Fear in the Forest

by Bernard Knight

  Rapidly, he drew the story from his cook-maid, and once again it transpired that he had his brother-in-law to thank for stabbing him in the back. Richard de Revelle had turned up at the house the previous morning, and within a minute of being closeted with his sister in the hall there had been an outburst of yelling from Matilda. This was soon followed by a slamming of doors as she swept up to the solar, the sheriff letting himself out of the house with a satisfied smirk on his face.

  ‘I can’t think how he found out, damn him!’ muttered John, but Mary, familiar with the gossip network that connected every alehouse, shop and doorstep in the city, was in no doubt.

  ‘The sheriff has informants everywhere – and it was not that much of a secret, anyway. I heard of it from the pastry-shop man who drinks in the Bush, even before you told me.’

  She continued her tale of Matilda’s departure. It seemed that his wife had screamed at her maid Lucille to pack some clothes into a bag and then go to the high street to order a two-horse litter. Within an hour, Matilda appeared, still in a towering rage and dressed in her best black kirtle with a white wimple and gorget. With a weeping Lucille trailing behind, lugging a large bag, she proceeded up to the corner of the lane, where a litter was waiting. They vanished, and Mary had heard nothing of them since.

  John listened in silence. Once the first surge of hope had passed, he became more realistic and had grave doubts about Matilda really having left for good. After her occasional flounces to stay with her cousin – and once even six weeks away at her distant de Revelle relatives in Normandy – she always came home when her temper cooled. He supposed he had better take himself to Polsloe to see what the true situation was and bring her back, if the worst of her passion had subsided. But first he was going down to see Nesta and talk it over with her.

  ‘What about me, how do I fare in this?’ demanded Mary, as he started to leave. De Wolfe stared at her, then slid an arm reassuringly around her shoulders.

  ‘You stay right where you are, good girl! You’re almost a wife to me yourself. You feed me, clothe me, clean my house and tell me when to wash and shave. How could I ever do without you?’

  She looked up at him with the suspicion of a tear in her eye. This was the only home she had, with her mother dead and her father an unknown soldier who had only stayed for her conception, not her birth.

  ‘What will happen to Lucille?’ she sniffed. ‘A nun can hardly keep a personal maid with her in the priory.’

  De Wolfe shrugged. ‘This won’t last, mark my words. If Lucille comes back, tell her she can keep her room under the stairs and I’ll still give her twopence a day until the situation gets settled.’

  His conscience assuaged, de Wolfe whistled for Brutus, who was lurking in the back of the kitchen, aware that something unusual was going on. Together they set out for the Bush, John’s head spinning with a mixture of hope and guilt, as well as recognition that this situation was too good to last.

  In Idle Lane, he pushed through the tavern door impatiently, all his reluctance of past weeks vanished. The taproom was crowded, with a clamour of noise and a fug of the usual spilt ale and sweat. He saw Nesta at the back of the room, haranguing one of her serving wenches. Brutus, used to the ways of the Bush, sloped off to the back door, where he knew he could cadge some old trenchers and other scraps from the outside kitchen, leaving John free to march across and take Nesta by the arm.

  ‘Upstairs. We can’t talk in this hubbub!’ he growled. Something about his manner stopped her from making her usual protests about how busy she was, and she climbed ahead of him up the wide ladder in the corner.

  In her room, he dropped the latch inside the door and sat on the bed, motioning her to come alongside him.

  ‘Matilda has left me,’ he said without any preamble. ‘She’s gone to be a nun at Polsloe, though whether it will last I fear to hope.’

  Nesta stared at him wide eyed, then began to cry, turning John’s insides to water. He slid an arm around her shoulders as she leaned into him.

  ‘It’s my fault – everything is my fault. I wish I was dead!’ she sobbed.

  Desperately, he murmured useless soothing noises.

  ‘She’s discovered I’m with child, hasn’t she?’ moaned Nesta.

  John was unable to deny it. ‘It seems so, my love – though it would have happened sooner or later. It alters nothing. In fact, if she’s gone for good, we are freer than ever!’ He tried to sound cheerful in the face of his mistress’s obvious distress. ‘That bastard brother of hers told her, I don’t know how he found out,’ he concluded.

