Intrigued, Gwyn felt for the chain, risking a sudden bite from an unknown guard dog. He felt the last link, which had been dropped over an iron pin hammered into one of the frames for the wattle panels. Using the tension of the straining beast to pull it off, he urged it onwards, and without hesitation the hound scrambled down into the ditch and leapt up the other side, with Gwyn dragging along behind.
The dog panted and pulled, its ears now flattened, and made for the first line of trees. Once the were inside the wood, even the faint daybreak was extinguished. Gwyn stumbled along in the darkness, his feet catching in roots and brambles, until they reached the barer ground deeper under the trees, where leaf mould was the only hazard, apart from fallen branches.
The hound aimed off slightly to the left and, straining its powerful shoulders, took the coroner’s officer at an uncomfortably fast pace several hundred yards into the forest. Gwyn began to wonder whether the damned beast was merely after a badger or a hind, though it should have been well used to those where it lived, but a moment later his affection for dogs was given a massive boost. The tension in the chain suddenly slackened and the dog started to whine and pant.
‘Stop licking me, you bastard!’ came a wonderfully well-recognised voice from the gloom.
‘Crowner! Is that you?’ shouted Gwyn, almost overcome with joy.
‘Gwyn? What in hell are you doing here at this time of night?’
The harsh voice was weak, but grated beautifully on Gwyn’s ears.
He bent down and, pushing the clever hound aside, found the coroner stretched out, his shoulders against the bole of a tree. The light had increased marginally and Gwyn could just make out de Wolfe’s long body.
‘Are you injured, Crowner? Where in blazes have you been?’
‘I took a blade across my side, but it’s nothing, though I’ve shed some blood. It was a bad knock on my head that did for me, though I can’t remember much about it.’
Gwyn told his master to lie still, then stumbled part-way back towards the distant alehouse, yelling for help in a voice that could surely be heard in Ashburton itself. Some men came running with a couple of pitch flares and before long Ralph Morin, Gabriel and the rest of the soldiers were clustered around the fallen coroner.
The lights now showed that he had a huge blue bruise across his left temple, spreading on to his ear, which was torn at the edge. Of more concern to Gwyn was the ominous dried blood that stained his tunic over his left side, but when they looked underneath, the slash, though four inches long, had been stopped by his hip bone and would not be dangerous, as long as it did not suppurate.
‘Can you get up — or shall we make a stretcher for you?’ asked Morin.
‘Get me up and on to my horse!’ snarled John, struggling to rise. He promptly fell down again and Gwyn and the castle constable, both huge men themselves, stood either side of de Wolfe and locked an arm around his, lifting him to his feet. With the flares guttering before them, they slowly walked him back to the edge of the forest, the hound prancing about delightedly in front of them.
In the alehouse, Gwyn bound up John’s wound with a length of clean linen provided by the landlord, whose stock of bread, cheese and ale was rapidly exhausted by the posse and the rescued victim, whose appetite seemed to have easily survived his ordeal. As they ate and drank, the story came out, as far as the coroner could recollect. He remembered felling the first outlaw and being threatened by the second, but from there his memory was a blank until he recovered consciousness. Gwyn explained that the corpse of the first man was near the scene of the fight, but not that of the second, who must have staggered off until he collapsed and died where they found him.
With a terrible pain in his head and a bleeding wound in his side, de Wolfe had stumbled as best he could towards what he thought was the direction of the path. Then he must have collapsed again, for he remembered nothing but jumbled memories of weaving through the trees and repeatedly falling down in a stupor — due either to blood loss or the effects of the blow on the head. Eventually his head had partially cleared, but it was now dark and he groggily gave up until dawn, slumped at the foot of the tree where the dog had discovered him.
When all the excitement had died down, the coroner told Morin of the assignation they had witnessed between Stephen Cruch and the outlaw chief, as well as the mysterious priest that they assumed had met the horse-dealer in that very room.
‘What’s to be done about these foresters and outlaws, John?’ asked Ralph Morin, as they finished the rest of the landlord’s meagre food supply.
‘Depends on Richard de Revelle,’ growled the coroner. ‘So far, he’s done everything he can to be obstructive over this, which makes me suspect that he’s got an interest in the matter.’
‘Even if he allowed the garrison to be used for a sweep against the outlaws, I doubt if we’d have enough men. I couldn’t take all of them away from Exeter at once. We’ve got only sixty all told.’
‘And many of those are little better than raw youths,’ added Gabriel glumly. ‘These men here are some of the best, for I picked them myself.’
De Wolfe, whose tough body was rapidly recovering, swallowed the last of his ale. ‘Then I’ll have to go to Winchester and see if Hubert Walter is willing to act. It’s his bloody country, after all, for as long as the King is absent.’
‘And this horse-dealer and the priest? What about them?’ persisted the constable.
John gingerly felt his bruised head before he spoke. ‘We can’t prove that anything illegal passed between them, though the landlord here confirms that they met and spoke together here. But Stephen Cruch is guilty of consorting with outlaws, for I saw him with my own eyes.’
‘Seize the fellow and ask him a few questions in the undercroft in Rougemont,’ suggested Gwyn grimly. ‘That fat bastard Stigand will soon get some answers from him.’
‘Maybe, but I must think about it first. Perhaps soon we should take a ride to Buckfast and see what this priest has to say for himself, if it’s the same one that Thomas met.’
An hour later, John pronouced himself fit to ride and was helped up into the saddle of his borrowed horse by solicitous hands. Slowly, they made their way up the high road at a walking pace, Gwyn and Ralph riding closely on either side of the coroner, in case he was taken dizzy again. However, his iron constitution and his determination to see this crisis though kept him in the saddle for the next four hours. He had a sore scalp and a throbbing headache, as well as a burning pain in his hip wound, but he had suffered worse many times before.
When they reached the city, the constable and his men hurried back to the castle, trusting that the sheriff had not yet returned from his conjugal duties in Tiverton. Gwyn went with his master back to Martin’s Lane, insisting that he took to his bed for the rest of the day
For once, De Wolfe seemed amenable to the idea, feeling even more exhausted after the long ride, but once again fate had other ideas.
After leaving the hired mount at the stables opposite, John preceded his officer into the house and made for the stairs to his bed in the solar. But as they came into the yard from the passage, Thomas de Peyne almost hopped out of the kitchen hut, Mary close behind him.
The clerk’s face lit up when he saw his master alive and relatively intact, but Thomas’s expression told John straight away that something was wrong.
‘Thank Almighty God that you’re safe, Crowner!’ gabbled the clerk, crossing himself furiously.
‘What’s wrong, Thomas?’
The little ex-priest came close and put a skinny hand on his master’s arm, a thing he would never have done in less fraught circumstances.