The Awful Secret

by Bernard Knight

  ‘And this dead man?’

  ‘He was on the deck, just astern of the hold. The mast had broken and the spars had come down, so that his legs were tangled in the rigging. Otherwise, we would never have found the body – it would long have been washed overboard, out at sea.’

  De Wolfe downed the last of his ale from a crude pottery jar and stood up. ‘Let’s go and have a look at him, then.’

  Pulling his pointed leather hood over his head, he made for the door and stooped to pass under the low lintel. Watched by the curious villagers, who followed the party at a distance, they were led across the street to the quayside. Matthew strode ahead to a small shed made of rough timbers, the turf roof held down against the winds by flat stones. As they entered the open landward end, an overpowering stench of decaying fish filled their nostrils.

  Two elderly women and a boy were standing at a crude bench, gutting fish and dropping them into wicker baskets. The entrails were thrown on to the ground to add to a stinking heap, which would be shovelled into the harbour for the tide to remove. Thomas de Peyne, the only sensitive member of the team, shrank back, holding his threadbare cloak over his nose.

  ‘He’s in that corner,’ declared the reeve, pointing past the women to the dark recesses of the shed. Gwyn walked across and pulled a tattered canvas from a still shape lying against the wall.

  De Wolfe and the reeve joined him to look down at the pathetically small figure of a youth, huddled in death on the odorous earth. The young man wore dark trousers and a short tunic pinched in with a wide leather belt. His clothes were still saturated with sea water and he lay on his side, as if asleep, his face to the wall. Gwyn bent down and lifted him like a child, to lay him flat on his back.

  ‘He’s had a mortal wound, that’s for sure,’ observed Matthew, pointing down at the thin bloodstains that had not washed completely from the fabric of the man’s hessian tunic.

  At the upper part of his belly, there was an oblique rent in the cloth, surrounded by the sinister pink staining. John squatted on his heels alongside the corpse, undid the belt and pulled up the tunic.

  ‘The head of a pike!’ said Gwyn immediately, jabbing a massive forefinger towards a characteristic wound on the victim’s upper abdomen. A two-inch-wide stab with bruised edges lay on the pale skin below the rib margin, while in line with it, and half a hand’s breadth away, was an angry red graze on top of more bruising.

  ‘How can you tell it was a pike?’ asked the reeve, a man of no military experience.

  ‘The spike went in here,’ snapped de Wolfe, poking his finger deeply into the stab wound. ‘And the sidearm below it made this mark here.’ He indicated the abrasion.

  ‘Can’t have been more than sixteen, this lad,’ observed Gwyn. ‘Do we know who he might be?’

  ‘Not a local fellow,’ said the reeve. ‘The vessel had no name, but several of our fishermen say it is from Bristol. It plies up and down the coast from the ports on the Severn down to Plymouth and sometimes across to St Malo and Barfleur.’

  De Wolfe, though a soldier, was a reluctant sailor and marvelled at the bravery – or foolhardiness – of the shipmen who sailed their clumsy cockleshells around the violent waters of western Britain.

  Thomas had overcome his revulsion at the stench of fishguts and was almost fearfully peering at the corpse under Gwyn’s elbow. ‘A drowned sailor?’ he asked timidly, spasmodically making the Sign of the Cross.

  ‘No, dwarf, a stabbed sailor,’ grunted the big man. ‘Skewered on a pike. This is murder.’

  The coroner checked that the body had no other injuries, then motioned for the reeve to throw the canvas over him again. ‘Was there any sign of anyone else aboard?’

  Matthew shook his head. ‘Nor any remains of a cargo. The hull had been sound until she crashed on to the rocks, but there was not a box, barrel nor bale aboard her.’

  John thought he detected a note of disappointment in the man’s voice and he suspected, like Gwyn, that the villagers had been intent on plundering the wreck. ‘I had better get out there and view the vessel,’ he decided. ‘How far away is it?’

  Matthew looked slightly evasive. ‘Half an hour’s walk, Crowner, but not worth the journey. She’ll have broken up altogether by now – the sea was battering her to pieces and yesterday there was hardly anything left.’

