Nesta moved away from him a little and looked up into his face, her big eyes serious. 'It would make no difference, John. We can never be wed to each other, you know that. We have ploughed that furrow so often.'
De Wolfe did not answer her directly. Instead, he reached for her hand and held it between his long fingers. 'If I were to go away for good, leaving Exeter and indeed Devon itself, would you come with me?'
She looked at him in surprise. 'Why do you say these foolish things, John? You are the king's coroner here. You have a grand position, a house and a wife. You cannot just leave!'
Her instant dismissal of the possibility made him drop the subject. He had hoped that she might say that she would follow him to the ends of the earth, but although Nesta had always been the more romantic and sentimental of them tonight she clung to practicalities. After a long silence, she excused herself to attend to her supervision of the two cook-maids out in the kitchen-shed and John was left alone to his ale and his worries.
When she came back, he broached a familiar topic. 'With Matilda away, I am alone in the house,' he began. 'My bed is cold and lonely, so I thought I might seek a night's lodging here.' He looked meaningfully at the wide ladder that climbed to the loft and Nesta's small bedchamber. He tried to ignore the fact that a certain Welsh artisan would be occupying a palliasse on the other side of the thin partition.
However, his concerns were irrelevant, as Nesta, with a sudden flushing of her cheeks, shook her head. 'The phase of the moon is against us tonight, John, if you know what I mean.'
He knew well enough what she meant, but after some rapid calculation in his mind he wondered if she was telling the truth or whether she needed to seek an apothecary.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
In which Crowner John devises a plan
Next day John broke his usual routine by avoiding his chamber in Rougemont's gatehouse and, instead, again rode a borrowed rounsey up to Polsloe. This time he was more forthright with the taciturn porter and demanded that he would go and ask Dame Madge if she would speak to him. He lingered on the porch of the priory building for a few moments, until the gaunt sister appeared. The angular Benedictine was dressed in her usual black habit and veil, with a white coif and wimple framing her long face. Her front was protected by a white apron carrying some smears that looked suspiciously like fresh blood. Ignoring the scowls of the gatekeeper, who was peremptorily dismissed by the nun, John followed her into a vestibule where there were a couple of benches against a bare wall, a staircase going up to the prioress's parlour above and a corridor disappearing into the recesses of the ground floor. Sitting down together, he began without any preamble.
'I have been abroad for several weeks, sister, and need to know what the situation is with my wife. I know that she has already disposed of her personal belongings and had her money chest brought here. Am I never to see her or speak to her again?'
Dame Madge looked at him sympathetically. 'You have not been a good husband, Sir John, as everyone in the county is aware,' she said with a wry smile. 'But I also realise that our sister Matilda cannot have been the easiest person in the world to get along with. Her arrival here once more is the culmination of years of disappointment and anguish, which has come to a head mainly because' of the well-known behaviour of her brother - though you are by no means exonerated because of that!' she added sternly.
'But can I see her and discuss this with her?' pleaded de Wolfe. 'She did this once before and caused me great concern - then calmly returned home as if nothing had happened!'
The nun shook her head emphatically. 'If it were up to me, you could certainly visit her. But she has given strict instructions that she will see no one from outside this house. I, and indeed the prioress, must abide by that decision.'
Frustrated, John cast about for some other means of communicating with Matilda, if only to get some clue as to her intentions. 'If I were to get a letter written to her, could someone here read it to her?' he asked earnestly. He thought that Thomas could write something at his dictation and one of the literate sisters here could give her the gist of its contents.
Dame Madge shrugged her bony shoulders. 'You are welcome to send one, Crowner - but whether she will be willing to receive it will be up to her.'
John made one last attempt. 'How long would it be before she makes a final decision about taking the veil?' he asked. 'I am soon leaving Exeter for London on the king's business, possibly for a long time. I need to know what to do about my personal affairs: for example, do I keep my house here, if she is never to emerge from Polsloe?'
The nun sighed. 'I see that you have many problems, too. All I can promise is that I will tell Matilda what you have said, and if she has any change of heart I will send you a message.'
