The Noble Outlaw (6 page)

Sitting in a wooden monk's chair, which had side panels and a hooded top to deflect draughts, John looked across at his wife on the opposite side of the hearth. Matilda's stocky body was enveloped in a thick kirtle of heavy green wool, with a long velvet mantle around her shoulders for warmth. Her head was encased in a tight-fitting helmet of white linen, tied with laces under her double chin, framing a square, pugnacious face with heavy-lidded eyes. A big fire of crackling logs kept their faces scorched, but behind them the bleak hall, towering up into the darkness of the rafters, was icy.

'Well?' snapped Matilda. 'Are you going to be here or not?'

Bereft of any excuse on the spur of the moment, he nodded reluctantly. 'What brings him here tomorrow? I thought he would be at Revelstoke or up at Tiverton.'

Richard had several manors in Devon and another in Somerset, and compared to John, he was a rich man. His wealth came both from lands inherited by his haughty wife Lady Eleanor and from his own incessant pursuit of money, some of which had come from his embezzling activities when sheriff.

'You surely must know that he has recently bought a house in North Gate Street as a pied-de-terra' said Matilda sharply. 'Is it so unnatural for him to want to see his only sister when he is in our city?'

John glowered at her, wondering again how he had survived seventeen years of marriage to this woman. Neither of them had wanted to be wedded to the other, but they were forced into it by their families, one lot anxious to see their plain daughter married off to a knight, the other keen to marry the youngest son into a richer family.

'Richard is rarely happy to set eyes on me,' he replied dourly. 'So why do you want to inflict me upon him tomorrow?'

His wife glared at him. 'Because he has asked to speak to you, that's why. Something about that fellow who was found dead in the school in Smythen Street.'

De Wolfe groaned. 'I might have guessed that was it. He's afraid the gossip will harm his bloody purse, by putting off rich students from signing up to his poxy college. We don't yet know who the dead man was.'

Matilda began a scandalised tirade against his denigration of her brother's educational initiatives, but was diverted by Mary bustling in with a tray bearing their supper. Ever eager for food and drink, Matilda heaved herself up and went to her stool at one end of the long table, ready to attack the spit-grilled trout that lay on a thick trencher of bread.

Slitting it expertly along the backbone with a small knife, she picked up the succulent flesh in her fingers. Afterwards she washed them in a bowl of rosewater and wiped them on a napkin, all produced by the tireless Mary from her journeys back and forth from the kitchen hut in the backyard, where she cooked, ate and slept.

John poured his wife a cup of wine, then went to sit at the opposite end of the table to have his own meal, the distance between them exemplifying the emotional gulf between them. He was grateful for the silence that the serious business of eating required, a silence which went on through the second course of slices of cold pork with onions, followed by fresh bread and hard yellow cheese.

Eventually, they finished and Matilda rose, as he knew she would, seeking Lucille, her browbeaten French handmaid, to prepare her for bed.

'I'll expect you home for dinner tomorrow, John,' she said in a tone that invited no contradiction. 'Richard needs to hear from you about this corpse and I'll not have him disappointed.'

With that, she sailed out of the hall to go around to the yard, where there were outside stairs to her solar. This was a room built high up on to the back of the hall, supported on stout timbers, under which Lucille lived in a small boxlike chamber.

Left to himself, John sank with a sigh into his chair by the hearth and waited for Mary to come to clear the debris of the meal. As she entered, his old hound Brutus slunk in and laid at his feet to enjoy the warmth of the fire, knowing full well that his master would soon be taking him out for a stroll - a nightly excuse to visit the Bush Inn and its attractive Welsh landlady.

As an unfrocked priest only recently restored to grace, Thomas de Peyne was not overly fond of visiting taverns, but the Bush was an exception. Just around the corner from his modest lodging in Priest Street, the building in Idle Lane was the nearest thing to home for him, as the kindly Nesta insisted on mothering the little cleric. Even though he had a few more pennies to spend since his rescue from abject poverty, the landlady fed him gratis whenever he appeared, convinced that his weedy frame, with the slight hunchback and lame leg, needed more sustenance than he bothered to give it.

