Fear in the Forest

by Bernard Knight

  ‘Stop struggling and you won’t be hurt,’ he whispered into his ear. The older man looked at him in surprise, then went limp. At the same time, Simon, rubbing his bruised arm, was dodging another blow from the son, a burly youth who was red in the face with mixed anger and fear. The outlaw, no stranger to vicious infighting, rapidly rallied against the unexpected attack and swung his own club, striking the son hard on the shoulder, making him howl. By now, the two other ruffians had arrived and grabbed the son by the arms. He managed to pull his right one free long enough to deliver a swinging blow with his branch to the temple of the youth who had trampled his garden, sending the fellow to the ground as if poleaxed. Gwyn had to hang on to the father as he struggled and swore when Simon drove his fist into the son’s belly, causing him to double up. The lad sagged in the grip of the other outlaw, as he vomited his breakfast on to the ground.

  The younger outlaw gave him a cruel kick in the ribs as he dropped him to the floor and turned to see what Simon was going to do to the father.

  ‘Well done, Cornishman! Now we’ll punish the silly old fool for daring to attack us.’ As he spoke, Simon drew back his arm and punched Edwin in the face, splitting his lip and making his nose bleed.

  ‘That’s just a start – you can let him go now, Gwyn. I want to kick him around the garden for a bit.’

  Gwyn reluctantly decided that this was the moment of truth.

  ‘Leave him alone, Simon. And the boy.’

  The outlaw stopped with his fist already raised for another blow, a puzzled expression on his face. His two yellowed fangs stuck out as his mouth stayed open in surprise.

  ‘What the devil are you playing at, man? Get out of the way!’

  By way of reply, Gwyn gave him a push in the chest that sent him staggering back into the younger outlaw. The cottar’s son was recovering by now and was leaning against the whitewashed wall, wiping vomit from his chin with the back of his hand. His father wriggled from Gwyn’s loosening grasp and went to the aid of his boy.

  ‘Look, we’ve done them enough harm already,’ barked Gwyn hurriedly, in an attempt to preserve his cover. ‘Wrecked their garden, driven off their pigs – why not call it a day and let the bloody foresters do their own dirty work?’

  Simon stared at the big redhead in amazement. ‘What are you saying, you damned fool? Even if we weren’t being paid for this, I’d half kill these swine for this – look what they did to Ralph there!’

  In a fury, he pointed to the other outlaw, who was groaning as he slowly pulled himself to a crouch, blood oozing from between the fingers he held to the side of his head.

  Simon advanced on Edwin and his son, his cudgel raised, but Gwyn swiftly stepped between them, his own club held out as a protective barrier against the angry outlaw. ‘I said leave them alone!’ he boomed, resigned now to abandoning any hope of further deception.

  The thug’s ugly face creased into a sneer and Gwyn recognised that here was a man who revelled in inflicting pain, suffering and humilation on others.

  ‘Right, you’ve had your chance, you big Cornish bastard!’ he snarled. Pulling a long dagger from a sheath on the back of his belt, he came at Gwyn, club raised in one hand, the knife in the other. The bearded ruffian was close behind him, as the other young outlaw struggled to his feet a few yards away.

  Gwyn smiled beatifically at the prospect of a good fight. Though he had had a few skirmishes since becoming coroner’s officer, they were few and far between compared to his old warrior days, and he missed the rough-and-tumble of confrontation. As Simon lunged at him with the blade and swung at his head with the club, he dodged and used his own club to give the attacker a crack on the wrist that made him howl, the dagger flying off into the dirt.

  ‘Watch the other one!’ yelled the cottar, as the other outlaw dived at Gwyn, his heavy stick raised. The defender parried the blow, the crack of wood on wood echoing from the cottage wall as he brought up his foot and kicked the youth hard between the legs. With a scream, he backed away, clutching his groin, but he stayed on his feet. By now, Ralph had recovered enough to stagger upright and was fumbling to draw his own knife. Simon, his left hand numb from the blow he had taken, had dropped his bludgeon and groped for his fallen dagger. A moment later, Gwyn faced two very angry men clutching long-bladed knives and another with a large club and a score to pay for his bruised testicles.

