Fear in the Forest (26 page)

Gwyn sloped off to the kitchens attached to the end of the West Range, marked by a basket of vegetable scraps outside the door, in the hope of scrounging something from one of the lay sisters. John climbed a step to an entrance he remembered from his last visit and knocked firmly on an open door to attract attention. In a moment a woman appeared from a side chamber, dressed in the dark habit of a Benedictine. Her hair was hidden under a flowing head-veil, her throat swathed up over the chin in a linen gorget. A wooden crucifix swung from her braided belt, as her moon-like face stared at him suspiciously.

‘I am Sir John de Wolfe, the King’s coroner,’ he began, thinking it as well to pull rank from the start.

The nun did not ask his business, but stood aside and motioned him to enter. She led the way to the room from which she had emerged, a small chamber with nothing inside but a small table, a stool and a large, rather crude cross nailed to the wall.

‘Please wait here in the outer parlour. The prioress will be here in a moment,’ were her first and last words, as she glided out and vanished.

John, somewhat bemused by his reception, stood looking around at the bare cell. If this was what a nunnery had to offer, he thought glumly, Matilda would be back home within hours. A few moments later, another lady appeared, with another nun hovering behind as a chaperone.

De Wolfe recognised the prioress from his previous escapade here and gave her a stiff bow of respect.

‘I believe that my wife may have arrived here yesterday, Dame Margaret. I wondered if I might speak to her,’ he said humbly.

The prioress was usually an amiable-looking woman, but now her expression was forbidding. ‘I am well aware of the situation, Sir John. But Matilda has said – in the strongest possible terms – that she does not wish to see you.’

John stared at her. He was not used to being thwarted, especially by a woman. ‘But she is my wife!’ he snapped. ‘I have the right to speak to her – and to take her home, if it pleases me.’

He immediately wondered why he had said that, as the last thing he wanted was to have Matilda back in his house, where she would give him hell, then continue to ruin his life. But his father’s legacy of Norman blood had broken through to assert his dominance as a husband – and an arrogant dismissal of anyone who denied it.

However, he seemed to have met his match in Polsloe. The prioress looked at him calmly and explained as if she were talking to a child.

‘Once inside the walls of a monastery, sir, the laws of the outside world no longer apply. Indeed, in some orders, entrance equates with death. The person no longer exists in the secular sense.’

‘My wife is not a member of your order, lady! She is presently not in a rational state of mind and unable to make reasoned decisions about her future.’

Dame Margaret smiled sadly. ‘That is for her to decide, Crowner. She needs some time to reflect on her position. Until then, she wishes to stay here – and we are happy to shelter her.’

John’s instinct was to argue, but he managed to stifle his annoyance, deciding that it was against his own interests to demand her ‘release’.

‘What’s to be done, then? Do you need my support for her sustenance here? I am willing to pay.’

The prioress shook her head. ‘She came well provided, Sir John. There will be time to deliberate about any endowment if and when Matilda decides to enter upon her vows. At the moment she is but a candidate, not even a novice.’

John silently hoped that the process would last indefinitely, but said nothing. It seemed obvious that Matilda had brought a dowry with her – he knew that she kept some treasure in a locked trunk in her solar, money that was hers alone, derived from an annuity from the de Revelle estates. He had never queried nor coveted anything of hers – he was comfortably provided from the income from his wool partnership with Hugh de Relaga and his share of the manorial profits from Stoke-in-Teignhead.

There seemed little more to be said, as the prioress stood placidly but still quite adamant that he was not going to be allowed to speak to his wife. He cut short the impasse by nodding respectfully to her again and turning to the door.

‘Please tell Matilda that I was here and was concerned for her. If there is anything she requires, please let me know.’

The prioress bowed her head graciously.

‘If there is any change in the situation, I will make sure that you are informed. I am still indebted to you for the help you provided when we had that unpleasantness some months ago, so I am distressed at this problem in your personal affairs.’

