‘Has he confessed?’ snapped the prelate.
‘Not yet – but I intend to put him to the Ordeal to settle the matter rapidly.’
At this the coroner bristled. It was the first he had heard of it. ‘Wait a moment, Sheriff. The death of Hubert de Bonneville has been enrolled by a coroner, officially to be presented before the Justices in Eyre when they come next to Exeter. You may not take such a serious case outside the King’s courts.’
The Bishop turned his cadaverous face with its large watery eyes on John, as if seeing him for the first time.
The Sheriff put on his familiar martyred expression. ‘My dear Crowner, you may have this odd interest in dead bodies, treasure-trove, wrecks, royal fish and the like, but you have no jurisdiction over suspects.’
‘What’s all this about?’ asked the Bishop suspiciously.
De Revelle stepped in again. ‘John de Wolfe thinks that he can investigate all deaths himself, since Archbishop Walter set up this pointless coroner system. Well, he can amuse himself by recording dead bodies, but the apprehension and punishment of felons remains my responsibility.’
The Bishop nodded. ‘Of course, you represent the sovereign in Devon. I cannot see how anyone can think otherwise.’
Here the Archdeacon interjected craftily, ‘Yet, my lord Bishop, our brother in Canterbury specifically introduced coroners into every county in the land only two months ago. We cannot lightly put aside what has been instituted so recently.’ Henry Marshall twitched his cloak around him and scowled at John de Alecon – their antipathy, mainly due to opposing political allegiances, was well known. The Bishop had been appointed only that year, long after the Archdeacon who had been a member of the chapter for eight years and an archdeacon for four. If the Bishop had been there first, John de Alecon would never have been elevated and Henry Marshall would have liked to get rid of him now, but no excuse to do so had yet presented itself.
‘In matters of investigating crimes, it is the Sheriff who has the first and last say,’ he bleated. ‘If he thinks this man in custody should be put to the Ordeal, then although I have no secular authority, I certainly give it my moral approval. This murder must be solved – and speedily, for the sake of my old friend, mortally sick though he be.’
‘I shall see to it without delay, your grace,’ said de Revelle increasingly. ‘Perhaps you could appoint one of your priests to be present at the castle an hour after dawn tomorrow.’
The ritual of the Ordeal had religious origins, both Christian and pagan. It consisted of subjecting the suspect to physical challenge, usually a torment which often proved fatal, in order to seek a supernatural sign of guilt or innocence. Formerly, the Church had officiated at such ceremonies, usually on sanctified ground, but latterly it had been content to send a cleric to bless the proceedings – indeed, there had been murmurings from the Vatican that this barbaric ritual should be banned.
Bishop Henry had another warning to deliver. ‘This bickering and schism between you custodians of the law must end. I would remind you that Archbishop Walter, who set up these recent matters, is due to visit the diocese soon. I’m sure that, as well as seeing to the spiritual health of his flock, he will want to know how his legal system is faring, so you must put a better face on your relationship. Is that clear?’
Without waiting for a response, he turned and walked solemnly away. The interview was over. With a smirk from the sheriff and a face like a thundercloud on the coroner, the players went their separate ways.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
In which Crowner John attends an ordeal
Much against John’s will, the Ordeal went ahead and, whether he liked it or not, he had to attend. His antagonism to the procedure was not due to humanitarian distaste – or even his healthy scepticism about its usefulness – but because it rankled with him that his brother-in-law could so easily interfere with the coroner’s work. Unfortunately, as he had complained to Gwyn during their ride back from Dartmoor, there had been as yet no firm ruling from the royal justices as to how the jurisdiction of coroner and sheriff interlocked.
Reluctantly, John had to admit that the sheriff’s task was to arrest suspects, investigate their crimes and either try them at the county court, or keep them in custody for the royal judges. It was clear enough that for theft, assault, treason and the like the sheriff had sole responsibility – but where there was a body, the coroner was obliged to record all the facts for the Justices in Eyre, even though he could not try the cases. He also had to examine rapes and serious assaults and record the facts – but it was not clear whether this should prevent the sheriff from trying these cases, as he had been doing for centuries, at least since the time of the Saxon king Aethelstan.
