The Poisoned Chalice

Chapter Two In which Crowner John finds three corpses

At dawn next morning, the coroner’s team was on the beach. After hot gruel and cold beer in the reeve’s cottage, they had walked the short distance through the scrubby pasture to the sea, where a few flimsy fishermen’s huts were built on the low bank above the high-water mark. Aelfric loped ahead, turning left at the edge of the beach to walk northwards towards the rise of ground that sloped up to the start of the rocky cliffs.

The worst of the gale was over, but there was still a strong south-easterly that blew scuds of foam off the white-capped waves that crashed and boomed part-way down the beach. The tide was ebbing, leaving a smooth expanse of sand, unmarked by footprints.

As they walked, with half a dozen curious villagers trailing behind, the reeve bent down and scooped up a handful of sand from the high-tide mark, not far below the brown rocks that marked the upper margin of the beach. ‘See? There is fruit all along here.’ He held out his hand and John could see, among the shingle grains, some soggy raisins and a fig.

Mindful of what Thomas had covertly told him about the wine casks, he asked innocently, ‘But no chests or casks from the cargo?’

Aelfric shook his head virtuously. ‘Never a one, sir. Only broken staves and timber that will help a poor village like ours mend our houses and feed our fires this winter.’

Your poor village will be a damned sight poorer when I’ve finished amercing you, thought John grimly, but for now he held his tongue.

They reached a point a few hundred yards from the start of the low cliffs. Ahead of them on the left, the ground began to rise, ending in another line of cliffs that marched higher until it was broken by a small valley. The coastline on the further side of this combe was much higher and turned through a right-angle, so that more cliffs faced them, ending in the blunt promontory of Torpoint.

Aelfric stopped and beckoned to a couple of the village men. They carried wooden shovels and, without a word, went to the drier, shingly sand above the high-tide line where three crude crosses were standing, each just two sticks bound with cord.

John and Gwyn stood huddled in their riding clothes, their backs to the gusting wind, as they watched the men digging. Within minutes they had scooped out two feet of sand and the first body began to appear. One of the peasants dropped his spade and knelt to scrape away more sand with his hands. As soon as a leg and an arm were visible, he and his companion heaved on them and slid the body up on to the surface. As they moved to do the same for the other two corpses, the coroner and his officer bent over the first to examine it.

Thomas hung back, busily crossing himself in the presence of death. Strangely, for a man steeped in the belief of resurrection and everlasting life thereafter, he was morbidly afraid of death, especially his own. Notwithstanding his damaged body, ravaged by old disease, he was greatly attached to life. His fertile imagination caused him a great deal of torment as he anticipated his own demise. Sometimes, especially since he had begun his work for the coroner, dealing daily with corpses, Thomas would stare at his own hand and imagine the flesh decaying and shrivelling in putrefaction as he lay in a wooden box under the damp soil. Now he tried to shake off these morbid thoughts as his companions went about their business with apparent indifference.

‘A young man, looks about twenty,’ observed Gwyn, wiping the sand from the cadaver’s face.

The body was fresh, having kept well during two cold December days. The face was peaceful enough, eyes closed and the mouth relaxed. When John lifted a lid, the front of the eye was beginning to cloud over. The man was dressed in typical sailor’s clothing of a tightly belted tunic over thick serge braies to the knees, below which the legs were bare, as were the calloused feet.

The coroner turned his attention to the mouth and turned down the lower lip to look at the teeth, still tightly clenched in rigor mortis.

Gwyn, the former fisherman, was better acquainted with drowning than John de Wolfe, whose considerable experience of death was mainly centred around battle casualties. He said, ‘If you’re looking for froth at the lips, it disperses soon after the body is taken from the water – the bubbles burst and dissolve away in a few hours.’

Having delivered this lecture, for he was usually a man of few words, Gwyn knelt, placed a massive palm on the dead man’s chest and pressed forcibly downwards. The young sailor made his last sound on this earth as air was squeezed from his lungs – and with the macabre gasp came a gout of white foam from his nostrils, seeping down over his lips. The Cornishman stood up and dusted the sand from his hands. ‘That sometimes works for a day or two, though you get more from bodies drowned in rivers or ponds than in this salt sea.’ He sounded satisfied that, for once, he had outdone his master in knowledge of the ways of death.

The other two victims were rapidly unearthed and examined by the coroner and his henchman. One was that of a thin, grey-haired man, probably in his fifties, the other a fat fellow of indeterminate age, with a sodden thatch of yellow hair. He failed Gwyn’s chest pressure test, but the older man produced a little blood-tinged spume from his mouth.

At John’s command, his officer pulled off their belts and rolled the three corpses on to their faces. He lifted their tunics and undershirts to examine the back of each body, but nothing was to be seen, except the lividity of the skin, where gravity had caused the blood to run down after death.

‘Often see them bright pink like that, when they’ve been in cold water.’ The Cornish giant seemed unwilling to forsake his expertise on drowning.

