‘Thomas, you know much of what goes on in the Close,’ he said suddenly, in his deep, sonorous voice. ‘Have there been any whispers or scandals there recently?’
The clerk, always eager to air his eccelesiastical knowledge, put down his quill. His bright button eyes fixed on the coroner and his head tilted like a bird. Like his master, he always wore black or grey, though his long tube-like tunic was shabby and worn, as he was poorer than the most penurious church mouse. ‘Nothing about Robert de Hane, Crowner. He was the quietest of all the canons. He had no mistress or secret family placed in a distant village, like some of his fellows.’
‘As far as you know, toad,’ trumpeted Gwyn. ‘I wouldn’t trust any priest out of my sight with half a penny – or with my wife!’
De Wolfe had never discovered the cause of the Cornishman’s antipathy to the clergy, in spite of being daily in his company for the past twenty years. ‘Is there nothing these days to set tongues clacking about the cathedral?’ persisted the coroner. ‘With all those servants, vicars, secondaries, choristers, surely there must be some jealousies and intrigues afoot!’
Thomas racked his brains to dredge up some scandal to satisfy his master and bolster his own reputation as a source of inside information. He slept rent-free on a straw mattress in a servants’ hut behind one of the canon’s houses, thanks to the intercession of his uncle, the Archdeacon. He ate sparingly, either at food stalls in the streets or sometimes cooked a little of his own food in the kitchen hut in the backyard. On a salary of twopence a day, which came from the coroner’s own purse, he would never get rich, but at least he would survive. That was more than he could have said of the previous two years, when he had almost starved to death in Winchester. The youngest son of a Hampshire knight, his spine and hip had been afflicted as a child by the disease that had killed his mother, but an aptitude for learning had directed him into the Church. After ordination, he had become a diocesan clerk and junior teacher at Winchester, where he had become valuable as an excellent writer of Latin. His teaching duties had been his downfall, as his pupils included some young girl novices from the nunnery. His physical faults, such as the bent back, the limp and the lazy eye, had made him so unattractive to women that he had no experience of them at all. When one precocious novice amused herself by making eyes at him, his clumsy attempts to embrace her had resulted in a charge of attempted rape. Poor Thomas had been arrested by the cathedral proctors and only the fact that he was a priest and that the alleged offence had occurred in the precinct saved him from the sheriff’s justice and a probable hanging. As it was, the Consistory Court had tried him and summarily ejected him from the priesthood, which meant that his stipend and lodgings vanished. He had tried to eke out an existence by writing letters for tradesmen, but after a year or so, he had been virtually in rags and starving.
Desperate, he had walked to Exeter to throw himself on the mercy of his father’s brother, Archdeacon John of Alencon. His uncle gave him a little money to keep him alive and promised to look out for some suitable employment. In September, the newly appointed coroner had needed a clerk to keep his inquest rolls and the Archdeacon had prevailed upon his friend John de Wolfe to take the disgraced priest on probation. In spite of the largely assumed scorn with which the two big fighting men treated the stunted clerk, the arrangement worked well and Thomas’s undoubted skill with a pen was reinforced by his value as a seeker-out of information. He was incurably inquisitive and had a knack of worming information from people and sifting gossip, which the coroner had found invaluable in the tightly knit communities of Devonshire.
Now, however, as Thomas tried to recall any recent rumours that might in any way be connected to the murder of the canon, nothing came to mind. ‘The only hints of intrigue I’ve heard in the Close concern outside matters – and they were political, rather than ecclesiastical,’ he said thoughtfully, tapping his chin with the end of the feathered quill.
Gwyn, who was lifting a stone jar of cider on to the sill, was scornful of the clerk’s efforts to be useful. ‘We’ve got a dead canon to deal with, so what’s politics got to do with it?’
‘Let’s hear about it, anyway,’ countered de Wolfe. ‘We’ve nothing else to follow up.’
Thomas made a rude face at the Cornishman before continuing. ‘It’s only a glimmer of a rumour, really, but I overheard it several times from different people. They were guarded and spoke in a roundabout way, but I had the impression that some of the barons and, indeed, some prominent churchmen are chafing at the way the King seems to have abandoned England for Normandy and left William Longchamp as Chancellor and Hubert Walter as Chief Justiciar.’
De Wolfe was indignant. ‘King Richard would never abandon his country, for Christ’s sake! He has to fight that yellow-bellied Philip of France to keep Normandy intact, after John – that fool he has for a brother – tried to give it away when he was imprisoned in Germany.’ The coroner was almost obsessively loyal to Richard, after serving him so closely at the Crusade: he took any criticism of his monarch as a personal affront.
Thomas was immediately on the defensive. ‘I’m only repeating the gossip, Crowner. Everyone hates Longchamp and though Archbishop Walter,’ he paused to cross himself, ‘is not himself unpopular, these crushing taxes he has imposed to support the King’s campaigns certainly are.’
Gwyn joined in the argument as he reached for the loaf and hunk of cheese that were sitting in a stone niche in the bare wall. ‘People have always grumbled about their rulers and their taxes. It’s only natural.’ He hacked off a culf of bread for each of them with his dagger and chopped the hard cheese into three portions. ‘So what’s this to do with our dead canon?’ he asked, handing round the food.
‘Nothing, I suppose. I was only repeating what tittle-tattle is current,’ squeaked Thomas.
De Wolfe stared suspiciously at his clerk. ‘Is it just idle talk, Thomas? I know you, and your crafty mind wouldn’t have brought this up unless you knew something more.’
The scribe wriggled on his stool. ‘Not so much what is said, Crowner, as the way some people around the cathedral are talking. They look over their shoulders and lower their voices – or change the subject if they sense me eavesdropping.’
‘That’s no wonder, everyone knows what a nosy little turd you are!’ growled the Cornishman, pouring rough cider from a stone jar into three mugs set on the table.
Thomas made a vulgar gesture at him with two fingers, borrowed from the archers who had escaped having their bowstring digits chopped off by their enemies. ‘More than that, Sir John, I overheard, at a small feast for St Justinian the other day, two vicars-choral who had their heads together over the wine. It seems one had heard the cathedral Precentor, Thomas de Boterellis, talking to another canon after Chapter. They were discussing some imminent meeting with the Count of Mortaigne, at which Bishop Marshal was to be present. They broke off when they saw they were being overheard.’
The coroner chewed this over in his head. Prince John was the Count of Mortaigne: it was one of the titles – to a Normandy province – that the King had recently restored to him, as part of his forgiveness for having plotted against him. The Prince had been across the Channel for most of the time since Richard’s release last March, but he was reported to have been seen back in England recently.
‘Why shouldn’t the bishop talk to his sovereign’s brother?’ Gwyn always contradicted the clerk on principle.