  De Wolfe glared at him. ‘I have a legal duty to view the wreck, man.’ He turned to Thomas. ‘I’ll hold an inquest when I get back, so round up everyone who knows anything about this – and a dozen more men above the age of twelve.’

  Minutes later, the reeve was leading them on foot across the back of the cliffs to a track that passed down through the hamlet of Hele, with its water-mill, and across the shoulder of Widmouth Hill to rejoin the shore further east. Two miles from Ilfracombe, they crossed a deep, sandy inlet and scrambled across a warren to a low cliff. Below, the surf sucked and pounded remorselessly in a series of rocky gullies and narrow inlets.

  ‘I said there was little left of her,’ shouted Matthew, going down a muddy sheep-track ahead.

  Looking down, de Wolfe saw that the reeve exaggerated somewhat, as the lower part of the fifty-foot hull was still jammed firmly between the jagged teeth of a reef. The tide was now almost at full ebb and it was easy for them to get to the derelict without getting wet, apart from the spray from an occasional large wave.

  The stump of the mast still poked up at an acute angle, but all the gunwales and most of the deck planking had gone, timbers littering the small shingle beach immediately inland of the wreck.

  ‘All you’ll get from this one is some kindling for your winter fires,’ cackled Gwyn, with a wink at the gloomy manor reeve.

  ‘What would she have been likely to be carrying, Gwyn?’ demanded the coroner, still suspicious that the villagers might have made off with some cargo, which should have been confiscated for the king’s treasury.

  ‘Depends where she came from. If it was Brittany or Normandy, then maybe wine and fruit. If she was outward bound, she’d have had wool, no doubt.’

  De Wolfe nodded at that. He had a substantial interest in wool exports himself, having sunk most of the loot from his foreign campaigns in a partnership with one of Exeter’s foremost wool merchants, Hugh de Relaga. He also shared in the profits of his family’s estate at Stoke-in-Teignhead, where his elder brother, William, was a keen sheep-farmer.

  ‘There’s nothing to see, Crowner, as I told you,’ said Matthew, virtuously.

  De Wolfe had to agree, but Gwyn clambered the last few yards over the rocks and pulled himself on to the wreck, standing rather precariously on a surviving thwart, which had supported the decking. He looked around intently, determined not to miss any clues. Before taking up soldiering, he had helped his father as a fisherman in his home village of Polruan and was well used to the sea and ships.

  As de Wolfe and the reeve watched him, Gwyn seemed particularly interested in the remains of the mast, a tree-trunk a foot thick, which had broken off about six feet above the deck.

  He pointed to some marks at waist height and shouted back to the other men, ‘Fresh slashes in the wood here! Been struck several times with a heavy sharp blade, fore and aft.’ He hopped back ashore and came up to them.

  ‘What does that mean?’ grunted his master, who knew next to nothing about ships.

  ‘The halyards were cut to bring the sail down, ‘explained the Cornishman. ‘No one in the crew would do that to their own vessel, so it must have been boarded and disabled.’

  De Wolfe looked grim. ‘So it was piracy, not mutiny – though that was unlikely from the start, for why would the crew of a dull merchantman want to mutiny?’

  ‘How many men on a vessel like this?’ asked Matthew.

  De Wolfe looked at Gwyn for enlightenment.

  ‘About five or six, usually. Two men could sail her in normal weather, but they need extras for sleeping, cooking and handling her at the ports.’

  ‘So the rest are still floating around the
Severn Sea until they get washed ashore?’

  Gwyn shook his shaggy head. ‘Many bodies never turn up. They either sink or get pulled out into the broad ocean. Or, in this channel, they may even end up near Gloucester.’

  As if to confound him, at that moment there was a distant cry from above and a man appeared on the skyline, waving his arms.

  The group at the wreck stood watching as he came rapidly down the narrow paths with the agility of a mountain goat. He was within a hundred yards before Matthew recognised him. ‘It’s Siward, a shepherd who lives up on the cliffs above here. What the devil does he want? He’s a bit lacking in the head.’

  From the speed of his surefooted descent, de Wolfe had expected some active youth, but when he got to them, Siward showed himself to be a gnarled old man, with a bent back and a face like a walnut, wrinkled and brown. He wore a rough woollen tunic, the skirt tucked up between his legs and pushed into an old rope wound around his waist. He was barefoot and his toenails were curled like ram’s horns.

