Fear in the Forest

by Bernard Knight

  He bent down and, pushing the clever hound aside, found the coroner stretched out, his shoulders against the bole of a tree. The light had increased marginally and Gwyn could just make out de Wolfe’s long body.

  ‘Are you injured, Crowner? Where in blazes have you been?’

  ‘I took a blade across my side, but it’s nothing, though I’ve shed some blood. It was a bad knock on my head that did for me, though I can’t remember much about it.’

  Gwyn told his master to lie still, then stumbled part-way back towards the distant alehouse, yelling for help in a voice that could surely be heard in Ashburton itself. Some men came running with a couple of pitch flares and before long Ralph Morin, Gabriel and the rest of the soldiers were clustered around the fallen coroner.

  The lights now showed that he had a huge blue bruise across his left temple, spreading on to his ear, which was torn at the edge. Of more concern to Gwyn was the ominous dried blood that stained his tunic over his left side, but when they looked underneath, the slash, though four inches long, had been stopped by his hip bone and would not be dangerous, as long as it did not suppurate.

  ‘Can you get up – or shall we make a stretcher for you?’ asked Morin.

  ‘Get me up and on to my horse!’ snarled John, struggling to rise. He promptly fell down again and Gwyn and the castle constable, both huge men themselves, stood either side of de Wolfe and locked an arm around his, lifting him to his feet. With the flares guttering before them, they slowly walked him back to the edge of the forest, the hound prancing about delightedly in front of them.

  In the alehouse, Gwyn bound up John’s wound with a length of clean linen provided by the landlord, whose stock of bread, cheese and ale was rapidly exhausted by the posse and the rescued victim, whose appetite seemed to have easily survived his ordeal. As they ate and drank, the story came out, as far as the coroner could recollect. He remembered felling the first outlaw and being threatened by the second, but from there his memory was a blank until he recovered consciousness. Gwyn explained that the corpse of the first man was near the scene of the fight, but not that of the second, who must have staggered off until he collapsed and died where they found him.

  With a terrible pain in his head and a bleeding wound in his side, de Wolfe had stumbled as best he could towards what he thought was the direction of the path. Then he must have collapsed again, for he remembered nothing but jumbled memories of weaving through the trees and repeatedly falling down in a stupor – due either to blood loss or the effects of the blow on the head. Eventually his head had partially cleared, but it was now dark and he groggily gave up until dawn, slumped at the foot of the tree where the dog had discovered him.

  When all the excitement had died down, the coroner told Morin of the assignation they had witnessed between Stephen Cruch and the outlaw chief, as well as the mysterious priest that they assumed had met the horse-dealer in that very room.

  ‘What’s to be done about these foresters and outlaws, John?’ asked Ralph Morin, as they finished the rest of the landlord’s meagre food supply.

  ‘Depends on Richard de Revelle,’ growled the coroner. ‘So far, he’s done everything he can to be obstructive over this, which makes me suspect that he’s got an interest in the matter.’

  ‘Even if he allowed the garrison to be used for a sweep against the outlaws, I doubt if we’d have enough men. I couldn’t take all of them away from Exeter at once. We’ve got only sixty all told.’

  ‘And many of those are little better than raw youths,’ added Gabriel glumly. ‘These men here are some of the best, for I picked them myself.’

  De Wolfe, whose tough body was rapidly recovering, swallowed the last of his ale. ‘Then I’ll have to go to Winchester and see if Hubert Walter is willing to act. It’s his bloody country, after all, for as long as the King is absent.’

  ‘And this horse-dealer and the priest? What about them?’ persisted the constable.

  John gingerly felt his bruised head before he spoke. ‘We can’t prove that anything illegal passed between them, though the landlord here confirms that they met and spoke together here. But Stephen Cruch is guilty of consorting with outlaws, for I saw him with my own eyes.’

  ‘Seize the fellow and ask him a few questions in the undercroft in Rougemont,’ suggested Gwyn grimly. ‘That fat bastard Stigand will soon get some answers from him.’