  Nesta sat up, sniffing loudly and wiping her eyes with the hem of her apron.

  ‘Everyone else seems to know already – either my maid or her mother, the midwife, must have let it out,’ she moaned.

  John tugged her towards him. ‘It doesn’t matter how it came out. I’ve told you, I’ll openly acknowledge the babe and cherish him as much as I cherish you. There’s no problem, my love, really.’

  This only provoked another flood of tears from Nesta, leaving John even more discomfited and mystified at the ways of women. They sat in mutual misery for a few more minutes, his mistress rubbing her reddened eyes against the shoulder of his tunic, until she pulled herself together a little and sat up straight.

  ‘What are you going to do about your wife?’ she demanded.

  De Wolfe looked down at the upturned face with puzzlement.

  ‘What am I going to do? I wasn’t going to do anything,’ he said. ‘Matilda’s a free woman, she has money of her own from her family. She’s got this mania for religion, so it’s up to her what she wants to do with her life. Though I suspect that the food and raiment of a nunnery won’t be to her liking for very long. This is just a petulant gesture born of her anger. It won’t last once she gets a taste of monastic life.’

  He sighed and hugged her to him again. ‘I’ve dreamt of something like this ever since I met you, Nesta. But it’s just a dream. I’ll never get free of her, will I? But at least it gives us a short time when I don’t have to creep back into her solar and get an earful of abuse every time I’ve been down to see you.’

  The Welsh woman was putting herself back into order, sniffing back the last of her tears, while tucking her unruly red curls back under her cap.

  ‘You must go to see her, John, straight away,’ she said in a voice filled with new determination.

  ‘And say what?’ he asked in some surprise.

  ‘Beg her to come home, John. It’s ridiculous that the crowner’s wife should take off to a nunnery. You’ll be the laughing stock of the county. Get her back – and quickly, John.’

  He shrugged, bemused by her reaction. ‘If you say so, my love. It makes no difference to us, everything I said about the child stands. It would be easier if Matilda was out of the way, but that’s too much to hope for.’ He looked wistfully at her. ‘I was even going down to talk to John de Alencon, to see if her taking vows would be equivalent to a divorce.’

  At other times this might have squeezed a smile from Nesta, but she remained blank faced, a kind of miserable determination etched on her features.

  ‘We’d better go down. I’ve work to do,’ she murmured.

  He kissed her tenderly and handed her up from the bed, now totally confused as to her mood. As they left the little room, she spoke again.

  ‘Promise me that you’ll go to see your wife – this very night.’

  He nodded, almost afraid to argue with her, and they went back down to the taproom. The level of noise dropped as they descended the steps and a number of curious faces turned up to watch them, then hurriedly dropped away and pointedly ignored them.

  As John squeezed her hand for the last time and turned to the door, he saw two familiar figures standing inside. Gwyn and Thomas had turned up, and their first words told him that they had heard the news about Matilda’s departure.

  ‘Bloody hell, this city is beyond belief!’ he snapped. ‘You can’t fart here without everyone knowi
ng about it within the space of a dozen heartbeats!’

  ‘We wondered if you were all right?’ said Gwyn solicitously. ‘And if we could do anything to help you both?’

  Gwyn was very fond of Nesta in an avuncular fashion and had been delighted when the recent rift between his master and the innkeeper had been healed. Thomas too, was devoted to Nesta, who treated him like a lost dog, sympathetically feeding and petting him. It was not long ago that she had given him free bed and board, when he had been evicted from his meagre lodgings in the cathedral precinct.

  ‘That’s kind of you both,’ muttered John, embarrassed by even a hint of solicitude from a rough diamond like his officer. ‘But I must go up to Polsloe now and see what the hell this woman is thinking of!’

  Gwyn offered to ride with him and, glad of the company, de Wolfe arranged to meet him at the East Gate after he had got his horse from Andrew’s stable. Gwyn went off to fetch his own mare from the garrison stables in the other ward of Rougemont, leaving John standing with Thomas de Peyne.

