Bernard Knight - Crowner's Quest

Also like the Moor, she threw something at him suddenly, not a spear but a half-eaten apple that had been on the floor alongside the mattress. ‘Oh, go to hell, you miserable devil!’ And with those final words, she slid down the bed and violently pulled the sheepskins over her head.

Slowly de Wolfe took off his own outer clothes, blew out the tallow dip that lit the room, then slid into the opposite side of the large bed. Lying back to back, there was only a yard between their bodies, but a mile between their souls.

Listening to her regular breathing, as she feigned sleep, he sighed. ‘And a merry Christ Mass to you, too!’ he muttered bitterly.

Unless occupied with other duties, it was the habit of Sir John de Wolfe to enjoy a second breakfast with his two retainers at about the ninth hour, after the cathedral bell had tolled for the services of terce, sext and nones, which preceded high mass. He had already eaten at seven that morning, alone in the dank, empty hall in Martin’s Lane. Mary had given him hot oaten porridge, to keep out the winter cold, followed by slices of salt beef and two duck eggs on barley bread. She was a buxom, dark-haired woman of twenty-five, born of a Saxon mother and a Norman soldier who had not stayed for the birth.

As she stood near de Wolfe to pour him more ale, he absently laid a hand on her rounded bottom, more for comfort than in lust. In the past, they had enjoyed more than a few romps together in the hut she occupied in the backyard. But Mary, keen to keep her job, had refused him for some time past, sensing that her arch-enemy Lucille was suspicious of them. ‘I’m in disfavour again, Mary,’ he announced in a low voice, looking up furtively at the narrow window high on the inner wall that connected the hall to the solar.

‘She had her heart set on that party last night being a great event,’ murmured the maid. ‘When you left with the Archdeacon — and especially when her brother followed you — the whole thing went flat and they all drifted away. She’ll not forgive you that for a long while yet.’

Matilda pointedly failed to appear at the table, and after his breakfast and a visit to the privy, John had a perfunctory wash in a leather bucket of cold water in the yard: it was Saturday, his day for such ablutions, though not for his twice-weekly shave. Mary had set out his weekly change of clothing in front of the smouldering fire and he slowly climbed into a linen undershirt and a plain grey serge tunic that reached below his knees. Thick woollen hose came up to his thighs — he wore no breeches or pants unless he was going to ride a horse — and a pair of pointed shoes reached to his ankles. Buckling on a wide belt that carried his dagger — no sword was needed in the city streets — he swung a mottled grey wolfskin cloak over his shoulders and pulled on a basin-shaped cap of black felt, with ear-flaps that tied under his chin. Then, yelling farewell to Mary, he left for the castle, where the sheriff had grudgingly given him a tiny room above the gatehouse for an office.

At the drawbridge of Rougemont, the solitary sentry greeted him by banging the stock of his lance on the ground, a respectful salute for a knight whom every soldier knew had been a gallant Crusader and a companion of the Lionheart himself.

He climbed the narrow stairs to the upper floor of the tall gatehouse, which had been built, like the rest of the castle, soon after the Conquest, by King William the Bastard, who had demolished fifty-one Saxon houses to make space for it. His office was a bare attic under the roof-beams, bleak and draughty, with a curtain of rough sacking over the doorless entrance at the top of the stairs. There was no fireplace and the miserable chamber reflected the scorn with which Richard de Revelle regarded this new-fangled office of coroner. He considered it a slight on his monopoly of law enforcement in the county — a view shared by most sheriffs across England.

The coroner’s team gathered here every morning to discover what calamities had occurred overnight, and today, though it was Yuletide and a religious holiday, the death of Canon Robert de Hane was high on the agenda.

De Wolfe sat himself on the bench behind his crude trestle table, with Thomas hunched on a stool at one end. The clerk was carefully copying a list of last week’s executed felons on to another parchment, his quill pen almost touching his thin, pointed nose as he scribed the Latin words in an elegant script, his tongue protruding as he concentrated.

Gwyn of Polruan, named after the Cornish fishing village where he was born, perched in his favourite place, on the stone sill of the small window opening. As he looked down at the narrow street that led to the steep drawbridge below, he cleaned his fingernails absently with the point of his dagger.

The coroner sat with his long dark face cupped in his hands, elbows on the table. He usually spent this time of the morning struggling with his Latin grammar, as belatedly he was learning to read and write, under the tuition of one of the senior cathedral priests. But today his mind was on other ecclesiastical matters, trying to fathom who would want to kill an apparently innocuous old scholar.

‘Thomas, you know much of what goes on in the Close,’ he said suddenly, in his deep, sonorous voice. ‘Have there been any whispers or scandals there recently?’

The clerk, always eager to air his eccelesiastical knowledge, put down his quill. His bright button eyes fixed on the coroner and his head tilted like a bird. Like his master, he always wore black or grey, though his long tube-like tunic was shabby and worn, as he was poorer than the most penurious church mouse. ‘Nothing about Robert de Hane, Crowner. He was the quietest of all the canons. He had no mistress or secret family placed in a distant village, like some of his fellows.’

‘As far as you know, toad,’ trumpeted Gwyn. ‘I wouldn’t trust any priest out of my sight with half a penny — or with my wife!’

De Wolfe had never discovered the cause of the Cornishman’s antipathy to the clergy, in spite of being daily in his company for the past twenty years. ‘Is there nothing these days to set tongues clacking about the cathedral?’ persisted the coroner. ‘With all those servants, vicars, secondaries, choristers, surely there must be some jealousies and intrigues afoot!’

Thomas racked his brains to dredge up some scandal to satisfy his master and bolster his own reputation as a source of inside information. He slept rent-free on a straw mattress in a servants’ hut behind one of the canon’s houses, thanks to the intercession of his uncle, the Archdeacon. He ate sparingly, either at food stalls in the streets or sometimes cooked a little of his own food in the kitchen hut in the backyard. On a salary of twopence a day, which came from the coroner’s own purse, he would never get rich, but at least he would survive. That was more than he could have said of the previous two years, when he had almost starved to death in Winchester. The youngest son of a Hampshire knight, his spine and hip had been afflicted as a child by the disease that had killed his mother, but an aptitude for learning had directed him into the Church. After ordination, he had become a diocesan clerk and junior teacher at Winchester, where he had become valuable as an excellent writer of Latin. His teaching duties had been his downfall, as his pupils included some young girl novices from the nunnery. His physical faults, such as the bent back, the limp and the lazy eye, had made him so unattractive to women that he had no experience of them at all. When one precocious novice amused herself by making eyes at him, his clumsy attempts to embrace her had resulted in a charge of attempted rape. Poor Thomas had been arrested by the cathedral proctors and only the fact that he was a priest and that the alleged offence had occurred in the precinct saved him from the sheriff’s justice and a probable hanging. As it was, the Consistory Court had tried him and summarily ejected him from the priesthood, which meant that his stipend and lodgings vanished. He had tried to eke out an existence by writing letters for tradesmen, but after a year or so, he had been virtually in rags and starving.