Fear in the Forest (40 page)

John told him of his visit earlier that day to Buckfast and the abbot’s admission that many favoured Prince John, especially those to whom he had promised favours, such as the monasteries.

‘The King is the King!’ roared Ferrars, spilling some of his wine in his passion. ‘If Richard was to die, which God forbid, then I would be equally loyal to the next monarch – though I view the prospect of John Lackland on the throne with dismay and contempt.’

Though Ferrars was an overbearing bigot and a harsh, unforgiving landlord and master to his subjects, he was totally devoted to Richard the Lionheart, having fought alongside him many times. De Wolfe could forgive him his rough nature because of his loyalty, even though he could never generate any affection for the man.

‘So what’s to be done about the matter?’ he asked, partly to cool the baron’s rising temperature, already fuelled by too much wine.

‘Can you join us tomorrow morning, Crowner, if I get a search party and some hounds? I’d give much to find this corpse, for my own satisfaction, though no doubt his family would like to see him given a Christian burial.’

They arranged to meet at one of his manors near Lustleigh the following morning, John groaning inwardly at the thought of yet another two-hour ride soon after dawn. As he was leaving, Guy Ferrars followed him to the door.

‘I’ll bring that bumpkin of a son of mine, too. He’s not the brightest of men, but he’s big and fit and can wield a sword after a fashion.’

John went from Goldsmith Street to his house, where he collapsed into his fireside chair to rest his aching limbs. Though he was well used to spending much of his time in the saddle, these past few days had put a strain on him, having to ride long distances following his head injury and the still-painful slash across his hip. The thought came to him as Mary bustled about getting him a meal that he was getting old. He was now forty-one, and though he knew of men eighty years of age, relatively few survived past fifty or sixty. True, the upper classes fared better, though being killed in battle was an ever-present hazard. The villeins and serfs had a far lower life expectancy, threatened by pestilence, starvation and accidents, many being fortunate to reach thirty.

As he sat in his gloomy hall, hung with faded tapestries to hide the timber walls, he thought about death and how it would come. He hoped it would be sudden, unexpected and bloody, rather than a slow wasting from a seizure or a long fever or some variety of pox. If it were not for Gwyn and the tavern hound, he could have died this week, slumped bemused in that forest, fading in and out of consciousness and with a bleeding wound.

He shook himself free of these morbid thoughts as Mary brought in his dinner. At the table he found that she had fried him three trout, which rested invitingly on a large trencher of barley bread, with turnips and leeks on a side platter. Wild berries, white bread and cheese followed, with a quart of best ale to wash it down.

‘I went down to the Bush for a gallon, just to cheer you up, Sir Crowner!’ she announced, in her part-mocking, part-affectionate way.

‘I thought you might have forgotten the place, now that your lady friend is no longer in residence.’

Then, becoming serious, she enquired after Nesta’s health. ‘I heard that she is still very weak, poor girl. Maybe I can walk up to Polsloe some time to see her and take her a decent morsel of food. I doubt they get anything very tasty in that place.’

John slipped an arm around her waist as she stood near him at the table.

‘Your heart is in the right place, Mary, apart from being in a very shapely chest!’ he said. ‘Soon I will have to be away for at least a week, travelling to Winchester, so it would be good if you could visit her when I’m gone.’

His meal finished, he crawled to his bed for a few hours’ rest to ease his aching side, but in the evening he borrowed a mare from the farrier and rode gently up to Polsloe. Nesta was much the same, though perhaps even more pale and wan. Her face was so white that her cheeks seemed almost green below the eyes. When she rested her hand in his as he sat at the bedside, he saw that her nail-beds were the colour of milk, without a vestige of pink. She spoke little, as if the effort of talking was too much, but seemed somehow more content, even in her exhausted state.

John attempted to make largely one-sided conversation, no mean feat for such a taciturn man. Nesta lay listening, savouring the thought that she would no longer have to screw up the courage to respond to Thomas’s plea to tell John that the child was not his. Her feelings about losing the babe were strange, and she was almost frightened by her own lack of emotion about the miscarriage. There was a natural element of deep shock and sorrow that was inevitable in any woman, but overlying this was the feeling of relief that she had escaped from an intolerable situation – one that had almost driven her to take the life of both herself and the baby she carried.

