Fear in the Forest (21 page)

Though the sky was half filled with cloud today, it was still fine, and in the warmth of early summer, with the birds bursting themselves with song in the surrounding trees, John lay back against a trunk and felt at ease with the world. The conversation drifted from topic to topic and came back to the lack of any success in the hunt that morning.

‘Do you not keep a woodward these days?’ he asked his brother.

William shook his head. ‘I’ve neither the time nor the inclination to spend half my life chasing around after buck and hind,’ he replied. ‘There’s no Royal Forest within five miles of here, so why go to the trouble and expense of a woodward?’

A woodward was to a private estate what a forester was to the royal lands. Hunting grounds of large estates, especially those running adjacent to royal demesnes, were called ‘chases’ – or, if walled or fenced, ‘parks’ – and the landowners were obliged to employ woodwards to police them and preserve the wildlife. These men had divided loyalties, for although employed at the landowner’s expense, they had to abide by the same code as the royal foresters and to swear fealty to the verderers, Warden and the King, reporting any breach of forest law that affected the royal interests. Most of the problems arose where a chase abutted against the King’s forest, and complicated rules existed to prevent beasts from the royal land from escaping – or being driven – into private ground.

William explained all this to his brother, heartily glad that these problems did not afflict his manor.

‘The barons and lords who have bigger fiefs up against the King’s forest are having increasing problems,’ he explained. ‘They can no longer trust their own woodwards, who are often under the thumb of the foresters. I hear there are new tricks that are being played, like driving deer from the chases and parks into the King’s land – the very opposite of what traditionally used to happen.’

The conversation brought John’s mind back to the duties he had waiting in Exeter, and he wondered how Thomas and Gwyn were faring on the expedition he had commanded them to undertake. He knew his officer could look after himself, but he worried slightly about the timid Thomas, who openly admitted to his own cowardice. Still, he thought, talking to a string of priests could not present much danger, and he dismissed his concerns as the hunting party gathered themselves to resume their search for the elusive animals.

In the next two hours they found nothing, but then the hounds caught the trail of a roe deer. Before long they had brought it down and the huntsmen dispatched it cleanly within seconds. They decided to call it a day and wended their way back to the manor house, with the fresh carcass slung across the houndmaster’s mare.

‘We’ve brought you tonight’s supper, Mother,’ announced William, with some satisfaction, as the women came out on the house steps to greet them. The steward and other servants went off to deliver the venison to the kitchens, and the brothers flopped on to benches in the hall. A jar of wine appeared between them as they regaled Enyd and her daughter with exaggerated tales of their prowess in the hunt. This was a fairly short story and the conversation soon came around to John’s domestic problems.

‘How will you deal with this matter of the baby, my son?’ asked his mother, concern in her voice. She offered no censure to John over the affair, accepting that this was what men did, marriage or not. She knew that even her own late husband, Simon, had a bastard somewhere in the north, a product of a long sojourn away during one of King Henry’s campaigns. Her worry was over the practicalities of the child’s upbringing, especially knowing of Matilda’s vindictive nature.

Her younger son scratched his head through his black thatch.

‘I’ve not given it that much thought yet, Mother,’ he admitted. ‘He’ll not want for anything, I assure you – including my love and affection.’

‘You seem very sure it’s going to be a boy, John,’ said Evelyn.

His sister’s prim nature made her slightly more uneasy with the situation than her mother. She had wanted to become a nun years before, until, on the death of her father, his widow had vetoed the ambition and made her stay at home to help with the household duties.

Her brother grinned sheepishly. ‘Of course it’ll be a boy! How could I ever sire a daughter? I need to teach him to swing a sword and hold a lance!’

‘Will the babe live in the inn? Is it a suitable place?’ asked Enyd, still worrying away at the problem.

John considered this. ‘I think it will serve. There’s plenty of room upstairs. I can get another room built alongside Nesta’s chamber, then hire a good woman to look after the child while Nesta runs the inn.’ He grinned. ‘At least she’ll not need a wet-nurse, as nature provided well for her in that regard!’

Evelyn pursed her lips primly. ‘You shouldn’t jest about such things, John, it’s not decent.’

