Bernard Knight - Fear in the Forest

June 1195

The hamlet dozed in the afternoon sun. The dappled shadows of a few fleecy clouds glided slowly across the green woods that rose on either side of the small valley. Most of the two score men and boys of Sigford were working in the strip-fields that lined the track through the village: a few more were scything hay in an enclosed part of the meadow land beyond the fields. The ragged idiot boy was hiding from the sun under a hawthorn bush, keeping an eye on a dozen goats cropping the summer grass along the verge of the dusty road that led to Owlacombe and distant Ashburton.

The smithy was silent, as the blacksmith was squatting outside the wall of the alehouse a hundred paces away, restoring his sweating body with a quart of Widow Mody’s indifferent brew. At least it was cool and wet, he thought — though he regretted the death of the widow’s sister from the yellow plague last year. By God, she used to brew a good ale!

The smith drank slowly, spinning out the time before he must go back to his forge, where the flames from the furnace and the labour of his hammering convinced him that Hell itself would be a relief from working in this summer heat. The only sound was the distant smack of mattocks as the labourers hacked at weeds in the furrows between the rows of beans, turnips and oats. This quilted patchwork of crops was all that stood between the people of Sigford and starvation next winter.

Much nearer, he heard the buzzing of a couple of bluebottles as they hovered over his boots, attracted by the dried blood of a chicken he had killed that morning. He felt himself nodding off and pulled himself together with a jerk. Sigford was too small to have either a church or a manor house and it belonged to the manor of Ilsington, a mile away. Their lord, William de Pagnell, had a nasty habit of sending his servants on unexpected visits to check on the village. Though the smith was a freeman, it would not be politic to be found in mid-afternoon dozing against the alehouse wall with a jar in his hand. He struggled to shake off his lethargy and stared out over the green hills in front, the outriders of Dartmoor, the grim plateau that lay high beyond the dells and coombes west of Sigford.

As he gathered the will to finish his ale and get back to work, a new sound began to insinuate itself into his consciousness. Faintly at first, then more clearly, the sound of hoofs reached his ears. Well used to horses from his trade as a farrier, he could tell that the rider was in a hurry. In case it was de Pagnell’s steward or manor-reeve, he gulped the rest of his ale, put the pot on the ground and hurriedly rose to get back to his smithy. But before he went five paces, his keen ears told him something else — this horse was running wild, without a rider.

A bend in the track hid the approaching animal until the hammering of its hoofs was all too clear. As a cloud of reddish dust swirled around the bend, he was aware of the men in the fields shouting in alarm.

Abruptly, Morcar, the village reeve, and a couple of good-wives appeared from their cottages opposite, as a tall brown mare materialised through the dust, its eyes rolling wildly as it charged down the track between the dwellings. Wary not to get trampled, both the smith and the reeve ran into the roadway, waving their arms and yelling. At the last minute, just as they were about to throw themselves out of its path, the mare shied, pranced and finally skidded to a stop, trembling and frothing, a foam of sweat mixing with the grime on its flanks.

Only then, as the dust settled, did they see what was being dragged from the left-side stirrup. With a foot trapped in the iron hoop, the rider was face down, and when in desperate haste the two villagers lifted him up, they looked in horror at his ravaged features, dragged an unknown distance on the flinty surface of the unforgiving road. His clothing was ripped to shreds, but two things were all too obvious to Morcar and the smith.

On his breast was an embroidered badge depicting an axe — and from the centre of his back protruded the broken shaft of an arrow.

As Sigford lacked a church or even a tithe barn, the coroner’s inquest had to be held in the open air on what passed for the village green. Where the Bagtor lane came down from the moor to join the main track, a triangle of beaten grass lay between the alehouse and the smithy. Here the villagers gathered to eat, dance and get drunk on saints’ days and the occasional chapman or pedlar set out his ribbons, threads and trinkets for the women to paw over.

This Tuesday noontide, however, saw a unique gathering on the dusty greensward. For the first time in history, a coroner’s inquest was to be held in the village, a happening beyond the comprehension of anyone other than Morcar, who had a vague notion of this new-fangled process.

The previous autumn, he had been told by William de Pagnell’s bailiff that henceforth all deaths, other than those from old age or disease, must immediately be reported to himself or the manor-reeve, so that the King’s coroner in Exeter could be notified. This obscure command had gone in one of Morcar’s ears and out the other, and as no unnatural deaths had happened in Sigford since then the matter had been forgotten until yesterday, when a battered corpse had been dragged into the village.

Now the sleepy hamlet had been invaded by three men from the great city of Exeter. Although it was barely sixteen miles away, only two villagers had ever been there, and these awesome officials were as alien as if they had come from the moon. The whole population, ordered by the bailiff to congregate on the green at midday, stood silently as the coroner and his companions rode into the village. At their head was a great black destrier, a former warhorse, carrying the lean and forbidding figure of the coroner himself. Dressed in a long tunic as black as his steed, he hunched in his saddle like some great bird of prey. Hair of the same jet colour was swept back from his bony forehead to the nape of his neck. Heavy eyebrows hung over deep-set eyes, and a long hooked nose added to his eagle-like appearance. The dark stubble on his lean cheeks gave further credence to his old nickname of ‘Black John’, given to him by the soldiers of campaigns from Ireland to the Holy Land. His wide leather belt and diagonal baldric carried a formidable broadsword.

Sir John de Wolfe walked his horse to the centre of the grassy patch, watched in silence by the small crowd as the reeve came forward to take the reins. Behind him, a giant of a man with wild ginger hair and a huge straggling moustache of the same colour halted his brown mare and slid to the ground. The third visitor was a complete contrast, a little man with a slight hump on his left shoulder, riding a grey pony side-saddle like a woman.

The coroner dismounted and the reeve and two other villagers led their mounts away to be fed and watered, whilst the three men stood in the centre of the green and looked about them.

‘God-forsaken bloody place!’ muttered the dishevelled redhead under his breath, as he looked around at the handful of dwellings that made up the village. They were all shacks built of cob, with roofs of thatch in varying states of dilapidation, most surrounded by a small plot containing a vegetable patch and a few scrawny fowls. The only larger building was the alehouse, and from its door now strode a man in a fine yellow tunic, followed by a pair in more sober clothes. He marched up to the trio on the green and smacked his forearm across his chest in greeting.

‘Sir John, welcome! I am William de Pagnell, lord of the manor of Ilsington — which includes this miserable vill!’