De Wolfe merely grunted – he knew what the Cornishman was hinting at. One of his favourite mistresses, the blonde Hilda, lived in Dawlish. She was wife to Thorgils the Boatman and with most of the cross-Channel shipping lying in the little creek, he was now probably at home with his young and beautiful wife.
With no chance of a visit the coroner kept his eyes on the track, and they continued along the coast for a few miles until they came to the wide valley of the Teign. At the point where it entered the sea, a sand-bar drastically narrowed the river so that at low tide horses could splash across. This morning they were in luck and could wade straight across with no delay. By noon the three riders were winding their way down a pleasant wooded valley into Stoke-in-Teignhead. The manor house was just outside the village, which consisted of a new church to St Andrew and a dozen houses and huts, of a better quality than in most other villages.
The coroner’s father, Simon de Wolfe, whose family had come from Caen in the last years of the previous century, had been killed fifteen years before in the Irish campaigns. Though, like his son, he had spent much of his life fighting, he was also a careful and considerate landowner: his two manors at Stoke and at Holcombe near the coast were kept in good condition and the villagers were well treated.
Inside the bailey around the house, servants and freemen came running to greet their popular master, for now John de Wolfe, his brother William and his sister Evelyn jointly owned the honour, with their sprightly mother Enyd enjoying a life interest in the manor.
Their Saxon steward, Alsi, came out to organise the stabling of the horses then effusively escorted de Wolfe and de Ridefort into the house. Gwyn made for the kitchen hut, where he knew from long experience that giggling maids would ply him with food and drink until he was fit to burst.
The house was solidly built of stone: one of Simon’s last acts before he died had been to provide his family with a substantial home built to resist attack, though thankfully there had been no fighting around here for decades. The stockade, which encircled the bailey, was still sound, but the drawbridge over the small moat had not been raised for many years, a good indicator of peaceful times.
‘Are the family at home, Alsi?’ asked de Wolfe as they climbed the outer staircase to the entrance on the first floor.
‘Your mother and sister are here, Sir John. Your brother is overseeing the cutting of new assarts in the West Wood.’
John grinned at the familiar tale. William, though he looked remarkably like himself, was no soldier. All his enthusiasms were for farming and managing the estate, which suited John well as he shared in the profits. Together with a steady income from his share in the wool-exporting business with Hugh de Relaga, he had a comfortable income without having to work for it.
In the solar, he introduced Gilbert de Ridefort to his mother and sister. Enyd de Wolfe was a still-pretty woman of sixty, with a little grey in her fair hair – de Wolfe’s colouring came from his father. Enyd was pure Celt, which explained part of Matilda’s antipathy to her. Her father was Cornish and her mother Welsh, and John’s fluency in those similar languages had been learned in childhood at Enyd’s knee.
Evelyn was a plump, cheerful woman of thirty-four, still unmarried. She had once wanted to become a nun, but her mother had rightly suspected that her daughter was too garrulous to settle under the constraints of the veil and insisted that she stay at home and help run the manor-house.
De Wolfe gave them an edited version of de Ridefort’s problem, emphasising that the knight wanted somewhere quiet to stay until his companion arrived from France. His sharp-witted mother, who knew every nuance of her son’s character, knew full well that there was more to the man’s problems than a need for peace and quiet, but she said nothing and, with Evelyn, gave him a warm welcome. Gilbert became his usual charming self and soon had them eating out of his hand. He offered, with just the right amount of reluctance, to stay at the local inn to save them the trouble of boarding him, but they would have none of it.
‘Not that the church hostel is uncomfortable,’ said Evelyn, proudly. ‘My father established it for travellers, instead of a rowdy alehouse. But you will be far better off here.’ After her intuitive reading of the situation, she could have added ‘and safer’, but she held her tongue.
After a good meal, Gilbert was shown to a small chamber off the hall, the only other room apart from the solar and the ladies’ sleeping chamber. He dropped the large satchel that held his possessions and looked with satisfaction at the thick straw mattress laid for him on the floor. As John prepared to leave for Exeter, de Ridefort begged him to keep him informed of any developments. ‘Your clerk must find out what Cosimo of Modena is really engaged in,’ he pleaded.
‘One small priest cannot be any threat to you, surely,’ said de Wolfe, reassuringly. ‘Even his two escorts could hardly abduct a fighting Templar against his will.’
‘Not personally, it’s true,’ replied de Ridefort. ‘But he is an accomplished organiser and schemer. There will be other men to do any strong-arm work, you can depend on it. That’s why I’m keen to know if any strange fighting men appear in the district. You will let me know that, John?’ he ended, with an imploring look in his eyes.
With promises to keep him up to date with any developments, and especially to tell him when Bernardus de Blanchefort arrived, the coroner took his leave, with hugs for his mother and sister.
After collecting Gwyn, he rode via the West Wood, to greet his brother William. They could do this as part of their homeward journey by going through the band of forest that bordered the river and thence up to Kingsteignton, as the tide would by now prevent them from crossing back at Teignmouth.
They found William with his tunic pulled up between his thighs and tucked into a broad belt, serge breeches inside stout boots, swinging an axe with his bailiff and half a dozen villeins from the village. They were cutting down trees to extend the arable land and oxen were dragging away the larger trunks for timber and firewood, the smaller branches being burned on a large bonfire.
‘There must be few lords of the manor who work alongside serfs,’ muttered Gwyn, slightly disapproving of this degree of egalitarianism.
‘He does it because he likes swinging an axe. So do I, but I prefer hitting a Saracen rather than a beech tree,’ replied de Wolfe, gazing benignly at his brother.
When William saw them approach, he dropped his axe, and for fifteen minutes the brothers talked animatedly, the Cornishman going discreetly to the bailiff for a chat. John explained to William the situation concerning de Ridefort, more forthright with him than with the women. ‘This threat against him seems real enough, but he sees an assassin behind every tree,’ he concluded. ‘I’ll be glad when this other Templar arrives and the pair of them can clear off to Ireland or wherever they wish to go.’
Before they parted, his brother promised to do all he could to make his unexpected guest as welcome as possible. De Wolfe collected Gwyn, and they rode off along the narrow track into the forest that bordered the tidal part of the river. The sky was overcast, with the threat of rain, but it held off as they crossed the Teign where it narrowed suddenly four miles inland from the sea. At a steady pace, they expected to reach Exeter in the early evening, following the road from Kingsteignton through Ideford and Kenn.
The two men rode side by side, mainly in silence. They had covered thousands of miles together over the years, in snow and sandstorm, sleet and sun. Neither was talkative and, except when reminiscing over a quart of ale in a tavern, their conversation was confined to immediate matters, such as deciding which fork of the track to take or a suspicion of a lame horse.