Bernard Knight - The Tinner's corpse

He flushed with chagrin. ‘Would that I could, but I must go with Matilda this evening to visit her damned cousin. I had long promised her, to save her endless nagging.’

‘Tomorrow, then, John,’ said Nesta, with a long-suffering sigh.

He groaned. ‘It’s the Shire Court in the morning, and then I must go to Ashburton to take confessions from two robbers who have locked themselves in the church there.’

‘What about the evening, when you return?’ she asked tartly, beginning to lose patience with him.

John almost writhed on his bench. ‘I cannot, Nesta! From Ashburton, I must ride at dawn the next day to the high moor, to attend the Great Court of the tinners.’

Nesta’s generous lips tightened. ‘It seems difficult to get an audience with you these days, John.’ She rose again and walked away towards the kitchen door, calling imperiously for Alan as she went.

That evening, while de Wolfe was fidgeting with resentful impatience in the two-roomed dwelling of Maud, his wife’s impoverished cousin, his clerk was sitting on a stool in a hut at the back of a canon’s house in the cathedral Close, talking in low tones to a friend.

Thomas de Peyne had free lodgings in the house — or, at least, a straw-filled palliasse laid out near the hearth of the cook-shed in the backyard. It was warm and it was free — and had the added virtue of being within the ecclesiastical pale of Exeter, which was a city within a city. In the cathedral Close, the writ of the sheriff and burgesses did not run, except on the main pathways. The bishop was the ultimate authority here, and Thomas felt more at home in a coven of priests than in the bustling city itself.

When he had prevailed upon his uncle, John of Alençon, Archdeacon of Exeter, to have mercy on his destitution following his ejection from Holy Orders in Winchester, the good man had persuaded a fellow canon, Gilbert de Basset, to allow the penurious Thomas to sleep in his servants’ quarters. At first Thomas had begged scraps from the cook and raised a few pence by writing letters for illiterate merchants, but when his uncle had persuaded John de Wolfe to take him on as coroner’s clerk, the twopence a day stipend had allowed him to buy food, which he cooked on the kitchen fire — though de Basset’s cook often took pity on him and fed him some of the servants’ rations. Now, although his bodily needs were satisfied, he suffered an increasing hunger of the soul.

This evening he sat in the kitchen, leaning on a rough table, with one of the secondaries opposite, a young man called Arthur. The priest was drinking slowly from a pot of small ale, but Thomas had a cup of cider. He disliked ale — a serious handicap in a world where it was almost the universal drink. Wine was for the affluent, and water was foul-tasting and dangerous, useful only for boiling, cooking and the occasional wash.

‘Have you yet tried to be restored to the priesthood?’ Arthur asked, as they eyed each other across the table.

Thomas shook his head miserably. ‘No. What chance would I have? The Archdeacon in Winchester who defrocked me said I was lucky not to have been hanged or mutilated and that I was a disgrace to the cloth.’

‘But that was approaching three years ago and a hundred miles away. I know that the Archdeacon has since died, God rest him. People will have forgotten about your problem by now.’

‘But where would I start?’ Thomas said sadly. ‘Soon enough, someone would bring up the past to defeat me.’

The other topped up the ale in his pot from a jug. ‘Your uncle is the obvious place. John of Alençon is well respected for being an honest, compassionate man. He has already done much for you — and you have proved your worth with the crowner. Both would surely support you if you tried for ordination again.’

The clerk looked doubtful, but a spark of hope glowed in his eyes. ‘Do you really think I should try?’

His companion was a young man, still enthusiastic about his calling and optimistic that the world was filled with honest men. A secondary was the lowest grade of applicant for the priesthood, under the age of twenty-four and usually a choir-boy who wanted to make the Church his career. They stood in for the vicars-choral, older men who had attained the priesthood and who were themselves stand-ins for the canons in the interminable daily services of the cathedrals. Each canon had a hierarchy of assistants, depending upon his affluence and activities; a vicar and a secondary were the minimum and they often lodged in the canons’ houses, which were spread around the cathedral Close. Canons’ Row, along the north-east side of the Close, was the largest concentration of such dwellings, but others were dotted around the precinct. There was insufficient room for all the junior grades, many of whom lodged in Priest Street, 1near the Watergate, not far from the Bush Inn.

Arthur lived in Canon de Basset’s house, in one of the communal cubicles along the passageway that led from the canon’s rooms to the backyard. He had befriended Thomas and felt sorry for the obvious misery that losing his priestly status had caused — especially when he learned that Thomas had been at the centre of ecclesiastical life in Winchester, working in the chancery and teaching in the cathedral school.

They talked on for a time, until Arthur had finished the jug of ale and Thomas had sipped the last of his cider. Then the secondary crept off for a few hours’ sleep on his pallet, before he had to rise at midnight for Matins, the first service of the day. Thomas went to many of the services, lurking in the background of the quire: the cathedral devotions were meant for the continuous glorification of God by the cathedral staff, not the laity, who worshipped at the seventeen parish churches inside the walls of Exeter. Tonight, after the ride from Chagford earlier that day — and the prospect of riding back to Dartmoor tomorrow — Thomas felt like staying quietly on his bag of straw.

When Arthur had gone, he remained at the table, gazing absently at the flickering kitchen fire, which like all fires in the cathedral precinct was exempt from the nightly curfew. The bell tolling from the castle at the eighth hour signalled the couvre-feu , when all fires elsewhere in the city must be covered with turf or extinguished, for fear of conflagration.

Thomas looked for shapes in the glowing logs, as if he might find a sign there as to his future. Should he take Arthur’s advice and seek his uncle’s help to be reinstated in the clergy? Could he stand a rebuff? His state of mind had spiralled downwards lately to a point at which he had ceased to care whether he lived or not without the embrace of the Church that had been his life since his schooldays in Winchester at the age of seven.

He heaved a final mighty sigh, then got up and went to his thin mattress and threadbare blanket in the corner. As he lay down, he resolved to broach the subject with his master on the morrow.

The following evening, the coroner’s trio rode wearily into Dartmeet, almost at the centre of Dartmoor. It was no more than a couple of farms and some scattered shepherds’ huts, where the two upper branches of the Dart met to form the river that meandered down to the sea twenty miles away. The rolling moors spread around them, like a fossilised ocean, some crowned by weird tors — flattened, wind-scoured rocks piled up into fantastic shapes.

They plodded down into the valley from Yartor Down to the ancient clapper bridge, at the end of a long, winding, eight-mile track from Ashburton, seeking shelter for the night, which was heralded by the closing dusk. De Wolfe reined in alongside the bridge. ‘This side or the other, Gwyn?’ On this bank there was a longhouse of cob under thatch, with two barns behind it. On the other side of the Dart, he could see a larger dwelling with wattle and daub walls within a timbered frame, but only one barn and a couple of ramshackle sheds adjacent.