Nesta responded with little more than monosyllables and sighs, until John pulled her to him on the bench behind the screen and tried to get at the root of the trouble. He had little success, however, as she dissolved into quiet weeping again, which both embarrassed and terrified him. Peering over the top of the hurdle, he looked to see if the patrons were eavesdropping, but the relatively few drinkers were either unaware or were studiously pretending not to notice. John wished that they were upstairs in the privacy of her room, but for her to stumble across the taproom, red eyed and sniffling, would be worse than sitting tight. He wondered whether he really wanted to ask her whether he should stay the night — and immediately felt disloyal for preferring even his empty house to the prospect of endlessly trying to break through the barrier that had sprung up between them.
For her part, Nesta knew that nothing had changed, but that some kind of nemesis was fast approaching. Try as she would, she could not bring her to tell him that he was not the father of this creature in her womb, as she had begun to think of it. She knew well enough that this big, awkward, craggy man was doing his utmost to be kind and gentle to her, but the great lie that she was living prevented her from responding.
Eventually, as the evening wore on, she did invite him to stay, managing to reason that she might as well lie passively in his arms all night as suffer alone. John took this as Fate’s rebuff to his previous reluctance to share her bed and, as the daylight faded, the sad pair climbed the ladder to her tiny chamber.
CHAPTER TEN
The following day, John was called to the port of Topsham, some four miles downriver, to deal with two deaths on a trading ship. The vessel had been beached on the mud alongside the wharf for unloading, but when the tide came back in the hull suddenly tilted over, as the uneven removal of a few tons of cargo had made her unstable. One stevedore was crushed between the ship’s side and the wharf, while a sailor who had been mending rigging was tossed into the swirling flood tide, his drowned body being recovered a quarter of a mile upstream.
The examination of the scene and witnesses, followed by an acrimonious inquest, in which de Wolfe accused the ship-master and the wharf-owner of negligence in discharging the cargo, lasted much of the day, and it was early evening when he returned to Exeter.
He went straight to Martin’s Lane and sat quietly in his echoing hall with his dog and a quart of cider for an hour, trying to deny to himself that he was reluctant to go to the Bush and face his mistress’s misery. Mary came to refill his pot and then stood looking down at him sternly, one fist on her hip, her handsome face creased in a frown.
‘What’s to become of me, Crowner?’ she demanded. ‘I’ve not cooked a meal for days, I’ve hardly seen you and you’ve slept here one night since your wife left. Should I look around for another master? — though God knows where I’ll find one.’
‘Mary! Don’t talk like that. I’ve told you everything will go on as before,’ he said placatingly. ‘Whether Matilda comes home or stays away, I have to live somewhere, break my fast, have my shirts and tunics washed and my fire made up in winter.’
‘And what if your Welsh lady decides to do all that, where will I be then?’
‘That seems very unlikely, good Mary. I just don’t know what’s going to happen between us.’
He looked so crestfallen that she softened immediately, as she had done so often in the past. Crouching down beside him, she listened while he poured out his tale of woe concerning Nesta.
‘She’s lonely and frightened, John. Afraid of losing you and of a hopeless future for herself.’
He waved his hands in desperation. ‘I’ve told her over and over, I’m glad about the child and will stand by her. Why won’t she listen?’
Mary stood up, shaking her head helplessly. ‘You men will never understand, will you? A pregnant woman, especially one in her position, is uncertain, bewildered, vulnerable — not that I’ve been like that myself, but I’ve seen it in a few.’
Unable to help him any more, she took herself off to her kitchen to make him some supper, for he guiltily decided to delay going down to the Bush until later. As fate decided, he was destined not to visit the inn that evening, for a couple of hours later, as the sun was setting, Gwyn turned up at his front door. Usually, his blustery arrival was a summons to some new death, assault or rape, but this evening he had more interesting news.
‘I’ve been having a few jugs in the White Hart,’ he announced, mentioning an alehouse in Southgate Street. ‘There’s been a horse market on Bull Mead today and some of the buyers and dealers were in the tavern. I saw that little fellow again, the one the outlaw was talking to in the alehouse at Ashburton.’
De Wolfe waved him to a chair and filled a pot for him from his ale-jug. Normally Gwyn would never come into the hall if he could help it, in case Matilda was there, as she thought him a Celtic barbarian and made her feelings painfully clear.
‘You mean the man who seemed to have some dealings with … what was his name, Martin Angot?’
‘That’s him! Now tonight I did some eavesdropping and found that this fellow’s a horse-trader,’ explained Gwyn, pleased with his spying activities. ‘I even got his name, listening to people who were either contented or complaining about what they had bought or sold. They’d all been drinking a fair amount, so they weren’t speaking in whispers, by any means.’
John was used to his officer’s long-windedness. ‘So what was his name?’ he asked patiently.
‘They called him ‘Stephen’ and ‘Cruch’, so I reckon he’s Stephen Cruch,’ he grinned, wiping ale from his huge moustache. ‘I gathered from the potman that he was sleeping tonight in the loft of the White Hart — but I also heard him tell some fellow that he was leaving early in the morning for Ashburton.’
‘Our Thomas said that he had come across a horse-dealer in Buckfast who had dealings with this priest, Edmund Treipas. What shall we do about this, Gwyn?’ pondered de Wolfe.
‘We could jump him and beat some truth from the fellow. I could take him blindfold, with one hand in my pouch!’
John grinned at his henchman’s enthusiasm. ‘Would he recognise you, if he saw you?’ he asked.
Gwyn shook his shaggy head. ‘I very much doubt it. I kept well back in the tavern in Ashburton and didn’t approach Martin Angot until this Cruch fellow left. There’s no reason for him to have remembered me from a crowded taproom. And he certainly wouldn’t have seen me tonight. I kept well down on a stool among the throng that was there.’
De Wolfe thought about this for a moment.
‘He’s never seen me, to my knowledge. Tomorrow, could we not follow him discreetly to see if he gets up to anything near Ashburton?’
The Cornishman readily agreed. ‘Surely, if we keep well back, he’ll not notice us on the main west road. There are always travellers going back and forth.’
The coroner hawked and spat into his empty fireplace. ‘It would be good to catch him meeting up with an outlaw again. Then we could seize the pair of them and make them talk.’
It was agreed that they should ride out of the West Gate as soon as it opened in the morning, keeping a sharp eye open for the horse-dealer. They would ride a few miles along the Plymouth road and hide in the trees to await his passing, then follow him at a distance.