Fear in the Forest

by Bernard Knight

  ‘She’ll not be fit to return for some time yet. Be assured that we will look after her here.’ She looked sternly at the coroner’s own battered face, where the bruises on his temple were beginning to turn yellow at the edges. ‘I want to see that wound in your loin before you leave, Crowner. It’s time the dressing was changed again.’

  Even Nesta managed a smile as the coroner meekly trailed out to the treatment room after the nun, the pair looking like two skinny rooks in their black plumage.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  In which Crowner John follows a dog

  Guy Ferrars had gone to Lustleigh the previous evening and billeted himself, his son and servants on his tenant there, Roger Cotterel. The manor was not an ancient one, being ignored in William the Bastard’s great survey over a century earlier. It had been hewn from some of Baldwin the Sheriff’s lands many years before, and Ferrars’ father had purchased it as an addition to his extensive estates in the county.

  The manor house was small, but built of stone with a slate roof, and when John de Wolfe and Gwyn arrived the next morning, the bailey within the surrounding fence was humming with activity. Guy Ferrars had brought eight of his private soldiers from Tiverton, together with his hound-master, steward and bailiff. Half a dozen lean brown hounds yapped excitedly in an empty pigsty, where they had been confined for the night.

  Ferrars invited the coroner and his officer into the hall, which occupied the whole ground floor, Cotterel’s living quarters being on the upper floor. The reluctant host was a tall, thin man with sandy hair, who was trying his best to look as if he enjoyed having his landlord and his retinue foisted upon him for a day and a night. Food and drink were plentiful on the trestles, and they all filled themselves ready for the search in the adjacent forest.

  Together with Cotterel, his manor-reeve and a dozen villagers, the party moved out on foot, as the edge of the woods was barely a quarter of a mile to the west, beyond which the land dropped down into the valley of the Bovey river, with Trendlebere Down on the other side. As they walked ahead of the motley crowd, the dogs now following slavishly behind the whip-carrying hound-master, Ferrars explained the lie of the land.

  ‘I own everything as far as you can see,’ he bellowed, waving his arm expansively at the tree-covered horizon. ‘I use the land beyond the village fields as part of my chase, which extends for four miles north of here. But farther up, the bloody Royal Forest comes right across the river.’

  They walked on for half an hour, diving into the trees and turning right within sound of the Bovey in its deep valley. John and Gwyn, who had their own swords buckled on, saw that every man was armed in some way, two of the retainers being bowmen. They seemed a large enough party to repulse anything other than a major force of outlaws, but John felt vulnerable after his recent experiences and kept a wary eye open for any sign of opposition. Hugh Ferrars walked with them in the vanguard. He was a younger version of his father in build and colouring, but had barely half his father’s personality and energy. John assumed that the tragic Adele de Courcy had been given little choice in her betrothal to this boorish young man. The manor-lord, Roger Cotterel, was the first to spot the demolished deer-leap that had caused this trouble. He pointed ahead to a tumble of earth and turf among the trees.

  ‘There’s the saltatorium, so we’re in royal territory now, by a few hundred paces.’

  The leap had been built across a narrow defile which carried a well-trodden deer path down the centre. Though it had been partly destroyed by the efforts of Ferrar men, John could see that an eight-foot bank had been thrown up from a deep ditch, which sloped gently up on the far side. The agile deer could easily spring down the sheer face and scamper up the slope, but the return journey was blocked as they could not get enough of a run in the ditch to scale the vertical wall.

  The party scrambled down the tumbled earth and stood in the partly filled trench to await orders from the baron. He called over his steward, a venerable-looking elder with snowy hair.

  ‘Have you got that clothing from the widow?’

  The steward unslung a leather shoulder bag and produced a ragged pair of woollen breeches. ‘These had been discarded but not washed, my lord. They will have his scent upon them.’

  Guy Ferrars put his nose to the rags and grimaced. He held them out to John, who even at arm’s length could savour the mixture of stale sweat and urine.

  ‘Don’t need a bloody dog. I could follow that myself!’ said Gwyn, when he had also sampled the odour.

