The Awful Secret

Chapter Two In which Crowner John inspects a corpse

All the next day the coroner’s trio rode steadily across the county, following the main track north-west from Copplestone, about thirteen miles from Exeter, where they had spent the night bedded down around the hearth at the small manor house. The weather remained chill but dry, and the going underfoot was good. The winter mud had hardened, but not yet dried into the dusts of summer. The bushes and trees alongside the narrow road were budding into the first signs of spring, and a few primroses and violets lurked in the undergrowth on this tenth day of March.

Though he would not admit it, by midday de Wolfe’s leg had begun to ache, from jolting incessantly in the stirrup, but he had suffered far worse after two major and countless minor injuries in past campaigns. Even so, he was glad when Gwyn suggested then that the horses needed a rest, some water and half an hour’s grazing. They had been on the road since first light and even at the modest pace set by John’s leg and Thomas’s pathetic riding, they had covered almost twenty miles. Now in the valley of the Taw, they were well over half-way to Barnstaple.

In a clearing just before the forest gave way to strip-fields near the manor of Chulmleigh, they slid thankfully from their saddles and hobbled the horses, letting them crop the short new grass that was now appearing after winter. A stream nearby offered men and beasts the chance to slake their thirst. Thomas, who rode his moorland pony side-saddle like a woman, staggered about, holding his backside and complaining about long journeys, which he detested.

‘Come on, dwarf,’ teased Gwyn, grabbing the clerk by his waist and holding him kicking and yelling in the air. ‘Forget your sore buttocks and get us some bread and cheese from that bag.’

They were soon seated on a tree-stump, eating heartily and drinking from a leather flask filled with coarse cider. Even if the little ex-priest hated travelling, the coroner and his henchman were glad to be out on the road again: they had shared thousands of leagues over the past two decades, in Ireland, France and the Levant.

‘We’ve made better time than I expected,’ growled de Wolfe, between mouthfuls of hard crusts, even flintier cheese. ‘At this rate, we’ll not need to stop on the road tonight. We can be in Barnstaple by dark and claim a bed from Oliver de Tracey.’

‘And ten or twelve miles to Ilfracombe tomorrow,’ added Gwyn, sucking cider from the sides of his luxuriant whiskers. Even keeping down to a brisk walk or occasional trot, they could cover four or five miles in an hour without overly tiring the horses.

All that afternoon the three moved steadily northward, passing slow ox-carts and flocks of sheep, then a number of pilgrims and pedlars, as well as journeymen moving between employment with their tools slung in a bag across their shoulders. De Wolfe forgot the cares of life in Exeter, especially the moody and grim Matilda. He had even forgotten the mysterious face that had been peering at him around street corners.

As it grew dusk, they found themselves at the estuary of the river Taw, with the port and borough of Barnstaple on the eastern side, some five miles inland from the open sea. Thomas, who had an encyclopaedic knowledge of history, informed his uninterested companions that the burgesses held a dubious claim to the oldest charter in England, granted by the Saxon king Athelstan, although certainly the first King Henry had given them a new Norman one.

As the light faded, the trio rode thankfully through the gate, just beating the curfew, and made their way to the castle. This had a small tower on top of a motte, which in recent years had been rebuilt in stone, in place of the original timber donjon. Around it was a triangular bailey inside a curtain wall that stood not far from where the small Yeo stream joined the Taw. The hall was a wooden building inside the bailey, the tower being a place for defence, too small for peacetime living quarters.

It was here they found the seneschal, the chief steward to the lord, and learned that Oliver de Tracey was away on a tour of his manors. However, the seneschal, a wizened old man called Odo who had looked after his lord’s affairs for a quarter of a century, made them welcome. De Wolfe had been to the town several times in his capacity as coroner since the premature death of Fitzrogo and had had dealings with Odo before. The old steward seemed impressed with this new legal officer, partly because he admired de Wolfe’s reputation as a Crusader and his close acquaintance with the Lionheart.

Gwyn and Thomas were sent off to the kitchens for a meal, with the promise of a pallet of clean straw in the servants’ quarters, whilst John was offered a chamber in the hall, which had a low bed and mattress, luxury indeed for such a remote place as Barnstaple.