  ‘There are worse things than taking vows, Crowner,’ said the little clerk tentatively.’Since staying in Buckfast, it occurred to me that if I cannot regain my place in holy orders, maybe I will enter some monastery.’

  John looked down with half-concealed affection at Thomas, who was trying to console him, unnecessarily as it happened.

  ‘She’ll not stay there long, Thomas. My wife is too fond of the good things in life to put up with austerity and hardship. She’s tough and will do exactly what she feels is in her best interests. It’s Nesta that concerns me. She seems so unhappy, though there’s no need for it.’

  It was unheard of for the coroner to unbend his habitual stern manner enough to say these things to his servant, but today was fraught with unusual emotions.

  ‘You go off to see your wife, master,’ replied his clerk. ‘I’ll see if I can comfort the lady here. When I was a priest, I had some pastoral skills and maybe some still remain,’ he ended, rather wistfully.

  John patted Thomas awkwardly on the shoulder and went to the door, Brutus abandoning a sheep’s bone to lope after him.

  It was less than a mile and a half from the East Gate of the city to Polsloe, the track curving through some dense woodland after leaving the village of St Sidwell’s, where Gwyn lived. The two horsemen reached the priory of St Katherine well within half an hour and sat in their saddles for a few moments outside the encircling wall. De Wolfe seemed reluctant to go in to face his wife, and Gwyn asked whether he wanted him to accompany him. The last time they had been to the priory they had been chasing a murderer, and it felt odd to be here now on a more delicate mission.

  ‘No, you stay out here, unless you want to wheedle a jug of ale from someone. I’m not sure how welcome men are in this nest of women.’

  The thought of a drink overcame any concerns the Cornishman may have had about nuns, so they approached the low arched entrance together. An aged porter opened the wooden door when they banged on it and, after lashing their horses to a hitching rail, directed them across the wide compound to the West Range. This was a two-storey building, behind which were the small cloisters, all built of timber. The priory had been endowed over thirty years ago by Sir William de Brewer and, like Bovey Tracey, its church of Thoverton stone was dedicated to St Thomas the Martyr, another building funded by William de Tracy, in penitence for killing Becket. There were fourteen nuns here, and John wondered whether there would soon be fifteen.

  Gwyn sloped off to the kitchens attached to the end of the West Range, marked by a basket of vegetable scraps outside the door, in the hope of scrounging something from one of the lay sisters. John climbed a step to an entrance he remembered from his last visit and knocked firmly on an open door to attract attention. In a moment a woman appeared from a side chamber, dressed in the dark habit of a Benedictine. Her hair was hidden under a flowing head-veil, her throat swathed up over the chin in a linen gorget. A wooden crucifix swung from her braided belt, as her moon-like face stared at him suspiciously.

  ‘I am Sir John de Wolfe, the King’s coroner,’ he began, thinking it as well to pull rank from the start.

  The nun did not ask his business, but stood aside and motioned him to enter. She led the way to the room from which she had emerged, a small chamber with nothing inside but a small table, a stool and a large, rather crude cross nailed to the wall.

  ‘Please wait here in the outer parlour. The prioress will be here in a moment,’ were her first and last words, as she glided out and vanished.

  John, somewhat bemused by his reception, stood looking around at the bare cell. If this was what a nunnery had to offer, he thought glumly, Matilda would be back home within hours. A few moments later, another lady appeared, with another nun hovering behind as a chaperone.

  De Wolfe recognised the prioress from his previous escapade here and gave her a stiff bow of respect.

  ‘I believe that my wife may have arrived here yesterday, Dame Margaret. I wondered if I might speak to her,’ he said humbly.

  The prioress was usually an amiable-looking woman, but now her expression was forbidding. ‘I am well aware of the situation, Sir John. But Matilda has said – in the strongest possible terms – that she does not wish to see you.’

  John stared at her. He was not used to being thwarted, especially by a woman. ‘But she is my wife!’ he snapped. ‘I have the right to speak to her – and to take her home, if it pleases me.’