With that, she swept away, her chaperone hurrying after her, leaving John to find his way to the outer door. He collected Gwyn from the kitchen, where he had charmed a buxom lay sister into giving him a pasty and a quart of ale, then they made their way back to their horses and began plodding back to Exeter, the coroner in a silent, pensive mood.

Thomas found Nesta in the brew-shed, one of the outhouses of the tavern which shared the backyard with the kitchen, privy and pigsty.

After the coroner and his officer had left for Polsloe, Nesta had gone about her usual business in the inn, but listlessly, with none of her normal bustling efficiency. When she disappeared through the back door, Thomas followed her, glad to get out of the taproom. He disliked alehouses, he drank reluctantly and sparingly, and usually only entered inns when he had to accompany either Gwyn or John de Wolfe.

Padding up the yard in the approaching dusk, he stopped outside the brew-house door and heard the sound of soft sobbing from inside. Tapping gently, he put his head around the door and saw Nesta sitting on a milking stool, a long paddle, used for stirring the ale mash which was stewing in several large wooden tubs, in her hands.

Her head jerked up at the intrusion, but her face softened when she saw it was the little clerk.

‘Thomas, what is it?’ she asked.

‘I’m the one who is supposed to say that!’ he replied with a wry smile. ‘Is there anything I can do for you – or anything you want to talk about, dear Nesta?’

She shook her head mutely, her eyes again moist with tears. He went over to her and knelt on the dusty earth floor at her feet.

‘Even if I am no longer a priest, able to take confession, I am still your good friend, Nesta. Can’t you tell me what’s wrong? I have seen both you and my master becoming more unhappy as the days go by. It grieves me sorely and I know Gwyn feels the same.’

Nesta put a hand on his thin shoulder and shook her head silently.

‘Everyone knows the babe is at the root of this matter,’ he said softly. ‘Yet John de Wolfe has acknowledged it and even seems glad about being its father. This nonsense concerning his wife will pass, I know. As little as I know about family affairs, it is common for a man to have children outside marriage – and he has none of his own.’

Through her tears, she smiled sadly at his innocence.

‘Dear Thomas, it is far more complicated than you imagine. I have sinned, I have attempted greater sins, and now contemplate an even greater sin.’

The clerk looked up at her, his brown eyes wide with apprehension.

‘What are you saying, woman? You are goodness itself. What’s this talk of sin?’

She gave a great sigh, then put both her hands on his shoulders, feeling the bones through his threadbare tunic. Face to face now, she told him of her despair.

‘Thomas, you just said that John is glad to be a father – but he is not a father, though he doesn’t yet know it.’

As the clerk gaped at her, she went on, the words spilling out now that she had taken the plunge. ‘The father is Alan of Lyme, that viper I took to my bosom some months ago, when your master and I had fallen out. I had hoped against hope that it was not so, but when I visited Bearded Lucy down on Exe Island, she found that the time I have been with child makes it impossible for it to have been John’s.’

Thomas’s head sagged so that his forehead rested on her knees for a moment. Then he looked up, his face filled with compassion.

‘That was your first sin – so what are these others?’

Nesta’s hands left his shoulders to drop into her lap and screw up the folds of her thin leather brewing apron into a creased bundle.

‘I have tried to rid myself of this traitor in my womb. I have taken every herb and potion I could obtain. All they have done is make me sick, but not shifted this legacy of my infidelity!’

Thomas rocked back on his heels in the dirt, staring up at her.

‘That is indeed a sin, Nesta. Understandable in your distress, but a sin nevertheless. You call the child a traitor, but he knows nothing of his creation, he can have no fault – at least until he is born, when he will have the same original sin as the rest of us.’

Her hands left the torturing of her apron to rub her filling eyes again.

‘You are right, Thomas, the babe is not the one at fault, he is but the instrument of my own misdeeds. Anyway, these pills and potions failed, so the matter is of no consequence. I have ruined John’s life, his marriage, perhaps his standing as a high official.’

The clerk made twittering denials at this.

‘Come, Nesta, be realistic! Every Norman knight has by-blows, some by many different women. It’s not something that is even worthy of mention in their company. Matilda’s own brother has several, that everyone knows about. And as for the crowner’s marriage, you know as well as any of us that it is an unhappy sham. If only this child were his, then it would have been one of the best things to happen to him.’