Tonight, he was just finishing a bowl of mutton stew, sitting at a table near the hearth with Gwyn, who had just demolished his favourite pork knuckle with a pile of beans and onions. The big Cornishman seemed always hungry and thirsty and justified his appetite by the soldier's adage that one should sleep, eat, drink and make love whenever the opportunity arose, as one never knew when the next chance would come along. On the other side of the trestle sat John de Wolfe, with a quart of Nesta's best ale in front of him, just topped up by old Edwin, the one-eyed potman. Brutus lay under the table, waiting expectantly for Gwyn to drop the stripped bone down to the rush-covered floor. This peaceful tableau was completed a moment later by the appearance of the shapely landlady herself, who slipped down on to the bench alongside the coroner and pushed her arm through his.

'Tell me all the day's gossip, John,' she demanded.
 

The lean, dark face of her lover broke into a rare smile as he looked down at the pretty redhead. 'Not a great deal today, my girl. Just a mouldy old corpse found around the corner from here, hardly a hundred paces away.' He told her briefly about the finding of the body in the nearby forge.

'Have you any idea who it might be, given that you are almost neighbours?' he demanded, with mock severity. The question was not completely facetious, as Nesta was a fount of gossip, her inn being one of the most popular in Exeter, especially amongst travellers passing through the city. Like his maid Mary, Nesta had often been the purveyor of titbits of information that were of use to the coroner.

'No one has gone missing from this part of the town,' she replied seriously. 'How long had the poor man been there?'

De Wolfe shrugged. 'Hard to say, given that it was dried out like a smoked herring, up above that forge. Some months, I would guess.'

'When did the metalworkers leave there, I wonder?' asked Gwyn, brushing bits of food from the luxuriant ginger moustaches that hung down each side of his chin.

The landlady had the answer to this. 'Michaelmas, that was. I heard that their lease ran out then and it was bought for this college, whatever that place might be.'

Thomas could never resist airing his knowledge of anything remotely academic. 'It's one of these new schools that are springing up in some cities - Oxford was the first, but a few other places are now aping Paris and Bologna.'

'I thought schools were where young boys and girls learned to read and write,' offered the more philistine Gwyn, picking shreds of pork from his teeth. 'Like the one in Winchester where you got into trouble, Thomas,' he added slyly.

The clerk's pinched face coloured immediately. 'I was totally innocent, as you well know - you great Cornish clown,' he retorted, with a sharpness that was unusual for him. Now that he had been vindicated of the allegations that had got him ejected in disgrace from the priesthood, he was even more sensitive than before about having the matter brought up.

'Who's this man Anglicus they call Magister?' asked Nesta.

'He's the fellow who runs the establishment, the prime teacher there, though I understand there are two others under him,' explained de Wolfe. 'But what amazed me was to find that my dear brother-in-law actually owns the place - and no doubt puts the profits into his purse.'

Thomas nodded eagerly, his annoyance with Gwyn forgotten. 'He may be on to a good thing, such schools are becoming popular now. Some have sprung up in Northampton and Norwich, but the best-known outside Oxford is here in Exeter, where the poet Joseph Iscanus is magister.'

'So what do they teach, if it's not reading and writing?' asked Nesta.

'How to smoke corpses, by the looks of it!' scoffed Gwyn, getting another scourging glare from Thomas.

'Here it would be the trivium,' the clerk expounded, his own enthusiasm as a teacher spurring him on. 'The three great subjects, Grammar, Rhetoric and Logic. If the school succeeds, then later they may go on to the quadrivium, Arithmetic, Geometry, Astronomy and Music - and even Physic.'

Impatient with this academic lecture, the coroner turned to his officer and demanded to know if he had any news about the dead man.

'There's no gossip at the four taverns I visited earlier to suggest anyone's missing,' said Gwyn dolefully. 'The trouble with a big city like Exeter is that folks come and go every day, and no one takes any notice.' He paused to take a huge draught of ale, before continuing. 'In a manor, the tithings keep a strict watch on each member and every villager knows every other freeman and villein but here, you can walk in and out of the five gates and unless you're driving a pig or pushing a barrow, no one says a word to you.'