As John faltered to the end of his stock of small talk, which mainly concerned his problems in the forest and the day’s excursion to Buckfast, she lay sleepily under the influence of Dame Madge’s infusion of gentian. As he fell silent, she squeezed his hand and remembered something to tell him.

‘Dear Thomas came to visit me this afternoon, while you were snoring in your bed,’ she said softly. ‘He is a good little man – he has been kinder to me than you would ever imagine.’

‘Is he another fellow for me to be jealous of, a rival for your affections, madam?’ he said jocularly. ‘Will I have to fight him with broadswords for your favours?’

‘I can’t see little Thomas fighting anyone. He is a true man of peace – and one who has the greatest devotion and affection for you, too. He has promised to teach me to read and write when I am recovered, so that I can keep accounts in the inn.’

‘Then you can write me love letters – and I will speed up my own learning so that I can read them!’

Their tender flirting was interrupted by the forbidding figure of Dame Madge coming into the room. She looked impassively at the sight of the county coroner holding hands with an innkeeper, while his noble wife was hardly a dozen yards away under the same roof.

The angular nun advanced on the bed with some brown potion for Nesta. ‘She needs to build back the blood she lost, Sir John. There’s no more I can do for her, except keep watch against a fever and give her the best nourishment.’

John expressed his deep appreciation of the treatment she was receiving. ‘I have to go to Winchester in a few days and will be away a week or more. Can she stay here until I return? Her maids at the inn are diligent, but I would be more content if she was cared for here.’

‘She’ll not be fit to return for some time yet. Be assured that we will look after her here.’ She looked sternly at the coroner’s own battered face, where the bruises on his temple were beginning to turn yellow at the edges. ‘I want to see that wound in your loin before you leave, Crowner. It’s time the dressing was changed again.’

Even Nesta managed a smile as the coroner meekly trailed out to the treatment room after the nun, the pair looking like two skinny rooks in their black plumage.

Guy Ferrars had gone to Lustleigh the previous evening and billeted himself, his son and servants on his tenant there, Roger Cotterel. The manor was not an ancient one, being ignored in William the Bastard’s great survey over a century earlier. It had been hewn from some of Baldwin the Sheriff’s lands many years before, and Ferrars’ father had purchased it as an addition to his extensive estates in the county.

The manor house was small, but built of stone with a slate roof, and when John de Wolfe and Gwyn arrived the next morning, the bailey within the surrounding fence was humming with activity. Guy Ferrars had brought eight of his private soldiers from Tiverton, together with his hound-master, steward and bailiff. Half a dozen lean brown hounds yapped excitedly in an empty pigsty, where they had been confined for the night.

Ferrars invited the coroner and his officer into the hall, which occupied the whole ground floor, Cotterel’s living quarters being on the upper floor. The reluctant host was a tall, thin man with sandy hair, who was trying his best to look as if he enjoyed having his landlord and his retinue foisted upon him for a day and a night. Food and drink were plentiful on the trestles, and they all filled themselves ready for the search in the adjacent forest.

Together with Cotterel, his manor-reeve and a dozen villagers, the party moved out on foot, as the edge of the woods was barely a quarter of a mile to the west, beyond which the land dropped down into the valley of the Bovey river, with Trendlebere Down on the other side. As they walked ahead of the motley crowd, the dogs now following slavishly behind the whip-carrying hound-master, Ferrars explained the lie of the land.

‘I own everything as far as you can see,’ he bellowed, waving his arm expansively at the tree-covered horizon. ‘I use the land beyond the village fields as part of my chase, which extends for four miles north of here. But farther up, the bloody Royal Forest comes right across the river.’

