The Poisoned Chalice

Chapter One In which Crowner John attends a shipwreck

Silence also reigned in the narrow chamber set high in the gate-house of Rougemont Castle. It was broken only by the steady champing of Gwyn’s jaws as he finished the last of the crusty bread and cheese left over from the trio’s second breakfast. The other two members of the coroner’s team were totally silent. Thomas, the clerk, was laboriously penning a copy of yesterday’s inquest held on a forester crushed by a falling tree. The coroner himself was covertly studying the latest lesson set him by a cathedral canon, who was trying to teach him to read and write.

Sir John de Wolfe sat, silently mouthing the simple Latin phrases. With an elbow on the table, he held his hand casually across his mouth to hide the movements of his lips from the others. After twenty years as a soldier, he was sensitive about his efforts to become literate, in case it was thought effeminate. Thomas de Peyne, the unfrocked priest who was his very literate clerk, knew of his master’s ambition and was somewhat piqued that he himself had not been asked to be the tutor – though he appreciated the coroner’s sensitivity about his inability to read his own documents. Gwyn of Polruan knew little of this and cared less, as sensitivity was foreign to the nature of the red-haired Cornish giant, who acted as the coroner’s officer and bodyguard.

This comfortable peace continued for a while, its background the mournful whine of the winter wind as it blew around Exeter Castle. There was the occasional slurping noise, as Gwyn washed down his food with rough Devon cider from their communal stone jar, ignoring the stringy curds that swirled from the bottom like seaweed in a rock pool.

As he concentrated on the neatly written vocabulary, the coroner’s brow creased with the effort of making sense of these marks on the parchment. His clerk looked up covertly now and then to will his master to make a success of his studies.

The unfortunate Thomas was a born teacher and, had he known of it, would have agreed wholeheartedly with the quotation ‘Far more than the calf wishes to suck, doth the cow wish to give suck’. His sly glances showed him a tall, lean man, who gave a potent impression of blackness. De Wolfe had thick, neck-length black hair, and though, unlike the usual Norman fashion, he had no beard or moustache, his long face was dark with stubble between his twice-weekly shaves. Bushy black eyebrows surmounted a hooked nose and deep-set eye sockets, from which a pair of hooded eyes looked out cynically on the world. The only relief to this hardness was provided by his rather full lips, which hinted at a sensuality that many women, both in Devon and much further afield, could happily confirm.

Black John, as he had sometimes been called in the Holy Land, enhanced his dark appearance by his choice of garments. He rarely wore anything but black or grey, and his tall, sinewy body with its slight stoop often looked like some great bird of prey. When his black cloak swung widely from his hunched shoulders, some men said he was like a huge crow – though others compared him more to a vulture.

The little clerk turned down his eyes again and was just reaching the end of his inquest record when their tranquillity was broken. He had barely scratched the final date on the parchment with his quill – ‘the Second Day of December in the Year of Our Lord Eleven Hundred and Ninety-four’ – when footsteps and the clanking of a broadsword scabbard sounded on the narrow staircase coming up from the guard-room below.

Their tiny office, grudgingly allotted to them two months ago, was the most cramped and inconvenient chamber the sheriff could find in the whole of Rougemont, perched high in the gate-tower set in the inner curtain wall. Three heads turned to see who would appear in the doorway, a hole in the wall draped with rough hessian in a futile attempt to reduce the draughts. This sacking was pulled aside and a sergeant-at-arms appeared, dressed in the usual peacetime uniform of a basin-shaped metal helmet with a nose-guard, a long over-tunic with some chainmail on the shoulders, and cross-gartering on the hose below the knees. His baldric, a leather strap slung across one shoulder, supported a large, clumsy sword that dangled from his left hip.

Gwyn climbed down from his stool, his towering height causing his tousled ginger hair almost to touch the ceiling beams. ‘Gabriel, be damned! You’re too late to eat, but there’s some drink left.’ Hospitably, he held out the stone jar to the sergeant, who took a deep draught after nodding a greeting to everyone.

Gabriel was one of the senior members of the castle garrison, a grizzled and scarred veteran of some of the same wars that John de Wolfe and Gwyn had fought in Normandy, Ireland and France although, unlike them, he had never been crusading to the Holy Land. He was an old friend and a covert antagonist of the sheriff, Richard de Revelle, who unfortunately was his ultimate lord and master, though Gabriel’s immediate superior was Ralph Morin, the castle constable.

