Though de Braose, standing just outside the door, guffawed at this, the sheriff did not take it so lightly. De Wolfe could see his Adam’s apple rise and fall beneath his small beard as he swallowed nervously. ‘Nonsense, man, you have no proof – not a single witness to implicate me. Even if you were able to blab to someone, where could you go now with these wild tales? Winchester and London are far away for a man imprisoned for rape.’
‘So what do you intend to do with me, brother-in-law? Get Stigand to poison me tonight – or cut out my tongue tomorrow to silence me? That would be effective, as you know I couldn’t write my denunciation of you!’ He even used his private longing to be literate to goad the sheriff.
De Revelle was becoming more rattled as he realised the enormity of the path he was being forced to take. Getting rid of a king’s coroner was not as easy as getting rid of a common criminal. Coroners did not just vanish from the face of the earth without questions being asked at the highest level. He was now irrevocably launched on this escapade, but the further he went the less he relished it.
John sensed this, and deliberately provoked his brother-in-law with mockery. He raised his long chin and pointed to the black stubble on his neck. ‘When you hang me, before all those good burgesses and churchmen, do you think the knot should be on the left or right, eh?’
Jocelin de Braose could see what was happening and stepped forward angrily. ‘Come on, Sheriff, leave him, he’s trying to make fools of us!’
‘Too late, God did that years ago!’ sneered de Wolfe. De Braose raised his arm to strike the coroner, but then realised that he was not being held or tied. He stepped back hastily and pulled his dagger from its scabbard.
‘That’s it, hack the crowner to death,’ invited de Wolfe. ‘That really would intrigue the Chief Justiciar and the Lord Marshal.’
Richard de Revelle was almost at the end of his tether at this taunting mention of the most powerful members of the royal court. ‘Stop this, de Braose! Remember your place. You are nothing but a hired sword and you have no say in these matters.’ He turned back to the prisoner with a final entreaty. ‘I beg you, John, consider your position through the night. Otherwise this woman will Appeal you for ravishing her at the County Court tomorrow. We have four witnesses to your indecent assault – and have an apothecary who will say that he examined her and found her grievously bruised about the private parts. Within days you will be accused, convicted and hanged. I am powerless to stop this once you set foot in the Shire Hall tomorrow morning.’ Then, as if afraid to hear any more than would unnerve him, the sheriff stepped back, slammed the door, and yelled for Stigand to lock up.
With plenty to occupy his thoughts, de Wolfe lay back on the cold slate slab, wondering if the inside of a tomb was as hard and as dark as this bare stone.
Though Richard de Revelle had enjoyed same malicious delight in telling his sister about her husband’s infidelities, he had not anticipated the consequences. He had thought that she would give de Wolfe hell on a grander scale than usual, but not that she would leave home immediately and saddle herself on him. Matilda had always idolised her elder brother, but in spite of his outward show of affection for her, he had from childhood thought her a plain and sulky girl, whose sourness had grown as she got older. To have her ensconced, bag and baggage, in his already cramped living quarters at Rougemont was too much – especially at a critical time like this. And to have that evil-eyed, buck-toothed French maid there too was intolerable. He had had to evict his steward from his outer chamber to sleep there himself, give his bed to Matilda and have a pallet brought in for the maid. Thank God he could get rid of them in a few days’ time when he took them down to Revelstoke – though his spirit quailed at the prospect of telling his wife, Eleanor, that she was to have permanent lodgers. Perhaps one of them would move out to his other manor near Tavistock, but de Revelle could foresee serious domestic trouble stretching into the infinite future.
But was there going to be an infinite future for him – or even much future at all?
As he lay sleepless on his steward’s lumpy mattress in the early hours of the morning, de Revelle felt increasing apprehension at what the coming day – and weeks – would bring. He felt that he was launched on a slippery slope over which he had no control. The grand idea of rebellion had seemed excitingly attractive in the planning stages, when conspirators had gathered over jugs of wine to change the face of England. But now that he was in danger of being forced to hang his own brother-in-law, who was a king’s officer, a friend of the Justiciar and the monarch himself, that impersonal plotting seemed far removed from less palatable reality.
De Revelle had come near to disaster before, less than a year ago. He had always craved the status of high office, and being sheriff of a far western county so remote from the centre of power had not satisfied his ambition. He had never found favour at the court of either Henry the Second or his son Richard. Every effort he had made to gain a post in Winchester or Westminster had been frustrated. Perhaps he had become paranoid about it, but he sensed personal snubs and rejection from every quarter, especially since the old King had died in ’eighty-nine. Two years ago, when he heard rumours of the Count of Mortaigne’s aspirations to seize the throne in the absence of his brother Richard, he had seen a chance to nail his colours to a different mast and hopefully be repaid for his new allegiance with preferment under a new sovereign.
Thankfully, as it turned out, he had not gone too far down this road before it collapsed under him. By the time the old Queen, Eleanor, had mobilised action against the rebels, shortly before Coeur de Lion was released from captivity, de Revelle had been promised the sheriffdom of Devon through the influence of barons sympathetic to the Count. When the revolt crumbled, he had been brushed with the same tar of disgrace as the other rebels, and his elevation to sheriff suspended. This was when Henry de la Pomeroy’s father had been driven to suicide. Only the casual, irresponsible pardon granted by the King to his brother and most of the rebels got Richard de Revelle off the hook and eventually allowed him to take up the sheriff’s post.
Now the whole cycle appeared to be beginning again, and as he lay on his cold bed he wished that he had stayed content with his lot. The worm of ambition still wriggled within him, but the last day or two had made him doubt that the price he paid in anguish was worth the tenuous prize at the end.
At the meeting in Berry Pomeroy, two days before, he had put forward his feeble plan to shame de Wolfe into silence as a desperate attempt to avoid the present situation dreamed up by Bernard Cheevers and de Braose of having the coroner in gaol for alleged rape so that he could be judicially strangled! For the sheriff, the situation had snowballed into a nightmare, out of control and irreversible. He tossed and turned, and cursed – the curses aimed as much at himself for becoming so involved, as at de Wolfe for being such an iron-headed, stubborn fool, yet a fool who commanded respect for his loyalty, as compared with de Revelle’s own repeated treachery.
Before sleep born of exhaustion claimed him, he had a last waking nightmare: he had to face Matilda in the morning and tell her that her husband was now a ravisher as well as an adulterer, and that by the end of the week she was likely to be a felon’s widow.
As always, it was impossible to keep anything quiet in the small city of Exeter. Soon after dawn the rumour went around like wildfire that Sir John de Wolfe, the coroner, was in Rougemont gaol, though as yet no one knew why. When he came off duty, the guard at the gatehouse had told his drinking friends the news, they had told their wives, and as soon as the stall-holders and hawkers flooded through the opened city gates, the gossip flashed through the city like fire through a cornfield.