Whatever the rights and wrongs, de Revelle was intent on putting Alan Fitzhai to the Ordeal, and tomorrow morning was the soonest it could be staged.
After he had walked the short distance from the cloisters to his house, the coroner learned from Mary that his wife was still locked in her solar so, not in the mood for another confrontation, John took himself to the Bush, seeking beer and sympathy. Rather to his surprise, he found Gwyn sitting at one of the benches, tucking into a mutton knuckle and onions soaking into a slab-like trencher of bread.
‘Has your wife thrown you out as well?’ he asked, sitting on a stool opposite.
Gwyn stopped chewing on the bone to shake his head. ‘Her brother, the one that’s a carter, came through from Taunton on his way back to Polruan so she and the children have taken a ride on his wagon to see her mother. Won’t be back for two weeks or more, when he makes the next trip.’
Nesta bustled up to give the new arrival a quart jar of ale and a quick squeeze on the shoulder. ‘You’ve come at a busy time, John. I’ll be with you when I’ve settled these folk in their penny beds.’
Half a dozen pilgrims, with wide-brimmed hats and tall staves, had just arrived on their way from Truro to Canterbury, and the businesslike innkeeper was hurrying about, shouting at her chambermaid to bring extra pallets for the upstairs dormitory and yelling at the cook to throw more meat into the pot.
John threw his black cloak on to a bench and took a deep swallow of his beer. ‘So we’re both temporary widowers, Gwyn. Thank God for taverns or we’d both starve and go mad with boredom. What that poxy clerk of ours does with his time I can’t imagine. He never goes into an inn unless we’re travelling.’
Gwyn gave one of his grunts and returned to tearing meat from his knuckle. When this was done, he wiped the fat from his moustache with the back of his hand.
‘I heard about Alan Fitzhai,’ he said. The fraternity of sergeants and men-at-arms in Rougemont seemed to have an almost instantaneous method of communicating gossip.
‘That he’s in the gaol or having to undergo the Ordeal?’ asked John.
‘Both. But I don’t know if it’s supposed to make him open his mouth wider – if he has anything to tell – or to prove his guilt or innocence.’
The coroner sank a good half-pint of ale in one swallow. ‘It’s supposed to determine guilt. These things were dreamed up by priests long ago, so they say, but I can’t see the sense of it myself.’
Gwyn began to tear the gravy-soaked bread into lumps, which he stuffed into his mouth before answering. ‘It’s like this business of murder suspects touching the bier of a dead man, I reckon.’
John frowned, his craggy face furrowing. ‘But that happened to our King when old Henry died at Chinon in ’eighty-nine.’ The story went that when Richard the Lionheart had approached the body of his recently dead father in the abbey of Fontrevault, the corpse began to bleed from the nose and mouth. Richard had fallen to his knees and wept tears of guilt for having contributed to his father’s death.
John wasn’t ready to dismiss all such beliefs, even when they were to the discredit of his hero, Richard Coeur de Lion.
‘But Richard didn’t kill him, did he?’ persisted Gwyn.
‘Helped break the old man’s heart when all his sons turn
ed against him. I’d have expected it of that bastard John, but not my lord Richard.’
They were silent as they both played over old battles in their minds. Then John returned to practicalities. ‘If the sheriff forces Fitzhai to prance across nine red-hot ploughshares or whatever he plans for the Ordeal, then we must try to get as much information out of him as possible beforehand about Hubert de Bonneville.’
Gwyn vigorously wiped the last of the onion gravy from the scrubbed table with the final crust and thrust it between his lips. ‘And as quickly as possible, too,’ he said, through a mouthful. ‘Half the people I’ve seen go through the Ordeal die of shock or burns the same day.’
Nesta, her duties finished, bustled across and tried to push Gwyn from his stool. ‘Go on, you’ve been fed well enough now. Go and sit by the fire with your pot and let me talk to John.’
Gwyn ambled away amiably to talk to a group clustered near the roaring logs, leaving Nesta alone with the coroner.
‘Can you stay tonight?’ she asked, directly.
He looked into her attractive, open face and wished that he could. ‘It isn’t politic, according to my maid,’ he said, with a lopsided grin.
