The rest of the unhappy tale was plain. The two assassins had tracked de Bonneville across Hampshire and Dorset. When their best opportunity came, on a bare moorside above Widecombe at dusk, they attacked Hubert together but, a seasoned fighter after his Crusading, he fought them off and raced down towards the village. ‘He nearly got away from us, blast him, but his horse put a foot in a rabbit hole and threw him off. We caught him up near Dunstone and continued the fight on foot.’
‘Two of you against one – a brave performance!’ John was cynical this morning.
‘He put up a good fight, I’ll say that,’ admitted Nebba, with some admiration. ‘Though I was never much good with a sword, I was brought up to use a long-bow.’
‘But you managed to stab him in the back, while that squire cut him in the arm from the front,’ snarled Gwyn, unable to conatin himself any longer.
Nebba’s silence was as good as an admission of guilt.
‘What about the mare, the one with the black-ringed eye?’ demanded the coroner.
Nebba sighed, as if realising that he could only be hanged once, so it made little odds what he confessed to now.
‘We dragged the body into some bushes near the hamlet of Dunstone and set his horse loose to wander away.’
‘If you left Hubert’s body in a thicket in Dunstone, how did it come to be found in a stream in Widecombe?’ John asked. Even as he spoke the words, he realised that his earlier suspicions about the Dunstone reeve were probably true and that the village had foisted the corpse on their neighbours to avoid trouble.
Gwyn of Polruan picked up on another matter. ‘If you turned that grey mare loose, how did it come to be sold to Ralph the reeve?’
Nebba shuffled his feet, his ankle chains clanking. ‘I didn’t trust that Baldwyn. One night he told me about the killing of that other fellow, that Aelfgar. Though he didn’t say outright, after a gallon of ale he made hints that he’d silenced the man for safety’s sake.’
‘So?’ grunted the Cornishman.
‘I didn’t turn my back to him for fear of getting it stabbed. I got him to pay me what he owed me, then slipped off back into the woods. I gave him time to clear off, then came back to find the mare.’
‘And sold it to the village reeve,’ finished John. ‘Well, I’ll see you at the hanging tree.’
He jerked his head at Ralph Morin, who gestured to his men-at-arms to take Nebba back to the castle. Undoubtedly the next time he emerged it would would be for a one-way trip to the gallows. The gap in the crowd fused together after he had clanked mournfully away and attention was once more focused on the sorry figure of the abjurer, still kneeling in the mud.
Gervaise seemed to have run out of confessions and John began his own part of the ritual. ‘You are a killer and a liar, and have enough felony on you to be hanged a dozen times over. But I have to accept your confession, as it seems to fit the sorry facts. Now you will take the oath of abjuration.’
He turned to the motley collection of townsfolk behind him. ‘You, the jury, will witness everything that is said here.’
The Archdeacon came forward with a copy of the Gospels from the cathedral and the kneeling penitent put his right hand on the cover. John de Alecon took care to keep the valuable book well away from the mire.
Gwyn bellowed for silence and John then spoke the words of the oath, making Gervaise repeat them after every line.
‘This hear thou, Sir John de Wolfe, that I, Gervaise de Bonneville of Peter Tavy in the county of Devon, am an instigator and conspirator in the murder of Aelfgar of Totnes and my own brother, Hubert de Bonneville. And because I have done such evils in this land, I do swear on this Holy Book, that I will leave and abjure the realm of England and never return without the express permission of our lord Richard, King of England or his heirs.’
Gervaise stumbled over the words many times and his voice dropped to become inaudible now and then, but the coroner remorselessly made him repeat any faulty passages.
‘I shall hasten by the direct road towards the port which you have allotted me and I will not leave the King’s highway under pain of arrest or execution. I will not stay at one place more than one night and I will diligently seek for a passage across the sea as soon as I arrive. I will tarry there only one flood and ebb, if I can have such passage. If I cannot secure such passage, I will go every day into the sea up to my knees, as a token of my desire to cross. And if I cannot secure such passage within forty days, I will put myself again within a church … and if I fail in all this, then let peril be my lot.’
Satisfied with this, John then told the felon to rise and lifted the right hand that clutched the rough cross high into the air. It was merely two sticks, one as tall as Gervaise, the other a two-foot cross-bar, which the abjurer had been made to bind together with some rough twine. Then he was given a pair of crude wooden-soled shoes and the time to send him on his way had finally come.
The crowd were still growling at him and a stone, thrown with unerring aim by an urchin, hit him on the side of the head, causing blood to trickle down between the ragged clumps of shorn hair. John grasped him by the shoulders and turned him to face away from the cathedral.
‘You will walk from here bare-headed to Plymouth to seek a ship to France or Brittany. You have been given sufficient of the contents of your purse to pay for a passage and to keep you alive for a number of days. You have two days and two nights to get to Plymouth on foot, which should be ample. Remember, you must abide strictly by the terms of your oath. If you fail, by staying more than one night in any place or by straying an inch off the highway, people are entitled to treat you as the wolf and behead you. And if you ever set foot in England again, you will be outlawed and your wolf’s head forfeit to any man who can lift a sword.’ The coroner gave him a token push. ‘Now go!’
The Archdeacon and the Precentor chanted, ‘May God have mercy on your soul,’ and made the sign of the cross in the air, feverishly mimicked by Thomas de Peyne, who had been writing energetically on his roll draped over a large stone left by the masons.
To the jeers and abuse of the crowd, Gervaise jerked forward and began to walk towards the exit of the Cathedral Close, which led to the West Gate, the river and the road to Plymouth.
The sergeant and his men beat a path for him through the hostile crowd and a man-at-arms walked alongside the abjurer to make sure that at least he got out of the city in one piece.
The coroner stood watching, with Gwyn and the Archdeacon at his side. ‘There he goes! It seems unjust that he kills two or three men and walks away, while a child who steals a jug is hanged.’ John was bitter and philosophical at the same time.
‘What about that man who was made to suffer the Ordeal?’ enquired John de Alecon. ‘It seems that he was unjustly accused.’
The Precentor naturally took an opposite view. ‘It proves the efficacy of the ritual. As he survived the scalding, it proved his innocence.’
‘He damned near died,’ John snapped. ‘Only his strong constitution saved him. Let’s hope the ministrations of the holy sisters will make him fit again.’
Thomas de Boterellis had no answer to this and kept a sulky silence when the Archdeacon expressed the hope that Alan Fitzhai would find it in his heart to forgive the sheriff for his actions.
The crowd dispersed and, though a few youths and idiots had followed de Bonneville to the gate, the mass hatred seemed to have faded as readily as it had come.
Yet John was still uneasy about the abjurer, as he disappeared into the distance. ‘I keep thinking about the Palatine of Durham and the way they shepherd their exiles,’ he said to Gwyn.