De Wolfe nodded at that. He had a substantial interest in wool exports himself, having sunk most of the loot from his foreign campaigns in a partnership with one of Exeter’s foremost wool merchants, Hugh de Relaga. He also shared in the profits of his family’s estate at Stoke-in-Teignhead, where his elder brother, William, was a keen sheep-farmer.
‘There’s nothing to see, Crowner, as I told you,’ said Matthew, virtuously.
De Wolfe had to agree, but Gwyn clambered the last few yards over the rocks and pulled himself on to the wreck, standing rather precariously on a surviving thwart, which had supported the decking. He looked around intently, determined not to miss any clues. Before taking up soldiering, he had helped his father as a fisherman in his home village of Polruan and was well used to the sea and ships.
As de Wolfe and the reeve watched him, Gwyn seemed particularly interested in the remains of the mast, a tree-trunk a foot thick, which had broken off about six feet above the deck.
He pointed to some marks at waist height and shouted back to the other men, ‘Fresh slashes in the wood here! Been struck several times with a heavy sharp blade, fore and aft.’ He hopped back ashore and came up to them.
‘What does that mean?’ grunted his master, who knew next to nothing about ships.
‘The halyards were cut to bring the sail down,’ explained the Cornishman. ‘No one in the crew would do that to their own vessel, so it must have been boarded and disabled.’
De Wolfe looked grim. ‘So it was piracy, not mutiny – though that was unlikely from the start, for why would the crew of a dull merchantman want to mutiny?’
‘How many men on a vessel like this?’ asked Matthew.
De Wolfe looked at Gwyn for enlightenment.
‘About five or six, usually. Two men could sail her in normal weather, but they need extras for sleeping, cooking and handling her at the ports.’
‘So the rest are still floating around the Severn Sea until they get washed ashore?’
Gwyn shook his shaggy head. ‘Many bodies never turn up. They either sink or get pulled out into the broad ocean. Or, in this channel, they may even end up near Gloucester.’
As if to confound him, at that moment there was a distant cry from above and a man appeared on the skyline, waving his arms.
The group at the wreck stood watching as he came rapidly down the narrow paths with the agility of a mountain goat. He was within a hundred yards before Matthew recognised him. ‘It’s Siward, a shepherd who lives up on the cliffs above here. What the devil does he want? He’s a bit lacking in the head.’
From the speed of his surefooted descent, de Wolfe had expected some active youth, but when he got to them, Siward showed himself to be a gnarled old man, with a bent back and a face like a walnut, wrinkled and brown. He wore a rough woollen tunic, the skirt tucked up between his legs and pushed into an old rope wound around his waist. He was barefoot and his toenails were curled like ram’s horns.
He had sparse grey hair, and although his eyes were as bright as a blackbird’s, the lids were red and inflamed.
‘You took the corpse, sirs?’ Siward asked abruptly, in the manner of one who, isolated with his sheep, rarely conversed with his fellow men.
‘When did you see a corpse, old man?’ demanded de Wolfe.
Matthew opened his mouth to warn again that the octogenarian was more than a little simple, but Siward seemed quite able to speak for himself. ‘When I took the other one away – the live one,’ exclaimed the old Saxon.
The other four stared at him. ‘What other one?’ rumbled Gwyn.
Siward rolled his bloodshot eyes heavenwards. ‘Almighty God spoke to me the other evening, and gave me a task. I looked across the sea from my dwelling and saw this vessel being driven ashore.’
‘He lives in a turf hut on top of the cliffs,’ explained Matthew.
‘I lit my lantern and hurried down here. From the upper path, I saw the ship just before it hit the rocks. Then, there were two bodies on the deck, but only one by the time I had got down here.’
‘What of this living man?’ demanded the coroner.
‘He was on the shingle, more dead than alive. I dragged him up on to the grass, then went up for my pony, which I ride to herd my distant flocks.’
‘You got a horse down here?’ said Gwyn incredulously.
‘He is an Exmoor cob, he can go where any sheep can stray. I draped the man over the pony’s back and took him up to my house. He began shivering, so I knew he was alive.’
‘And where is he now?’ asked the manor reeve.
‘Still in my hut. His mind came back yesterday, but he is very weak.’
Since he had become coroner de Wolfe had ceased to be surprised by anything. ‘Then take us to him at once. Lead the way,’ he said.
Again with a remarkable turn of speed for an old man, Siward scuttled back up the cliff path, with the coroner, his officer and the reeve labouring behind him.
‘Why didn’t you know about this, Matthew?’ panted de Wolfe, as they reached the top.
‘He doesn’t belong to our manor. He works under the reeve in Combe Martin – the sheep are from there. Siward has probably never set foot as far away as Ilfracombe.’
At the top of the cliffs, there was a rough grassy ridge, and tucked in a hollow out of the wind was a crude circular hut, the walls made of stacked turf reinforced with loose stones. The roof was also of turf, the grass growing as strongly on it as on the surrounding pasture. Blue smoke drifted from under the ragged eaves.
Siward pulled aside an unhung door made of driftwood and beckoned them inside. In the dim light, they saw a single room floored with soiled bracken, on which two orphan lambs were bleating. Against the further wall, near a small peat fire confined by large stones, was an indistinct figure huddled under a torn woollen blanket.
‘Can’t understand a word from him,’ complained Siward, whose only language was English, heavy with the local accent.
Gwyn and de Wolfe advanced on the man and bent down over his hunched form. He looked up and they saw he was another young man, probably no more than eighteen, with a deathly pale face and sores on his lips. Before he could speak, he was racked by a bubbling cough and spat copiously into the ferns on the floor. His eye-sockets were hollow, and in spite of the ghastly whiteness of his face, two pink spots burned on either cheek.
Gwyn put a hand on his forehead. ‘He’s got a burning fever, Crowner.’
‘Who are you, boy, what happened to your ship?’ de Wolfe asked. He spoke in English and the youth looked blankly at him, shivering and hugging the rough blanket more closely around his thin shoulders.
‘He doesn’t understand a damned word,’ explained Siward. ‘I’ve given him some hot ewe’s milk and a few herbs I have here to try to calm his fever.’
Suddenly, between a spasm of teeth-chattering, the shipwrecked sailor loosed a torrent of words. De Wolfe and his officer looked at each other in satisfaction. ‘He’s a Breton,’ exclaimed the coroner and changed his questioning to his blend of Cornish-Welsh.
With a wan smile, the sick youngster responded in his own language and, within minutes, they had the whole story from him. The vessel was the Saint Isan, owned by a syndicate of burgesses from Bristol. It made regular voyages from the Avon to the Cornish ports and then across to Brittany. It had a master and a crew of five, two Somerset men and three Bretons. A few days ago, they had been coming from Roscoff via Penzance, back towards their home port, and were running before a brisk wind between Lundy and the mainland.
‘Our old tub was always slow, even with a following wind. A couple of hours after noon, we were overhauled by a longer vessel that had half a dozen oars each side, though these were shipped as she easily outran us under her sail.’ Alain, for that was his name, stopped for a prolonged bout of coughing. ‘Before we knew what was happening, they were alongside and a dozen men scrambled over the side,’ he continued, gasping for breath. ‘I remember seeing them almost cut our master’s head off with a sword and throw him overboard as they attacked all of us. Then one came at me with a club – I remember nothing more until I woke up on the deck, clinging for my life, with a dead man alongside me. Then the vessel struck and the last I recall was being thrown into the sea. I came to again in this hut, where this kind fellow has been doing his best for me.’