The Awful Secret (17 page)

When William saw them approach, he dropped his axe, and for fifteen minutes the brothers talked animatedly, the Cornishman going discreetly to the bailiff for a chat. John explained to William the situation concerning de Ridefort, more forthright with him than with the women. ‘This threat against him seems real enough, but he sees an assassin behind every tree,’ he concluded. ‘I’ll be glad when this other Templar arrives and the pair of them can clear off to Ireland or wherever they wish to go.’

Before they parted, his brother promised to do all he could to make his unexpected guest as welcome as possible. De Wolfe collected Gwyn, and they rode off along the narrow track into the forest that bordered the tidal part of the river. The sky was overcast, with the threat of rain, but it held off as they crossed the Teign where it narrowed suddenly four miles inland from the sea. At a steady pace, they expected to reach Exeter in the early evening, following the road from Kingsteignton through Ideford and Kenn.

The two men rode side by side, mainly in silence. They had covered thousands of miles together over the years, in snow and sandstorm, sleet and sun. Neither was talkative and, except when reminiscing over a quart of ale in a tavern, their conversation was confined to immediate matters, such as deciding which fork of the track to take or a suspicion of a lame horse.

Today their steeds were performing well, and de Wolfe was pleased with Odin, a worthy successor to his beloved Bran. At a steady trot, letting the stallion and the mare set their own pace, the pair could keep going for many hours. On a decent track in good weather, when the mud was dry, they could cover thirty miles a day. This particular route was not the main road between Exeter and Plymouth, that being further north, but it was well used and had many villages and patches of farmland between the stretches of forest. So it was something of a shock when the two riders came round a bend inside a mile of trees to find themselves confronted by half a dozen armed ruffians, obviously intent on highway robbery.

With bloodcurdling yells, the footpads rushed at their intended victims, wielding a variety of weapons. One ragged outlaw swung a long stave, trying to knock Gwyn from his horse. Two others converged each side of de Wolfe, one waving a rusted sword and the other jabbing with a broken lance, the lower part of its shaft missing. The other trio circled behind, armed with an axe, a long dagger and another staff.

If they had thought they were ambushing a pair of fat merchants, returning from Kingsteignton market, they were sadly mistaken. The coroner and his officer had been attacked a score of times in several parts of the known world and were well versed in defending themselves.

After the first few seconds of surprise, the reflexes of these two old soldiers snapped into action. Though de Wolfe wore no hauberk or helmet, his long sword swung at his hip and a mace and chain stood in a pocket on his saddle. Gwyn wore his usual battered cuirass of thick boiled leather with metal-studded shoulder pads. In addition to his massive sword, he had a long-handled axe slipped into a loop on his saddle-bow.

Almost as the yelling began, there was a rattling hiss as both swords were slid simultaneously from their scabbards. Gwyn, with an exultant howl that matched his almost manic grin of delight at the promise of action, hoisted his mare’s forelegs high into the air and pulled her round, then let her drop on to the villain with the staff, who screamed with pain as her metal-shod hoofs struck him in the chest. As he staggered back and fell on to the track, Gwyn kept his steed turning to face the two men who had come up behind. The one with the dagger had frozen rigid at the realisation that they had picked the wrong pair to rob, and before he could gather his wits, Gwyn had swung his sword at his neck. He fell poleaxed into the road, already dying from the fountain of blood that shot from a main artery into the leaf-mould of the track.

Meanwhile, de Wolfe had his two bandits to contend with. The man with the lance, his face contorted into a broken-toothed snarl of rage, jabbed up at him. The coroner’s sword was not long enough to reach the attacker and he felt the tip of the lance dragging at his riding cloak, although the wolfskin was tough enough to resist the thrust. As the second man came to his other side and attempted to hack at de Wolfe’s leg with his sword, he dug both his prick-spurs into Odin’s flanks. Indignantly, the stallion leaped forward, leaving the two outlaws facing each other across an empty space. Dragging on the reins, de Wolfe pulled Odin round and repeated Gwyn’s manoeuvre, rearing the horse up to fall upon the most dangerous adversary – the man with the lance.

