The Sanctuary Seeker

Chapter Three In which Crowner John falls out with his wife

The shortening days and the leaden sky made it almost dark when John arrived home. The trio had spent an hour in a tavern at Fulford on the road back from Widecombe where they ate better food and drank better beer than the reeve’s wife had provided.

At the walls of Exeter they separated, the clerk going off to his room in the cathedral precinct – which he had obtained in spite of his expulsion from holy orders. Gwyn went back to his wife and children in their thatched hut outside the East Gate, while the Coroner, with a noticeable lack of enthusiasm, went slowly home to his burgage in St Martin’s Lane, a passage between the High Street and the cathedral.

He stabled his horse at a nearby farrier’s and, after seeing the stallion fed and watered, plodded up the muddy cart-tracks to the timber town-house that leaned over the tiny street. It was too large for him – he had no children with whom to share it – but his wife would hear nothing of moving to a smaller dwelling. ‘You are a knight, and the King’s coroner for the country, and I am the sister of the sheriff!’ she would declaim in her grating, high-pitched voice. ‘How could we hold up our heads among our peers if we moved to some miserable little tenement?’

At forty-six, Matilda was six years older than John. Though she had once been a handsome woman, now she looked every month of her age, in spite of the constant ministrations of her French maid, Lucille, who with powder and curling tongs attempted to keep back the ravages of time.

The coroner had been pushed into this lacklustre marriage sixteen years ago by the ambitions of his late father, Simon de Wolfe, who saw in a match with the de Revelle family the best road for the advancement of his eldest son. After less than eighteen months with his shrewish bride, John escaped from her with repeated absences at the Irish wars and then with King Richard in Palestine. In fact, his enthusiasm for warfare was founded less on patriotism and the removal of the Saracen from the Holy Land, than on his desire to stay away from Matilda.

The street door was ajar when he reached it and he pushed it open to find Brutus, his house dog, sitting in the vestibule beyond. The old hound’s ears were held back and his feathery tail slowly swished the floor in a rhythmic welcome.

‘At least someone’s glad to see me home,’ he murmured, as he bent to fondle the dog’s head.

As he shrugged off his damp cloak and unbuckled his sword-belt, another figure appeared from a door at the rear, who also seemed pleased to see him. ‘Master, you’re back! Let’s have those filthy boots off you.’

He sat on the inner step, watching strands of Mary’s long blonde hair slip from beneath the linen kerchief that she wore on her head, as she tugged off his riding boots.

Mary was their serving maid, a handsome, if over-muscular, girl of twenty-five. Exuding good health, she had a briskness and determination that brushed aside all problems. She never failed to make John feel better when he was low – a frequent condition for the coroner.

Mary was the by-blow of a Norman squire and a Saxon woman from Exeter. In this divided household, she was firmly, if discreetly, John’s ally against Matilda and Lucille. He had given her her job against his wife’s wishes and, an eminently sensible girl, Mary valued it too highly to risk losing it over household politics – but short of open warfare with the mistress, she aided and abetted the coroner whenever she could in his campaign of survival against his strident wife. As she fetched him a pair of soft house shoes, she whispered to him conspiratorially, ‘Her brother is here again, master. They’re in the hall, complaining about you as usual.’

John groaned. His damned brother-in-law seemed to spend more time in this house than he did himself, and if Matilda were not such an obnoxious woman, he might have suspected Richard de Revelle of incestuous inclinations.

Reluctantly he rose from the chair and moved to the other door in the vestibule. This opened into the hall, which occupied the front half of the house from floor to roof. Behind it on the upper level was the solar, his and his wife’s private chamber and sleeping place, reached by an outside stairway at the rear. Here Matilda did her needlework and Lucille primped her hair. In the small yard at the back of the house were outhouses where the two servants lived, and where the cooking, brewing and washing were done.

Mary picked up the boots, thickly coated with mire. ‘I’ll get these cleaned and polished – and good luck in there!’ she added impishly.

John ruffled her fair hair affectionately. In the past they had had a few clandestine sessions in bed, but Mary had refused him in recent months, fearing that the mistress, through the hated Lucille, may have developed suspicions.

As she vanished outside to the domestic area, John lifted the wrought-iron latch on the hall door and, with a sigh, stepped into his own domain.

The room was high, gloomy and cold, in spite of a big log fire in the cavernous hearth at the further end. Much of the bare timber of the high walls was covered with tapestries and banners, but even these were sombre and depressing. A long oaken table stood in the centre of the room with a heavy chair at each end and benches down either side.