‘As my lord and his family are away, we have no formality in the hall tonight,’ explained Odo. ‘But there are a few knights doing their service here with their squires, as well as the constable, the priest, some travellers and a few clerks, so you are welcome to sup with us in an hour’s time.’

With a dozen men eating and drinking in the flickering lights of wall flares and tallow dips on the table, de Wolfe spent a pleasant evening listening to and telling tales of past battles, skirmishes and ambuscades. As the ale and wine went down, the stories became more adventurous and far-fetched, but this was a life that he loved, the companionship of strong men and witty minds. At intervals, they were entertained by a pair of travelling musicians, who had arrived by ship from Neath across the Severn Sea, on their way to Cornwall. They earned their meal and mattress by some accomplished playing on pipgorn and crwth, Welsh wind and stringed instruments.

John took the opportunity to catch up with events in Wales; seven years earlier he had accompanied Archbishop Baldwin around the country on his recruiting campaign for the Third Crusade – in which the Archbishop himself had perished outside Acre. Speaking in his mother’s native Welsh to the minstrels, he learned that the endless feud between Welsh and Normans was in a quiet phase. He even had news of his friend Gerald, Archdeacon of Brecon, who had been with them on the famous journey around Wales and was now apparently writing a book on the events.

But the business of the day was not forgotten; it had been Odo who had sent the messenger to Exeter the previous day.

‘The manor reeve from Ilfracombe came here the day before yesterday seeking my bailiff, as your new coroner’s law demands,’ Odo said. ‘He had news of this dead man found aboard ship the night before.’

De Wolfe wanted details, but Odo had little more to tell him. ‘It seems a wrecked vessel was driven ashore somewhat to the east of Ilfracombe. On it, lashed to the deck by ropes, was a corpse with undoubted wounds from a sword or knife – certainly not injuries from the shipwreck. That’s about all he could tell us, so I sent word to you. We have been told that now the crowner must deal with all suspicious and violent deaths.’

‘And wrecks of the sea, as well,’ added John.

This was news to Odo, and as de Wolfe explained, the group of men around the table listened with interest. Some had never heard of the new office of coroner and the rest were hazy as to his functions. ‘Last September, at the General Eyre in Kent, the royal justices proclaimed an edict from Hubert Walter, our Chief Justiciar and Archbishop of Canterbury, which had several purposes,’ explained de Wolfe.

‘The main purpose seems to be to screw more taxes from the population!’ growled one of the knights, who was working off some of his annual service to Oliver de Tracey in return for his manorial holding.

De Wolfe shrugged, conscious that this was the general perception of Hubert Walter’s harsh taxation regime. ‘Better an honest coroner than a corrupt sheriff,’ he grunted. ‘I name no names, but it is common knowledge that most of the sheriffs in England are more concerned with lining their own purses than with upholding the King’s peace in their counties. Why else would so many nobles pay large sums to secure appointment to that office?’

Heads nodded around the table, for they remembered the scandal in the time of old King Henry, when all the sheriffs were dismissed for corruption – though almost all had seemed to claw their way back into favour.

‘But what has that do with dead bodies and wrecks?’ asked one of the Welshmen. Apart from a few franchise coroners in Glamorgan and Pembroke, the Normans’ rule of law did not extend to most of Wales.

‘King Richard’s ransom was a heavy burden on England,’ explained de Wolfe. ‘One hundred and fifty thousand marks were demanded by Henry of Germany to release the Lionheart. This, together with the expense of the Crusades and his present wars against Philip of France, creates a need for every penny that our Justiciar can raise. It is where the coroner comes into the picture, to raise what legitimately belongs to the king’s treasury.’

‘Just another bloody clutch of taxes!’ grumbled another knight.

John took a gulp of his wine and nodded in agreement. ‘Taxes, like death and our wives, are always with us!’ he exclaimed. ‘Yet there are other advantages. The coroners now divert many lawsuits to the king’s courts instead of leaving them to the mercy of the sheriffs’ and burgesses’ courts, whose ideas of justice are primitive. We record all serious crimes and accusations for presentation to the royal judges when they arrive at the Eyre of Assize in each county. Our very title of coroner comes from custos plactitorum coronae – keeper of the pleas of the Crown.’

