The Sanctuary Seeker

Chapter Eleven In which Crowner John attends an exhumation

In the churchyard at Widecombe, a heap of fresh earth proved that Thomas de Peyne had carried out his master’s instructions. By the time the coroner and his small party arrived in the mid-afternoon, the clerk had ordered Ralph the reeve to complete the digging and two serfs had removed all the soil from the new grave.

Before he took Gervaise de Bonneville and the squire into the churchyard, John adjourned to the large hut on the other side of the village green, which did service as a tavern. Here, the widow of a freeman crushed to death two years before by a bull supported her three children by brewing beer and selling oat-cakes. Her thatched wattle hut stood in the dip of the track that came down from the moor and led on towards Dunstone. The green was humped, as was most of the land around the village: the church was on one side of the slope and the tavern on the other, the green hillside rising steeply behind.

The travellers sat outside the door on a large log that served as a bench, while the toothless young widow brought them bread and ale, to which John added the remains of Mary’s ham and some hard cheese. For a few moments they ate and drank, Gervaise and Baldwyn uneasy as they anticipated the moment of truth at the graveside.

John looked across the open green space to the low dry-stone wall of the churchyard, from where he could hear the final sounds of the raising of the coffin. The rise of the land prevented him seeing their activities and, as he chewed the rough bread, his eye fell instead on three straw mats, held up vertically on poles stuck into the ground at the further end of the green.

‘They seem keen archers in this place,’ he commented to Gwyn.

The woman, refilling his beer mug, grinned a gummy smile. ‘Good for my business. Shooting at those targets is thirsty work. The lord of our manor, FitzRalph, insists that every man above fourteen practises with the bow at least once a week. He wants plenty of good shots if he has to raise men for an army.’

When the food was finished, the coroner got down to business. ‘Show them the effects of the dead man, Gwyn,’ he commanded.

The cornishman went to his tethered horse and took a hessian-wrapped bundle from a pannier. He unrolled it on the ground before then and displayed the ornate sword belt, the empty scabbard and sheathed dagger.

The two men leaned over to study and then handle the objects. Gervaise sank back on to the log. ‘I’ve not seen these before, but they are undoubtedly foreign so it means little. If they were Hubert’s then he must have obtained them in the East.’ Baldwyn nodded in silent agreement.

‘What about this, then?’ asked John, unrolling a green surcoat from the bundle. It had been washed, but the tear in the back was still obvious.

Gervaise and Baldwyn looked doubtfully at each other. ‘Certainly Hubert had some green clothing – he was fond of the colour. But so are half the men in England,’ Gervaise said.

‘There’s nothing special about this one,’ added Baldwyn. ‘It would be about his size, but there are thousands of men it would fit.’

John motioned to Gwyn to roll up the artefacts again, and they all rose to their feet. ‘Then it remains only to view the body, painful though that might be to you.’

He led the way across the green to the church. It was a poor structure of old wood, with peeling whitewash, dating back to Saxon days, but a new tower had been built in stone during the past decade, presumably a gift from the manorial lord.

Thomas was waiting at the gap in the wall, standing with bowed head, his hands together before him, and turned to lead the procession solemnly to the graveside, as if he was still a priest and conducting a funeral. At the heap of earth – grey here, not red like Exeter – Thomas turned and crossed himself. ‘The box is ready to open, Crowner,’ he said sonorously.

The two village men, one of whom habitually acted as sexton, stood by the crude coffin, which rested at the end of the hole. The parish priest, a thin soul with a furtive, hunted look, stood well back against the church wall, as if to distance himself from these unwelcome goings-on in his churchyard.

‘Open it, man,’ snapped John, as they stood in a ragged half-circle around the gaping grave.

The sexton took an old rusty sword with a broken blade and rammed it into the joint of the coffin lid. He levered up and, with some cracking and splintering of wood, the two rough planks were torn off. Thomas hopped back like a frightened sparrow, his hand to his mouth, while the others looked on impassively, Gervaise’s face pallid.

An aura of sweet-sour corruption wafted from the box, but soon drifted away on the slight breeze. Within the coffin was a crude cross, made of two sticks lashed with cord. This lay on a length of soiled linen that covered the body, the fabric marred by greenish yellow patches where it lay over the face, chest and belly. Without ceremony or hesitation, Gwyn stepped forward, took out the cross and whipped off the cloth, revealing the victim’s naked body.