‘The hell with her!’ exploded the red-head, who had a temper to match her colouring. ‘Since when has she decided who you sleep with?’
Patiently, John explained his domestic crisis, and his mistress’s wrath subsided as quickly as it had arisen. She even laughed at the thought of him sleeping in his cloak on his own floor and gave him a quick kiss on the cheek.
‘Well, unless you’re thinking of leaving home for good and moving in here as a crowner-cum-innkeeper, you’d better toe the line, my lad.’ Her advice was virtually identical to Mary’s. Edwin, the one-eyed potman, limped over with a fresh jug of ale from a new barrel and leered at the pair.
‘Good to see you back, Captain,’ he croaked, with a wink at Nesta.
She kicked his lame leg hard and told him sharply to get about his business. ‘What’s the latest on this dead crusader, John?’ she asked. ‘Like your dear wife, I’ve not seen you these past few days.’ Nesta was anxious to keep abreast of all the county gossip. Usually she was a one-woman intelligence service, thanks to all the comings and goings at the tavern, but she was not up to date on this case.
John told her of all that had transpired and of the torment that Alan Fitzhai would suffer next morning.
‘Do you think he did it?’ she demanded, taking a mouthful of his drink.
‘How can I tell? He’s hiding something, that’s for sure. Something was between Fitzhai and the dead man, but that falls far short of suspecting him of murder.’
Nesta nodded sagely. ‘You need a motive, that’s what you need,’ she said, profoundly. ‘And what about this other corpse up on high Dartmoor? D’you think there’s any connection?’
‘They’ve both been in Palestine, obviously, and though he was corrupt, this last corpse had healed sword wounds not a year old. But that’s not to say he was anything to do with de Bonneville, though he did have a similar stab wound in the back,’ he added, thoughtfully.
John could almost hear Nesta’s astute brain ticking away.
‘Why not enquire in Southampton?’ she said. ‘Maybe to see if any one was with the Widecombe man when they arrived from France. This Fitzhai knew him, so maybe someone else saw something. Did he say he was alone in Honiton?’
John agreed to send Gwyn next day to see what could be discovered at the various ports along the Dorset coast and on to Southampton, the main entry-point from Normandy.
‘There! You need a woman’s touch in this,’ teased Nesta. ‘You men don’t have enough imagination.’
John slipped a hand under the table and squeezed her thigh. He was suddenly beginning to feel that there was more to life than discussing violent crime.
‘Let’s go up the ladder and discuss it in private, my girl,’ he said quietly. ‘I can’t stay all night, but I won’t be missed at home for a few hours.’
Next morning, an hour after dawn, they assembled in the sinister chamber below the keep of Rougemont Castle. It was half-subterranean, reached by a flight of steps leading down from the muddy bailey – a gloomy place, made ruddy by a few flaming torches stuck into iron rings set in the walls. Beyond it, on the same level, was the gaol. A passage left the main chamber, with a series of heavy doors leading off each side into cells furnished only with chains and dirty straw. John de Wolfe came down the steps with Thomas behind him. Gwyn had already set off eastwards to tour the ports.
In the dank, shadowy chamber, the sheriff, his bailiff and the constable Ralph Morin were gathered together with Thomas de Boterellis, the cathedral Precentor, sent by his bishop to represent the Church. The guard sergeant and several men-at-arms stood watchfully around the walls.
As John walked in, he saw that they were grouped around a large iron bucket about three feet high, set on four big stones on the earthen floor. A fire of logs and charcoal burned in a clay-pit underneath, tended by Stigand the gaoler, a dirty, grossly obese man, who crouched on the floor feeding firewood under the bucket to keep the water boiling.
Richard de Revelle greeted his brother-in-law with false joviality, as if they were meeting for a pleasant breakfast rather than preparing to inflict a maiming torture on a healthy man. If the sheriff had heard of the quarrel between John and his sister, he avoided any mention of it and went straight to the business of the morning.
‘You’ll agree that this Fitzhai, though he be Norman of sorts, is a damned liar?’ he said.
John agreed unwillingly that the fellow was almost certainly holding something back. ‘But that doesn’t make him a killer. Why should it?’
