Slowly the man lifted his head enough to turn it to face the coroner. ‘Neither, damn you! I killed a man in fair fight, after he cheated me at dice in a tavern in Lyme. But the bailiffs gave false witness. The man I fought was cousin to a burgess and the court condemned me in five minutes.’
‘So you escaped and ran for the woods?’
‘My wife and my mother paid a bribe to the gaoler – it left them destitute and they lost their breadwinner, for I was an ironsmith. I’ve not seen them since – nor never will now.’
The story was too familiar to tug at anyone’s heartstrings. The man was no more than twenty-five, by the looks of him, though he was filthy and dressed in little better than rags.
‘What are we to do with him?’ asked Gwyn, still fingering the hilt of his sword. ‘It would be kinder to put him out of his misery, not leave him there in the road, paralysed with a broken back.’
While he was thinking of an answer, de Wolfe noticed that both their horses were wandering down the road, nibbling at choice clumps of new spring grass that were appearing along the verges. They both walked over to take their bridles and turn them to bring them back to the scene of the fight.
A sudden movement of the surviving outlaw drew their eyes back to him and they saw that he had solved the problem himself. The dagger that he had tried to stick in the coroner was lying near his outstretched hand. Seizing it in one hand, he used the other with one last despairing effort to lift himself off the road. Holding the knifepoint upwards against his breast, the hilt against the ground, he lurched downwards to force the sharp point into his heart. With a bubbling cry, which sounded almost like joy, he released himself from an intolerable life, dying in the dirt of the king’s highway. Gwyn and his master stood holding their reins, their eyes meeting after they watched the last convulsive spasm of the body.
‘That’s settled that, then,’ grunted Gwyn.
De Wolfe climbed on to Odin, his leg still giving him a twinge of pain. ‘I’ll call out the manor reeve from Ide when we pass through. He’ll have to send someone to bury these corpses in the forest. They can’t be left here to stink.’
Before riding off, he took one last look at the dead outlaw and again the fleeting thought came into his mind: where had the spirit of the man gone in the last few minutes? Was killing a man any different from sticking a pig? Or was there something extra that made a body, arms and legs into an ironsmith?
He cursed himself for foolishness – he must be getting old to start this wondering what secrets the grave held for him.
Chapter Seven
In which Crowner John hears much about Templars
On his return to Exeter in the early evening, John rode straight up to Rougemont to see his brother-in-law. Gwyn came into the city with him, instead of going to his dwelling in St Sidwell’s, just outside the East Gate, as his wife and family were staying with her sister in Milk Street.
De Wolfe found Richard de Revelle in his official chamber in the keep, in discussion with the castle constable, Ralph Morin. A flask of wine was open on the table and the sheriff motioned John to fill himself a pewter goblet. It was a good red vintage from Aquitaine and the coroner relished taking something expensive from his notoriously mean brother-in-law. ‘Our trip to the north produced nothing useful,’ he began. ‘The village of Appledore could barely raise a couple of rowing boats.’
De Revelle nodded languidly, as if already bored by the coroner’s presence. ‘I’ve already heard that from Ralph here, whose sergeant reported to him. I tell you, it’s Lundy we should be looking at. They’ve harboured pirates for centuries.’
De Wolfe looked across at the constable, who stood solidly in the centre of the chamber, his feet apart and his arms crossed as if he had grown out of the floor. His grizzled grey hair and matching forked beard, together with his chain-mail hauberk and massive sword, suggested that he had just stepped off a Norse longboat. ‘Dressed for battle, Ralph?’ he asked.
Morin grinned, his rough, weather-beaten cheeks wrinkling. ‘No, John, there was no attack on the city today. I’ve been down at Bull Mead putting the garrison through some exercises. All these years of peace are turning them soft. We need a good war to sharpen them up.’
‘We nearly had one a few months ago,’ muttered de Wolfe, and there was an awkward silence in the room as the constable and the coroner avoided looking at the sheriff.
‘Gabriel told me about the ride to the north coast,’ said Morin, to cover the hiatus. ‘He says there were no signs at all of any looted goods or ships that might have been involved in piracy.’
John nodded in agreement. ‘That’s right, though they might have concealed goods in any of a hundred barns around the countryside. But galleys with a bank of oars, as that young Breton described, can’t easily be hidden out of sight.’
‘There are scores of small coves and bays up there where a ship or two could be hidden off the beaten track,’ objected Richard.
Morin grunted again. ‘I’m no sailor, but that exposed coast gives no shelter except at known harbours.’
De Wolfe poured himself another brimming goblet of wine, ignoring a scowl from de Revelle. ‘They may be from far away, of course,’ he said, ‘from Ireland, Brittany or Galicia in Spain. There have even been attacks from Turks and Moors in the past. For centuries our Viking ancestors used to come from Scandinavia to terrorise the Severn Sea.’
‘What about the Scilly Isles? The whole population down there seem to be robbers,’ suggested Morin.
De Revelle poured himself some wine, taking the opportunity to move the flask as far as possible from his brother-in-law. ‘Wherever they come from, they must have a base within striking distance – they can’t stay at sea indefinitely. And they need somewhere to store their booty, so I still say Lundy is the place. Since the de Mariscos came there, there’s been nothing but trouble – look at this business with the Templars.’
De Wolfe pricked up his ears at the mention of the Knights of the Cross. ‘Is anything new happening over that matter?’
The sheriff shook his head. ‘Not that I know of. But it’s high time that that nest of vipers on the island was wiped out. If the king spent more time looking after his affairs at home, maybe something would be done about it.’
This time, the coroner suffered no awkward silence, but met the sheriff head on. ‘Richard, forget any ideas about a new king doing a better job. Remember your own position in this – the king we have is the king we keep!’
Faced with this blunt warning, de Revelle reddened but left the sensitive subject of an absentee monarch and reverted to the problem of Lundy, which was within his jurisdiction of Devon. ‘I will do something about it, never fear! Last year, my predecessor fined William de Marisco three hundred marks for failing to deliver up to the Templars – and I’ll impose the same amercement this year!’
De Wolfe’s lean face creased into a sardonic smile. ‘For God’s sake, what use is that? He ignored the fine last year and will ignore any you put upon him in the future. The only penalty de Marisco will heed is force of arms.’