Fear in the Forest (12 page)

Laying a hand on her still-flat stomach, Nesta wondered whether to love or hate what was growing within her womb. Turning on her side, she wept herself softly to sleep, for once uncaring about her busy taproom down below.

The next few days passed quickly for the coroner, as there was a Summer Fair in Exeter, including a Horse Fair on Bull-mead outside the South Gate. Hundreds of traders flocked into the city, and stalls and booths sprang up along the main streets, though the focus of activity was in the cathedral Close, the fair being linked to a saint’s day. Many fairs in England were franchised by the Church, which made a handsome profit from licences to traders. Unlike some towns, which closed all the regular shops during the fair, the merchants of Exeter joined in the general scramble for custom, and for several days the city was a seething hotbed of buying, selling, trading, entertainment and revelry. Every bed in every inn was taken and the alehouses were overflowing with drinkers and drunks.

John de Wolfe was kept busy with a number of incidents, most related to the turmoil of the fair. There was a brawl at the Saracen inn on Stepcote Hill, in which a man was killed from being kicked in the head, several others being injured in the drunken mêlée. Then a visiting stall-holder from Dorchester was stabbed in a dark alley behind a brothel in Bretayne, the poorest part of the city. His purse was stolen and he died before he could be carried off to the small infirmary at the nearby St Nicholas Priory.

John managed to get to the Bush for an hour on Saturday evening, and upstairs in her little cubicle a subdued Nesta confirmed to him that she was indeed pregnant. As they both had more or less accepted the fact even before she had visited the midwife, it was no great surprise to him, but Nesta failed to respond to her lover’s efforts at reassurance and support. John was puzzled and rather hurt by her lack of reaction to his attempts at being enthusiastic about the future.

‘I’ll bring the lad up as if he were my legitimate son,’ he declared, oblivious to the fact that the child might be a girl. ‘If Matilda doesn’t like it, then to hell with her. We’ll live apart, it will be little different from my present existence.’

Nesta shook her head sadly. ‘How can you do that, John? Everyone will know – they’ll know even months before the birth, if I judge Exeter gossips correctly.’

‘What of it? I’ve told you before, half the men I know have one or two extra families about the place. Matilda’s own brother, for one.’

The auburn-haired innkeeper sat mutely, and John persisted in his uphill attempts to cheer her. ‘The name ‘Fitzwolfe’ sounds impressive, eh? Then later we’ll have to decide on his baptismal name.’

At this, Nesta burst into tears and an embarrassed and half-terrified John pulled her jerkily to his chest with spasms of his arm and incoherent mutterings intended to soothe her. He tried to console himself with the assumption that these strange moods were a passing symptom of pregnancy, like the strange appetites that he had vaguely heard about.

Though he hated to admit it even to himself, he was relieved when a tapping on the door heralded the potman. Old Edwin came to tell them that he was needed downstairs, where Gwyn was waiting with an urgent message.

It turned out to be a summons to a house near the East Gate, where a middle-aged cordwainer had returned early from his stall at the fair, to find his young wife in bed with an itinerant haberdasher, who had persuaded her into more than his ribbons and buttons when he called at the door.

When de Wolfe arrived, the haberdasher was lying naked and dead on the floor of the solar and the husband was spread-eagled across him, unconscious and bleeding from a deep gash on his scalp.

‘It seems the cuckolded merchant stabbed the fellow in the back while he was lying across his wife,’ explained Gwyn. ‘Then the woman got up and smashed the water pitcher over her husband’s head, in a fury at having been deprived of a far better lover than the shoemaker!’

The house was in chaos, with Osric the constable trying to restrain the screaming wife. The grandmother and several relatives were all shouting and wailing, and it was midnight before the coroner and his henchman could get away from the turmoil, John deeming it wise to attach the cordwainer for ten marks to appear at the inquest on Monday. There was no way in which the man would ever be convicted of murder, in the circumstances of finding a stranger
in flagrante delicto
with his wife. De Wolfe felt that a low-key handling of the affair was all that was required for the present – let the justices sort the matter out when they next came to Exeter.