Flanking each side of the stone fireplace was a settle, a double wooden seat with a high back and side wings to keep out the draughts, and directly before the hearth, a pair of monk’s chairs, each with a cowled back like a beehive, again to protect the occupant from the cold.

As John walked across the bare flagstones – Matilda would not suffer the usual scattered rushes on beaten earth as being ‘common’ – a mutter of voices echoed from the high walls. ‘Matilda, I’m back,’ he called.

A face appeared around the side of one of the cowled chairs. ‘Indeed, so I see! A wonder you bother to come home at all. I’ve not laid eyes on you in daylight all this week.’

His wife’s square face was set in a perpetual expression of disdain, as if a bad smell was ever under her nostrils. Though handsome once, a faint moustache and fleshy pouches under her blue eyes and along the jawline suggested both a lazy lifestyle and an over-enthusiastic appetite. Her elaborately curled hair was partly hidden under a brocade cap, which matched a heavy gown to keep out the November chill.

John crossed to the hearth and stood with his back to the fire, both to warm the seat of his breeches and to emphasise that he was master of the household.

Two pairs of eyes stared at him. ‘And how did my new law officer fare today, in the dung-hole they call Widecombe?’

Sarcasm fell easily from the thin lips of his brother-in-law, lolling in the other chair. Though sibling to Matilda, his face was as long and lean as hers was broad, but he had the same cold blue eyes.

‘Good day, Sir Sheriff, though I’m not your law officer. I answer directly to the King, who appointed me.’

Sir Richard de Revelle sighed, assuming a pitying smile as if indulging a naughty child. ‘Of course, John, of course! Though faint chance you have of ever reporting to our good King – or even of seeing him. I hear reliable reports from France that he intends never again to set foot in England.’

Matilda snorted. ‘And very good sense he shows, too. If I had my wishes, I’d not stay a day longer in this miserable rain-sodden country, full of Saxons and Cornishmen.’

In her youth she had once spent a few months in Normandy with relatives and had played ever since the martyred role of a reluctant Norman exile, though she had been born in Exeter and had spent nearly all her life in Devon.

John had heard it all a score of times, but familiarity did not lessen his exasperation. ‘The King may not be in Winchester or London, but he’s still the sovereign of this land, Richard. And we remain his officers, wherever he is.’

The sheriff’s face, with its thin dark moustache and small pointed beard, kept its patronising smile. ‘Agreed, brother, and I’m sure you need no reminding that I am his representative in this country. What the Justiciar was thinking of when he meddled with this coroner business in September I still cannot fathom.’

John was not overburdened with patience and although the argument was familiar, the other’s sneers were like a red rag to a bull. ‘I’ll tell you why, once again, brother-in-law. It was because the sheriffs were milking too much of the revenue due to the Exchequer into their own purses. Hubert Walter has had the good sense to set someone trustworthy in each county – the coroners – to keep a record of what’s due.’

De Revelle waved this aside with a languid flip of his hand. ‘Nonsense, John. You should know the truth better than any man, having been with Richard when he was taken in Austria. It was to raise the huge ransom that Henry of Germany demanded for him. Our wily Hubert dreamed up this scheme to screw even more cash out of the long-suffering populace.’

There was more than a grain of truth in what the sheriff said, and it touched John on a sore spot: his conscience still pricked him for not having saved his king from capture near Vienna, two years ago. As a knight in Richard’s army, he had left the Holy Land with the King’s retinue in October 1192, leaving Hubert Walter, now Chief Justiciar and Archbishop of Canterbury, in command of the remaining English force. During the voyage, which included shipwreck and attack by pirates, John proved such a staunch protector to his king that Richard took him into his personal bodyguard. The king had decided to return home by sailing up the Adriatic and travelling overland through Bohemia. Several times evading capture, he was eventually trapped in an inn at Erdberg, just outside Vienna. At the time John had been out with Gwyn, searching for fresh horses, and for ever after blamed himself for not having been on hand to fight for his royal master. Richard was imprisoned for a year and a half, first by Leopold of Austria, who sold him on to Henry VI of Germany. Eventually a ransom of a hundred and fifty thousand marks was agreed, a terrible burden for England, which had already been stripped by Richard to finance his army for the Third Crusade and later his campaign against Philip of France.

However, his loyalty to Richard the Lionheart forced John to deny his brother-in-law’s argument and they bandied words for several minutes, neither willing to agree that the other was partly correct.

Matilda had tired of these political joustings in which she could take no part. ‘You use your coronership as an excuse to be away at all hours, John!’ she complained. ‘You are never at home, seeing to our affairs and keeping me company.’

John’s gaunt face reddened above the black stubble on his unshaven chin.