This was beyond one of the castle clerks, though perhaps the amount of beer he had drunk was slowing his wits. ‘But what has this to do with dead bodies or wrecks?’ he complained.

‘There are many ways of raising revenue for the king. Any fault of the community in failing to report a sudden death, to raise the hue and cry, or the death of any who cannot be proven to be Saxon – as well as rapes, assaults and other felonies – these lead to amercements, all grist to the Treasury. I have to attend every execution and see that the property of the hanged felon is seized for the Crown. If there is a wreck of the sea, then this also belongs to the king, as do catches of royal fish, the whale and sturgeon.’

For another hour, there was endless argument, lubricated by wine, ale and cider, about the morality of taxation, but it was all good-natured and de Wolfe defended his monarch’s right-hand man, Archbishop Hubert Walter, in his need to extract as much money from the population as was bearable. Eventually, the minstrels played another tune and sang another song, and as the rush-lights burned low, the audience staggered off to their various chambers or sought their straw palliasses around the glowing embers of the fire in the Great Hall.

After a good breakfast early next morning, Sir John de Wolfe thanked Odo for his hospitality and, with his officer and clerk, set out for Ilfracombe. The main road curved westward along the estuary until it struck north-east to the coast, but there was a shorter, more direct route over the hills due north from Barnstaple through the village of Bittadon. The seneschal recommended this: although it was sometimes plagued by roving outlaws from the fringe of Exmoor, it saved a few miles’ riding. The coroner and his brawny henchman were veteran campaigners and had little fear of wayside ambush – their heavy broadswords and Gwyn’s fighting axe were sufficient to see off anyone other than a substantial band of men. However, Thomas rode in a perpetual state of anxiety, his beady eyes forever scanning the roadside for attacking ruffians, but the journey passed without incident.

A few hours later, they had covered the ten miles to the north coast and were jogging down the hill into Ilfracombe. The little port nestled between jagged cliffs, the harbour hidden behind a rocky prominence. The north-westerly breeze was strong and a line of white breakers hurled themselves against the craggy, indented shore. Ahead in the far distance, the hills of Wales could just be seen in the haze.

‘Who does this place belong to?’ asked Gwyn, as they trotted down towards the twisted street that led to the beach.

‘The Bishop of Coutances owns the land, as he does a great slice of the county,’ piped up the clerk, anxious to display his knowledge, especially when it concerned churchmen. ‘But he sub-let it to Robert of Pontecardon many years ago and then it passed to Robert Fitzroy’s family as tenants.’

‘Damn who it belongs to,’ grunted de Wolfe. ‘Let’s just find the reeve. He was the one who sent to Barnstaple with the news of this corpse.’

A substantial village and port like Ilfracombe would normally have had a resident bailiff, a more senior servant of the manorial lord, but Odo had told them that he had recently died of an apoplexy, and until Fitzroy or his steward appointed a new one, the manor reeve was having to cope with the administration. As they trotted down the only street, a dozen curious villagers appeared to gape at the strangers. The harbour was a sandy cove protected on the seaward side by a long peninsula, called the Benricks, which at the highest tides became an island. The outer end rose to a hill, on which was a low tower carrying a signal brazier to direct ships into the harbour. A score of buildings clustered around the harbour, ranging from a few stone-built houses to rickety hovels made of turf. The roofs were mostly thatched, but the larger dwellings had heavy stone slates, better to resist the foul weather that blew so often into this Atlantic mouth of the Severn Sea.

There were a couple of storehouses and fish-sheds at the head of the beach and several fishing boats were drawn up above the tide-line. Leaning against the single quay, listing until the water floated it again, was a merchant vessel with a stumpy mast. A procession of labourers was filing across a plank to the shore, carrying sacks of lime on their backs.

A few yards from the quayside, de Wolfe halted Odin and called down to a young woman, who was gawping open-mouthed at the new arrivals. She had a baby at her breast, the infant naked in spite of the keen wind that ruffled the poor wench’s rags. ‘Where can we find the reeve, girl?’ boomed the coroner.

Wide-eyed at the revelation that this great dark stranger from another world spoke her language, the young mother pointed wordlessly at a stone house directly opposite, then turned tail and ran away, the baby’s lips still clamped to her bosom.

