Immediately, the line of Lundy men congealed into several groups, as hand-to-hand fighting began. The defenders had the advantage, as they were higher up the bank and the wet attackers were not too steady on their feet until they got out of the water, the pebbles rolling and sliding under their feet.
Yelling and clashing of steel began in earnest, and although the Templars and Gabriel were taking the brunt of the conflict, de Wolfe and Gwyn were soon parrying and thrusting at a couple of de Marisco’s men. The coroner received a heavy blow on his shoulder, which dented one of the steel plates on his cuirass, but he returned it with such violent force to the side of his assailant’s head that the man’s helmet flew off and he dropped, as if poleaxed, on to the beach.
In the second’s respite that this allowed him, de Wolfe saw that many more men were clambering down the cliff paths and that before long the invaders would be well outnumbered. To his left, he saw Gwyn and the sheriff fighting side by side and, grudgingly, he had time to admit that de Revelle’s reluctance to expose himself to danger seemed to have worn off.
Though the islanders were losing ground as the newcomers fought their way out of the surf, the situation suddenly took a turn for the worse. A wave bigger than usual caught the second knarr and washed it broadside to the beach, momentarily heeling it over. The soldiers who were clambering over the bow at that moment were pitched into the surf and several sank under the weight of their chain-mail. Their comrades rescued them and none was drowned, but the errant wave turned out to be the first of many and almost immediately the two ship-masters yelled and pointed up at the darkening sky. A sudden squall whistled across the sea and, even under bare masts, the ships began rocking with the gusts of wind. The previously placid sea was already chopping up, and further out, the waves were crested with white horses.
Gwyn was the first to acknowledge the danger. ‘We must get off at once! Those vessels cannot stay there – they’ll be wrecked!’ he roared at his master. De Wolfe took a swing at a ruffian who was waving a mace at him and cut the fellow’s arm to the bone. Then he turned and knew instantly that they must retreat or be marooned.
He ran to Roland de Ver, then to the sheriff, and with shouts and gesticulations made them realise the situation. The Templars bellowed orders at the men-at-arms and formed a rearguard while everyone retreated to the knarrs, clustering around the bows. Some clambered aboard, while others pushed them off the pebbles, as the succession of waves and the rising tide got them afloat. As de Wolfe backed down the slope behind the fighting Templars, he stumbled over the groaning body of the man he had felled earlier. On a sudden impulse, he motioned to Gwyn and they tipped the inert islander unceremoniously over the ships’ side, before clambering in themselves.
The Templars, in a tight semi-circle around the bow, made a last slashing attack on their adversaries, felling two and driving the rest far enough back to allow them to get aboard. They were helped in by willing hands, as the knarr slid into deeper water, pulled by four men on the long sweep oars. De Wolfe glanced across at the other boat and saw the last of their men being hauled aboard.
As the vessels were backed off the beach, the defenders hurled insults and a few stones, but within minutes the knarrs were well out, their sails hoisted. The wind was now gusting hard and the sky was dark grey, with spots of rain beginning to fall. As they looked back, they saw several bodies lying on the beach and a few men being carried or helped to their feet by comrades.
‘What a pitiful fiasco! We should all be ashamed of ourselves,’ snarled de Falaise, rubbing angrily a deep cut on his cheek where he had been hit with a ball-mace.
‘God obviously did not wish you to conquer this time,’ said Abbot Cosimo, who with his two had remained on board and watched the jousting with apparent amusement.
‘But for this sudden storm we could have won the day,’ snapped Roland de Ver, looking ruefully at a slash across his white surcoat that almost cut the red cross in half.
‘We were fortunate that we left when we did,’ said the sheriff. ‘There was a legion of men coming down that path, who would have eventually outnumbered us two to one.’
‘Templars are supposed to fight on even at three to one,’ snapped Godfrey Capra. ‘It is a disgrace to leave the field at less than those odds.’
De Wolfe looked back at the shore as the knarrs began to roll and pitch as they left the shelter of the cliffs. ‘Have we lost any men, Ralph?’ he asked the castle constable.
‘Two dead and left behind, and three with wounds but none serious. We must have felled a few of theirs, but I didn’t have time to count them.’
Gwyn walked back from the bow, rock-steady on the swaying deck. ‘What about this fellow we threw aboard? I can’t get any sense out of him yet. He’s got a bruise on his head the size of an onion where you hit him.’
The coroner had forgotten him. ‘We’ll throw him into de Grenville’s cells when we get back to Bideford. Maybe he can tell us something useful, if he survives.’
He held on tightly to the rough wooden rail, his stomach telling him that the sooner this trip was over the better.
Chapter Fifteen
In which Crowner John rides to Exmoor
However else fate had been against them that day, in the matter of wind it was kind. The southerly breeze of the morning turned into a westerly blow when the horizon-wide cloudbank rolled in. The wind, together with the flood tide, gave them a fast if uncomfortable passage back to Bideford Bay, the spray constantly whipping across the decks and the knarrs pitching like unbroken horses as they dug their blunt bows into the whitened waves.
It was almost dark when they reached the entrance to the estuary and it took all the considerable skills of the ship-masters to get them safely into the channel, but the relief of entering calmer water caused a cheer to be raised amongst the cold and sodden warriors. They made passage around Appledore and up the Torridge in the dark, though the diffuse moonlight above the clouds and a few feeble lights from dwellings on either riverbank was enough to allow the shipmen to feel their way back to their berth against Bideford bridge.
At de Grenville’s castle, his steward and servants raced around banking up fires to dry out their men-at-arms and to prepare hot food. Within a couple of hours, everyone had settled back to drink ale and spin ever-improving yarns about the day’s events.
In the hall, afterwards, they all sat around a roaring fire set in a hearth in the middle of the floor, the smoke making eyes stream and lungs cough, but the blessed warmth was more than worth it, after the rigours of the ocean.
De Wolfe sat on a bench next to Richard de Grenville. After a time his mind wandered from the tale-telling and boasting to wonder what he was doing there. He was no further towards spotting either the killer of Gilbert de Ridefort or the origin of the pirates that had killed all but one of the crew of the Saint Isan. He ran through the possible suspects for the Templar’s murder. Of the potential killers, he would have liked to make the abbot the prime suspect, perhaps using one of his acolytes for the deed – he doubted that Cosimo was capable of wielding the necessary weapons. Failing him, he favoured Brian de Falaise, as the most aggressive and short-tempered of the Templars, always looking for real or imagined insults. But then he wondered if the type of injuries inflicted on de Ridefort was not too subtle for the blunt de Falaise, and his musings turned to either the more enigmatic Godfrey Capra – or the leader, Roland de Ver. Perhaps the fatal head injury could have come from someone like de Falaise, but the biblical allusion of the wounds in the side and hands may have been added, perhaps even after death, by either of the other knights. Somehow, he did not consider any of the Templar sergeants as candidates, although logically there was no reason why they should not have taken part in the killing.