She was sitting by the fire now, waiting for their serving woman Mary to bring in supper, another innovation, as most people were content with a single large dinner at noon.
'My brother is calling upon me tomorrow, John,' she snapped, without a word of greeting. 'I trust that you can manage to be civil to him for once.'
Considering that he had saved the man's life less than a month ago, de Wolfe thought this less than gracious, but Matilda was woefully short of grace. He rapidly scanned a mental list of possible excuses not to be at home for Richard de Revelle and hoped for a murder or a rape in the morning to keep him away.
Sitting in a wooden monk's chair, which had side panels and a hooded top to deflect draughts, John looked across at his wife on the opposite side of the hearth. Matilda's stocky body was enveloped in a thick kirtle of heavy green wool, with a long velvet mantle around her shoulders for warmth. Her head was encased in a tight-fitting helmet of white linen, tied with laces under her double chin, framing a square, pugnacious face with heavy-lidded eyes. A big fire of crackling logs kept their faces scorched, but behind them the bleak hall, towering up into the darkness of the rafters, was icy.
'Well?' snapped Matilda. 'Are you going to be here or not?'
Bereft of any excuse on the spur of the moment, he nodded reluctantly. 'What brings him here tomorrow? I thought he would be at Revelstoke or up at Tiverton.'
Richard had several manors in Devon and another in Somerset, and compared to John, he was a rich man. His wealth came both from lands inherited by his haughty wife Lady Eleanor and from his own incessant pursuit of money, some of which had come from his embezzling activities when sheriff.
'You surely must know that he has recently bought a house in North Gate Street as a pied-de-terra' said Matilda sharply. 'Is it so unnatural for him to want to see his only sister when he is in our city?'
John glowered at her, wondering again how he had survived seventeen years of marriage to this woman. Neither of them had wanted to be wedded to the other, but they were forced into it by their families, one lot anxious to see their plain daughter married off to a knight, the other keen to marry the youngest son into a richer family.
'Richard is rarely happy to set eyes on me,' he replied dourly. 'So why do you want to inflict me upon him tomorrow?'
His wife glared at him. 'Because he has asked to speak to you, that's why. Something about that fellow who was found dead in the school in Smythen Street.'
De Wolfe groaned. 'I might have guessed that was it. He's afraid the gossip will harm his bloody purse, by putting off rich students from signing up to his poxy college. We don't yet know who the dead man was.'
Matilda began a scandalised tirade against his denigration of her brother's educational initiatives, but was diverted by Mary bustling in with a tray bearing their supper. Ever eager for food and drink, Matilda heaved herself up and went to her stool at one end of the long table, ready to attack the spit-grilled trout that lay on a thick trencher of bread.
Slitting it expertly along the backbone with a small knife, she picked up the succulent flesh in her fingers. Afterwards she washed them in a bowl of rosewater and wiped them on a napkin, all produced by the tireless Mary from her journeys back and forth from the kitchen hut in the backyard, where she cooked, ate and slept.
John poured his wife a cup of wine, then went to sit at the opposite end of the table to have his own meal, the distance between them exemplifying the emotional gulf between them. He was grateful for the silence that the serious business of eating required, a silence which went on through the second course of slices of cold pork with onions, followed by fresh bread and hard yellow cheese.
Eventually, they finished and Matilda rose, as he knew she would, seeking Lucille, her browbeaten French handmaid, to prepare her for bed.
'I'll expect you home for dinner tomorrow, John,' she said in a tone that invited no contradiction. 'Richard needs to hear from you about this corpse and I'll not have him disappointed.'
With that, she sailed out of the hall to go around to the yard, where there were outside stairs to her solar. This was a room built high up on to the back of the hall, supported on stout timbers, under which Lucille lived in a small boxlike chamber.
Left to himself, John sank with a sigh into his chair by the hearth and waited for Mary to come to clear the debris of the meal. As she entered, his old hound Brutus slunk in and laid at his feet to enjoy the warmth of the fire, knowing full well that his master would soon be taking him out for a stroll — a nightly excuse to visit the Bush Inn and its attractive Welsh landlady.
As an unfrocked priest only recently restored to grace, Thomas de Peyne was not overly fond of visiting taverns, but the Bush was an exception. Just around the corner from his modest lodging in Priest Street, the building in Idle Lane was the nearest thing to home for him, as the kindly Nesta insisted on mothering the little cleric. Even though he had a few more pennies to spend since his rescue from abject poverty, the landlady fed him gratis whenever he appeared, convinced that his weedy frame, with the slight hunchback and lame leg, needed more sustenance than he bothered to give it.
Tonight, he was just finishing a bowl of mutton stew, sitting at a table near the hearth with Gwyn, who had just demolished his favourite pork knuckle with a pile of beans and onions. The big Cornishman seemed always hungry and thirsty and justified his appetite by the soldier's adage that one should sleep, eat, drink and make love whenever the opportunity arose, as one never knew when the next chance would come along. On the other side of the trestle sat John de Wolfe, with a quart of Nesta's best ale in front of him, just topped up by old Edwin, the one-eyed potman. Brutus lay under the table, waiting expectantly for Gwyn to drop the stripped bone down to the rush-covered floor. This peaceful tableau was completed a moment later by the appearance of the shapely landlady herself, who slipped down on to the bench alongside the coroner and pushed her arm through his.
'Tell me all the day's gossip, John,' she demanded.
The lean, dark face of her lover broke into a rare smile as he looked down at the pretty redhead. 'Not a great deal today, my girl. Just a mouldy old corpse found around the corner from here, hardly a hundred paces away.' He told her briefly about the finding of the body in the nearby forge.
'Have you any idea who it might be, given that you are almost neighbours?' he demanded, with mock severity. The question was not completely facetious, as Nesta was a fount of gossip, her inn being one of the most popular in Exeter, especially amongst travellers passing through the city. Like his maid Mary, Nesta had often been the purveyor of titbits of information that were of use to the coroner.
'No one has gone missing from this part of the town,' she replied seriously. 'How long had the poor man been there?'
De Wolfe shrugged. 'Hard to say, given that it was dried out like a smoked herring, up above that forge. Some months, I would guess.'