De Wolfe motioned Gwyn to go to the left with Wichin, while he and David circled the other way, to come on the diggers from both directions.
As he got within twenty paces of the bushes beyond which they were excavating, a face was suddenly raised and a pair of eyes met his. It was Eric Langton and, for a tense moment, John was afraid that the fool might cry out in surprise. He raised a finger to his lips, then motioned with his hand for the vicar to move away from the others.
A voice from behind the thicket said, ‘Where the hell d’you think you’re going, priest?’
‘To have a piddle, that’s all,’ came the vicar’s tremulous reply.
‘Well, have it here, we’re not particular. And check that damned parchment of yours. There’s no sign of anything yet and we’re down well over two feet.’
As de Wolfe crept even nearer, the sound of digging started again, and a moment later, there was a loud clang and another curse.
‘There’s a bloody great stone down here. Give me a hand to heave it out, will you?’
The coroner heard the tools being dropped as the men struggled with a boulder set in the red earth. It seemed the ideal moment to surprise them, so John stood erect, gave a great yell for Gwyn and crashed round the bush that separated them from the diggers.
He had a momentary impression of the four men frozen in utter surprise, two of them knee-deep in a hole in the ground, then confusion erupted. The first to react was the red-haired man standing on the other side of the hole, who pulled out his sword and, holding it two-handed, advanced on de Wolfe with a roar of defiance.
The coroner picked de Braose as the main adversary and, in a second, their steel blades had clashed with arm-tingling impact. But before de Wolfe could pull back for another strike he felt a numbing blow on his left leg, which threw him off balance. One of the men in the hole, probably Fulford, had seized his discarded shovel and swung it almost at ground level to strike the coroner on the shin, giving him the chance to scramble out of the hole and join the fight.
De Wolfe came within an ace then of being killed, as the auburn-haired leader poised himself for a chopping swing with his broadsword, but David, the groom, swung his thick stave in the path of the blade. The stout wood was splintered by the blow, but it turned the swing away from de Wolfe, who had fallen sideways, supporting himself with one hand on the ground.
Gwyn and his cathedral companion Wichin had been delayed a few seconds by a thicker wall of undergrowth on their side, forcing them to run a few yards to the left to get through. Now, with ferocious yells, the wild Cornishman crashed across to the mêlée, his first thought being for the safety of his master, whom he saw almost on the ground under the menacing blade of de Braose. But the latter had been diverted by the intervention of David and his staff and, in anger, Jocelin turned his blade on the groom. He swung his great sword again, but fortunately for David the flat of the blade, rather than the edge, caught him on the side of the head. He fell as if poleaxed and took no further part in the fight.
As Fulford scrambled out of the hole, John recovered sufficiently to face de Braose again, but he found that both knight and squire were now coming against him, as the other digger, far from being a menial labourer, showed himself an experienced combatant. Ignoring his discarded hoe, he seized a long spear lying on the grass and, almost before his feet were out of the excavation, lunged forward with it at Gwyn. Though the officer had his sword at the ready, its reach was far less than that of the spear and the hairy giant had to hop back and chop sideways at the shaft to avoid being skewered. Eric Langton had taken to his heels and was out of sight of the yelling, thrashing group of men, but the battle was not to last long.
As Fulford and de Braose advanced on de Wolfe, Gwyn backed around to try to stand by him, dodging repeated short jabs from the unknown man’s spear. The coroner was now facing a sword and a long-handled spade, waving his own sword slowly from side to side.
For a few seconds, there seemed to be a stand-off, until the canon’s man Wichin, who had been obscured behind Gwyn, gave a great yell, swung his stave over his head and brought it down on the shaft of the spear. He forced it to the ground, but before he could lift his stave again, the spearman had pulled back his weapon and jabbed it into Wichin’s shoulder. The leaf-shaped point dug deeply into the muscle, and blood welled immediately through the leather jacket. Wichin screamed, dropped his staff and, as the lance was pulled out, fell to his knees with the pain and shock.
But the intervention had given Gwyn his opportunity. He reversed his move towards the coroner and, raising his great sword, swung it in a whistling horizontal arc at the spearman. The blade connected with the side of his neck and the man collapsed in a welter of blood and agonal convulsions.
With hardly a glance at the man whose life he had just taken, Gwyn leaped back to John’s side. Within two minutes of the fight beginning, three of the combatants had been eliminated and now it was two against two, all seasoned warriors. However, the coroner and his officer had twice the number of years’ experience on the battlefield than the younger men, and Fulford was armed only with a shovel – his sword lay sheathed on the ground where he had left it to go digging.
‘Give in, both of you,’ yelled de Wolfe. ‘We don’t want to kill you!’
For answer, Jocelin de Braose, his capuchon unwound and fallen down his back, swung his sword back and forth to form a zone of protection in front of him and tried to move forward towards the coroner. That old campaigner dropped his own massive blade at an angle, holding the hilt above waist-level, then suddenly moved it forward into the path of de Braose’s weapon. There was a clang as metal hit metal and when de Wolfe jerked his hands forward again, the other blade was deflected towards the ground. But the younger man leaped backwards and freed his sword before John could make a swing at him.
As this duel was going on, Giles Fulford was attempting to use the longer reach of the shovel to hit Gwyn on his sword arm. One blow landed, but the coroner’s officer merely grunted and waited his opportunity. As the tool swung again, he sidestepped and hacked down on the wooden shaft just above the heart-shaped blade. Though it was too thick and hard to be severed, a deep chop mark appeared, which then split several inches up the centre of the handle. With a roar, Gwyn opened himself deliberately to another blow, which landed with a thwack on his leather-covered ribs. As he had anticipated, the split handle gave up the ghost instantly and the shovel-head fell off on to the ground.
‘I’ve got the bastard!’ he yelled, and dived on Fulford, knowing that the coroner would prefer these two alive rather than dead. As Jocelin and de Wolfe entered another cycle of striking and parrying, Gwyn became over-confident of seizing the squire. He tossed his sword behind him to grab Fulford in a bear-hug. But Giles still had half the shovel-shaft in his hands. With it he gave Gwyn a bone-shattering crack on the temple, which made the big Cornishman stagger and put his hands to his head in a temporary stupor, though he wasn’t knocked out. Fulford put a hand to the back of his belt and whipped out an eight-inch dagger. The flash of the blade caught de Wolfe’s eye. In desperation he brought down his sword with a sledge-hammer of a blow that skidded down de Braose’s weapon and struck the hilt-guard with such force that it was twisted out of his hand. Before the sword had even hit the ground, John made another swing at Fulford, trying to strike his knife arm. He missed as the man jumped aside, but by then Gwyn, though groggy, had recovered enough to grab his attacker’s arms and the pair began to wrestle with the dagger waving dangerously a few inches from Gwyn’s ribs. De Wolfe was trying to watch both adversaries, afraid that Fulford would manage to stab his officer and that de Braose would retrieve his sword and return to the attack while the coroner’s attention was divided.