Nicholas glared at him, sudden suspicion showing on his face. 'What else should we do, starve or freeze to death? If it were not for those bastard swine de Revelle and de la Pomeroy, we would be hard-working, peaceful men, tending our acres down in Hempston.'
Robert Hereward's voice was vibrant with emotion: 'I killed a man without intent when he drew a blade on me during a mélée, Crowner. I am more than willing to pay the price: I would give myself up to be hanged tomorrow if it would help these others - but it would be futile.' He thumped the table. 'But I swear by Mary, Mother of God and all the saints you wish to name, that we have never killed a single person these past two years. Yes, we have cut purses from fat priests and wealthy merchants - and we have stolen geese, sheep and the occasional deer for Gunilda to cook for our bellies. But that was for survival, nothing else.'
His voice shook with sincerity and John believed him.
Next morning the coroner and his companion were riding back through Dunsford as the bell in the village church tolled for the noon hour. They had spent the night in Challacombe with their outlaw hosts, lying wrapped in their own cloaks on a pile of dried bracken around the firepit. At dawn, after a meagre breakfast provided by Gunilda, Robert Hereward and Martin Wimund had escorted them back over the moor and left them within sight of Bovey.
'So what did you think of all that?' grunted the coroner after they had ridden in silence for a mile.
'Their tale rang very true, Crowner,' answered Gwyn.
'The whole sad story is typical of that bastard Richard de Revelle and that swine Henry de la Pomeroy. He's every bit as bad as his treacherous father, who may be dead, but I don't mind speaking ill of him!' John's face remained dour, and he remained silent for another few minutes as he assembled his thoughts.
'I too believe what those men told me, and I intend to seek justice for them,' he said finally. 'The stumbling block is that they are undoubtedly outlaws and criminals, having preyed on the population for a couple of years. Every one of their legion of thefts is a capital offence, and even if it were not so, just being outlaws earns them a hanging.'
'But none of that would have happened if it were not for the vile crime that those lords committed,' protested the Cornishman. 'They are victims of circumstance and deserve better than to be stranded on Dartmoor with every man's hand against them.'
'I agree with you,' replied the coroner. 'But though they slipped into becoming a gang of desperate men with little difficulty, finding a solution will be a great deal harder.'
'So what are you going to do about it?' boomed the ever-practical Gwyn.
John leaned back against the cantle of his saddle, easing his back which had stiffened during the ride. He was getting old and soft, he thought, not like the days when he could spend a week on a horse and think nothing of it. He dragged his mind back to the immediate problem.
'Henry de la Pomeroy seems to be the prime instigator of this plot, but my dearly beloved brother-in-law is also very much involved. He is the first person I must confront about this, though my wife has already given him a drubbing over it.'
'But remember, he's the one who is accusing Sir Nicholas of planting that murdered body in his school,' said Gwyn. 'Perhaps he's saying that just as a means of further blackening Arundell's name, as an extra safeguard for keeping him beyond the law.'
John nodded. 'De Revlele will no doubt remember the body, too, when I tackle him about Hempston.'
'You'll get short shrift from that slippery eel,' prophesied Gwyn. 'Whatever you say, he'll twist your words and try to put you in the wrong. But it's bloody daft to think that Nicholas and his men had anything to do with these guild killings.'
'Though the second murder was on the high road near Ashburton - a place that outlaws and footpads habitually haunt in order to attack travellers,' said de Wolfe, playing at devil's advocate himself to tease Gwyn.
'But if you get nowhere with de Revelle, what else can be done?'
They were trudging uphill now, their horses labouring against the gradient of the rutted track.
'I'll go to see Lady Joan again,' answered de Wolfe.
'She has no reason to hide now, for being the wife of an outlaw is no crime. She may be able to tell me something that's of use. But in the circumstances, the only real solution is a royal pardon. Even in the highly unlikely event of de Revelle agreeing to hand back the manor, that still leaves those men outlaws, unless the royal justices feel able to revoke the writ of exigent - or the king grants a pardon.'
Gwyn pulled up the hood of his leather jerkin as they crested the hill and met the full force of an icy wind.
'And how the hell do you get a royal pardon?' he shouted. 'Sail the winter sea to France to seek King Richard?'
'Not in this weather! Nicholas can wait on the moor a few more months. But perhaps I'll take a ride to Winchester to seek Hubert Walter and talk it over with him. Maybe he can offer a pardon on the king's behalf, if he thinks the case is strong enough.' The Chief Justiciar had been in charge of the army in Palestine after the king left for home, and he knew John de Wolfe well in fact, it was he who had suggested to the Lionheart that John be appointed coroner in Devon. Since the king had left for France again the previous year, Hubert had become the virtual ruler of England, as well as being Archbishop of Canterbury.
They rode on, conversation stalling as they sank their chins into their hoods against the numbing wind. A few more miles and the great twin towers of Exeter's cathedral were in sight, outlined against grey clouds that threatened more snow.
They had missed their dinner, so Gwyn made for the nearest inn as soon as they entered the city and John went home to Martin's Lane, where he could always depend on Mary to find him something substantial to eat in her cook-shed.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
In which Crowner John goes to visit a lady
On Wednesday morning, the coroner rose later than usual; after the long ride across the moors, his back and buttocks ached as if they had been beaten with a pike handle. After eating his morning gruel, bread and salt bacon in Mary's warm hut, he found his cloak and boots and ventured out into the streets. A light covering of snow had fallen during the night. It was barely an inch deep, but the icy breeze kept it from thawing, and his boots made a crisp crunching noise as he walked up to the castle. The passage of men, beasts and wheels would soon churn the snow into a dirty grey paste, but while it was still pristine it was attractive even to the unimaginative de Wolfe, especially as it covered up the filth that lay in the gutters in the middle of the streets.
