The Awful Secret (7 page)

After a good breakfast early next morning, Sir John de Wolfe thanked Odo for his hospitality and, with his officer and clerk, set out for Ilfracombe. The main road curved westward along the estuary until it struck north-east to the coast, but there was a shorter, more direct route over the hills due north from Barnstaple through the village of Bittadon. The seneschal recommended this: although it was sometimes plagued by roving outlaws from the fringe of Exmoor, it saved a few miles’ riding. The coroner and his brawny henchman were veteran campaigners and had little fear of wayside ambush – their heavy broadswords and Gwyn’s fighting axe were sufficient to see off anyone other than a substantial band of men. However, Thomas rode in a perpetual state of anxiety, his beady eyes forever scanning the roadside for attacking ruffians, but the journey passed without incident.

A few hours later, they had covered the ten miles to the north coast and were jogging down the hill into Ilfracombe. The little port nestled between jagged cliffs, the harbour hidden behind a rocky prominence. The north-westerly breeze was strong and a line of white breakers hurled themselves against the craggy, indented shore. Ahead in the far distance, the hills of Wales could just be seen in the haze.

‘Who does this place belong to?’ asked Gwyn, as they trotted down towards the twisted street that led to the beach.

‘The Bishop of Coutances owns the land, as he does a great slice of the county,’ piped up the clerk, anxious to display his knowledge, especially when it concerned churchmen. ‘But he sub-let it to Robert of Pontecardon many years ago and then it passed to Robert Fitzroy’s family as tenants.’

‘Damn who it belongs to,’ gruntedde Wolfe. ‘Let’s just find the reeve. He was the one who sent to Barnstaple with the news of this corpse.’

A substantial village and port like Ilfracombe would normally have had a resident bailiff, a more senior servant of the manorial lord, but Odo had told them that he had recently died of an apoplexy, and until Fitzroy or his steward appointed a new one, the manor reeve was having to cope with the administration. As they trotted down the only street, a dozen curious villagers appeared to gape at the strangers. The harbour was a sandy cove protected on the seaward side by a long peninsula, called the Benricks, which at the highest tides became an island. The outer end rose to a hill, on which was a low tower carrying a signal brazier to direct ships into the harbour. A score of buildings clustered around the harbour, ranging from a few stone-built houses to rickety hovels made of turf. The roofs were mostly thatched, but the larger dwellings had heavy stone slates, better to resist the foul weather that blew so often into this Atlantic mouth of the Severn Sea.

There were a couple of storehouses and fish-sheds at the head of the beach and several fishing boats were drawn up above the tide-line. Leaning against the single quay, listing until the water floated it again, was a merchant vessel with a stumpy mast. A procession of labourers was filing across a plank to the shore, carrying sacks of lime on their backs.

A few yards from the quayside, de Wolfe halted Odin and called down to a young woman, who was gawping open-mouthed at the new arrivals. She had a baby at her breast, the infant naked in spite of the keen wind that ruffled the poor wench’s rags. ‘Where can we find the reeve, girl?’ boomed the coroner.

Wide-eyed at the revelation that this great dark stranger from another world spoke her language, the young mother pointed wordlessly at a stone house directly opposite, then turned tail and ran away, the baby’s lips still clamped to her bosom.

By now, more inhabitants had gathered to peer at the new arrivals, and from them, a stocky middle-aged man with a large moustache and a square brown beard stepped forward. ‘You must be the crowner, sir. I am Matthew, the manor reeve. I’ve been expecting you.’

John recognised him for a sensible, reliable man, which was more than could be said for some reeves, who often seemed high-grade idiots. The manor reeve was at the bottom of the pecking order of officials in the feudal system, responsible for the day-to-day organisation of the village farm work. Although all but the stewards were illiterate, the reeves kept account of village business – crops, stock, tithes and work rotas – by means of notched tally-sticks and their memories.

With half the population following at a respectful distance, the reeve led them across to the bailiff’s house, which he was occupying for the time being. A boy took their horses to the backyard to be fed and watered and they went into the building. It had the luxury of two rooms, though they were bare of any comfort, apart from a few benches and stools grouped around the fire on the beaten earth floor in the centre of the smaller room. Piles of bracken and hay lay against the walls, forming the sleeping quarters for the reeve’s wife and four children. The other room was the kitchen and dairy, which was shared with a cow and three orphaned spring lambs.