  The coroner’s henchman quickly decided that, in spite of his greater size and fighting experience, it would be politic to draw his sword. With a metallic rattle, he removed the tempered steel from its scabbard and waved it in an arc before the advancing outlaws.

  ‘That’s enough, boys!’ he snapped. ‘You’ve done enough here for one day. Now just go home, there’s good fellows.’

  He was wasting his breath, however, as the men, livid with excitement and fury, came on to crouch in a semicircle just beyond the reach of Gwyn’s weaving broadsword. Edwin, a few feet away to the left, now drew his own knife, and his son had recovered enough breath to grope for his fallen stave of timber.

  ‘Keep out of it. These bastards are killers!’ boomed Gwyn, seeing the movement out of the corner of his eye. With Simon feinting with his dagger right in front of the Cornishman, the two younger outlaws rushed in from either side, creating a situation that even the battle-hardened Gwyn found disconcerting. He slashed his sword forward to keep Simon at bay, and simultaneously swung a massive arm towards Ralph, an arm that had an oaken cudgel on the end. It connected with the youth’s already battered face, and for the second time in a few minutes, Ralph staggered back to collapse on the ground.

  However, Gwyn had but two arms, and without the intervention of Edwin and his son he would have been in serious trouble, as the other ruffian was coming at his side with a very sharp knife. The cottar dived at the youth’s dagger-arm just as the tip stuck into Gwyn’s thick jerkin of boiled leather. He stopped the momentum of the thrust and his muscular son followed up by jumping on the man’s back and getting his neck in an arm-lock. Between them they wrestled him to the ground, but not before Edwin suffered a long slash across the back of his forearm.

  With both young villains out of the fray, Gwyn turned his full attention to Simon. The long reach of his sword completely outclassed the other man’s dagger. The outlaw now bitterly regretted having left his own at the camp, as he had expected today’s activity only to be an easy roughing-up of a simple freeholder.

  ‘Drop it, Simon, or I’ll have your head off your shoulders!’ bellowed Gwyn.

  The man with the boar’s teeth stared at him for second, as if debating whether to chance an attack, then his knife-arm drooped towards the ground. ‘You’ll answer for this, Jess. What in hell’s name has got into you?’ he snarled.

  ‘Let’s just say that I’ve got a particular hate for bloody foresters. This poor fellow here should get a bounty for telling one to go to hell, not get roughed up.’

  Gwyn began to wonder whether he could yet retrieve something from this fiasco, but Simon was not forgiving.

  ‘You’re dabbling in affairs you know nothing about. This is more than just stirring up some petty freeholder.’

  Gwyn lowered the point of his sword. ‘Drop that knife, then we can talk about it.’

  ‘Don’t trust the swine!’ yelled Edwin, looking up from where he was kneeling on the young outlaw’s legs. His son had dragged the boy to the ground and was holding him there with the branch pressed across his throat, half strangling him. The other youth, having had his head cracked twice within three minutes, was crawling away across the garden on his hands and knees. These events distracted Gwyn’s attention for a brief moment, which was almost his undoing. Simon’s knife shot up again and he lunged at Gwyn with a ferocious cry.

  Caught unawares, Gwyn was unable to step back as he was against the wall of the house, but his fast reflexes allowed him to twist sufficiently for the dagger to snag in the diagonal shoulder band of his baldric, which was hard leather a quarter of an inch thick. The keen blade
sliced across the wide strap and embedded its point in his jerkin, but the force was lost and Gwyn suffered only a shallow cut on the skin of his midriff.

  Though the Cornishman’s body was hardly injured, his pride at being caught off guard suffered greatly. With a roar of anger, he whistled his sword in half a circle above his head and brought it down on the outlaw, catching him between the base of his neck and his shoulder.

  As the man crumpled in a welter of blood, Gwyn prodded him in the breast-bone with the point of the sword, so that he fell away on to the grass, twitching his last agonies at the edge of the garden that he had so successfully ordered ruined.

  ‘Are you hurt, man?’ gasped Edwin, his eyes like saucers as he watched the rapid dispatch of the evil Simon. Gwyn put a hand into his jerkin and looked ruefully at his severed baldric and bloodstained fingers. ‘Nothing a jug of good ale couldn’t put right. What about you and your son?’

