Crowner's Quest

by Bernard Knight

  She was silent long enough to make him look down at her and give one of his smiles, which was all the warmer for its rarity. ‘Sweet woman, you know most of the gossip in this city. Are there any new whispers?’

  She pretended to pout at his lack of romance. ‘Crowner John, do you only want me for a spy? Am I of no use any longer to warm your bed – though it always seems to be my bed that you try to wreck in your frenzy?’

  He slid a hand on to her plump thigh, smooth through the green woollen kirtle she wore under a white linen apron. ‘I’ve no time today to warm your bed, more’s the pity, my love. Gwyn will be chasing me before long for this inquest. But I wondered if your sensitive – and very pretty – nose had smelt any intrigues that may have a bearing on this murder. It seems like the work of men who knew what they were about, to make such an attempt to conceal murder as self-destruction.’

  The Welsh woman grew serious. ‘I know nothing remotely to do with dead canons, John. But there has been a strange atmosphere abroad these past few weeks, even for a month or two.’

  ‘What do you mean – strange?’

  ‘All manner of men come in here, from the city and further afield. From Cornwall going east, and from Southampton and London going west, as well as shipmen from Normandy and Brittany. I listen to all their chatter – many a contract is made in here and not a few dark plots, I’m sure.’

  ‘What are you trying to say, woman?’

  ‘Lately, there have been more furtive conversations, ones that break off when you pass their table. And more among the soldiering class, knights, squires and a few mercenaries, who would sell the use of their sword for a couple of marks.’

  ‘How can you tell, if you can’t hear what they say?’ he objected.

  Nesta turned up her hands in supplication. ‘Just a woman’s instinct – or maybe an inn-keeper’s instinct. This doesn’t affect the merchants and workmen but a higher class of customer, especially those who have a sword clanking under the table. Even old Edwin has noticed it, he says. He’s the nosiest man this side of Windsor and he tries to eavesdrop on people’s talk, but he has been warned off more than once.’

  ‘By whom, for instance?’ persisted the coroner.

  ‘There are some mercenaries, out-of-work squires, who sometimes pass through. They go to Plymouth or the eastern ports, seeking recruitment for wars in France or even from barons this side of the Channel. One threatened to cut off Edwin’s ears if he persisted in hanging about their table.’

  De Wolfe considered this, his black brows lowered in thought. ‘This is interesting, though for different reasons than our deceased canon,’ he murmured. ‘Keep your ears open, Nesta love, this may be a return of the old trouble that afflicts England.’

  CHAPTER THREE

  In which Crowner John holds an inquest

  A few minutes later, de Wolfe was back in the cathedral Close, where Gwyn and Thomas waited for him at the front of the dead canon’s house.

  ‘There are too many folk to fit inside so I moved the cadaver out into the backyard,’ explained his officer. ‘I’ve laid him on a bier we borrowed from the cathedral porch.’

  They walked through the house and out at the kitchen door. Gwyn had taken a chair from the hall and set it against the wooden fence. In the centre of the yard was the bier, a stout wooden stretcher with four legs and handles, on which lay the mortal remains of Robert de Hane, decently covered with a linen bedsheet. In a wide circle around it stood the servants from the house, the vicar-choral, the secondary priest, two choristers and several similar residents from nearby houses.

  As John took his solitary seat, a convoy of priests, their black cloaks billowing, hurried down the alleyway from the Close to join the throng. They included the Archdeacon, the Precentor, the Treasurer and half a dozen canons, including the two who had been at the meeting that morning. De Wolfe noticed that the sheriff was not among them: he had no legal obligation to be present.

  Gwyn started the proceedings in the traditional way, enjoying his chance to bellow at a group of senior churchmen. ‘All persons having anything to do with the King’s coroner for the county of Devon, draw near and give your attendance!’

  The buzz of conversation died down as those present gave their attention to the coroner.