In spite of Thomas’s apprehensions, the corpse was not much changed from the day of the inquest. The skin was more tense, moist and slimy, and was beginning to peel in places. Along the flanks were large blisters filled with bloody fluid and the abdomen and genitals were grossly swollen and green. The face, though, was only moderately puffy and blurred.

‘Cover him, for decency’s sake!’ grated Baldwyn tensely. Gwyn spread the linen over the lower half of the cadaver and turned to look inquiringly at Gervaise de Bonneville. The coroner’s eyes also swivelled to the young man. ‘Well, sir, is this your brother or not?’

Gervaise stood transfixed, staring at the putrefying body in the splintered box. For a long moment he was as motionless as the corpse, then he turned slowly to the coroner, his face even paler than it had been before.

‘It is Hubert, God rest his soul.’ His voice cracked and his squire took his arm.

Thomas edged forward, made the sign of the cross in the air over the open box and began to mutter some incantation in Latin.

The coroner turned to Baldwyn of Beer. ‘You must have known him well. Do you agree that this is your master’s kin?’

Baldwyn dropped his hand from Gervaise’s shoulder, stepped forward and bent to look more closely at the cadaver. Like John and Gwyn, he seemed immune to the sights and odours of death.

‘There is no doubt, sir. Though the face is swollen and the eyes squeezed shut, it is certainly Hubert. The build, the hair, the features and, above all, that disfigurement he was born with, they all prove it.’ He pointed at the raised brown mark on the side of the dead man’s neck, its colour and hair virtually unchanged, though it now sat on a slimed waxy bed of mottled skin.

John waved a hand imperiously at the sexton. ‘Seal the box and put him to rest.’

He turned to Thomas. ‘See to it that everything is done decorously – and tell that lurking priest to say a few words over the grave.’

As the party turned from the graveside, Gwyn nudged the coroner and pointed into the crude coffin. ‘Those bruises on the arms have come out since we last saw the corpse,’ he muttered.

John squatted to looked at the greening skin between each elbow and shoulder. On either side, three or four reddish purple marks, the size of a thumbnail, were now prominent on the shiny, peeling surface.

‘Grip marks, where fingers have pinioned his arms,’ he said.

‘Held by one man, while another stabbed him in the back, already disarmed by a slash into his sword arm,’ completed the Cornishman.

The coroner rose and shrugged at his henchman. ‘Nothing we didn’t know before, but it confirms that he was ambushed by more than one assailant.’ He led the way out of the churchyard and back to the ale-house, his black cloak billowing behind him.

Waiting for him was Ralph the reeve, who had been out in the fields when they arrived. He had been supervising the villeins as they ploughed some of the harvest stubble ready for next year’s crop, leaving the rest fallow as part of the rotation system that he had to organise.

Immediately John put him to work again. ‘Collect as many men from the village as you can muster for an inquest jury. Especially find those who were at the first inquiry a few days back.’

Ralph’s mouth opened in surprise. ‘What, now?’

John dropped heavily on to the log outside the tavern door and sat with his hands planted aggressively on his parted knees. ‘Yes, now! And hurry, it will be dark in a couple of hours, too late to ride back either to Exeter or to Peter Tavy, so we must sleep here tonight. We may as well use the remaining daylight to complete the inquest formalities and make an early start in the morning.’

Muttering under his breath, Ralph hurried off, shouting at every villager he saw to assemble at the tithe barn, set just beyond the church. As he went, Gwyn’s bright blue observant eyes lit on something else, this time at a distance. He tapped John’s shoulder. ‘Look over there, in the reeve’s croft,’ he said.

John followed his man’s pointing finger to where a horse was contently cropping the thin winter grass in the fenced plot of land that lay behind the hut. He yelled after the reeve, in a voice that could be heard up on the moor, ‘Come back here, damn you!’

Ralph, who had been giving orders to a couple of villagers to gather up a jury, plodded back to the coroner and his officer.

John grabbed him by the arm of his coarse tunic and turned him round, none too gently, so that he faced his own house. ‘Is that your dwelling there?’ he boomed, gesturing with his free hand.

Ralph looked surprised. ‘Of course it is – you ate and rested there last week.’