  He had sparse grey hair, and although his eyes were as bright as a blackbird’s, the lids were red and inflamed.

  ‘You took the corpse, sirs?’ Siward asked abruptly, in the manner of one who, isolated with his sheep, rarely conversed with his fellow men.

  ‘When did you see a corpse, old man?’ demanded de Wolfe.

  Matthew opened his mouth to warn again that the octogenarian was more than a little simple, but Siward seemed quite able to speak for himself. ‘When I took the other one away – the live one,’ exclaimed the old Saxon.

  The other four stared at him. ‘What other one?’ rumbled Gwyn.

  Siward rolled his bloodshot eyes heavenwards. ‘Almighty God spoke to me the other evening, and gave me a task. I looked across the sea from my dwelling and saw this vessel being driven ashore.’

  ‘He lives in a turf hut on top of the cliffs,’ explained Matthew.

  ‘I lit my lantern and hurried down here. From the upper path, I saw the ship just before it hit the rocks. Then, there were two bodies on the deck, but only one by the time I had got down here.’

  ‘What of this living man?’ demanded the coroner.

  ‘He was on the shingle, more dead than alive. I dragged him up on to the grass, then went up for my pony, which I ride to herd my distant flocks.’

  ‘You got a horse down here?’ said Gwyn incredulously.

  ‘He is an Exmoor cob, he can go where any sheep can stray. I draped the man over the pony’s back and took him up to my house. He began shivering, so I knew he was alive.’

  ‘And where is he now?’ asked the manor reeve.

  ‘Still in my hut. His mind came back yesterday, but he is very weak.’

  Since he had become coroner de Wolfe had ceased to be surprised by anything. ‘Then take us to him at once. Lead the way,’ he said.

  Again with a remarkable turn of speed for an old man, Siward scuttled back up the cliff path, with the coroner, his officer and the reeve labouring behind him.

  ‘Why didn’t you know about this, Matthew?’ panted de Wolfe, as they reached the top.

  ‘He doesn’t belong to our manor. He works under the reeve in Combe Martin – the sheep are from there. Siward has probably never set foot as far away as Ilfracombe.’

  At the top of the cliffs, there was a rough grassy ridge, and tucked in a hollow out of the wind was a crude circular hut, the walls made of stacked turf reinforced with loose stones. The roof was also of turf, the grass growing as strongly on it as on the surrounding pasture. Blue smoke drifted from under the ragged eaves.

  Siward pulled aside an unhung door made of driftwood and beckoned them inside. In the dim light, they saw a single room floored with soiled bracken, on which two orphan lambs were bleating. Against the further wall, near a small peat fire confined by large stones, was an indistinct figure huddled under a torn woollen blanket.

  ‘Can’t understand a word from him,’ complained Siward, whose only language was English, heavy with the local accent.

  Gwyn and de Wolfe advanced on the man and bent down over his hunched form. He looked up and they saw he was another young man, probably no more than eighteen, with a deathly pale face and sores on his lips. Before he could speak, he was racked by a bubbling cough and spat copiously into the ferns on the floor. His eye-sockets were hollow, and in spite of the ghastly whiteness of his face, two pink spots burned on either cheek.

  Gwyn put a hand on his forehead. ‘He’s got a burning fever, Crowner.’

  ‘Who are you, boy, what happened to your ship?’ de Wolfe asked. He spoke in English and the youth looked blankly at him, shivering and hugging the rough blanket more closely around his thin shoulders.

  ‘He doesn’t understand a damned word,’ explained Siward. ‘I’ve given him some hot ewe’s milk and a few herbs I have here to try to calm his fever.’

  Suddenly, between a spasm of teeth-chattering, the shipwrecked sailor loosed a torrent of words. De Wolfe and his officer looked at each other in satisfaction. ‘He’s a Breton,’ exclaimed the coroner and changed his questioning to his blend of Cornish-Welsh.

  With a wan smile, the sick youngster responded in his own language and, within minutes, they had the whole story from him. The vessel was the Saint Isan, owned by a syndicate of burgesses from Bristol. It made regular voyages from the Avon to the Cornish ports and then across to Brittany. It had a master and a crew of five, two Somerset men and three Bretons. A few days ago, they had been coming from Roscoff via Penzance, back towards their home port, and were running before a brisk wind between Lundy and the mainland.