  ‘This is the inquest into the death of Robert de Hane, lately a canon of this cathedral,’ began de Wolfe formally, his hard voice cutting incisively through the cold air of the winter afternoon. ‘It is not the usual procedure as we are on ecclesiastical ground, which strictly is within the jurisdiction of the Church. However, Bishop Henry Marshal has agreed that whenever there is an unnatural death in the cathedral precincts he will defer to the secular authorities, embodied in the King’s sheriff and coroner.’

  He paused to look sideways at Thomas de Peyne, who was squatting on a small stool with a roll of parchment, quill and ink spread on a box before him. ‘Normally, a jury would be gathered from all who might know anything about the death – in the countryside every man above twelve years of age from the Hundred or the four nearest townships should be summoned – though that is often an impossible task. Here we cannot drag half the population of Exeter into the Close, so I will make do with those who may have any information by virtue of their nearness to this house.’

  He paused again, to let Thomas write a summary of what he had said, then went on. ‘Where a corpse is found in the countryside it is also usual to demand presentment of Englishry. Here this is pointless, as we all well know the late Robert de Hane for a Norman. And as there is no village or town to amerce for the death of a Norman and as this is Church ground, I will dispense with that aspect.’

  ‘Not a lot left to say, then,’ murmured Gwyn to himself, under cover of his huge moustache.

  The coroner scowled around the expectant throng. ‘Let the First Finder step forward.’

  The servant who had discovered the body when he visited the privy the previous night trod hesitantly forward. He described in a few words that at about two hours before midnight he had found the canon hanging by the neck when he pushed open the door. When the shock had passed, he had run to the house and roused the older steward, then they had raced to the adjacent houses to raise the alarm. One of the servants remembered that Thomas de Peyne, the coroner’s clerk, lodged in a nearby house. As they had a vague idea that this new official called the coroner had to be told about sudden deaths, Thomas was sought and he had taken control of the situation.

  One by one, the servants from de Hane’s house were called but, as John already knew, there was virtually nothing they could add.

  ‘He was in his room from about the sixth bell,’ quavered Alfred, the old steward, near to tears at the sight of his master lying still under the sheet in front of him. ‘After that, I didn’t see him again – alive.’

  ‘Was that at all unusual, for him to stay alone all evening?’ asked the coroner.

  ‘Not at all, sir. He was a great one for reading and praying, or sometimes writing about his old churches. And he went to bed very early, as he was used to getting up at midnight for matins.’

  The other servants all told the same tale, as did Robert de Hane’s vicar-choral and his secondary. De Wolfe avoided the matter of historical research and the canon’s trips into the countryside, as he could not see that the inquest was the place to delve into those. When all who might have had anything useful to say had been heard, he rose from his chair and advanced with Gwyn to the bier.

  ‘It is necessary for you, the jury, to examine the body, before coming to a verdict based on what you know, what you have heard and what you see on the corpse,’ he said. He nodded to Gwyn, who pulled down the sheet to expose the cadaver as far as the waist. The Cornishman usually flicked off the death shroud to expose the whole body, but de Wolfe had warned him that in the presence of a gaggle of senior cathedral canons, he had better be a little more reverential. Even so, there was a communal sigh as the pallid skin of the dead priest was revealed. Reluctantly, the jury
shuffled a step or two nearer at John’s impatient gesture.

  The coroner stepped to the side of the wooden stretcher and began to demonstrate to the onlookers. ‘The victim had a cord around his neck, which sat in this upper groove.’ He ran his finger around the deep valley under the left side of the corpse’s chin. At the same time, Gwyn held up the offending ligature and showed it to the jury, like a mountebank conjuror about to perform a new trick. ‘But that had not killed him,’ barked de Wolfe. ‘Here you also see a mark, lower down, which does not rise behind the ear.’ Gwyn lifted the head and the coroner jabbed at the skin of the nape of the neck. ‘Here there is a cross-over mark. A cord – no doubt the same one – was pulled from behind to strangle him.’ Gwyn lowered the head and at a sign from his master held up the arms. ‘On both arms, betwixt shoulder and elbow, there are fresh blue bruises, where he was gripped – see?’ Finally, after Gwyn had replaced the arms by the sides, the coroner pointed at the dead man’s mouth and turned out the lower lip to show the bruising inside. ‘He was struck in the mouth – there!’ Then de Wolfe stepped back and Gwyn pulled up the sheet with a flourish.