  He immediately wondered why he had said that, as the last thing he wanted was to have Matilda back in his house, where she would give him hell, then continue to ruin his life. But his father’s legacy of Norman blood had broken through to assert his dominance as a husband – and an arrogant dismissal of anyone who denied it.

  However, he seemed to have met his match in Polsloe. The prioress looked at him calmly and explained as if she were talking to a child.

  ‘Once inside the walls of a monastery, sir, the laws of the outside world no longer apply. Indeed, in some orders, entrance equates with death. The person no longer exists in the secular sense.’

  ‘My wife is not a member of your order, lady! She is presently not in a rational state of mind and unable to make reasoned decisions about her future.’

  Dame Margaret smiled sadly. ‘That is for her to decide, Crowner. She needs some time to reflect on her position. Until then, she wishes to stay here – and we are happy to shelter her.’

  John’s instinct was to argue, but he managed to stifle his annoyance, deciding that it was against his own interests to demand her ‘release’.

  ‘What’s to be done, then? Do you need my support for her sustenance here? I am willing to pay.’

  The prioress shook her head. ‘She came well provided, Sir John. There will be time to deliberate about any endowment if and when Matilda decides to enter upon her vows. At the moment she is but a candidate, not even a novice.’

  John silently hoped that the process would last indefinitely, but said nothing. It seemed obvious that Matilda had brought a dowry with her – he knew that she kept some treasure in a locked trunk in her solar, money that was hers alone, derived from an annuity from the de Revelle estates. He had never queried nor coveted anything of hers – he was comfortably provided from the income from his wool partnership with Hugh de Relaga and his share of the manorial profits from Stoke-in-Teignhead.

  There seemed little more to be said, as the prioress stood placidly but still quite adamant that he was not going to be allowed to speak to his wife. He cut short the impasse by nodding respectfully to her again and turning to the door.

  ‘Please tell Matilda that I was here and was concerned for her. If there is anything she requires, please let me know.’

  The prioress bowed her head graciously.

  ‘If there is any change in the situation, I will make sure that you are informed. I am still indebted to you for the help you provided when we had that unpleasantness some months ago, so I am distressed at this problem in y
our personal affairs.’

  With that, she swept away, her chaperone hurrying after her, leaving John to find his way to the outer door. He collected Gwyn from the kitchen, where he had charmed a buxom lay sister into giving him a pasty and a quart of ale, then they made their way back to their horses and began plodding back to Exeter, the coroner in a silent, pensive mood.

  Thomas found Nesta in the brew-shed, one of the outhouses of the tavern which shared the backyard with the kitchen, privy and pigsty.

  After the coroner and his officer had left for Polsloe, Nesta had gone about her usual business in the inn, but listlessly, with none of her normal bustling efficiency. When she disappeared through the back door, Thomas followed her, glad to get out of the taproom. He disliked alehouses, he drank reluctantly and sparingly, and usually only entered inns when he had to accompany either Gwyn or John de Wolfe.

  Padding up the yard in the approaching dusk, he stopped outside the brew-house door and heard the sound of soft sobbing from inside. Tapping gently, he put his head around the door and saw Nesta sitting on a milking stool, a long paddle, used for stirring the ale mash which was stewing in several large wooden tubs, in her hands.

  Her head jerked up at the intrusion, but her face softened when she saw it was the little clerk.

  ‘Thomas, what is it?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m the one who is supposed to say that!’ he replied with a wry smile. ‘Is there anything I can do for you – or anything you want to talk about, dear Nesta?’

  She shook her head mutely, her eyes again moist with tears. He went over to her and knelt on the dusty earth floor at her feet.

  ‘Even if I am no longer a priest, able to take confession, I am still your good friend, Nesta. Can’t you tell me what’s wrong? I have seen both you and my master becoming more unhappy as the days go by. It grieves me sorely and I know Gwyn feels the same.’

  Nesta put a hand on his thin shoulder and shook her head silently.

  ‘Everyone knows the babe is at the root of this matter,’ he said softly. ‘Yet John de Wolfe has acknowledged it and even seems glad about being its father. This nonsense concerning his wife will pass, I know. As little as I know about family affairs, it is common for a man to have children outside marriage – and he has none of his own.’