‘I told you, I’m back to normal again. You don’t have to complain about me riding a horse. God knows, I’ve had worse injuries than this in my campaigning days.’
He hauled up his stocking again and stood up. ‘Now that I’ve prised a makeshift chamber from your brother, I can get back to business.’
The mention of Richard de Revelle silenced her, as usual now since he had so narrowly escaped disgrace. After a moment, she abruptly changed the subject. ‘It’s high time the Justiciar, or someone in Winchester or London, filled these vacant coronerships,’ she said. ‘Walter Fitzrogo fell from his horse more than six months ago and has never been replaced. Even before that, the county was one crowner short – and then you go acting the fool and break a leg. Is that any way to run a country?’ She might have added that it would be better for England if the king stayed at home and paid more attention to the affairs of his realm, but she knew that criticism of the Lionheart would stir her husband into a passionate diatribe of loyalty to his sovereign.
‘Well, no one wants the job, so I’ve got to make the best of it,’ he growled, tired of the same old complaints from his wife. He sensed that she was leading up to another tirade about his being away from home so much, neglecting her and failing especially to pander to the social life of the county aristocracy, which meant so much to her.
‘You’ll be forcing yourself on to that great horse every hour of the day just to defy me! You’ll regret it – that leg is not yet fit for riding. You’ll fall from the saddle like Fitzrogo, or get a purulent fever in the bone. I suppose you’d like to make me a widow, just for spite!’
Exasperated at the accuracy of his predictions, John moved towards the door. ‘No fear of that, wife! I’ve not been outside the walls of Exeter these past two months. It’s high time I began getting around more. And that’s just what I’m going to do now. I’ve not been through one of the city gates since they carried me home on a cart from Bull Mead.’
He banged the heavy door behind him, and as he sat on the bench in the vestibule to pull on his riding boots, Mary appeared from the passageway. ‘Did I hear raised voices in there?’ she asked. A dark-eyed, attractive woman, she was the bastard daughter of a Norman man-at-arms whose name neither she nor her Saxon mother had ever known.
‘Same old story, that I’m always away and neglecting her – she’s getting back to normal, more’s the pity,’ he muttered. ‘I’m going for a ride around the outside of the walls, if anyone wants me.’
As she handed him his mottled grey wolfskin cloak from a peg on the wall, Mary virtually repeated Matilda’s caution. ‘Watch that leg of yours, Sir Crowner! You’re not as young as you think, remember.’
As he threw the cloak around his shoulders, he gave her a quick kiss. ‘I’m still young enough to creep under your blanket tonight, if you’d let me!’ She pushed him away with mock annoyance, fearful that Matilda or her maid might appear, but de Wolfe pulled open the iron-banded front door and stepped into the narrow street.
A few minutes later, he was riding Odin sedately through the Close around the cathedral, picking his way along the criss-crossing paths between the piles of rubbish and earth from new graves that made such an unsightly contrast to the soaring church with its two great towers. Urchins ran around yelling or playing ball and hawkers touted shrivelled apples and meat pies to the loungers and gossipers who stood or squatted around the untidy precinct. He came out through Bear Gate into Southgate Street and pushed his way past the throng around the butcher’s stalls, where more hawkers squatted behind their baskets of produce. With almost a sense of adventure, he passed under the arch of the South Gate, with its prison cells in the towers on each side, and emerged from the city for the first time in many weeks. Ahead of him, past the small houses, huts and shacks that had sprung up outside the walls, the road forked into Holloway and Magdalen Street, leading to Honiton, Yeovil and, eventually, distant Winchester and London, which to most residents of Exeter were as remote as the moon.
De Wolfe turned right and followed the city wall steeply down towards the river, where a number of small vessels were beached on the muddy banks. A stone quay and some thatched storehouses lay at the corner of the walls, where the line of the ancient Roman defences turned towards the West Gate and the road to South Devon and Cornwall. He plodded along slowly, taking in the familiar sight of the broad, shallow river, which meandered through the swampy islands that carried the mean shacks of the workers from the fulling mills which processed the wool that was the prime wealth of England.
Reining in Odin at the edge of one of the broad reens of muddy water that separated Exe Island from the bank, he watched the traffic coming out of the West Gate. Those on foot or with small handcarts, even some on a donkey or pony, used the rickety wooden footbridge that spanned the river and the grassy mud to reach the further bank. Large vehicles, like the ox-carts with their huge wooden wheels, and anyone on horseback had to ford the river, which here was just at the upper limit of the tidal reach.
His gaze travelled to the stone bridge, the huge project still less than half finished. The builders, Nicholas Gervase and his son Walter, had completed seven of the eighteen arches needed to span the marshy river, but even though they were wealthy mill-owners, their funds had run out. Until they could raise more from the burgesses and churchmen of Devon, travellers would still have to clamber or wade across the Exe. Even though it was incomplete, the city end of the bridge already had a chapel built on it, with a resident priest, a token of Nicholas’s beholdenment to his ecclesiastical paymasters.
As John de Wolfe sat taking his ease on the broad back of his stallion, watching life go by with almost lazy contentment, he became aware of another horse coming up behind him at a trot. Without needing to turn, he knew from the clip of the hoofs that it was Gwyn’s big brown mare and a twinge of annoyance came over him at the idea that he needed a nursemaid on such a short jaunt as this.
Then he wondered whether the Cornishman had managed to seize his mysterious stalker, but as his officer stopped alongside, he found that he was wrong on both counts.
‘Mary told me you’d be somewhere outside the walls,’ grunted Gwyn. ‘I thought I’d best find you now, in case you wanted to make some arrangements for the morning.’
De Wolfe’s black eyebrows rose up his forehead. ‘What arrangements?’
‘A rider has just come to Rougemont from Oliver de Tracey’s bailiff at Barnstaple to report a murdered man on a wrecked ship at Ilfracombe.’
John whistled through his teeth. ‘A wreck and a killing? Both of those are crowner’s business, Gwyn. Any more details?’
The big man shook his shaggy red head. ‘The messenger knew little. He had been riding since noon yesterday. The body was found the night before, it seems.’
The coroner lifted a gloved hand to rub the bridge of his beaked nose, a mannerism he had that seemed to aid thought, much as Gwyn scratched his groin and Thomas crossed himself when agitated. ‘A dead man on a ship means either mutiny or piracy. We must go and discover which.’
His officer looked concerned. ‘The north coast is a long way on the back of a nag when you have a poorly leg, Crowner. Let me go in your stead.’
The coroner leaned across and slapped him on the shoulder. ‘Not nearly so far as Palestine, man! We’ll set off within the hour and take it easily. We can get to Crediton by nightfall, find a night’s rest there and get an early start to Barnstaple in the morning.’
The Cornishman still looked doubtful. ‘Your good lady’s not going to like it, you being away for at least three days.’