  ‘Now, you jurymen, I suggest that you have little choice as to a verdict, given what you have heard and seen. It was not an act of God, like an apoplexy. It was not a misadventure, as no one is strangled accidentally in a privy. The taking of his own life would be extraordinary in a man of God who wishes to preserve his immortal soul – especially so near Christ’s birthday. And, in any event, he could not assault himself then strangle himself before he hanged himself!’

  There was a single nervous snigger among the jury, which attracted ferocious looks from the clergy.

  De Wolfe glared around the assembled men and fixed on one, a servant from next door. ‘I appoint you the spokesman. What is your verdict?’

  Surprised, the man looked hurriedly around at his fellows, who all nodded vigorously, anxious to be compliant. ‘We agree it was a killing, Crowner. Somebody else done it.’

  John nodded briskly. ‘I therefore declare that the death of Canon Robert de Hane was a homicide by persons as yet unknown. There is no question of amercing anyone. The First Finder seems to have done his duty correctly by immediately raising what amounts to a hue and cry. The surrounding four households were alerted, as the law demands. The coroner was notified without delay and the body was not moved or buried, so all these requirements were met. As I have said, the matter of presentment does not arise and, although he was a Norman, there is no question of a murdrum fine as the ground belongs to the Church.’ He bowed his head perfunctorily to the canons in the back row before declaring the inquest closed.

  As the jury and audience dispersed, the coroner went across to John de Alencon, who was standing with the Precentor, Thomas de Boterellis and the Treasurer, John of Exeter. ‘The corpse is now yours. The legal processes are finished,’ he said sombrely.

  The Archdeacon stepped forward and laid a hand on the shoulder of the still form under the linen sheet. ‘Poor Robert. We will arrange for him to be taken straight away to the cathedral. He can lie there with candles at his head and feet until we can bury him with due honour.’

  Thomas de Boterellis fastened his small, beady eyes on John and demanded to know what was being done to arrest the perpetrators.

  ‘That is the sheriff’s task,’ replied de Wolfe, ‘but we both feel an obligation to seek out the killers. There are some pointers, but we have a long way to go, I fear.’

  The cathedral Treasurer shook his head sadly. ‘What a way to have to spend part of Jesus’s birthday,’ he said. ‘We should all be celebrating, not mourning.’

  After a few more minutes of commiseration in a similar vein, the group drifted away and de Wolfe told the house steward to have the body taken back into the house and to dress it in whatever was appropriate for a priest lying before the high altar.

  The rest of that Yuletide day was an anticlimax, as far as de Wolfe’s coronial duties were concerned. After the inquest, he made his way slowly and reluctantly back to Martin’s Lane, but was relieved to find that Matilda was still absent. He assumed she was deliberately shunning him, for which he was thankful, so he walked back to the Bush and spent a few hours in pleasant dalliance with Nesta, first in her bed upstairs then, in the early evening, over another good meal before the hearth downstairs.

  When he eventually trudged home it was snowing fitfully, and this time he found his wife sitting grimly before a small fire in the gloomy hall. Matilda responded to his attempts at conversation with monosyllabic curtness, so John gave up trying to heal the breach and sat silently fondling his hound’s ears until Mary came in to see if they wanted food or drink. Matilda shook her head sulkily, but her husband, determined to dull his smouldering resentment, called for mulled wine.

  However, while this miserable holy-day evening was being endured in the coroner’s household, others were pursuing the mystery of the canon’s death: his clerk in the cathedral and his officer in another tavern.

  Thomas de Peyne, eager as ever to prove his worth to his master, had already started his researches in the cathedral library. He had taken the Archdeacon’s consent literally, and had obtained the key to the Chapter House from one of the cathedral proctors. With the light of a few candle ends from one of the side altars, he was poring over the parchments scattered on and around de Hane’s desk. They were in total disorder and Thomas thought that either the old canon had been utterly disorganised in his way of working or that someone had been rooting though the rolls and sheets.