The fronts of the corpses were now examined, the breasts and bellies searched for injuries, but apart from a few scratches on the hands and shins, there seemed no signs of violence.

‘Those grazes are from being dragged across the rocks by the surf – fair hammering in here it was,’ confided Aelfric, helpfully.

John and Gwyn stood up and banged the ubiquitous sand from their hands and clothing. ‘Drowned right enough, so what was that damned hermit on about?’ muttered the coroner’s officer.

‘There’s something amiss with the whole affair,’ murmured John, out of hearing of the reeve. ‘After Thomas’s story last night, we have to get to the bottom of it.’

With the bodies now laid out side by side on the sand, Aelfric and his men looked anxiously at John de Wolfe. ‘Now that you’ve seen the cadavers, Crowner, shall we bury them again?’

‘No, indeed not! They have to be properly identified and presentment of Englishry made, if that’s possible.’

The reeve looked blankly at the King’s coroner. The words meant nothing to him.

John, who had never been a patient man, snapped an explanation. ‘Under the new law, someone must prove to me that these dead men were Saxons. Otherwise it will be assumed that they were Normans and a murdrum fine imposed on your village.’ He ignored the groan from Aelfric and carried on. ‘Already you’re in trouble and liable for amercement for burying the bodies before I had a chance to see them, and until we can put names to these corpses there is no hope of proving they are English or even West Welsh.’

The reeve looked at his men and rolled his eyes upwards in horror at the prospect of double fines when they eventually came before the Justices. ‘But how can we tell who they are, sir? Just bodies washed up from the sea, nothing to do with our village at all!’

John shrugged – his job was merely to enforce the new laws, he felt no responsibility for their existence.

Gwyn, a commoner more in tune with the lowly inhabitants of Torre, felt a little more sympathy and tried to help. He looked around the beach, his shaggy red hair blowing wildly in the gale. ‘Was there nothing to show what vessel this might have been? The dress of these men looks more local than that of Bretons or Frenchmen.’

Aelfric shouted something to one of the men, who scrambled up into the rough grass above the beach and returned with a four-foot length of plank, freshly shattered at both ends.

‘This has some marks on it, but no one here can read.’ The villager held up the board and John studied it gravely, pretending that its message was profoundly significant to him, though in fact the words meant nothing – his tutor at the cathedral was teaching him only Latin grammar.

‘Thomas, what do you make of this?’ he demanded, as if offering the clerk the chance to confirm his opinion.

Thomas took a quick look at the incomplete lettering cut deeply into the oaken board, which had obviously been one of the bow planks of the vessel. It read ‘… ARY OF THE S …’ and below this ‘TOP …’

‘It’s part of the nameboard of the ship,’ he said.

‘So what’s the name?’ demanded John.

‘It’s not complete, the ends are missing, but I suspect it says Mary of the Sea, from Topsham.’ This was a small port on the east bank of the River Exe, where it widened into the tidal estuary a few miles downstream from Exeter.

‘I know the ship!’ exclaimed Gwyn, who had an inborn interest in all things maritime. ‘It’s a vessel belonging to Joseph of Topsham, who runs quite a few boats across to Brittany and Normandy taking wool. He often brings back French victuals, such as wine and fruit.’

John nodded, for Joseph’s vessels often took his own wool across the Channel for sale in France. The coroner had a part-share in a wool business with one of the Portreeves of Exeter. He had wisely invested most of the loot he had won in foreign wars in this business, which together with his share of the family lands at Stoke-in-Teignhead, brought him a comfortable income.

‘So! We must get Joseph to identify these poor souls, if they were his seamen. Might anyone else know who they were?’

Thomas, whose nosy nature made him a mine of Exeter gossip, had a suggestion. ‘With wine on board, then surely Eric Picot would be involved. He is the main importer into Exeter and supplies most of the nobility and the taverns. In fact, I think he might own a share in Joseph’s ships.’

John turned to the reeve. ‘Send a man to your manor bailiff to tell Lord William that the King’s coroner requires him to dispatch a rider immediately to Exeter on the best horse he has. He is to tell the sheriff – or, if he is absent, the castle constable – that a message be given to Joseph of Topsham and Eric Picot at the Watergate. He is to tell them that their vessel Mary of the Sea has foundered in Torbay and that all the crew and cargo are lost. They will have to come in a day or so to identify these bodies, but I will be back in Exeter tomorrow to talk to them.’ It took several repetitions of this message to get it fixed in the head of the messenger.

When he had gone, the coroner turned again to Aelfric, prepared to deliver his hammer-blow about what was concealed in the tithe barn. But this pleasure was suddenly delayed, as Thomas was tugging at the edge of John’s dark wolf-skin cloak.

