‘It is possible, though short of burying it in the marshes behind his house, I fail to see where he might have concealed it. I find it hard to contemplate a portly canon going out at dead of night to dig a hole!’
‘Yet he was a surprising man, if you say that it was in a whorehouse in the city that he was taken mortally ill. I would not have expected that of him, though God knows many clerics are wont to relieve their celibacy in that way.’
De Wolfe decided to slant the subject away from the canon’s morals. ‘He was said to have dined with some unknown man shortly before he was poisoned. I wish I knew some way of identifying him, but given our cool relations with the city sheriffs I doubt they would be keen to offer us much help.’
‘As you know, at the moment I am in bad odour with the city fathers myself,’ said Hubert ruefully. ‘But if this mysterious man did poison Basset’s food with foxglove, as the monks claim, then we are back to the two motives you mentioned. For one reason or the other, Canon Simon had become a liability.’
John agreed, but his glum expression betrayed his frustration.
‘But it doesn’t help tell us which of the reasons it was. We need to catch this man and press him in the Tower to loosen his tongue.’ He thought almost nostalgically of Stigand, the evil torturer back in Rougemont Castle in Exeter.
A senior Chancery clerk came to the door and hovered with a sheaf of parchments, doing his best not to glare at de Wolfe for taking up the Justiciar’s valuable time. Hubert took the hint and stood up to end the audience.
‘Keep at it, John! Knowing your tenacity, I’m sure you will get there in the end.’
De Wolfe rose and bowed his head politely, but had one last matter to discuss before he went to the door. He felt in his scrip and took out the scrap of parchment that Robin Byard had found in Basil’s book. He held it out to the Justiciar and explained how it had come into his hands.
‘Perhaps what is written upon it may make sense to someone learned in your service. It seems to refer in some way to the counties of Kent and Sussex. Given the present anxiety along that coast about a possible raid by the French, maybe it is an indication that the fears that the murdered palace officer had about his safety might have been justified.’
Hubert took the scrap and read it, his brow furrowing as he scanned the garbled words and figures. ‘I will give this some thought and pass it to other barons on the council. You are nearer the gossip in the palace than I can ever get, so keep your ears open for any other titbits, John. There are persons around who bear considerable ill-will towards England.’
The coroner pondered this as he walked back towards his dwelling in Long Ditch. There were a number of guests from the continent staying in the palace, apart from those who formed their little supper group. He had met a few of them briefly, as the archdeacon had introduced him to Guy de Bretteville, a nobleman from Anjou, and Peter le Paumer, a knight from Angoulême. Before the situation arose with Hawise, her husband had presented him to a canon from the cathedral in Tours, another minor lord from Artois and an aged physician from Berri. John promptly forgot their names and where they came from.
The political situation in France was so fragmented and shifting that it was hard to know who was for the Norman confederacy or for the small, but powerful central core of France under Philip Augustus, centred on Paris. Though Richard was Duke of Aquitaine, there was constant trouble down there from rebellious barons. He had managed to wean and bribe the princes of Flanders to his side, but elsewhere, fragile truces, marriages of political convenience and untrustworthy pacts between the many small states and counties were confused even more by the battle lines that ebbed and flowed. Though the king was slowly making inroads into the Vexin, north of the Seine, recovering land that had been lost by the treachery and foolishness of his brother John, there was still a strong French presence in the north-east, which posed a danger to the southern corner of England. It was impossible to know where the sympathies of some of these cross-Channel guests lay — and even some English lords and barons held covert allegiance to John, Count of Mortain.
He continued to ponder these matters sitting silently with Gwyn, as they ate their dinner in the house. Osanna served them rabbit stew, then salt cod with onions, carrots and cabbage, followed by bread and cheese. She seemed to have a limited range of dishes in her culinary repertoire, but both these seasoned old warriors were not that particular about what they ate, quantity often being of greater importance than quality.
The exotic dishes favoured by what John considered posturing courtiers, held no attraction for them and they were content to do without braised lark’s tongues or swans stuffed with chestnuts and hard-boiled eggs.
Gwyn, used to Black John’s dark moods after twenty years’ companionship, made no effort to interrupt his master’s reverie and devoted himself to eating and drinking. Eventually, when Osanna waddled in to remove the bowls and horn spoons, de Wolfe lifted himself from his silent contemplation and reached over the table to refill his officer’s ale jar.
‘We should be out of this miserable village soon, Gwyn!’ he said with an almost cheerful change of mood. ‘Not for long, unfortunately, but it’ll be a change of scenery, especially if we manage to slip away to Exeter.’
The Cornishman’s blue eyes twinkled in his ruddy face as he sucked ale from his red moustache. ‘Maybe you can have a little trip down to Dawlish while we’re there!’ he said mischievously.
‘And another up to bloody Polsloe to try to see my wife,’ added John, with a scowl. ‘The house in Martin’s Lane worries me. Poor Mary is marooned there alone and I have no idea what to do about it. It can’t stay empty for ever.’
Gwyn shifted uncomfortably on his seat. ‘Are you stuck in Westminster with no hope of relief,’ he asked tentatively. ‘The last thing I want is to desert you after all these years, but I can’t bear this place and I miss my wife and sons more than I thought.’
This was the first time that his old friend had even hinted at a possible parting of the ways and it gave John more food for thought. But there was nothing to be done about it for some time to come. The pressing matters were the solution to the theft of the treasure and the coming perambulation of the court to Gloucester.
‘I spoke to the Justiciar this morning about the possible involvement of Simon Basset in the robbery,’ he said, as they were leaving the table. ‘I said there was no sign of the treasure in his house, but we spoke about the possibility of it being buried somewhere on the marshes behind his dwelling.’
‘Do you want me to have another look around?’ asked Gwyn. ‘After all that rain during the storm, maybe something has been washed clear and exposed by those leats and reens. I’ll have a walk up there now and poke about a bit.’
De Wolfe agreed and they parted outside the door, the coroner’s officer going up the lane alongside the Long Ditch to follow the track across the marsh, which eventually led to the back of the Royal Way.
John loped back to the palace, thankful that the torrid heat had moderated to a pleasant summer’s day. He found Thomas at work in his chamber, writing out some text related to his duties in the archives of the abbey, rather than anything to do with coroner’s cases.
‘There is nothing outstanding for me to deal with,’ he explained apologetically. ‘We have had so few deaths to record that I have been up to date for some time.’
‘You carry on, Thomas,’ said John, reassuringly. ‘Maybe business will improve when we get on the road to Gloucester next week.’
He sat behind his table and half-heartedly unrolled the parchment which carried his last lesson in Latin comprehension.
He could read and write his own name now and make some sense of the Lord’s Prayer, but his attention kept wandering. He looked across at his clerk, whose thin face stared down at the document he was writing, his tongue projecting slightly from the corner of his thin lips as he concentrated on scribing perfect letters with the quill in his right hand. His lank brown hair hung down in a fringe all around the shaved circle on top of his scalp, which denoted his clerical status. John almost envied his clerk’s single-minded devotion to his faith and his scholarship, the Church being the very engine of his life.