The Medieval Murderers - House of Shadows

‘Where in God’s name are we, William?’ he shouted back to the bandy-legged sailor who commanded the vessel from the high stern.

‘Just off Woolwich, Crowner! As far as we’ll get on this flood tide with no wind. Unless I anchor now, we’ll drift back down with the ebb.’

John’s two companions heard the news with mixed feelings. Thomas de Peyne, the small priest who was the coroner’s clerk, was murmuring thanks to the Almighty for the flat calm that came with the fog, for this was the first day he had not been trying to turn his stomach inside out on the four-day voyage from Devon.

However, the coroner’s officer, Gwyn of Polruan, was irritated by their lack of progress, especially as until now they had had an exceptionally swift passage from Dawlish, a small port not far from Exeter. A brisk westerly wind had raced the ship along the south coast in record time, and when it conveniently changed to a north-easterly after they had rounded the butt end of Kent it pushed them up the estuary as far as Greenwich. Only then had it failed them, as the wind dropped and the fog rolled in. The tide carried them a few more miles, but now even that had deserted them.

Gwyn, a giant of a man with wild red hair and long moustaches of the same hue, looked up at the single sail, hanging damp and motionless from the yardarm.

‘If we want to get to Bermondsey by river, we’ll have to swim the rest of the bloody way!’ he growled. A former fisherman from Polruan in Cornwall, he claimed to be an authority on all things maritime, and he watched critically as one of the four-man crew, a lad of about fourteen, heaved the anchor over the bow – a stone weighing a hundredweight with a hole chiselled through it to take the cable.

Annoyed, his master, John de Wolfe, slapped the wooden rail that ran around the bulwarks. ‘We made such good time, compared with flogging up from Exeter by horse,’ he complained. ‘The justiciar said that time was of the essence and here we are, stuck only a few miles from the priory.’

Thomas stared through the murk at the dimly seen shore. ‘Is there no way we can continue by land, Crowner?’ he asked hesitantly.

Gwyn turned to look at the curragh lashed upside down on top of the vessel’s single hatch. It was a fragile cockleshell of tarred hide stretched over a light wooden frame, like an elongated coracle.

‘They could put us ashore in that, I suppose,’ he said rather dubiously.

The coroner shrugged and shouted at the master, William Watts. ‘How far is it to Bermondsey from here?’

‘About six or seven miles, Sir John, as the crow flies.’

‘We’re not bloody crows!’ grumbled Gwyn. ‘But I suppose we could get horses in that miserable-looking hamlet over there.’ He pointed to where a couple of shacks were fleetingly visible between the walls of yellow fog, then watched his master lope away across the deck to arrange their disembarkation.

The coroner was a forbidding figure in the wreathing mist, dressed in his habitual black and grey. As tall as Gwyn, he was lean and spare, with a slight stoop that gave him the appearance of a large bird of prey, especially with his hooked nose and jet-black hair that was swept back to his collar, unlike the close crops of most Norman knights. Gwyn had been his squire, companion and bodyguard for twenty years, in campaigns from Ireland to the Holy Land, where the Crowner’s taste in clothing and the stubble on his lean cheeks had earned him the nickname ‘Black John’.

Half an hour later, after a short but perilous voyage in the flimsy curragh, they were landed on a muddy beach and shouted farewell to the shipman who had paddled them ashore. As soon as he had returned to the Saint Radegund , the vessel up-anchored and drifted down on the tide to begin its journey to Flanders with a cargo of wool. John had used the voyage to get to London as quickly as possible, as on horseback it would have taken the better part of a week.

As their last link with home vanished into the fog, the three men trudged up the muddy foreshore, thankfully narrow at this state of the tide. At the top, they followed a track to the straggle of huts and a few larger dwellings that was Woolwich, looking even more dismal than usual in the moist gloom of a winter’s morning. The largest building was a single-storeyed erection of wattle and daub, the thatched roof tattered and moss-infested. However, over the doorway hung a withered bush, the universal sign of an inn, and after a quart of ale each the coroner negotiated the hire of three horses. Though the tavern-keeper was reluctant to allow his nags to leave the parish, the coroner waved a parchment scroll in front of him. None of them could read it, apart from Thomas de Peyne, but the royal seal dangling from it impressed the man sufficiently to agree to let them have the beasts.

They set off on the underfed rounseys, following a lad on a pony, who would show them the way to Bermondsey and bring the horses back again.

What they could see of the countryside, which was very little in the mist, looked bleak and barren, mudflats giving way to scrub-covered heath, rather than the forested dales they were used to in the West Country. As they plodded along, at half the speed of a decent horse, de Wolfe asked his clerk what kind of a place they were bound for. Thomas, always eager to share his vast store of knowledge about things religious and historical, was pleased to oblige.

‘The priory was founded over a century ago, master. It’s a daughter house of a Cluniac abbey, St Mary’s at La Charité-sur-Loire. Four monks came over from France to take advantage of a gift of land from a rich London merchant.’

Gwyn, whose blunt views on religion were well known to his companions, said that he didn’t give a damn who founded the place, as long as they kept a good kitchen and a comfortable guesthouse. For once, Thomas agreed with him in respect of their accommodation.

‘Thank God for a bed that won’t roll around for four hellish nights!’ he said fervently, crossing himself several times, in recollection of the misery he had suffered on the Saint Radegund .

They rode in silence for a while, the coroner contemplating the circumstances which had brought him so far from his home, wife and mistress. A week ago he was minding his own business as coroner in Exeter, dividing his time as usual between his chilly chamber in the gatehouse of Rougemont Castle, his house in Martin’s Lane and the taproom of the Bush Inn, where he enjoyed the company of his pretty mistress, Nesta.

Then one freezing morning a herald with the king’s insignia on his tabard arrived, guarded by two men-at-arms. He bore a parchment with the impressive seal of Hubert Walter, virtual regent of England now that Richard de Lionheart was permanently in France. As de Wolfe could read little more than his own name, Thomas de Peyne rapidly translated the Latin text, his eyes growing wider as they scanned the lines of manuscript.

‘The chief justiciar wants you to go to London, master!’ gabbled the little priest. Hubert Walter was not only Archbishop of Canterbury but was also the head of England’s legal system and effectively of its government. Impatiently, John de Wolfe waited for his clerk to deliver the rest of the message, with Gwyn peering over Thomas’s shoulder as if he could decipher the words himself.

‘He requires you to go with all speed to the priory at Bermondsey, to investigate the death of a ward of our lord the king. He gives you this Royal Commission as a temporary Coroner of the Verge, as the former coroner is laid low with the ague and is likely to die.’

John knew that the royal household had its own coroner, the ‘Verge’ being the area of jurisdiction radiating twelve miles around wherever the perambulating court happened to be.