The three riders plodded miserably along the rutted track. The hoofs of their animals splashed in the muddy water that trickled down to meet the Webburn river, a mile away. Leading the trio, Crowner John cursed as he felt the rain beginning to trickle from the edge of his leather hood into the neckband of his cloak. Even the hardships he had endured during the Crusades or the Irish campaigns had failed to immunise him against the purgatory of a wet autumn in the West Country.
Close behind his great grey stallion came a brown mare, carrying the gaunt shape of the coroner’s bodyguard, his ginger hair wrapped turban-wise in an oat-sack that dripped water down his frayed leather cuirass. ‘I thought November was for fog on these bloody moors, not this endless rain,’ he grumbled. Though he knew Saxon English well enough, Gwyn of Polruan spoke in his native Cornish, mainly to annoy the third member of the party.
‘Stop complaining, if that’s what you were doing in that barbaric tongue!’ whined the man bringing up the rear. He was half the size of the other two and sat his mule side-saddle, like a woman. An unfrocked priest, Thomas de Peyne was the coroner’s clerk and, in Gwyn’s eyes, as evil a little bastard as ever fouled the soil of Devon.
The weather had frayed their tempers more than usual, though they were ever a quarrelsome band. It was now more than three hours since they had left Exeter and the ceaseless downpour along the eastern edge of Dartmoor was enough to rot a man’s soul.
At last, the coroner’s horse breasted the ridge at the edge of Rippon Tor and Sir John de Wolfe could look down with relief on the wretched hamlet that was their destination. He brushed the rain off his eyebrows and wiped the drops from his hooked nose as he reined in his stallion. A tall, dark, sinewy man, John had a pair of deep-set, brooding eyes surmounting a long face with high cheekbones. It was a face that was not given to much humour – not that his previous soldiering life had offered much to laugh about.
The two other riders stopped alongside him and they sat in a row, gazing down without enthusiasm on the saturated countryside. To their right, a grey slope of bare moorland swept up to the granite crags of Chinkwell Tor and Hameldown Beacon, stark against the skyline. Below, the land canted away to the left, with clumps of trees thickening to forest as the moor gave way in the distance to the Dart valley. Strips of cultivated fields filled the middle foreground, with a dozen mean houses clustered around a wooden church. Further away they could see a band of dense woodland, beyond which drifting smoke indicated the next village, which the coroner thought to be Dunstone, though the few available maps of Dartmoor were a mixture of fact and speculation.
‘Another God-forsaken place,’ complained the hunchbacked clerk, in his irritating high-pitched voice. At frequent intervals he crossed himself nervously, where another man would pick his nose or belch.
John tapped his horse’s belly with his heel. ‘Come on, let’s see what they’ve got for us.’
He led the trio down the slope, their mounts picking their way carefully over the slippery mud and stones of the path down to the village of Widecombe.
A hundred paces from the muddy mound that served as the village green, they were met by a man with a reeve’s staff, who had ambled out of the nearest thatched hut. He was a rough-looking fellow, with unkempt hair plastered to his skull by the rain. Touching his brow in a grudging salute, he approached the grey horse. ‘You this crowner man, then?’ he demanded.
The rider glared down at him from under heavy black eyebrows that matched the dark stubble on his face, for against the fashion of the times he had no beard or moustache. With his black hood and dark riding cloak, he looked like a great raven perched on the horse.
‘Sir John de Wolfe to you, fellow! The King’s coroner in this county – so show some respect, will you?’ Though not a vain man, John was conscious of his new royal appointment, foreign though it might be to most people in this westerly limb of Coeur de Lion’s kingdom.
The manor reeve caught the snap in the coroner’s voice and became vastly more deferential. ‘Yessir, begging your pardon. Ralph the reeve, I am. Come indoors out of the rain, sirs.’
They squelched after him through the cattle-churned mud towards his long-house. Though the best in the village, it was a rickety low structure of frame and wattle, with a roof of tattered straw that sprouted grass and green moss. One end was a byre, from which came the lowing of cattle, most destined soon for the butcher’s knife as few could be kept fed through the coming winter.