By now, more inhabitants had gathered to peer at the new arrivals, and from them, a stocky middle-aged man with a large moustache and a square brown beard stepped forward. ‘You must be the crowner, sir. I am Matthew, the manor reeve. I’ve been expecting you.’

John recognised him for a sensible, reliable man, which was more than could be said for some reeves, who often seemed high-grade idiots. The manor reeve was at the bottom of the pecking order of officials in the feudal system, responsible for the day-to-day organisation of the village farm work. Although all but the stewards were illiterate, the reeves kept account of village business – crops, stock, tithes and work rotas – by means of notched tally-sticks and their memories.

With half the population following at a respectful distance, the reeve led them across to the bailiff’s house, which he was occupying for the time being. A boy took their horses to the backyard to be fed and watered and they went into the building. It had the luxury of two rooms, though they were bare of any comfort, apart from a few benches and stools grouped around the fire on the beaten earth floor in the centre of the smaller room. Piles of bracken and hay lay against the walls, forming the sleeping quarters for the reeve’s wife and four children. The other room was the kitchen and dairy, which was shared with a cow and three orphaned spring lambs.

Matthew’s wife brought them bread, meat and ale, and they sat around the clay-lined fire-pit where burning logs threw a blue smoke into the atmosphere.

‘The cadaver is in one of the fish sheds over on the quay,’ explained the reeve. He had a handsome face, albeit scarred by cow-pox, with a moustache that almost matched Gwyn’s in size.

‘How did you come by this corpse?’ demanded the coroner.

Matthew leaned forward, his roughened hands on the knees of his serge breeches. ‘A boy up on the headland above the harbour saw this derelict vessel out to the east, no sail upon her and obviously going to be driven ashore. A gang of us set out at once to find where she would beach, in case we could save any souls.’

Gwyn, who came from a fishing village himself, strongly suspected that they would have been more interested in saving cargo and gear than souls, but kept these cynical thoughts to himself.

‘We went across the cliffs, but the vessel had been blown further up towards Combe Bay, and by the time we had walked that distance, she had struck on Burrow Nose, near Watermouth. It was almost dark, but we found her wedged in a gully. She was not too badly damaged, but by the next day, she had broken up with the pounding of the tide.’

‘And this dead man?’

‘He was on the deck, just astern of the hold. The mast had broken and the spars had come down, so that his legs were tangled in the rigging. Otherwise, we would never have found the body – it would long have been washed overboard, out at sea.’

De Wolfe downed the last of his ale from a crude pottery jar and stood up. ‘Let’s go and have a look at him, then.’

Pulling his pointed leather hood over his head, he made for the door and stooped to pass under the low lintel. Watched by the curious villagers, who followed the party at a distance, they were led across the street to the quayside. Matthew strode ahead to a small shed made of rough timbers, the turf roof held down against the winds by flat stones. As they entered the open landward end, an overpowering stench of decaying fish filled their nostrils.

Two elderly women and a boy were standing at a crude bench, gutting fish and dropping them into wicker baskets. The entrails were thrown on to the ground to add to a stinking heap, which would be shovelled into the harbour for the tide to remove. Thomas de Peyne, the only sensitive member of the team, shrank back, holding his threadbare cloak over his nose.

‘He’s in that corner,’ declared the reeve, pointing past the women to the dark recesses of the shed. Gwyn walked across and pulled a tattered canvas from a still shape lying against the wall.

De Wolfe and the reeve joined him to look down at the pathetically small figure of a youth, huddled in death on the odorous earth. The young man wore dark trousers and a short tunic pinched in with a wide leather belt. His clothes were still saturated with sea water and he lay on his side, as if asleep, his face to the wall. Gwyn bent down and lifted him like a child, to lay him flat on his back.

‘He’s had a mortal wound, that’s for sure,’ observed Matthew, pointing down at the thin bloodstains that had not washed completely from the fabric of the man’s hessian tunic.

At the upper part of his belly, there was an oblique rent in the cloth, surrounded by the sinister pink staining. John squatted on his heels alongside the corpse, undid the belt and pulled up the tunic.