‘And is that your croft behind it?’ John indicated the patch of grass between the back of the house and the cultivated strip that stretched towards the field system.

‘It is … yes.’ The reeve was more puzzled than ever and apprehension crept into his voice.

‘And is that your horse?’

There was a slight hesitation, but Ralph had to admit that the beast tethered to a peg in the plot behind his house belonged to him.

‘A dappled grey mare with a singular black ring around her right eye!’ said John, with a rising note of triumphant accusation in his voice.

‘What of it? It’s just a horse,’ retorted Ralph, with tremulous defiance.

‘What of it? What of it, man?’ roared John. ‘That horse belonged to the dead man, as can be testified from when they were last seen together in Honiton.’

Gervaise de Bonneville and Baldwyn listened intently to this exchange, as did Gwyn, Thomas and the group of inquisitive jurymen. Village reeves were as unpopular as sheriffs or coroners: they were the agents of the manorial lord and chivvied the serfs from dawn to dusk.

Ralph turned this way and that like a cornered fox, but the coroner allowed him no escape.

‘I don’t know where the beast came from,’ he muttered desperately.

John sneered, ‘It just walked into your croft and tied itself to your peg. Are you going to have the audacity to tell me that a dead man turns up in the village and a horse, identified as his, also appears by sheer coincidence?’

Ralph stared at the ground.

‘I found her,’ was all he could manage to mutter.

‘Speak up, man! Let’s all hear what you have to say!’ shouted the coroner.

‘I found her, I tell you! She was wandering the woods between here and Dunstone, grazing among the trees. She was without an owner – I thought he may have been thrown and injured or killed, maybe miles away, so I brought the mare back here for safe keeping until she was claimed.’

‘Ha! A likely story. Did you make any effort to find the owner? This man who may have been thrown from his horse and injured or killed?’

The reeve was silent.

‘When did you “find” this animal?’

‘Er, about a week ago … a week last Sunday. I was taking my ease and walking to Dunstone to visit the reeve there.’

‘To visit your fellow reeve, eh? The last time I saw you two together you almost came to blows!’

The sullen Ralph had no answer.

‘So did this horse have any saddle or harness?’

‘No, nothing – she was just wandering, I tell you, cropping the grass here and there among the trees. God knows how far she had roamed.’

‘And you made no connection between the singular arrival of this unusually patterned horse and the finding of a soldier’s body in your stream?’ asked John sarcastically.

‘Why should I? I found the beast days before the body appeared. I had no cause to connect the two.’

‘Of course not. Widecombe is such a busy place that a murdered nobleman and a valuable stray horse are everyday occurrences, I suppose.’

Again the reeve could devise no answer.

‘You lie, Ralph,’ thundered the coroner, ‘and I will check your story. First, though, I’ll talk to that other rascal, Simon, the reeve from Dunstone, to see what he has to say about it.’

Ralph crumbled. ‘He’ll know nothing of this. It wasn’t me that found the mare, it was Nebba. He sold her to me for six shillings. He wanted the money to leave the village.’

‘Ha, so Nebba’s name crops up again, eh?’ said John, sharply. ‘And where is he now? Are you telling me he’s left?’

‘He went the day you held the inquest, Crowner. Just up and went, we didn’t know where he came from and we don’t know – nor care – where he’s gone. The village has had nothing but bad luck since he walked in from the forest.’

John turned to be Bonneville and his squire. ‘That mare is forfeit to the Crown, as a chattel of a slain man – but I think you should take her home with you to Peter Tavy. Though in no way compensation for the loss of your brother, she may be some living reminder of him.’ He turned back to Ralph. ‘As for you, you’ve not heard the last of this.’

The reeve stared sullenly at the ground. ‘I’m tempted to drag you back to Exeter gaol as a suspect for the murder, but the city won’t thank me for another mouth to feed at public expense. I know where to find you and I amerce the village in the sum of a further ten marks to ensure that you don’t vanish into the forest as soon as my back’s turned.’

Gervaise de Bonneville and his squire had been talking together in low voices, their heads close together, when John interrupted them again. ‘I regret this, but the law must be observed. I will take down your depositions on my rolls. The murder of a Norman gentleman is a serious matter, as well as being a sad one for your family.’