  Ferrars threw the garment at the hound-master, a wizened fellow dressed all in green, with a horn hanging around his neck on a leather thong. He caught it and looked dubiously at the hounds.

  ‘I’ve never tried this before, sir. They’ll follow a fox or a stag to the ends of the earth, but I don’t know if they understand about humans.’

  He called his beasts to him and, as they clustered excitedly around his feet, held the breeches to their snouts. The hounds looked puzzled but willing, and seemed to understand when he waved them away and gave a blast on his horn as encouragement. He started running away from the deer-leap farther into the King’s forest, the dogs running yelping before him. They began spreading out and putting their noses to the ground and to bushes and tree trunks. In a moment they all seemed to converge on to a side track and went racing away, barking excitedly.

  ‘Looks as if they’ve got the idea!’ said Gwyn, to whom dogs were preferable to most men. They all hurried after the hound-master, who was trying to keep up with his charges. The party swished through the sparse undergrowth beneath the tall trees, the stench from crushed garlic strong on the still air. After some four hundred yards, labouring up a slope from the defile, they saw the green tunic of the hound-master in a small hollow at the base of a huge oak. As they panted up, the man looked crestfallen.

  ‘I think they’ve been misled by the scent of a fox, my lord.’

  The six dogs were milling around a wide hole between the roots of the great tree, which was poised on the edge of a dip in the ground. Red Devon earth was exposed, and fresh soil was scattered downhill from the tunnel mouth. The hounds were milling about in circles, yapping and barking, and one had his head in the hole, trying to worm his way inside.

  Gwyn bent to look closely at the ground around the hole.

  ‘This doesn’t look right for a foxhole or a badger sett,’ he grunted. ‘The earth has been thrown up against the bottom, not dug out from it.’

  The hound-master looked and agreed with him. ‘There was a sett here – a big one, but it’s been partly refilled.’

  The two men, watched by the rest of the party, seized a couple of fallen branches and broke off four-foot lengths to use as crude spades. They attacked the soft, crumbly soil, pulling it back to slide down the slope below the hole, which now appeared as a much larger aperture. The dogs, which had been hovering excitedly around them, whimpered even louder, and one, more daring animal again dived head first into the hole. The houndsman yelled at it and gave it a smack across the bottom to get it out. Gwyn took its place, dropping to his knees to peer down the shaft, which went obliquely down between the tree roots.

  ‘See anything?’ snapped the impatient coroner.

  Instead of answering, his officer dropped on to his side, careless of the damp rusty earth soiling his clothing, and stuck his right arm up to the shoulder into the hole. The onlookers watched his face change to an expression of disgust as he pulled his arm out of the tunnel and looked at his hand.

  ‘No wonder the hounds were so excited,’ he said with his usual infuriating slowness in imparting information. ‘How long has this man been missing?’

  A jabber of consternation broke out among the watchers as Gwyn held up his hand to show a piece of greenish skin stuck to his palm.

  ‘Is that human?’ demanded Guy Ferrars.

  ‘It slid off something with five fingers and a thumb!’ answered the Cornishman with black humour. ‘I think he’s in head first, with the legs under this
earth.’ He clambered to his feet and pointed to the soil that was still piled below the hole. Now the baron snapped into activity, shouting orders at his retainers, while de Wolfe and his henchman stood and watched. The dogs were called off and three Lustleigh men energetically began scraping away the earth with pieces of wood. Within a couple of minutes one of them gave a yell and bent to brush away loose soil with his hand, exposing a bare foot. It was white and wrinkled but not decomposed, and very soon both legs were uncovered.

  ‘Can you drag it out now?’ demanded the manor-reeve, who was hovering over the three villagers. They dropped their branches and heaved on the ankles of the corpse. After a momentary hesitation, there was a minor avalanche of powdery earth and the body slid out of the hole, into which it had been pushed up to the knees, then covered with loose soil. One arm below the elbow had been exposed within the tunnel, and it was this that Gwyn had felt. The diggers brushed off most of the earth from the body and stood back to allow everyone to see the dead man.

  ‘There’s no doubt it’s William Gurnon,’ said the reeve. ‘He’s not too mortified, considering it’s a week since he died.’