‘The head of a pike!’ said Gwyn immediately, jabbing a massive forefinger towards a characteristic wound on the victim’s upper abdomen. A two-inch-wide stab with bruised edges lay on the pale skin below the rib margin, while in line with it, and half a hand’s breadth away, was an angry red graze on top of more bruising.

‘How can you tell it was a pike?’ asked the reeve, a man of no military experience.

‘The spike went in here,’ snapped de Wolfe, poking his finger deeply into the stab wound. ‘And the sidearm below it made this mark here.’ He indicated the abrasion.

‘Can’t have been more than sixteen, this lad,’ observed Gwyn. ‘Do we know who he might be?’

‘Not a local fellow,’ said the reeve. ‘The vessel had no name, but several of our fishermen say it is from Bristol. It plies up and down the coast from the ports on the Severn down to Plymouth and sometimes across to St Malo and Barfleur.’

De Wolfe, though a soldier, was a reluctant sailor and marvelled at the bravery – or foolhardiness – of the shipmen who sailed their clumsy cockleshells around the violent waters of western Britain.

Thomas had overcome his revulsion at the stench of fishguts and was almost fearfully peering at the corpse under Gwyn’s elbow. ‘A drowned sailor?’ he asked timidly, spasmodically making the Sign of the Cross.

‘No, dwarf, a stabbed sailor,’ grunted the big man. ‘Skewered on a pike. This is murder.’

The coroner checked that the body had no other injuries, then motioned for the reeve to throw the canvas over him again. ‘Was there any sign of anyone else aboard?’

Matthew shook his head. ‘Nor any remains of a cargo. The hull had been sound until she crashed on to the rocks, but there was not a box, barrel nor bale aboard her.’

John thought he detected a note of disappointment in the man’s voice and he suspected, like Gwyn, that the villagers had been intent on plundering the wreck. ‘I had better get out there and view the vessel,’ he decided. ‘How far away is it?’

Matthew looked slightly evasive. ‘Half an hour’s walk, Crowner, but not worth the journey. She’ll have broken up altogether by now – the sea was battering her to pieces and yesterday there was hardly anything left.’

De Wolfe glared at him. ‘I have a legal duty to view the wreck, man.’ He turned to Thomas. ‘I’ll hold an inquest when I get back, so round up everyone who knows anything about this – and a dozen more men above the age of twelve.’

Minutes later, the reeve was leading them on foot across the back of the cliffs to a track that passed down through the hamlet of Hele, with its water-mill, and across the shoulder of Widmouth Hill to rejoin the shore further east. Two miles from Ilfracombe, they crossed a deep, sandy inlet and scrambled across a warren to a low cliff. Below, the surf sucked and pounded remorselessly in a series of rocky gullies and narrow inlets.

‘I said there was little left of her,’ shouted Matthew, going down a muddy sheep-track ahead.

Looking down, de Wolfe saw that the reeve exaggerated somewhat, as the lower part of the fifty-foot hull was still jammed firmly between the jagged teeth of a reef. The tide was now almost at full ebb and it was easy for them to get to the derelict without getting wet, apart from the spray from an occasional large wave.

The stump of the mast still poked up at an acute angle, but all the gunwales and most of the deck planking had gone, timbers littering the small shingle beach immediately inland of the wreck.

‘All you’ll get from this one is some kindling for your winter fires,’ cackled Gwyn, with a wink at the gloomy manor reeve.

‘What would she have been likely to be carrying, Gwyn?’ demanded the coroner, still suspicious that the villagers might have made off with some cargo, which should have been confiscated for the king’s treasury.

‘Depends where she came from. If it was Brittany or Normandy, then maybe wine and fruit. If she was outward bound, she’d have had wool, no doubt.’

De Wolfe nodded at that. He had a substantial interest in wool exports himself, having sunk most of the loot from his foreign campaigns in a partnership with one of Exeter’s foremost wool merchants, Hugh de Relaga. He also shared in the profits of his family’s estate at Stoke-in-Teignhead, where his elder brother, William, was a keen sheep-farmer.

‘There’s nothing to see, Crowner, as I told you,’ said Matthew, virtuously.

