The coroner glared at Gwyn, daring him to spin out the story. ‘Well, tell me the worst!’
‘Osric called me — I was in the guardroom playing dice after dinner.’ He hurriedly continued, before de Wolfe could berate him for his usual irrelevancies. ‘This house belongs to William Fitz-William, a burgess of the Cordwainers’ Guild.’
‘I know who lives here, damn it! What’s happened?
For once, Gwyn was brutally brief. ‘He’s dead. Dropped into the well.’
‘Dropped? How do you know? He could just have fallen in.’
‘He’s lived here for years, so why should he now fall down his own well? And the water can’t be very deep so he could have stood up, not drowned.’
‘He might have hit his head on the way down.’ The coroner was sceptical about Gwyn’s intuitions, but the officer was stubborn in his opinion. ‘I just feel it in my water, Crowner. Something isn’t right.’
‘Let’s have a look, then. Why are you so sure it’s another murder?’
His officer pulled worriedly at his shaggy red moustache. ‘There’s something strange about this household. Judge for yourself.’
As he stood aside to let de Wolfe though the gate, which stood at the side of the house, Brother Rufus came panting up, closely followed by Thomas de Peyne, who had been sent down from the castle by Sergeant Gabriel.
‘Can I come with you?’ asked the monk. ‘If there’s something related to the scriptures, maybe I can assist young Thomas here.’
The coroner nodded his assent and his clerk scowled behind Rufus’s back, but they all trooped through the gate, which Gwyn shut firmly in the faces of the gathering onlookers.
De Wolfe saw a large yard with the usual huts for kitchen, privy and wash-house, as well as a small stable at the back, beside a vegetable patch. In the centre, between the house and the thatched wooden kitchen, was a well, with a knee-high circular stone wall. A leather bucket with a length of thin rope lay on the ground alongside, at the feet of Osric, the lanky Saxon constable. Sitting on the wall, slumped in a posture of despair, was a lad of about ten and alongside him was an older boy, probably thirteen or fourteen, whose hand rested on the younger one’s shoulder as if to comfort him.
The constable beckoned urgently. ‘Over here, Crowner. Take a look down the well first.’
John strode across the yard and peered down the shaft. About ten feet below ground level the surface of the water was broken by the buttocks and thighs of a man. The visible part of the body was clothed in a red tunic with a wide embroidered pattern on the hem.
The coroner stood back and looked at the top rim of the stone wall. He waved at the young boy to get off, so that he could see the whole circumference. ‘Fresh scratches here,’ he grunted to Gwyn, pointing. The others followed his finger and saw three irregular lines running roughly parallel to the inner edge of the shaft, a few inches apart. He turned at last to look at the boys, whom he had so far ignored. ‘Who are they?’
Osric took it upon himself to explain. ‘These are the two servants of William Fitz-William. This one is Edward,’ he said, tapping the elder on the shoulder, ‘And that’s Harry.’
De Wolfe stared at the lads, who seemed cowed and speechless in the presence of these large strangers. ‘Young for servants, are they not?’ he barked.
‘Fitz-William has a cook as well, but he lives elsewhere and comes in only during the day. These two look after his other needs.’
The constable’s tone made John aware that this might be no ordinary household, but he concentrated on the immediate situation. ‘So, what’s the story?’ Before Osric could start explaining, the coroner swung round to Gwyn. ‘Better find some way of getting him up from there. I presume this is William Fitz-William down the well?’
The elder boy spoke for the first time, in a dull subdued voice. ‘It is, sir. That’s the master’s tunic, with that embroidery on it.’
As Gwyn picked up the rope from the bucket and went to the edge of the well to ponder the best way of recovering the corpse, Osric continued his interrupted tale. ‘The lads sleep in the house, in a closet under the staircase. They say they heard their master come home late last night from some Guild meeting and go up to his bedroom as usual. This morning, they were up at dawn to light the cook-shed fire and begin preparing William’s breakfast.’
‘He always wants it soon after the sixth hour, when we hear the church bells for Prime,’ cut in Harry. His cherubic face was deathly white and he was shivering.
The constable took up the tale again. ‘Fitz-William failed to appear in his hall for the meal and after a time, Edward here went up to knock on his bedroom door.’
‘There was no answer, so I looked in and he wasn’t there, and the bed hadn’t been slept in.’ The older boy was blond and would be handsome when he grew, but he had the same pallid, pinched expression as the other lad, with wary, anxious eyes.
‘So what did you do, if your master was missing?’ demanded de Wolfe.
Edward shrugged. ‘He never likes us prying into his business, sir. He can get very angry with us.’ His eyes strayed to Harry’s, and de Wolfe noticed some mutual signal seemed to pass between them.
‘If this happened early in the morning, why did it take until this afternoon to discover him?’ Brother Rufus entered the questioning.
‘We didn’t need water until then,’ explained Edward, hesitantly. ‘I had filled the big jar in the kitchen last night and only went to the well about an hour ago as I had to carry a few buckets for the young plants in the vegetable patch.’ His voice went up a few tones. ‘It was then that I saw him. I almost hit him with the bucket, but pulled back on the rope in time.’
Though both boys looked scared, de Wolfe could see no signs of sorrow for the sudden death of their lord — he suspected that it was not a matter of particular regret to them.
Gwyn had worked out a way to retrieve the master shoemaker from his pit. ‘Someone will have to go down and pass this rope under his shoulders.’
He looked speculatively at the elder boy, but de Wolfe shook his head. ‘You can’t ask him to handle his master’s corpse. I’ll go, you take the strain.’
Osric vetoed this. ‘You are too big a man, Crowner, and Gwyn is even bigger. I’m thin and light so I’ll do it.’
Gwyn untied the bucket and wrapped the line twice around his middle, then threw the free end down the well. The skinny constable tucked his tunic up into his belt, revealing his nakedness underneath, apart from his thigh-length woollen hose. He climbed nimbly down the rope, his feet against the inside wall, Gwyn’s bulk taking the strain.
‘It’s not deep,’ said Edward reassuringly. ‘Only a couple of feet, since this dry weather.’ He seemed to have become more confident since these strange men had not treated him unkindly.
Osric lowered his feet into the water and sank well above the knees, his feet squeezing down into soft mud at the bottom. Quickly, he bent over the corpse and passed the rope under an armpit and across the chest. He tied it firmly between the shoulder-blades, then signalled to the ring of faces above.
Gwyn stepped on to the rim of the well, one foot each side and hauled straight up, with the burly monk leaning out to keep the line in the centre to avoid the body scraping against the rough stones of the shaft.
With a squelch and a splash, it left the water and, almost at once, Osric gave a yell. ‘There’s a damned great stone hanging around his neck!’
With Gwyn straining every sinew to hoist Fitz-William up, there was no chance to pause for an investigation. Grunting and cursing breathlessly, he hauled the body level with the parapet, and Rufus and John reached out to pull it in to the side and roll it over on to the ground. Red in the face, Gwyn stepped down and threw a look of triumph at his master. ‘What did I tell you, Crowner?’