  ‘Maybe, but I must think about it first. Perhaps soon we should take a ride to Buckfast and see what this priest has to say for himself, if it’s the same one that Thomas met.’

  An hour later, John pronouced himself fit to ride and was helped up into the saddle of his borrowed horse by solicitous hands. Slowly, they made their way up the high road at a walking pace, Gwyn and Ralph riding closely on either side of the coroner, in case he was taken dizzy again. However, his iron constitution and his determination to see this crisis though kept him in the saddle for the next four hours. He had a sore scalp and a throbbing headache, as well as a burning pain in his hip wound, but he had suffered worse many times before.

  When they reached the city, the constable and his men hurried back to the castle, trusting that the sheriff had not yet returned from his conjugal duties in Tiverton. Gwyn went with his master back to Martin’s Lane, insisting that he took to his bed for the rest of the day

  For once, De Wolfe seemed amenable to the idea, feeling even more exhausted after the long ride, but once again fate had other ideas.

  After leaving the hired mount at the stables opposite, John preceded his officer into the house and made for the stairs to his bed in the solar. But as they came into the yard from the passage, Thomas de Peyne almost hopped out of the kitchen hut, Mary close behind him.

  The clerk’s face lit up when he saw his master alive and relatively intact, but Thomas’s expression told John straight away that something was wrong.

  ‘Thank Almighty God that you’re safe, Crowner!’ gabbled the clerk, crossing himself furiously.

  ‘What’s wrong, Thomas?’

  The little ex-priest came close and put a skinny hand on his master’s arm, a thing he would never have done in less fraught circumstances.

  ‘It’s Nesta. She’s with the nuns in Polsloe.’

  For a moment, de Wolfe’s bruised brain thought that, like his wife, his mistress had also taken the veil, until the memory of Dame Madge and her special art came to him. Now the words were tumbling out of Thomas, as he explained what had happened, carefully leaving out any hint of the fatherhood of the child.

  ‘Some fool came into the Bush blathering a rumour that you were dead – that’s what did the damage, in the fragile state that she was in,’ he concluded.

  John felt as if the whole of this day was a bad dream – or a nightmare.

  His head ached, he had flashing lights in his left eye and he could feel blood still oozing out through the rough bandages on his side. To be faced now with the news that his mistress had narrowly been saved from throwing herself into the river, before possibly miscarrying his child, was almost too much to be taken in. He stood in the yard, dazed by the overload of events. Gwyn, himself shaken by this news of a woman for whom he had such affection, rested a fatherly hand on John’s shoulder.

  ‘I’ll ride to Polsloe this minute, to see how matters stand. You must get some rest – and have that wound attended to.’

  John abruptly threw off his confusion. ‘We’ll go together, Gwyn. And thank you, Thomas, for your aid to the poor woman. You’re a good man and I’ll not forget it!’ The clerk gaped at these unheard-of words of thanks from his dour master, but was warmed inside by their sincerity.

  With Mary and Thomas staring anxiously after them, the two men left to reclaim their horses from across the lane, John having Odin saddled up this time. Half an hour later, they were at the door of the little priory outside the city. Someone must have seen them walking across from the gate, for by the time they reached the door in the West Range, Dame Madge herself was waiting there to greet them.
Her tall, hunched frame was draped in her usual black habit, but over it she wore a white linen apron, which ominously had a few spots of blood upon it.

  The nun’s gaunt face displayed the suspicion of a smile as she noticed John’s eyes stray to the apron. ‘No, that’s from another woman in childbed, Sir John. Come with me.’

  She stepped outside and walked along a gravel path to the left, aiming for the kitchen and the South Range beyond. ‘This is where we have our infirmary now. Your friend is there.’ She used the word carefully, with no hint in her voice of disapproval.

  ‘So what happened? And how is she faring?’ queried John, almost afraid to ask, in case the answer was devastating.

  ‘She has lost the babe, may God bless it. I fear she is not at all well, both in body and mind. There was a great issue of blood when she miscarried, which has weakened her.’

  ‘But she will recover?’ demanded John, his legs feeling weak as he anticipated the answer.

