Fear in the Forest (16 page)

In the late afternoon of that day, John de Wolfe was relaxing as best he could before his own cold fireplace. He had not long arrived back from Manaton and, ignoring Matilda’s displeasure, was sprawled in one of the monk’s chairs with a quart of ale in one hand, the other resting on Brutus’s head. His long legs were stretched out in front of him, his feet enjoying their freedom after a day in tight riding boots. His wife’s tut-tutting was due to his lounging in his black woollen hose without shoes, especially as one big toe protruded through a hole in the foot.

‘You still behave like a rough soldier, John!’ she scolded, sitting opposite him in tight-lipped disapproval. ‘Why can’t you comport yourself like a knight and a gentleman? What would anyone think if they came in now?’

He rolled up his eyes in silent exasperation at her eternal snobbishness.

‘I’ll do what I like in my own house, wife,’ he grunted. ‘And who in hell is likely to come calling here on a hot Monday afternoon, eh?’

Promptly, as if the fates were conspiring against him, there was a loud rapping on the front door. Mary was cleaning his boots in the vestibule and answered straight away, then put her head around the screens to announce visitors.

‘It’s Lord Guy Ferrars – and some other nobles,’ she proclaimed in a somewhat awed voice. Matilda jumped to her feet as if struck by lightning, and hurriedly began to straighten the wimple at her throat and pat down her kirtle.

‘Put on your shoes, at once!’ she hissed, as John hauled himself from the chair and groped for his house slippers. A moment later, Mary had stood aside for three men to stride past her into the hall.

‘De Wolfe, forgive us for intruding unannounced,’ boomed the leading man, who sounded as if he was in no way seeking such forgiveness. A powerful, arrogant fellow, some years older than John, Guy Ferrars was one of the major landowners in Devon – and indeed had manors in half a dozen other counties. De Wolfe knew him slightly and disliked him for an overbearing, ruthless baron, whose only saving grace was that he had been a good soldier and a loyal supporter of King Richard.

Behind him was Sir Reginald de Courcy, a lesser light but still an important member of the county elite, with manors at Shillingford and Clyst St George, as well as property outside Devon. The third man was also known to the coroner by sight, being Sir Nicholas de Molis, whose honour included a number of manors along the eastern edge of Dartmoor. Rapidly gathering his wits together after this sudden invasion, John ushered the visitors to the long table, as there were too few chairs at the hearth.

‘Mary, wine and some wafers or whatever you have for our guests,’ he commanded, pulling out the benches on either side of the table. Matilda, her sallow face flushed with mixed pride, excitement and shame at her husband’s dishevelled appearance, stopped bobbing her head and knee and rushed after their cook-maid to accelerate the arrival of refreshments.

John took the chair at the end of the table, with Reginald de Courcy on his left and the other pair to his right. Lord Ferrars began without any preamble, his harsh voice echoing in the bare hall.

‘We have just come from the castle, where we attended upon your dear brother-in-law.’ The tone was unambiguously sarcastic, and John was glad that Matilda was out of the room. The speaker was a large, florid man with a mop of brown hair and a full moustache, both flecked with grey. He wore a long yellow tunic, slit back and front for riding, with a light surcoat of green linen on top. The last time the coroner had seen him he had had a full beard, but this was now gone. That had been a sad occasion, as the fiancé of Ferrar’s son Hugh had been found dead in an Exeter churchyard – and she had been the daughter of Reginald de Courcy.

‘Our meeting was less than satisfactory, de Wolfe,’ continued Ferrars. ‘We went as a deputation of landowners to protest at various happenings in the Royal Forest, but received little satisfaction.’

‘None at all, to be frank!’ snapped the third man, Nicholas de Molis. ‘De Revelle was his usual mealy-mouthed self, full of evasions and excuses.’

Mary bustled back with a tray full of savoury tarts and fresh-baked pastry wafers, together with a large jug of wine. Matilda was close behind and de Molis, a burly man with a face like a bull-dog, snapped his mouth shut on any further condemnation of her brother. She went to a chest against the far wall and took out some goblets of thick Flemish glass, only brought out on special occasions.