‘’Twas you pushed me into the damned job, woman. Didn’t you plead with your brother and the Bishop to petition Hubert Walter on my behalf?’

The sheriff looked from one to the other, a smug expression on his lean features. He enjoyed a good row between his relatives.

‘Of course I wanted you to have the appointment, you clod of a man. Did you think I wanted you be a crude soldier all your life, lumbering about the country waving a sword?’ She hauled herself out of the chair and stood threateningly in front of her husband, hands propped on her bulging hips. ‘You needed decent employment – like a law officer high in the county, where you wouldn’t shame me with your soldier’s ways. Something appropriate to our position – a king’s knight and a sheriff’s sister!’ She advanced another step towards him and even the redoubtable John moved back a little along the fireplace.

‘By Mary Mother of God! John de Wolfe, be glad you have such a post. I don’t want you skulking around, like some unemployed squire waiting for a new war – or, even worse, sinking to become some merchant or trader. Could I ever hold my head up then?’

The veins on his forehead bulged and the Coroner slapped his hand violently on the stone of the fireplace.

‘It’s always you, you, you!’ he shouted. ‘Damn what I might want as long as you can walk in a new gown in the portreeve’s procession or in the judge’s train, flaunting your airs and graces!’

He kicked at a log violently, sending a shower of sparks dancing up the wide chimney, and ignored her brother’s smirks.

‘You should make up your mind, wife!’ John fumed. ‘One moment you want me to be a county coroner, then you complain that I spend too much time doing the job!’

Matilda’s podgy cheeks coloured under the layer of powder. ‘Don’t you shout at me! Why did you agree to accept the crownership, then, if you’re so set against it?’

‘I didn’t say I was against it … though, by God, it’s a hard task sometimes. I did it to please you – or, at least, to avoid your endless nagging. It keeps me occupied as you’re so set against me going off to fight – where any man with guts would wish to be,’ he added, with a pointed look at his brother-in-law.

Richard’s condescending good humour faded at this. ‘You well know I’ve this old wound in my side, suffered in King Henry’s service – it plagues me continually. But for that I would, of course, be following Coeur de Lion in Normandy.’

John had his own ideas on that, but even the heat of a family dispute was insufficient to bring it out now – he was keeping it for a more rewarding opportunity.

Matilda, however, was still in full spate. She had subsided heavily into her chair, but continued to wag a beringed finger at her glowering husband. ‘I suggested the coronership for your own pride and status in Exeter, John. I had no intention of you taking on most of the county of Devon as an excuse for you to go galloping over hill and dale every hour God made!’

John turned angrily and bent over his wife. ‘You know well enough what happened, Matilda, and you were greatly pleased at the time, for it puffed up your image in the county as well as the city.’

The Article of Eyre had demanded that three knights and a clerk be appointed to form a coroner’s service in each county. John de Wolfe had been summarily elected by the burgesses as their city coroner. His crusading connections with both the King and Hubert Walter had ensured that he was a prime candidate. In truth, the coronership was not much sought after, as it was unpaid. In fact, coroners had to have a private income of at least twenty pounds a year: a rich man would have no need to resort to corruption as the sheriffs had. As the job was so unattractive, only one other coroner had been found, and he, Robert FitzRogo, had fallen from his horse two weeks after his appointment and died from spinal paralysis. John had been left with the jurisdiction of the whole county until someone else could be pressed into service.

Matilda chose to ignore this. ‘The devil with your excuses! The nub of the matter is that you are staying out all day and night, on some pretext about crowner’s duties when I know that you’re sitting in taverns or carousing with your old wartime comrades – and bedding as many dirty wenches as you can throw your leg over!’

John purpled again with righteous indignation, though what she alleged was not far off the mark. Today, however, he had been out in teeming rain since dawn, had ridden thirty hard miles and had barely spoken to a woman.

Richard de Revelle put in, ‘You’re a law officer, John, like myself. I don’t go chasing around the countryside after every petty criminal, I let my sergeants and men-at-arms do that. Why not stay in Exeter, direct matters and come home each day?’

Matilda took up the theme: ‘Yes, send that Cornish savage to do the work – and your misshapen clerk. Have more dignity and less mud on your boots.’

John stared at them scornfully. ‘Do I have a castle full of men-at-arms at my command, Sir Sheriff? And can I send my only servants to hold inquests for me in places thirty and forty miles away? If you find me someone to be coroner in the north and south of Devon, I’ll gladly stay in this city and be home every noon and night!’ His black eyes flashed. ‘And when I get home, what welcome is there for me? If it were not for the maid, I’d go hungry, for I fail to see you bustling about, Matilda, to see that the kitchen finds me a meal when I get back wet, tired and famished. All I get is your nagging and the smirks of your damned brother.’