His mother laughed at her daughter’s prudishness, and even William’s long face cracked into a smile. ‘The babe will certainly be well fed, as far as I remember from my one meeting with the young woman.’

‘This will be my first – and probably only – grandchild, John, so look after it well,’ commanded Enyd. ‘You should get her seen by that woman in Polsloe Priory that you told us about. She seems wise in the ways of women and childbirth.’

‘You mean Dame Madge, the nun?’ responded John. ‘Yes, that’s a good notion, Mother. She helped me several times when women’s problems were an issue.’

Dame Madge was a gaunt sister at the Benedictine priory just outside Exeter, a woman well versed in diseases of women and the problems of childbirth. When John had had cases of rape and death from miscarriage to deal with, she had proved of considerable help, in spite of her forbidding appearance and manner.

‘And don’t forget, my son, you tell Nesta that this house is always open to her at any time. She can come down here when she is heavy with child and go to childbed here, if needs be. She can scream out her labour pains in Welsh, for we’ll understand her well enough!’

Gwyn woke up at dawn to find himself staring at a rocky ceiling. He was used to curling up in a wide variety of places and could sleep soundly anywhere, from the heaving deck of a fishing boat to the open deserts of Outremer. However, since settling down a couple of years ago, he now usually awoke either in his family hut in St Sidwell’s – or somewhere in Exeter, if he had been out drinking after the city gates closed at curfew.

He stared at the damp rock for a moment, gathering his sleep-fuddled senses, before recollecting that he was in an outlaw’s cave about five miles north of Ashburton. After leaving the alehouse the previous evening, Martin Angot had walked with him out of the little town for about a mile up the road towards Haytor. It was almost dark by then, though a pink summer glow in the west gave enough light for them to see their way. At a bend in the lane, Martin suddenly plunged off the road and, a few hundred paces through the trees, came upon a sturdy pony on a long head-rope, contentedly cropping the grass in a clearing.

‘You’ll have to walk behind, it’s a couple more miles at least,’ he said rather thickly, as the outlaw did not have the iron head that Gwyn possessed when it came to drinking ale.

They plodded for an hour along an ill-defined track through the woods alongside a valley, then came out on moorland and began to climb towards the rocks of a jagged tor silhouetted against the sky.

A full moon now rose above the eastern horizon, and for another mile the coroner’s officer, who had given his name as Jess, followed the rump of the pony up towards the high moor.

There was a hoot ahead which was a fair imitation of an owl, though Gwyn was well aware that it came from a human throat. Martin Angot called a soft reply and a moment later the figure of a sentinel loomed up from behind a rock, a lance in his hands.

‘Who’s this, Martin?’ he demanded.

‘A new recruit – an abjurer who lost his way,’ jested the blond man.

The guard waved them on, and in a few minutes they came upon a deep dell set into the edge of the escarpment. Behind a barrier of piled moor-stones the glowing ashes of a fire remained, one fed only with dry wood to avoid smoke. A few crude shelters made of stones and wood, with turf roofs supported on branches, were propped against the rocky faces of the dell, and at its apex was a wide, shallow cave. Snores from the shelters and the cave drew Gwyn’s gaze to about a score of sleeping men, wrapped in cloaks and rough blankets. Martin slid from his pony and pulled off the oat sack he used for a saddle. Giving the beast a slap on the rump to send it out of the dell for the night, he muttered, ‘It’ll not go far, there are others tethered around the corner. Find a space in the cavern – at least it’s better than a ditch or pigsty,’ he grunted, making for one of the turfed shelters. ‘I’ll take you to the chief in the morning – he’ll either accept you or slit your throat.’

Now, at dawn, Gwyn lay wondering what he had let himself in for, penetrating this den of thieves. If any of them recognised him as the coroner’s henchman, he was in big trouble, but he felt it worth the risk if he could learn something useful for his master.

The danger was that, though probably none of the gang of outcasts would have seen him before, the description of a huge, ginger-haired Cornishman acting as the crowner’s officer might be common enough currency in the countryside to give him away. It would surely happen sooner or later, but as he intended only to spend a day or so as an outlaw, he gambled on it being later.

