s back,’ Mary added, with a jerk of her head towards the inner door.

A handsome woman in her twenties, Mary covertly sided with John against the grim Matilda and her acidulous French maid Lucille. In the past, he had shared her mattress on more than one occasion, but lately she had resisted him: Lucille was getting suspicious and Mary valued her job even more than the pleasure provided by the lusty coroner. ‘Go in and make your peace,’ she suggested. ‘She’ll probably have guessed where you’ve been this morning.’

As she vanished down the passageway, de Wolfe sighed and lifted the latch on the inner door to his hall. The house in Martin’s Lane was a tall, narrow structure of wood, with a shingled roof. It consisted almost entirely of one high room, but with a solar added at the back of the upper part of the hall, reached by an outside stairway from the backyard. The solar was both their bedroom and Matilda’s retreat, where she spent her hours when not at prayer or slumber in some indifferent needlework.

At the back of the hall, most of the wall was taken up by a huge stone fireplace, with the tapering cone of the chimney rising above it to the rafters. Two settles and a couple of cowled chairs stood in a half-circle around the hearth, and down the centre of the gloomy room a long oak refectory table took up much of the space. The heavy boards of the walls were hung with sombre tapestries that helped to keep the draughts at bay. The floor was slabbed in stone, another modern innovation of Matilda, who scorned the usual rushes or straw strewn on beaten earth.

When he entered, his wife was sitting at the far end of the table, waiting for her meal. Though there were benches along each side of the table, at each end was a heavy upright chair, used by de Wolfe and Matilda almost consciously for the purpose of staying as far apart as possible. He closed the door behind him and limped towards her.

Matilda lifted her head to glare at him, her square pug face devoid of any welcome. ‘You’ve been overdoing it again, I suppose! I told you that it’s too soon to be riding that great beast of a horse. God knows where you’ve been on it, but I suppose I can guess.’

The coroner threw his stick on to the table with a clatter and stared down at her. ‘I’ve been up to Rougemont to see your damned brother, if you must know! I need a new chamber that’s not almost on the roof of the cursed gatehouse, and all he would give me was a closet the size of our privy.’

He stamped to the fire and threw on a couple of logs from the stack, as Brutus sidled in behind him and lay down to bask in the warmth. The mention of the sheriff imposed an ominous silence upon them: she had never mentioned her brother’s name since she had had to plead with her husband not to reveal him as a would-be rebel.

De Wolfe stood warming himself by the rising flames and looked across at the back view of his sullen wife. Though never pretty, sixteen years ago when his father had arranged their marriage into the well-known de Revelle family, she had been slimmer and had had a good complexion. Now at forty-six – half a dozen years older than de Wolfe – she had thickened into a podgy, short-necked woman, with coarse skin and thinning fair hair. She had loose flesh under her chin and her puffy lids gave her a narrow-eyed, almost Oriental appearance. John put this down to some internal disorder of her vital humours, though it did not seem to diminish her appetite for either food or wine.

‘Now that you can sit a horse again, I suppose you’ll be off about the countryside at all hours,’ she complained to the opposite wall, not turning to address him.

‘It’s my duty, for Christ’s sake,’ he snapped. ‘You were the one who was so keen for me to become the king’s coroner here.’

‘Must you blaspheme every time you open your mouth?’ she retorted, still staring ahead of her. ‘It would be fitter if you went to church more often, instead of the tavern.’ Since the débâcle two months ago, she also avoided mentioning Nesta’s name, though Matilda, like most of Exeter, was well aware of the attraction the Bush Inn held for Sir John de Wolfe.

‘I’ve neglected the coroner’s tasks for too long, though Gwyn and Thomas have done their best these past few weeks. I can’t leave matters to them and the bailiffs much longer. I must get out and about as much as my leg will let me – it’s strengthening fast, better each day.’

He paused, then added, almost reluctantly, ‘Due in large measure to you, Matilda, for which I’m truly grateful.’ He said this awkwardly, as even a hint of intimacy was foreign to their relationship.

She swung round on her chair, the heavy skirt of her brocade kirtle swishing on the flagstones. ‘You have your duty as coroner and I have mine as your wife. I wasn’t going to allow some drab of a maid or a doxy from the lower town care for your injury. It was bad enough having that hairy Cornish creature or that pervert of an ex-priest hanging about the house most of the time.’