Up in his chamber, high in the gatehouse, it was freezing as there was no means of having a fire. The floor was wooden and there was no modern hearth or chimney. The tower had been the first place built on the orders of William the Bastard when he demolished forty-eight houses to make room for the castle, immediately after quelling the Saxon rebellion of 1068.
Sometimes, one of the guards brought up a charcoal brazier and lit it on a large slab of slate in a corner of the room, but today there was nothing.
Gwyn had abandoned his usual seat on one of the windowsills, as the icy wind was moaning through the narrow gap, having already blown a powdering of snow across the floor. He sat on Thomas's stool at the table, hugging his thick leather jerkin to his chest, his pointed hood sticking up over his untidy red locks.
'Colder than a nun's backside,' he complained. 'I would have gone back to the soldiers' barracks, only I waited to see if you had any orders for me.'
De Wolfe stood a moment, rubbing his hands together and looking at the pile of parchments on the table - unreadable until Thomas came from saying his Masses. John sat for a few minutes attempting to concentrate on the reading lessons the vicar in the cathedral had given him in his lack-lustre attempt to teach John to read. Boredom soon made him seek some excuse to abandon the attempt, and he got up from his bench.
'Too bloody cold to stay here, Gwyn! Makes the heat in the Holy Land seem almost welcome - though when we were there, we yearned for cold weather.' He turned to the staircase. 'Until the little fellow arrives, there's nothing to be done, so let's get to the fire in the hall. I presume there are no new deaths reported overnight?'
The Cornishman shook his head and lumbered over to join him.
'What's to be done today, Crowner?' he enquired as he followed John down the winding steps.
'No court or hangings today, so I thought I would have a word with our good sheriff about Nicholas de Arundell, then go and talk to his wife.'
'What about tackling de Revelle again? You'll have to do that sooner or later.'
With the memory of Matilda's verbal assault still fresh in his mind, John was reluctant to think about that problem, though he knew he would have to challenge his brother-in-law before long. For now, John was content to make Joan de Arundell his next target.
They walked across the inner ward, where the usual crusted mud was temporarily hidden under the thin blanket of snow, and climbed the high wooden steps to the entrance of the keep, whose two storeys squatted on the undercroft which housed the castle gaol and torture chamber.
Inside the hall, crowded even at this early hour, Gwyn made for the firepit, where he could scrounge some food and ale and talk to his many acquaintances, while John headed for the door on the left wall which led into the sheriff's chamber.
Henry de Furnellis was hunched over his fireplace, which did have a chimney running up through the outer wall. 'I'm damned cold, John! My blood must be running thin in my old age,' he complained as de Wolfe joined him. He was still a fit man, if rather lazy - he had once confided to John that after more than forty years fighting for several kings, he felt he now deserved an easier time in his dotage.
Ignoring his chief clerk's pained expression as he surveyed the heap of neglected documents on the sheriff's table, Henry retrieved a wineskin from a shelf, and poured two cups for John and himself.
After they had settled down, hunched on two stools close to the fire, de Wolfe told him of the journey out to Dartmoor and his partial abduction. The sheriff's lugubrious features showed mild surprise.
'The county coroner consorting with outlaws! What's the world coming to?' Then he grinned and topped up John's cup. 'What's to stop me raising a posse and going out there and hanging the lot of them?'
De Wolfe could have retorted that Henry's usual regime of masterly inactivity made that highly unlikely, but he knew that the sheriff was not serious. 'I haven't told you where they are, for one thing. And I promised, as one old Crusader to another, not to reveal it,' he said.
'Though I'll admit, it would take very little enquiry amongst the folk around the edge of the moor to discover their hideout.'
He drank some of the wine and stared into the leaping flames of the burning logs. 'What's to be done about it, that's the thing? That bastard de Revelle has stolen a nice little manor and is getting away with it, thanks to the fact that de Arundell got himself outlawed, through no real fault of his own.'
'You say his steward actually felled this man who died?' asked de Furnellis.
'He swears it was not deliberate, just an unlucky blow during a free-for-all in which they were outnumbered. And I believe him, but of course there was no inquest or any sort of court hearing.'
De Furnellis grunted in disgust. 'And if there had been, who would be the judges down around Totnes? Pomeroy and de Revelle! But what trapped Nicholas was running for sanctuary and then escaping.'
John nodded gloomily. 'That's the problem, Henry. Not answering to their attachments in the county court has put them outside the law and bans him from any attempt at getting legal redress.'
They sat in silence for a moment.
'The king seems the only hope in this matter,' said the sheriff finally. 'I can do nothing, as it was my own county court that made them outlaws - though before I was in office - so I can't turn round now and say it never happened. The writs of exigent will still be lying in the court records.'
John finished his drink and stood up. 'It's not really any of my business, either. All this happened before the office of coroner was set up, so I've no power to look into the death of that man almost three years ago.'
Henry looked up at his friend with a knowing expression. 'But you're going to make it your business, I can tell. How will you set about it?'
De Wolfe hauled his cloak higher and wrapped it around himself before leaving the relative warmth of the chamber. 'It's no good waiting for the next visit of the Commissioners of Gaol Delivery, or even the judges at the next Eyre, whenever that might be. They're not likely to be sympathetic to an outlaw's plight. I'll need to talk to Hubert Walter and see what he can do. I might even have to cross the Channel to seek King Richard, come the spring sailing season.'
Henry rose and walked to the door with him. 'Let me know if there is anything I can do, as I would hate to see that crafty swine de Revelle getting away with this. He's kept it pretty well hidden, for very few people know what happened in Hempston. It was put about that de la Pomeroy bought it back from the so-called widow.'