  By the dim light of the guttering candles, the little clerk began to sort the documents into some kind of order, trying to match up separate sheets so that they followed a pattern. There were long rolls of sewn vellum, which were easier to deal with as the text was continuous, but sorting the many single sheets needed the patience of Job. Thomas, perched on a high stool, carefully compared sheet after sheet of parchment, checking the subject matter and the last few lines of Latin script, to match them where possible with other leaves to make continuous text. Some were single pages, but others were fragments of incomplete narratives. Many of the parchments were ancient, dry and brittle, often faded and discoloured, to the extent that they were virtually indecipherable. Some were ragged and frayed, or even torn in half. Many were palimpsests, sheets that had been used more than once previously, the old writing having been scraped off and the surface chalked so that they could be re-used. Parchment was sheepskin that had been laboriously treated to take ink – the best quality was vellum, the soft skin of young lambs. But all this effort was a task in which Thomas delighted: parchment and ink were more to him than food and drink and his exceptional literacy, in an age when fewer than one person in several hundred could read, made him the ideal choice for a nosy coroner’s clerk.

  In a couple of hours, he had made as much order as was possible among the material on the desk and the nearby floor and had a score of neat piles and rolls in front of him. During his sorting, he had gained a cursory impression of the subject matter and, as the archivist Jordan de Brent had said earlier, it was apparent that Robert de Hane’s main interest had been in the early history of the parish churches in Devon, especially the transition from Saxon to Norman control soon after the Conquest.

  There was much reference to the Domesday survey of 1086, and most of the parchments seemed to have been written by priests and canons in the decades after this. They were of all degrees of quality, both in penmanship and literacy; some were of fluent and elegant prose, others of a crude doggerel, written by country clerics with little learning apart from the ability to put quill to parchment to record bare facts.

  That evening Thomas sat in the lonely archive room for hours, lighting one candle stump from another as the flame flickered down to the last blob of wax. He was fascinated by the stories of the days when a few thousand Norman invaders had subjugated two million Saxons and imposed a whole new administration, secular and religious, upon them.

  But his task was t
o find something in these records that might shed some light on the canon’s death. He sat back in the icy room to try to assemble his thoughts on what he had read so far. Most of the texts were factual records of the names of priests, both Saxon and their Norman successors, changes in manorial tenancies that affected the gift of the curacies and lists of grants, tithes and largess from new Norman lords who had ousted the Saxons from their lands.

  But which one, thought Thomas anxiously, held a clue to the current tragedy? The coroner seemed convinced that de Hane’s death was connected with his researches in the archives. As the clever little man reviewed in his head the parchments he had just scanned, he failed to see anything that might have had a financial aspect, such as was hinted at by de Hane’s confession and the vague promise to the cathedral Treasurer.

  The only faint clue he had found was a pen mark in the shape of a cross in the margin of one parchment. Many of the documents were so creased and stained that marks were abundant, but Thomas’s expert eye saw that the ink on this little crucifix was fresh. The mark was on a single sheet of aged parchment which had a few paragraphs about the original Saxon landowners of some land west of Exeter – and about those Normans who had acquired it after the Conquest. Thomas recognised the parchment as one of a number of sheets that between them covered most of the county. Unfortunately the little ink mark was not against any particular parish or hamlet, but was at the start of a line in Latin that contained the word ‘Saewulf’. The clerk knew this to be the name of a Saxon earl who had been a substantial landowner in the county and whose name cropped up time after time in the Domesday survey. Thomas also noticed that the mark had been made against the first of many entries of Saewulf’s name in the parchments that he had sorted, so he reasoned that whoever had drawn the cross had a particular interest in the long-dead noble. The fresh look of the mark strongly suggested that it must have been made by Robert de Hane as, according to the other canons, no one had looked at these dusty archives for many years.