The others stared at him, surprised by the bitterness in his voice. Though they constantly bickered, this was stronger stuff than usual from John de Wolfe.

He wagged a long finger under his wife’s nose. ‘And if you falsely accuse me, woman, then I’ll justify it by doing what you claim,’ he threatened, thinking attack the best form of defence. Striding away from the hearth, he delivered a parting shaft. ‘I’m going down to the inn, where at least I’ll get a kind word, some ale … and possibly a cheerful wench!’

The heavy door made a satisfying bang as he slammed it behind him.

He sat near a large log fire, leaning on a scrubbed table, screened from the main room of the inn by a wattle partition that formed an alcove near the hearth. The bones of half a chicken, some pork ribs and the crumbs of a small loaf lay scattered on the boards of the table, the remnants of a good meal that his mistress had provided an hour earlier.

The Bush Inn was acknowledged as the best in Exeter, tucked away in Idle Lane, in the lower part of the town, not far from the West Gate and the river. For the moment he sat alone. Nesta was in the outhouse kitchen behind the inn, scolding the cook for being so long with another customer’s supper. Edwin, the potman, an old cripple who had lost an eye and some toes in the battle for Wexford over twenty years before, washed pewter tankards in a bucket of dirty brown water, before filling them with ale from two rough barrels propped at the back of the room. Seven or eight townsmen, all well known to John, sat on benches, drinking and gossiping.

Something approaching contentment, born of the beer and the warmth, began to steal over him. His resentment and fury at his wife and her brother had been brimming over when he had stalked into the Bush, but Nesta’s affection and common sense had soon calmed him down. The good food and drink and his draught-free seat before the crackling sycamore logs had pacified him and he was now slightly sleepy.

He took another long pull at the ale, bittered with oak-galls, and stared at the almost hypnotic leap of the flames. Was that damned woman right, he wondered. Did he really want this coroner’s job hung like a millstone around his neck? Was it just a device he used to avoid his wife and and sit in taverns or visit his women? He had been coroner for only two months but, there in the firelight, John decided he enjoyed it.

‘What’s this deep thought about? Is my beer too strong for your brain?’ She had come back from the kitchen and stood behind him, a hand on his shoulder.

John reached up to cover her fingers with his own. ‘I was thinking that maybe I’m too old to go racing off to the wars, Nesta, my love. My sword arm is getting too slow and I’d be run through at the first skirmish.’

She squeezed his shoulder affectionately and came round the table to sit on the bench by his side. Twelve years his junior, the Welsh woman had dark red hair and, unusual in one of her age, a perfect set of teeth. A round face, a high smooth brow and a snub nose gave her prettiness rather than beauty. Small and shapely, she wore a high-necked plain gown that did nothing to hide her prominent bosom.

‘You’re a big handsome man in his prime, John. You’re as strong as a horse and I can personally vouch that you rut like one! So shake off this “poor old man” nonsense, will you? It’s just your usual gloom after fighting with that old bitch you call wife.’

Nesta reached across and drank from his pot, while he slipped an arm around her and hugged her. ‘I don’t know where I’d be without you, sweet woman.’

Nesta smiled up at him, rather wistfully. ‘You’d be with one of your other sweet women, Sir Crowner. I’ve no illusions about your faithfulness, though I think you like me best – so I’ll settle for that, for it’s all I’m likely to get.’ She finished his ale and yelled at the one-eyed old soldier to bring a refill, then pointedly changed the subject. ‘Was that chicken to your liking, John? This new cook had some daft idea of stuffing its belly with bread and sage herbs.’

‘It was good, very good.’ He ran a finger across the table top and licked at the grease appreciatively. The Bush had not taken up the new fad for platters, but served the food on thick bread trenchers, direct onto the scrubbed boards, walling in the gravy with crusts.

Old Edwin limped across and banged a brimming quart pot in front of John. ‘Here ye are, Captain. Good health to you.’

He used the Coroner’s old military name. Although he had never served under him, he had a respectful admiration for John’s record as a soldier.

‘There’s another who doesn’t think you’re past it as a warrior,’ Nesta observed slyly, as Edwin shuffled across to the fire to load on more logs. ‘Come on, John, cheer up. Tell Nesta what’s on your mind.’

After six pints of ale he had to search for the root of his earlier despondency. He pulled Nesta closer to his side, so that his free hand could cup her breast, while he drank.

‘My wife suggests that I took this crowner’s appointment only as an excuse to escape her. But, damnation, it was she who encouraged it, to get a rung or two up the ladder of nobility.’