The next day was quieter, so John could find no excuse to avoid being hauled off by Matilda to morning Mass at the cathedral, something she succeeded in doing about once a month. Unlike Gwyn, he had no strong objection to going to church, though he was supremely uninterested in both the future of his immortal soul and the boring liturgy purveyed by the clergy. Being dragged to the cathedral was at least preferable to her forcing him to St Olave’s, her favourite little church in Fore Street. One of his objections to this place was Julian Fulk, the smug priest who officiated there. During the recent spate of priestly killings in Exeter, Fulk had been a suspect and the collapse of John’s suspicions against him gave the podgy priest an extra reason to smirk at the coroner.

After midday dinner, John arranged to met Gwyn and walk down to Bull-mead, just outside the town, where the Horse Fair was still in progress. Like most active men, they were both interested in horses, and this was an opportunity to walk around the field and look at the profusion of animals and gossip about them both with the dealers and many of their local cronies. As the tall, stooping coroner and his massive wild-haired officer paraded along the lines of beasts and watched them being pranced around the display area in the centre, at least one pair of wary eyes followed them. Stephen Cruch, who had a dozen stallions, mares and geldings there for sale, contemplated the former Crusader thoughtfully – and wondered what it was about him that made even the reckless Robert Winter a little uneasy.

It was often mid-morning when new cases were reported to the coroner from outside Exeter. In the summertime, a rider from a town or village in the south or west of the county could leave at dawn and be in Exeter after two or three hours’ riding, before the cathedral bells rang for Prime or Terce.

The Monday after the fair was no exception, and before the eighth hour the manor-reeve from the village of Manaton had clattered up to the gatehouse of Rougemont and slid from his horse to enquire for the coroner. Though Gwyn and Thomas were in the bare chamber above, John de Wolfe had gone across to the castle keep to view the body of the man kicked to death in the Saracen inn. Usually, dead bodies were housed in a ramshackle cart-shed against the wall of the inner ward, but this had recently been knocked down for rebuilding. Now any stray corpses awaiting burial were being taken to an empty cell in the castle prison, the dismal undercroft beneath the keep, ruled over by Stigand, the repulsive gaoler. The cadaver had been carried up to the castle before de Wolfe had visited the tavern – an offence in itself for which someone would be amerced – so he was obliged to view it before the inquest later that morning.

It was here that the gatehouse guard sent Robert Barat, the reeve of Manaton, a village between Moretonhampstead and Ashburton, on the south-western edge of Dartmoor. The reeve, a tall man of thirty-five, had hair and a flowing moustache of an almost yellow colour that pointed to Saxon ancestry, in spite of his Norman name. He was the headman of the village, responsible for organising the rota of work in the fields and acting as the link between the lord’s bailiff and steward and the common folk of the hamlet.

Robert cautiously went down the few steps from ground level into the undercroft, a semi-basement below the keep which acted as gaol and storehouse. When his eyes became accustomed to the gloom after the bright morning sun outside, he saw a low chamber with stone pillars supporting an arched roof, discoloured with patches of lichen and slime. The floor was of damp beaten earth, divided across the centre by a stone wall containing a rusted iron fence, in the centre of which was a metal gate leading into a passageway lined with squalid cells. The only illumination came from a pair of flickering pitch brands stuck into iron rings on the wall and a charcoal brazier in one of the alcoves, where the gaoler slept on a filthy straw mattress. The whole place stank of damp, mould and excrement.

As he went in, ducking his head under the low arch at the entrance, he saw a grossly fat man waddle out of the iron gate, a horn lantern in one hand. He had an almost bald head and rolls of fat hid his neck. Piggy little eyes peered from a pallid, round face, a slack mouth exposing toothless gums.

He wore a shapeless smock of dirty brown wool, which bulged over his globular stomach, covered by a thick leather apron which had many stains that looked ominously like dried blood.

For a moment, Robert Barat feared that this revolting apparition might be the coroner, but thankfully the grotesque figure was followed out of the gate by a tall, dark man dressed entirely in black and grey. The reeve walked towards him and they met halfway from the entrance.

‘Are you the crowner, sir?’

De Wolfe stopped and nodded at the man, who seemed to be a respectable peasant, dressed in plain homespun and a good pair of riding boots.

‘I am indeed – who are you?’

‘Robert Barat, the manor-reeve from Manaton, sir. My lord’s bailiff sent me urgently to find you.’

