Gwyn pointed to its hem. The bottom few inches were bloodstained and blood was mixed with the muddy ashes on the earth below. ‘Where’s that coming from? Have we got another Christina Rifford? And, if so, why is she dead?’
John shrugged and climbed to his feet. ‘We can’t leave the poor woman here. Is there room in the church?’
Gwyn looked across at the small chapel, recently rebuilt in stone to replace an older wooden structure. ‘I doubt the priest will want a corpse in there, bleeding over his floor – especially as it’s Sunday tomorrow and he’ll want to hold Mass and other offices. What about St Nicholas Priory?’
John agreed with Gwyn’s good advice. The Benedictine monks would undoubtedly show their usual charity, and the little monastery was only a few hundred yards away, towards St Mary Arches.
The rotund local priest was only too glad to get the corpse off his property and snapped orders at his caretaker and three other men who were idling among the gawping onlookers. They went into the church to fetch the bier, which was hanging by ropes in its customary place from the rafters. The four jogged out with the wooden frame and set it on its legs alongside the body. With Gwyn supervising, they lifted the rigid corpse on to it and John threw the cloak over the woman for decency’s sake.
Then he stood with Gwyn to look at the ground where the body had lain. A pool of blood, with a thin shiny skin of clot the size of a hand, lay on the hard earth. ‘Nothing else – no knife, no weapon, no footprint!’ John commented. ‘Yet she was concealed right enough. No highborn lady comes to creep under a midden to die.’ He turned to the four men standing expectantly alongside the bier. ‘Follow me to St Nicholas’s. I’ll go ahead and pray that the prior will accommodate us.’ He stalked away, leaving Gwyn to potter about the scene and to question the onlookers, before he tried to disperse them – this was an unexpected novelty to lighten their drab existence.
John threaded his way through the stinking alleys between the poverty-stricken dwellings, filled with ragged children, mangy dogs, scuttering rats and trickling sewage. He dodged handcarts filled with firewood, wandering goats and porters bent double under heavy loads. He was greeted respectfully every few yards by old men tugging their forelocks and housewives and crones bobbing their heads in salute: Sir John de Wolfe had been known to most of the town’s population even before he became coroner.
Within a couple of minutes, he reached the priory of Saint Nicholas, a small stone-built range of buildings half-way between the north wall and Fore Street. A tonsured monk in a black habit girded up to his thighs, was scratching with a hoe in a tiny vegetable plot and directed John to the prior’s cell. He was a spare, ascetic man with a miserable face, but readily agreed to house the unknown corpse in a store room next to their tiny infirmary.
By then, the bier-carriers had arrived and the frame was set down in the small chamber, which was half-full of bags of grain, old clothes and bedding. Gwyn came in soon afterwards, clutching something in his large hand. ‘We have to put a name to this lady as a matter of urgency,’ snapped the coroner. ‘Surely someone must be missing from home by now?’
His bodyguard nodded, but first thrust his fist under the coroner’s nose. His fingers opened and John saw two small, pale, soggy cylinders lying in his palm. They were each about an inch long and as thick as a little finger. Streaked with blood, they looked rather like broken pieces of candle. ‘What are they? And where did you find them?’
Gwyn humped his shoulders. ‘I don’t know what they are, but they were lying in that patch of blood under the corpse.’
The objects meant nothing to John and he turned back to his main problem, that of identity.
‘Who might know this lady?’ he asked the four carriers, the prior and the other monk with the hoe. None of them seemed to have any inspiration, until the Cornishman suggested Nesta, landlady of the Bush.
The coroner considered this for a moment. It was certainly true that his red-headed mistress was a mine of information on all manner of local gossip – and her common sense and discretion were beyond question. ‘Get down to the tavern and ask her to come up,’ he said to Gwyn. ‘I had better stay here in case our friend the sheriff gets wind of something affecting an aristocratic lady. That would even prise him away from his planning for the Chief Justiciar’s visit.’
With a final grunt, Gwyn vanished into the town.
The morning was a relatively slack time at the Bush for the Welsh innkeeper and within twenty minutes, she was at St Nicholas’s, a green cloak thrown hastily over her aproned figure.
‘Great God, Sir Crowner, is there a campaign against the young women of Exeter?’ she asked, as soon as she arrived at the store room door. Nesta spoke in Welsh, which both John and Gwyn could readily understand: his mother Enyd had used it with him as a child, and Gwyn’s native Cornish was virtually the same language.
‘She is no town drab, this one,’ John told her, as they entered the temporary mortuary. ‘Her clothing is fine and she has the whole aspect of a Norman lady. There is blood upon her, but no obvious wound – and I hesitate to look further at her body at this stage.’
Nesta had seen many a tavern fight and was no stranger to blood and even corpses, but she entered the mortuary with some trepidation. A narrow window-slit threw a dim light from the overcast sky and the monks had lit a few candle-ends to add to the illumination.
John, with Gwyn at his back, walked to the bier, gently steering Nesta by the elbow.
‘These are really superb garments,’ she explained, a slight quiver in her voice as she approached the still, covered form on the trestle. ‘The shoes alone would cost me a week’s takings – and that fine wool cloak is more than I am ever likely to have.’
John slowly lifted the mantle and draped it to one side, letting it hang to the floor. Nesta stood breathlessly still, as rigid as the dead woman on the bier. Then she slowly exhaled. ‘I know her, John!’ Turning to him, she said, ‘Surely you must too?’
‘The face seems familiar, but I can recall no name.’
The innkeeper looked up at him, her big eyes round in her pleasant features. ‘It’s Adele, daughter of Reginald de Courcy, of the manor of Shillingford.’
John’s bushy eyebrows rose an inch up his forehead. ‘Of course! I know Reginald, so I must have seen his daughter with him at some function.’
Nesta looked pityingly at the dead young woman lying still and stiff on her wooden bed. ‘Poor woman – she was only twenty years old. And soon to be married, too!’
The coroner’s eyebrows could go no higher. ‘Good God! Another young woman betrothed, like Christina.’
Nesta knew all the society gossip from overhearing endless conversations at the Bush. ‘The wedding was to be at Easter in the cathedral, a grand affair.’
‘To whom, for God’s sake?’
‘Hugh Ferrars, son of Lord Guy Ferrars.’
John whistled. The de Courcys were an affluent family, with several manors in south Devon, but Lord Ferrars was a major landowner in the West Country.
‘There’ll be the devil to pay over this,’ he muttered. Though he was an independent spirit, who offered little deference to anyone but Richard Coeur de Lion, the significance of a sudden and probably criminal death interrupting the union of a de Courcy and a Ferrars struck him forcefully. ‘Now we know who she is, we need to know urgently how she came to her death. And who hid her in a rubbish tip.’
Nesta’s eyes travelled down the still figure until they reached the skirt of the kirtle. Now that the body was lying on its back, an ominous bloodstain was visible on the fabric between the thighs, as well as at the hem.