  ‘Our old tub was always slow, even with a following wind. A couple of hours after noon, we were overhauled by a longer vessel that had half a dozen oars each side, though these were shipped as she easily outran us under her sail.’ Alain, for that was his name, stopped for a prolonged bout of coughing. ‘Before we knew what was happening, they were alongside and a dozen men scrambled over the side,’ he continued, gasping for breath. ‘I remember seeing them almost cut our master’s head off with a sword and throw him overboard as they attacked all of us. Then one came at me with a club – I remember nothing more until I woke up on the deck, clinging for my life, with a dead man alongside me. Then the vessel struck and the last I recall was being thrown into the sea. I came to again in this hut, where this kind fellow has been doing his best for me.’

  ‘You have no idea who these pirates were?’ demanded Gwyn.

  ‘I recollect very little. It was all confusion for the couple of minutes that I remember. They shouted in English, that’s for sure.’

  ‘What was their ship like?’ asked John, standing over the man like a great black crow.

  Alain shrugged under the blanket. ‘Nothing special, though it was not a trading knarr like the Saint Isan. It was slimmer and faster, more like a longship – and it had a big sail, as well as a bank of oars on each side.’

  ‘No name painted on the bow, nor any device on the sail?’ grunted Gwyn.

  ‘Nothing. Other than that they used your Saxon tongue, I’ve no idea who they were or where they came from.’

  Gwyn pulled down the ends of his moustache, as if that would help him think. ‘You are a shipman in these waters. Have you heard of any other vessels being attacked in this way?’

  Alain shook his head wearily. ‘It was never mentioned by the other men, God rest them.’

  ‘What cargo were you carrying?’

  ‘It was a mixture – some wine, casks of dried fruit, bales of silk, I don’t know what else.’

  ‘Valuable stuff, a good haul for pirates,’ observed Gwyn.

  After some more questions, it became obvious that Alain had nothing else useful to tell them. Although de Wolfe would have liked him to appear at the inquest to identify the corpse, it was obvious that the young Breton was far too sick to be moved at present. They described the dead man to Alain, who felt sure that it was a Bristol youth called Roger, of mixed Norman and Saxon blood.

  De W
olfe felt in his waist pouch and gave Siward three pennies, with instructions to get some good food for the shipman and to tend him until he was fit to travel down to Ilfracombe, hopefully in a few days’ time.

  Leaving the old shepherd and his patient, they made their way back the several miles to the port, arriving in mid-afternoon. Their clerk was fussing outside the bailiff’s dwelling, hopping about on his lame leg like a black sparrow, marshalling the reluctant crowd of about thirty men and boys whom he had coerced into a jury.

  De Wolfe, conscious that the day was slipping away, led them across to the fish shed where the cadaver lay. ‘Let’s get this over quickly, Gwyn,’ he growled. ‘There’s little we can do today – it will mean at least one other journey back here later.’

  At the shed, he instructed Gwyn to pull out the body into the open, and the jury stood in a wide half-circle in the keen wind, the surf rumbling beyond the harbour and the seagulls wheeling and mewing overhead.

  The Cornishman cut short his usual formal opening of an inquest and merely yelled at the motley throng, ‘Silence for the king’s crowner!’

  With his arms folded across his chest, de Wolfe stood near the head of the corpse and addressed the jury. ‘You men are representing the Hundred in this matter. I have to determine who this man might be and where, when and how he came to his death. The witness who can name him is too ill to attend but was also a member of the crew of that vessel. The name of the dead man was Roger of Bristol, that’s all I know. He was part Saxon, but we cannot prove presentment of Englishry as there are no relatives here nor even the only witness who knew him.’ He glared around the faces of the jury, as if daring them to contradict him. ‘In the circumstances, I am not going to amerce this village as it is plain that he died before reaching your land.’

  There was a murmur of relief from the older men and the few wives who stood listening in the background. At least they would avoid the heavy fine for being unable to prove that the dead man was a Saxon: the Norman laws assumed that, in default of proof, he was of the conquering race – even if that event had taken place well over a century ago.