Gwyn, who could spend all day on a horse without a twinge, set off to do a tour of all the other alehouses in the hope of hearing something useful. In the fourth, by which time he had drunk the better part of a gallon of common ale, he fell into conversation with two tinners, who had brought a train of pack ponies down that day from the high moor, laden with crudely smelted tin ready for the next assay. Their talk followed the usual pattern — complaints about the stinginess of their employers, the outrageous taxes on the tin and the corruption of the Warden of the Stannaries, who was none other than Sheriff Richard de Revelle. As the ale flowed and tongues became loosened, Gwyn turned the talk to extortion in the forest and had a useful response from the grousing tinners.
‘Thank God we’re exempt from the antics of these bloody foresters!’ said one. ‘The stannary laws and our parliament on the moor make sure that they don’t interfere with us. But I pity the folk who live off the land down here, they’re getting a harder time than ever.’
Gwyn encouraged them to keep talking by waving down a potboy and getting in more quarts. ‘What’s going on in the forest, then? I’m from Exeter, we don’t hear much about it there,’ he added ingenuously.
‘More oppression from the foresters. They’ve become worse lately,’ growled the other man, a huge bear of a fellow with a black beard. ‘Forcing alehouses to take their brew, setting up forges and tanneries — taking the very bread from people’s mouths.’
‘Can’t they do something about it?’ asked Gwyn, his blue eyes radiating innocent curiosity.
‘What can they do?’ retorted Blackbeard belligerently. ‘The manor-lords are either powerless to act against royal custom or their palms are being crossed with silver to persuade them to mind their own business.’
‘And the common folk can do nothing,’ snarled the other tinner. ‘If they complain, they are beaten up by the foresters or their hulking pages. And not only that, but lately they seem to have the damned outlaws on their side. I don’t understand it, I tell you.’
He had raised his voice and the other man nudged him forcibly in the side, slopping his ale over the rim of his pot.
‘Watch what you say, Tom,’ he growled in lower tones. ‘That fellow over there, I’m sure he’s one of Winter’s gang.’
He jerked his head to indicate a young man slouching on a low window shelf across the room, flirting with one of the slatternly maids who was clearing empty mugs and platters.
‘Who’s Winter?’ asked Gwyn, determined to draw the men out.
‘Robert Winter. He runs the main coven of thieving outlaws in these parts,’ grunted the smaller man. ‘They’ve become so bold lately they come into town to drink and wench now, for no one seems interested in stopping them. Someone seems to be protecting them.’
‘Are there any others in here, d’you reckon?’ asked Gwyn, looking around the crowded taproom. Blackbeard cautiously turned his head right and left. Although he was built like a bull, he seemed unwilling to get involved in any trouble.
‘No, I can’t see anyone else here that I recognise, but I’ve only seen these villains now and then on the verges or talking to the foresters. Although for all I know, all this damned lot might be wolf’s heads.’
The thought seemed to sober the two tinners and they refused to be drawn into any more discussion of the forest troubles. A few moments later they finished up their ale and shambled out, leaving Gwyn with the beginnings of a plan germinating under his ginger thatch.
Within minutes of the tinners leaving, Gwyn quietly rose from his corner bench and made his way to the door. The young man in the window recess was still talking to the ale-maid, trying to pull her to him with an arm around her waist, as she half-heartedly pushed him away with the empty drinking pots she held in her hands.
Gwyn hurried down the main streeet of Ashburton towards the inn where they were staying, stopping only in an alleyway to empty his bladder of some of the vast quantity of drink that he had taken that day. When he arrived at the Crown tavern, distinguished from other houses only by the tarnished gilt sign that was nailed over the door, he pushed his way in through the drinkers and made for the open ladder-like stairs that went up to the floor above. The loft was similar to that in the Bush, though dirtier and more squalid. A row of hessian pallets stuffed with hay lay along one wall, and on the other side a straggle of loose straw offered cheaper accommodation.
The place was almost deserted this early in the evening, but one man lay retching in the straw and, in a corner, another, older man appeared to be shaking with the rigors of some fever, unattended and uncared for. The Cornishman looked along the row of thin mattresses to one with a bulge, where Thomas lay wrapped in his thin mantle in lieu of a blanket. He stumped across the creaking boards and shook the clerk by the shoulder.
‘Hey, little man, you’re on your own from here. I’m off into the forest to see if I can discover something straight from the horse’s mouth.’ Rudely awaken and bleary eyed, the ex-priest groggily sat up on his pallet and stared at the tousle-haired giant who had so abruptly disturbed him.
‘What do you mean, on my own? Where shall I go, then?’
‘Carry on with what you have been doing, man. It’s Thursday evening now. I’ll meet you back here on Sunday and we can ride back to the city.’
The clerk stared anxiously at his friend in the gloom of the windowless attic. ‘I’m unhappy at travelling alone. Must you leave me?’
Gwyn gave him a playful push on the shoulder, which flattened him on to his mattress. ‘Come on, have some spirit, Thomas. Who in God’s name would bother to rob such a poor-looking waif as you? I reckon a beggar would share his alms with you out of pity!’
‘What about your horse?’ wailed the clerk.
‘I’ll give the ostler a couple of pence to feed her until I come back — and put the fear of the crowner’s wrath into him not to sell her!’
Agog with consternation, Thomas watched Gwyn stump away to the ladder, then with a muffled wail of anxiety he lay down again and pulled his cloak over his head.
Outside, the coroner’s officer made his way back to the other alehouse and slipped back into the taproom, which was even more crowded than before. All the benches were full and men were standing shoulder to shoulder with hardly room to lift their tankards to their lips. There had been a local horse fair that day and some of the patrons were loudly discussing their bargains and their losses.
Gwyn pushed his way to the back of the room and gave a segment of a penny for a quart pottery mug of ale, dipped from an open cask by a slatternly woman with a huge goitrous swelling in her throat.
He turned, his eyes scanning the far corner to see if the young man was still there. The maid with whom he had been flirting was now struggling about the room with new pots of ale, urged on by the landlord, who was yelling at her to keep her mind on her work. Her previous place with the alleged outlaw had been taken by a short, scrawny man with a dark, leathery complexion, who was talking animatedly with the other fellow. Gwyn watched them covertly for a time and tried to edge nearer, though the press of jostling patrons made it difficult. Although the two were talking rapidly to each other, their voices were kept low and Gwyn could not pick up a single word without getting so close as to make them suspicious. Abruptly, the smaller man, after much nodding and gesticulating, turned and forced his way quickly to the door and vanished, leaving the other looking thoughtfully into his empty pot. Fearful that he was about to leave, Gwyn shouldered his way to his side, and with what he hoped was a furtive look behind him, gestured at the ale jar.