The other half of the building was a windowless dwelling, smoke filtering from under the low eaves of the thatch. A puny lad hurried out from somewhere to take the reins of the horses and lead them off to feed.
The three travellers followed the village headman, the tall figures of John and Gwyn having to stoop under the doorway to enter the house. In the dim light, they saw a bare room with an earthen floor. A smoky fire burned dully in a clay hearth-pit in the middle, over which a small cauldron hung on a trivet. One crude door led to the cowshed and another to the luxury of an inner room, where two runny nosed barefoot children gaped with round eyes at these visitors from the unknown outer world.
‘Sit yourselves, sirs,’ invited the reeve. He pulled forward a low bench and a milking stool to the fire, virtually the only furniture, then called brusquely to a woman lurking in the darker recesses of the room. ‘Martha, bring ale, bread and some bowls for this broth you’ve got warming here.’ His English was thick with the local accent.
The official party shrugged off their sodden outer clothes and the reeve hung them on wooden pegs fixed into the wall-frames. He wondered where Gwyn and the small man fitted into the system. The Cornishman, betrayed by his accent, was even taller and certainly more massive than the crowner, but with his ginger hair and moustache, was a complete contrast to the saturnine blackness of Sir John. Although the man had no beard, his moustache was so profuse that its bushy tails hung down on both sides of his mouth and chin almost to his chest. His unruly shock of hair ran down as sidewhiskers to join his moustache.
Gwyn had been born forty-two years earlier, to a tin-miner who had turned to fishing and moved to the coast at Polruan, on the opposite side of the river entrance to Fowey. Gwyn had followed the fishing trade until he was seventeen, then come to Exeter to be a slaughterman in the Shambles. His huge size brought him an invitation to become bodyguard-cum-squire to a local knight off to the wars. Fourteen years ago, in 1180, he had come to Sir John de Wolfe and they had remained together ever since, fighting and travelling in Ireland and to the Third Crusade.
The coroner’s clerk, Ralph saw, was a furtive little man with a dropped shoulder from old spinal disease and a shifty pair of eyes that darted everywhere and missed nothing.
The visitors were served a simple meal by the silent woman, who was pale and toothless though probably no more than thirty. While they slurped meat broth over the edges of wooden bowls and champed at the hard bread, the coroner sat and listened to the story of Ralph the reeve.
‘Found him before milking time, yesterday morning, we did,’ the village overseer said, with a certain morbid relish. Little happened in Widecombe and the finding of a body made an intriguing change from sheep foot-rot and mouldy oats, the only local topics of conversation. ‘Lying on the bank, he was – head in the water. In the little stream that runs into the Webburn, between here and Dunstone, a fair way beyond the old Saxon well.’
Gwyn’s ruddy face followed the story carefully, while the button eyes of the sparrow-like clerk jumped restlessly about the room.
Crowner John held up a large hand, keeping his half-consumed bowl of broth in the other. ‘Wait a minute, man! Whose side of the stream was it on – yours or the next village’s?’
The reeve looked shiftily from John to Gwyn and then to the clerk.
‘The truth, man!’ snapped the coroner.
Ralph’s acne-scarred cheeks twitched and the single yellow tooth in his upper jaw stuck out like a spike as he grinned feebly. ‘’T was on our side, sir … though I’ll swear those damned Dunstone folk put him across in the night.’
The big Cornishman grunted. ‘Why should they do that? And how could you know they did?’
The reeve scratched vigorously at the lice on his head as an aid to thought. ‘To save themselves the trouble of all this new-fangled crowner’s business – beggin’ your pardon, sirs,’ he added hastily. ‘That body wasn’t there the night before, for our pig boy was down in that there meadow till dusk.’
‘He could have come there and died during the night, you fool!’ whined Thomas.
Ralph shook his head. ‘His belly was blown up. Been dead a while – a good few days at least, at this season.’
‘Washed down the stream, then?’ hazarded John.
The reeve rocked his head again. ‘’Tis but a trickle of a brook before it joins the other stream. Not enough to move a badger, let alone a man’s corpse. No, them Dunstone people dumped him on us, so as not to be first finders, that’s for sure.’
