Next morning, de Wolfe ambled up to his chamber above the gatehouse of Rougemont, partly to get out of the house on a Sunday and also to give Brutus some exercise: the old hound’s joints were getting stiff.
With the dog resting by his feet under the table, he spent a few minutes studying his reading lessons, badly neglected during the recent busy weeks. Soon bored and thirsty, he rose to look for Gwyn’s store of cider, which he kept in a large jar in the corner of the barren room. The Cornishman’s frayed leather jerkin, discarded in the warmer weather, was draped over the two-gallon pot and when John pulled it off, something fell out of the large poacher’s pocket inside. It was one of Thomas’s little pottery jars of ink, a curious thing for the illiterate Gwyn to be carrying. Intrigued, de Wolfe dipped his hand into the pocket and pulled out a quill pen and a ragged piece of blank parchment.
Sitting back at the trestle, he felt in the pouch on his belt and pulled out the folded note with the text from Ecclesiastes that had been left at the scene of his own assault. When he put the irregular margins of the two fragments of parchment together, they fitted exactly. Staring at them with slowly dawning comprehension, John now knew why Gwyn had chosen to make his own private visit to the clerk on the last evening before he was due to be hanged. The Cornishman must have overcome Thomas’s resignation to a welcome release from this world and persuaded him to use his accomplishments with a pen to forge a note in a disguised hand, similar to that left with the dead Jew.
Slowly, de Wolfe sat back on his stool. A lopsided grin creased his face as he put up a hand to feel the still-tender swelling on the back of his head.
‘Thank you, Gwyn,’ he said quietly. ‘But now I owe you one!’