He managed to dodge the flailing hoofs the first time, but fell to his knees and was trampled by the big destrier when John ruthlessly pulled Odin round a second time. An iron shoe landed squarely between the ruffian’s shoulder-blades and even above the shouting of the men and the neighing of the protesting horses, John heard the crack as the spine snapped.

Realising the fatal error they had made, the other four tried to make their escape. The one that Gwyn had first knocked to the ground was slowest off the mark and paid for it with his life. He made for the trees, but the big brown mare was upon him before he reached them. Gwyn had couched the bare sword under his left armpit to hold the reins with that hand, whilst he pulled his axe from its thong and slid his right hand down the shaft. As the mare came level with the fugitive, the wedge-shaped axehead whistled down to strike him on top of the head. The blade cleaved his skull almost down to the nape of the neck and the man fell twitching to the road in a welter of blood and brains. The momentum had taken the Cornishman almost into the trees, but he hoisted the mare round to see how his master was faring with his contest.

Two of the remaining outlaws had already reached the safety of the dense woodland, but de Wolfe was pursuing the last one diagonally across the track, his sword poised for a strike as soon as he was within reach. But the man was lucky: he shot between two beech trunks only inches ahead of the weapon. The trees and the thorny scrub between them at the edge of the road were too dense to allow a horseman to follow and Odin skidded to a halt with his nose in a tangle of brambles.

The two old Crusaders trotted back to each other and halted in the middle of the road, slamming their swords back into their sheaths. Gwyn, his wild carrotty hair poking from under his pointed leather cap, grinned with unashamed delight. ‘We haven’t done that for a long time, Crowner!’ he growled, swinging down from his mare to wipe the mess from his axehead in the long grass at the edge of the track.

He walked over to the robber whose neck he had half severed and rolled him over with his foot. ‘Dead already – most of his blood is on the ground.’ As he checked that the other outlaw with the split head had also given up the ghost, the coroner slid from his saddle. He was suddenly aware that, contrary to his expectations, his damaged leg was still not quite restored to normal, especially when called upon to perform gymnastics upon a warhorse. He stroked Odin’s neck and whispered into his ear, as the stallion was still quivering with excitement and exertion.

When his horse was calmer, John walked over to the body of the man he had felled with Odin’s hoofs. He was lying face down and, expecting him to be unconscious or dead, he was surprised to see the fellow move as he approached. Futilely, he was trying to pull himself towards the trees on his hands, his legs trailing uselessly behind him, paralysed by his broken back.

After a few attempts, he sank hopelessly back to the dirt road, his face turned sideways towards de Wolfe, his hands beneath his body. As the coroner bent down to speak to him, he suddenly brought up his right hand and made a desperate attempt to stab upwards with the dagger he had drawn from his belt.

As de Wolfe stepped back in surprise, Gwyn, who had come across the road to join him, swore and began to pull out his sword but John put out a hand to stop him. ‘Leave him be, Gwyn. He’s going to die, anyway. Not much point in carrying him back to Exeter to be hanged.’

‘He’s an outlaw, Crowner, so he is as the wolf’s head. Best kill him now, then I could claim the bounty.’

Anyone declared by the courts to be outside the law did not exist officially under the king’s peace and any citizen was entitled to kill them on sight, as if they were a wolf. If the severed head was taken to the county gaol, a payment could be claimed from the sheriff as a reward for helping to rid the forests of the bands of armed robbers that plagued the countryside.

De Wolfe shook his head. ‘I don’t think it would be either legal or politic for a coroner or his officer to claim the wolf’s head. And I would have to hold an inquest on it, anyway.’ Gwyn, looking disappointed, indicated the two corpses. ‘What about them? Will you hold inquests there?’

John considered for a moment. ‘I see no point – we will never know their names nor be able to get presentment of Englishry. There are no witnesses except us and no one knows or cares what happened to them. Legally, they don’t exist.’ He turned to look down at the paralysed ruffian, whose head had fallen forward to press his face into the soil, in an attitude of final despair. De Wolfe wondered briefly what it would be like to know that death was soon inevitable. He was not an imaginative man and had only vague notions of the resurrection that the priests seemed to take for granted. Would he meet this robber in Heaven – or Hell? Would all the men who had ever lived be there? All the children, all the infants, all the unborn babes? It seemed an unlikely proposition, but he shrugged off this sudden introspection and bent down to speak to the doomed outlaw. ‘What made you take to the forest, fellow? Are you a thief on the run – or an escaped sanctuary-seeker?’