The coroner casually slid his Latin lesson under some other parchments and leaned back on his bench, his long arms planted on the table. ‘What brings you here, Gabriel? Just a social visit to sample our cider?’

The sergeant touched the brim of his helmet in salute. He respected John de Wolfe both for his rank as a knight and for his military pedigree. Though his relations with the new coroner’s team were relaxed, he took care not to be over-familiar with this tall, dark, hawkish man who, after the sheriff, was the most senior law officer in the county of Devon.

‘No, Sir John, I bring a message from Sir Richard.’

The coroner groaned. Relations with his brother-in-law were more strained than usual, since the controversy last month over the murder in Widecombe.

The problem of jurisdiction over criminal deaths between sheriff and coroner was still unresolved and remained a bone of contention between them, so any message from Richard de Revelle was hardly likely to be good news. But John was to be surprised.

‘The sheriff’s compliments to you, Crowner, and he asks, will you please deal with three deaths reported from Torre?’

John’s black eyebrows rose on his saturnine face, crinkling the old sword scar on his forehead. ‘Good God! He’s actually asking me to deal with them? What’s the catch, Gabriel?’

The old soldier shrugged, his lined face wooden. He was not going to get involved in the well-known power struggle between Sir John and the sheriff, whatever his own personal sympathies.

‘Don’t know, sir, but he doesn’t want to go down there himself. Far too busy, he says, with the Chief Justiciar coming to Exeter in a few days’ time.’

Hubert Walter, the Justiciar and Archbishop of Canterbury, was virtually ruler of England now that King Richard had gone permanently back to France. He was to visit Exeter at the end of that week and one of his tasks would be to try to settle this demarcation dispute between coroner and sheriff.

Thomas de Peyne, the crook-backed clerk, made the Sign of the Cross at the mention of the Archbishop – an obsessional habit he had developed since the mental trauma of being dismissed from the priesthood two years earlier. It was a counterpoint to Gwyn, who was prone to frequent and vigorous scratching of his crotch. ‘What sort of deaths are these?’ he demanded, in his squeaky voice, thinking ahead as to how much writing he would have to do on his sheepskin rolls.

Gabriel took off his helmet to run a horny hand through his greying hair. ‘All I know is that a messenger came in from Torre an hour ago, saying that a hermit monk turned up there last night with a story of three corpses on the beach somewhere between Paignton and Torpoint. Drowned sailors, most likely. Doesn’t sound very exciting.’

John snorted. ‘Doubtless why my dear brother-in-law is content to leave them to me. No glory or fame for him in a few wet corpses. Any more details?’

‘Only that this hermit fellow knows most about the matter. His name is Wulfstan and he lives in a cave near Torre. We’ve heard nothing about it from William de Brewere, the manor lord, or his bailiff.’

The coroner clucked his tongue in annoyance. ‘We’ll hear nothing from Lord William, he’s always away on his political campaigning – the manors there are run by his son, the younger William.’ He smacked a big hand on the table. ‘How I’m supposed to carry out my royal warrant to keep the Pleas of the Crown with such scanty knowledge, God alone knows!’

Gwyn wiped a hand the size of a small ham across his wild moustache, which hung down each side of his mouth and chin like a red curtain. ‘What are we supposed to do about this, Gabriel?’

‘Sir Richard requests that the crowner find this monk and carry on from there. He devoted no more than a couple of heartbeats to the problem.’

De Wolfe rose, his grey-black figure hovering over the scatter of documents on his table. ‘It’s now about mid-morning. We can be there before nightfall, so let’s go.’ He took his heavy wolf-skin riding cloak from a wooden peg hammered between the stones of the wall and picked up his sheathed sword from the floor, then led the way to the stairs.

The winter dusk was falling as the trio trotted along the final mile of coastal track towards the village of Paignton. The coroner was on his massive grey stallion Bran, a pensioned-off warhorse with hairy feet. Just behind him was Gwyn on a big brown mare, while Thomas jogged along side-saddle on a small but wiry pony.

Until the previous week, the little clerk had ridden a semi-derelict mule, but during the de Bonneville case, when they had to ride long distances over Dartmoor, his master had become so exasperated by the beast’s lack of speed that he had bought Thomas a cheap pony, using some of the money acquired from hanged felons.

The track wound close to the red cliffs and many combes that formed steep-sided bays along the coast south of the river Teign. To their left was the sea, grey and forbidding, with white foam caps whipped up by the bitter easterly wind across the whole expanse of water.