De Wolfe had to agree, but Gwyn clambered the last few yards over the rocks and pulled himself on to the wreck, standing rather precariously on a surviving thwart, which had supported the decking. He looked around intently, determined not to miss any clues. Before taking up soldiering, he had helped his father as a fisherman in his home village of Polruan and was well used to the sea and ships.

As de Wolfe and the reeve watched him, Gwyn seemed particularly interested in the remains of the mast, a tree-trunk a foot thick, which had broken off about six feet above the deck.

He pointed to some marks at waist height and shouted back to the other men, ‘Fresh slashes in the wood here! Been struck several times with a heavy sharp blade, fore and aft.’ He hopped back ashore and came up to them.

‘What does that mean?’ grunted his master, who knew next to nothing about ships.

‘The halyards were cut to bring the sail down,’ explained the Cornishman. ‘No one in the crew would do that to their own vessel, so it must have been boarded and disabled.’

De Wolfe looked grim. ‘So it was piracy, not mutiny – though that was unlikely from the start, for why would the crew of a dull merchantman want to mutiny?’

‘How many men on a vessel like this?’ asked Matthew.

De Wolfe looked at Gwyn for enlightenment.

‘About five or six, usually. Two men could sail her in normal weather, but they need extras for sleeping, cooking and handling her at the ports.’

‘So the rest are still floating around the Severn Sea until they get washed ashore?’

Gwyn shook his shaggy head. ‘Many bodies never turn up. They either sink or get pulled out into the broad ocean. Or, in this channel, they may even end up near Gloucester.’

As if to confound him, at that moment there was a distant cry from above and a man appeared on the skyline, waving his arms.

The group at the wreck stood watching as he came rapidly down the narrow paths with the agility of a mountain goat. He was within a hundred yards before Matthew recognised him. ‘It’s Siward, a shepherd who lives up on the cliffs above here. What the devil does he want? He’s a bit lacking in the head.’

From the speed of his surefooted descent, de Wolfe had expected some active youth, but when he got to them, Siward showed himself to be a gnarled old man, with a bent back and a face like a walnut, wrinkled and brown. He wore a rough woollen tunic, the skirt tucked up between his legs and pushed into an old rope wound around his waist. He was barefoot and his toenails were curled like ram’s horns.

He had sparse grey hair, and although his eyes were as bright as a blackbird’s, the lids were red and inflamed.

‘You took the corpse, sirs?’ Siward asked abruptly, in the manner of one who, isolated with his sheep, rarely conversed with his fellow men.

‘When did you see a corpse, old man?’ demanded de Wolfe.

Matthew opened his mouth to warn again that the octogenarian was more than a little simple, but Siward seemed quite able to speak for himself. ‘When I took the other one away – the live one,’ exclaimed the old Saxon.

The other four stared at him. ‘What other one?’ rumbled Gwyn.

Siward rolled his bloodshot eyes heavenwards. ‘Almighty God spoke to me the other evening, and gave me a task. I looked across the sea from my dwelling and saw this vessel being driven ashore.’

‘He lives in a turf hut on top of the cliffs,’ explained Matthew.

‘I lit my lantern and hurried down here. From the upper path, I saw the ship just before it hit the rocks. Then, there were two bodies on the deck, but only one by the time I had got down here.’

‘What of this living man?’ demanded the coroner.

‘He was on the shingle, more dead than alive. I dragged him up on to the grass, then went up for my pony, which I ride to herd my distant flocks.’

‘You got a horse down here?’ said Gwyn incredulously.

‘He is an Exmoor cob, he can go where any sheep can stray. I draped the man over the pony’s back and took him up to my house. He began shivering, so I knew he was alive.’

‘And where is he now?’ asked the manor reeve.

‘Still in my hut. His mind came back yesterday, but he is very weak.’

Since he had become coroner de Wolfe had ceased to be surprised by anything. ‘Then take us to him at once. Lead the way,’ he said.

Again with a remarkable turn of speed for an old man, Siward scuttled back up the cliff path, with the coroner, his officer and the reeve labouring behind him.

‘Why didn’t you know about this, Matthew?’ panted de Wolfe, as they reached the top.

‘He doesn’t belong to our manor. He works under the reeve in Combe Martin – the sheep are from there. Siward has probably never set foot as far away as Ilfracombe.’

