Fear in the Forest (36 page)

The apothecary dropped to his knees alongside the Welsh woman and felt her pulse and lifted an eyelid. ‘Get her to her bed, that’s all we can do.’

Edwin looked dubious. ‘That’s up the bloody ladder, Adam! Hard to do until she comes to her senses.’

‘Put her on my pallet in the cook-house,’ suggested the maid. ‘That’s good enough until she can climb to her own bed.’

With much fussing and concern, willing hands lifted Nesta and carried her through the back door to the large hut in the yard, where the two maids lived and where they also prepared food. Thomas insisted on accompanying them, and as he was virtually accepted as a priest by the staff of the Bush, he was as welcome as the apothecary.

As they laid her on the long hay-filled sack that was the maid’s bed, and covered her with a coarse woollen blanket, Nesta began to stir and moan. Her eyelids fluttered and a moment later she was staring blankly at Thomas.

‘What’s happening?’ she began, then gave a weak cry as memory flooded back. ‘He’s dead! My John, he’s gone!’

‘Hush, girl, it’s just a rumour,’ crooned Thomas. ‘We don’t know what’s happened yet.’

Edwin chased everyone out of the hut except the apothecary, Thomas and the maid and stood guard outside the door, leaving them to comfort his mistress. Nesta tried to struggle upright, but Adam gently pushed her back on the pallet. ‘Stay quiet for a time, keep your head low until you feel stronger,’ he advised.

As Thomas held her hand and spoke softly and reassuringly in her ear, the apothecary felt the pulse in the other wrist, a worried expression stealing over his face.

‘Get her some wine with hot water in it,’ he murmured to the maid. ‘I’ll go back to my shop and get something to soothe and strengthen her – some valerian and other herbs might help.’ He rose and left, while the girl went out to the brew-house to find a flask of wine. Thomas was left with Nesta, who was gripping his hand tightly.

‘Tell me again it’s not true, Thomas,’ she whispered.

‘It’s certainly not true, good lady,’ he said with a confidence he did not really share. ‘I don’t know the truth of everything, but it seems he’s got lost in the forest. Knowing the crowner, that’s no great hazard, after all the wars he’s fought in his lifetime.’

She made no reply, but two tears appeared from under her closed eyelids and trickled down her cheeks, which were so pale as to look faintly green in the evening light from the unshuttered window.

The maid came back with a cup of hot, watered wine and managed to coax her mistress to take a few sips. Thomas sat for a long time holding her hand, gazing anxiously at her pale face. Nesta appeared to be sleeping, but when he tried to gently slide his hand from hers, her fingers gripped his to restrain them.

Eventually, Adam Russell came back with some potions in two small flasks and tried to persuade the landlady to drink the bitter fluids. As Thomas and the girl attempted to lift her up a little, Nesta groaned and her free hand slid to her belly. ‘It hurts me!’ she muttered.

With a look of concern, the maid lifted the blanket and looked underneath. Dropping it, she looked at the apothecary.

‘She’s losing blood down below. Her gown is soaking!’

Propriety prevented him from looking for himself, but he readily accepted her word. ‘Her pulse told me something was not right,’ he murmured, looking anxiously at the increasing pallor of Nesta’s face.

‘What can you do?’ demanded Thomas desperately.

Adam shook his head. ‘This is beyond my skill. I’m an apothecary, not a physician or midwife. Everyone knows she is with child. This is clearly some problem with that condition.’

There were no physicians in Exeter, all medical care apart from apothecaries’ drugs being provided by the infirmarians in the five priories in and around the city. Thomas thought rapidly, drawing on his experience with the coroner and his officer.

‘Then she must be taken to St Katherine’s in Polsloe. There Dame Madge is an expert on these matters.’

Adam readily agreed, not wanting to take any responsibility for a worsening condition. He jumped up and went back into the inn, returning a few moments later with the news that one of the local carters would willingly take her to the priory in his wagon.

As the man went off to harness up his ox, Thomas remained with Nesta, while the two maids scurried around fetching more blankets and some clothing for their mistress to take to Posloe.

‘We must take you to be cared for by the nuns, Nesta,’ said the clerk gently. He had to lean close to her as she lay pale and motionless on the mattress, but her lips moved in reply.

‘Then both John’s women will be in Polsloe,’ she murmured.

