This comfortable peace continued for a while, its background the mournful whine of the winter wind as it blew around Exeter Castle. There was the occasional slurping noise, as Gwyn washed down his food with rough Devon cider from their communal stone jar, ignoring the stringy curds that swirled from the bottom like seaweed in a rock pool.
As he concentrated on the neatly written vocabulary, the coroner’s brow creased with the effort of making sense of these marks on the parchment. His clerk looked up covertly now and then to will his master to make a success of his studies.
The unfortunate Thomas was a born teacher and, had he known of it, would have agreed wholeheartedly with the quotation ‘Far more than the calf wishes to suck, doth the cow wish to give suck’. His sly glances showed him a tall, lean man, who gave a potent impression of blackness. De Wolfe had thick, neck-length black hair, and though, unlike the usual Norman fashion, he had no beard or moustache, his long face was dark with stubble between his twice-weekly shaves. Bushy black eyebrows surmounted a hooked nose and deep-set eye sockets, from which a pair of hooded eyes looked out cynically on the world. The only relief to this hardness was provided by his rather full lips, which hinted at a sensuality that many women, both in Devon and much further afield, could happily confirm.
Black John, as he had sometimes been called in the Holy Land, enhanced his dark appearance by his choice of garments. He rarely wore anything but black or grey, and his tall, sinewy body with its slight stoop often looked like some great bird of prey. When his black cloak swung widely from his hunched shoulders, some men said he was like a huge crow – though others compared him more to a vulture.
The little clerk turned down his eyes again and was just reaching the end of his inquest record when their tranquillity was broken. He had barely scratched the final date on the parchment with his quill – ‘the Second Day of December in the Year of Our Lord Eleven Hundred and Ninety-four’ – when footsteps and the clanking of a broadsword scabbard sounded on the narrow staircase coming up from the guard-room below.
Their tiny office, grudgingly allotted to them two months ago, was the most cramped and inconvenient chamber the sheriff could find in the whole of Rougemont, perched high in the gate-tower set in the inner curtain wall. Three heads turned to see who would appear in the doorway, a hole in the wall draped with rough hessian in a futile attempt to reduce the draughts. This sacking was pulled aside and a sergeant-at-arms appeared, dressed in the usual peacetime uniform of a basin-shaped metal helmet with a nose-guard, a long over-tunic with some chainmail on the shoulders, and cross-gartering on the hose below the knees. His baldric, a leather strap slung across one shoulder, supported a large, clumsy sword that dangled from his left hip.
Gwyn climbed down from his stool, his towering height causing his tousled ginger hair almost to touch the ceiling beams. ‘Gabriel, be damned! You’re too late to eat, but there’s some drink left.’ Hospitably, he held out the stone jar to the sergeant, who took a deep draught after nodding a greeting to everyone.
Gabriel was one of the senior members of the castle garrison, a grizzled and scarred veteran of some of the same wars that John de Wolfe and Gwyn had fought in Normandy, Ireland and France although, unlike them, he had never been crusading to the Holy Land. He was an old friend and a covert antagonist of the sheriff, Richard de Revelle, who unfortunately was his ultimate lord and master, though Gabriel’s immediate superior was Ralph Morin, the castle constable.
The coroner casually slid his Latin lesson under some other parchments and leaned back on his bench, his long arms planted on the table. ‘What brings you here, Gabriel? Just a social visit to sample our cider?’
The sergeant touched the brim of his helmet in salute. He respected John de Wolfe both for his rank as a knight and for his military pedigree. Though his relations with the new coroner’s team were relaxed, he took care not to be over-familiar with this tall, dark, hawkish man who, after the sheriff, was the most senior law officer in the county of Devon.
‘No, Sir John, I bring a message from Sir Richard.’
The coroner groaned. Relations with his brother-in-law were more strained than usual, since the controversy last month over the murder in Widecombe.
The problem of jurisdiction over criminal deaths between sheriff and coroner was still unresolved and remained a bone of contention between them, so any message from Richard de Revelle was hardly likely to be good news. But John was to be surprised.
‘The sheriff’s compliments to you, Crowner, and he asks, will you please deal with three deaths reported from Torre?’
John’s black eyebrows rose on his saturnine face, crinkling the old sword scar on his forehead. ‘Good God! He’s actually asking me to deal with them? What’s the catch, Gabriel?’
The old soldier shrugged, his lined face wooden. He was not going to get involved in the well-known power struggle between Sir John and the sheriff, whatever his own personal sympathies.
‘Don’t know, sir, but he doesn’t want to go down there himself. Far too busy, he says, with the Chief Justiciar coming to Exeter in a few days’ time.’
Hubert Walter, the Justiciar and Archbishop of Canterbury, was virtually ruler of England now that King Richard had gone permanently back to France. He was to visit Exeter at the end of that week and one of his tasks would be to try to settle this demarcation dispute between coroner and sheriff.
Thomas de Peyne, the crook-backed clerk, made the Sign of the Cross at the mention of the Archbishop – an obsessional habit he had developed since the mental trauma of being dismissed from the priesthood two years earlier. It was a counterpoint to Gwyn, who was prone to frequent and vigorous scratching of his crotch. ‘What sort of deaths are these?’ he demanded, in his squeaky voice, thinking ahead as to how much writing he would have to do on his sheepskin rolls.
Gabriel took off his helmet to run a horny hand through his greying hair. ‘All I know is that a messenger came in from Torre an hour ago, saying that a hermit monk turned up there last night with a story of three corpses on the beach somewhere between Paignton and Torpoint. Drowned sailors, most likely. Doesn’t sound very exciting.’
John snorted. ‘Doubtless why my dear brother-in-law is content to leave them to me. No glory or fame for him in a few wet corpses. Any more details?’
‘Only that this hermit fellow knows most about the matter. His name is Wulfstan and he lives in a cave near Torre. We’ve heard nothing about it from William de Brewere, the manor lord, or his bailiff.’
The coroner clucked his tongue in annoyance. ‘We’ll hear nothing from Lord William, he’s always away on his political campaigning – the manors there are run by his son, the younger William.’ He smacked a big hand on the table. ‘How I’m supposed to carry out my royal warrant to keep the Pleas of the Crown with such scanty knowledge, God alone knows!’
Gwyn wiped a hand the size of a small ham across his wild moustache, which hung down each side of his mouth and chin like a red curtain. ‘What are we supposed to do about this, Gabriel?’
‘Sir Richard requests that the crowner find this monk and carry on from there. He devoted no more than a couple of heartbeats to the problem.’
De Wolfe rose, his grey-black figure hovering over the scatter of documents on his table. ‘It’s now about mid-morning. We can be there before nightfall, so let’s go.’ He took his heavy wolf-skin riding cloak from a wooden peg hammered between the stones of the wall and picked up his sheathed sword from the floor, then led the way to the stairs.
The winter dusk was falling as the trio trotted along the final mile of coastal track towards the village of Paignton. The coroner was on his massive grey stallion Bran, a pensioned-off warhorse with hairy feet. Just behind him was Gwyn on a big brown mare, while Thomas jogged along side-saddle on a small but wiry pony.