The law laid an obligation on those who discovered a body, the so-called ‘First Finders’, to raise the hue-and-cry by immediately rousing the nearest four households and starting a chase for the culprit, as well as notifying the authorities. It was an obligation that carried penalties for errors, and most people made every effort to avoid being involved.
The coroner finished his soup, put the bowl on the floor and stood up, his head all but touching the rough beams above. He moved to stand right over the fire, letting the moisture steam off his worsted breeches and the grey knee-length surcoat, slit back and front for sitting a horse.
‘Any idea who this corpse might be?’ he snapped at the reeve. The battle-scarred veteran of a score of years spent campaigning in Ireland, France and Palestine, John had a demanding manner. A man of few words, he wasted none and, in turn, expected no fancy turns of phrase or beating about the bush.
Ralph shook his head again. ‘No one from these parts, Crowner. Not a serf nor villein, neither. More a gentleman, by his garments.’
John’s eyebrows rose a little, crinkling the forehead scar he had won from a Saracen sword outside Acre. ‘A gentleman? We’ll see about that. Where’ve you got him?’
The abruptness of his deep voice sent Ralph scurrying to get their cloaks, still dripping on the wall hooks. ‘In the tithe barn, just inside the entrance. Starting to smell a bit, he is.’
They trooped outside to find that the rain had eased to a fine drizzle. The sodden village sat dejected in its valley and now a pall of white mist had settled on the moor above, heightening the feeling of isolation from the rest of the world. A few curious souls watched covertly from the doorways of their cottages as the procession left the reeve’s dwelling.
‘Over this way, sirs,’ called Ralph, splashing ahead towards the small church and larger barn that sat slightly below the crest of the village green.
John saw that the hamlet, set in a valley, was all slopes and mounds, but fertile from the soil washed down from the moors over aeons of time.
‘We called you right away, Crowner, just as we should,’ said Ralph virtuously. His initial truculence had long vanished, now that he realised that under the new law Sir John de Wolfe was a force to be reckoned with.
It was only a month since his own lord, Hugh FitzRalph, had assembled his six manor reeves and told them of various new laws that had filtered down from the royal court, where the King’s justiciar, Archbishop Hubert Walter, was ruling England now that Richard had returned to France.
One new regulation had come from the General Eyre, sitting in the county of Kent: in September, it had revived the ancient Saxon post of coroner.
To the ignorant reeves, including Ralph, Kent was as remote as the moon and coroners were equally incomprehensible. They had gathered that the new men would record illegal events and enquire into dead bodies, but their interest waned rapidly as FitzRalph’s clerk, the only man in the manor who could read, droned on. All that Ralph remembered was that if a death occurred violently or unexpectedly, a runner had to be sent straight away to Exeter to notify the sheriff and this new official – otherwise the village would be amerced, which meant a heavy fine. As he heaved at the tall, rickety door of the barn, it occurred to Ralph that if he wanted to keep the perquisites of his job as village reeve, he had better find out a little more about coroners and stick to the rules: if this hawkish black beanpole was crossed, he might prove a handful of trouble. As he wrestled with the door Ralph looked covertly at Sir John de Wolfe and decided that the stern, sallow face, with the deep furrows running down to the corners of the mouth, was that of a hard man. His great height and slightly hunched shoulders gave him the appearance of a bird of prey, ready to swoop on any wrong-doer. De Wolfe’s lips, though, made Ralph wonder if the new crowner made himself more agreeable to the ladies than he did to men: they had a full sensuality at odds with the man’s otherwise flinty appearance.
He jerked his mind back to reality and pushed the door wider, aiming a kick at several small boys who had followed them across the green. Three other men came and stood a respectful distance from the group.
‘Here we are, Crowner, I threw this sack over him for decency.’ He flicked off the rough hessian from the still shape on the ground and stood at the head of the cadaver with an almost proprietorial air.
John de Wolfe and Gwyn stood each side of the corpse and bent to view it more closely, while the clerk crossed himself and stood further away, holding a grubby cloth over his nose.
‘Smells a bit, don’t he?’ muttered Gwyn. It was merely an observation.
‘Told you he was corrupt,’ said the reeve, triumphantly. ‘He never died in our stream night ’fore last, that’s for sure.’