‘It’s the best place for you to recover, Nesta,’ advised Thomas. ‘You remember Dame Madge, who helped us some months ago? She will soon get you well again.’

‘Am I losing the child, Thomas?’ she whispered.

He was unable to lie to her, though he had no real knowledge.

‘I don’t know, my girl. I just don’t know. It’s in God’s hands.’

He crossed himself surreptitiously.

‘It’s God’s judgement, Thomas. As with you and the cathedral roof – he refused to let us take our own lives, but now he’s taking the babe’s instead.’

‘You don’t know that, Nesta. I know nothing of women’s ailments, but at Polsloe they may make everything well again.’

She shook her head weakly.

‘No, dear Thomas. This is God’s retribution upon me … maybe it’s just as well, for now there’ll be no child to be born in sin. And I’ll not have to tell John the truth after all.’

The tears forced their way from under her lids again as she sank her head wearily back on to the rough hessian of her maid’s bed.

Gwyn slept fitfully on the floor of the alehouse, getting up just as a trace of dawn had lightened the eastern sky. All around were the men-at-arms, snoring as they lay rolled in their riding cloaks. Ralph Morin and Gabriel had opted for a penny bed in the loft, but Gwyn had been too restless to bother with a mattress. He wandered outside and, to clear his senses, doused his head in cold water from the horse trough. Three of the soldiers were sleeping on the ground near the animals, with another acting as sentry trying to keep awake. Gwyn grunted at him, then wandered around the inn, willing the dawn to strengthen, so that he could begin the search again.

He had had a fantasy the previous evening, while walking from the lane back to the alehouse, that maybe he would walk into the taproom and find Crowner John sitting on a bench waiting for their return. Unfortunately it remained a fantasy, and he faced the day with foreboding. Ralph and the garrison men might leave later, but Gwyn was determined to stay and search these woods until he discovered what had happened to his master. They had not been together across most of the known world for almost twenty years for him to abandon him now, within a few miles of home.

To kill time until it was fully light, he wandered around the back of the small, low building, where there was a ramshackle privy alongside a stinking midden. Needing to rid himself of the last of the previous night’s ale, he loosened his belt and pulled down the front of his breeches to relieve himself into the ditch that ran behind the tavern, only a few yards from the first of the forest trees. The trunks were just visible in the growing light, and as he stood there he tried to throw his mind into the darkness to seek out John de Wolfe by sheer will-power.

Nothing happened, but from the other side of the privy came a low-throated growl. Tying up the thongs of his breeks, he wandered towards the noise, always unable to resist looking at a new dog.

The rattle of a chain drew his eyes down, and he could just see the outline of a large hound, straining at its leash, which must have been secured to the wall. He gave it some friendly words, but the animal took no notice of him. There was enough light now to see the silhouette of sharp-upstanding ears as the dog stood quivering, intent on something out in the forest.

Intrigued, Gwyn felt for the chain, risking a sudden bite from an unknown guard dog. He felt the last link, which had been dropped over an iron pin hammered into one of the frames for the wattle panels. Using the tension of the straining beast to pull it off, he urged it onwards, and without hesitation the hound scrambled down into the ditch and leapt up the other side, with Gwyn dragging along behind.

The dog panted and pulled, its ears now flattened, and made for the first line of trees. Once the were inside the wood, even the faint daybreak was extinguished. Gwyn stumbled along in the darkness, his feet catching in roots and brambles, until they reached the barer ground deeper under the trees, where leaf mould was the only hazard, apart from fallen branches.

The hound aimed off slightly to the left and, straining its powerful shoulders, took the coroner’s officer at an uncomfortably fast pace several hundred yards into the forest. Gwyn began to wonder whether the damned beast was merely after a badger or a hind, though it should have been well used to those where it lived, but a moment later his affection for dogs was given a massive boost. The tension in the chain suddenly slackened and the dog started to whine and pant.

‘Stop licking me, you bastard!’ came a wonderfully well-recognised voice from the gloom.

‘Crowner! Is that you?’ shouted Gwyn, almost overcome with joy.

‘Gwyn? What in hell are you doing here at this time of night?’

The harsh voice was weak, but grated beautifully on Gwyn’s ears.

He bent down and, pushing the clever hound aside, found the coroner stretched out, his shoulders against the bole of a tree. The light had increased marginally and Gwyn could just make out de Wolfe’s long body.

