Bernard Knight - Crowner Royal

It was little more than a five-minute walk from their door to the palace and it was with some relief that they passed through the arched gate into New Palace Yard, where a sentry struck the butt of his pike on the ground in salute to the king’s coroner.

The palace was a rambling collection of buildings of various types and ages, the major feature being the huge hall built almost a century ago by the Conqueror’s son, William Rufus. Behind and to the sides of that, an extensive collection of stone and wooden buildings had sprung up without much attempt at organised planning. More buildings, stables and houses lay behind the hall, including another hall, a chapel and a large block which formed the king’s accommodation. This was largely unused, as Richard the Lionheart had spent barely a few months in the country during the whole of his reign, preferring to be across the Channel in Normandy or his homeland of Aquitaine. At the farther end, a wall and then the Tyburn stream demarcated the palace precinct from the marshy pastures beyond.

The coroner and his officer walked down the landward side past the great hall and turned into a small doorway in a two-storeyed stone building that housed the Chancery clerks. A gloomy corridor gave immediate relief from the heat; they pushed past worried-looking clerics clutching rolls of parchment as they scuttled between various offices.

‘I’m starting to get the hang of this place at last,’ muttered Gwyn. ‘For the first couple of weeks, I didn’t know where the bloody hell I was!’

He turned left at a junction in the passageway, walking with a sailor’s roll, a legacy of his youth as a fisherman. De Wolfe loped alongside him with characteristic long strides like the forbidding animal whose name he bore.

‘It’s very different from Rougemont,’ he agreed, thinking with some nostalgia of Exeter Castle where his brother-in-law, the former sheriff, had grudgingly allotted them an attic room in the gatehouse.

Another dozen yards brought them to another junction, but here a flight of stone stairs rose to the upper level. At the top, another corridor abruptly changed from stone to timber construction as they entered an older part of the palace. Clumping across the planks, Gwyn led the way to one of half a dozen doors set along a passage. They were now above and to the river side of the block housing the royal apartments.

Gwyn lifted the wooden latch and stood aside for his master to enter. Though there was a hasp and staple on the doorpost, there was no lock, as apparently it was felt that there was unlikely to be anything worth stealing in a coroner’s office.

‘It’s cooler in here, thank God,’ muttered de Wolfe. He strode across the almost bare room to the window, whose shutter was propped wide open on an iron hook. Leaning on the worn timber of the unglazed frames, he stared out at the river, whose brown waters flowed sluggishly past as the tide began to ebb.

A hundred paces away, the scrubby grass shelved down to a rim of dirty gravel at the edge of the water, but John knew that in a few hours the shallow river would shrink to half its width between wide stretches of thick mud. Indeed, only half a mile upstream, it was possible for carts and horses to cross at the lowest point of the tide.

‘Where’s our saintly clerk? Still saying his prayers, I suppose,’ grunted Gwyn, as he closed the door. The coroner turned away and sat behind his table to stare around the room. It shared one feature with their previous accommodation in Exeter — the sparsity of furniture. A bare trestle table occupied the centre, pitted and stained with years of spilt ink and aimless disfigurement with dagger points. John had a chair, a clumsy folding device with a leather back and on the opposite side of the table was a plank-like bench and two three-legged stools, which Gwyn had ‘acquired’ from a neighbouring empty room.

‘Thomas could have shared the house with us, but he obviously prefers the company of those monks and clerics across the road,’ observed de Wolfe. He said this without sarcasm or rancour, as after three years of dismal exclusion from his beloved Church after being defrocked, John did not begrudge his clerk’s delight in his recent reinstatement.

Gwyn pulled a stool over to the window and sat with his elbow on the sill, catching the slight breeze that came off the river.

‘I reckon we’d be more use back in Devon that sitting on our arses up here, Crowner,’ he growled. ‘Not even a decent hanging to attend!’

One of the coroner’s duties was attendance at all executions to record it and confiscate any property the felon might possess. But so far there had not been one hanging during the six weeks that they had been living in Westminster.

‘I don’t even know where the damned gallows is!’ complained the Cornishman, almost plaintively.

‘They’ve just started using a place up on the Tyburn stream, where it’s crossed by the Oxford road,’ replied John. ‘They strung up those rebels there a couple of months ago — William Longbeard and his followers. Now it’s used as much as the Smithfield elms.’

He was interrupted by a patter of feet on the boards of the passageway outside and the door opened to admit a scrawny young man with a slight hump on one shoulder. He wore a faded black cassock and his lank brown hair was shaved off the crown of his head to form a clerical tonsure. Thin and short of stature, Thomas de Peyne had a sharp nose and a receding chin, but this unprepossessing appearance hid an agile mind crammed with a compendious knowledge about all manner of subjects.

‘I regret my lateness, Crowner,’ he panted. ‘But the archivist engaged me in a discussion about the Venerable Bede and I could hardly detach myself from such an eminent man.’

De Wolfe grunted his indifference as Thomas hurriedly sat himself at the other side of the table. He scrabbled in his shapeless shoulder bag for his quills, ink horn and parchment, and set them on the table, ready to get on with copying the proceedings of a previous inquest on a child who had been crushed by the collapse of a wall in King Street.

‘Take your time over that, little fellow,’ rumbled Gwyn cynically. ‘There’s little else for you to write, so make it last!’

‘Gwyn is right, I’m afraid,’ agreed de Wolfe. ‘Our duties seem very light here. I’m beginning to wonder why the king was so keen to drag us away from Exeter.’

Thomas looked up from spreading a roll of parchment on the table and weighing down the curling ends with pebbles.

‘Sir, perhaps things will soon be different when the court moves away from Westminster into the shires.’

John detected a slight hint of smug satisfaction in the clerk’s voice and stared at him suspiciously. Thomas was always a mine of information, which had often proved useful to the coroner.

‘Going into the shires?’ he demanded. ‘Have you heard anything about that?’

‘It is common knowledge that the old queen is expected to arrive in the near future,’ answered de Peyne. ‘And I did overhear a suggestion that she wishes to progress with the whole court to visit her youngest son at Gloucester.’

There was a snort of disgust from across the room. ‘That bastard Lackland! Do we have to go anywhere near that treacherous swine?’ Gwyn turned and spat through the window to express his feelings about Prince John, Count of Mortain.

‘We must admit he’s kept his head down lately,’ conceded de Wolfe. ‘I think Hubert Walter has got his measure after all the problems John caused our king.’

The coroner expected his outspoken officer to reply with more condemnation of the man who had tried to unseat his royal brother from the throne — but Gwyn was staring intently out of the window.

‘What in hell is going on out there?’ he roared suddenly, leaning across the sill and pointing with a brawny arm.