De Wolfe sighed, sensing that things were rapidly getting back to normal between them after their relative truce of the past two months. But a developing quarrel was blunted by the appearance of Mary with a tray bearing a large wooden bowl of broth and bread trenchers covered in pork and cabbage. She was followed by the emaciated form of old Simon, their yard servant who chopped wood and tended the fires and the privy. He brought a pitcher of hot wine with two pewter mugs, and the business of eating and drinking diverted the ever-hungry Matilda from her nagging.

After champing her way through a large meal, including the slab of bread that did service for a plate on the scrubbed boards of the table, and drinking the better part of a pint of mulled wine, Matilda abruptly broke her silence by announcing that she was going to the solar to have her hair brushed by Lucille, though de Wolfe suspected that she was going to sleep off the effects of her full belly.

She stalked out without another word and, thankfully, he took his mug across to the hearth and sank into one of the monk’s chairs, which had wooden sides and a hood to keep off the draughts that came from the unglazed windows, covered in linen screens. Brutus came to lay his big brown head on his master’s knees, and John stared absently into the fire as he fondled the animal’s ears.

Mary appeared to clear away the debris of the meal and scour the table. ‘Thomas called earlier. He said he would bring some work at about the second hour.’ She jerked her head in the direction of the nearby cathedral, whose bells for its many services told the city the time. ‘I gave him some food, too. The poor man looks half starved,’ she added, with a hint of accusation that de Wolfe underpaid his clerk. The little ex-priest received a penny a day from the coroner’s own pocket, which – as he enjoyed a free mattress laid in a servant’s hut in one of the canon’s houses in the Close – should have been ample to feed him. It was certainly far more than he had had until last September: he had been virtually destitute since he had been thrown out of Winchester, where he had had a teaching post in the cathedral school. One of the girl pupils had accused him of an indecent assault. After failing to scratch a living by writing letters for merchants, he had walked to Exeter and thrown himself on the mercy of his uncle, Archdeacon John de Alençon. A good friend of de Wolfe, the canon prevailed on the new coroner to take Thomas as his clerk, for the little ex-priest was highly proficient with quill and parchment.

The coroner was almost dozing off, replete with food and warm wine, when the scrape of the door on the stones jerked him into wakefulness. He turned, expecting to see his clerk, but it was Gwyn of Polruan, named after his home village, a fishing hamlet on the Fowey river. The huge man poked his head inside first, wary in case Matilda was at home: she looked on anyone who was not a Norman as some sub-species of mankind, especially Celts. She hated the thought that her husband was half Welsh, from which stemmed much of her virulent dislike of her mother-in-law.

‘It’s safe, Gwyn, she’s up in the solar,’ said de Wolfe, guessing the reason for his officer’s hesitation. He kept his voice down as there was a narrow slit high in the hall that communicated with the upper room.

The Cornishman padded in and stood by the coroner’s chair. De Wolfe was taller than average, but Gwyn more than equalled his height and had a massive body that made the coroner look thin by comparison. He had an unruly mop of wiry hair and a huge bushy moustache that drooped down each side of his mouth almost to his chest. Bright blue eyes shone out above a bulbous nose. ‘I’ve shifted our belongings down to that festering hole in the ground that the sheriff so generously gave us,’ he growled. ‘I hope to God your leg mends even faster so that we can go back up to our proper chamber.’

‘Anything new occurred today?’ asked John. ‘Any deaths or woundings?’

Gwyn shook his shaggy head. ‘Nothing today. There are two hangings at the Magdalen tree tomorrow, which you should attend if you can.’

One of the duties of the coroner was to seize for the king’s treasury, the chattels of condemned felons and to record the fact of execution and the profit – if any – on his rolls. This would be presented to the royal judges, along with every other legal aspect of life in Devon, when they eventually trundled to the county as the General Eyre. It was different from the Eyre of Assize, which was supposed to come each quarter to try serious cases, but which was often a year late.

‘I saw that fellow again today – twice, in fact,’ remarked de Wolfe. ‘I’m sure he’s following me, but with this leg I’ve no chance of catching him.’