Gervaise’s face was drawn, but he had recovered some of the colour he had lost during the exhumation. John realised that he had never been involved in any fighting or war campaign, which made violent death an unwelcome novelty.

‘Who could have done this terrible thing?’ he asked. ‘And how am I to explain it to my father? And to Martyn – he was devoted to his eldest brother.’

John clasped his shoulder in sympathy. ‘As to the perpetrator, we have much to do to investigate – the inquest is but a starting point. The forest is full of outlaws, as you well know, some of them dangerous and desperate men, yet your brother was a fully armed campaigner, well able to take care of himself unless he was outnumbered.’

Thomas returned and the sullen reeve assembled more than a dozen villagers to act as jury.

At the barn door, John took the evidence of Gervaise and Baldwyn as to the undoubted identity of the slain man, all of which Thomas scratched down on his parchment roll. As no other witness came forward, at Gwyn’s stentorian invitation, the coroner declared that death had been due to a murderous knife attack by persons unknown, and the formalities were concluded.

Before the jury dispersed to go about their business, Ralph had a blunt question for the coroner. ‘What about this amercement you put on the village last time, Crowner?’ There was a murmur of assent and much nodding by the surrounding peasants, who would have to find the money if the fine were collected.

‘It stays, of course,’ John asserted. ‘You failed to present Englishry at the first inquest and now that we know the dead man was a Norman, your manor is in more trouble even than before.’ He glared round at the ring of faces. ‘That amercement is now converted into a murdrum fine, for having a slain Norman on your land and not bringing forth the culprit.’

The village crowd dispersed with much grumbling and Gwyn noticed that the reeve received some jostling and more than one hard dig in the ribs.

After he had ensured that Thomas had inscribed everything on his parchment roll, John led his party up the valley to claim a night’s lodging from Hugh FitzRalph, the manorial lord who, though he must have heard about the murdered Crusader on his land, had until now kept aloof from the proceedings.

Next morning, soon after dawn, the two from Peter Tavy left, anxious to reach home and break the sad news to Martyn.

After their early-morning meal, the coroner and his men prepared to ride in the opposite direction. John had given his thanks to FitzRalph for his hospitality. However, if he had had any hope of getting home quickly to avoid further friction with Matilda, it was soon dashed. Just as a their horses and the mule were being led out from the pasture behind the stables, a solitary horseman, dressed in the conical helmet and leather cuirass of Rougemont Castle’s soldiery, came up the track at a fast trot and swung himself agilely from the saddle right in front of the coroner. John recognised him as one of the men who had brought back Alan Fitzhai from Honiton. He saluted and fished inside his belt-pouch.

‘The reeve in the village said you would be here, Sir John. The sheriff sent me last evening. I slept the night at the roadside.’ He held out a crumpled piece of vellum, which John, rather self-consciously, passed to Thomas to read.

The former priest unrolled it and scanned the few sentences. ‘It’s written by the sheriff’s scribe, at his direction. It tells of another body found by shepherds on Heckwood Tor, up on the moor, apparently another murder by knife. It was known about for some time, but a carter only brought news of it to Exeter yesterday. The sheriff wishes to know if you will deal with it as you are so near or …’ He trailed and looked somewhat furtively at the coroner.

‘Well, go on! How does it end?’ John was impatient.

Thomas cleared his throat. ‘It says do you want to deal with it or shall it be handled properly by the sheriff’s men?’

John spat on the ground, as if to rid his mouth of the taste of Richard de Revelle. Then he put a foot in his stirrup and hoisted himself up to Bran’s broad back. ‘I’ll show him “properly”, damn the man!’ he muttered. ‘Gwyn, find out exactly where this place is – and you, soldier, you’ve travelled all night so get some food and rest here at the manor house. Tell the bailiff that you’re the sheriff’s messenger.’

Within minutes, John, Gwyn and Thomas were moving off, back down the valley to Widecombe and then westward on to Dartmoor, following the track of the two who had left an hour before. Gwyn had discovered from the manor bailiff that Heckwood Tor was half-way to Tavistock, just off the road they had travelled the day before. The nearest village was Sampford Spiney.

It was three hours’ ride, especially as Thomas’s mule seemed less inclined to keep trotting than it had when they left Exeter. John wondered if he should have confiscated the grey mare for his clerk, instead of rashly returning it to the family – but he doubted that the puny Thomas could have handled it.