Matthew’s wife brought them bread, meat and ale, and they sat around the clay-lined fire-pit where burning logs threw a blue smoke into the atmosphere.

‘The cadaver is in one of the fish sheds over on the quay,’ explained the reeve. He had a handsome face, albeit scarred by cow-pox, with a moustache that almost matched Gwyn’s in size.

‘How did you come by this corpse?’ demanded the coroner.

Matthew leaned forward, his roughened hands on the knees of his serge breeches. ‘A boy up on the headland above the harbour saw this derelict vessel out to the east, no sail upon her and obviously going to be driven ashore. A gang of us set out at once to find where she would beach, in case we could save any souls.’

Gwyn, who came from a fishing village himself, strongly suspected that they would have been more interested in saving cargo and gear than souls, but kept these cynical thoughts to himself.

‘We went across the cliffs, but the vessel had been blown further up towards Combe Bay, and by the time we had walked that distance, she had struck on Burrow Nose, near Watermouth. It was almost dark, but we found her wedged in a gully. She was not too badly damaged, but by the next day, she had broken up with the pounding of the tide.’

‘And this dead man?’

‘He was on the deck, just astern of the hold. The mast had broken and the spars had come down, so that his legs were tangled in the rigging. Otherwise, we would never have found the body – it would long have been washed overboard, out at sea.’

De Wolfe downed the last of his ale from a crude pottery jar and stood up. ‘Let’s go and have a look at him, then.’

Pulling his pointed leather hood over his head, he made for the door and stooped to pass under the low lintel. Watched by the curious villagers, who followed the party at a distance, they were led across the street to the quayside. Matthew strode ahead to a small shed made of rough timbers, the turf roof held down against the winds by flat stones. As they entered the open landward end, an overpowering stench of decaying fish filled their nostrils.

Two elderly women and a boy were standing at a crude bench, gutting fish and dropping them into wicker baskets. The entrails were thrown on to the ground to add to a stinking heap, which would be shovelled into the harbour for the tide to remove. Thomas de Peyne, the only sensitive member of the team, shrank back, holding his threadbare cloak over his nose.

‘He’s in that corner,’ declared the reeve, pointing past the women to the dark recesses of the shed. Gwyn walked across and pulled a tattered canvas from a still shape lying against the wall.

De Wolfe and the reeve joined him to look down at the pathetically small figure of a youth, huddled in death on the odorous earth. The young man wore dark trousers and a short tunic pinched in with a wide leather belt. His clothes were still saturated with sea water and he lay on his side, as if asleep, his face to the wall. Gwyn bent down and lifted him like a child, to lay him flat on his back.

‘He’s had a mortal wound, that’s for sure,’ observed Matthew, pointing down at the thin bloodstains that had not washed completely from the fabric of the man’s hessian tunic.

At the upper part of his belly, there was an oblique rent in the cloth, surrounded by the sinister pink staining. John squatted on his heels alongside the corpse, undid the belt and pulled up the tunic.

‘The head of a pike!’ said Gwyn immediately, jabbing a massive forefinger towards a characteristic wound on the victim’s upper abdomen. A two-inch-wide stab with bruised edges lay on the pale skin below the rib margin, while in line with it, and half a hand’s breadth away, was an angry red graze on top of more bruising.

‘How can you tell it was a pike?’ asked the reeve, a man of no military experience.

‘The spike went in here,’ snapped de Wolfe, poking his finger deeply into the stab wound. ‘And the sidearm below it made this mark here.’ He indicated the abrasion.

‘Can’t have been more than sixteen, this lad,’ observed Gwyn. ‘Do we know who he might be?’

‘Not a local fellow,’ said the reeve. ‘The vessel had no name, but several of our fishermen say it is from Bristol. It plies up and down the coast from the ports on the Severn down to Plymouth and sometimes across to St Malo and Barfleur.’

De Wolfe, though a soldier, was a reluctant sailor and marvelled at the bravery – or foolhardiness – of the shipmen who sailed their clumsy cockleshells around the violent waters of western Britain.

Thomas had overcome his revulsion at the stench of fishguts and was almost fearfully peering at the corpse under Gwyn’s elbow. ‘A drowned sailor?’ he asked timidly, spasmodically making the Sign of the Cross.