Gwyn frowned. Anything that threatened his master, even remotely, was something to be taken seriously. Although the city was a fairly safe place inside its stout walls, with its gates locked from dusk to dawn, he knew that Sir John had quite a few enemies, most of them antagonistic to his fierce loyalty to the king. ‘I must keep a sharper eye out for him,’ he rumbled. ‘I’ll follow you when you’re riding or walking the streets. If I see anyone, or if you give me the wink that he’s there, I’ll have the bastard, never fear!’

With this grim promise, he lumbered out, but de Wolfe had no chance to slide into slumber as he heard his henchman’s voice in the vestibule and almost immediately the door opened again to admit Thomas de Peyne, who sidled through the wooden screens put up to reduce the draughts.

His clerk was a poor specimen of a man, short and scrawny, with a slight hump on his back and a lame left leg, both due to childhood phthisis, which had carried away his mother. Thin, lank brown hair, a slight squint, a long, pointed nose and a weak chin all conspired to make him the least attractive of men, which was emphasized even more by his threadbare clothes – a grey tunic under a thin black cloak. Though expelled from the clergy almost two years ago, he still hankered passionately after his old vocation, and those who did not know his history often assumed that he was still a priest. Living in the servants’ quarters of a canon’s house and associating with clergy every day, he kept abreast of all the ecclesiastical gossip, which was often useful to John de Wolfe.

However, for all his unprepossessing appearance, Thomas possessed an agile and cunning brain, and had a remarkable talent for penmanship. His knowledge of history, politics and the classic writers was remarkable, and though de Wolfe and Gwyn pretended to be contemptuous of his puny physique and timid nature, they were secretly quite fond of the little ex-cleric.

Thomas came across the hall in his customary tentative manner, his writing materials slung in their usual place over his shoulder. ‘Are you up to date with your rolls?’ demanded his master. The clerk lifted the flap of his bag and produced two palimpsests – parchments that had been reused several times: the old writing was scraped off and the surface rubbed with chalk to make it ready for new ink.

‘These are the last two inquests, Crowner. And the names of the last two weeks’ hangings, with a record of their chattels, such as they were.’ He handed the rolls to de Wolfe, who stared at the first few lines of each and silently mouthed the Latin words Thomas had been so laboriously teaching him these past weeks. ‘Will you read them aloud for practice?’ suggested Thomas hesitantly. Sometimes de Wolfe was in no mood for reading practice and today seemed one of those occasions.

‘Too damned tired, Thomas! Maybe my wife is right. Riding that horse this morning has taken it out of me.’ In truth, several quarts of ale at the Bush and the wine at his midday meal were more the reason for his torpor. ‘Anything else happening?’ he asked. His clerk was the nosiest man in Exeter and often provided gossip that kept him informed of many of the city’s intrigues.

Thomas shook his head glumly. He liked nothing better than to feel part of the coroner’s team, and to have no titbit of scandal to pass on made him feel as if he had shirked his duty.

‘Have you seen this damned fellow peering after me around corners these past few days?’ de Wolfe demanded.

Thomas’s bright, bird-like eyes flicked to the shuttered window. ‘The man in the street Gwyn told me about? No, I’ve been up in the gatehouse writing these rolls. But I’ll keep a look-out now, with Gwyn. Have you any idea who it might be?’

‘Indeed not. I thought you might have heard of some new arrival in the city that might match this knave. About thirty-five, strong-looking, his face shaved and his clothing an unremarkable dun brown, with a wide-brimmed pilgrim’s hat that shades his eyes.’

The little clerk looked worried, as if his inability to know of every transient passing through Exeter was a personal failing. ‘Perhaps he is a pilgrim, then – or masquerading as one. Have a care, Crowner, you have enemies in this county.’

At that moment, the door grated open and Matilda marched in, refreshed from her nap in the solar. She was dressed in a heavy green mantle over her kirtle and a white linen coverchief was wrapped decorously around her temples and neck, secured at her forehead by a silk band. Behind her followed Lucille, her sallow face framed by a brown woollen shawl.

As soon as Matilda saw Thomas, the expression on her face changed as if she had just trodden in something left by Brutus. Without a word, the clerk scooped up his rolls and scuttled from the hall. ‘You shouldn’t let that little pervert bring his work here to tire you out, John,’ she snapped.

