Fear in the Forest

by Bernard Knight

  Morin’s bushy eyebrows lifted almost into his hairline.

  ‘Me? Not the sheriff?’

  De Wolfe took a sip of his wine and explained.

  ‘De Revelle is in bad odour with the Justiciar, though he can’t get rid of him just yet because of his influential allies. But Hubert has given me a coroner’s Royal Commission to use whatever means I wish to sort out this mess in the forest. That includes using these troops under your direct command.’

  The constable looked delirious with joy. ‘God’s teeth, that’s marvellous! But will the sheriff let you get away with it? He’s supposed to be the King’s man in the county.’

  ‘I have letters from the Justiciar, speaking for the Curia Regis, which confirms the Commission. They strictly forbid de Revelle from countermanding my activities, as well as stopping him from becoming Warden.’

  The man with the forked beard beamed. ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Another parchment gives me the power to arrest any forest officer whom I consider to be guilty of an offence, irrespective of forest law. As the Royal Forests are royal, they can hardly oppose a direct order on behalf of the King!’

  ‘Is there anything you can’t do?’ asked the portly chaplain.

  ‘You’re safe enough, being a man of the cloth,’ replied John. ‘I’ve no mandate to do anything against clerics or any ecclesiastical or monastic establishments. So I can’t act against this damned Father Edmund, apart from handing him over to the Church authorities, which would probably be a waste of time.’

  Ralph Morin was already imagining himself in command of a small army. ‘When do these soldiers get here?’ he demanded.

  ‘As soon as Ferrars can march them from Southampton – they should be halfway here by now. You’ll have to find some accommodation for them somewhere.’

  The constable swallowed the rest of his wine and jumped to his feet.

  ‘I’d better get started – tents and shelters to put up in the outer ward and extra victuals to get in. The sheriff will have apoplexy when he hears, not least when he realises the cost of feeding these men!’

  At the door of the sacristy, he turned to John,

  ‘Please, let me come with you when you tell the bastard about all this. I wouldn’t want to miss seeing his face at the news!’

  John decided that there was no time like the present, and they walked across the bailey to the keep, smugly anticipating the violent reaction of de Revelle when he heard how he was being sidelined. But the man was not there, and from the furtive looks and feeble excuses of his chamber servant, John suspected that he had some dubious assignation in some backstreet of the city.

  ‘Delay increases the anticipation of good things,’ he told Ralph philosophically. ‘We’ll ruin his day by telling him first thing in the morning.’

  As he walked through the gatehouse arch on his way home, Sergeant Gabriel bobbed out of the guardroom to intercept him.

  ‘Crowner, Gwyn sent a message up by a lad a few minutes ago. He said to meet him as soon as you can just above the Saracen, but not to go inside.’

  John stared at the grizzled soldier, unsure of the meaning of this cryptic message.

  ‘Any idea what it’s about?

  ‘No idea, sir, but it was from Gwyn all right – I questioned the boy and he said it was a giant with red hair who gave him a quarter penny to run with the message!’

  For Gwyn to be so generous for such a small task must surely mean something important, thought John.

  ‘That Saracen’s an evil place, Crowner. Would you like me to come with you, in case there’s any rough stuff?’

  The old soldier was obviously curious, as well as trying to be helpful, so John accepted his offer and they set off at a quick march for the lower town. The tavern of ill repute was at the top of Stepcote Hill, leading down to the West Gate, and ten minutes later they were within sight of the low thatched building, with dirty yellow-plastered walls displaying a crude painting of a Musselman over the door.

  In the rays of the setting sun, they saw Gwyn lurking fifty paces short of the ale house, trying unsuccessfully to look inconspicuous in the doorway of the last house in Smythen Street. They walked cautiously up to him, as he peered down towards the hill.

  ‘What the devil’s going on, Gwyn? Are you spying on someone?’

  He pointed a forefinger the size of a blood sausage towards the Saracen. ‘He’s in there! I didn’t want to scare him off before you came.’

  The Cornishman was in one of his exasperatingly obscure moods.

  ‘Who, for Christ’s sake?’ snarled de Wolfe.