Richard, elegant as ever in a bright blue tunic, gestured his indifference. ‘Let’s see what he has to tell us when his mind is concentrated by our little ceremony, eh?’
The coroner scowled. ‘Then give him a chance to divulge it all first. He may tell us all that is necessary without maiming the fellow?’
The sheriff tapped his nose, which he did almost as often as Thomas de Peyne crossed himself. ‘We may get a confession as well. Kill two birds with one stone – a very hot stone!’ He laughed at his own joke and the Precentor, an overfed priest with a round, waxy-white face, joined in his amusement.
‘It will fix his guilt or innocence as well, so that’s three birds for us.’ He sniggered.
John was not amused, but any more badinage was ended by the squeal of the gaol’s barred iron gate.
Two soldiers pushed a bedraggled Alan Fitzhai into the big room. His hands were free but his ankles were shackled with rusted metal bands so that he could only shuffle and stumble as he was prodded by the guards. He was in a poor state, compared to the last time John had seen him. His clothes were the same, but they were crumpled and filthy, his hair and beard were tangled, his cheeks were hollow, and he blinked in even that poor light, which was bright compared to the Stygian gloom of the cells. As soon as he saw the sheriff, coroner and constable, Fitzhai began to shout his indignation and innocence, until one of the guards gave him a shove that sent him staggering over his manacled ankles.
De Revelle stepped forward to stand in front of the prisoner. ‘Everything points to you as the man who did this foul killing,’ he lied, ‘but now you have a chance to prove your innocence, before the Church and officers of the King.’
Alan stared at him in amazement. ‘King Richard! If he knew of my condition now, he would vouch for me to the hilt. I fought for him at Acre and Arsuf and Jaffa … and this is the reward I get!’
The sheriff, who had been no nearer to the Holy Land than Aquitaine, dismissed this. ‘That’s not the issue, Fitzhai. A fellow Crusader lies dead, as well as another man back from the Holy Land – and you are the best candidate for the crime.’
Fitzhai was frightened, but still pugnacious. ‘Another Crusader dead? Who is he? I know nothing of this.’
John moved to face the prospective victim. ‘It’s plain there are t
hings you did not tell us the other day when you were brought from Honiton. If you give us all the help you can, it may go better for you.’
The mercenary soldier looked from the coroner to de Revelle and back again. ‘About Hubert de Bonneville?’
John nodded. ‘Everything you know … now!’
Fitzhai hesitated, then looked at the gaoler stoking the fire under the boiler and decided to speak. ‘If I had told you a few days ago, you’d have taken it as extra proof that there was more bad blood between de Bonneville and me.’
John thought that telling it now was hardly going to improve matters, but held his tongue and let Fitzhai continue.
‘When we landed in Marseille, I said that a group of English and Welsh Crusaders decided to band together and we made our way up through France to take ship to Southampton.’ He looked down at his feet and shuffled them, making the fetters jangle. ‘Well, like all soldiers, we did plenty of drinking and carousing … and there were girls, of course. We hadn’t seen women for months – even years. Spirits and passions ran high some nights.’
De Revelle became impatient. ‘Come on, man, what are you trying to say?’
‘All of us had a girl or two on the journey, a tumble in a tavern or a hay-barn. All except that prig Hubert, of course. He should have been a priest.’ He looked sourly at the Precentor.
‘How did this get you at odds with him?’ rapped the sheriff.
‘Somewhere in Touraine I got drunk and took a girl in an inn. We were all the worse for drink, including the women. Afterwards the girl came to me with her father and accused me of raping her.’ He raised his voice almost shrilly. ‘It was no such thing! She was eager for it, then got scared of being with child and lied to her family.’
John had heard similar stories many times – sometimes they were true, sometimes not.
‘Hubert de Bonneville became sanctimonious and sided with the father, demanding that I admit my guilt and pay off the girl and her father with gold. I told him to mind his own damn business and a fight started.’ He stared truculently at the two law officers. ‘Naturally, I won. I hammered the fool into a pulp. It started a wholesale mêlée in the tavern, between his friends and mine. Next day he went, cursing me and swearing that he’d get even one day. I never saw him again until Honiton. It was just a common fight, I forgot all about him afterwards.’
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