With a sigh, he hauled himself from his chair and, forsaking the warmth of the fire, went around to the back yard to see Mary. He found her sitting in her cook house, talking to Lucille, his wife's maid. Mary was wary of the skinny girl, as she knew she carried every bit of tittle-tattle back to her mistress, but she felt sorry for her. Lucille was a refugee from the Vexin, a part of Normandy north of the Seine which was fought over endlessly by Richard and Philip of France. Her parents were dead and she had been palmed off on Matilda by the latter's Norman cousins, of whom Matilda was inordinately proud, as they validated her own ancestry.
Though she had been born in Devon and had spent barely a couple of months visiting across the Channel, she acted to her friends in the town almost as if she were a direct descendant of William the Bastard himself. John hardly ever said a word to Lucille and she was obviously in awe of him, bobbing her knee and running off to her box under the solar steps as soon as he came into view.
'Anyone would think that I was going to eat that bloody girl,' he growled to Mary. 'I'm off to Rougemont and then I'll be going down to the Bush, so you can tell my dear wife that I'll not be sitting at table with her and her damned brother!'
He stalked away and minutes later was in the Guildhall, just around the corner from his house. Here he found his friend Hugh de Relaga fussing with final details of the finances of the fair and of the arrangements for the guild pageants that would help to entertain the crowds over the next three days. With clerks scurrying around him with parchments, John had difficulty in catching his attention and when he managed to tell him that he had lost one of his stall-holders, the Portreeve was too distracted to take much notice, apart from clucking in sympathy and putting a line through August Scrope's rental payment on a document.
De Wolfe abandoned him to his duties and went back up High Street and turned left before the East Gate, climbing the steep lane to cross the drawbridge into the castle at the top end of the city. The weather was overcast but dry and the mud in the inner ward was setting into a hard red crust, crunching under his feet as he walked across to the squat keep on the other side. There was the usual bustle in the hall, which served as a meeting place, refectory and business office for the mixture of soldiers, clerks, merchants and supplicants to the Sheriff that normally milled around inside its sombre walls.
The first door on the left led to the sheriff's chambers and he nodded curtly to the man-at-arms who stood guard upon it. As he opened the door, he thought how strange it was that he was not going in for his usual confrontation and shouting-match with Richard de Revelle, who had occupied these rooms ever since John had been coroner. He gave a rare grin as he decided he would be unlikely to surprise the new man in his shirt or dressing robe, with a whore in the bedchamber beyond, as he had with his brother-in-law on two previous occasions.
Inside the room, he found that he was right, as Henry de Furnellis was sitting behind a table with his exasperated chief clerk, Elias Pulein, who was trying to explain the contents of a parchment roll spread out before them. Like John, the new sheriff was virtually illiterate, barely able to write his name, whereas de Revelle, for all his many faults, had been an educated man. Now de Furnellis, once more sitting in this chamber as sheriff, was again dependent upon his clerks and scribes to guide him through the intricate task of running the county of Devon, especially overseeing the collection and delivery of 'the farm', the twice-yearly submission of taxes to the treasury in Winchester. Though getting old and weary, Henry was no fool, and had sufficient wealth and lack of ambition to disdain corruption and embezzlement.
He looked up as John entered and, with a sigh of relief, used his arrival as an excuse to dismiss his irritaring clerk and reach for a jug of wine and two cups.
His somewhat haggard face creased into a weak smile as he motioned to John to sit down on a stool on the opposite side of the table.
'I've managed to survive the first day without clouting that damned Elias across the head, in spite of his sneering at my lack of understanding of these blasted accounts!' he said, raising a fist that could have laid a larger man than the clerk flat on the floor. John knew that the older man had been a doughty fighter in his day — he had been with Strongbow, Earl of Pembroke, on the first invasion of Ireland a quarter of a century earlier, and even some years later, when de Wolfe and Gwyn had been fighting there, Henry de Furnellis was still a well-known figure in that bloody campaign.
The coroner took a sip of wine and found it to be a good Bordeaux red — the new sheriff was not one to drink common gut-rot and he could well afford to have the superior stuff brought from his town house near the East Gate, where he lived when he was not at his manor near Crediton.
John told him at length about the murdered silversmith from Totues and the injured survivor lying in St James' Priory. Henry nodded sagely, but made no offer to intervene in the matter, even though technically he was the supreme oyerseer of law and order in the county,
'You can handle it, de Wolfe, I'm sure!' he boomed in his deep voice. 'Take whatever you need in the way of men. I know Ralph Morin is a good friend of yours, I'll tell him to go along with whatever you want.' John nodded, well aware of the new sheriff's desire to hand over as much responsibility as he could, but he felt he had to point out a few home truths.
'These next few days will see Morin's men stretched pretty thinly. We'll be lucky to get away without trouble at the tournament — and keeping order in the town will be a job in itself.'
Henry waved his cup dismissively. 'No doubt you'll manage well enough. All my time will be taken up sorting out this bloody mess that de Revelle left behind.' He slapped his other hand on the pile of parchments on the table. 'God knows what schemes he was up to, it will takes months to get to the bottom of it — and I'm dependent on these damned clerks to tell me what it all means.'
For a moment John was tempted to offer him the use of Thomas de Peyne, whose reading, writing and arithmetical skills were superb. Then he thought that with all the extra work that de Furnellis was going to burden him with, he needed to keep all Thomas's help for himself.
The talk moved on to other things, foremost among them the arrangements for the next day's tournament.
This was a topic dear to the sheriff's heart, as in his day he had been a keen tourney contestant himself and still followed news of the various big events across the country. Along with the portreeves, he was a prominent member of the council that had brought this contest to Exeter, and was keen to hear what John thought of the preparations at Bull Mead. They discussed this for some time, and John felt himself warming to the new incumbent of the seat opposite.
Though he had known him slightly for years, he had never had much to do with Henry officially, but knew him to be a staunch ally of the King, which was good enough for John.
The wine finished, he Pose and announced that he was going to seek Ralph Morin to talk about patrolling the city during the rest of the week, As he reached the door, de Furnellis had a last query.
'So what are you going to do about the slaying of this silversmith? It looks bad that a prominent merchant who hires one of our stalls in the fair should straightway get himself robbed and killed!' De Wolfe shrugged, 'Little I can do until we get some more information. I'm hoping this servant of his will recover enough to give us some description of his assailants. I'll keep you informed, never fear!' Outside in the noisy hall, he moved up to the next door and went into, the constable's domain, an office that had a more military stamp upon it. There were several tables with benches piled with equipment, and behind one Gabriel, the sergeant of the men-at-arms, was counting out a pile of pike-heads, to be sent down to the workshops in the outer ward to be fixed to their shafts. His craggy face creased even more into a smile of welcome as the coroner entered.