What was more interesting was the sight of the horse-dealer sitting in his saddle, in the act of raising a cow horn to his lips. Three mournful hoots echoed through the woods, then Cruch sat immobile, intently watching and listening. Nothing happened and, a few minutes later, three more blasts were given on the horn. Then, distantly, came an answering blast, repeated four times, on a horn with a higher pitch.
Soon, two riders came into the clearing from the opposite side and met Stephen Cruch in the centre, alongside the ruined hut. They were astride moorland ponies and wore swords, with maces hanging behind their saddles. John recognised neither man, but suspected from Gwyn’s description that these were Robert Winter and Martin Angot.
They remained on their horses and began an animated conversation, but from a hundred paces away John had no hope of catching any words.
A leather bag was passed over to the bearded man that he assumed was Winter, but again he had no way of knowing whether it contained money.
The meeting was very short, for as soon as the bag was stowed away in his saddlebag the leader raised his hand in salute and the pair pulled their short-legged ponies around and walked out of the clearing the way they had come. Stephen Cruch also turned and departed much faster than he had arrived.
De Wolfe was in a quandary as to what he should do. He doubted both the wisdom of following the presumed outlaws and his ability to do so, as only God knew how far they intended riding, and even in the woods he could never keep up on foot for any great distance. And what could he do, if he ended up at an outlaw camp with twenty or thirty desperate villains against him? Discretion seemed not only the better part of valour, but eminently more sensible, so he decided to retrace his steps and get back to Gwyn. He was eager to get a better description of the two outlaws, now that he had seen them with his own eyes.
No doubt Thomas would have advised him that ‘man proposes, but God disposes’, for as he left the shelter of his tree trunk to find his way back to the path, there was a bull-like roar from his right and a yell from his left. Two ragged men hurtled towards him through the trees, kicking up showers of dried leaves as they came. Shocked for an instant, as he had thought himself alone, he barely had time to draw his sword before the first was upon him. Thankfully – for it probably saved John’s life – the other caught his foot in a trailing brier and fell heavily on his face, delaying him for almost a minute.
During that time, the first man skidded to a halt before the tip of the coroner’s weapon, his expression suggesting that he had not expected to be confronted by a fighting man wielding a Crusader’s broadsword – and one who appeared to be well accustomed to using it.
‘I’ll get you, you bastard!’ he yelled, lifting a ball-mace in one hand, the other brandishing a dagger. He was not a big man, being a fellow of about twenty years, dressed in a tattered tunic which was pulled up in front between his legs, the hem tucked into his belt. His head was covered in unkempt brown hair which merged with a wispy beard of the same colour.
John took in all this in the instant the man came to a stop in front of him, which was his undoing. With a quick prod, almost a reflex, the coroner jabbed the sharpened point of his blade into the fellow’s left forearm and the dagger went spinning away as the man howled in pain. Clutching the bleeding arm against his chest, he made a vicious swing with the mace, a studded metal ball on a chain attached to a short rod. If the chain had wrapped itself around John’s sword, it would have snatched it from his grip, but wise to the ways of infighting he dropped the point and stepped back, letting the ball whistle past his nose. The momentum of the heavy weight turned the assailant’s shoulder towards de Wolfe and, without hesitation, he slid his sword into the armpit, deep into the man’s chest. It was killed or be killed, and after twenty years of practising survival, the coroner gave not a second thought to inflicting a fatal wound.
But his minute was up, and as the first man staggered away to die the other, now recovered, was upon him. Seeing what had happened to his mate, he was more cautious and stopped when de Wolfe swung round to menace him with his sword, held two-handed before him.
‘Clear off, or I’ll kill you as well!’ snarled the coroner. The outlaw’s eyes flicked briefly to where his partner was oozing his lifeblood into the leaf mould.
‘You’ll not be so lucky this time, whoever you are!’ snarled the lout.