They now struck inland across the rocky prominence of Torpoint towards the lower, sandy coastline, which carried on around a wide bay, past Paignton to the fishing village of Brixham in the far distance. They were aiming for the hamlet of Torre, a small settlement a quarter of a mile inland from the beach at the northern end of Torbay.

‘Where do we find this damned fellow?’ growled Gwyn, pulling his coarse woollen cloak tighter around his neck to keep out the searching wind. He wore a round leather hood with ear-flaps tied under his chin. His bushy moustache helped to shelter his face, but his blue eyes watered and his nose ran in the cold breeze.

‘He must live in that cavern near Torre – the cave where bones of old animals lie in the mud,’ replied John. ‘I visited there as a boy, when I went with my father to buy sheep in Paignton.’ He knew this part of Devon well, as he had been born and brought up at Stoke-in-Teignhead, a village between here and the estuary of the Teign, where his mother and brother still held a manor. In fact, they had called there for a quick meal on their journey today.

It was growing dark when they reached Torre, a straggle of huts and cottages belonging to one of the manors of William de Brewere. There was a ramshackle wooden church and a row of crofts, sheltering under the slope of rocky ground that formed the base of the great peninsula of Torpoint. A few hundred yards downhill was a row of fisherman’s shacks near the beach, where stretches of coarse red sand lay between low rocky promontories. They reined up in the twilight and Gwyn dismounted to seek out the reeve, to claim a night’s lodging. This meant a space on his earthen floor around the fire, where they could roll themselves into their cloaks to sleep – no hardship for old fighting men like Gwyn and his master, although the softer ex-cleric viewed the prospect with distaste.

The Cornishman lumbered back in his ragged brown cloak and climbed back on to his mare. ‘The reeve was down at the beach, but I’ve told his drab of a daughter that we’ll be back later to eat and sleep. She says the cave is something over a mile from here.’

‘I know well enough where it is,’ snapped John, wheeling Bran around and setting off up the hill.

Clouds were flying rapidly overhead, driven by the remnants of the south-easterly gale that had blown for three days. They picked their way in the fading daylight past strip fields, until they came to the scrubby virgin woods that covered the headland, except where the wind allowed only gorse and bracken to survive. Now a well-trodden path led through the gloom and John, who remembered the geography fairly well from his youth, was able to lead them to a small valley running down towards the sea on the eastern side of the headland. A glimmer of light led them to the foot of a low cliff, the face of which was rent by a rock shelter that hid access to deep caves in the hillside.[1]

As they approached through the scrubby undergrowth, Gwyn called out, in a voice like an angry bull, to attract the hermit’s attention. The shout echoed against the cliff, then an answering cry came wavering back. A dark figure came stumbling down the slope from the cave.

‘Are you Wulfstan, who knows about some corpses?’ called the coroner.

The hermit, who in the fading light appeared as a frail, dishevelled old man, came up close to the grey stallion. ‘Come up to my dwelling, out of this keen wind, and I’ll tell you what I know.’ He waved his staff at the cliff and hobbled off again.

They dismounted and tied their steeds to the bushes that grew on the muddy slope below the rock shelter, then trudged up behind the loping figure of Wulfstan. Just inside the cave mouth, the recluse had built a rough dry-stone wall, behind which he dwelt in utter squalor. Though John was far from particular about his own personal comfort, even he was glad that the gloom concealed Wulfstan’s living conditions, though the smell was suggestive enough.

A tallow dip flicked on the pile of flat rocks that served as a table, sufficient only to reveal the hermit’s face as he squatted down nearby. This was almost hidden by unkempt hair and beard, all of a dirty brown streaked with grey. He wore a long, shapeless garment of rough wool, tied around the waist with a frayed rope, which smelt as if its last wash had been at about the time of Becket’s martyrdom.

‘Well, holy man, what’s all this about?’ Sir John was anxious to get out of this dirty hole as soon as possible.

‘Dead men, Crowner. I saw three, but I’m sure there are more.’ He pulled his fingers through his hair in a futile attempt to remove some of the tangles. ‘I was at the beach near Torre yesterday morning, seeking shellfish in the pools, when I saw men from the village gathering planks from the tide-line. When I approached, others were burying three bodies just above the high-water mark.’

Wulfstan’s voice was gentle and mellow, at variance with his wild and neglected appearance. The more sensitive Thomas wondered what had happened to him in the past to drive him into this miserable exile.