The clerk’s ever-roving eye, squinted though it was, had seen something further up the beach. ‘Look up there, Crowner, near to where the rocks begin!’ he hissed. John stared at where Thomas’s sharp forefinger was pointing and saw a smooth semi-circle of tide-washed sand, where the spring tide earlier that morning, higher than the previous day, had pushed a line of seaweed and debris almost up to the rocks at the head of the beach. Within this area, three shallow depressions could be seen, where the weight of water had pulled out recently disturbed sand.

On previous days, with lower tides, these had been just above the high-water mark, but today the rising tide had swept over them. From one of these slight hollows protruded a white, bleached foot. De Wolfe nudged Gwyn and gestured towards it. With a loud bellow of surprise, the Cornishman strode towards the hollow, his ragged-edged brown cloak blowing out in the wind behind him. John and his clerk hurried close after him, across the shiny wet strand.

When he reached the dead limb, Gwyn bent down and, with a single tug, lifted a whole leg from the sand. He roared with the effort and tried to pull the rest of the body out of the grave, but the depth of sand over its trunk was too great.

John turned and yelled at Aelfric, immobile and aghast beside the first three corpses. ‘Bring that shovel, reeve! And you’ve got some explaining to do.’ He saw one of the other men running away as hard as he could in the direction of the village.

Reluctantly, the reeve and the other two came across the beach. Gwyn seized a spade from one and began to dig furiously. The coroner grabbed Aelfric by the collar of his grubby tunic and shook him. ‘What’s this, damn you? Did you know these were here?’ While the reeve stammered out a string of denials, Gwyn had pulled the first body from the shallow pit and was rapidly exhuming the other two.

John, his tall, crow-like figure towering above the reeve, shook the man again. ‘Well?’ he demanded.

‘I know nothing, sir! These bodies must have drowned as well and been covered by the sand.’

The coroner rattled the man like a dog shaking a rat. ‘A likely story! Did the tide place them side by side in a row, eh? Exactly in line and buried to the same depth?’

Aelfric made no attempt to answer but stood dejectedly when John released his grip.

By now, Gwyn had hauled the second body from the sand and was digging down into the third depression. The coroner went to help him and soon another three corpses lay side by side on the beach. This time, the findings were different. Though again the bodies were those of men in seafaring clothes, their faces were streaked with blood, thin and watery, leaking from clots matted in their hair.

‘They must have been buried before this high tide, so that the dry sand has preserved the blood, as the hermit claimed,’ said Gwyn.

‘And the much higher tide today came up beyond yesterday’s level, washing away the loose sand and exposing that foot,’ John deduced, in a satisfied, though menacing, tone.

He pushed back the hair of the first corpse, who stared up at the clouded sky with softened eyeballs partly covered with sand. On the upper forehead, extending back into the fair hair, was a deep gash, exposing the skull beneath.

‘Is that from a sword?’ demanded Gwyn. John shook his head. ‘Can’t tell. Even a blow from a plank or an axe shaft can split the scalp like that.’ After years on the battlefields of Ireland, France and the Holy Land, he considered himself an authority on wounds. ‘But it’s certainly not from the sea pounding him on the rocks, for look here.’ He parted the bloody, sand-crusted hair on the crown of the head, to display two similar wounds, exactly parallel with the first. ‘What rock strikes a head three times with the same strength and in the same direction, eh? And the surf not wash away the blood!’

He turned to the other bodies. The first one, another young man, had no blood in the hair, but down the side of the neck, from behind the left ear to the Adam’s apple, was a sharply defined double line of bruising. Across the left cheek was a similar pair of parallel bruises, four inches long and over an inch apart. The last victim, a burly, brown-haired man, probably over thirty years of age, had two sharply defined black eyes. When John opened the swollen lids, the whites were heavily bloodshot. On feeling the head, shattered skull-bones crackled under the coroner’s probing fingers and when he parted the sodden hair, he saw a great mass of swollen bruising on the top of the scalp. None of the corpses had any significant wounds on the rest of their bodies, apart from a few scratches.

John turned again to the terrified reeve. ‘Very active rocks, these, eh, Aelfric? They just jumped up and struck these poor men only on their heads, then the sea buried them in nice regular graves, side by side?’

His sarcasm brought nothing but denial from the village headman. ‘I tell you, sir, we know nothing of this!’

John showed his teeth in a snarl reminiscent of his animal namesake. ‘Like you know nothing of the casks and boxes in your barn? And why did your man take to his heels just now?’

Aelfric had no answer, but continued to shake his head in desperate denial: this sounded like a hanging matter.

‘Get these bodies taken up to the barn – my officer will go with you to see that your thefts from the wreck do not go astray,’ ordered the coroner. ‘In a day or so, when the ship-owner comes to identify his seamen, I will hold the inquest – and then decide what is to be done with you and your village.’

With that ominous warning, he strode back along the beach, intent on visiting the lord of the manor, to see if William de Brewere the Younger had any knowledge of this affair, before they rode back to Exeter.