John tilted his scabbard out of the way and squatted at the side of the body.
The front of the tunic and undershirt were ripped open and greenish-red veins could be seen across the swollen belly, making it look like marble. The face was slightly puffy and the open, sightless eyes were sunken and clouded.
‘His features are still fairly good, if we had someone who knew him,’ remained Gwyn.
‘They won’t be for long, though. Another few days above ground and his own mother wouldn’t recognise him.’ The coroner was an expert in corpses; he had seen thousands in all states of decay in the Holy Land and other campaigns. He prodded the flank with a finger, feeling the bubbling tenseness of the gas within.
‘Good clothing, as you said, reeve. Worn and dirty, but fair material. Looks French in style.’
‘What did he die of?’ grunted the ever-practical Gwyn, crouching on his large haunches alongside his master.
For answer, the reeve bent down and grabbed the shoulders of the body, oblivious to the wave of stench that came up as he heaved it over onto its face.
‘There, on his back. We saw it when we carried him in.’ Bending closer, John saw a bloody stain diluted with rain, on the green tunic. In the centre was a small tear, narrow and just over an inch in length, sitting obliquely between the man’s shoulder-blades.
‘Have you looked here under his clothing?’ he boomed at the reeve.
Ralph shook his head. ‘Left it to you, sir, like we were told,’ he said obsequiously.
The coroner grabbed the lower hem of the tunic with a bony but powerful hand and pulled it up. It would come no further than waist level. ‘Gwyn, let’s get this up.’
The ginger giant moved around to the other side to raise the limp arms, as they wrestled away the tunic and pulled the undershirt up to the armpits. At least the early putrefaction had got rid of rigor mortis, which would have made the process even more difficult.
As Gwyn let fall the left hand of the corpse, he grunted again, his favourite form of communication. ‘His fingers … they’re cut.’ He picked up the hand and pulled back the curled fingers to expose the palm and finger pads. Between the thumb and first finger was a deep slash to the bone, and across the inside of the first joints of all the fingers, the flesh was cut to the tendons.
Even the squeamish Thomas de Peyne was intrigued. ‘How did he come by that?’ he squeaked.
‘Caught hold of a blade, trying to defend himself. A knife or a sword,’ answered John shortly.
‘Perhaps the same blade that did this, then.’ Gwyn pointed to the now exposed back of the corpse, reddened and blotchy where the blood had settled under the skin as it lay on its back after death. Under the rip in the tunic and shirt, the surface of the body showed a clean-cut deep wound, an inch long, sharp at the lower end and blunt at the top. As they watched blood and gas blew slow bubbles out of the injury.
Without hesitation, the coroner poked his forefinger into the wound and pushed down until his knuckles were level with the skin. ‘A stab, deep inside him. Slashed his heart and lights, no doubt.’ There was a sucking sound as he withdrew his finger and wiped it clean on the hay that littered the floor of the barn. Thomas the clerk retched and John looked round at him with a scowl.
‘If your stomach is to be turned by every little thing like this, a useless clerk you’ll be to me. Pull yourself together, man, or I’ll get rid of you, even if the Archdeacon is your uncle!’
Thomas gulped back his bile, crossed himself and nodded. Since his trouble with the girl novitiates in Winchester, he had had no employment and only the intercession of the Archdeacon of Exeter had persuaded Sir John to take him as his clerk.
The coroner rose to his feet and looked pensively down at the corpse.
‘It’s clear how he died. What we need to know is where and when he died… and who he is.’
Gwyn ran a hand through his tangled hair, which so often looked like a haystack after a gale. ‘Murdered, no doubt. Stabbed in the back, a coward’s act with dagger or short sword by the size of the wound.’
He never called his master anything, not ‘Crowner’, not ‘Sir John’. Yet he was utterly loyal without being servile, a Cornishman deferring to a man with Saxon, Norman and Celtic blood in his veins.
The coroner stood scowling down at the body. ‘Stabbed in the back, yes … But he had the chance to grab the blade with his left hand, maybe setting aside a second thrust.’
