‘He’ll not be able to get back here until morning,’ said Father Amicus, looking up at the position of the afternoon sun. ‘What are we to do with the corpse until then?’
Joel took the initiative. ‘I’ll check that damned dog has put the sheep in the right place, then I’ll get back to the village and have men bring four hurdles down here. We can set them around the body to keep off any beasts during the night.’
The bailiff mounted up and prepared to spur his mare towards the city, some fifteen miles away. ‘Get word to my Lord Henry what’s happened — and tell my wife I’ll not be home tonight.’
As he left at a trot, the priest and the shepherd also parted.
‘I’ll have to call at his croft and give the sad tidings to his wife,’ said Father Amicus. ‘A task I’m not relishing, telling the poor woman she’s destitute.’
Despondently, he clambered on to his pony and set off up the road.
The now familiar pattern of a coroner’s investigation was repeated yet again. The bailiff of Manaton arrived at Rougement after almost a three-hour ride and sought out Gwyn, whom he remembered from the recent inquest on the tanner — who could forget Gwyn?
In turn, the coroner’s officer arranged for Matthew to sleep in the garrison’s quarters overnight, then went to find de Wolfe.
It was not hard to guess where he was that evening, and soon the Cornishman was sharing his table at the Bush, his big nose buried in a quart pot. Though John was supposed to be keeping his mistress company in a lover’s tête-à-tête, he was secretly glad to be interrupted by his henchman. Try as he would, he seemed unable to shake off Nesta’s apathy, which was just as bad as it had been the previous evening. She had given up weeping, but sat with eyes downcast, answering when spoken to, but otherwise in the lowest of spirits. Her face was pale and drawn and the tendrils of hair that escaped from her cap seemed limp and lustreless, compared with their usual red glory. She frequently had to visit the privy in the yard, John putting it down to the effects of her pregnancy. It was in a sense, as the substances Bearded Lucy had given her were still upsetting her bowels, without any other effect.
For her part, Nesta’s desperate resolution to pluck up courage to tell him of Alan’s fathering had evaporated, and she knew now that, in spite of her promise to Thomas, she would be quite unable to get the words out. The realisation of her cowardice added to her general despair, plunging her into the depths of a depression from which she could see no escape. Even the running of the inn, which she prided herself was the best in the city, no longer seemed important, and she let Edwin and the girls carry on without her usual constant chivvying.
She was also relieved to see Gwyn appear, trusting him to lighten the atmosphere, as his nature was even less sensitive than John’s. It was only the timid, gentle Thomas who sensed people’s inmost feelings and responded to them in a like manner.
Now Gwyn was telling his master about the summons to Manaton.
‘Another corpse at the roadside with an arrow in his back!’ he boomed in western Welsh, the language of his youth. ‘But at least it’s some wretched serf this time, not a verderer.’
De Wolfe shook his head in baffled astonishment. ‘This situation is getting out of hand. There’ll be another fight over jurisdiction, I can see it coming. Forest law against the common law — and, damn it, they’re both the King’s law, that’s the rub!’
‘So are we off at dawn, Crowner?’
‘Yes, back in the saddle at first light. At least I’ve not got my wife to nag at me for being away most of the time.’
To their mutual but unspoken relief, John told Nesta that he would sleep in Martin’s Lane that night, to be able to get Odin from the farrier’s before dawn and be on their way as soon as the city gates opened.
By the eighth hour next morning, they were trotting up the slope above the deep wooded ravine which hid the Becky waterfalls. They had made good time from Exeter, in spite of Thomas’s usual slower progress. De Wolfe had recently offered to buy him a woman’s palfrey, a larger mount than the pony he had, but the clerk resisted the exhortation to give up his side saddle and ride like a man.
Gwyn was the first to see the spot they were seeking. Ahead, on a straight part of the track, a group of people were waiting for them alongside a box-like erection of wattle panels. As they approached, they recognised Robert Barat, the village reeve, and Father Amicus. Hovering behind were a couple of villagers, including the shepherd, who had had the foresight to bring a handcart to take the body away.
‘Nothing personal, Crowner, but we’re seeing too much of you lately,’ said the priest, motioning to the reeve to pull down the hurdles.
De Wolfe and the bailiff stood contemplating the corpse, around which flies and bluebottles were already congregating, while Father Amicus enlarged on the story already related to John by the bailiff.
‘I found him just as he is, yesterday afternoon. He’s not been moved, except to lift him to see where that blood was coming from.’
The coroner and his officer knelt on the grass and began to examine it as the priest went on with his tale.
‘I went to his cot up the road and broke the sad news to his wife. They are a poor couple, finding it hard to make ends meet. And she’ll find it harder still, though the village will rally round as best it can.’
As John felt the rock-hard stiffness in the arms and legs, Father Amicus continued.
‘We all knew he took a coney or a bird from the forest now and then — and he’s not the only one in the vill who does that. Until recently the foresters turned a blind eye, as long as deer or boar were not the targets. His wife said that latterly the coneys had been playing havoc with his young vegetables behind the cottage — they depend on them for much of their food. So yesterday, he went out at dawn to see to the traps he had laid the previous night.’
‘Where were they laid?’ asked Gwyn.
‘There’s a small warren in a clearing a few hundred paces into the forest behind their dwelling, riddled with burrows. These rabbits are becoming a pest. A pity our Norman grandfathers ever brought them into the country!’ The priest’s annoyance suggested that his own garden plot had suffered as well.
Gwyn hauled the cadaver over on to its face and the two men sat back on their haunches to look at the broken arrow mutely protruding from the back, as the priest continued his tale.
‘But he never came back — he should have gone to his work in the strip-fields soon after daylight, but they saw no sign of him. The wife sent the son out to search for him, but he found nothing, except that his traps around the warren had been pulled out and thrown aside.’
That was the whole story, and there was silence as the onlookers watched the coroner working out the arrowhead, just as he done with the verderer before. Owing to the long shaft, the tunic could not be taken off over it, so John pulled the arrow out first and laid it on the grass near by.
‘Different from the verderer’s,’ grunted Gwyn. ‘Better made than that one.’
‘That’s what I said yesterday,’ chipped in the shepherd. ‘It’s the sort the foresters buy from the fletcher in Moretonhampstead,’ he added with deliberate emphasis.
The coroner and his henchman went through their usual routine of raising the dead man’s tunic, examining the wound and the rest of the body. Then de Wolfe stood up and motioned to the shepherd and another villager that they could load the corpse on to the cart and trundle it off to the village.
‘We’d better have a look in the forest, now we’re here’, grunted de Wolfe. He led the way along the trampled grass and weeds into the tree line, followed by Gwyn and Matthew Juvenis.
‘A few spots of blood here and there, nothing else.’