They walked on for half an hour, diving into the trees and turning right within sound of the Bovey in its deep valley. John and Gwyn, who had their own swords buckled on, saw that every man was armed in some way, two of the retainers being bowmen. They seemed a large enough party to repulse anything other than a major force of outlaws, but John felt vulnerable after his recent experiences and kept a wary eye open for any sign of opposition. Hugh Ferrars walked with them in the vanguard. He was a younger version of his father in build and colouring, but had barely half his father’s personality and energy. John assumed that the tragic Adele de Courcy had been given little choice in her betrothal to this boorish young man. The manor-lord, Roger Cotterel, was the first to spot the demolished deer-leap that had caused this trouble. He pointed ahead to a tumble of earth and turf among the trees.

‘There’s the saltatorium, so we’re in royal territory now, by a few hundred paces.’

The leap had been built across a narrow defile which carried a well-trodden deer path down the centre. Though it had been partly destroyed by the efforts of Ferrar men, John could see that an eight-foot bank had been thrown up from a deep ditch, which sloped gently up on the far side. The agile deer could easily spring down the sheer face and scamper up the slope, but the return journey was blocked as they could not get enough of a run in the ditch to scale the vertical wall.

The party scrambled down the tumbled earth and stood in the partly filled trench to await orders from the baron. He called over his steward, a venerable-looking elder with snowy hair.

‘Have you got that clothing from the widow?’

The steward unslung a leather shoulder bag and produced a ragged pair of woollen breeches. ‘These had been discarded but not washed, my lord. They will have his scent upon them.’

Guy Ferrars put his nose to the rags and grimaced. He held them out to John, who even at arm’s length could savour the mixture of stale sweat and urine.

‘Don’t need a bloody dog. I could follow that myself!’ said Gwyn, when he had also sampled the odour.

Ferrars threw the garment at the hound-master, a wizened fellow dressed all in green, with a horn hanging around his neck on a leather thong. He caught it and looked dubiously at the hounds.

‘I’ve never tried this before, sir. They’ll follow a fox or a stag to the ends of the earth, but I don’t know if they understand about humans.’

He called his beasts to him and, as they clustered excitedly around his feet, held the breeches to their snouts. The hounds looked puzzled but willing, and seemed to understand when he waved them away and gave a blast on his horn as encouragement. He started running away from the deer-leap farther into the King’s forest, the dogs running yelping before him. They began spreading out and putting their noses to the ground and to bushes and tree trunks. In a moment they all seemed to converge on to a side track and went racing away, barking excitedly.

‘Looks as if they’ve got the idea!’ said Gwyn, to whom dogs were preferable to most men. They all hurried after the hound-master, who was trying to keep up with his charges. The party swished through the sparse undergrowth beneath the tall trees, the stench from crushed garlic strong on the still air. After some four hundred yards, labouring up a slope from the defile, they saw the green tunic of the hound-master in a small hollow at the base of a huge oak. As they panted up, the man looked crestfallen.

‘I think they’ve been misled by the scent of a fox, my lord.’

The six dogs were milling around a wide hole between the roots of the great tree, which was poised on the edge of a dip in the ground. Red Devon earth was exposed, and fresh soil was scattered downhill from the tunnel mouth. The hounds were milling about in circles, yapping and barking, and one had his head in the hole, trying to worm his way inside.

Gwyn bent to look closely at the ground around the hole.

‘This doesn’t look right for a foxhole or a badger sett,’ he grunted. ‘The earth has been thrown up against the bottom, not dug out from it.’

The hound-master looked and agreed with him. ‘There was a sett here – a big one, but it’s been partly refilled.’

The two men, watched by the rest of the party, seized a couple of fallen branches and broke off four-foot lengths to use as crude spades. They attacked the soft, crumbly soil, pulling it back to slide down the slope below the hole, which now appeared as a much larger aperture. The dogs, which had been hovering excitedly around them, whimpered even louder, and one, more daring animal again dived head first into the hole. The houndsman yelled at it and gave it a smack across the bottom to get it out. Gwyn took its place, dropping to his knees to peer down the shaft, which went obliquely down between the tree roots.

‘See anything?’ snapped the impatient coroner.

Instead of answering, his officer dropped on to his side, careless of the damp rusty earth soiling his clothing, and stuck his right arm up to the shoulder into the hole. The onlookers watched his face change to an expression of disgust as he pulled his arm out of the tunnel and looked at his hand.