  Edwin rubbed a hand across the drying blood on his face and the slash on his forearm. ‘We’ll survive – until those bastards come again.’

  Gwyn took a couple of steps towards Simon, who had stopped jerking and was lying in a widening pool of blood that was soaking into the dry soil. ‘He’ll give you no more trouble – what about that one?’

  He moved to stand over the younger outlaw and rested the tip of his sword gently on his belly. ‘You can let him go now, son. Pity to choke him to death with a stick, when hanging’s so much easier!’

  As the two cottars released the lad and stood up, there was a scuffling noise behind them as the third ruffian managed to get to his feet and tottered rapidly towards the ring of trees around the homestead.

  ‘He’s getting away! After him, Garth,’ shouted Edwin. Gwyn put out a hand to restrain the son from pursuing the terrified fugitive, who had just seen the summary dispatch of his leader.

  ‘Don’t bother with him. Let’s see what this one has to tell us.’ He grinned down at the youth under his sword-point, who stared back fearfully.

  ‘Who are you?’ he croaked. ‘Why have you turned against us?’

  ‘I’m the officer of the King’s coroner for this county, that’s who I am. And you are in big trouble, my lad. A fatal kind of trouble!’

  Edwin looked at Gwyn, then at his son. ‘The crowner? That’s the Sir John de Wolfe that we heard looked into that death of the tanner in Manaton last week.’

  Gwyn nodded. ‘The very same – and foresters were mixed up in that affair, too.’

  The cottar’s face darkened. ‘Those swine – they’re the cause of all this.’ His arm swept around to encompass his ruined vegetable plot and the corpse still oozing blood into his soil. He gave the prostrate outlaw a hefty kick in the ribs to relieve his feelings.

  ‘What are you going to do with this piece of filth?’ he demanded.

  Gwyn looked down and grinned again. ‘I could cut off his head and give it to you. With the other one there, you could claim four shillings bounty, if you took them to the sheriff.’

  The young outlaw, having seen what this hairy giant had done to Simon, was in no doubt that Gwyn was quite capable of carrying out his promise. He began squirming under the sword and babbling pleas for his life.

  ‘Let’s see if you can change my mind, lad,’ offered the coroner’s henchman. ‘Tell me what you know about this campaign to terrorise law-abiding dwellers in the forest – and what the foresters have to do with it.’

  The boy protested that he knew next to nothing and in spite of a few small pricks with Gwyn’s sword-tip all he could say was that he had once seen William Lupus talking amicably with Robert Winter on the roadside near Ashburton – and that occasionally a man who was said to be a horse-trader came to meet Winter and money was handed over.

  In spite of futher threats, which reduced the youth to a state of abject terror, it became obvious that he was such a minor part of the outlaw gang that he had no significant knowledge to disclose. Against the inclinations of the cottar and his son, Gwyn decided to send him on his way, rather than be saddled with a pathetic and useless prisoner who would inevitably end up on the gallows. He dragged him to his feet and gave him a push to help him on his way. As he tottered across the garden in the wake of his fellow villain, both Edwin and his son gave him a series of buffets across the head as parting gifts. The last they saw of him was a ragged figure stumbling into the shelter of the trees.

  The freeholder stooped to pick up the torn door-leather and stood looking sadly at the ruin of his vegetable plot.

  ‘There goes much of our food for the winter. And what’s to become of us now? Those bastards will be back as soon as they hear what happened here.’

  Gwyn slid his sword back into the scabbard, after wiping it on the grass.

  ‘I’ve a feeling that all this trouble will be settled before long. The coroner will have to get help from outside if the sheriff won’t act. Have you nowhere you can go for a few weeks?’

  ‘There is my brother near Moretonhampstead. We can round up most of our pigs and drive them over there. My wife died last year and there is little else of value here now, only the land itself.’

  Garth went off with a dog that had been locked in one of the sheds, to see if he could gather the hogs together, while Gwyn helped Edwin to load some of his meagre household goods on to a small handcart.

  As they worked, the coroner’s officer learned more details of the brush with the foresters.

  ‘These past months it has become much worse,’ said the old man, repeating the same litany that had been told elswhere in the forest. ‘They always had the right to demand a night’s lodging and food from any forest dwelling, together with feeding their horse and hound. But lately they have been grossly abusing the right, coming every week, bringing their pages as well – and claiming extra fodder for their mounts, which they take away across their pages’ saddles. They have been deliberately provoking us – for other cottars in the area have been treated likewise.’