Even in such a perilous situation, John realised that the attackers had no idea who he was. Cruch must have sensed that he was being followed up the track and had told the two outlaws. They had presumably left a couple of sentries outside the clearing and had now told them to circle around and get rid of whoever had been spying on them. John fervently hoped that there were no more of them around, as without Gwyn odds of two to one were the most he wanted to cope with.
This man was older and more heavily built, bare footed and wearing a torn leather jerkin over brown serge breeches. A florid, dirty face was cracked in a ferocious grimace, exposing crooked, yellow teeth. He gripped a heavy pike, a dual-purpose weapon which was both a staff and a lance, having a sharp spearhead on one end. For a moment, they faced each other without twitching a muscle, each waiting for the other to make the first move. John knew that the pike had a much longer reach than his own sword – it could not slash sideways, but as a stabbing weapon it easily surpassed his own in range.
Suddenly, the outlaw lunged, and though John hacked at the pike shaft to divert it, the edge of the iron tip scored through his tunic over the left side of his hip bone. A searing pain swept up from his loin, but he sensed that the wound had not gone deep. His adversary was still out of range and drew back for another lunge, grinning evilly at having made the first strike. They feinted again and John saw that his hacking blow with the sword had cut through half the thickness of the pike, just below the head. Another swipe might sever it completely, and he deliberately left himself open for a split second to tempt the outlaw. But the man was too canny a fighter to be tricked and backed off, giving John time to wonder whether he was facing another old campaigner.
‘You’re bleeding, Big Nose!’ taunted the ruffian. ‘In a minute, I’ll have you gutted like a goose!’
John could feel the warmth of blood seeping into his clothing, but he had no time to look down at the damage. The other fellow made another sudden charge, aiming for de Wolfe’s heart, but this time the coroner was ready for him. As he twisted away, he snatched his left hand from his sword hilt and grabbed the spear just below the head, throwing his weight sideways, so that it fell full on the weakened shaft. With an audible crack, the wood split and the wicked iron point fell uselessly to the ground. Off balance, John had no chance to land a precise blow with his sword, but he swung it wildly and was rewarded with a bellow as the heavy cutting edge sliced into the thigh of his opponent.
Then things happened with lightning speed, as the enraged man used the shaft of his broken pike to deliver a smashing blow to de Wolfe’s left shoulder, numbing his arm completely. A fraction of a second later, John, though reeling from the pain, lunged forward and jabbed his sword into the lower belly of his antagonist, feeling the point go in until it crunched against bone. As he pulled it out, the sharp edge was dragged across the man’s groin and a fountain of blood spurted from the severed main artery. With a scream of mortal agony, the outlaw used the last of his strength to swing his pike handle again. This time it caught John cleanly across the temple and he collapsed unconscious on to the forest floor.
With no clock nearer than Germany, Gwyn had no way of knowing how long he sat outside the alehouse on the Plymouth road, but judging by the height of the sun it was noon by the time his patience ran out. He had seen the horse-dealer trot past the inn in the direction of Exeter about an hour after leaving his master, showing no signs of having been in a fight. Unsure of what to do next, Gwyn spent the next couple of hours drinking several quarts of ale, eating a loaf and cheese and, not long since, a sheep’s knuckle with fried onions. He had also questioned the cripp
led man who ran the tavern about the priest and his acquaintance – and discovered that the smaller, wizened fellow was indeed a well-known horse-dealer by the name of Stephen Cruch. The landlord had no idea who the cleric was; he had never seen him before.
In between these activities, Gwyn had paced up and down outside with increasing concern, looking a hundred times back down the road to where the entrance of the track lay. He blamed himself for letting the coroner go into the forest alone, though he knew that de Wolfe’s stubborn streak could not have been overcome. The road continued to be fairly busy, with travellers within sight every few minutes, but there was no sign of the coroner emerging from the lane.
Eventually, Gwyn could stand it no longer. He went around to the side of the crude wattle-and-daub building to check on the horses, which he had tied up in the shade, with two leather buckets of water dipped from the ditch behind and a ha’p’orth of hay bought from the inn. Satisfied that they were safe to leave, he tightened up his sword belt and stalked off down the road, with a foreboding that all was not well with John de Wolfe.