At the top of the cliffs, there was a rough grassy ridge, and tucked in a hollow out of the wind was a crude circular hut, the walls made of stacked turf reinforced with loose stones. The roof was also of turf, the grass growing as strongly on it as on the surrounding pasture. Blue smoke drifted from under the ragged eaves.

Siward pulled aside an unhung door made of driftwood and beckoned them inside. In the dim light, they saw a single room floored with soiled bracken, on which two orphan lambs were bleating. Against the further wall, near a small peat fire confined by large stones, was an indistinct figure huddled under a torn woollen blanket.

‘Can’t understand a word from him,’ complained Siward, whose only language was English, heavy with the local accent.

Gwyn and de Wolfe advanced on the man and bent down over his hunched form. He looked up and they saw he was another young man, probably no more than eighteen, with a deathly pale face and sores on his lips. Before he could speak, he was racked by a bubbling cough and spat copiously into the ferns on the floor. His eye-sockets were hollow, and in spite of the ghastly whiteness of his face, two pink spots burned on either cheek.

Gwyn put a hand on his forehead. ‘He’s got a burning fever, Crowner.’

‘Who are you, boy, what happened to your ship?’ de Wolfe asked. He spoke in English and the youth looked blankly at him, shivering and hugging the rough blanket more closely around his thin shoulders.

‘He doesn’t understand a damned word,’ explained Siward. ‘I’ve given him some hot ewe’s milk and a few herbs I have here to try to calm his fever.’

Suddenly, between a spasm of teeth-chattering, the shipwrecked sailor loosed a torrent of words. De Wolfe and his officer looked at each other in satisfaction. ‘He’s a Breton,’ exclaimed the coroner and changed his questioning to his blend of Cornish-Welsh.

With a wan smile, the sick youngster responded in his own language and, within minutes, they had the whole story from him. The vessel was the Saint Isan, owned by a syndicate of burgesses from Bristol. It made regular voyages from the Avon to the Cornish ports and then across to Brittany. It had a master and a crew of five, two Somerset men and three Bretons. A few days ago, they had been coming from Roscoff via Penzance, back towards their home port, and were running before a brisk wind between Lundy and the mainland.

‘Our old tub was always slow, even with a following wind. A couple of hours after noon, we were overhauled by a longer vessel that had half a dozen oars each side, though these were shipped as she easily outran us under her sail.’ Alain, for that was his name, stopped for a prolonged bout of coughing. ‘Before we knew what was happening, they were alongside and a dozen men scrambled over the side,’ he continued, gasping for breath. ‘I remember seeing them almost cut our master’s head off with a sword and throw him overboard as they attacked all of us. Then one came at me with a club – I remember nothing more until I woke up on the deck, clinging for my life, with a dead man alongside me. Then the vessel struck and the last I recall was being thrown into the sea. I came to again in this hut, where this kind fellow has been doing his best for me.’

‘You have no idea who these pirates were?’ demanded Gwyn.

‘I recollect very little. It was all confusion for the couple of minutes that I remember. They shouted in English, that’s for sure.’

‘What was their ship like?’ asked John, standing over the man like a great black crow.

Alain shrugged under the blanket. ‘Nothing special, though it was not a trading knarr like the Saint Isan. It was slimmer and faster, more like a longship – and it had a big sail, as well as a bank of oars on each side.’

‘No name painted on the bow, nor any device on the sail?’ grunted Gwyn.

‘Nothing. Other than that they used your Saxon tongue, I’ve no idea who they were or where they came from.’

Gwyn pulled down the ends of his moustache, as if that would help him think. ‘You are a shipman in these waters. Have you heard of any other vessels being attacked in this way?’

Alain shook his head wearily. ‘It was never mentioned by the other men, God rest them.’

‘What cargo were you carrying?’

‘It was a mixture – some wine, casks of dried fruit, bales of silk, I don’t know what else.’

‘Valuable stuff, a good haul for pirates,’ observed Gwyn.

After some more questions, it became obvious that Alain had nothing else useful to tell them. Although de Wolfe would have liked him to appear at the inquest to identify the corpse, it was obvious that the young Breton was far too sick to be moved at present. They described the dead man to Alain, who felt sure that it was a Bristol youth called Roger, of mixed Norman and Saxon blood.