  ‘The earth helps preserve them,’ said John de Wolfe, an expert on corpses. ‘Only that hand is green and slimy, because it was out in the air.’

  ‘Some animal, rats or a fox, must have unearthed it,’ added Gwyn, not to be outdone in matters of death. ‘All the tendons on the back have been laid bare where it’s been nibbled.’

  Guy Ferrars was more interested in what had killed his servant, rather than the effects of death. ‘Have a look at him, de Wolfe. He’s a coroner’s responsibility now.’

  John and his officer went into their familiar routine of examining the cadaver. As he squatted by the body. de Wolfe observed aloud that someone had already committed several offences, by failing to report a sudden death to him and by concealing the corpse from his view. A week’s hot weather had begun to affect the body, though as John had already pointed out, being buried in a cool wood had markedly slowed down putrefaction. The dead man wore a short tunic and knee-length breeches, his feet being bare. The upper garment had ridden up over his worn leather belt and the exposed belly was greenish and slightly swollen. His face was somewhat flattened from the weight of soil on it and the eyes were collapsed and opaque, but the features were still recognisable to the other men from Lustleigh.

  ‘Here’s the trouble, Crowner!’ said Gwyn, pointing to ominous brown staining on the neutral-coloured wool of the tunic. On both sides, coming around under the armpits, the staining was partly obscured by adherent loose soil, but when Gwyn rolled the corpse over, the whole of the back of the clothing, from shoulder blades down to waist, was stiff with dried blood. When the belt was removed and the tunic pulled right up, the cause was obvious.

  ‘Stabbed in the back – twice!’ barked Ferrars, who was peering over John’s shoulder.

  ‘Bloody cowards! Two with arrows in their backs, and now a knife in the same place,’ added his son belligerently.

  The coroner traced out the two wounds with his finger. One was a few inches from the centre of the back on the right side, where the lower ribs began. It was two finger-breadths wide and shaped like a teardrop, with a sharply pointed lower end and a rounded top.

  ‘A single-edged knife, that!’ said Gwyn. ‘Quite a wide blade, too.’

  ‘Probably the same weapon did this other one,’ observed de Wolfe. He rested his forefinger alongside the second stab wound, which was slightly higher and in the exact centre of the back, over the knobs of the spine. It was half the length of the other, but had the same shape.

  ‘A tapered blade couldn’t go in so deeply, because of the bone underneath,’ he muttered, half to himself. He poked his finger into the hole to measure the depth and gave a short exclamation as he jerked his digit out again and examined the tip, which now had a small cut on it.

  With a curse, he wiped it on the dead man’s coarse tunic, then sucked it vigorously, spitting repeatedly on to the ground.

  ‘Careful with that, Crowner!’ growled Gwyn. ‘Corpse juice can give you a nasty septic wound. Was it a spike of bone that you hit?’

  ‘Didn’t feel like it. Let’s have a better look.’

  He pulled out his own dagger from the back of his belt and enlarged the stab wound over the spine with a slash a few inches long. Taking the free edge of the dead man’s tunic, he carefully mopped up the blood and tissue fluid from the wound, revealing a metallic glint inside. Using the point of his dagger, he levered out a piece of steel, which he displayed on his palm.

  ‘Whoever did this snapped off the tip of his knife in the bone,’ he announced to the heads craning over him to see what he was doing. ‘The other wound was the one that killed him. It’s gone deep into his chest and belly.’

  He displayed the small triangle of sharp metal, which had an irregular edge where it had been snapped off. As he wrapped it in a dock leaf and put it away carefully in his belt-pouch, he turned to Guy Ferrars.

  ‘At least we’ve found your man and you can take him back to his family for a decent burial.’

  The baron glowered at the corpse. ‘I want the swine who killed him. Was it these outlaws or the foresters? Whoever it is will be sorry when I catch up with them.’

  ‘The King’s law will deal with them. But we have to find them first.’

  Ferrars ordered his men to make a rough bier of branches to carry the body home and they then set out on the tramp back to Lustleigh.