Gwyn’s mind was on more immediate matters. ‘They were drowned men, then?’

‘I think two of them were. It was obviously a shipwreck, from the profusion of wood and spars about the sands. But one had injuries on him that I thought were from a grievous assault.’

‘Why so?’ asked John.

‘Blood was caked on his hair and there were wounds on his temple.’

De Peyne, always keen to show off his knowledge, interrupted the hermit. ‘He may have struck his head on the rocks when pitched from the wreck or pounded by the surf.’

Wulfstan smiled. ‘Then the water would have washed away the blood – but this was thick on his head, so he must have bled ashore, out of the water.’

The clerk, somewhat abashed, crossed himself for no particular reason.

‘Why did you take the trouble to report this to these priests and not to the steward or bailiff, as you should?’ asked the coroner, suspicious of any co-operation from the public.

The recluse looked troubled. ‘Not only because of the wounds, brother, but those villagers of Torre are a bad lot. Yesterday they appeared even more shifty than usual and tried to get me off the beach as soon as I began to show an interest in what they were doing.’

‘In what way?’

‘I saw some casks hidden under bushes above the sand – and an ox-cart was taking away a load of planks covering something underneath. After they chased me away, my conscience troubled me over the dead men and I sought the advice of my brothers in God who are settled nearby. They took me seriously and sent a messenger to the sheriff.’

‘Who are these brothers?’ asked Thomas, his religious curiosity aroused. Though so ignominiously ejected from the clergy, he still hankered after his old life and pathetically sought out every ecclesiastical contact within his reach.

‘They are a small party of White Canons, invited by Lord William to establish an abbey on ground that he is to give them above the beach. This is an advance party, living in wooden cells, but their Order, the Premonstratensians, hopes to build an abbey in a year or two on that spot.’

‘Never heard of them!’ said Gwyn gruffly. He had no fondness for priests or monks.

‘They are followers of Saint Norbert, and are come to pray for the souls of old King Henry and his son, our present Richard Coeur de Lion.’

‘He’s not dead yet, thank Christ,’ objected John.

Wulfstan again smiled his gentle smile. ‘It comes to us all, my son. William de Brewere is being generous with his land for the sake of his own soul and to give thanks for the safe return of his son from durance in Germany.’

William the Younger had been one of the hostages sent as surety for the payment of the huge ransom of a hundred and fifty thousand marks for the release of King Richard, whose capture near Vienna still troubled John’s conscience: he and Gwyn had been part of the royal bodyguard, yet had been unable to save him from seizure. But this was far from the problem now in hand.

Gwyn pulled off his leather helmet to scratch his ruddy thatch. ‘You think they were pillaging the wreck of a vessel, then?’

Wulfstan nodded. ‘Maybe not only pillaging it but getting rid of witnesses. I wouldn’t put it past them to wreck a ship deliberately, with false beacons, though the weather was foul enough for a ship to founder anyway, on that lee shore with an easterly gale.’

‘Have you any notion of what vessel it might have been?’ asked the coroner.

The older man shook his head, and Thomas stood back hastily in case any lice were flung off in his direction. ‘I saw nothing except shattered timbers on the sand.’

There seemed little more to learn from Wulfstan and, with some relief, the coroner led the way down to their horses. By this time the daylight had almost gone, and they rode slowly back along the track to the village, lit fitfully by a moon that constantly dodged in and out of the rapidly scudding clouds.

‘The man seems definite about this, for all that he’s an odd character,’ Gwyn grunted, in his deep bass voice, his usual way of communicating.

‘He is obviously at odds with the villagers – probably some old feud between them. But his story had a ring of truth,’ replied John, his grey form almost invisible in the gloom.

Thomas, unwilling to be left out of the big men’s discussion, piped up from the rear. ‘The coroner’s writ is doubly valid in this,’ he offered.

‘What are you on about, dwarf?’ growled Gwyn. He pretended to despise the ex-priest, though he would have defended him to the death.

‘A possible killing, and a definite wreck of the sea,’ pointed out the clerk. ‘Both well within the crowner’s jurisdiction.’

‘That had occurred to me already,’ snapped de Wolfe sarcastically.

‘Why are you charged with investigating wrecks, for Mary’s sake?’ demanded the Cornishman.

‘All part of Hubert Walter’s plan to revive the royal treasury. Too much money due to the King has been lost these past few years. Crooked sheriffs and manorial lords have all helped to impoverish the royal purse.’

‘So why wrecks?’