When they reached the place described by the bailiff, it seemed certain to the trio that the most prominent tor must be the one named in the note, but not a soul was in sight to confirm it.

‘What now?’ asked Gwyn, looking around the bare moor.

John was angry that the local population seemed so unaware or heedless of the new royal office. It was not that he felt a personal slight at this indifference, but that his unfailing devotion to King Richard interpreted this widespread apathy as a mild form of treason. He was silent, so Gwyn suggested, ‘Let’s get up there and look for ourselves.’

They turned their mounts about and plodded up the prominent hill to the south of the track. As they rose, they could see over the crest of the right shoulder of the tor into a deep dip where a flock of several hundred sheep was being guarded by two shepherds and their dogs.

‘Go down and see what they know,’ John commanded. Gwyn urged his horse over the crest, and a few moments later, John saw him haul one shepherd on to the back of the big mare. The pair came back to where the coroner waited with his clerk.

‘He knows where the body lies. It’s still there, above us in the crag.’

With the young shepherd clinging on behind and giving directions, they all climbed almost to the top of the tor, where granite boulders lay in tumbled disorder. The shepherd, clad in shapeless woollen garments little better than rags, slipped from the horse and ran the last few yards, vanishing into a cleft between two grey rocks that were each the size of a small hut.

The others had dismounted and John left Thomas to hold their mounts. By the time the coroner and Gwyn had caught up, the shepherd was crouched over a bundle lying at the foot of a rock face. He was prodding it with a piece of stick and muttering to himself, which suggested to John that he was simple.

‘What have we got here, boy?’ growled Gwyn, pushing the lad aside with his leg.

It was the badly decomposed body of a man in a sitting position against the rock. Unlike the one in Widecombe, it was partly mummified. The skin of the face was almost black, and leathery, stretched tightly over the cheekbones like a mask on a skull. The eye-sockets had collapsed to deep holes and the lips had dried to an open circle, as if the corpse was uttering an eternal cry. The hands, protruding from a brown leather jacket, were like bundles of sticks, the skin dried tightly around spidery finger-bones, with loosened nails on the ends.

‘The sun and the wind have shrivelled him instead of the usual corruption,’ observed John, with his usual detached interest.

‘How long has he been dead, I wonder?’ ruminated Gwyn, tapping the hard skin of the forehead with his knuckle.

‘In the desert, in the burning sun and dry air, they can stay like this for months – even years,’ said the coroner, veteran of Palestine. ‘But here the maggots, the foxes and the rats would see him off in a few months, so I reckon on five or six weeks.’

He turned to the shepherd, a slack-jawed lad of about fifteen who was crouching nearby, gaping at these visitors from another world. ‘When did they find this, boy?’

‘’Bout two weeks back, sir. I can’t reckon time very well, but it was past a couple of church days ago. Will Baggot found it, looking for a missing ewe up here. He told the reeve a few days after, back in Sampford Spiney.’

‘A few days!’ exploded John. ‘No hue-and-cry, no one telling the sheriff or myself? I despair of these idle people.’ But it was no use railing against the shepherd, who had no idea of what went on outside his little world.

‘Let’s have a proper look at him, Gwyn. Surely we have another soldier here.’

They examined his tough leather jerkin, with reinforced shoulder covers and studded sides. He still wore a tight-fitting cap, like a bowl of tough leather, with a deep flap to protect his neck. His legs were encased in strong linen breeches with boots coming above the ankles, spurs still in place.

‘He has no baldric or sword belt, but the waist-loops of his breeches are snapped through,’ said the Cornishman. ‘I reckon his belt, with sword, scabbard and dagger, has been wrenched off.’

The coroner was looking at the man’s boots. ‘Eastern work again, I’m sure. That traced stitching is a Mussulman design, just like Hubert de Bonneville’s. This is another Crusader.’

Gwyn stood up and regarded the corpse from head to toe. ‘Yet he’s no gentleman. His clothing is coarser and of less value. He’ll be a squire or perhaps even a mercenary soldier.’

John nodded. ‘But the great question is, how did he die? And why is his body up here, in this God-forsaken place? And how long has it been here?’

