‘She’s known about you for years, love.’
‘The whole of Devon knows about us, John. But what about Hilda? Does Matilda know she’s on your list of conquests?’ Even Nesta couldn’t resist the slightly bitter remark.
De Wolfe tried to shrug this off, but he had a nagging suspicion that he was in for a hard time with his wife.
As the light faded, the tavern began to fill when men came in at the end of the working day. Nesta had to bustle around, chivvying the cook and the serving-maids, so eventually de Wolfe went with leaden feet back to his gloomy house near the cathedral. As he pulled off his cloak and his wet, leaky boots in the vestibule, Mary put her head around the passage to the yard. She pointed at the inner door to the hall and rolled her eyes heavenwards, then vanished. Even Brutus slunk after her, his tail between his legs.
De Wolfe sat before the fire in the cowled chair usually occupied by his wife. His old hound had crept back in and lay now at his feet. Simon, the aged man employed to cut wood and tend the fowl and garden pig, had carried in a pile of logs sufficient to last the night. Mary had brought him a stone flask of Loire wine, the last of those bought from Eric Picot before he had disappeared last month. Thus stocked up, he prepared to pass the long evening alone, as a westerly wind moaned outside and spattered rain against the shutters. He heard the outer door slam as Mary left to visit her mother in Rack Lane, leaving him in peace to contemplate the events of the past few hours.
As Nesta had anticipated, his brother-in-law, having had his attempt at blackmail so scornfully rejected, had vindictively gone ahead and revealed John’s indiscretions. It was not the old steward who had called but de Revelle himself, while de Wolfe had been at the jousting that afternoon, to poison his sister’s ear against her husband.
As John sat moodily before his hearth, sipping warm wine, he recalled the final show-down with Matilda earlier that evening. After his visit to the Bush, he had expected a blazing row, foul words, maybe something thrown at him and then a few weeks’ ostracism and certainly banishment from their cold marital bed, to all of which he was well accustomed.
But this time it had been different. He did not know exactly what de Revelle had said to his sister, but he suspected that he had embroidered the bare truth considerably and probably added some political lies to the issue of infidelity. Whatever it had been, Matilda had stood before him in the hall, grim-faced and flinty-eyed, but not in the expected raging temper. De Wolfe remembered the actual words she had used – they had been so few.
‘My brother has told me of your evil, John de Wolfe. I am ashamed to be burdened with your name and I am leaving you this moment. You no longer have a wife and I never wish to see you again.’ She had stalked past him towards the door, her square, high-cheekboned face white with suppressed emotion. Then he noticed Lucille lurking in the shadows near the door, already dressed for outside. She held a cloak, which she draped over her mistress’s shoulders, then picked up some large bundles tied into cloths and followed Matilda to the vestibule.
‘Where are you going, for God’s sake?’ he asked, tracking them to the front door. Matilda ignored him, but as she stepped outside he saw Sergeant Gabriel and two men-at-arms standing in the lane as an escort. As they walked away, Gabriel risked giving him a shrug of supplication and pointed his finger in the direction of Rougemont. A moment later, they had vanished into the gloom of the lane, lit only by the farrier’s torches opposite.
Hardly knowing whether to be mortified or relieved, de Wolfe came inside and slammed the outer door. Instantly Mary appeared from the passage, where she had been eavesdropping.
‘She’s left me, girl,’ he said, almost incredulously.
‘No such luck, Sir Crowner!’ said the maid cynically. ‘She’ll be back some time. You’re too good a catch for a woman her age to let slip through her fingers.’ She followed him back into the sombre hall, which somehow seemed all the more cheerless now.
‘I presume she’s gone to her brother at the castle,’ he muttered.
‘Yes, I heard her talking to Lucille about it – that ugly witch is delighted you’re in trouble and that she’s now going to live in a manor house’
‘What manor house?’ he demanded.
‘They’re going to stay in the sheriff’s rooms in Rougemont for a day or two, as Lady Eleanor has gone home, then they are travelling down to Revelstoke to live there indefinitely.’
De Wolfe gave a roar of sardonic laughter. ‘By Christ, that makes me feel better already! Matilda and Eleanor living in the same house! There’ll be murder done within a week. And Revelstoke – your friend Lucille will go mad there with boredom. She might as well be on the moon as that lonely place on the cliffs.’
Revelstoke was the sheriff’s ancestral home, in a remote spot on the coast near Plympton in the west of the county, where both he and Matilda had been brought up. Richard had another manor near Tavistock, which his haughty wife preferred.
‘Did you hear anything else between them, Mary?’ he asked.
‘No, I was out buying fish when the sheriff called. All I heard later was that your wife will be sending Lucille back some time to collect all her clothes and belongings.’
Now, as de Wolfe sat alone with his hound and his wine, he mulled over the implications of this unexpected turn of events. He had little doubt that Mary was right, and that in the fullness of time Matilda would return. What else could she do? Divorce was well-nigh impossible and a woman of forty-six had no other prospects, other than buying her way into a nunnery. That was always one possibility, given Matilda’s religious leanings, but John felt this was too good to be true.
Looking on the bright side, he had little to concern him. The house was his, bought with money left him by his father and from the accumulated loot of a dozen wars. He had wisely invested money in Hugh de Relaga’s wool export trade and he had a steady income from his share of the manors at Stoke-in-Teignhead and Holcombe. In fact, he could never have been appointed coroner unless he was financially independent: the Justiciar had laid down that every knight so elected must have an income of at least twenty pounds a year, which was supposed to make the attractions of embezzlement less appealing. With Mary to satisfy his stomach, and Nesta his heart and loins, he felt ready to wait out Matilda’s latest protest – and if she chose to take the veil, good luck to her!
As he drank and dozed by the fire, he thought half-heartedly of going down to the Bush to tell his Welsh mistress the latest news, but sleep overcame him. As the wind moaned outside, he began to snore gently as Brutus edged nearer the dying logs.
De Wolfe must have slept for several hours, though as the nearest clock was in Germany, it was only later that he calculated from the cathedral bell that he must have awakened around the tenth hour. His final dream seemed to contain an insistent knocking, and as he opened his eyes groggily, he realised that someone was hammering on his street door.
He climbed to his feet and sleepily threw some small sticks on to the fire, which had crumbled to glowing ashes. Brutus lazily hauled himself to his haunches as John stumbled across the cold stones of the hall, pulling a grey house-cape more tightly around his shoulders against the damp chill. A tallow dip guttered in its bowl on the long table, and he lit the wick of a new candle in passing to light himself to the front door.
The knocking continued with greater urgency, and he wondered who it could be. Not Mary, for she would spend the night with her mother, as she did once a week, coming back early in the morning to prepare breakfast – and she would have known that the door was never locked, as would Gwyn or Thomas.