The coroner turned to Thomas de Peyne. 'What about you? Any whispers amongst you holy men?' As well as being his clerk, the little man .had part-time employment in the cathedral, teaching some of the choristers to read, working on the archives in the scriptorium and saying early masses for the wealthy deceased who had left annuities for perpetual prayers. It gave him a good opportunity to keep his ear to the ecclesiastical ground, as he was probably the most inquisitive man in Devon. However, today he had drawn a blank in respect of the murdered corpse from the forge.

'Nothing at all, Crowner,' he admitted sadly. 'From the appearance of his clothing, I think he was a tradesman or merchant, rather than anything to do with the cathedral Close, though of course there are plenty of lay people associated with the running of the diocese.'

With an admonition to them both to keep trying on the following day, John lazily stood and, with a wink at Nesta, said he was going out into the backyard of the inn to unburden himself of some of his ale against the fence. Gwyn and Thomas knew from experience that this was their cue to leave and reluctantly tore themselves away from the firepit to go out into the cold night air of Idle Lane, where Thomas set off for the room which he shared with a vicar-choral from the cathedral and the Cornishman made for yet another alehouse, with the excellent excuse that he was spying for his master.

CHAPTER THREE

In which Crowner John suffers his brother-in-law

Next morning, the coroner was obliged to attend the Tuesday hangings, to record the event and officially to seize the property of the four felons, which was forfeit to the Crown. The executions were held outside the city at Heavitree, where the gallows stood along Magdalene Street, one of the main roads going eastwards.

Thomas was there to scribe the details on his parchment sheets, and as usual Gwyn followed in the shadow of his master, partly as bodyguard, but mainly as assistant and companion, as he had done for twenty years in Irish rain, French mists and Levantine sunshine.

After the wretched victims had dropped from the crossbar of the high scaffold with ropes around their necks, the coroner's team made their way back to the South Gate and de Wolfe strode reluctantly towards his house, aggrieved that no legal emergency had cropped up to use as an excuse to avoid dinner with his brother-in-law. He heard Richard de Revelle' s braying voice as soon as he entered the vestibule and groaned as he lifted the latch of the hall and went inside.

Richard was sitting in John's chair near the hearth, drinking their best wine from one of the glass goblets that were brought out only on special occasions. Matilda, in her best brocade kirtle, sat opposite and scowled at her husband as he entered.

'You're late, John. I've had to tell Mary to wait before serving the food.'

'Well, I'm here now. Some of us have duties to attend to,' he retorted, with a meaningful nod at her brother.

He went to a side table and poured himself some wine, pointedly using a pottery cup instead of one of the heavy glasses he had bought at considerable cost in France some years earlier. 'Matilda tells me you had something to discuss with me, Richard,' he grunted.

'Let that rest until we have eaten,' commanded his wife, as Mary came in with a wooden tray bearing a boiled duck. They came to the table and began eating, today using pewter plates instead of the usual bread trenchers. Bowls of cabbage, onions and beans were brought in from the kitchen shed, together with a large jug of a different wine. The courteous Richard cut slices from the plump bird with his knife and placed them on his sister's platter before serving himself, leaving John to fend for himself.

As de Wolfe had recently ruined de Revelle's political ambitions and come within a whisker of having him arrested and possibly hanged, it was hardly surprising that the atmosphere was strained. However, the former sheriff was beholden to John several times over, and he could not afford to be too openly antagonistic to the coroner, especially as de Wolfe still had enough evidence to have him indicted for treason over Richard's support for the rebellious Prince John.

They began eating in a state of muted truce, the dapper Richard making some small talk, largely with his sister, leaving John to chew undisturbed and to regard their visitor from under his black eyebrows. He saw a slight man of average height, with wavy brown hair and a small pointed beard which made his face look triangular. Like his sister, Richard had rather small brown eyes, which darted restlessly around, giving him a shifty appearance that matched what John knew of his nature. But what most drew the attention was the splendour of his dress, for though he was not as showy as John's trading partner, Hugh de Relaga, de Revelle had expensive tastes in costume. He wore a calf-length tunic of the best green linen, heavily embroidered around the neck and hem with gold thread, and, clinching his waist, a wide belt of elaborately tooled leather. Over these he wore an open surcoat of fine yellow wool, while on a hook behind the screens hung a further defence against the chill of winter, a heavy, fur-lined mantle of blue cloth. As they ate, Richard regaled his sister with details of the house he had just bought in the city.