Gwyn had no answers. Then he spotted something and bent again to put a hand inside the front opening of the corpse’s jerkin. He pulled out a small crucifix, made of some base metal like tin or pewter but of a complex design and good craftsmanship. Thin wires were wrapped around the shank of the cross, like crude filigree work. It was held on a leather thong around the neck and Gwyn tried to lift it free from the body for a better look. The shrunken head was flexed with the chin on the chest and Gwyn lifted it to free the thong.

‘Look there, at the neck,’ said the coroner.

Gwyn took off the thong, but held back the head to expose the front of the throat. The skin there had been protected from the elements and was white with a tinge of green. Across the throat, almost from ear to ear, was a wide slash, exposing the Adam’s apple, the muscles and vessels of the neck.

‘A cut throat, for a start,’ said John sombrely. There was a strong bond between all those who had made the arduous journey to the Holy Land to fight the defilers of Jerusalem, and it saddened him to think that two had survived the often lethal rigours of the journey and the campaign only to be slaughtered like beasts on their return to their homeland.

With the shepherd boy watching, wide-eyed, John and Gwyn struggled to undress the body to examine the clothing and the skin surface for other clues. On both arms, and across the chest, were thin lines of hard scar tissue, typical of long-healed war wounds – both Gwyn and the coroner carried similar signs of sword and lance combat on their own limbs.

When they moved the body, they found beneath it an empty sheath, but there was no sign of the dagger it had once held. They rolled it over, an easy task as it had shrivelled to half its original weight. On the brown wrinkled skin of the back, there was something that raised the eyebrows of both the coroner and his attendant. Just to the left of the spine, whose knobs corrugated the stretched skin, was a one-inch slit, sharp at the lower end, blunt and slightly notched at the upper extremity. John stared at the wound, then at Gwyn. ‘Same wound, same place,’ he observed.

They let the body slump back to the ground, as Gwyn made a cautious response. ‘Many a man gets stabbed in the back – and most knife blades are much of a muchness, so the slits are similar.’

John stood up straight and stretched his aching back. ‘Two men on Dartmoor, both with Levantine accoutrements, both stabbed in the back within a few weeks of each other. Is that coincidence?’

Gwyn held his peace.

Unlike de Bonneville’s, this man’s clothing seemed intact, although the inside of the leather jerkin, the undertunic and shift were blackened by dried blood, which had poured from the arteries and veins of the slashed neck. A small slit in the back of the clothing corresponded with the stab wound, which did not appear to have bled much.

Under the cap, they found an area of crushed, bloodied scalp, though the cap itself had not been penetrated. The blond hair was cropped short.

‘He was struck a heavy blow with some blunt object,’ was John’s opinion. ‘Enough to make him lose his senses and not resist having his throat cut … though maybe, by then, he had also been stabbed in the back.’

‘Another unexpected, cowardly attack?’ suggested Gwyn.

John raised his stooped shoulders in a gesture of doubt. ‘That Fitzhai fellow said that de Bonneville was travelling alone in Honiton. And we have no idea how long this corpse has lain here, though I have no doubt that he died weeks before de Bonneville. So what connection can there be?’

The ginger-whiskered Cornishman looked again at the gaunt cadaver. ‘No one could identify this fellow by his face, that’s for sure. And if his clothing and property are from Outremer, they will be unfamiliar to anyone here at home.’

‘There’s this crucifix, though … It looks like Cornish tin.’ The coroner rolled up the thong and placed the ornament in his pouch. ‘It’s the best we have. Someone may recognise it. You had better bundle up his clothing and that dagger sheath as well – at least they don’t stink like the last one.’

As they walked to where Thomas was holding their horses, the coroner dwelt on his administrative duties. ‘We must get an inquest over with today, I can’t ride all the way out here again tomorrow.’ There was no sun, but he looked up at the sky to see where the clouds were lightest, reckoning that it was not yet noon. ‘Thomas, go down straight away with those shepherds to that village – what was it called?’

‘Sampford Spiney, according to the North Hall steward.’

‘Get them to send a cart up for the body – take it to the church there. Tell the clerk to raise a dozen souls for a jury and we’ll get the man’s pathetic remains put underground after a quick inquest – although with idiots like these living around here, it seems a waste of time. We’ll learn precious little from them.’