Gwyn nodded in agreement. He, too, had had ample experience of the ways of assault and sudden, violent death. ‘That wound may not have struck him dead on the instant. Mortal though it was, he could have had time to turn and start fighting. I’ve seen men with three wounds worse than that carry on swinging a sword for five minutes before falling to the ground.’
John looked up at the reeve. ‘No pouch or wallet, was there? Nothing about him to say who he was?’
Ralph shook his head dolefully. ‘If they were robbers, they’d have taken anything of value. He has no ring, no brooch.’
The coroner shrugged and turned away. ‘Clerk, earn your keep by writing all this in your roll. Make a note of all his clothing, exactly as to nature and colour. His age – would you say about twenty-five or somewhat older? His eyes look brown, though it’s hard to tell when they’ve been clouded in death as long as this. Hair is very pale, though that’s common enough around here.’ He was still staring at the corpse, his lips pursed thoughtfully. ‘How long would you reckon he’s been dead, Gwyn?’
His henchman pursed his own lips and considered for a while. He was no man for rash judgements. ‘November? This weather, wet but not cold. At least a week, probably a few days longer.’
The coroner nodded: that fitted with his own estimate. ‘Yes – no maggots, but it’s late in the season.’
Gwyn pointed down at the body. ‘He’s also got that.’ It was a large brown mole, low down on the right side of the neck, from which a cluster of long hairs stuck out. ‘Some one may know it – it’s obvious enough.’
Crowner John nodded. ‘He was born with that, so his family would know of it – if we ever find them. Add it to your roll, clerk.’
While Thomas pulled out his quill, ink-vial, a roll of sheep parchment and sought a flat-topped sack for a desk, Gwyn looked at the stout shoes still worn by the dead man. He bent down again and felt the heels with a finger. ‘He had a horse, that’s for sure. There are marks of prick-spurs rubbed into the leather.’
John pursed his lips. ‘Good clothing and owned a horse. Not a common peasant. Should make him easier to trace, if he’s a man of better birth. So long as he’s from these parts.’
‘And so long as he’s not a Frenchman, as you suggested from his garments,’ put in the clerk, now busy with his quill.
The inquest was to be held that afternoon, in the barn in which the body lay.
As putrefaction was worsening rapidly, Crowner John decided that there was no point in going back to Exeter only to return the next day. They would give themselves miles of weary riding and allow the corpse to get more foul by the hour. ‘Summon a jury by noon – and your priest. We’ll get the poor fellow buried before evening,’ he commanded the reeve.
‘Every man and boy over twelve years old, mind you, from the four nearest villages,’ yapped his clerk, officiously latching himself on to the power of the coroner.
Ralph stared at them with a return of his former truculence. ‘I can’t do that! Many will be working the fields, cutting wood, tending sheep and cattle, some far from the villages up on the moor.’
Thomas de Peyne waved his arms at the village headman. ‘Do as you’re told, man. The law says every male in the Hundred has to come forward and see the corpse, then stand as juryman.’
The reeve stuck sullenly to his objections. ‘’Tisn’t possible, sirs. I couldn’t even get word by midday to everyone from this village, let alone the Hundred. And who’s to tend the animals, work the mill? The sheep will have roamed half-way to Exmoor while folk are here gawping at the corpse.’
As the little clerk was about to continue his ranting, John put out a large hand to push him aside. ‘Do your best, reeve. Just get as many men as you can in the time. The pig boy, the first finders, anyone who knows anything about how the body was first seen. And get someone to dig a fresh grave in the churchyard. He’ll have to go in unnamed, but at least you can get your priest to read a few words over him.’
Ralph ambled off, relieved that the big man was not going to apply every letter of the disruptive new law.
Gwyn pushed the barn door closed and they strode off through the mud, back to the reeve’s house.
‘We may as well dry off properly around his miserable fire while we wait,’ muttered the coroner, squinting up at the low clouds draped over the moors above. It had stopped raining for the moment, but the threat hovered over them.
The silent wife produced more soup and bread, and they slowly steamed dry by the hearth, now brightened a little with a few new logs. Afterwards, like the old campaigner he was, Gwyn of Polruan wrapped himself in his cloak and stretched out his massive frame on the hard-packed floor. He never missed the chance to eat, rest or relieve himself, on the principle that he never knew when the next opportunity might come along.