‘It’s not his work, woman, it’s my work!’ retorted de Wolfe. ‘Thank God I can get back to something approaching my duties.’

His wife ignored this and dropped heavily on to one of the settles near the hearth. ‘Let’s see that leg of yours, husband. Brother Saulf warned you to make sure it doesn’t swell again by putting too much strain on it.’

‘Damn it, woman, there’s nothing to see now! It’s almost as good as new.’

‘Do as you’re told, John. I’ve not cared for you all these weeks for my work to be undone now by your neglect.’

Reluctantly, he sat on the chair opposite her and, with the rabbit-toothed Lucille staring from across the room, he hauled up the skirt of his long tunic and pushed down his grey woollen hose to the ankle. ‘There, I told you. You’d not know anything had been amiss with it.’

The leg certainly looked well, the last traces of redness on the shin having faded and the slight deformity almost gone. Matilda reached out a ringed finger and prodded it, but could feel no puffiness. There was nothing but a smooth ridge under the skin where the broken ends of the shinbone had knitted together.

‘I told you, I’m back to normal again. You don’t have to complain about me riding a horse. God knows, I’ve had worse injuries than this in my campaigning days.’

He hauled up his stocking again and stood up. ‘Now that I’ve prised a makeshift chamber from your brother, I can get back to business.’

The mention of Richard de Revelle silenced her, as usual now since he had so narrowly escaped disgrace. After a moment, she abruptly changed the subject. ‘It’s high time the Justiciar, or someone in Winchester or London, filled these vacant coronerships,’ she said. ‘Walter Fitzrogo fell from his horse more than six months ago and has never been replaced. Even before that, the county was one crowner short – and then you go acting the fool and break a leg. Is that any way to run a country?’ She might have added that it would be better for England if the king stayed at home and paid more attention to the affairs of his realm, but she knew that criticism of the Lionheart would stir her husband into a passionate diatribe of loyalty to his sovereign.

‘Well, no one wants the job, so I’ve got to make the best of it,’ he growled, tired of the same old complaints from his wife. He sensed that she was leading up to another tirade about his being away from home so much, neglecting her and failing especially to pander to the social life of the county aristocracy, which meant so much to her.

‘You’ll be forcing yourself on to that great horse every hour of the day just to defy me! You’ll regret it – that leg is not yet fit for riding. You’ll fall from the saddle like Fitzrogo, or get a purulent fever in the bone. I suppose you’d like to make me a widow, just for spite!’

Exasperated at the accuracy of his predictions, John moved towards the door. ‘No fear of that, wife! I’ve not been outside the walls of Exeter these past two months. It’s high time I began getting around more. And that’s just what I’m going to do now. I’ve not been through one of the city gates since they carried me home on a cart from Bull Mead.’

He banged the heavy door behind him, and as he sat on the bench in the vestibule to pull on his riding boots, Mary appeared from the passageway. ‘Did I hear raised voices in there?’ she asked. A dark-eyed, attractive woman, she was the bastard daughter of a Norman man-at-arms whose name neither she nor her Saxon mother had ever known.

‘Same old story, that I’m always away and neglecting her – she’s getting back to normal, more’s the pity,’ he muttered. ‘I’m going for a ride around the outside of the walls, if anyone wants me.’

As she handed him his mottled grey wolfskin cloak from a peg on the wall, Mary virtually repeated Matilda’s caution. ‘Watch that leg of yours, Sir Crowner! You’re not as young as you think, remember.’

As he threw the cloak around his shoulders, he gave her a quick kiss. ‘I’m still young enough to creep under your blanket tonight, if you’d let me!’ She pushed him away with mock annoyance, fearful that Matilda or her maid might appear, but de Wolfe pulled open the iron-banded front door and stepped into the narrow street.