  ‘De Wolfe, I’ve been thinking about your journey to Winchester. In the circumstances, I’ve decided to come with you. I need to go there soon on other business, but you may need a little extra persuasion to get the Curia to send a force down here. To them, Devon is a distant country full of yokels and savages, good only for producing tin and wool for their benefit.’

  Privately, John felt that his personal connections, especially with his old crusading commander, Hubert Walter, would be sufficient, but he was in no position to contradict Lord Ferrars. He accepted with good grace, and on reflection thought that however proficient he and Gwyn were with swords, a larger party would be that much safer on the long road to Hampshire.

  When they arrived back in Lustleigh, they delivered the dead man to his wailing wife and grieving family. For formality’s sake, to fulfil the legal requirements, John held a five-minute inquest using the members of the search party as jurors, to deliver a verdict of murder by persons as yet unknown. Thomas was not there to record the very abbreviated proceedings, but de Wolfe could dictate the essentials when he returned to Exeter.

  Ferrars and his son and steward were going back to Tiverton, so John bade them farewell at Lustleigh, arranging to meet them at Honiton, on the road to the east, at noon in two days’ time, all prepared for the journey to England’s royal capital.

  John debated whether or not to take Thomas de Peyne with them to Winchester. He doubted whether such a poor horseman could keep up with the party, especially as Ferrars was such a short-tempered, intolerant man. However, on Gwyn’s suggestion, they hired a better horse from the farrier’s stables for the clerk, a sturdy but docile palfrey, meant for a lady’s mount. In the one day they had before leaving, Gwyn insisted that Thomas give up his side saddle and ‘sit on a horse like a man’, as he put it. Ignoring Thomas’s protests, he made him practise up and down Canon’s Row for an hour until the little fellow learned not to fall off. On Friday morning, the three of them set of for Honiton, which was a convenient meeting point for riders from both Exeter and Tiverton. Guy and Hugh Ferrars arrived with half a dozen men-at-arms in leather cuirasses. These were covered with tabards bearing Ferrars’ armorial emblem, in the new fashion for displaying the family crest – in this case a golden arm grasping a hammer, on a field of crimson. De Wolfe suspected that Ferrars was developing political ambitions to match his increasing lands and wealth and wanted to make an impression on the established grandees who ran England in the continued absence of the King. It was probably t
his motive, as much as concern about the forest problem, which was taking him to Winchester.

  The journey was long but uneventful, apart from Thomas slipping from his saddle near Wimbourne Minster, to the great amusement of Ferrars’ soldiers. The distance from Exeter was over a hundred miles, and at a steady pace the journey took them three days.

  They stopped overnight at Dorchester and Ringwood, where Ferrars claimed hospitality from manorial lords that he knew – in one case, he actually owned the manor himself. He, together with his son, steward and John de Wolfe, fed and slept in the manor houses, while Gwyn, Thomas and the men-at-arms found a heap of straw in the outhouses and barns and ate well in the kitchens, to the delight and amusement of the maids.

  During the many hours of riding through the long summer days, John had plenty of time to mull over his personal affairs back in Exeter, not that such prolonged meditation brought him any nearer a solution. What did he really feel about the women in his life? Similar to his devotion to King Richard, his ingrained sense of honour tilted him towards his duty to Matilda, much as she exasperated and annoyed him for most of his waking hours. It had been a marriage of convenience, and though John had had virtually no say in the decision, the bond had been made under the judicial and spiritual laws and was almost impossible to put asunder. His hopes that Matilda’s entry into a nunnery would annul the marriage contract seemed doomed, as John de Alençon, who should be best informed, seemed to be pessimistic about his chances.

  In any case, would Matilda stay in Polsloe? After more than sixteen years of wedded purgatory, he knew his wife’s character very well indeed, and was all too aware of her fondness for good food and fine clothes. Though he did not doubt her genuine regard for the Church and all its appurtenances, as well as her faith in God and all his saints, he also well knew that there was a large social element in her endless attendances at St Olave’s and the cathedral. They were the places to be seen with the wives of burgesses, knights and guildmasters – venues for showing off her newest kirtles and mantles and currying invitations to feasts in the Guildhall.