Reaching the old track in a couple of minutes, he turned into the cool green of the trees. Going as cautiously and quietly as his large body would allow, he followed the path into the forest, noting the few recently broken twigs and branches that told of the recent passage of a rider. He stopped every few minutes and listened, his hand on the hilt of his big sword, but there was nothing except the twitter of birds and the occasional rustle of some small woodland animal.
Obliviously, he passed the spot where the coroner had cut off left from the path, as there was nothing to show for it. Like John, he now saw the brightening ahead where the clearing lay, and even more cautiously he walked to the edge of the trees and looked around. All was quiet and, after a moment, he advanced to the charred timbers of the old cottage and saw the crushed vegetation in the centre of the clearing. A pile of fresh, still-moist horse droppings lay there and, looking beyond them, Gwyn saw that more disturbed grass and bracken indicated that at least one rider had gone off through the far side of the clearing. He stopped to consider what he should do. For all he knew, Stephen Cruch, as he now knew him to be, had himself ridden straight across, but the width of the flattened undergrowth suggested that several horses had turned around here. He walked to the opposite trees and went into the wood again for a few hundred yards, finding nothing. Returning, he stood again in the clearing and risked giving a few piercing whistles, ones that he knew the coroner would recognise from their old campaigning days. There was no response and he circled the perimeter of the clearing, whistling again, then finally calling ‘Crowner!’ at the top of his voice a few times.
Only the birds replied.
Worried and frustrated, he began a more systematic search of the edges of the clearing, reasoning that if there had been some meeting there his master would have been spying on it. Of course, there was always the possibility that he had followed the other party, presumably outlaws, in which case he could be miles away by now.
The Cornishman decided on one more circuit, this time a few trees back from the edge, where John may have been hiding to be within sight of the conspirators. Halfway around, he stopped, fear suddenly gripping him. On the waxy green leaves of some wild garlic, he saw a spatter of blood. A few feet away there was more, and scuff marks through the fallen leaves were deep enough to expose the almost black leaf mould beneath. With his heart in his mouth – and his sword in his hand – he followed the intermittent trail for a dozen yards, to the lip of a depression which looked like an old badger sett, drifted over with leaves. Three or four feet lower, he saw the inert body of a man, which instinct told him was a corpse. After the first lurch of fear, he saw straight away that it could not be the coroner, though the head was buried in leaves where he had pitched face down. The clothing was brown and the fellow was bare footed.
Sheathing his sword, Gwyn tipped the dead body over and saw a total stranger, but enough of a ruffian to qualify as one of the outlaw band. The cadaver was still warm and the limbs and jaw were slack, so he had been dead less than a few hours. The eyes were wide open and the mouth gaping. His jerkin and tattered tunic were saturated with blood from the waist down and, on probing, Gwyn saw a gaping slash in his upper thigh and gouts of blood clot oozing from a wound in his lower belly.
‘This is John de Wolfe’s work, I’ll wager!’ he muttered to himself, letting the corpse fall back again. ‘But where in the Virgin’s name is he?’
He began yelling again, uncaring about concealing his presence, then began following the blood trail back in the opposite direction. Unfortunately, it virtually petered out just at the point where he had first seen it. A close search revealed a few spots ten yards away, but there were no visible tracks in the forest floor. Two deer trails crossed near by, which confused the issue, and in spite of many minutes casting about, he failed to find anything to help him locate the coroner.
He leaned against a big oak, to recover his wits. There was a dead outlaw back there and it was highly likely that John de Wolfe was responsible. But that by no means meant that the coroner was still around here – or that he was dead or injured. Had he taken off after the other outlaws?
Gwyn sighed and scratched his tangled hair in indecision. There was no way in which he could search the forest – it went for miles in various directions. For all he knew, de Wolfe might emerge somewhere else and either walk or borrow a horse to come back to the alehouse. But some sixth sense niggled at him to say that the situation was not that simple – so he must have help to look for his friend and master.