‘Are you injured, Crowner? Where in blazes have you been?’

‘I took a blade across my side, but it’s nothing, though I’ve shed some blood. It was a bad knock on my head that did for me, though I can’t remember much about it.’

Gwyn told his master to lie still, then stumbled part-way back towards the distant alehouse, yelling for help in a voice that could surely be heard in Ashburton itself. Some men came running with a couple of pitch flares and before long Ralph Morin, Gabriel and the rest of the soldiers were clustered around the fallen coroner.

The lights now showed that he had a huge blue bruise across his left temple, spreading on to his ear, which was torn at the edge. Of more concern to Gwyn was the ominous dried blood that stained his tunic over his left side, but when they looked underneath, the slash, though four inches long, had been stopped by his hip bone and would not be dangerous, as long as it did not suppurate.

‘Can you get up – or shall we make a stretcher for you?’ asked Morin.

‘Get me up and on to my horse!’ snarled John, struggling to rise. He promptly fell down again and Gwyn and the castle constable, both huge men themselves, stood either side of de Wolfe and locked an arm around his, lifting him to his feet. With the flares guttering before them, they slowly walked him back to the edge of the forest, the hound prancing about delightedly in front of them.

In the alehouse, Gwyn bound up John’s wound with a length of clean linen provided by the landlord, whose stock of bread, cheese and ale was rapidly exhausted by the posse and the rescued victim, whose appetite seemed to have easily survived his ordeal. As they ate and drank, the story came out, as far as the coroner could recollect. He remembered felling the first outlaw and being threatened by the second, but from there his memory was a blank until he recovered consciousness. Gwyn explained that the corpse of the first man was near the scene of the fight, but not that of the second, who must have staggered off until he collapsed and died where they found him.

With a terrible pain in his head and a bleeding wound in his side, de Wolfe had stumbled as best he could towards what he thought was the direction of the path. Then he must have collapsed again, for he remembered nothing but jumbled memories of weaving through the trees and repeatedly falling down in a stupor – due either to blood loss or the effects of the blow on the head. Eventually his head had partially cleared, but it was now dark and he groggily gave up until dawn, slumped at the foot of the tree where the dog had discovered him.

When all the excitement had died down, the coroner told Morin of the assignation they had witnessed between Stephen Cruch and the outlaw chief, as well as the mysterious priest that they assumed had met the horse-dealer in that very room.

‘What’s to be done about these foresters and outlaws, John?’ asked Ralph Morin, as they finished the rest of the landlord’s meagre food supply.

‘Depends on Richard de Revelle,’ growled the coroner. ‘So far, he’s done everything he can to be obstructive over this, which makes me suspect that he’s got an interest in the matter.’

‘Even if he allowed the garrison to be used for a sweep against the outlaws, I doubt if we’d have enough men. I couldn’t take all of them away from Exeter at once. We’ve got only sixty all told.’

‘And many of those are little better than raw youths,’ added Gabriel glumly. ‘These men here are some of the best, for I picked them myself.’

De Wolfe, whose tough body was rapidly recovering, swallowed the last of his ale. ‘Then I’ll have to go to Winchester and see if Hubert Walter is willing to act. It’s his bloody country, after all, for as long as the King is absent.’

‘And this horse-dealer and the priest? What about them?’ persisted the constable.

John gingerly felt his bruised head before he spoke. ‘We can’t prove that anything illegal passed between them, though the landlord here confirms that they met and spoke together here. But Stephen Cruch is guilty of consorting with outlaws, for I saw him with my own eyes.’

‘Seize the fellow and ask him a few questions in the undercroft in Rougemont,’ suggested Gwyn grimly. ‘That fat bastard Stigand will soon get some answers from him.’

‘Maybe, but I must think about it first. Perhaps soon we should take a ride to Buckfast and see what this priest has to say for himself, if it’s the same one that Thomas met.’

An hour later, John pronouced himself fit to ride and was helped up into the saddle of his borrowed horse by solicitous hands. Slowly, they made their way up the high road at a walking pace, Gwyn and Ralph riding closely on either side of the coroner, in case he was taken dizzy again. However, his iron constitution and his determination to see this crisis though kept him in the saddle for the next four hours. He had a sore scalp and a throbbing headache, as well as a burning pain in his hip wound, but he had suffered worse many times before.