  He threw a couple of coarse blankets on to the cart as he spoke.

  ‘The last straw was William Lupus claiming three of my best sows last week. That’s well outside the law, but he threatened us when I told him to clear off. My other son was here that day, the one who works with my brother, so we were enough to turn him away. No doubt he’s behind what’s happened here today.’

  ‘Is it always this Lupus fellow who causes such trouble?’

  ‘Most of the time, though Michael Crespin, the other forester in this bailiwick, sometimes gets up to the same tricks.’

  ‘Why do you think all this has blown up only in the past months?’ asked Gwyn, as he helped Edwin throw a securing rope over the pile of belongings on the cart.

  ‘It seems that they are doing this as part of some plan to create chaos and dissatisfaction in the forest. The death of the verderer, who was a decent man, all seems part of something – though God knows what!’

  There was little more to be learned, and while the father went off to help his son find their missing pigs, Gwyn dragged Simon’s body into the woods and buried him in a shallow depression, covering the corpse with armfuls of last autumn’s leaves, though no doubt foxes and badgers would soon unearth him. Coming back, he covered the bloodstains with soil, using a wooden shovel he found in a shed.

  By now, Garth and his father had returned with all but two of their pigs, and soon set out with the little cart and their dog, driving the grunting flock ahead of them the few miles up the road to Moretonhamstead and relative safety.

  With a sigh at the sad sight of a dispossessed family, Gwyn left them at the junction of their lane with the high road and set off briskly for Ashburton to reclaim his horse.

  John de Wolfe’s holiday passed quickly and pleasantly in the company of his family. Though he had the worry about Nesta niggling at the back of his mind the whole time, he still managed to enjoy the copious food and drink and the obvious delight of his mother and sister at the chance to coddle him for three whole days. His brother’s welcome s
howed a more masculine restraint, but was none the less warm and genuine, so the days passed very pleasantly indeed.

  He went out hunting again for one morning and spent a considerable time walking or riding with William around the manor. His brother showed him all the agricultural activites with obvious pride – and as part of John’s income came from the products of William’s enterprise, his interest was unfeigned. On the Friday evening, as he relaxed in the solar after a good meal, his mind strayed again to his two trusted servants, Gwyn of Polruan and Thomas de Peyne. He wondered how they had fared and looked forward to seeing them safely returned to Exeter when he got back on Sunday.

  At the moment that de Wolfe was thinking about his clerk, Thomas was in his element in the new church at Buckfast Abbey. Secure in his masquerade as a priest, for no one here knew him, he was standing in the quire of the lofty building. Squeezed on to the end of a row of monks, he was chanting his heart out in the responses that were bringing the office of Compline to a close. He had arrived that afternoon, following a fruitless day jogging from one parish church to another, and went to enrol for the night at the large guest hall across the abbey compound from the imposing church, using his story of being a parish priest on his way to a living in Cornwall. The lay brother who administered the hall looked at this travel-weary little man and took in his worn clerical gown and his ragged tonsure.

  ‘You are a clerk, sir? Perhaps you would be better lodged in the dorter in the abbey over the way, rather than here among the common travellers.’

  Thomas felt a pang of guilt in keeping up the deception that he was still in holy Orders, but a combination of intense longing, together with the knowledge that he was on the business of the King’s coroner, managed to dampen his misgivings. He mumbled something that sounded vaguely confirmatory and the custodian took him by the arm and walked him across to the main abbey buildings. They entered through a small door between the church and the imposing abbot’s lodging and passed through to the cloisters, a pillared arcade around four sides of a grassy square. In his seventh heaven, Thomas lingered behind his guide, basking in the serene peace of the monastic surroundings. Several monks passed, treading softly in their white robes, covered at the front by a brown scapular apron. They nodded at Thomas, but the strict Cistercian vow of silence forbade them from offering any other greeting. The lay brother, uninhibited by any such restraint, urged Thomas along and pointed out some of the main features of interest in the relatively new building, which before the Cistercians had been a Savignac house, and before that a Benedictine abbey founded in Saxon times.