De Wolfe felt in his waist pouch and gave Siward three pennies, with instructions to get some good food for the shipman and to tend him until he was fit to travel down to Ilfracombe, hopefully in a few days’ time.

Leaving the old shepherd and his patient, they made their way back the several miles to the port, arriving in mid-afternoon. Their clerk was fussing outside the bailiff’s dwelling, hopping about on his lame leg like a black sparrow, marshalling the reluctant crowd of about thirty men and boys whom he had coerced into a jury.

De Wolfe, conscious that the day was slipping away, led them across to the fish shed where the cadaver lay. ‘Let’s get this over quickly, Gwyn,’ he growled. ‘There’s little we can do today – it will mean at least one other journey back here later.’

At the shed, he instructed Gwyn to pull out the body into the open, and the jury stood in a wide half-circle in the keen wind, the surf rumbling beyond the harbour and the seagulls wheeling and mewing overhead.

The Cornishman cut short his usual formal opening of an inquest and merely yelled at the motley throng, ‘Silence for the king’s crowner!’

With his arms folded across his chest, de Wolfe stood near the head of the corpse and addressed the jury. ‘You men are representing the Hundred in this matter. I have to determine who this man might be and where, when and how he came to his death. The witness who can name him is too ill to attend but was also a member of the crew of that vessel. The name of the dead man was Roger of Bristol, that’s all I know. He was part Saxon, but we cannot prove presentment of Englishry as there are no relatives here nor even the only witness who knew him.’ He glared around the faces of the jury, as if daring them to contradict him. ‘In the circumstances, I am not going to amerce this village as it is plain that he died before reaching your land.’

There was a murmur of relief from the older men and the few wives who stood listening in the background. At least they would avoid the heavy fine for being unable to prove that the dead man was a Saxon: the Norman laws assumed that, in default of proof, he was of the conquering race – even if that event had taken place well over a century ago.

‘This witness I mentioned confirms that the vessel, known as the Saint Isan, was attacked by pirates somewhere between here and Lundy Island. We know of this death, and the survivor claims he saw the ship’s master killed, so we assume that the rest of the crew were also killed or drowned.’ He paused to look down at the shrouded figure at his feet. ‘This man, Roger of Bristol, was most certainly murdered.’

He motioned to Gwyn, who pulled off the canvas and displayed the corpse to the jury. As they shuffled nearer for a better view, the coroner pointed out the deep slash in the belly, livid against the whitened skin. ‘A typical pike wound. There is no explanation other than murder.’

Again his dark face came up and his eyes slowly ranged across the villagers, brooding on each face in turn. ‘Have any of you here any knowledge of who may have done this thing?’ he boomed. ‘Have you heard tell of any piracy in these waters?’

There was muttering and whispering and general shaking of heads, and the coroner, not really expecting any useful response, was about to carry on speaking when a quavering voice piped up from the middle of the crowd, ‘I have heard tell, sir, that them Appledore folk are not above a bit of thieving at sea.’

This provoked a further buzz and another man, dressed in the short blue serge tunic of a sailor or fisherman, called out, ‘I do know they’ve pillaged a wreck last year, afore the lord’s steward could get to it. That was down Clovelly way.’

John de Wolfe spent a few minutes trying to get more concrete evidence than these rumours, but he ended with the suspicion that there was bad blood between Ilfracombe and Appledore, a small village on the other side of the river from Barnstaple. After he had ended the inquest, with the curt decision that Roger of Bristol had been killed against the king’s peace by persons as yet unknown, he dismissed the ragged jury and turned to Gwyn and Thomas. ‘What d’you think of these Appledore accusations, eh?’

‘Village gossip, that’s all,’ grunted his ginger henchman. ‘Any hamlet will strip a wreck, given the chance. This one was already pillaged or they would have stolen every last raisin.’

‘But why Appledore? They might just as well have blamed Combe Martin or Bideford – or Lundy itself, which is more likely,’ objected Thomas.

De Wolfe shrugged. ‘Some local spite, no doubt. You have to live in one of these villages to fathom the petty disputes they dredge up.’ He looked thoughtfully at the corpse. ‘Though they may be right, of course.’