There was little more to be gained by staying, and with thanks to the helpful old sister he trotted back to the city little the wiser for his visit. His first stop was the castle gatehouse, where he had his second breakfast with Gwyn and Thomas, sharing a fresh loaf and a slab of hard cheese, washed down with ale and cider.
He interrogated his clerk about one pressing problem. 'Thomas, I asked you some time ago to discover if any of your religious books in the cathedral library - or if any of your clerical friends - had any notion about a marriage being annulled if one partner entered a religious order. Did you learn anything of that matter?'
The little clerk shook his head sadly. 'I pored over every text of canon law that I could find, Crowner. But I found nothing helpful, nor did my acquaintances in the cathedral have any better information to offer. Everything that was written about the dissolution of a marriage confirmed that it is almost impossible to achieve, except on grounds of consanguinity or impotence. '
He looked crestfallen at being unable to help his master in his hour of need.
De Wolfe grunted. 'Neither of those last grounds could be invoked, not after seventeen years of marriage! Could not a Papal Legate or even the Pope himself grant a dissolution, if he was pressed?'
Thomas grimaced. 'I fear such elevated manoeuvres are reserved for kings and princes, sir! I doubt if anyone less could achieve it, especially given such a long-standing bonding as you have enjoyed.' He used the last word with no suggestion of irony and went on to offer some more advice.
'My uncle, the archdeacon, might have the final word on this matter. He is the most learned man in this diocese, and I am sure that his opinion would be beyond dispute.'
De Wolfe nodded, and when he had thrown down the last of his ale he rose to his feet. 'I have asked him before, Thomas, and he had the same pessimistic view as yourself. But I will make one final appeal to him.'
He reached for his cloak, as it had begun to rain outside and spots were flying in through the open window-slits on the back of a brisk wind. 'I am going to see the sheriff again now. If he agrees with what I have in mind, we will all need to meet again this afternoon. There will be much to discuss.'
After a long discussion with Henry de Furnellis, John waylaid his friend, John de Alençon, as he returned from the cathedral to his house in Canon's Row for his dinner. Just before noon, when there was a break in the incessant devotions held in the huge church of St Mary and St Peter, the priests spread out across the precinct and the lower town to take their main meal of the day. The Archdeacon of Exeter, one of the four in the diocese, had a dwelling halfway along the road that formed the north side of the Close, a narrow but substantial house, one of a dozen that accommodated senior clerics. The coroner, who lived but a few hundred paces away, ambushed him as he walked from the small door in the North Tower and was promptly invited for a cup of wine. De Alençon was a very austere man, unlike some of his fellow canons, who indulged in a luxurious lifestyle. His house was simply furnished and he ate sparingly, which explained his thin body and hollow cheeks. However, he had a weakness for fine wines, and the one he gave to de Wolfe when they were seated in his spartan study was a choice red from Anjou. After they had sampled it and made appropriate comments abou
t its excellence, de Wolfe came straight to the point.
'You may have heard about my wife leaving me again, John,' he began. 'Gossip travels with the speed of lightning in this city, and I know that the Close is by no means immune from its spread. I have asked you before and, now that the problem is more urgent, I must seek your opinion again. If Matilda does take her vows in that Benedictine house, how would that affect the legality of our marriage?'
The grey-haired priest smiled sadly at his friend over the rim of his pewter goblet. 'I know that my sharp-brained nephew has been researching this problem in the library. I, too, have made what enquiries I could since we last spoke of the matter. There is little more I can tell you, except to reinforce my opinion that you would not be free to marry again.'
De Wolfe stared glumly into his own cup. 'I had heard that men who enter some religious orders were looked upon as dead. Surely a corpse cannot remain married?'
The archdeacon shook his head. 'That is rare and usually concerns old men who have no living wife. But in any event that applies only to their secular existence - their loss of civil rights and ability to interact with the world. Marriage is a contract before God Almighty - do not the vows say that those whom God has joined together let no man put asunder?'
'But annulment does happen sometimes?' said the coroner, clutching at the last few straws.