‘That’s the very point, can’t you see!’ she wailed. ‘It’s not his and when he discovers that, as he is bound to before long, then I will have destroyed him. He will hate me, reject me and that I cannot bear! There is only one course left.’

He gaped at her, uncomprehending at first.

‘You should know, Thomas, you have been down that same road yourself, not long ago.’

‘No, Nesta, not that! Never that, you must never even think of that.’

The clerk was aghast at what finally he understood her to be contemplating.

‘It is the only way, Thomas. He would be rid of the fruit of my wickedness and rid of me at the same time – me, who stands between him and fulfilment in his life.’

De Peyne jumped to his feet, agitated and desperate. This time it was he who seized her by the shoulders and virtually shook her.

‘No, Nesta, no! You must never even think of it again! Yes, you said I had been down that road – but I turned off that road and now I know that madness had enveloped me at that time. My desperation was different from yours, but none the less awful!’

He stopped for breath and shook her gently again.

‘Yet when I tried, God showed me I was wrong. He stopped me and now I would never, never contemplate that again! In fact, only yesterday I found another answer, if the need arises – to enter the peace of monastic life, like Matilda. There are always answers, Nesta – always!’

He stood now with his arm around her as she sat on the stool, her head sinking against his waist. They were both shivering with emotion, as he crooned further encouragement to her.

‘If you harmed yourself, you would also wound John de Wolfe for life. I know he loves you, in spite of his gruff ways. And what of Gwyn and myself? We cherish you too. Think how we would be devastated if you were no longer with us.’

They talked in low tones for a long time, Thomas gradually winning from her a solemn promise not to harm herself or the child. Though a former priest, he made no threats of eternal hellfire or the damnation of the Church. Rather, he played on the desolation that would fall upon de Wolfe and the sadness and grief that would be inflicted upon her friends.

‘But what’s to be done, Thomas?’ she whispered, when her tears had almost dried and she was rational again. ‘Am I to tell him the babe’s not his?’

This was where the clerk’s exhortations, fluent where mortal sin was concerned, became rather thin when applied to earthly practicalities.

‘Is he bound to find out, if we say nothing?’ he asked.

Nesta turned up her hands helplessly. ‘It’s a great risk, especially if some busybody puts it about – and there are plenty of those in Exeter, God knows! Look how soon his wife was told of my condition.’

Thomas nodded sadly. He was well aware of the gossip machine that operated so efficiently in the city.

‘Then you must tell him yourself. It would be far better coming from you than for him to be shocked by hearing it from some common chatter.’

Nesta considered this, the worried look on her face deepening.

‘How could I screw up enough courage to break that news to him?’

‘Better from your lips than from anyone else,’ advised the clerk.

She sighed and stood up to lean against one of the mash tuns.

‘You must be right, good Thomas. I must pick the right moment and pray to God that he does not spurn me for ever.’

‘Amen to that!’ he replied fervently.

Back in his own house, de Wolfe sat by his hearth, the unlit wood behind the iron fire-dogs emphasising the coldness of the lofty hall. Strangely, he already felt lonely, in the knowledge that the solar above his head was empty. Even the presence of his surly and unpleasant wife made the house more than just a pile of timber and stone, which was what he felt it to be at that moment. Brutus had slunk away to the back yard to seek the company of Mary in the cook-shed, instinctively aware of some sea change in the household that day.

John rarely drank wine except at meals or in the company of others, but today he went to a chest against the wall and took out a pottery flask of his best Loire red. He broke the wax seal and twisted out the wooden bung, pouring a liberal measure into one of the glass cups that he had looted in a distant campaign in Brittany.

Sitting back in one of the hooded chairs, John drank and brooded on the day’s events. There was nothing more he could do about Matilda. He had made his best attempt to see her and persuade her to come home, so his conscience was clear on that score, if not on the cause of her leaving in the first place. She had long known of his affair with Nesta, as she was aware of his occasional fling with Hilda of Dawlish.