The Sanctuary Seeker

Chapter Fifteen In which Thomas de Peyne plays the spy on Dartmoor

The following day, even though a chill easterly wind was whirling the autumn leaves from the trees, a slight thaw was noticeable in St Martin’s Lane. While John was eating breakfast in solitary state in the gloomy hall, Matilda suddenly appeared and sat down at her place at the opposite end of the long table.

No words were spoken and she ignored him, but this was at least a start in the peace process after a whole week’s hostilities. Mary came in and quietly set some food and a cup of hot wine in front of her mistress, winking at John over the folded white linen of Matilda’s headdress.

The coroner murmured a greeting, which his wife seemed not to hear, then maintained a discreet silence, hoping to avoid any careless remark that might reopen the battle.

At the end of this strained meal, Matilda rose and stalked to the door. John, with uncharacteristic gallantry, hurried to open it for her and was rewarded with a murmur that he assumed was thanks, before she vanished to the seclusion of the solar.

‘Things are looking up, Sir John,’ observed Mary, cheerily, as she bustled in to clear the debris on the table.

‘The mistress seems to be coming round slowly,’ he whispered, always conscious of the solar window high in the wall above. The maid clattered together the two platters and mugs and brushed the remaining crusts to the floor for Brutus to chew.

‘You’ve been a good boy the last few days, coming home every night and not spending too much time in the Bush,’ she murmured. ‘I reckon you’ll get your bed back tonight and not have to sleep in front of the fire.’

As she went out of the door with the dishes, he reached out a hand to pat her curvaceous bottom, but she swerved to evade him and wagged a forefinger in admonishment.

He grinned, which was rare these days, then took his dagger belt and short cloak from the vestibule before setting off in the biting wind for his chamber at the castle.

The same wind, bringing an occasional flurry of sleet, had chilled Thomas de Peyne for much of the day as he travelled from Exeter to Totnes and then up to the bleaker wastes of Dartmoor.

Although Gwyn of Polruan sneered endlessly at Thomas’s mule – and even the coroner had hinted at providing him with a horse – the sturdy beast had kept up a steady trot all day. Although slow compared to the great animals that the other men possessed, the animal never seemed to tire and his daily mileage was almost as good as that of the horses.

Thomas reached Totnes about three hours after dawn and soon completed the first part of his business. Although unfrocked, he still had a rapport with his brother clergy, especially if they were unaware of his unfortunate history, so he usually made one of the parish priests his first port of call.

Over a jar of weak ale – which Thomas disliked, though there was little else to drink apart from cider and water – he soon learned that Aelfgar had indeed been a native of Totnes. He had been born there and his mother and sister still worked as laundry-maids in the manor house. They were pure Saxons, the mother’s grandfather having been dispossessed of his considerable estate by the Normans soon after the Domesday survey that had followed the Conquest. The priest, himself half-Saxon, said this bitterly, but the thrust of his information was that Aelfgar, a professional man-at-arms, had gone away some five years earlier and had not been heard of since. It was assumed that either he had been killed in battle or he was in some distant land, fighting as a mercenary. The priest’s only description of him as a ‘fair-haired man’ was all but useless, but when Thomas fished in his scrip and pulled out the twisted tin crucifix, the cleric uttered a cry of surprise. ‘I gave him that myself! He did me a service not long before he left. I fell from my donkey on the road to Paignton and broke my ankle. Aelfgar found me and brought me back home to safety so I gave him this cross as a token. My father is a tin-miner in Chagford and used to make these as a pastime.’

Having now established that the mummified body on Hackford Tor was that of Aelfgar, the coroner’s clerk set off for Sampford Spiney, complacently satisfied with the first part of his mission. This small village was the nearest to where the corpse had lain and the coroner had ordered his clerk to inquire covertly as to whether Aelfgar had been seen there in the recent past.

Thomas took directions from the priest in Totnes and rode north to Buckfastleigh, where he claimed a meal in the abbey, and carried on north-west over the most remote part of southern Dartmoor. Following further advice from the abbey cellarer, a locally born monk, he followed an ancient trackway known as the Abbot’s Way, which wound through a brown, desolate wilderness of dying bracken, heather and rock. All afternoon, the lonely little man rode up and down hillocks, through scrub-covered valleys and across bare plateaux of withered grass, keeping to an ill-defined pathway worn by shepherds and rare travellers such as himself.

Before the track reached the road across the moor from the Widecombe direction to Tavistock, he took the cellarer’s advice and turned west to cross Walkhampton Common. There were no signs or markers, apart from occasional stone cairns at intersections of pathways, and navigation was almost as difficult as on the sea, even in this clear weather. Twice he was lucky enough to come across a shepherd who gave directions, vague though they were, as most inhabitants of the county spent their lifetimes without going outside the boundaries of their own manor.

