John stared at Gwyn, then held up his hands in frustration. ‘I’ve just got to go to this place near Ide. I may not get another chance if they all get locked up after the canons get at them. But I couldn’t get to Wonford and back in time to go there!’
His officer took it calmly. ‘I can go with Thomas, just to view the body. You can see it again tomorrow, before you go off to Stoke.’
Their clerk looked worried, but de Wolfe assured him that he would be going about coroner’s business to see a suspected murder, which was nothing to do with condoning heresy.
‘Did the bailiff give you any details?’ he asked Thomas.
‘Only that it was obviously violence with a knife.’
Gwyn grunted and passed a thick finger across his throat. ‘Not another Adam’s apple missing?’
Thomas shivered. ‘He didn’t say so, but you can ask him yourself. He’s waiting for us at Rougemont.’
‘No, not his neck, but there’s a knife still sticking out of his belly,’ announced Robert of Wonford as he climbed into his saddle in the inner ward of the castle. ‘Covered in blood all down his front. I think there are other stab wounds in his chest, but I’ll leave that to you.’
Gwyn and Thomas were already mounted, and the three riders set off over the drawbridge across the dry moat and took their horses cautiously down the steep track through the outer ward to the gates in the stockade. As they trotted the mile or so to the village, Robert told them where they had eventually found the corpse.
‘In an earth closet behind an abandoned toft, half a mile away,’ he said with disgust. ‘Thank God no one had lived in the place for a few years, but it was still stinking!’
They confirmed this when they reached the old cottage, a crumbling ruin built of wattle and daub on the road out of Wonford towards Clyst St Mary. It was an isolated place, an overgrown half-acre set between trees. The roof had collapsed, but the remains of a couple of small outbuildings still stood at the back.
‘He’s in here. We left him for you to see just as we found him.’ He led the way to a small roofless hut made of planks, guarded by two villagers, though Gwyn thought that there was little chance of anyone interfering with the corpse in this isolated place. He looked inside the privy, where a rotting plank with a large hole formed the seat, but saw no sign of a dead man.
‘He’s around the back, in the pit,’ explained Robert. The toft was on a slope and the back of the hut was lower than the front, with a wide hole for clearing out the ordure — apparently at long intervals, by the amount and smell of the contents.
The bailiff pointed at the hole and Gwyn bent down to look inside, a move not copied by the more squeamish Thomas. He first saw a pair of legs and, as he stooped even lower, glimpsed a whole body stuffed into the space.
‘From above, you can see the knife and the blood through the shite-hole,’ said Robert. ‘Shall we get him out now?’
With the clerk standing well back, with the sleeve of his tunic over his nose, the two villagers came and hauled the corpse out on to the grass behind the privy. The back was smeared with the decaying contents of the pit, but thankfully a couple of years’ disuse had moderated the smell. Hengist of Wonford was an elderly man, with a stubble of grey beard and lank hair to match. The legs were drawn up and the head flexed down on the chest.
‘He’s still got some death stiffness,’ muttered Gwyn, testing the muscles. ‘So he hasn’t been dead for more than a few days.’
‘We know he was alive last Thursday,’ said the bailiff. ‘What about that knife? Are you going to pull it out?’
Just to one side of the navel was the handle of a large knife, all of the blade being buried in the belly. It had a crude wooden hilt and looked more like a tool than a weapon. The brown serge tunic was soaked in dried blood from neck to thighs, though most of this appeared to be coming from a series of stabs in the front of the chest, as the fabric showed half a dozen rents, each about an inch long.
Gwyn touched the hilt with a finger, then shook his head. ‘I’ll leave this for Sir John,’ he decided. ‘He hates his corpses to be interfered with before he gets to see them!’
The face of the dead man was remarkably peaceful, considering the violence of his demise, but Gwyn knew from long experience, both in battle and as the coroner’s officer, that the common belief that the expression on the features bore any relation to the act of dying was totally false.
‘What’s that stitched on to his tunic?’ asked Thomas, venturing nearer to point at the shoulder of the dead man.
‘He always wore that,’ said Robert. ‘He said it was a badge of his faith.’
‘Looks like a bit of felt in the shape of a fish,’ grunted Gwyn, not really interested.
‘That’s what it is, the ichthys sign,’ explained Thomas, crossing himself. ‘It’s the word for “fish” in Greek.’
‘I thought he was a leather-worker, not a fishmonger?’ quipped Gwyn. ‘We’ve already got one of those as a heretic.’
The clerk looked at his big friend with scorn. ‘You ignorant Cornish peasant!’ he said scathingly. ‘It was the secret sign for the persecuted Christians in the first century, as the Greek letters stood for the first letters of “Jesus, Christ, God, Son and Saviour”!’ He crossed himself yet again.
‘Well, this one was certainly persecuted, as were Nicholas Budd and Vincente d’Estcote,’ said Gwyn.
‘Father Patrick didn’t like him wearing that badge, but Hengist said that it was none of his business,’ offered the bailiff.
‘Heretics are Christians, so I suppose they are as entitled to wear it as anyone else,’ conceded Thomas.
Gwyn became impatient. ‘None of this helps to discover who killed the damned fellow,’ he rumbled. ‘Who would know of this cottage as a good hiding place?’
Robert waved a hand to encompass the whole countryside. ‘Anyone who passed by, as well as our villagers, of course,’ he answered. ‘But none of us would slay Hengist. He’s been accepted as being strange for years.’
Gwyn stood up and stared down at the corpse.
‘Better leave him where he lies until the coroner comes in the morning. Cover him with something and keep him guarded against foxes. Sir John will no doubt hold an inquest, so gather together whoever found him and a dozen men from the village for a jury by the ninth hour.’
While his assistants were in Wonford, de Wolfe was setting off in the opposite direction, west of the city. He had obtained directions from the fishmonger and made his way down a lane off the highway to Crediton. The river lay between him and the small village of Ide a mile away, and at the edge of some common pasture which led to the start of dense woodland he saw a dilapidated barn that stored hay cut in the summer. The walls were made of crude boards, with irregular gaps between them, and the old thatch was lopsided and rotted. He rode past and entered the edge of the woods to tie up Odin in a small clearing, which still had some grass which had escaped the frost, then walked back to the barn.
There were no other horses about, and it was obvious that everyone else attending the meeting had come on foot. He silently approached the back of the barn but was suddenly confronted by Adam of Dunsford, who must have heard Odin’s hooves on the track.
‘You found us, then?’ he asked abruptly, looking around suspiciously, as if uncertain whether the coroner had brought a troop of soldiers to arrest them.
‘I doubt your attempts at secrecy are very effective, Adam,’ scolded John. ‘I suspect that half Devonshire knows where and when you meet.’
He was right, as unknown to him another pair of eyes was watching from the cover of a bramble thicket where the trees ended.
The fishmonger led him around the front and into the barn, which was about half-filled with this year’s fodder. Seated or sprawled on this were eight men and two women, who seemed to have an air of resigned martyrdom about them. The men rose to their feet when the coroner entered and stood uneasily before him. Adam, who seemed to be the leader and spokesman, waved a hand around the small congregation.