As the dawn strengthened, men began to move, stretching and cursing as they pulled on their boots. They drifted to the fire, which someone had blown into life, piling on fresh wood, so that a cauldron of yesterday’s stew could be heated for breakfast. Some stale bread, stolen at knife-point from some village bake-house days before, was the only accompaniment, washed down by a sour ale.

The other men, who varied from hideous ruffians to weak-looking runts who must have been clerks escaping from embezzlement charges, seemed incurious about him, and Gwyn assumed that the membership of the gang was a fluid affair, with much coming and going. During the desultory converation around the cauldron, he stuck to his story about being ‘Jess’, an absconding abjurer, and no one seemed interested enough to question him in any detail about his orginal crimes. Thankfully, no one leapt to his feet and pointed a quivering finger at him, accusing him of being the Exeter coroner’s officer.

After they had finished picking out shreds of fatty meat and gristle from the pot with their knives and drinking the thin soup dipped out with their empty ale-mugs, a dozen of the outlaws trooped off on foot, one of them telling Gwyn that they were going up to the high moor to steal some sheep belonging to Buckfast Abbey. For some reason, the mention of this religious house seemed to cause some amusement, and Gwyn heard one man cackling about ‘Biting the hand that feeds you!’.

As they left, Martin Angot came across from one of the shelters, walking with a tall, slim man with brown hair and beard. He was better dressed than the others, with a green tunic circled with a belt and baldric from which hung a heavy sword. Ankle-length boots were worn over cross-gartered breeches, and his head was partly covered by a pointed woollen cap that flopped over to one side.

‘Is this the man, Martin?’ he asked his lieutenant. Gwyn recognised that his voice was more cultured than the other men’s, though he spoke English with a Devon accent.

Gwyn lumbered to his feet and nodded to the newcomer, who he assumed was Robert Winter. ‘Jess is my name. I seek somewhere to stay in peace for a time, until I can carry on with my journey.’

The outlaw grinned, his face lighting up pleasantly, his intelligent eyes scanning Gwyn’s huge frame and his dishevelled clothing.

‘Martin tells me you’ve walked from Bristol? You look as if it was from York, by the state of you.’

Now it was Gwyn’s bulbous features which cracked into a smile. ‘Almost as far, for I walked from Anglesey in Wales to Bristol, having taken ship from Ireland.’

He knew Ireland and Wales well and felt easier talking about somewhere that was not pure invention.

‘What were you doing in Ireland?’ asked Martin.

‘Selling my sword-arm as usual. But they’ve run out of wars there at the moment, so I was making for home. Then, being without money after a gaming match, I relieved a Bristol merchant of his purse, but the damned man had two servants following behind. I laid them out, but then had to run for sanctuary.’

It was a simple enough story to be credible, and neither of the outlaws seemed suspicious.

‘D’you mind risking your head as an outlaw?’

Gwyn grinned at the question.

‘It makes no odds to me whether my neck is severed or stretched on the gallows tree, which is what would happen if Bristol caught up with me!’

Winter looked keenly at the big man, sizing up his huge muscles before his eyes settled on the broadsword hanging from his baldric.

‘Are you any good with that thing, Jess?’

Gwyn rattled the battered blade in its scabbard of scuffed leather.

‘It’s kept me alive these past twenty years, so I reckon on being able to use it well enough – though I’ll admit I’m no bowman.’

Both Robert Winter and his deputy Martin Angot asked some more questions, mainly about his origins and where he had served as a mercenary soldier. Once again, Gwyn stuck as near to the truth as possible, which he could do without difficulty. His accent confirmed him as a Cornishman and he correctly claimed to be the son of a tin miner who had given up the trade to become a fisherman at Polruan, where Gwyn had spent the first sixteen years of his life. As to campaigning, he stuck to his actual escapades in France, Ireland and Wales, leaving out any mention of the Holy Land or Austria, which might have brought him uncomfortably near John de Wolfe.

After a few minutes, the other men appeared satisfied that this dishevelled giant was what he claimed to be.

‘You’re welcome to stay with us, Jess, until you want to move on. But you’ll have to earn your keep and our protection,’ said Winter.