Bernard Knight - Fear in the Forest

‘When can I talk to him again?’

‘Try this evening — or better, tomorrow morning.’

With that John had to be content and, leaving the injured Warden in the care of the apothecary, he took Gwyn back to their chamber in Rougemont.

Thomas was already there, busy writing up duplicate copies of the rolls, which eventually would have to be presented to the Commissioners of Gaol Delivery or the Justices in Eyre when they next came to Exeter. He sat on his usual milking stool at one side of the trestle table and pulled his parchments and inks nearer to give space to de Wolfe, as he bumped down on to his bench opposite. Gwyn took up the only other flat surface in the bare room, perching his broad backside on the stone sill that ran below the pair of slit windows. The inevitable pitcher of cider came out for the coroner and his officer, though the abstemious clerk declined, preferring water — when he could get any that looked even halfway clean. He had already heard of the trouble in St Pancras Lane from one of the guards and started off the debate about its significance.

‘Can this be connected with the killing in Sigford, Crowner?’

‘God knows, Thomas! It could be a chance robbery, though the cook says that de Bosco never had much of value in that small town house. He had several manors out in the country where most of his goods and his strongbox were kept.’

Gwyn lowered his drinking pot long enough to comment.

‘The assailants may not have known that, though. Yet they made no attempt to force either the old bottler nor the Warden to tell them where there might have been valuables.’

John drummed his fingers on the table restlessly. ‘To my mind, it’s too great a coincidence that a pair of forest officers get attacked within as many days. De Bosco told me that he had had several threats recently, seemingly designed to force him out of office.’

‘Three feet of arrow certainly put the verderer out of office!’ said Gwyn. ‘But I wonder if they intended to kill the Warden — or just beat him up as a warning?’

‘Is there no clue as who these villains might be?’ piped Thomas.

‘No one saw them, except the servant and Nicholas de Bosco,’ growled John. ‘And one of those is dead and the other has wits back only partly yet. No one saw them in the street, so I suspect they climbed into the garden and came from around the back.’

‘Any chance of finding them still in the city?’ asked the clerk optimistically.

Gwyn fell back to heckling Thomas, a sign that the clerk’s melancholia was improving. ‘You’re an idiot, little man! Do we go around asking almost four thousand people whether they were nasty enough to batter two old men this morning?’

The clerk stuck his tongue out at Gwyn in a most unpriestly manner, but the officer persisted. ‘Even if the sheriff shifted himself to put a watch on the city gates, who would they look for? Two men can walk in and out as they like, especially if they were pushing a barrow or carrying a bale of wool.’

The mention of the sheriff started de Wolfe’s fingers drumming again.

‘I’ll swear he’s up to something concerning this affair — but I’m damned if I see what. Why was he in such a hurry to appoint this fellow as a new verderer? Does anyone know anything of this Philip de Strete?’

Gwyn shook his big head, but Thomas de Peyne, whose large ears collected all manner of information, knew a little.

‘He’s a knight from down the west end of the county, fairly young, I hear. He was in one of the French campaigns and scraped enough loot together to buy out his knight-service and get himself a freeholding.’

The coroner digested this, but was none the wiser.

‘Why should he want to burden himself with a thankless, unpaid job like that of a verderer? He’d be better off staying home to look after his flocks and his fields.’

As the words left his mouth, he realised that the same applied to himself and his coroner’s appointment — though he had no flocks and fields to labour over. His brother William was quite content to look after the two family manors and John’s business partner, city burgess Hugh de Relaga, turned them a nice profit from their wool-exporting enterprise.

But the fact remained that Richard de Revelle had produced this man from nowhere and was going to install him in a dead man’s shoes.

‘The post may be unpaid, master — but anything to do with the forests is suspect of being involved with extortion and corruption,’ Thomas reminded him. They argued the issues back and forth for a time, but with no solid facts to hand it became a futile exercise.

‘I’ll hold the inquest on the bottler this afternoon in the courthouse — not that it will advance us one inch farther,’ grumbled John. ‘Gather the neighbours for a jury in a couple of hours, Gwyn. Afterwards, I’ll go to see if de Bosco has recovered any more of his memory.’

Though considerably recovered, de Bosco was of little further help when John went to visit him in the early evening. Adam Russell, the apothecary, was just leaving as the coroner arrived and confirmed that the older man would have a sore head for a week or two, but was in no danger as long as fever did not set in from the gash on his head. When the coroner climbed to the solar where the injured man was in his bed, he found a neighbour’s ample wife came to sit with him until nightfall.

Standing alongside the pallet like some great black crow, John looked down at the bandaged head and saw that the eyes were now almost closed from the bruised swelling of the lids. However, what could be seen of them was bright enough and Nicholas spoke quite rationally.

‘I suppose you have no hope of catching those murdering bastards?’

He had been told of the death of his bottler and was grieving for the loss of the innocent old man.

‘I wish I had better news for you, but there was no chance of finding these men. We had no description whatsoever and they had been gone from your house many hours before you were found. I’m sorry.’

‘No matter. When I’m able to move, I’ll take myself off to one of my manors, where I can feel safe with my servants around me. For they’ll try again, mark my words.’

‘So you don’t believe they were common robbers?’

De Bosco’s toothless mouth made a derisory sound. ‘Not at all, Crowner! You can’t think that yourself, with the verderer slain not two days before — and me having been threatened to give up my duties.’

‘Will this encourage you to do that?’ ventured de Wolfe.

‘No, be damned to them, whoever it is!’ snapped Nicholas. ‘I was appointed by my King to do his duty, just as I fought for him in the wars. I’m not going to be frightened off by a bang on the head.’

John forbore to mention that his bottler had suffered more than a bang on the head, as had Humphrey le Bonde. He admired the older man’s courage, but hoped that he would do as he promised and retire to the safety of one of his manors to carry out his duties.

‘Can you hazard any guess at all as to what’s behind this?’ he asked, as a last query.

‘Someone wants to infiltrate the forest administration, I suspect. But why, God alone knows! There’s plenty of graft and dishonesty there, but that’s mainly the perquisite of the foresters and woodwards. It would be unusually well-organised corruption if the verderers and the Warden had their fingers in the same pie.’

As John left, he wondered whether de Bosco had struck nearer the truth than he imagined.

In the long summer evenings, they ate supper much later in the house in Martin’s Lane, and John found he had a couple of hours to spare before he need sit with Matilda at their silent meal. His feet took him automatically towards Idle Lane, and as he strode through the town his thoughts abandoned dead men and split heads, in favour of his lady love.