Slowly the man lifted his head enough to turn it to face the coroner. ‘Neither, damn you! I killed a man in fair fight, after he cheated me at dice in a tavern in Lyme. But the bailiffs gave false witness. The man I fought was cousin to a burgess and the court condemned me in five minutes.’

‘So you escaped and ran for the woods?’

‘My wife and my mother paid a bribe to the gaoler – it left them destitute and they lost their breadwinner, for I was an ironsmith. I’ve not seen them since – nor never will now.’

The story was too familiar to tug at anyone’s heartstrings. The man was no more than twenty-five, by the looks of him, though he was filthy and dressed in little better than rags.

‘What are we to do with him?’ asked Gwyn, still fingering the hilt of his sword. ‘It would be kinder to put him out of his misery, not leave him there in the road, paralysed with a broken back.’

While he was thinking of an answer, de Wolfe noticed that both their horses were wandering down the road, nibbling at choice clumps of new spring grass that were appearing along the verges. They both walked over to take their bridles and turn them to bring them back to the scene of the fight.

A sudden movement of the surviving outlaw drew their eyes back to him and they saw that he had solved the problem himself. The dagger that he had tried to stick in the coroner was lying near his outstretched hand. Seizing it in one hand, he used the other with one last despairing effort to lift himself off the road. Holding the knifepoint upwards against his breast, the hilt against the ground, he lurched downwards to force the sharp point into his heart. With a bubbling cry, which sounded almost like joy, he released himself from an intolerable life, dying in the dirt of the king’s highway. Gwyn and his master stood holding their reins, their eyes meeting after they watched the last convulsive spasm of the body.

‘That’s settled that, then,’ grunted Gwyn.

De Wolfe climbed on to Odin, his leg still giving him a twinge of pain. ‘I’ll call out the manor reeve from Ide when we pass through. He’ll have to send someone to bury these corpses in the forest. They can’t be left here to stink.’

Before riding off, he took one last look at the dead outlaw and again the fleeting thought came into his mind: where had the spirit of the man gone in the last few minutes? Was killing a man any different from sticking a pig? Or was there something extra that made a body, arms and legs into an ironsmith?

He cursed himself for foolishness – he must be getting old to start this wondering what secrets the grave held for him.

On his return to Exeter in the early evening, John rode straight up to Rougemont to see his brother-in-law. Gwyn came into the city with him, instead of going to his dwelling in St Sidwell’s, just outside the East Gate, as his wife and family were staying with her sister in Milk Street.

De Wolfe found Richard de Revelle in his official chamber in the keep, in discussion with the castle constable, Ralph Morin. A flask of wine was open on the table and the sheriff motioned John to fill himself a pewter goblet. It was a good red vintage from Aquitaine and the coroner relished taking something expensive from his notoriously mean brother-in-law. ‘Our trip to the north produced nothing useful,’ he began. ‘The village of Appledore could barely raise a couple of rowing boats.’

De Revelle nodded languidly, as if already bored by the coroner’s presence. ‘I’ve already heard that from Ralph here, whose sergeant reported to him. I tell you, it’s Lundy we should be looking at. They’ve harboured pirates for centuries.’

De Wolfe looked across at the constable, who stood solidly in the centre of the chamber, his feet apart and his arms crossed as if he had grown out of the floor. His grizzled grey hair and matching forked beard, together with his chain-mail hauberk and massive sword, suggested that he had just stepped off a Norse longboat. ‘Dressed for battle, Ralph?’ he asked.

Morin grinned, his rough, weather-beaten cheeks wrinkling. ‘No, John, there was no attack on the city today. I’ve been down at Bull Mead putting the garrison through some exercises. All these years of peace are turning them soft. We need a good war to sharpen them up.’

‘We nearly had one a few months ago,’ muttered de Wolfe, and there was an awkward silence in the room as the constable and the coroner avoided looking at the sheriff.