The coroner gave more instructions to his new and not very cherished clerk. ‘Get all this down on your rolls without fail. The reeve’s name, names of the first finders and anyone else who has anything useful to say. And a note that the village is to be amerced, whatever transpires at the inquest.’
‘Why should that be, then?’ grunted Gwyn from the floor, not yet asleep.
‘Because the dead man’s not been presented as English by the village. Nor can he be, as they don’t know him from Adam – and he looks every inch a Norman gentleman.’
Even though it was almost a hundred and thirty years since the Norman invasion, the assumption was still made that anyone found dead of foul play was a Norman killed by Saxons.
‘Will they have to pay for that, then?’ demanded Gwyn.
‘Depends on what the King’s justices decide. If we find the real killer, then the villager’s fault is transferred to him. If not, I dare say they’ll be made to pay up.’
Gwyn sniffed loudly in disapproval. He thought this new coroner system merely another way to screw money out of the poor for the royal Treasury. Only his dogged loyalty to his knight made him keep his criticisms to himself, but the occasional grunt and sniff gave vent to his Cornish independence.
John de Wolfe was well aware of his henchman’s feelings, but chose to ignore them. ‘At least the village did the right thing in sending for me straight away – especially as I suspect they were right in thinking that the next village planted the body on them,’ he said. ‘Anyway, put it all down in that fair priest’s hand of yours, Thomas. It will have to be presented to the justices in the Eyre when they next come to Devon.’
Gwyn sniffed again. ‘Whenever that may be. They took five years to get to Bodmin last time.’
The bandy little clerk couldn’t resist a quick jibe at his enemy. ‘That’s because Cornwall’s so far from civilisation. A peninsula full of hairy Celtic savages.’
Gwyn threw a dead coal from the nearby hearth with unerring aim, hitting Peyne on the side of the head. The bird-faced ex-cleric let out a screech of anguish.
‘Stop it, you two!’ snapped John. ‘You’re like a pair of damned children, not grown men.’ He slumped on his stool, hunching over the fire, steam rising faintly from his leather jerkin.
Tranquillity reigned for a time and when the coroner and his officer were sleepily silent, Thomas de Peyne sat with his back to the wall, huddled in his worn cloak. He thought again of the coroner’s threat to sack him if he couldn’t stomach the job, even though he had the Archdeacon’s patronage. A fear of impending unhappiness seemed to be his lot: for almost two months now he had been almost content, with at least some purpose in life and a few pence from the coroner’s purse to cover his minuscule needs. Common sense told him that Sir John’s threat had been only half meant, but Thomas’s insecurity dogged his every waking hour. As he crouched on the damp earth floor, his crooked back against the rough wall, he mulled over his own unhappy history. He was not a devout man, in spite of his former vocation, but he believed in God and trusted that, when he died, his next incarnation would be a damned sight better than the present one.
The fourth son of a minor Hampshire knight, there had been no land for him in their small honour near Eastleigh, so at the age of twelve he had been put into the cathedral school at Winchester. The entrance of such an unprepossessing lad, the runt of the litter, into such a prestigious college had been eased by his father’s cousin John de Alecon, now Archdeacon of Exeter but who had then been one of the prebendaries of Winchester Cathedral. As he sat nursing his knees under his thin cloak, Thomas reflected on the years he had spent at school, never seeing his home for a full five years. As a small child, he had suffered a cold abscess of his upper spine, contracted from the phthisis that affected his mother and which had killed one of his older brothers. Though his had eventually healed, it had left him slightly stooped and twisted, the object of ridicule by his schoolfellows. Yet he had survived and had been strengthened in resolve by his persecution. He excelled at his letters, perhaps as compensation for his physical disadvantage. He could soon read and speak Latin and Norman French, as well as native English, which was looked on with scorn by his aristocratic Norman contemporaries – even King Richard had never bothered to learn a word of English. His penmanship earned even the grudging praise of his strict monkish tutors, but with these narrow talents, only one course was open to him – to go into the Church. Thomas de Peyne had no particular interest in theology, liturgy or pastoral care, but had a strong liking for books and manuscripts, and an insatiable curiosity about other people’s business – probably because his own was so dull.