When she had poured wine for them all, simpering and nodding at these county luminaries who had graced her house, she retired to one of the fireside chairs. Only the linen cover-chief over her head stopped her ears from flapping, determined as she was to hear every word of their conversation. Guy Ferrars looked across at her in irritation, but he could hardly evict the woman from her own hall. He turned back to the coroner.

‘I know you have been involved twice within the past few days on some of these matters, de Wolfe. But our complaints go back much farther.’

‘And concern many more than we three,’ said de Courcy, speaking for the first time. ‘We are but a deputation – the Abbot of Tavistock was to have joined us today, but he is indisposed.’

John knew that Tavistock Abbey was a major landholder in Devon and anything that interfered with its business would be greatly resented. In fact, he had learned only today that the burned-out tannery in Manaton had belonged to them.

‘So what can I do for you in this situation?’ he asked cautiously.

De Courcy, a thin, gaunt man with a completely bald head and a thin rim of grey beard running around his jaw, thumped the table with his fist.

‘We know you for a man of honour and one totally loyal to the King. There seems to be a campaign afoot to greatly increase the royal revenues from the forest at our expense.’

‘Though I wonder how much of this extra profit ever gets to the treasure chest in Winchester,’ added Nicholas de Molis, with a look over his shoulder at the woman listening avidly across the room. For once, Matilda took the hint, murmured something about fetching more wine and left the hall. A few moments later, John’s keen ears heard the solar door open and close, and guessed that she was listening through the slit high up on one side of the chimney breast.

By now, the three visitors were in full flow, their indignation more potent than the wine in loosening their tongues. ‘More and more of the breweries, forges and tanneries in the forest are being taken over by the bloody foresters,’ ranted Guy Ferrars. ‘I’m losing revenue hand over fist – and when my men protest, they are told that the forest law allows this and there is nothing that we can do to stop it.’

Nicholas de Molis took up the complaint. ‘They are enforcing the rules of venison and vert even more strictly than before. I make no complaint about punishing a man who hunts down a stag or wild boar, but for years many a blind eye has been turned to some peasant who traps a coney or puts an arrow in a fox that’s been stealing his chickens. Now they treat them as if they are murderers and the families are thrown on the parish for us to support.’

De Wolfe looked from one to the other, as de Courcy completed their protests.

‘The Warden seems unwilling or unable to do anything – perhaps we need a different man. Though when I put this to de Bosco, he said that neither he nor any other successor who was appointed could control the foresters.’

Guy Ferrars swallowed some wine, then glared at the coroner.

‘What do you read into all this, de Wolfe? The damned sheriff seems indifferent to the problem, but with his history I suspect that he may be involved.’

John, wondering what his wife was making of all this upstairs, gave a guarded reply. ‘Something is certainly going on in the forest, but I can’t yet make out what it is – or who is behind it. There seems to be a plot to unseat the Warden and I suspect that whoever wants to take his place is fostering trouble to prove that de Bosco is incompetent.’

De Courcy nodded his shiny, hairless head in agreement. ‘That crossed my mind, de Wolfe. But who in hell wants a lousy, thankless job like that?’

The four men looked at each other, then Ferrars spoke.

‘The same man who hung on to the wardenship of the Stannaries when everyone tried to unseat him … Richard de Revelle. But why?’

The other three knew all about the sheriff’s dalliance with Prince John’s cause and his close brush with accusations of treachery the previous year.

‘De Revelle is an expert at embezzlement himself,’ said de Wolfe. ‘But I fail to see what he could gain from the forests – the foresters have a monopoly on extortion there.’

No one had any better suggestions, but they worried away at the worsening situation for some time, cataloguing the misdeeds of the foresters and their loutish servants.

‘This man William Lupus seems to be the most active and obnoxious of them all,’ said John, relating the scene at Manaton that very morning.

‘Yet I can’t see him putting an arrow into the back of a verderer,’ objected de Courcy. ‘That seems more the style of one of these bands of outlaws. We all know the edge of Dartmoor is infested with them, as well as farther afield in the east of the county.’

‘Loyal as I am to our King, I wish he would devote more attention to what goes on in England,’ muttered Guy Ferrars, which was the nearest he would ever get to treason, thought de Wolfe.

‘Yet Hubert Walter speaks for him in most matters. Is he aware of what is going on?’ asked Nicholas de Molis.

