Bernard Knight - Fear in the Forest

‘Then you’ll not have heard that the poor fellow was slain at the same time as they left his master for dead — the Warden of the Forests.’

The sheriff sat up suddenly from the settle in which he had been lounging, almost spilling a cup of wine he was holding.

‘Nicholas de Bosco? Holy Mary, I knew nothing of this!’

Rather against his will, John somehow believed him. ‘A verderer and the Warden attacked within a few days. What’s going on, Richard?’

Matilda had been listening to their exchange, her small eyes flicking from one to the other. ‘You told me you had appointed a new verderer already, brother,’ she observed.

Richard nodded distractedly. ‘Yes, the woodmotes must carry on. This Philip de Strete will be a worthy successor in organising them.’

‘What are woodmotes?’ she demanded, and her husband answered her.

‘Some use that word for the Attachment Courts, others call them forty-day courts. Whatever they’re called, the forest folk hate them — they usually mean more fines and punishments.’

‘Careful, John, these are the King’s forests you’re talking about. You don’t want to be mouthing treason, do you?’

Both the others knew that de Revelle was sneering at de Wolfe’s well-known devotion to Richard Coeur-de-Lion, but his sister was not amused.

‘The less you say about that the better,’ she growled, and her brother sank back in his settle, suddenly engrossed in the decoration around his pewter cup. This was a sensitive subject and Matilda’s warning was the first time she had broached the matter since de Revelle’s brush with treachery a few months earlier.

Thankfully, the awkward silence was broken by Mary bustling in with a large bowl of stew, causing them to rise and take their places at the long table. Two fresh loaves cut into quarters and a platter of yellow butter accompanied the mutton-and-onion soup. Mary ladled big portions into wooden bowls and laid deep spoons carved from cow horn before them. Then she came back with ale, cider and more wine, and left them to fill their bellies. This did away with the necessity for much conversation until the second course, a boiled salmon which John dissected with his dagger, placing portions in the empty soup bowls of the other two diners. As they picked out the bones and licked their fingers, the coroner returned to the problems in the forest.

‘There is increasing disaffection among some of the barons and manor-lords over this,’ he began. ‘My brother William down in Stoke-in-Teignhead, who knows more about rural life than I do, told me that in Hampshire and Northampton they are petitioning the King to disafforest some areas. Increasingly they resent not being able to hunt the venison on their own lands.’

De Revelle dug a fish bone from between his teeth before answering.

‘They have no chance of that, unless they pay a large fee to the Crown. It was old King Henry who made the largest encroachments into their lands. Why should his sons give any of it up now?’

De Wolfe noticed that he said ‘sons’, a slip which showed that the sheriff still had John, Count of Mortain, in mind as one of the possible beneficiaries of the fruits of the forest. He thought of making an issue of it, but decided that he was in no mood to reopen the old controversy again and further distress Matilda, as she had been devastated when her brother’s active sympathy for the usurper had been discovered by her husband.

She reached across the table to scoop up another segment of pink fish with her spoon. ‘Have the Devonshire gentry expressed the same concerns to you, Richard?’

‘In passing, yes. Guy Ferrars and Arnulf de Mowbray were moaning to me about having to do all their hunting in their chases and parks, instead of on all the other land they own. But they’re always complaining about something — the more they have, the more they want.’

John gave a derisive grunt — that was rich, he thought, coming from de Revelle, who was a champion money-grubber himself.

‘Why should anyone want to kill Nicholas de Bosco?’ persisted Matilda. ‘He seemed a harmless enough fellow. I’ve often seen him at worship in the cathedral.’ Anyone who was a devout attender at Mass was bound to be looked on favourably by her, even if he had horns and a tail.

‘Nice he may have been, but I’d prefer to say he was weak,’ snapped Richard. ‘A new Warden is needed. De Bosco is just an old soldier, given that job as a sinecure for past services.’

He gave a meaningful look across at his brother-in-law as he said this, but John steadfastly ignored the jibe.

‘Is it possible that someone tried to remove him from office by an attempt to murder him?’ asked Matilda, oblivious of a trickle of salmon fat running down her chin. ‘But who would want such a job, so dismal and unpaid?’

John stared pointedly at de Revelle, until the sheriff began to look decidedly uncomfortable. ‘Well, Richard, haven’t I heard rumours about your ambitions in that direction?’

‘If the office happened to fall vacant, then yes, I’d be interested. It would be a challenge, as this de Bosco has let things slip recently. The forests are teeming with outlaws, the discipline of the foresters is all to hell, and I’m sure the royal exchequer is not gaining all the profit it should from the forests.’

De Wolfe leered across the table at his brother-in-law. ‘No, I’m sure you would find many ways of increasing the revenue, Richard!’

He avoided saying that much of this extra revenue would never reach the royal treasure chests in Winchester or Westminster, but the sheriff knew very well what he was implying.

After a bowl of early summer fruits swimming in fresh cream and a glass of sweet dessert wine, Richard left for his apartments in Rougemont and Matilda called for her maid Lucille to prepare her for bed, as the late summer dusk was now upon them.

To give them time for their womanly pursuits in the solar, John took Brutus for a walk around the cathedral Close. Walking amid the graves, the rubbish piles and the rank grass, he pondered the news that Nesta had laid upon him that evening.

Did he really want to be a father? Could he survive the inevitable onslaught from Matilda, who would taunt him for ever with having sired a bastard on a tavern-keeper? Would Nesta survive childbirth, which claimed such a large proportion of new mothers? Why had this come now, when he had been lying with Nesta for two years? And why had none of his other women, going back over many years, ever conceived?

These questions milled about in his mind as he loped around the huge church of St Mary and St Andrew, following his hound, which dashed hither and thither in search of new smells. He passed beggars sleeping alongside new grave-pits, truant urchins playing tag in defiance of their mother’s screeching, and lovers walking hand in hand or kissing in dark corners under the cathedral’s looming walls. Oblivious to all these familiar sights, he circled the Close and plodded back to his house with none of the questions answered in his turbulent mind.

Hennock lay about two-thirds of the way between Exeter and Sigford and was a larger village than the latter. Early the next morning, three riders came into Hennock and reined up outside the forge. It was a large shack set at the edge of the roadside, its walls of wattle and daub set in a rough timber frame. The sagging roof was covered with faded wooden shingles, which were less inflammable than straw thatch. Behind was a cottage sitting in a patch of garden, with two pigs penned in by a fence and a few chickens scratching in the dust.

The riders sat silently on their mounts for a few moments, listening to the rhythmic clanging of a pair of hammers on the anvil, as the smith and his eldest son rained precise blows on a red-hot length of rod than was destined to be a cart axle. A younger boy, about eight years of age, was in the shadows at the back of the hut, pumping away at a large leather-and-wood bellows to keep the charcoal of the furnace glowing almost white.