‘No, dwarf, a stabbed sailor,’ grunted the big man. ‘Skewered on a pike. This is murder.’

The coroner checked that the body had no other injuries, then motioned for the reeve to throw the canvas over him again. ‘Was there any sign of anyone else aboard?’

Matthew shook his head. ‘Nor any remains of a cargo. The hull had been sound until she crashed on to the rocks, but there was not a box, barrel nor bale aboard her.’

John thought he detected a note of disappointment in the man’s voice and he suspected, like Gwyn, that the villagers had been intent on plundering the wreck. ‘I had better get out there and view the vessel,’ he decided. ‘How far away is it?’

Matthew looked slightly evasive. ‘Half an hour’s walk, Crowner, but not worth the journey. She’ll have broken up altogether by now – the sea was battering her to pieces and yesterday there was hardly anything left.’

De Wolfe glared at him. ‘I have a legal duty to view the wreck, man.’ He turned to Thomas. ‘I’ll hold an inquest when I get back, so round up everyone who knows anything about this – and a dozen more men above the age of twelve.’

Minutes later, the reeve was leading them on foot across the back of the cliffs to a track that passed down through the hamlet of Hele, with its water-mill, and across the shoulder of Widmouth Hill to rejoin the shore further east. Two miles from Ilfracombe, they crossed a deep, sandy inlet and scrambled across a warren to a low cliff. Below, the surf sucked and pounded remorselessly in a series of rocky gullies and narrow inlets.

‘I said there was little left of her,’ shouted Matthew, going down a muddy sheep-track ahead.

Looking down, de Wolfe saw that the reeve exaggerated somewhat, as the lower part of the fifty-foot hull was still jammed firmly between the jagged teeth of a reef. The tide was now almost at full ebb and it was easy for them to get to the derelict without getting wet, apart from the spray from an occasional large wave.

The stump of the mast still poked up at an acute angle, but all the gunwales and most of the deck planking had gone, timbers littering the small shingle beach immediately inland of the wreck.

‘All you’ll get from this one is some kindling for your winter fires,’ cackled Gwyn, with a wink at the gloomy manor reeve.

‘What would she have been likely to be carrying, Gwyn?’ demanded the coroner, still suspicious that the villagers might have made off with some cargo, which should have been confiscated for the king’s treasury.

‘Depends where she came from. If it was Brittany or Normandy, then maybe wine and fruit. If she was outward bound, she’d have had wool, no doubt.’

De Wolfe nodded at that. He had a substantial interest in wool exports himself, having sunk most of the loot from his foreign campaigns in a partnership with one of Exeter’s foremost wool merchants, Hugh de Relaga. He also shared in the profits of his family’s estate at Stoke-in-Teignhead, where his elder brother, William, was a keen sheep-farmer.

‘There’s nothing to see, Crowner, as I told you,’ said Matthew, virtuously.

De Wolfe had to agree, but Gwyn clambered the last few yards over the rocks and pulled himself on to the wreck, standing rather precariously on a surviving thwart, which had supported the decking. He looked around intently, determined not to miss any clues. Before taking up soldiering, he had helped his father as a fisherman in his home village of Polruan and was well used to the sea and ships.

As de Wolfe and the reeve watched him, Gwyn seemed particularly interested in the remains of the mast, a tree-trunk a foot thick, which had broken off about six feet above the deck.

He pointed to some marks at waist height and shouted back to the other men, ‘Fresh slashes in the wood here! Been struck several times with a heavy sharp blade, fore and aft.’ He hopped back ashore and came up to them.

‘What does that mean?’ grunted his master, who knew next to nothing about ships.

‘The halyards were cut to bring the sail down, ‘explained the Cornishman. ‘No one in the crew would do that to their own vessel, so it must have been boarded and disabled.’

De Wolfe looked grim. ‘So it was piracy, not mutiny – though that was unlikely from the start, for why would the crew of a dull merchantman want to mutiny?’

‘How many men on a vessel like this?’ asked Matthew.

De Wolfe looked at Gwyn for enlightenment.

‘About five or six, usually. Two men could sail her in normal weather, but they need extras for sleeping, cooking and handling her at the ports.’

‘So the rest are still floating around the Severn Sea until they get washed ashore?’