‘Everything washed up on the shores of the kingdom has traditionally belonged to the Crown.’

‘Including the Royal Fish – the whale and the sturgeon,’ chipped in the know-all Thomas.

‘Damn the fish! It’s these thieving villagers stealing everything from a wrecked ship, valuables that should have gone to the King’s coffers. The sheriff said nothing about that, I notice, only about corpses that have no value.’

‘Maybe he didn’t know,’ observed Gwyn reasonably.

Just then, the moon appeared through a wide gap in the clouds and they took the opportunity to speed up to a trot along the track. Here, so near the sea, the forest was thin and low, bent by the Channel winds that blew salt air across the land. Within minutes, they reached Torre again, a few glimmers of light escaping from the unglazed windows crudely shuttered against the keening wind.

‘Too late to do anything now, with the daylight gone,’ grumbled John. ‘May as well settle for the night and make a start early in the morning.’

Gwyn led them along the double row of huts that was the village, the church and tithe barn the only larger buildings visible in the fleeting moonlight. Opposite the barn was a dwelling slightly larger than the rest, but with the same steep thatched roof, grass and moss growing from the old straw. There was no chimney and smoke drifted out from under the eaves.

The sound of their horses’ hoofs brought Aelfric, the Saxon manor reeve, to his door. His youngest son was sent out to take the mounts to a shed at the back, where they were unharnessed, fed and watered. The arrival of a king’s officer, however unwelcome, demanded automatic hospitality from the agent of the lord of the manor, even though the function of his new-fangled post of coroner was poorly understood.

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.

But Hubert’s imminent visit to Exeter was in his capacity as head of the English Church: the King had made him Archbishop of Canterbury as a reward for both his military prowess and his genius as an administrator.

Now the Archbishop was overdue for a tour of his various dioceses so he was coming to visit Henry Marshall, Bishop of Exeter – and brother to William Marshall, the most powerful baron in the land. The occasion would outwardly be ecclesiastical, but politics would be high on the agenda, rather than the cure of souls in that part of the kingdom.

But before John could go over this in his mind for the hundredth time, sleep suddenly overcame him. He began to snore gently, dreaming of the soft arms and plump breasts of Nesta.

At about the time that Sir John was dreaming of his favourite mistress, his stunted clerk was forcing down drink that he did not want, in the hovel that housed the village priest.

In the short time that he had been with the coroner, Thomas had learned that one of the best sources of information about local intrigues was the local priest. These men were often poverty-stricken vicars frequently placed in village churches by absentee prebendaries who held the living and rarely if ever visited their parishes. They preferred to live comfortably in the cathedral cities, paying a pittance to barely literate priests to carry out their duties.

The coroner’s clerk had made his way from the reeve’s cottage to the church, crossing the muddy track that was the village street. The House of God in Torre was the second largest building, the tithe barn next to it being considerably bigger. Thomas could see the thatched church roof, with its plain wooden cross, silhouetted against a moonlit gap in the fast-moving clouds. As he came closer, he could see that against the rear wall was a lean-to hut, made of the same rough boards as the church itself. A dim flicker of light showed through the cracks of the shuttered window opening, which told him that the incumbent of this rude vicarage was at home.

Stumbling over rubbish strewn on the path, de Peyne groped his way to the door and banged on the boards. There was a lengthy silence and he knocked again. This time he heard mumbling inside, and unsteady footsteps brought the priest to his door. He opened it sufficiently to peep suspiciously through a crack: he was not used to visits from his flock after dark – or at any other time, given the scorn in which he was held.

Thomas had developed a routine for such occasions. He rapidly established his religious status by sententiously delivering a greeting-cum-blessing in good Latin and making the Sign of the Cross. The bewildered pastor, already more than slightly drunk, dragged open the door and mumbled some response that the clerk took to be an invitation to enter.

De Peyne pushed his way inside and looked around the room in the minimal light of the guttering candle, apparently the remains of one from the church altar. As with the reeve’s dwelling, there was virtually no furniture, apart from an old milking stool, a slate slab on two stones for a table and a pile of straw covered in rags that served as a bed. The remains of a fire glowed in the central hearth, surrounded by a few dirty pots. The most prominent feature was a large jug near the stool and a mug half filled with red liquid.