John sighed. How many times had he had a similar visit in the nine months since he had been coroner?

‘Tell me the worst, Robert. Is it a beaten wife or a tavern brawl – or has another child fallen under the mill-wheel?’

‘None of those things, Crowner. It’s a fire in the tannery.’

John’s black brows came down in a frown. It was true that fires were within a coroner’s remit, but it was rare for him to be told of one in the countryside. In towns or cities it was a different matter, with the ever-present risk of a conflagration sweeping through the closely packed buildings, but out in the villages, fires were less common and certainly less dangerous, so they were rarely reported to him.

‘Just a fire, Reeve? Your bailiff must be a very conscientious fellow.’

The tall, fair man shifted uneasily. ‘It may be more than that, sir. The tanner is missing, too. We don’t know whether he’s still in the ashes or whether he has vanished. There’s something odd about the fire. I’m sure it was set deliberately.’

John sensed that even this extra explanation was not the whole story, but the reeve was not forthcoming with any more details.

‘Who is the lord of Manaton?’ he demanded.

‘Henry le Denneis, Crowner. Though he holds the manor as a tenant of the Abbot of Tavistock.’

‘What makes you think that the place was fired deliberately?’

Robert Barat raised his eyes to look directly at the coroner. ‘We have had trouble in the village these last few weeks, Sir John. You’ll know we are just within the Royal Forest, more’s the pity. Although it has always made things difficult, recently it has got worse.’

John pricked up his ears at this. Almost every day now, it seemed, some problem appeared linked to the forest.

‘What sort of trouble?’ he asked, as they walked back towards the daylight streaming down the steps.

‘I think you had better ask our bailiff or the lord’s steward,’ the reeve replied cautiously. ‘They know more about it, but it all goes back to the new tannery the foresters have set up near Moretonhampstead. They demanded that our small tannery should close down, so that theirs could take its trade.’

Though de Wolfe immediately appreciated this familiar situation, he pressed the other to finish his explanation.

‘So what happened?’

‘Our tanner, Elias Necke, refused to close down. How could he, for he and his three sons depend on it for their living. He was threatened more than once by that bastard William Lupus. Then, on Saturday night, the place burnt down and Elias went missing.’

Out in the inner ward, de Wolfe stopped and turned to the village reeve.

‘I’ll come out to Manaton later this morning, with my officer and clerk. I have to attend to an inquest first, but will set off before noon. If you get yourself some food and drink while your horse rests, you can set off ahead of us.’

Robert Barat respectfully touched his forehead and set off for the gatehouse, where his mare was tethered. De Wolfe called after him.

‘Tell the bailiff to gather as many villagers as he can for a jury, especially those who may know anything about the fire, even if they only watched it burn.’

The coroner’s trio reached the village in mid-afternoon, Manaton being about fifteen miles from the city. It was a hamlet typical of the edge of Dartmoor, nestling on the slope of a valley among wooded countryside. Above it was a hill crowned by jagged rocks, and across the vale was a smoother mound of moorland. In the distance, more granite tors stood on the skyline, like broken teeth against the sky.

The village straddled the crossing of two lanes, and as the three riders came up the eastern track from the Becka waterfalls, they could smell the fire before the remains came into sight.

‘What a bloody stench!’ grumbled Gwyn. ‘Tanneries are bad enough at the best of times, but a burnt one …!’

Thomas de Peyne, jogging side-saddle behind them, almost retched as they came up to the still-smoking ruin, which lay a few hundred paces east of the village. A thin haze of blue smoke wavered in the slight breeze and the heat from the ashes caused the distant woods to shimmer in the sun. The tannery had been set in a large plot, giving room for the stone tanks set in the ground, where the skins were soaked and which added their aroma to the acrid stench of scorched leather. Their smell came from dog droppings, as the strong ferments in the excreta were used to strip the soft tissue from the cow hides and sheepskins.

As they halted on the road to look across at the desolation, a group of people came towards them from the wide green in the centre of the village, which consisted of a loose cluster of cottages set around a church and an alehouse. The first to greet them was Robert Barat, who deferentially introduced a fat, self-important man as the manor lord’s bailiff, Matthew Juvenis.