'If a man and his wife both enter religious orders, then to all intents and purposes the marriage ceases to exist - but even that is in the eyes of men, not God. The cases where rulers and princes obtain annulments for political purposes are usually founded on often dubious claims of consanguinity. The Holy Father in Rome is usually involved in their granting, and it would be blasphemous of me to even hint at the wisdom of some of those decisions.'
'There is nothing else that could be used? What if one of the pair went mad?'
De Alençon shook his head again. 'Only if it was evident at the very outset, usually before consummation. And the madness would have to be extreme. It has been said that if magic was involved in the obtaining of a wife or husband, then that might be considered as grounds by Rome, but I doubt that you could persuade anyone that Matilda's behaviour has been either lunatic or involved sorcery!'
They talked for a few more minutes, but it was evident that Thomas's careful research was confirmed by the archdeacon's own knowledge. Despondent but unsurprised, de Wolfe let his friend get on with his dinner, while he himself went back to Martin's Lane and Mary's salt fish and boiled beans.
Two hours after noon the coroner collected his officer and clerk from the gatehouse and led them across the now muddy inner ward of Rougemont to the keep, where they filed into the sheriff's chamber.
They found Henry already closeted with Ralph Morin, the castle constable, and Gabriel, the sergeant of Rougemont's men-at-arms. They sat on stools around the sheriff's desk in a conspiratorial huddle.
'I've told the sentry outside to let no one in on any account,' boomed Morin. 'We don't want our discussion bandied abroad.'
De Furnellis bobbed his head, the loose skin under his sagging neck making him look more like an old bloodhound than ever. 'The coroner has a plan to flush out these pirates, if they do exist,' he began. 'So, de Wolfe, let us hear what you propose.'
John dragged his stool a little nearer to the table. 'Our attempt to catch them unawares at Axmouth by searching their storehouses went astray, as the sods were too clever for us,' he began. 'I'm convinced that some of the goods they have there and which they transport away to sell as soon as possible are the spoils of callous theft and murder on the high seas. But we have to catch them at it; that's the only way we'll ever defeat this barbarous trade.'
Morin voiced the obvious objection. 'That may well be, John, but the chances of being in the right place at the right time to see them pillaging some vessel are so slight as to be useless! The Channel is a huge area and, even if we knew where they hoped to strike, how could we get there?'
De Wolfe' s long saturnine face managed to produce a cunning smile. 'Exactly the problem, Ralph! The only way to be there when it happens is to be the intended victims ourselves.'
The furrowed brows of his listeners showed that they did not follow his reasoning, so he explained his plan. 'We have to offer a very tempting target, one they can hardly resist,' he growled. 'If it was known that a ship full of treasure was setting sail on a certain day, then such a prize would surely be hard to ignore!'
The sheriff sighed. 'Come on, John, let's hear about it, you devious devil!'
'There are precious few treasure ships sailing out of these ports,' objected Ralph. 'Why should they believe that any particular cog was worth the risk?'
The sharp-minded Thomas already saw the way his master's mind was working. 'Silver - that would be a temptation. Though tin is the main metal sent from these harbours, there is a fair bit of silver mined alongside it.'
He was right, as the panning of the hundreds of streams on Dartmoor, and now increasingly the digging deep into the banks to follow lodes, was producing enough silver to keep a mint going in Exeter.
'But we don't export silver from here,' grunted Gwyn. 'Surely there's only enough of it to make our own coinage.'
John shook his head emphatically. 'There is silver going away, but not in ships from these ports. King Richard has to pay his troops in Normandy and some Cornish and Dartmoor silver is taken up to Winchester and then across the Channel by shorter and safer sea routes.'
Henry de Furnellis nodded. 'The Exchequer sends an escort down for it every now and then. Between you and me, lately some of the so-called silver coinage sent to the Lionheart's army has had a fair proportion of Dartmoor tin in it, as Hubert Walter is running desperately low in funds.'
The constable tugged at the twin forks of his beard as he digested the argument. 'So you are going to load a vessel with silver and hope that this will attract the attentions of anyone bent on piracy?' he asked.