A few minutes later, he was riding Odin sedately through the Close around the cathedral, picking his way along the criss-crossing paths between the piles of rubbish and earth from new graves that made such an unsightly contrast to the soaring church with its two great towers. Urchins ran around yelling or playing ball and hawkers touted shrivelled apples and meat pies to the loungers and gossipers who stood or squatted around the untidy precinct. He came out through Bear Gate into Southgate Street and pushed his way past the throng around the butcher’s stalls, where more hawkers squatted behind their baskets of produce. With almost a sense of adventure, he passed under the arch of the South Gate, with its prison cells in the towers on each side, and emerged from the city for the first time in many weeks. Ahead of him, past the small houses, huts and shacks that had sprung up outside the walls, the road forked into Holloway and Magdalen Street, leading to Honiton, Yeovil and, eventually, distant Winchester and London, which to most residents of Exeter were as remote as the moon.

De Wolfe turned right and followed the city wall steeply down towards the river, where a number of small vessels were beached on the muddy banks. A stone quay and some thatched storehouses lay at the corner of the walls, where the line of the ancient Roman defences turned towards the West Gate and the road to South Devon and Cornwall. He plodded along slowly, taking in the familiar sight of the broad, shallow river, which meandered through the swampy islands that carried the mean shacks of the workers from the fulling mills which processed the wool that was the prime wealth of England.

Reining in Odin at the edge of one of the broad reens of muddy water that separated Exe Island from the bank, he watched the traffic coming out of the West Gate. Those on foot or with small handcarts, even some on a donkey or pony, used the rickety wooden footbridge that spanned the river and the grassy mud to reach the further bank. Large vehicles, like the ox-carts with their huge wooden wheels, and anyone on horseback had to ford the river, which here was just at the upper limit of the tidal reach.

His gaze travelled to the stone bridge, the huge project still less than half finished. The builders, Nicholas Gervase and his son Walter, had completed seven of the eighteen arches needed to span the marshy river, but even though they were wealthy mill-owners, their funds had run out. Until they could raise more from the burgesses and churchmen of Devon, travellers would still have to clamber or wade across the Exe. Even though it was incomplete, the city end of the bridge already had a chapel built on it, with a resident priest, a token of Nicholas’s beholdenment to his ecclesiastical paymasters.

As John de Wolfe sat taking his ease on the broad back of his stallion, watching life go by with almost lazy contentment, he became aware of another horse coming up behind him at a trot. Without needing to turn, he knew from the clip of the hoofs that it was Gwyn’s big brown mare and a twinge of annoyance came over him at the idea that he needed a nursemaid on such a short jaunt as this.

Then he wondered whether the Cornishman had managed to seize his mysterious stalker, but as his officer stopped alongside, he found that he was wrong on both counts.

‘Mary told me you’d be somewhere outside the walls,’ grunted Gwyn. ‘I thought I’d best find you now, in case you wanted to make some arrangements for the morning.’

De Wolfe’s black eyebrows rose up his forehead. ‘What arrangements?’

‘A rider has just come to Rougemont from Oliver de Tracey’s bailiff at Barnstaple to report a murdered man on a wrecked ship at Ilfracombe.’

John whistled through his teeth. ‘A wreck and a killing? Both of those are crowner’s business, Gwyn. Any more details?’

The big man shook his shaggy red head. ‘The messenger knew little. He had been riding since noon yesterday. The body was found the night before, it seems.’

The coroner lifted a gloved hand to rub the bridge of his beaked nose, a mannerism he had that seemed to aid thought, much as Gwyn scratched his groin and Thomas crossed himself when agitated. ‘A dead man on a ship means either mutiny or piracy. We must go and discover which.’

His officer looked concerned. ‘The north coast is a long way on the back of a nag when you have a poorly leg, Crowner. Let me go in your stead.’

The coroner leaned across and slapped him on the shoulder. ‘Not nearly so far as Palestine, man! We’ll set off within the hour and take it easily. We can get to Crediton by nightfall, find a night’s rest there and get an early start to Barnstaple in the morning.’

The Cornishman still looked doubtful. ‘Your good lady’s not going to like it, you being away for at least three days.’

But de Wolfe was rejuvenated by the prospect of a return to activity and was in no mood for Matilda’s strictures. ‘To hell with her grumbling, Gwyn! Go and tell that little turd of a clerk to meet us on his pony at the North Gate by the fourth bell.’

He touched Odin’s flanks with his heels and wheeled him around, heading back for the walls. ‘And bring some food and drink in your saddle pouch. It’s a long ride to Ilfracombe.’