Again, he announced this in such a way as to give the impression that he was doing the coroner a great favour.
'And what exactly is this business?' grated de Wolfe. 'Your servant seemed to have little idea of it, apart from the fact that there is a corpse.'
Sir Luke rubbed his hands together almost gleefully, as if this was a special treat he had arranged for the king's coroner. 'Indeed there is, my friend! I will conduct you to it without delay.'
He made no effort to enquire whether de Wolfe and his assistants needed food, drink and rest after their long ride from the city, but at that moment there was a diversion. Through the open gate under its stone arch, two men came striding purposefully towards them. The first was a powerfully built man with coarse features and a rim of black beard around his fleshy face. He had a mouth like a rat-trap and cold deep-set eyes under brows as dark as the coroner's own. He marched straight up to de Wolfe, completely ignoring the Keeper.
'I am Edward Northcote, bailiff to the Prior of Loders, who holds this manor,' he snapped. 'If you are the coroner, then you have had a wasted journey. You were sent for without my knowledge or consent.'
Within minutes, John now had another person to dislike on sight. He was not disposed to be ordered about by some prior's servant.
'If there is a dead body lying here, then I will be the judge of that,' he growled. 'Unless it died of a sickness, with witnesses to testify to that, then it comes under my jurisdiction, as granted to me by the king and his Council!' He added the last part to give weight to his royal appointment.
The other man who had arrived with the bailiff now spoke up, in a more conciliatory tone. 'We realise that, Crowner, but wished to have saved you a fruitless journey from Exeter. No doubt this is just some poor seafarer washed up from God knows where.'
'Nonsense! The fellow was done to death violently, not drowned,' brayed Luke de Casewold, his podgy features red with anger at being contradicted by Elias Palmer, the portreeve, a rake-thin man with sparse greying hair and a long narrow face. He wore a long tunic down to his calves. It was of a nondescript buff colour and the front was spattered with ink stains. Most manors had a reeve to organise the farming activities, but in Axmouth it was different, as agriculture played a much smaller part in the village economy. Though it was not a chartered borough, it was important enough by virtue of its harbour to have some officials, and Palmer had been appointed as portreeve by the Priory of Loders, which lay some twenty miles away in Dorset, to supervise all trading in the town. The manor itself was in the charge of the prior's bailiff, the aggressive Edward Northcote, so between them they were the effective rulers of Axmouth.
The coroner held up his hand to quell the argument developing between them and the Keeper of the Peace. 'I'm here now, so let's settle matters by letting me see the corpse,' he commanded. 'But tell me first the circumstances of its discovery.'
De Casewold turned and beckoned imperiously to someone in the group of onlookers. 'It's best coming from the First Finder, as is proper!' he brayed, again making John want to kick the man's rump for trying to tell a coroner his business. He was surprised when an elderly man in a long black robe, his grey hair shaved into a clerical tonsure, stepped forward. Completely toothless, his mouth had caved in, his sharp hooked nose pointing down at his chin.
'Here's one of your lot!' muttered Gwyn into Thomas's ear as the old priest came up to them. The clerk scowled at him for his habitual irreverence, then turned and smiled at the priest and murmured a greeting in Latin.
'This is Henry of Cumba, the parish priest of St Michael's there,' said Luke, waving a hand towards the church tower. 'It was he who found the body.'
Father Henry's lined face looked apprehensive as he confronted the forbidding figure of the coroner, and he spoke up in a quavering voice. 'I had an old hound, of which I was very fond, sir,' he began.
At this apparent irrelevance, John wondered if the aged priest's mind was wandering, but the old man soon made it clear.
'The poor beast died yesterday, mainly of old age, as I had had him more than a dozen years. Rather than cast his body on to the village midden, I thought I owed it to him to bury him decently, so took a spade and wrapped him in a sack.'
Gwyn, an ardent dog-lover, nodded his appreciation of the old man's humanity, as Henry carried on with his tale.
'I went outside the walls — through this very gate, in fact — and sought a place to dig a hole, well beyond those cottages.' He pointed back up the sloping track down which the coroner had approached the village. 'Behind a hazel bush, I began to dig, as I saw a patch of soft earth which would be easier to shift, my old backbone not being as strong as it used to be.'
'Get to the point, man!' urged the Keeper irritably.
'Well, not more than a spade's depth down, I unearthed a foot, and a couple more strokes showed me a whole leg. I stopped digging and uttered a prayer or two to shrive the poor fellow, then went back to the village to tell someone.'
'What happened to the dog?' asked Gwyn.
'Oh, I buried him first, twenty paces away,' the priest reassured him.
The bailiff and portreeve were becoming impatient with this long-winded tale from their rather vague old vicar. 'Why did you not come straight to me?' demanded Edward Northcote belligerently. 'We could have settled the matter quickly and you could have given the man a decent burial in your churchyard, without all this unnecessary fuss with the coroner.'
Henry of Cumba smiled weakly at the bailiff. 'I intended to seek you out — but I met the Keeper here as I entered the gate and told him instead.'
'Just as well I happened to be here on my weekly perambulation from Axminster,' said Luke de Casewold breezily. 'From what he told me, it was a clear case for the coroner, not one to be brushed aside for the sake of convenience.'
'Nonsense! You're just an interfering busybody!' shouted Northcote, his hard features twisted in anger.
Incensed by this insult, the Keeper once again went red in the face and rattled his sword in its scabbard. 'Have a care, bailiff! You are just a servant, albeit of a priory — but I am a knight of the realm and deserve respect from such as you! One of the reasons that our blessed King Richard set up Keepers last year was because of the laxity and corruption of sergeants and bailiffs.'
Again, John de Wolfe stepped in to quell the developing fight — if he had had a bucket of water, he would have thrown it over them, as if they were two dogs snarling in the street. 'Enough of this! I wish to see the body, straight away. I trust it has not been moved?'
De Casewold shook himself, like an angry cockerel settling its feathers.
'Of course not, Crowner! I know the law: the cadaver must be left in situ until viewed by the coroner. Though I had the nearest householders to put up hurdles around it to keep off dogs and foxes overnight.'
They set off back up the track, the Keeper of the Peace marching ahead importantly with his clerk trailing behind him. They were followed by the coroner's party, then the locals, headed by the bailiff and portreeve.
As they passed the few small thatched huts that straggled up from the town, heads poked out from each doorway, peering at these strangers from distant Exeter. Everyone knew that the coroner had been called, but no one wished to become involved unless they were forced to, as any contact with the law was likely to prove inconvenient and expensive in terms of attachments and amercements.
As they walked, John turned and beckoned to the portreeve to catch him up. 'Why did you say this was only a sailor whose body happened to be washed up here?' he asked. 'He could hardly get himself washed into a grave behind a hazel bush,' he added sarcastically.