  The dame pursed her lips. ‘As long as no puerperal fever or white-leg sets in, she should survive. The loss of blood is the main problem. But I am concerned for her state of mind. She seems to have little will to improve herself.’ She looked askance at the coroner. ‘All she does is ask for you!’

  They had reached the door into the infirmary and entered a short corridor off which were several small cells. Farther along, the corridor opened into a larger room from which came the murmur of a number of voices.

  ‘She’s in here – you can see her only for a brief moment,’ commanded the formidable nun, standing at the door of the first little cubicle. Stepping inside, John saw that the only furnishings were a low bed, a stool and a large crucifix on the wall. Beneath that was the heart-shaped face of Nesta, deathly pale against the red hair that flowed over the pillow.

  Her eyes were closed, but when he spoke her name they opened and the most radiant smile he had ever seen in his life spread across her face, like the sun rising on a clear morning.

  ‘John! You are alive – or are we both in heaven?’

  ‘If heaven be Polsloe, then yes, we are both dead – but together!’

  John bent to smooth a hand over her high forehead and gently kiss her cheek. Even the nun, aware of his wife somewhere under the same roof, could not resist a benign smile – and Gwyn was unashamedly delighted.

  ‘The babe has gone, John. It must have been God’s will,’ murmured Nesta. Privately, Dame Madge was not so sure. She saw too many infants failing to survive to believe that the Almighty wished to lose any more. After a few short minutes, she firmly expelled John and his henchman from the room.

  ‘The girl is very weak. She needs quiet and sustenance to build back the blood she lost,’ she said as John reluctantly left, with a promise to visit as often as he could. As the door closed, the nun looked down at the large stain that darkened his tunic.

  ‘Speaking of lost blood, what have you done to yourself, Crowner?’

  Though John falsely protested the wound’s triviality, Gwyn joined her in pushing the reluctant warrior across the corridor into another small chamber, where basins of water, cloths and shelves of salves proclaimed its function. In minutes he was placed on a stool, his tunic stripped off and the top of his breeches turned down to expose the blood-soaked dressing that had been put on earlier that morning.

  With much tut-tutting, the dame called down the corridor for another elderly nun and between them they uncovered his wound and cleaned it up. Then, with a needle and thread, she pulled the edges of the slash together with three neat stitches, John gritting his teeth as the bodkin pushed through his tender flesh. Covered with salve and neatly bandaged with a long strip of linen wound around his waist, he felt infinitely more comfortable.

  ‘In more ways than one, I owe this priory a great deal for the help I have received,’ he said gratefully to the infirmarian.

  ‘It is our duty to use what gifts God gave us for the good of all,’ replied Dame Madge.

  ‘You will find me not ungenerous after all this,’ murmured de Wolfe, but the indefatigable nun had an answer for everything.

  ‘You are a good man, as men go, Sir John. But your best gift to God would be to conduct your personal affairs as honourably as you do your public duties!’

  With Gwyn trying to suppress a grin behind him, the chastened coroner left the treatment chamber. As he stepped into the passageway, he saw a figure at the far end and stopped dead. For a long moment he locked eyes with his wife, her square face holding an inscrutable expression. She wore a plain black robe and a white head-rail, almost identical with that of the nuns, and was carrying a tray.

  John started towards her, but Dame Madge’s strong hand restrained him. A second later, Matilda swiftly turned her back on him and vanished into the larger room.

  ‘Does she still refuse to see me?’ he demanded, almost plaintively.

  The tall nun steered him towards the outside door.

  ‘In the circumstances, could you think otherwise?’ she asked reasonably.

  De Wolfe rode back to the city in a chastened mood. His wife still refused to acknowledge him, his mistress was desperately sick in both body and mind, and he had just lost his child. He had a sore head, a stinging wound in his side and a problem in the forest that seemed elusive and insoluble. Life was none too great today, and Gwyn, sensing his black mood, wisely kept silent during the short journey.

