Before long, Simon and the coroner were inside a small hovel, setting the widow on a low palliasse, and hurriedly pushing past the women who thronged the doorway to see what was happening to their neighbour.
The coroner took a deep breath of the cool early-evening air. ‘Right, Bailiff, Brother Monk, we have been working and travelling all the weary day. It is time for me to have at least a gallon of wine and mead before I take responsibility for a large joint of meat of some sort.’
‘I think we shall be fortunate to find a decent meal here,’ Simon said with a tired smile. It had been harder than he would have expected to carry the poor woman the relatively short distance to her own house. For such a small-bodied woman, it was a surprise how much she seemed to weigh after a few feet.
Coroner Richard hesitated, fixing Simon with a look of puzzlement. ‘You think so? I’ve never yet found a place that couldn’t provide a perfectly good meal if you know who to speak to. Mind you, this is a strange-looking vill. Not the sort of place I’d think to stop in usually. But there must be an inn or something nearby.’
He saw a man staring at the door to Agnes’s house. The fellow was surely on his way home from a day in the fields, and had seen or heard the noise of their return. Noticing the coroner bearing down on him, he squeaked and would have fled, but Sir Richard’s voice was pleasantly modulated for him. ‘Friend, I am in need of wine and vittles. Do ye know a good tavern about this place?’
Even with the coroner’s most gentle smile, the man looked ready to bolt, but Mark was already behind him. ‘My son, you need only point out the way to the tavern if that large fellow intimidates you too much. Personally, I think his bark is worse than his bite. But then, having heard him, you wouldn’t want to get too close, would you? I don’t anyway. So please, put us all out of our misery and just tell him where to get some wine.’
It was a rough little building, but Sir Richard declared himself delighted with it and its rustic charm. Simon looked about him and thought it looked marginally worse than some of the brawling drinking chambers in Dartmouth where the sailors would go to forget their woes. There were no stools, only a few large round tree trunk logs to rest on, and one bench that appeared to have been made by a man who had heard of such things but had never actually seen or used one. Simon stood eyeing it for some little while before resorting to leaning against a wall.
Sir Richard was less particular. He stood at the hearth in the middle of the room and warmed his hands on the rising heat. There was a tripod set over the fire, and a pot held a thickening pottage with some lumps of indeterminate meat bobbing about occasionally. A young girl of perhaps nine summers clad in a simple shift stood and stirred the pot seriously, spending more time warily keeping her eyes on these three strangers. Mark had walked straight in, sighed, and made his way to the bench, on which he rested his backside with a show of caution — a display that appeared unnecessary, for there was not even a squeak of protest from the wood as it took his weight.
‘Child, where is your father?’ Simon asked.
She said nothing, but nodded towards a door at the opposite end of the room. Simon walked to it, and soon there was a man with them. He was as old as Simon, but his face wore the years with less ease. He was also a deal slimmer than the bailiff, and his hair was almost all grey, while his brows were black as a Celt’s beard. In a short time they had ordered ales — there was no wine — and bread, pottage and a steamed suet pudding of apples and pears.
For some little while there was an appreciative silence as the three finished their meal and sat back contented. The coroner gave a belch, and then a trumpet blast from his arse. ‘Hah! I needed that. There’s nothing so disorders a man’s humours as having no ballast in his belly. And a pot or two of ale helps the digestion, I always reckon.’
‘I will be happier when I’ve had a sleep,’ Simon said. He stretched his arms over his head and felt the tension in his shoulders with a grimace. ‘So much still to learn and do in the morning.’
‘Aye. Well, we will be up early, I dare say,’ the coroner said with a rueful glance at the floor. They had agreed with the host that they could sleep in a room at the back, but it looked a verminous, unpleasant bedchamber. Sir Richard’s only hope was that the promised straw for bedding was not too smothered in fleas or lice. He had slept rough before and had no wish to do so again.
‘I find your attitudes astonishing,’ Mark hissed. ‘Today you have wasted so many hours in merely wandering about the land, asking all kinds of questions about a dead reeve, and learned nothing at all about the murder of two priests and their guards. These are the men the good cardinal requested you to ask after, but you’ve done precious little to learn anything so far as I can see.’
‘Aye?’ Sir Richard said, fixing a genial look on the monk. ‘Why is that?’
‘I assume you are still new to this kind of inquest,’ Brother Mark said. ‘In God’s name, I wish we had found another to do the job.’
‘Do ye now? Hmm. How many deaths have you investigated, Master Monk?’
‘Do not be ridiculous! I have never-’
‘None? Ah. And how many dead bodies, then, have you buried?’
‘I have been to a number of funerals.’
‘Not what I asked. No, you see, I was wondering whether you had buried many of your own family?’
‘I was present at my mother’s funeral not long ago.’
‘Oh? Your mother’s? Was she murdered?’
‘No, she was old, though.’
‘Oh, I see. Well then, Master Monk, you should remember that Simon and I have actually investigated more than a few deaths. Me, I’ve held more than a hundred inquests on corpses in my time; and I’ve seen enough felons hanged to fill my days. I have what you could call experience, if you were to be so crass.’
‘Then why did you ask nothing about the men today, and instead spent so much time on the reeve?’
‘That is why I asked whether you had lost a close relative. When you have, when you’ve had to find someone who’s close to you, when you’ve had to help bring that loved one home again, so that you can bury her, and when you have suffered all the misery and recrimination, all the self-loathing and hatred, for being so stupid as to let her die while you were off enjoying yourself, master, then, and only then, can you criticise us. I left my wife alone one day, and she was killed. I know what it feels like to lose a loved one. For now, let me remind you that you are here in the vill where an honourable, decent reeve lived and worked, with all his friends and companions from the area. He was a man of this vill. He did what he could for the folk here. They have had a loss that cannot be mended. And his wife, you will remember, was with us. How would she have felt were we to have ignored her old man and instead spent all our time in asking about a group of foreigners she’d never known? Eh? There is such a thing as compassion, Master Monk. Perhaps you have heard of the term?’
Mark was appalled. He could not meet their eyes, but shortly afterwards he silently walked from the room while Sir Richard squatted at the edge of the fire, poking at it with a long twig. ‘Has he gone?’
Simon nodded. ‘So, do I take it that you forgot about the travellers, then?’
Before answering, Coroner Richard cast a quick look over his shoulder to make sure that Mark wasn’t in earshot. Then he gave a sly grin. ‘Aye. I was thinking more of the reeve. Takes a damned monk to remind us of our jobs, eh?’
‘We will learn more tomorrow,’ Simon said. ‘And I am sure that the murderer of the reeve is somehow connected with those of the travellers.’
‘How so? Same men did them all, you mean? Looks unlikely to me — the weapons were all wrong, like we said.’
‘True. But perhaps there was one man left behind who realised the reeve was growing close to them, and decided to kill him. He may have picked up a stone purely because drawing steel would have betrayed his intent.’