Having made a decision, he now hurried to carry it out. Still yelling John’s name at intervals, he strode back to the track and jogged down it to the main road. At the inn, he slapped a couple of pennies down before the cripple, telling him what had happened and to care for the hired horse until it was collected the next day. With a last admonition to keep a sharp lookout for the coroner, he spurred his big mare towards Exeter to get help.
Even pushing his strong mount as hard as he could, it took Gwyn almost three hours to reach Rougemont. The first person he saw when he clattered his steaming mare under the gatehouse arch was his drinking and gambling friend, the garrison sergeant.
‘Gabriel, the coroner’s gone missing!’
He poured the whole story into the sympathetic ear of the old soldier, who was another who thought highly of Black John.
‘But we don’t know for certain he’s in trouble, just because he saw off some bloody outlaw!’ Gabriel tried to be reassuring.
The coroner’s officer shook his head. ‘I’ve got a bad feeling about this, friend. He wouldn’t have gone off for hours, leaving me and the horses without any word.’
‘So what do you think may have happened to him?’
‘With a dead man there, there’s no doubt he’s been in a fight. We must go to look for him. He may be lying wounded. It needs more than a few men to search that area. I couldn’t do it alone.’
Gabriel worriedly chewed his lip. ‘The bloody sheriff won’t be too keen on sending men-at-arms to look for John de Wolfe. He’d be glad to see the back of him.’
‘Surely his sister would give him hell if he refused!’ bellowed Gwyn.
‘Let’s find Ralph Morin. We can get some sense out of him.’
They found the castellan in the lower ward, inspecting some repairs to the palisade that topped the high earth bank of the outer defences.
He listened gravely to Gwyn’s urgent news and without hesitation agreed that a search party must be mustered without delay. To their great relief, Morin also said that Richard de Revelle had just gone on one of his duty trips to his manor at Tiverton, to spend Sunday with his wife.
‘So I’ll take it upon myself to assume that he would have been anxious to safeguard the well-being of his dear brother-in-law!’ he said sarcastically, a broad grin splitting his bearded face. ‘So let’s get a posse together, right now!’
Gabriel looked up at the s
ky which, though still blue, showed a sun leaning well over to the west. ‘By the time we get men mounted up and ride almost to Ashburton, there’ll be precious little daylight left.’
Gwyn, though he had already sat six hours in the saddle that day, was in no mood for delay. ‘Can’t be helped. The crowner may be bleeding to death somewhere. Let’s go!’
Such was their devotion to de Wolfe that the three men almost ran back to the inner bailey, where their horses were stabled. As they went, Gabriel and Ralph Morin yelled orders at some of the men-at-arms standing about, who in turn began running to knock up their fellows in the huts and lean-to buildings within the castle precinct. Before the three leaders returned on horseback, the outer ward was buzzing with activity, as a dozen soldiers took their mounts from the main stables and saddled up with the help of the ostlers and farriers.
A crowd of wives, children and off-duty members of the garrison came to gawk at the urgent preparations and cheered as the troop trotted briskly through the outer gate. As they hurried through the city, scattering the crowds in the High Street and Fore Street, the Exeter rumour mill started in full swing. In these peaceful times in the West of England, the sight of what looked like a war party of soldiers racing out of the city gave rise to all manner of speculation, from a French invasion to a new rebellion by Prince John! It was only when a couple of pedlars, who had been selling trinkets to wives in Rougemont, came out of the castle with the news that the King’s coroner was missing, probably wounded and quite possibly killed, that the rumour took on a new twist, spreading like wildfire throughout the city.
With the sense of urgency that Gwyn had engendered, the posse made good time to the alehouse on the Ashburton road. In the cooler part of the day, they trotted and occasionally cantered the fifteen miles from the city and arrived there when there was still some of the evening left, it being now early July. They stopped at the tavern for the troop to water their horses, while Gwyn went with the constable and sergeant to see whether the landlord had any news of de Wolfe.
Fear in the Forest Page 27