The wind, relentlessly whistling across from eastern England and the northern sea beyond, cut through his threadbare cloak and the nondescript garments underneath. He had a sack wound round his chest, tied on with cord, but his hands and feet were perished by the time he skirted Ingra Tor and came to the edge of a wooded valley that looked across to the hamlet of Sampford Spiney on the other side.

It was near dusk and he had been riding since dawn, apart from his brief rests at Totnes and Buckfastleigh. The fatigue ached through his bones and his backside was sore from sitting side-saddle on the back of the indefatigable mule.

He stopped for a moment, before setting the beast to scramble down the valley, through the little Walkham river and up the other side to the village. ‘What am I doing here?’ he asked himself, plaintively. A man with a good brain, who could read and write well, had been ordained as a priest and capable of high office in the Church, was now sitting in cold misery on the back of a flea-bitten mule in one of the most remote parts of England. All because of a momentary weakness of the flesh in Winchester, when the urge of his loins and the treachery of a female had ruined his life in a flash. He had no illusions about his physical failings, the crook back, the lazy eye and the bandy legs, but did God have to hand him losing cards every time? Was there nothing in him that was worthy of some commendation, at least a little comfort? Why was he always the butt of jokes, being pushed aside by Gwyn and peremptorily ordered about by John de Wolfe?

He was a good clerk – who else could write as fast or with such clarity? He was not evil, however unprepossessing he might look. He hated violence, he loved God and his Church, though not to excess. He even liked children and beasts, rare virtues in such a cruel and violent age – and yet he was treated like a leper or a beggar by most who knew him.

Sometimes he contemplated suicide, but knew he would never do it – not only because it would be a sin against God and lead to everlasting damnation, but because he was too squeamish to carry out any violent act.

All these were familiar thoughts, which came to him every day or two. He tried to be positive and look on the credit side. At least Crowner John had been persuaded to take him on as his clerk and not let him starve in the street. Also he had the benefit of sharing a mean lodging in the cathedral close, thanks to the Archdeacon’s influence.

Thomas sighed and kicked the old mule into motion, letting it pick its way down through the trees to splash through the river towards Sampford Spiney and the next stage of their investigation.

The next afternoon, a figure in the grey-white habit of a Cistercian monk walked slowly into the village of Peter Tavy. He had a long staff, recently cut from a hazel thicket, and when he begged food and a night’s lodging at the manor house, he said that he was returning to Sutton, near Plymouth, from a pilgrimage to St David’s in Wales.

The seneschal, the household bailiff, sent him over to one of the lean-to sheds against the tattered palisade, which housed the kitchen. He thought it odd that a monk should seek hospitality in a manor, when the huge monastery of St Mary and St Rumon was only an hour’s walk down the valley at Tavistock, but soon dismissed it from his mind, thinking that perhaps Cistercians had some dispute with the Benedictines.

In the kitchen, a lame young man and two giggling girls were preparing food for the evening meal in the hall. They were amiable enough and gave the monk generous helpings of boiled vegetables, coarse bread and slices of salt ham, washed down with the inevitable watery beer.

Always curious about travellers and eager for any news of the unknown world beyond their village, the cooks plied him with questions about his journey. Blessed with a fertile imagination, he lied endlessly to satisfy their curiosity, for he had never been nearer St David’s than Glastonbury.

Between their gossiping, the little man in the grey habit managed to slip in a few of his own questions and when Thomas, for of course it was he, bedded down on some clean straw in a corner of the undercroft later that evening, he was satisfied with his intelligence-seeking. He lay wrapped in the monk’s thick garment, worn over his own clothes, and felt warmer than he had for two days, especially as a glowing charcoal fire burned in the centre of the undercroft. A dozen other men and some children slept or talked around him, mostly house-serfs or manor workers who had no dwellings of their own.

Thomas stared out of one of the openings in the wall at the starlit sky, brilliantly clear in the threatened first frost of the year, and rehearsed the tale he would tell Crowner John when he returned to Exeter tomorrow.

At Sampford Spiney he had sought out the local priest, a fat, indolent man whose main interest was ale and cider rather than his pastoral duties. Thomas had claimed to be a priest on his way to take up a church in a remote part of Cornwall, posted there by the Bishop of Exeter. Knowing all the personalities and the ways of the Church, it was easy for him to get away with this fabrication to a largely ignorant and certainly uninterested colleague.

He wheedled a night’s lodging, which entailed having little food but an excess of drink, which loosened the tongue of his host to a satisfactory degree. Before they fell on to their hay-filled pallets in the single-roomed house attached to the wooden church, Thomas had extracted all that was known in Sampford Spiney about the dead man Aelfgar.