‘He’s in a difficult position,’ replied Ferrars, who was nearest to the levers of power in the land and often visited London and Winchester. ‘I have spoken to him about this and he says that every penny is needed for Richard’s undoubtedly expensive campaigns against the French, so it would be difficult to curb powers in the forest, which means revenue.’

‘But that revenue never reaches Winchester,’ snapped de Courcy. ‘Filling the pockets of foresters is not what we need here.’

Eventually they ran out of new grievances and fell silent. John rounded off the meeting with a question about how to proceed.

‘If it gets any worse, then some action must be taken. I have the ear of the Chief Justiciar, as I knew him well in Palestine. If necessary, I will travel to meet him, be it in Canterbury, London or Winchester, and place the case squarely before him. If we can show that these outlaws are colluding with the forest officers, then he must be persuaded to send troops against them.’

‘The sheriff will never do that of his own volition,’ grumbled Guy Ferrars. ‘But I agree that we arouse Hubert Walter’s interest if things do not improve.’

The meeting broke up and the three barons left, with John promising to speak sternly to the sheriff about their misgivings. When the heavy oak door had swung shut behind them, John went back to his chair and waited for Matilda to appear. He heard the solar door close and soon she came back into the hall. He wondered whether she would be angered at hearing the remarks about her brother – or chastened by the knowledge that the powerful men she admired were contemptuous of him. For a moment, he was uncertain which it would be, as she walked silently to her chair opposite him and sat down.

‘Is he going to be in trouble again, John?’ she asked in a low voice.

There had been times when John had relished any opportunity to denigrate his brother-in-law’s reputation, but the grief that overcame his wife at the several falls from grace that Richard had suffered had taken away any potential pleasure in repeating the process.

‘I don’t know, wife,’ he replied sadly. ‘He seems to have replaced the dead verderer with remarkable haste and his obstinate refusal to take any action against these misdeeds in the forest is suspicious.’

‘Is it the John affair all over again?’ she asked dully, meaning the Count of Mortain, not her husband.

De Wolfe shrugged, turning up his hands in mystification. ‘Again, I don’t know. I can’t see the connection, so let’s hope it’s just one of Richard’s schemes to fill his purse – and nothing more sinister.’

But privately he doubted it, and as much as living with Matilda irked him he had no wish to make her life more miserable as regarded her brother’s transgressions.

After their supper, at which Matilda was markedly subdued, she announced that she was going over to the nearby cathedral. The day’s offices were over until midnight matins, so John presumed she was going to spend time on her knees, probably praying that her brother would keep out of further trouble.

After the complaints that the county barons had brought to him, de Wolfe felt that he had better make the effort to get some sense from his brother-in-law, so in the warmth of the evening he strode up to Rougemont. The continued dry weather had turned the mud of the streets into dust, except where the effluent ran down the central gutters – but the downside was the increase in the stink from the ubiquitous refuse. The burgesses had recently invested in an extra soil-cart, which trundled around the city picking up the larger piles of garbage, dead dogs and putrefying offal, but several weeks of heat had so increased the stench of the city that even John’s insensitive nose began to notice it.

He wondered whether it might not be a good idea to take himself off out of the city for a few days, down to the healthier air of his family home at Stoke-in-Teignhead near the coast. But Matilda would never come, being flagrantly disdainful of his widowed mother, who was part Welsh, part Cornish. In his wife’s eyes, Celts were worse than Saxons, almost on a level with Moors and Barbary apes. John thought that if she had fully realised he had so much native blood, she would never have married him – and now he wished he had impressed this on her before they went to the altar. Ruefully, these thoughts passed through his mind as he climbed the slope to the castle gate – if he had stayed unmarried, this present crisis that loomed over Nesta’s pregnancy would never have arisen.

He called in at his room high above the guard chamber, but neither Thomas nor Gwyn was there. The clerk often stayed late, labouring over the rolls needed for inquests or making copies for the King’s justices – and Gwyn sometimes slept there when late drinking or gaming prevented him from going home to St Sidwell’s after the city gates closed at curfew. Coming down again, John crossed the inner ward, the red stone of the battlements glowing almost gold in the rays of the setting sun. It was quiet there, only a few off-duty soldiers squatting to play dice or sprawled on their backs fast asleep. Some children played outside the huts against the far wall, their mothers gossiping at the doors or preparing food for a late meal.