In due course and after years of study of logic, mathematics and more Latin, he became a junior deacon at Winchester. Gradually, over the next decade, he had become a workhorse in the administration of the cathedral and chapter. He was employed mainly in the treasury, his participation in religious life minimal, confined to obligatory attendance of the several daily services – but he had also become a teacher of reading and writing, which had helped towards his eventual downfall.
On his elevation to Archdeacon John de Alecon had moved to Exeter eight years ago, and was now one of the right-hand men of the Bishop. Before he left Winchester, his valedictory act for Thomas had been to get him ordained. Soon afterwards, he was made prebendary of one of the smallest parishes on the outskirts of the city, although he still laboured as a cathedral administrator and schoolmaster.
Thomas’s reminiscences were halted briefly by a shattering snore from Gwyn, which disturbed the Cornishman sufficiently to make him mutter and grunt, then turn over and go back to sleep. Crowner John seemed to be dozing quietly on his stool, and the clerk’s thoughts drifted back for the thousandth time to the events of his fall from grace.
Over the years, the malady that had affected his spine had grown worse: although the tuberculous abscess had subsided, the sinews and bone had contracted and shrunk so that his head was pulled slightly to one side and the lopsided lump on his back had become more obvious. His skin had seemed to coarsen and, though he was by no means grotesque, he was far from attractive. Although a prebendary was supposed to be celibate, many had mistresses or even illicit families – some had a whole clutch of bastards, often by different mothers – and although the cathedral precinct, where many canons lived, was forbidden to women, this rule was openly flouted.
Despite his physical shortcomings, Thomas de Peyne had a normal sex drive. He liked women, he desired women and, if he had been like his fellow prebendaries, his lust could easily have been satisfied. If only he had confined his activities to the stews that peppered Winchester – as they did every busy town – life could have carried on in its own humdrum, but comfortable way. But two years ago, one of his reading pupils in the cathedral day school, a fat fourteen-year old girl, had been his nemesis.
Hunched against the cottage wall, with the rough boards cutting into his bent back, Thomas wondered if her obesity and his crookedness had attracted each other – or whether she had been taunting him. For lead him on she certainly did, with requests for an extra hour of reading practice after the other scholars had left, coy looks, fluttering eyelashes and suggestive conversation. Either he misread the signs, from wishful thinking, or was deliberately trapped by her, but his eventual clumsy efforts at seduction in the dingy schoolroom off the cloisters were met with screams that could have drowned the cathedral bells. The proctors came running and he was imprisoned for the next week in a punishment cell under the chapter house. Thankfully, the whole abortive ravishment had taken place on episcopal premises so no sheriff’s sergeants had been called. If they had, he would probably have been hanged within days for attempted rape.
As it was, he kept his life, but lost almost everything else. After interminable delays, he was hauled before the consistory court of the diocese, found guilty on what he considered perjured evidence by the girl and her family, and stripped of his holy orders by an irate bishop and ejected from the cathedral precincts.
The loss of his priesthood meant little to Thomas, but deprivation of the prebend, his living accommodation and the comfortable ecclesiastical life were a disaster. He was thrown out of the religious community and escaped having to beg for his survival only by scribing letters and bills for tradesmen and tutoring a few youths for rich families.
This went on for a year and half, until his commissions dwindled as he became more and more dishevelled and despairing. Cut off from his family by the disgrace, he even contemplated suicide, but eventually summoned the last of his courage to walk to Exeter to throw himself on the mercy of his kinsman. Grudgingly, the Archdeacon agreed to help him, if and when he could, and some months later, when the new coroner system was introduced, he had prevailed on John de Wolfe to take on Thomas as his clerk, recommending strongly his capabilities with pen and parchment.
So here he was, he reflected, a crook-backed ex-canon, with no money and few prospects other than tramping the countryside acting as a scribe and spy for King Richard’s new law officer.
He sighed a great sigh and hunkered down into his hooded cloak, trying to submerge his chronic worries in the stupor of sleep.