‘Never heard of them!’ said Gwyn gruffly. He had no fondness for priests or monks.
‘They are followers of Saint Norbert, and are come to pray for the souls of old King Henry and his son, our present Richard Coeur de Lion.’
‘He’s not dead yet, thank Christ,’ objected John.
Wulfstan again smiled his gentle smile. ‘It comes to us all, my son. William de Brewere is being generous with his land for the sake of his own soul and to give thanks for the safe return of his son from durance in Germany.’
William the Younger had been one of the hostages sent as surety for the payment of the huge ransom of a hundred and fifty thousand marks for the release of King Richard, whose capture near Vienna still troubled John’s conscience: he and Gwyn had been part of the royal bodyguard, yet had been unable to save him from seizure. But this was far from the problem now in hand.
Gwyn pulled off his leather helmet to scratch his ruddy thatch. ‘You think they were pillaging the wreck of a vessel, then?’
Wulfstan nodded. ‘Maybe not only pillaging it but getting rid of witnesses. I wouldn’t put it past them to wreck a ship deliberately, with false beacons, though the weather was foul enough for a ship to founder anyway, on that lee shore with an easterly gale.’
‘Have you any notion of what vessel it might have been?’ asked the coroner.
The older man shook his head, and Thomas stood back hastily in case any lice were flung off in his direction. ‘I saw nothing except shattered timbers on the sand.’
There seemed little more to learn from Wulfstan and, with some relief, the coroner led the way down to their horses. By this time the daylight had almost gone, and they rode slowly back along the track to the village, lit fitfully by a moon that constantly dodged in and out of the rapidly scudding clouds.
‘The man seems definite about this, for all that he’s an odd character,’ Gwyn grunted, in his deep bass voice, his usual way of communicating.
‘He is obviously at odds with the villagers – probably some old feud between them. But his story had a ring of truth,’ replied John, his grey form almost invisible in the gloom.
Thomas, unwilling to be left out of the big men’s discussion, piped up from the rear. ‘The coroner’s writ is doubly valid in this,’ he offered.
‘What are you on about, dwarf?’ growled Gwyn. He pretended to despise the ex-priest, though he would have defended him to the death.
‘A possible killing, and a definite wreck of the sea,’ pointed out the clerk. ‘Both well within the crowner’s jurisdiction.’
‘That had occurred to me already,’ snapped de Wolfe sarcastically.
‘Why are you charged with investigating wrecks, for Mary’s sake?’ demanded the Cornishman.
‘All part of Hubert Walter’s plan to revive the royal treasury. Too much money due to the King has been lost these past few years. Crooked sheriffs and manorial lords have all helped to impoverish the royal purse.’
‘So why wrecks?’
‘Everything washed up on the shores of the kingdom has traditionally belonged to the Crown.’
‘Including the Royal Fish – the whale and the sturgeon,’ chipped in the know-all Thomas.
‘Damn the fish! It’s these thieving villagers stealing everything from a wrecked ship, valuables that should have gone to the King’s coffers. The sheriff said nothing about that, I notice, only about corpses that have no value.’
‘Maybe he didn’t know,’ observed Gwyn reasonably.
Just then, the moon appeared through a wide gap in the clouds and they took the opportunity to speed up to a trot along the track. Here, so near the sea, the forest was thin and low, bent by the Channel winds that blew salt air across the land. Within minutes, they reached Torre again, a few glimmers of light escaping from the unglazed windows crudely shuttered against the keening wind.
‘Too late to do anything now, with the daylight gone,’ grumbled John. ‘May as well settle for the night and make a start early in the morning.’
Gwyn led them along the double row of huts that was the village, the church and tithe barn the only larger buildings visible in the fleeting moonlight. Opposite the barn was a dwelling slightly larger than the rest, but with the same steep thatched roof, grass and moss growing from the old straw. There was no chimney and smoke drifted out from under the eaves.
The sound of their horses’ hoofs brought Aelfric, the Saxon manor reeve, to his door. His youngest son was sent out to take the mounts to a shed at the back, where they were unharnessed, fed and watered. The arrival of a king’s officer, however unwelcome, demanded automatic hospitality from the agent of the lord of the manor, even though the function of his new-fangled post of coroner was poorly understood.
The reeve had a vague idea, gleaned from the manor steward, that Justiciar Walter, in the name of the King, had revived the old Saxon office of coroner. In September, the General Eyre of judges in Kent had decreed that, in every county, three knights and a clerk be appointed to ‘keep the Pleas of the Crown’. If he had had the education of Thomas, he would have known that in Latin this was custos placitorum coronae, from which sprang the title of ‘coroner’. Keeping these Pleas meant recording all legal events, such as the imposition of fines, seizing of deodands, investigation of sudden and unnatural deaths, taking the confessions of sanctuary seekers, confiscation of the property of hanged felons, and a host of others that were required to be presented to the royal judges, who visited each county periodically to dispense what passed for justice.
Aelfric understood little of this. He was an older man than those who usually held the job of village headman. A widowed freeman, his house was run by a crippled daughter. His two sons cultivated his croft and gave the usual work-service to the manor.
It was the daughter who now brought the coroner’s team a meal of broth and coarse bread, which they ate sitting around the fire in the centre of the earthen floor. There was no furniture in the room, but against the walls were heaps of dry bracken and straw covered with rough blankets, doing service as the family’s beds.
‘Thought a reeve could have risen to a table and a couple of stools,’ muttered Gwyn, as he wolfed down the last of the soup from his warped wooden bowl.
Aelfric had gone out again, allegedly to check on the horses, and the woman had vanished into the lean-to shed attached to the back of the house, which served her as kitchen and dairy. A milking cow was tethered at the other end of the long room, behind a wattle screen that divided the living quarters from the stable, though it failed to divert the strong smell of fresh dung.
Sir John’s business-like mind was on other things that his comfort. ‘This miserable village is the nearest to the wreck, so they must be the ones involved,’ he said. ‘Thomas, you are the best at ferreting out secrets so get yourself outside when you’ve finished that crust and see what you can discover.’
The diminutive clerk, flattered at his master’s faith in his ability as a spy, swallowed the last crumbs and slid out of the door. His narrow face and long nose were almost quivering at the prospect of doing something useful for the coroner. Though the other two usually treated him with impatient scorn, he felt a loyalty to Sir John born mainly of the gratitude he felt for his master having saved him from shame and destitution. Until two years ago, Thomas de Peyne, the youngest son of a minor knight in Hampshire, had been a teacher-priest at Winchester Cathedral, holding the living of a small parish nearby, which brought him in a regular stipend. Then he was disgraced and dismissed for an alleged indecent assault on one of his young female pupils. Though he steadfastly claimed that the girl had maliciously led him astray, he had been unfrocked and had lost his living and his lodgings. He had remained semi-destitute, eking out a bare existence by scribing letters for merchants, until John took him on as coroner’s clerk. Humpbacked he might be, from old phthisis when a child, but a crafty intelligence and undoubted prowess with the written word compensated for his lack of good looks.