Thomas began his patter to dampen any doubts the priest might have, claiming that he was the personal chaplain to the new coroner, who had come to investigate the deaths of the seamen washed up on the beach. The fuddled mind of the local parson was reassured that Thomas had not come to murder him or steal his non-existent possessions. He motioned him hospitably to the stool, pressed another grubby pot into his hand and poured a ruby fluid into it from the jug. Then he subsided with a thump to sit on the floor. ‘Drink, brother and be welcome,’ he said thickly.

Thomas had little need to wonder where the poverty-stricken priest would get a limitless supply of good French wine: the answer seemed obvious and already he felt a glow of achievement in his espionage operation for his master. He made a pretence of enthusiastic drinking, though he was not fond of liquor. When his host was not looking, he tipped most of his drink into the tangled rushes on the floor, to keep his head clear so that he could encourage the man to reveal the source of his supplies. The conversation was less productive. The priest, an emaciated wreck with yellow skin and bloodshot eyes, seemed mentally stunted. Whether this was from years incarcerated in a remote village or due to his chronic alcoholism was not clear. Thomas wondered which condition had led to the other – was he a drunk because he was stuck here, or had he been banished here because he was a drunk? Either way, the man seemed intent on slow suicide by alcohol as a means of escape.

Thomas tried to get details from him of the wreck and the drowned men, but the priest, whose name he never discovered, had been ‘indisposed’ on that day. He knew nothing of the matter and had not even been asked to say a few words of prayer over the corpses as they were buried under the sand. Asked if he knew anything of the identity of the ship, he muttered that the reeve had brought in a plank with words carved upon it, but he admitted that he could not read well enough to decipher it. Thomas was not surprised at the admitted illiteracy of a man in Holy Orders – although priests were supposed to be able to read and write, many could barely scratch their own name.

The man soon tired of de Peyne’s questions and rose unsteadily from where he squatted on the floor, picking up his now empty jug. He tottered off to a hole in the rear wall, which led into a cupboard-like extension built on to the back of the hut. He stooped into this and leaned around the corner, clumsily fiddling with something out of sight. Thomas padded across the rushes behind him and peered around the corner of the alcove. He saw a small cask standing on end, probably the cleanest object in the hut. The top had been stove in and the priest was dipping his jug into the dark red contents.

Suddenly he became aware of the clerk at his shoulder and his hollow face split into a guilty grin. ‘A gift from my parishioners.’ He giggled, his shaking hand spilling some of the wine on to the floor. ‘And plenty more where that came from!’ he added, with a wink.

He shuffled out with his jug and, again, Thomas had to go through the charade of drinking with him.

The vicar’s boast that more wine was hidden somewhere stimulated Thomas’s new-found detective skills. As soon as he could he escaped and decided to investigate further.

Outside, in the cold darkness, he stood for a moment to consider where stolen goods might be hidden. The obvious place – almost too obvious – was the tithe barn, where a tenth of all the produce of the manor’s efforts was kept for the Church.

The barn was next to the priest’s hovel, looming above him, and Thomas felt his way carefully towards it: the moon was now temporarily hidden behind the clouds. The rough boards and wattle of the walls were under his hands as he felt his way towards the tall entrance, high enough to admit ox-carts piled with hay, corn and roots.

He found the bar that held the two shaky doors closed and lifted it out of its sockets. The whistle of the wind hid the creaking noise as he opened one door just far enough to slip through. It was pitch black inside and he had to feel his way forwards, hands held out in front of him. The oats had long ago gone to market and only hay and root crops remained for animal feed, although the villagers, often on the verge of starvation at the end of the winter, might well be driven to living on turnips by February.

When he reached the stack of hay piled above his head, the clerk felt blindly about him until, as if in answer to his unspoken prayer, the moon came out again. The walls of the barn were riddled with splits and gaps between the wattle panels, letting the pale lunar gleam light up the interior. Thomas’s eyes were by now fully accustomed to the gloom and he dived at the sweet-smelling hay, plunging his hands deeply into it, moving rapidly from one place to another. At the side of the stack, against the wall, his fingers came upon something solid. He soon traced a line of casks and boxes, of differing shapes and sizes, tucked against the wall and thinly concealed with a scattering of hay. He counted at least a dozen, including some square wooden crates.

The moon still glinted and he ran to the mound of turnips, but it was impossible to feel underneath them without a great deal of labour in moving them.

Then the light failed as quickly as it had appeared and he had to give up his quest, well pleased with his discovery, which should increase his standing with the stern, critical coroner. He pulled the hay back over the casks to conceal his snooping, slipped out of the barn and picked his way back to the reeve’s cottage.