In due course and after years of study of logic, mathematics and more Latin, he became a junior deacon at Winchester. Gradually, over the next decade, he had become a workhorse in the administration of the cathedral and chapter. He was employed mainly in the treasury, his participation in religious life minimal, confined to obligatory attendance of the several daily services – but he had also become a teacher of reading and writing, which had helped towards his eventual downfall.
On his elevation to Archdeacon John de Alecon had moved to Exeter eight years ago, and was now one of the right-hand men of the Bishop. Before he left Winchester, his valedictory act for Thomas had been to get him ordained. Soon afterwards, he was made prebendary of one of the smallest parishes on the outskirts of the city, although he still laboured as a cathedral administrator and schoolmaster.
Thomas’s reminiscences were halted briefly by a shattering snore from Gwyn, which disturbed the Cornishman sufficiently to make him mutter and grunt, then turn over and go back to sleep. Crowner John seemed to be dozing quietly on his stool, and the clerk’s thoughts drifted back for the thousandth time to the events of his fall from grace.
Over the years, the malady that had affected his spine had grown worse: although the tuberculous abscess had subsided, the sinews and bone had contracted and shrunk so that his head was pulled slightly to one side and the lopsided lump on his back had become more obvious. His skin had seemed to coarsen and, though he was by no means grotesque, he was far from attractive. Although a prebendary was supposed to be celibate, many had mistresses or even illicit families – some had a whole clutch of bastards, often by different mothers – and although the cathedral precinct, where many canons lived, was forbidden to women, this rule was openly flouted.
Despite his physical shortcomings, Thomas de Peyne had a normal sex drive. He liked women, he desired women and, if he had been like his fellow prebendaries, his lust could easily have been satisfied. If only he had confined his activities to the stews that peppered Winchester – as they did every busy town – life could have carried on in its own humdrum, but comfortable way. But two years ago, one of his reading pupils in the cathedral day school, a fat fourteen-year old girl, had been his nemesis.
Hunched against the cottage wall, with the rough boards cutting into his bent back, Thomas wondered if her obesity and his crookedness had attracted each other – or whether she had been taunting him. For lead him on she certainly did, with requests for an extra hour of reading practice after the other scholars had left, coy looks, fluttering eyelashes and suggestive conversation. Either he misread the signs, from wishful thinking, or was deliberately trapped by her, but his eventual clumsy efforts at seduction in the dingy schoolroom off the cloisters were met with screams that could have drowned the cathedral bells. The proctors came running and he was imprisoned for the next week in a punishment cell under the chapter house. Thankfully, the whole abortive ravishment had taken place on episcopal premises so no sheriff’s sergeants had been called. If they had, he would probably have been hanged within days for attempted rape.
As it was, he kept his life, but lost almost everything else. After interminable delays, he was hauled before the consistory court of the diocese, found guilty on what he considered perjured evidence by the girl and her family, and stripped of his holy orders by an irate bishop and ejected from the cathedral precincts.
The loss of his priesthood meant little to Thomas, but deprivation of the prebend, his living accommodation and the comfortable ecclesiastical life were a disaster. He was thrown out of the religious community and escaped having to beg for his survival only by scribing letters and bills for tradesmen and tutoring a few youths for rich families.
This went on for a year and half, until his commissions dwindled as he became more and more dishevelled and despairing. Cut off from his family by the disgrace, he even contemplated suicide, but eventually summoned the last of his courage to walk to Exeter to throw himself on the mercy of his kinsman. Grudgingly, the Archdeacon agreed to help him, if and when he could, and some months later, when the new coroner system was introduced, he had prevailed on John de Wolfe to take on Thomas as his clerk, recommending strongly his capabilities with pen and parchment.
So here he was, he reflected, a crook-backed ex-canon, with no money and few prospects other than tramping the countryside acting as a scribe and spy for King Richard’s new law officer.
He sighed a great sigh and hunkered down into his hooded cloak, trying to submerge his chronic worries in the stupor of sleep.
Chapter Two
In which Crowner John opens an inquest
Miraculously the rain held off until noon, when the inquest was held outside the great doors of the tithe barn. They now stood open to reveal the body of the murdered man lying inside on a rough bier. The only decent chair in the village had been brought from the church and placed a few yards in front of the entrance. It was a plain high-backed settle, kept in the small chancel in case the Bishop of Exeter ever visited – a penance he had so far managed to avoid.
Sir John de Wolfe sat augustly in the Bishop’s seat. A motley collection of about thirty men and boys stood in a ragged half-circle before him. They ranged from skinny youths to arthritic grandfathers. The only thing they had in common was a sense of awe and bewilderment as to what this new-fangled ‘Crowner’s quest’ was all about. They looked with interest, tinged with anxiety, at the predatory figure sitting there. To them he was dark and menacing, an almost demoniac messenger from the dimly perceived outer world.
For his part, John felt anything but messianic – he was cold, damp and would have killed for a good fire and a decent meal. He was the least introspective of men, practical and unimaginative. Unlike his brother-in-law, the sheriff, he had no sense of his own importance, other than a simple will to be an agent for the King’s peace. In fact, he was a simple man, uncomplicated, lacking subtlety or romanticism. Devotion to his leader, King Richard, was enough for him; it was at the heart of a code of loyalty by which he had lived since he had become a fighting man, more than twenty years ago. Now forty and getting too old for battlefields, he had welcomed this chance to uphold the Lionheart’s kingdom by doggedly and single-mindedly enforcing the royal laws as best he could. Whereas other more sophisticated minds might see that the King’s feet were at least partly made of clay, John de Wolfe saw him in the same light as others held religion: to be revered and obeyed with blind faith. Now, though, none of this was going through his mind as he sat in the Bishop’s seat and wished himself back in the warmth of the Bush tavern in Exeter with a jar of good ale in his hand, instead of in this miserable hamlet with its boggy soil and sodden inhabitants.
The burly Gwyn opened the proceedings by bawling in a voice that could have been heard far up on the moors ‘All ye who have anything to do before the King’s coroner for the county of Devon, draw near and give your attendance!’
There was some shuffling of feet as the gathering waited expectantly for something to happen. The women of the village, excluded from the menfolk’s participation, loitered in the background, whispering behind their hands at this unexpected entertainment in their drab lives.
‘The first finders – they who discovered the body – step forward,’ commanded the coroner.
With a jostling of neighbours’ elbows, a young man with curly blond hair stepped out reluctantly and made a diffident nod of obeisance before the coroner. He had a bad cold and his nose was running like a tap. A rough hessian smock, with a knotted rope for a belt, left his arms bare, which like his face, had many bramble scratches, some still bleeding.