‘He came here more than a month back,’ said the priest thickly, belching out the gas from three quarts of cider. ‘Came on a good big horse late in the evening, when the days were longer. Said he was making for Peter Tavy, and asked for directions. He decided he wouldn’t get there in daylight, as his horse had gone lame. The hag that brews the beer keeps the nearest thing to a tavern in this place – and she has a pallet for the few travellers that may pass through, so he stayed there.’

‘Why didn’t anyone, especially the reeve, tell this to the Crowner when he was here after the corpse was discovered?’ asked Thomas. The priest was too fuddled with drink to wonder how his visitor knew what the coroner had been told. John de Wolfe had come briefly to the village with his clerk to hold a cursory inquest, but the priest had not been around that day to recognise his present visitor as the same clerk.

‘What? Get the village amerced for keeping quiet about it? Not on your life! He played dumb about everything.’ He sniggered drunkenly. ‘The fellow left after two nights and rode away quite alive. How were we to know that he got himself killed a few miles up the track?’

‘But when your shepherds found the body, didn’t they know whose it was? And what happened to his horse?’

The fat churchman had taken another great mouthful of turbid cider. ‘God alone knows where his horse went – we certainly never saw it again. And as for finding the body, we knew nothing about this new crowner business, nobody ever told us. Let sleeping dogs lie, I say – and dead men, eh?’

He had cackled with laughter and swayed dangerously on his stool, the only furniture in the room apart from a rickety table.

Now, as Thomas lay on his straw in the undercroft, his mind moved on to today, when he had come from Sampford Spiney to Peter Tavy. Although there was little communication between villages, he couldn’t keep using the parish-priest network, so a few miles out of the village, he tethered his mule deep in the trees, on a long rope that would allow him plenty of grazing for a day. From his saddlebag he produced the robe he had acquired a long time ago, after the funeral of a Cistercian in Winchester. Cutting a staff from the forest, he walked into Peter Tavy, hoping that no one would comment on the fresh white wood at the cut end – or his lack of a monk’s tonsure. If asked about his long hair, he was ready to say that it had grown back during the three-month pilgrimage to St David’s and that he had vowed not to restore it until he reached his home monastery near Plymouth. As it turned out, no one had been the slightest bit curious, wanting only to hear about the big wide world beyond their constricted horizons.

He lay watching the night sky, and recalled the information he had gleaned from the kitchen staff, the grooms and a few old men who sat around the fire in the undercroft, too arthritic to work any longer in the field strips.

It seemed certain that Aelfgar of Totnes had never arrived at Peter Tavy, even though he had set out from Sampford Spiney with the stated intention of making that his next destination. It was only five miles away, little more than a hour’s journey even on a plodding horse, but he had ended up as a mouldering corpse on Heckwood Tor, about half-way between the two villages. No one in the manor had ever heard of Aelfgar, which tallied with the story of the Totnes priest, who said that the man had had no link with Hubert de Bonneville when he left his own village. Having drawn a blank on the Saxon squire, the clerk had soaked up as much local gossip as possible. It seemed that the dying lord of the manor, Sir Arnulph, had been popular among the freemen and serfs alike. He had been a relatively easy-going master, firm but fair, and the village had prospered for years without fighting or famine. They did not seem so complacent about the rest of the family.

‘That Hubert was a painful fellow,’ confided one old man, between the fits of bronchitic coughing that racked his body every few minutes. ‘He thought he was lord long before our master had his seizure, throwing his weight about and altering the way we’d done things for years back.’

Another rheumy old fellow nodded agreement. ‘A cold fish he was, full of religion and morals. Should have been a priest – begging your own pardon, Brother. That’s what decided him to take the Cross and go off to the Holy Land against his father’s desires.’

‘Good riddance, some of us said,’ added the first old man, reckless in his old age. ‘I never wished him dead like this, but we were glad to see him go away. Though he left a brood of brothers and cousins behind him who have prospered since Sir Arnulph suffered his apoplexy.’

Thomas gathered that Gervaise de Bonneville was more popular than his slain brother, and the younger brother, Martyn, was looked upon as a child by the villagers, overshadowed by Gervaise. But there were three cousins, adult sons of a dead elder brother of Arnulph, who had designs on the two manors. They were manoeuvring with Winchester to be given a share of the land when Arnulph died, as the Crown now held the ultimate overlordship.

‘Them cousins would like to see the other two brothers dead, as well as Hubert,’ cackled the second old man. ‘Wouldn’t be surprised if Gervaise has a nasty accident in the forest before long.’

This started a heated argument among the grandfathers around the fire, some slandering the cousins, others defending them, but there was no more hard information for Thomas to mull over. He pulled his disguise more closely about him and composed himself for sleep.