  Passing through East Gate, they turned up Castle Hill at the top of which John glowered at the sentry as he entered Rougemont. Throwing Odin’s reins at the man, he slid from the saddle with a grimace of pain from the pull of his new stitches and loped off across the inner ward towards the keep. As he had half expected, the sheriff had not yet returned from his manor in Tiverton, and John returned to the gatehouse, where Gwyn was sitting in the guard room with a jar of ale.

  ‘Go home to St Sidwell’s and see your wife, she’ll have forgotten what you look like,’ John said gruffly. ‘And I thank you once more for your faithful service. I just might not have got from against that tree if you’d not persisted in looking for me!’ Like Thomas, Gwyn was unused to any thanks from de Wolfe and scratched his crotch vigorously to cover his embarrassment.

  ‘You look after that wound, Crowner,’ he grunted. ‘You’ll be at Polsloe often enough now, so get them to put a clean bandage on it.’

  John nodded and ended their brief intimacy by stalking out to his stallion. In the absence of his brother-in-law, he decided to talk again to the Warden of the Forest, so walked Odin through the narrow streets to the house in St Pancras Lane.

  There was a new, middle-aged retainer there in place of the murdered steward, and the man showed him into the gloomy hall, where Nicholas de Bosco sat by the empty fireplace, a blanket thrown over his shoulders. He seemed ten years older than on the coroner’s last visit; the attack he had suffered had suddenly aged him. John accepted a cup of wine and, sitting on a stool opposite the older man, brought him up to date with the latest events in the forest.

  ‘I should already have known about all these matters,’ de Bosco said sadly. ‘Here I am, the King’s warden, and none of my own officers tells me anything! They ignore me and treat me with contempt.’

  ‘It’s all part of the plan,’ said de Wolfe, trying to reassure him and restore some of his injured feelings. ‘But have you heard nothing of the new verderer, this Philip de Strete?’

  ‘Not a word! The damned fellow hasn’t been near me. Not that he needs to legally, as the Forest Eyre is not due until next year at the earliest. But as a matter of courtesy, you’d think the devil would come to pass the time of day, as the verderers from the other bailiwicks do occasionally.’

  He pulled his blanket closer around him, though the day was warm.

  ‘And I’ve had several more demands to resign – a letter from the sheriff, damn his impudent eyes, saying that he had reports of continual unrest in the forest and holds me responsible!’

  ‘You said several?’ said John.

 
‘The other from Henry Marshal – or at least from his chaplain on his behalf. I suppose the bishop is too grand to write to me direct. Almost word for word what the sheriff claimed. It’s a damned conspiracy!’

  De Wolfe felt sorry for the old warrior. He had been given this sinecure as a reward for his long and faithful service to the King – and now treacherous elements were trying to take it from him.

  ‘It’s just as well that we have Hubert Walter behind us. Neither a sheriff nor a bishop can prevail against his will. I’m going to see him very soon. I’ll make sure he keeps confirming you in office – if that’s what you really want.’

  He added the last in case Nicholas decided that a quiet retirement was preferable to constantly looking over his shoulder for more assassins.

  ‘I no longer relish the damned job, but I’m not going to be frightened out of it by the Count of Mortain and his scheming curs!’ snapped the Warden, defiantly.

  The coroner stayed a while to talk with him, though there was nothing useful de Bosco could tell him, as he had been ignored since the attempt on his life. When he climbed stiffly back on to Odin’s back, John almost fell off with a sudden attack of dizziness, and with a throbbing head and an aching side, he slowly let the beast take him home to Martin’s Lane.

  Andrew helped him down and took him across to his house, sitting him down on the bench in the vestibule. The farrier called Mary from the back yard and the pair half dragged him up to his bed in the solar, where the maid clucked over him like a hen with a sick chick. John had intended going back to Rougement to confront Richard de Revelle when he returned, and then returning again to Polsloe, but the strong-willed Mary kept him in bed.

  She undressed him to change his bandage, which was still weeping thin blood. The maid had seen him naked at close quarters many times before, though this time he was in no condition to take advantage of her – not that Mary would have objected too much, with both his wife and mistress well out of the way. She forced him to take some hot broth and a herbal remedy, which cured his headache by driving him into a deep sleep.