Bernard Knight - Crowner's Quest

The reeve climbed to his feet, realising that, without their tools, there could be no more work that day — and that the bailiff and Lord Henry must be informed without delay. The message he must take to them was plain: this nibbling away at Fitzhamon’s land was no longer going to be easy.

For once, Matilda was happy. Flushed with pleasure and self-importance, she sat at one end of the long table in the high, gloomy hall of their house and urged her guests to take more drink, capons’ legs and sweetmeats from the jugs and platters set in front of them.

At the other end sat the brooding figure of her husband, Sir John de Wolfe, the King’s coroner for the County of Devon. Tall and slightly hunched, his black hair matched the thick eyebrows that sat above deep-set eyes. Unlike most Normans, he had no beard or moustache beneath his great hooked nose, but his dark stubble had helped earn him the nickname ‘Black John’ in the armies of the Crusades and the Irish wars.

This evening, though, even his usually grim face was more relaxed, partly due to the amount of French wine he had drunk but also because he had a good friend on each side of him. To his left was Hugh de Relaga, one of the town’s two Portreeves, a fat and cheerful dandy. On the other side was John de Alencon, Archdeacon of Exeter, a thin, ascetic man, with a quiet wit and a twinkling eye.

Around the rest of the table were a dozen other Exeter worthies and their wives, from the castle, the Church and the Guilds. It was about the eleventh hour on the eve of Christ Mass and they had not long returned from the special service in the great cathedral of St Mary and St Peter, only a few hundred paces away from the coroner’s home in Martin’s Lane.

Their timber house was high and narrow, being only one room from floor to beamed roof, with a small solar built on the back, reached by an outside staircase. The walls were hung with sombre tapestries to relieve the bare planks and the floor was flagged with stone, as Matilda considered the usual rush-strewn earth too common for people of their quality.

The guests sat on benches along each side of the heavy table, the only two chairs being at either end. Light came from candles and tallow dips on the table and from the large fire in the hearth. The guests were sufficiently filled with ale, cider and wine to be in prattling mood, especially at Yuletide, when a strangely contagious mood of bonhomie infected the community.

‘Matilda, I thought you usually patronised that little church of St Olave in Fore Street, not the cathedral?’

The high-pitched voice was that of her sister-in-law, Eleanor, wife to Sheriff Richard de Revelle. De Wolfe was not sure whom he detested more, his brother-in-law or the wife. Eleanor was a thin, sour-faced woman of fifty, an even greater snob than Matilda. Spurning the usual white linen cover-chief over the head, Eleanor wore her hair coiled in gold-net crespines over each ear. Her husband was also elegantly dressed, a man of medium height with wavy brown hair, a thin moustache and a small pointed beard — a complete contrast to his brother-in-law, who dressed in nothing but black or grey.

‘Why, in God’s name, is it called St Olave’s?’ drawled de Revelle, leaning back on the bench, the better to display his new green tunic, the neckband and sleeves worked elaborately in yellow embroidery.

‘It’s certainly in God’s name, sheriff,’ replied the Archdeacon, with a wry smile. ‘Olave was the first Christian king of Norway, though I admit it quite escapes me why one of our seventeen churches in Exeter is dedicated to him.’

The conversation chattered on, the noise level rising as the contents of the wine keg lowered. Matilda, her square pug face radiant with pleasure at the success of her party, looked around the hall and calculated her resulting elevation on the social scale, to be gauged when she next met her cronies at the market or in church. For once she had persuaded her taciturn husband, who had been made county coroner only three months earlier, to open up a little socially and invite some people to the house after the Mass on the eve of Christ’s birthday.

Rather to her surprise, even he appeared amiable tonight. At least the party had kept him at home, she thought, with momentary bitterness, and he was not down at the Bush tavern with his red-headed mistress, that Welsh tart Nesta. Outside the unglazed shutters the night was freezing, but a fire was roaring in the big hearth, which had the modern luxury of a stone chimney. Brutus, John’s old hound, was stretched luxuriously in front of the flames, twitching now and then as a hot spark spat out at him.

The wine and food were constantly replenished by Mary, their house-servant and cook, while old Simon, the labourer, carried in fresh logs to stoke the fire. Matilda’s own maid Lucille, the poisonous French hag, as de Wolfe thought of her, was too grand to serve at table and was lurking in the solar, eavesdropping through the high slit window, waiting to help Matilda undress for bed when the party was over.

Between joining in the gossip and scandal, Matilda stole frequent glances at her husband, willing him to do something socially elegant, such as standing to propose a toast — to Jesus Christ, or the prosperity of Exeter, anything to make his mark and reflect some more glory upon her. Several times, she saw him move as if to get up and she waited expectantly for him to raise his glass to the assembled worthies. But each time she was disappointed, as all he did was reach across for a chicken leg or a jug of Loire wine. Then the opportunity was lost, as her brother jumped up and brandished his beaker, tapping imperiously on the table with the handle of his dagger.

‘We must give thanks to our host and his good wife for inviting us to this most convivial gathering,’ he brayed, the long cuff of his tunic dangling as he waved his cup back and forth. ‘To Sir John de Wolfe, lately appointed crowner to this county, and his good wife, my little sister Matilda!’

As they stood and responded to his toast, John thought that ‘little sister’ was the greatest exaggeration of the twelfth century, as Matilda’s square figure was a good many pounds heavier than de Revelle’s. Then, charitably, he assumed that his brother-in-law had meant little in years, as she was four less than her brother’s fifty. The coroner himself was only forty, though the lined skin stretched over his high cheekbones weathered by more than two decades of campaigning in Ireland, France and the Holy Land, made him look older.

Matilda’s irritation at her husband’s failure to match Richard’s social graces was slowly subsiding, when another blow fell upon her ambition to become one of Exeter’s premier hostesses. Suddenly she saw Mary, whom she rightly suspected of being another of John’s amorous conquests, come up to him and whisper urgently in his ear. He looked over his shoulder at the door to the small vestibule that fronted on to the street. Following his gaze, Matilda glared in annoyance at a large face that peered around the door. It was fringed with unruly red hair and, below a bulbous nose, a huge moustache nestled, its ends merging with carrotty side-whiskers before hanging down past his lantern jaw almost to his chest. It was Gwyn of Polruan, her husband’s bodyguard and coroner’s officer, a Cornishman for whom her Norman soul had even more contempt than for Saxons.

With growing apprehension and annoyance, she heard her husband’s chair grate across the flagstones as he rose and walked across to the door. As she watched him whispering with Gwyn, her concern mounted into fury. ‘If he leaves now, I’ll kill him, God help me!’ she muttered to herself.