Nesta wriggled as his fingers played with her nipple. ‘Forget her for a moment, John. Tell me what you’ve been doing today to make you look as if you could drop off to sleep, even in the company of the prettiest woman in Devon.’

He bent his head down to the crown of her curls, his black locks mingling with the red. ‘We’ve been riding since dawn, out to Widecombe and back …’ He told her about the body in the brook and the probability that it was that of a Crusader.

Nesta took a drink from his pot. ‘Not bad ale, though I say it myself … Well, what about this Crusader? Was he young and handsome?’

John grinned, an uncommon lightening of his normally stern expression. ‘That’s all you flighty wenches think of, thank God!’ he chaffed her. ‘He might have been handsome once, but ten days or so dead takes the beauty out of any face.’

Nesta grimaced and pressed closer to his big body. ‘And who do you think killed him, Sir Crowner?’

John emptied his pot before answering, and Nesta signalled to old Edwin to bring another from the best barrel.

‘I don’t know. The cause of most deaths in a village – or town, for that matter – is plain. Drunken quarrels, violent robberies, strangled rapes, beaten wives … Everyone knows the culprit and the hue-and-cry is hardly needed to catch the felon. But this one …’ He fell silent as the old potman put a new jar in front of him.

Story-telling had taken John’s mind off fondling her, and Nesta pulled back his hand to her bosom in mock annoyance. ‘You think he’s a nobleman, you said?’ she asked.

‘He was certainly no common soldier. Good clothes, fine boots, belt and scabbard – mostly Levantine made. No doubt he’s come recently from Outremer.’

She looked up at his profile, his long jaw pink in the flames from the fire. ‘How did he reach the edge of Dartmoor? I’ve heard that Widecombe’s an outlandish place.’

Like most town-dwellers, to Nesta the countryside was a remote, alien place. She had hardly set foot outside Exeter in the five years since she had come from South Wales. Her late husband, a Welsh archer named Meredydd, had returned from fighting in Touraine with an unexpected bounty and some loot. He landed at Exmouth, took a fancy to the area and bought the Bush Inn, sending home to Gwent for his wife. Within a year, he was dead of the jaundice and Nesta had carried on alone – with unusual success for a widow.

John pondered her question. ‘He had marks of spurs on his boots, but even those had been stolen from him, along with everything else he possessed except his dagger. It was undoubtedly a robbery, probably by at least two attackers from the wounds he suffered.’

‘So, a simple robbery – but why would a Crusader be riding alone along the edge of Dartmoor?’ she persisted, partly to emphasise her interest in his doings and partly to keep his mind away from the spat with his wife.

‘Depends where he was headed – some people take the moor track to Tavistock and Plymouth instead of the longer road through the lowlands. Or he might have been going to some manor near Okehampton, or even further into North Cornwall. And we don’t know that he was alone. He may have had a companion or servant – also lying dead now in the forest.’

Nesta was becoming restive, but she sensed that her man needed to talk himself out of his mood.

‘You think it was outlaws that killed him?’

‘It seems most likely. The forest and moor abounds in fugitives. The two manor reeves each blamed the other, but I feel their sin is in trying to move the body from their land, rather than murder.’ He thought for a moment, his beetling brows coming down in thought. ‘A man called Nebba was there, too. Not a villager, he had been a soldier, I’ll swear. Two fingers missing.’

This struck a chord with the shapely innkeeper. ‘An archer, like my poor Meredydd! A barbaric custom, to cut off a man’s fingers with a knife.’

‘Not so bad as lopping off other parts, my girl,’ he grunted, giving her thigh a suggestive squeeze.

After a short silence, his chin dropped on to his chest and he raised his head with a jerk, startling the auburn head next to him.

‘Come, Sir Crowner, time you were in bed before you fall asleep across the table.’ Nesta pulled herself away from him and stood up. ‘You’ll stay here this night, John, in my bed – though by the look of you, there’ll be little action other than snoring. Come.’

She pulled him towards the wooden stair at the back, past the amused glances of the patrons and a chorus of ‘Good night, Sir John.’

As he lumbered up the steps behind her, John was vaguely uneasy. ‘I’ve not stayed a whole night with you before, Nesta.’

Holding a tallow candle high, she turned and grinned at him. ‘Afraid I’ll turn into a witch at midnight? You’ve spent many an afternoon and evening enjoying my hospitality, John.’

‘They’ll all know where I am,’ he muttered.

But Nesta scoffed, ‘It’s no secret in Exeter, not even from your wife. So don’t concern yourself, let her stew until the morning. She’ll not petition the Pope for an annulment and lose being Madam Coroner for the county of Devon!’