  Gwyn looked as his master in surprise, as if he should already know.

  ‘Stephen Cruch, of course! I was going to the Bush along Idle Lane when I spotted him creeping down here. I followed him and saw him going into the tavern.’

  ‘After that affair in the forest near Ashburton, it’s a wonder he’d show his face within miles of the city,’ observed Gabriel.

  ‘Maybe he didn’t know about it – though every one else in Exeter does,’ replied de Wolfe.

  ‘From the way he was skulking along, I think he’s well aware of the danger,’ said Gwyn. ‘Perhaps he left something in the Saracen last time he stayed there, which he urgently needs before making a run for it, out of the county.’

  De Wolfe stared down the street, keeping the door of the tavern in view.

  ‘If we seized him, it might help when the troops arrive. He can probably tell us where the various outlaw camps are placed. The one you saw, Gwyn – that must be only one of many.’

  The big man’s huge moustache lifted as he grinned. ‘I’m sure he can “probably” tell us, crowner. Especially if I lean on him a little. He’s only a small fellow!’

  ‘How are we going to do it?’ asked Gabriel.

  ‘Just march in and grab him!’ said John bluntly. ‘Though I’ve got the King’s Commission to do almost anything I like, he’s already due for a hanging for consorting with outlaws – which I saw with my own eyes!’

  ‘A good bargaining point!’ chuckled Gabriel. ‘Let’s go.’

  The taking of the horse-dealer was simplicity itself. The three men, two unusually large and the third in a military tunic, brandishing a sword, burst into the taproom of the tavern. There was a stunned silence from all the patrons, a rough-looking bunch with a sprinkling of resident harlots. As John and his friends scanned the room for Stephen Cruch, the silence was broken by the landlord, a grossly fat man called Willem the Fleming, with whom John had often had dealings, usually unpleasant.

  ‘What the hell do you want!’ he shouted.

  Gwyn spotted Cruch sliding behind the fat innkeeper, trying to make for the back door. With a roar, he charged forward, brushed Willem aside and grabbed the horse-trader by his greasy hair. As he dragged the smaller man back towards the entrance, pandemonium broke out and the patrons surged forward, but Gabriel swished his sword back and forth in warning as he and de Wolfe retreated to the door and left.

  Outside, their captive was writhing in Gwyn’s grasp, now with a massive arm locked around his neck, cutting off most of the oaths and blasphemies that he was trying to scream. They dragged him across to Idle Lane, where beyond the Bush on waste ground were a few scrubby trees. From the pocket of his jerkin, Gwyn produced a short length of stout twine and, pushing Cruch back against the trunk of an elder, he tied his wrists behind it, then stepped back.

  The three men stood around him, regarding him grimly.

  ‘Your life is already forfeit, Cruch,’ said John harshly. ‘You have been seen not once but twice dealing with Robert Winter’s scum.’

  The leathery features of the dealer contorted as he babbled his innocence, but the faces of his accusers remained implacable.

  ‘You will hang, unless the justices decide you should be mutilated, blinded and castrated,’ said de Wolfe. At this, Cruch sagged against the tree, almost fainting with terror.

  ‘There is one possible chance for you, if you can persuade me t
o be lenient.’

  ‘Anything, anything, Crowner! I had no part in the attack on you last week,’ croaked Stephen. ‘It was Winter who sent his men to deal with whoever was spying on them. We had no idea it was you.’

  When de Wolfe put his questions to the man, he was so eager to reply that his words fell out in an almost incomprehensible gabble.

  They learned that he admitted to being a messenger between Father Edmund and Robert Winter. This had arisen as an offshoot of his legitimate trading with Buckfast. Some months before, Treipas had paid him to seek out the outlaws, who were known to creep back into towns and villages for clandestine drinking and whoring. Cruch had provided ponies for the outlaws, paid for by the priest, then sent purses to them for reasons which Cruch claimed he knew nothing about.

  ‘There were slips of parchment with the money, which Robert Winter alone could read, for I could not. I keep my accounts on tally sticks.’

