Bernard Knight - Fear in the Forest

John attempted to make largely one-sided conversation, no mean feat for such a taciturn man. Nesta lay listening, savouring the thought that she would no longer have to screw up the courage to respond to Thomas’s plea to tell John that the child was not his. Her feelings about losing the babe were strange, and she was almost frightened by her own lack of emotion about the miscarriage. There was a natural element of deep shock and sorrow that was inevitable in any woman, but overlying this was the feeling of relief that she had escaped from an intolerable situation — one that had almost driven her to take the life of both herself and the baby she carried.

As John faltered to the end of his stock of small talk, which mainly concerned his problems in the forest and the day’s excursion to Buckfast, she lay sleepily under the influence of Dame Madge’s infusion of gentian. As he fell silent, she squeezed his hand and remembered something to tell him.

‘Dear Thomas came to visit me this afternoon, while you were snoring in your bed,’ she said softly. ‘He is a good little man — he has been kinder to me than you would ever imagine.’

‘Is he another fellow for me to be jealous of, a rival for your affections, madam?’ he said jocularly. ‘Will I have to fight him with broadswords for your favours?’

‘I can’t see little Thomas fighting anyone. He is a true man of peace — and one who has the greatest devotion and affection for you, too. He has promised to teach me to read and write when I am recovered, so that I can keep accounts in the inn.’

‘Then you can write me love letters — and I will speed up my own learning so that I can read them!’

Their tender flirting was interrupted by the forbidding figure of Dame Madge coming into the room. She looked impassively at the sight of the county coroner holding hands with an innkeeper, while his noble wife was hardly a dozen yards away under the same roof.

The angular nun advanced on the bed with some brown potion for Nesta. ‘She needs to build back the blood she lost, Sir John. There’s no more I can do for her, except keep watch against a fever and give her the best nourishment.’

John expressed his deep appreciation of the treatment she was receiving. ‘I have to go to Winchester in a few days and will be away a week or more. Can she stay here until I return? Her maids at the inn are diligent, but I would be more content if she was cared for here.’

‘She’ll not be fit to return for some time yet. Be assured that we will look after her here.’ She looked sternly at the coroner’s own battered face, where the bruises on his temple were beginning to turn yellow at the edges. ‘I want to see that wound in your loin before you leave, Crowner. It’s time the dressing was changed again.’

Even Nesta managed a smile as the coroner meekly trailed out to the treatment room after the nun, the pair looking like two skinny rooks in their black plumage.

Guy Ferrars had gone to Lustleigh the previous evening and billeted himself, his son and servants on his tenant there, Roger Cotterel. The manor was not an ancient one, being ignored in William the Bastard’s great survey over a century earlier. It had been hewn from some of Baldwin the Sheriff’s lands many years before, and Ferrars’ father had purchased it as an addition to his extensive estates in the county.

The manor house was small, but built of stone with a slate roof, and when John de Wolfe and Gwyn arrived the next morning, the bailey within the surrounding fence was humming with activity. Guy Ferrars had brought eight of his private soldiers from Tiverton, together with his hound-master, steward and bailiff. Half a dozen lean brown hounds yapped excitedly in an empty pigsty, where they had been confined for the night.

Ferrars invited the coroner and his officer into the hall, which occupied the whole ground floor, Cotterel’s living quarters being on the upper floor. The reluctant host was a tall, thin man with sandy hair, who was trying his best to look as if he enjoyed having his landlord and his retinue foisted upon him for a day and a night. Food and drink were plentiful on the trestles, and they all filled themselves ready for the search in the adjacent forest.

Together with Cotterel, his manor-reeve and a dozen villagers, the party moved out on foot, as the edge of the woods was barely a quarter of a mile to the west, beyond which the land dropped down into the valley of the Bovey river, with Trendlebere Down on the other side. As they walked ahead of the motley crowd, the dogs now following slavishly behind the whip-carrying hound-master, Ferrars explained the lie of the land.

‘I own everything as far as you can see,’ he bellowed, waving his arm expansively at the tree-covered horizon. ‘I use the land beyond the village fields as part of my chase, which extends for four miles north of here. But farther up, the bloody Royal Forest comes right across the river.’

They walked on for half an hour, diving into the trees and turning right within sound of the Bovey in its deep valley. John and Gwyn, who had their own swords buckled on, saw that every man was armed in some way, two of the retainers being bowmen. They seemed a large enough party to repulse anything other than a major force of outlaws, but John felt vulnerable after his recent experiences and kept a wary eye open for any sign of opposition. Hugh Ferrars walked with them in the vanguard. He was a younger version of his father in build and colouring, but had barely half his father’s personality and energy. John assumed that the tragic Adele de Courcy had been given little choice in her betrothal to this boorish young man. The manor-lord, Roger Cotterel, was the first to spot the demolished deer-leap that had caused this trouble. He pointed ahead to a tumble of earth and turf among the trees.

‘There’s the saltatorium, so we’re in royal territory now, by a few hundred paces.’

The leap had been built across a narrow defile which carried a well-trodden deer path down the centre. Though it had been partly destroyed by the efforts of Ferrar men, John could see that an eight-foot bank had been thrown up from a deep ditch, which sloped gently up on the far side. The agile deer could easily spring down the sheer face and scamper up the slope, but the return journey was blocked as they could not get enough of a run in the ditch to scale the vertical wall.

The party scrambled down the tumbled earth and stood in the partly filled trench to await orders from the baron. He called over his steward, a venerable-looking elder with snowy hair.

‘Have you got that clothing from the widow?’

The steward unslung a leather shoulder bag and produced a ragged pair of woollen breeches. ‘These had been discarded but not washed, my lord. They will have his scent upon them.’

Guy Ferrars put his nose to the rags and grimaced. He held them out to John, who even at arm’s length could savour the mixture of stale sweat and urine.

‘Don’t need a bloody dog. I could follow that myself!’ said Gwyn, when he had also sampled the odour.

Ferrars threw the garment at the hound-master, a wizened fellow dressed all in green, with a horn hanging around his neck on a leather thong. He caught it and looked dubiously at the hounds.

‘I’ve never tried this before, sir. They’ll follow a fox or a stag to the ends of the earth, but I don’t know if they understand about humans.’

He called his beasts to him and, as they clustered excitedly around his feet, held the breeches to their snouts. The hounds looked puzzled but willing, and seemed to understand when he waved them away and gave a blast on his horn as encouragement. He started running away from the deer-leap farther into the King’s forest, the dogs running yelping before him. They began spreading out and putting their noses to the ground and to bushes and tree trunks. In a moment they all seemed to converge on to a side track and went racing away, barking excitedly.