De Wolfe gave one of his lopsided grins. 'Not silver, but a few boxes full of stones! This ruse depends totally on our spreading false information, which is the main object of our meeting today - and why not a word must get out about the deception.'
As light dawned upon his audience, he elaborated on his plan. 'We can use one of our partnership cogs, perhaps the St Radegund, as she is the largest. We need room in the hold to hide at least a dozen of Gabriel's best soldiers to create an ambush if these bastards do set upon the vessel.'
'So why do we need boxes of stones, if the whole affair is a sham?' grunted Gwyn.
'Something heavy has to be seen being carried aboard at Exeter or Topsham, for we want it to appear as if our story is true. A story that must seem like a secret, that is carefully leaked well in advance.'
Thomas bobbed his scraggy head in understanding. 'It will take some cunning, to spread the rumour without giving the game away,' he observed. 'How do we set about that, for not a word of the real truth must escape from this room?'
De Wolfe looked around at the faces seeking his leadership. 'We need to start with the alleged treasure itself, arriving in Exeter soon. I think five hundred pounds' worth would be a credible but attractive prize to tempt anyone.'
The constable whistled at the amount. He was unable to read or write, but he was no sluggard when it came to calculating money. 'That's a hundred and twenty thousand silver pennies! We'll need half a dozen boxes of stones on packhorses or in a cart to shift that lot!'
'With a strong escort of your men, Ralph,' agreed John. 'They can be said to have come from the Bristol mint, so you could send out your men to, say, Taunton to fetch them from the castle there. We could send empty boxes up there beforehand, concealed in a wagon, and you can bring them back heavy with rocks.'
'And make sure that plenty of people see them arriving as a badly kept secret,' added Henry, who was warming to the deception.
'But we need more leakage than that and at an earlier stage,' warned the coroner. 'We have to make sure that the news filters thr
ough as far as Axmouth and soon enough for them to decide to act and get a ship ready to intercept the treasure vessel.'
'But subtly enough not to make them suspicious that this is a trap,' cautioned Thomas, as far-sighted as usual.
For the next hour they hammered out the details of the plot. Each was given his allotted task, and eventually they left feeling like arch conspirators in some ancient Roman intrigue.
CHAPTER TWELVE
In which the coroner visits a different priory
After his cool reception at the Bush the previous evening, de Wolfe decided to give it a miss that night and sat gloomily drinking alone at his own fireside, before taking himself early to bed in the lonely solar built above the back yard. He tossed and turned on the big hessian bag stuffed with feathers that lay on a low plinth on the floor, restless under the woollen blankets that now replaced the winter bearskin. It would be wrong to say that he missed Matilda's company there, but he had become used to her lumpy body breathing heavily on the other side of the bed, with the occasional strangled snore.
He went over his plan to try to entice pirates into his trap but was realistic enough to know that it had a slim chance of success. Even if the news of the 'treasure' reached Axmouth, would they want to act on it? Perhaps they would suspect a trick and, even if they did decide to attack, they would have to know exactly when the St Radegund left harbour to have any chance of intercepting her. This could not be done within sight of land, so they would have to identify the cog and then follow her for at least some hours. And what if some other pirate beat them to it? If the news was disseminated as well as John hoped, maybe privateers well known to operate out of Lyme or even Dartmouth might decide to try their luck against a hoard of silver.
Obviously, it did not matter greatly which pirates were ambushed, but John felt a particular need to squash whatever was going on in Axmouth. From piracy, the turmoil in his mind moved on to Matilda and her apparent implacable resolve to remain in Polsloe. He felt that part of her motive was to spite and punish him, but he had to admit that she had always inclined towards the religious life. Soon after their wedding, she had admitted to him that she had never wanted marriage. She had yearned as a girl to take the veil, but her forceful parents had insisted that she make a socially acceptable marriage and her heartfelt inclinations to the Church had been denied. There was now nothing he could do about it, and he accepted philosophically the disappointment of the archdeacon's final opinion concerning the impossibility of an annulment. They were saddled with each other until death parted them, so taking a new wife was probably denied him for ever.
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