The coroner turned his attention to the mouth and turned down the lower lip to look at the teeth, still tightly clenched in rigor mortis.
Gwyn, the former fisherman, was better acquainted with drowning than John de Wolfe, whose considerable experience of death was mainly centred around battle casualties. He said, ‘If you’re looking for froth at the lips, it disperses soon after the body is taken from the water – the bubbles burst and dissolve away in a few hours.’
Having delivered this lecture, for he was usually a man of few words, Gwyn knelt, placed a massive palm on the dead man’s chest and pressed forcibly downwards. The young sailor made his last sound on this earth as air was squeezed from his lungs – and with the macabre gasp came a gout of white foam from his nostrils, seeping down over his lips. The Cornishman stood up and dusted the sand from his hands. ‘That sometimes works for a day or two, though you get more from bodies drowned in rivers or ponds than in this salt sea.’ He sounded satisfied that, for once, he had outdone his master in knowledge of the ways of death.
The other two victims were rapidly unearthed and examined by the coroner and his henchman. One was that of a thin, grey-haired man, probably in his fifties, the other a fat fellow of indeterminate age, with a sodden thatch of yellow hair. He failed Gwyn’s chest pressure test, but the older man produced a little blood-tinged spume from his mouth.
At John’s command, his officer pulled off their belts and rolled the three corpses on to their faces. He lifted their tunics and undershirts to examine the back of each body, but nothing was to be seen, except the lividity of the skin, where gravity had caused the blood to run down after death.
‘Often see them bright pink like that, when they’ve been in cold water.’ The Cornish giant seemed unwilling to forsake his expertise on drowning.
The fronts of the corpses were now examined, the breasts and bellies searched for injuries, but apart from a few scratches on the hands and shins, there seemed no signs of violence.
‘Those grazes are from being dragged across the rocks by the surf – fair hammering in here it was,’ confided Aelfric, helpfully.
John and Gwyn stood up and banged the ubiquitous sand from their hands and clothing. ‘Drowned right enough, so what was that damned hermit on about?’ muttered the coroner’s officer.
‘There’s something amiss with the whole affair,’ murmured John, out of hearing of the reeve. ‘After Thomas’s story last night, we have to get to the bottom of it.’
With the bodies now laid out side by side on the sand, Aelfric and his men looked anxiously at John de Wolfe. ‘Now that you’ve seen the cadavers, Crowner, shall we bury them again?’
‘No, indeed not! They have to be properly identified and presentment of Englishry made, if that’s possible.’
The reeve looked blankly at the King’s coroner. The words meant nothing to him.
John, who had never been a patient man, snapped an explanation. ‘Under the new law, someone must prove to me that these dead men were Saxons. Otherwise it will be assumed that they were Normans and a murdrum fine imposed on your village.’ He ignored the groan from Aelfric and carried on. ‘Already you’re in trouble and liable for amercement for burying the bodies before I had a chance to see them, and until we can put names to these corpses there is no hope of proving they are English or even West Welsh.’
The reeve looked at his men and rolled his eyes upwards in horror at the prospect of double fines when they eventually came before the Justices. ‘But how can we tell who they are, sir? Just bodies washed up from the sea, nothing to do with our village at all!’
John shrugged – his job was merely to enforce the new laws, he felt no responsibility for their existence.
Gwyn, a commoner more in tune with the lowly inhabitants of Torre, felt a little more sympathy and tried to help. He looked around the beach, his shaggy red hair blowing wildly in the gale. ‘Was there nothing to show what vessel this might have been? The dress of these men looks more local than that of Bretons or Frenchmen.’
Aelfric shouted something to one of the men, who scrambled up into the rough grass above the beach and returned with a four-foot length of plank, freshly shattered at both ends.
‘This has some marks on it, but no one here can read.’ The villager held up the board and John studied it gravely, pretending that its message was profoundly significant to him, though in fact the words meant nothing – his tutor at the cathedral was teaching him only Latin grammar.
‘Thomas, what do you make of this?’ he demanded, as if offering the clerk the chance to confirm his opinion.
Thomas took a quick look at the incomplete lettering cut deeply into the oaken board, which had obviously been one of the bow planks of the vessel. It read ‘… ARY OF THE S …’ and below this ‘TOP …’
‘It’s part of the nameboard of the ship,’ he said.
‘So what’s the name?’ demanded John.
‘It’s not complete, the ends are missing, but I suspect it says Mary of the Sea, from Topsham.’ This was a small port on the east bank of the River Exe, where it widened into the tidal estuary a few miles downstream from Exeter.
‘I know the ship!’ exclaimed Gwyn, who had an inborn interest in all things maritime. ‘It’s a vessel belonging to Joseph of Topsham, who runs quite a few boats across to Brittany and Normandy taking wool. He often brings back French victuals, such as wine and fruit.’
John nodded, for Joseph’s vessels often took his own wool across the Channel for sale in France. The coroner had a part-share in a wool business with one of the Portreeves of Exeter. He had wisely invested most of the loot he had won in foreign wars in this business, which together with his share of the family lands at Stoke-in-Teignhead, brought him a comfortable income.
‘So! We must get Joseph to identify these poor souls, if they were his seamen. Might anyone else know who they were?’
Thomas, whose nosy nature made him a mine of Exeter gossip, had a suggestion. ‘With wine on board, then surely Eric Picot would be involved. He is the main importer into Exeter and supplies most of the nobility and the taverns. In fact, I think he might own a share in Joseph’s ships.’
John turned to the reeve. ‘Send a man to your manor bailiff to tell Lord William that the King’s coroner requires him to dispatch a rider immediately to Exeter on the best horse he has. He is to tell the sheriff – or, if he is absent, the castle constable – that a message be given to Joseph of Topsham and Eric Picot at the Watergate. He is to tell them that their vessel Mary of the Sea has foundered in Torbay and that all the crew and cargo are lost. They will have to come in a day or so to identify these bodies, but I will be back in Exeter tomorrow to talk to them.’ It took several repetitions of this message to get it fixed in the head of the messenger.
When he had gone, the coroner turned again to Aelfric, prepared to deliver his hammer-blow about what was concealed in the tithe barn. But this pleasure was suddenly delayed, as Thomas was tugging at the edge of John’s dark wolf-skin cloak.
The clerk’s ever-roving eye, squinted though it was, had seen something further up the beach. ‘Look up there, Crowner, near to where the rocks begin!’ he hissed. John stared at where Thomas’s sharp forefinger was pointing and saw a smooth semi-circle of tide-washed sand, where the spring tide earlier that morning, higher than the previous day, had pushed a line of seaweed and debris almost up to the rocks at the head of the beach. Within this area, three shallow depressions could be seen, where the weight of water had pulled out recently disturbed sand.