  Even Gwyn’s heavy hands squeezing his neck until his eyes bulged and his tongue protruded failed to get the man to admit any more, and John was eventually satisfied that they had learned all they could for the moment.

  ‘We’ll keep you in the cells in Rougemont for now,’ he said. ‘When we move against Winter’s gang, we will need you to show us the various places where you met him in the forest. If you comply, then maybe I will turn my back at the end of it all and forget that you are a prisoner – understand?’

  Cruch nodded his understanding, well aware that with hard men like the coroner and his officer, his life hung by a thread. Gabriel and Gwyn agreed to take the man back to Rougemont and deliver him to the care of Stigand the gaoler, while John went home to a well-earned rest. As they began to frog-march him away, de Wolfe called a last warning to the horse-trader.

  ‘I hear it rumoured that you yourself are already an escaped outlaw. If you have any sense, if we do let you go at the end of this you’ll either take ship out of England – or at least hide yourself in Yorkshire or Norfolk, well away from here!’

  With a wry grin at Cruch’s abject terror, the coroner set off for home and bed.

  The interview with the sheriff next morning, which Ralph Morin had been anticipating with such delight, came fully up to his expectations. He marched into de Revelle’s chamber behind the coroner, a forbidding figure in his long mailed hauberk, wearing a round iron helmet and a sword dangling from his hip, as if ready to do battle that very moment.

  De Wolfe’s armament was less obvious, but even more potent. He carried three rolls of parchment, from which dangled the red seals of both the Chief Justiciar and one of the lesser seals of King Richard, which had been entrusted to Hubert Walter during the monarch’s absence abroad.

  John threw these down on to the sheriff’s desk with a flourish. Though he could not read them himself, he knew every word by heart, thanks to Thomas’s translation.

  ‘Read those first, before you even open your mouth to protest!’ he snarled to his brother-in-law, a more literate man than himself. The coroner’s triumphant tone stifled Richard’s tirade before it began and he rapidly scanned through the unambiguous Commissions that the Justiciar had issued. His appreciative audience watched the sheriff’s narrow face tighten with horror, indignation and finally anger as the import of the documents sank in.

  ‘This is intolerable – outrageous!’ he fumed, as he threw the rolls back across the table towards John. ‘I am the supreme authority in this county. You can’t usurp the shrievalty with something penned on a piece of parchment!’

  De Wolfe leered at him, delighted at this further opportunity to pay Richard back for all the sneers and slights he had inflicted in the past – especially his spitefulness in telling Matilda of Nesta’s pregnancy.

  ‘That smacks of outright treason, brother-in-law!’ he responded. ‘See those seals? They are those of your king and the man to whom he has entrusted his kingdom. The king who, misguided as he may have been, made you sheriff. Are you now saying you dispute those orders or intend to disobey them?’

  De Revelle’s mouth opened and closed like that of a stranded fish, as his face flushed like a beetroot. He was desperate to protest, but afraid that any rash words would brand him openly as a rebel or traitor. The coroner went through the main provisions of the Commission, ticking off the points on his fingers. When he came to the matter of the Wardenship, he took particular delight in demolishing de Revelle’s ambitions.

  ‘You are specifically excluded from putting yourself forward as Warden of the Forests, in the unlikely event of Nicholas de Bosco giving up that office. And unless you tread very carefully indeed, Richard, you may well be deprived of the office you now hold. It was only thanks to our sovereign’s good nature – some would say folly – that he failed to crack down on all the supporters of John’s rebellion.’

  It was a fact that when the Lionheart had been released from his incarceration in Germany he had been extraordinarily lenient with those who had plotted to steal his throne in his absence – he even forgave the ringleader, his brother John, and restored many of his possessions.

  The sheriff began some stuttering condemnation of this latest humiliation, but his past record of flirting with the rebels left him too vulnerable to make any effective argument against John’s new-found supremacy.

  ‘We are going to march against these outlaws and bring these forester friends of yours to account,’ declared the coroner. ‘And I doubt that your verderer protégé Philip le Strete will have his appointment ratified when the matter next comes before the County Court!’

