Matthew’s wife brought them bread, meat and ale, and they sat around the clay-lined fire-pit where burning logs threw a blue smoke into the atmosphere.
‘The cadaver is in one of the fish sheds over on the quay,’ explained the reeve. He had a handsome face, albeit scarred by cow-pox, with a moustache that almost matched Gwyn’s in size.
‘How did you come by this corpse?’ demanded the coroner.
Matthew leaned forward, his roughened hands on the knees of his serge breeches. ‘A boy up on the headland above the harbour saw this derelict vessel out to the east, no sail upon her and obviously going to be driven ashore. A gang of us set out at once to find where she would beach, in case we could save any souls.’
Gwyn, who came from a fishing village himself, strongly suspected that they would have been more interested in saving cargo and gear than souls, but kept these cynical thoughts to himself.
‘We went across the cliffs, but the vessel had been blown further up towards Combe Bay, and by the time we had walked that distance, she had struck on Burrow Nose, near Watermouth. It was almost dark, but we found her wedged in a gully. She was not too badly damaged, but by the next day, she had broken up with the pounding of the tide.’
‘And this dead man?’
‘He was on the deck, just astern of the hold. The mast had broken and the spars had come down, so that his legs were tangled in the rigging. Otherwise, we would never have found the body – it would long have been washed overboard, out at sea.’
De Wolfe downed the last of his ale from a crude pottery jar and stood up. ‘Let’s go and have a look at him, then.’
Pulling his pointed leather hood over his head, he made for the door and stooped to pass under the low lintel. Watched by the curious villagers, who followed the party at a distance, they were led across the street to the quayside. Matthew strode ahead to a small shed made of rough timbers, the turf roof held down against the winds by flat stones. As they entered the open landward end, an overpowering stench of decaying fish filled their nostrils.
Two elderly women and a boy were standing at a crude bench, gutting fish and dropping them into wicker baskets. The entrails were thrown on to the ground to add to a stinking heap, which would be shovelled into the harbour for the tide to remove. Thomas de Peyne, the only sensitive member of the team, shrank back, holding his threadbare cloak over his nose.
‘He’s in that corner,’ declared the reeve, pointing past the women to the dark recesses of the shed. Gwyn walked across and pulled a tattered canvas from a still shape lying against the wall.
De Wolfe and the reeve joined him to look down at the pathetically small figure of a youth, huddled in death on the odorous earth. The young man wore dark trousers and a short tunic pinched in with a wide leather belt. His clothes were still saturated with sea water and he lay on his side, as if asleep, his face to the wall. Gwyn bent down and lifted him like a child, to lay him flat on his back.
‘He’s had a mortal wound, that’s for sure,’ observed Matthew, pointing down at the thin bloodstains that had not washed completely from the fabric of the man’s hessian tunic.
At the upper part of his belly, there was an oblique rent in the cloth, surrounded by the sinister pink staining. John squatted on his heels alongside the corpse, undid the belt and pulled up the tunic.
‘The head of a pike!’ said Gwyn immediately, jabbing a massive forefinger towards a characteristic wound on the victim’s upper abdomen. A two-inch-wide stab with bruised edges lay on the pale skin below the rib margin, while in line with it, and half a hand’s breadth away, was an angry red graze on top of more bruising.
‘How can you tell it was a pike?’ asked the reeve, a man of no military experience.
‘The spike went in here,’ snapped de Wolfe, poking his finger deeply into the stab wound. ‘And the sidearm below it made this mark here.’ He indicated the abrasion.
‘Can’t have been more than sixteen, this lad,’ observed Gwyn. ‘Do we know who he might be?’
‘Not a local fellow,’ said the reeve. ‘The vessel had no name, but several of our fishermen say it is from Bristol. It plies up and down the coast from the ports on the Severn down to Plymouth and sometimes across to St Malo and Barfleur.’
De Wolfe, though a soldier, was a reluctant sailor and marvelled at the bravery – or foolhardiness – of the shipmen who sailed their clumsy cockleshells around the violent waters of western Britain.
Thomas had overcome his revulsion at the stench of fishguts and was almost fearfully peering at the corpse under Gwyn’s elbow. ‘A drowned sailor?’ he asked timidly, spasmodically making the Sign of the Cross.
‘No, dwarf, a stabbed sailor,’ grunted the big man. ‘Skewered on a pike. This is murder.’
The coroner checked that the body had no other injuries, then motioned for the reeve to throw the canvas over him again. ‘Was there any sign of anyone else aboard?’
Matthew shook his head. ‘Nor any remains of a cargo. The hull had been sound until she crashed on to the rocks, but there was not a box, barrel nor bale aboard her.’
John thought he detected a note of disappointment in the man’s voice and he suspected, like Gwyn, that the villagers had been intent on plundering the wreck. ‘I had better get out there and view the vessel,’ he decided. ‘How far away is it?’
Matthew looked slightly evasive. ‘Half an hour’s walk, Crowner, but not worth the journey. She’ll have broken up altogether by now – the sea was battering her to pieces and yesterday there was hardly anything left.’
De Wolfe glared at him. ‘I have a legal duty to view the wreck, man.’ He turned to Thomas. ‘I’ll hold an inquest when I get back, so round up everyone who knows anything about this – and a dozen more men above the age of twelve.’
Minutes later, the reeve was leading them on foot across the back of the cliffs to a track that passed down through the hamlet of Hele, with its water-mill, and across the shoulder of Widmouth Hill to rejoin the shore further east. Two miles from Ilfracombe, they crossed a deep, sandy inlet and scrambled across a warren to a low cliff. Below, the surf sucked and pounded remorselessly in a series of rocky gullies and narrow inlets.
‘I said there was little left of her,’ shouted Matthew, going down a muddy sheep-track ahead.
Looking down, de Wolfe saw that the reeve exaggerated somewhat, as the lower part of the fifty-foot hull was still jammed firmly between the jagged teeth of a reef. The tide was now almost at full ebb and it was easy for them to get to the derelict without getting wet, apart from the spray from an occasional large wave.
The stump of the mast still poked up at an acute angle, but all the gunwales and most of the deck planking had gone, timbers littering the small shingle beach immediately inland of the wreck.
‘All you’ll get from this one is some kindling for your winter fires,’ cackled Gwyn, with a wink at the gloomy manor reeve.
‘What would she have been likely to be carrying, Gwyn?’ demanded the coroner, still suspicious that the villagers might have made off with some cargo, which should have been confiscated for the king’s treasury.
‘Depends where she came from. If it was Brittany or Normandy, then maybe wine and fruit. If she was outward bound, she’d have had wool, no doubt.’