Bernard Knight - The Manor of Death

As he plodded over a rise, he could see the roofs and church tower of Wilmington in its hollow below. One faint flickering light was visible — he presumed from either a candle or a horn lantern — but otherwise the place looked dead, as was normal in the countryside, where folk went to bed with the dusk and rose with the dawn. When he got down to the hamlet, he was intrigued to see that the light was coming from the open door of the alehouse and that several figures were moving in front of it, their shapes silhouetted against the flames from a log fire in the middle of the room. Even more interesting was the presence of the covered wagon just outside the tavern.

After the blows he had suffered, he approached cautiously, keeping out of the moonlight in the shadow of a hedge on the other side of the road. The rags on his feet muffled any sound, and he sidled along until he was opposite the cart. He stopped and watched what was happening outside the inn. The two men who had been on the footboard were carrying small kegs into the low thatched building whose whitewashed walls stood out starkly in the harsh moonlight. At the door, a fat man was watching them, presumably the landlord. The pedlar waited as about half a dozen of the firkins were taken inside. Then about the same number of flat bales were transferred from the back of the wagon, before he saw the driver pulling down the canvas cover and lashing it to cleats on the tailboard. At the alehouse door, the man who had beaten him was in close conversation with the innkeeper, and though

Setricus could make out none of their muttering he distinctly heard the clinking of coins.

The two men climbed back on to the cart and the inn door was quietly closed as the oxen jerked into life and the vehicle rumbled away out of the village. The pedlar followed it at a safe distance and for a quarter of an hour he trailed behind, wondering what manner of delivery needed to be made after dark in the depths of the countryside. He guessed that their boast that there were more armed men in the back was a bluff, as there had been no sign of them when they stopped at the tavern.

Assuming that they were going to Honiton, he stepped out quite boldly a couple of hundred paces behind, there being no chance that his soft footfalls could be heard over the rumble and squeak of the solid cartwheels. Suddenly, however, the wagon began to make a sharp turn off the highway, and Setricus scurried into the shadow of the bushes in case they looked back the way they had come. He saw that they had pulled into a space alongside a small toft, a solitary dwelling of cob-plastered wattle, with a thatched roof that even in the pale moonlight looked ragged and grass-grown. A rickety fence marked off a neglected plot of land, but there was no sign of man or beast.

The driver and his aggressive companion got down and untied the two oxen from the shafts, releasing them from the yokes across their shoulders. With a smack on their rumps, they drove the animals through a gate into the compound around the cottage, then vanished around the back. There were some noises within for a few minutes, but no light appeared through the roughly shuttered window-opening and soon all was quiet.

Setricus waited for many more minutes, then surmised that the men had taken to their beds. By the look of the place, these would probably be merely bags of hay or a pile of bracken on the floor — though he would dearly have liked the same comfort himself.

Setricus was gripped by a fervent desire to know what was left in the back of the wagon, especially if he could steal some of it. He shrugged off his pack into the hedge and quietly sidled up to the back of the cart. Undoing one of the thongs that secured the flap at the rear, he raised himself on tiptoe and peered over the tailboard. In the poor light, all he could see were some more kegs and bales, all of which were too large for him to carry away. There seemed to be some smaller objects on the floor between them and, determined to purloin something for his trouble, he undid the rest of the lashings and pulled out one of the wooden pegs that held the tailboard in place. He had expected the other end to be fixed in a similar fashion, so that he could ease the planks downwards when he removed the second pin — but this happened to be missing, and without warning the heavy tailboard dropped with a crash!

Frozen with terror, Setricus stood immobile for a moment before he could get his legs in motion — but he was too late. Seconds after, there was a roar from behind the house and the two men appeared just as the pedlar started to run for the roadway, all too visible in the bright moonlight.

'It's that bloody spy we met on the road!' roared the cart driver. 'He'll not get away to tell tales this time!'

Soon after dawn next morning, John de Wolfe was again on the road with his officer. He had broken his fast on his usual gruel with honey, then bread, cheese and watered ale in Mary's kitchen-shed in the back yard, where she cooked and slept with Brutus for company. Matilda was still snoring when he left her on the large mattress on the floor of the solar, an extra room built out on stilts at the back of the house. It was reached by a wooden stairway, under which her French maid Lucille lived in what was little more than a large box. Mary had again dressed his boil and padded it inside his breeches with a wad of linen, so that he was able to sit in the saddle without too much discomfort. John had been afraid that he would have to visit Richard Lustcote, the most experienced apothecary in Exeter, to have it lanced, but it seemed to have stayed brawny, without any sign of pus accumulating under the skin.

He rode down to the West Gate, where he had arranged to meet Gwyn, having left a message at Rougemont the previous evening. Thomas was performing his duties at the cathedral, where he had a stipend to say prayers and Masses each day for a rich merchant who had left money for a priest to intercede in perpetuity to ease the passage of his soul from purgatory to heaven. If needed urgently by the coroner, the little clerk could hand over this task to someone else, but today John felt that he could do without Thomas, who was such a poor horseman that he was a liability when they were in a hurry or needed to travel a long distance.

With the Cornishman alongside on his big brown mare, they waded the river alongside the flimsy footbridge, as it was low tide. The new stone bridge was still only half-finished after many years, the builders having run out of money again, but unless it was high tide or the Exe was in spate from heavy rain on Exmoor, the crossing could be made with only the horses' bellies getting wet. On the other side they trotted through several villages, then turned off the main highway that led to Buckfast Abbey and distant Plymouth. This side road went down towards the coast, and a few miles further on was their first destination, the hamlet of Kenton, which lay between the flat lands bordering the estuary and the Haldon Hills behind. De Wolfe knew it well, as it was on the road from Exeter to his home manor, Stoke-in-Teignhead, ten miles further on towards Torbay. His mother, sister and elder brother still lived there, and if there was time he resolved to visit them later that day.

The mill in Kenton was a stone structure with a roof of wooden shingles, built alongside a stream that had been channelled into a narrow leat to increase the speed of the flow. After emerging from below the wheel, the water spread into a large pool, and it was here that the body of the miller had been found the previous day.

When the coroner and his officer arrived and dismounted outside the upper entrance to the mill, they were met by a small deputation consisting of the manor-reeve and the bailiff, for the place had no local lord, being part of the royal demesne, owned by the Crown. The parish priest, incumbent of All Saints', was also there, as well as several members of the dead man's family, but it was the bailiff, Adam Lida, who did all the talking. He was an earnest fellow of about thirty, with close-cropped blond hair and a mournful expression on his narrow face.