  At that moment the door burst open and Guy Ferrars and his son strode in, ignoring the attempts of the guard on the door to announce them.

  ‘You’ve told him already, then?’ barked the irascible baron. ‘We arrived from Portsmouth last night. The foot soldiers should be here by this evening.’

  Richard de Revelle, his nerves now twanging like a bow-string, stared at the new arrivals as if they had come from the moon.

  ‘What soldiers? What are you talking about?’

  ‘I’d not got around to that yet, Richard,’ snapped de Wolfe. ‘You explain, Ralph – they’re your troops.’

  The castle constable gleefully told the sheriff that he had been put in command of a company of men-at-arms destined for the King’s army, to flush out the outlaws and other undesirables from the most troublesome part of the forest.

  ‘This is intolerable!’ gibbered de Revelle. ‘I am sheriff and they should be placed under my control. So don’t expect me to cooperate with you. I want nothing to do with this madness.’

  ‘You won’t be asked to take part, Richard,’ growled de Wolfe. ‘In fact, as Commissioner, I won’t have you anywhere near this operation. I don’t trust you.’

  De Revelle ranted and raved for a few more minutes, being repeatedly rebuffed by the others. Finally, an irate Guy Ferrars leaned over his table and thrust his face close to that of the sheriff.

  ‘Listen, de Revelle! You’re lucky to be allowed to sit safely in this chamber while better men go off to clear up the chaos you helped to foment. But I tell you, though the friends you have among certain barons and churchmen may have protected you so far, your time is fast running out!’

  He drew back and stalked to the door, his son and the coroner following him. As he jerked it open, Ferrars made one last threat.

  ‘I shall devote myself to getting rid of you as sheriff of this county. We need someone trustworthy, like Henry de Furnellis, to sit there in your place!’

  After his visitors had stormed out, Richard de Revelle picked up a pottery ink bottle from his table and with a scream of ill temper hurled it at the opposite wall. The missile exploded and black fluid ran down the stones like blood leaking from his wounded heart.

  The men-at-arms from Portsmouth spent the next two days resting from their long march and getting their equipment ready for the fray on Monday. During this time, the coroner was called out to a fatal accident in the small town of Crediton, where a wall around a cattl
e pound had collapsed on top of a wood-turner, crushing him under a pile of stones. The wall had been declared unsafe beforehand by many of the local people, and John attached the manor bailiff to the next Eyre, to appear to answer a charge of negligence. He did this with poorly hidden satisfaction, as the manor was one of many belonging to Bishop Marshal. He would have to pay any fine and compensation, which was likely to be substantial, as the turner was a craftsman with a wife and five children to support. John was sorry that he could not have declared the wall a deodand, as it was the instrument of death, but the value of a heap of stones confiscated on behalf of the widow was negligible.

  This episode took much of the day, as he held the inquest as soon as he had inspected the scene and the corpse, so it was early evening before he made his daily visit to Nesta at Polsloe Priory. She still had a slight fever, but Dame Madge seemed satisfied that it had not become worse.

  John sat by her bed and regaled her with a monologue about the day’s events and the sheriff’s discomfiture at having his authority usurped by his brother-in-law. His mistress listened quietly, holding his hand in hers, until he came to speak of the campaign planned against the outlaws in two days’ time.

  Then she struggled more upright on her bed and turned a pale and anxious face towards him.

  ‘Be careful, John, please! For God’s sake, don’t risk your life again. You were nearly killed by them but a few days ago!’

  She sank back, even the effort to rise exhausting her. He gave a lopsided grin, meant to be reassuring.

  ‘Don’t fret, there’ll be almost a hundred others there too – a few knights and scores of men-at-arms, as well as Ferrars, de Courcy and their men.’

  Nesta looked up at him, fearful of losing him after all that she had gone through lately. ‘All the men in England can’t stop a stray arrow striking you, John!’ she whispered.

  Anxious to stop this preying on her mind, he changed the subject.

  ‘Have you seen any sign of Matilda?’ he asked. ‘She still refuses to speak to me, though I’ve glimpsed her in the distance once or twice.’