John, who was quite indifferent to the morality of Mabel leaving her husband to stay with Picot, turned and went into the gloomy undercroft. The main area was empty, the damp floor of beaten earth glistening under the light of a few pitch torches burning in iron rings fixed to the walls. The further part was walled off and a low arch with a gate of metal bars guarded the entrance to the castle gaol. John loped up to the barrier and rattled the bars violently to attract the attention of the gaoler. ‘Where are you, Stigand, you fat bastard?’
There was a clinking of keys and mumbling, then a dirty, grossly obese man dressed in a ragged smock shuffled up to the other side of the gate, peering through at the new arrivals. ‘Who’s there?’ he demanded.
‘It’s the coroner – or are you too drunk to see straight?’ snapped John. Stigand, a Saxon who previously had been a slaughterman in the Shambles, was not one of his favourite people. ‘Let us in, I want to talk to Edgar of Topsham.’
Grumbling under his breath, the gaoler unlocked the gate and pulled it open with a screech of rusted hinges. Wheezing with the effort of moving his ponderous body, he tramped back up the dark passage beyond the gate. ‘He’s there, on the left,’ he grunted, waving his bunch of keys to one side.
Off the passage, half a dozen narrower gates led into tiny cells. At the further end was a larger cage, with about a dozen wretches penned in together. John recognised the reeve and two men from Torre, who stared at him with undiluted hatred.
He waved at the cell on their left. ‘Open it up, damn you!’ he commanded, and slowly the gaoler unlocked and pulled back the gate. Inside, Edgar sat dejectedly on a stone slab that served as a bed, below a narrow slit that admitted a sliver of daylight on to the filthy straw on the floor. The only other furniture was a leather bucket.
The apprentice jumped up and ran to embrace his father, then clasped the arm of Eric Picot, whom he looked on as an uncle. There was a torrent of speech between them all, with Edgar loudly declaiming his innocence and the other two denouncing both Richard de Revelle and Fitzosbern.
When the hubbub died down a little, the coroner managed to get in a few words. ‘Did you have anything to do with poisoning Fitzosbern, if that was the cause of his collapse?’ he demanded.
Edgar, already dirty and dishevelled from his hours in prison, was hotly indignant. ‘Of course not, Sir John! I wish him dead, I admit, but I would try to kill him openly in a fair fight, not by poison, which is against my apothecary’s oath.’
There was more in the same vein and John could not but be impressed by the lanky apprentice’s sincerity. Then, rather to the coroner’s surprise, there was a clanking of a sword scabbard in the passage and Sergeant Gabriel escorted the sheriff into the cell. ‘I heard you were here. I came to see that no impropriety takes place,’ snapped Richard imperiously.
That made little impression on Joseph of Topsham, who stepped up to de Revelle and prodded him in the chest. ‘What nonsense is this, Richard? You have no right even to accuse my son, let alone drag him off to gaol like a common criminal. Where is your proof?’
The sheriff deflated a little, as the ship-owner from Topsham was a powerful man in the merchant community. But he tried to bluster on for a while. ‘He attacked Fitzosbern the other night and has threatened to kill him. Being a puny youth, he could not do it face to face so he used his leech’s art to dispose of him by stealth.’
Joseph pushed his grey beard almost into Richard’s face. ‘Rubbish! That’s pure speculation, to make your task easier. Tell him, John, what the apothecary found.’
De Wolfe explained, not without some satisfaction, that Nicholas had tested the food and wine on animals, had even drunk the rest of the wine himself, all with no ill-effects. ‘Both he and Brother Saulf at St John’s Hospital say that it could have been some natural apoplexy,’ he concluded.
Richard coloured and huffed and puffed, but then John motioned him outside the cell and took him by the arm to the other side of the dank passage. ‘There is something else, brother-in-law, that they had better not know yet. I now have reason to believe that Nicholas of Bristol is the one who procured the fatal miscarriage on Adele de Courcy. If he committed the one crime, maybe he is a better suspect for the other.’ He did not believe this for a moment, but he saw no reason not to use it temporarily to take the pressure off Edgar.
The sheriff stared at John, who could almost hear the wheels going round in his head, as he set this information against the other powerful factions involved, such as the Ferrars and de Courcy. ‘This must be pursued with vigour,’ he muttered.
They went back to the cell and immediately Joseph went on the attack again. ‘Unless you release my son, and certainly lift any evil threat of torturing a false confession from him, I will seek out the King, wherever he is. I shall use one of my own ships to go straight to France to petition him – and I will refuse you all my taxes and stop my ships from exporting the wool from Devon, even if it ruins me. It will certainly ruin you, when you have to account to the Westminster Exchequer for the collapse of the county revenues! And I shall seek out the Chief Justiciar to tell him what I have done.’
Richard knew that the senior trader was in deadly earnest. Not only would the taxes collapse if the main cross-channel transport was withdrawn, but Richard would personally lose money as, like John de Wolfe and many others, he had a considerable private stake in the wool-export business, which was the backbone of the local economy. He put the best face on it that he could.
‘This claim of the apothecary, together with other information I have just been told, allows me to be lenient for the moment. You may take your son, but he must not leave Exeter until this matter is finally settled.’
He turned on his heel and marched stiffly away, his pointed beard jutting out like the prow of a ship. As Gabriel followed him, he risked giving John a slow wink.
When the last of the Justiciar’s rearguard had vanished over the brow of Magdalen Street, the eastward road out of the city, Exeter seemed to breathe a collective sigh of relief, as life got back to normal. The sheriff and his constable had gone off with half the castle garrison to escort the long cavalcade as far as Honiton, but would be back by nightfall.
In the meantime, the coroner had an unusual function to perform that afternoon, a first for him. The remnants of the cargo of the ship Mary of the Sea had been trundled by wagon from Torre and were stored in a warehouse on the quayside, outside the Water Gate.
As coroner, he was also Commissioner of Wrecks and his duty was to view the remains of the stricken vessel, which he had done at Torbay, even though only a few planks were to be seen. Then he had to claim any salvage for the Crown, make a valuation and get a jury to decide where the proceeds were to go – though John had already made up his mind to return it to the obvious owners.
‘What about the killing of those sailors?’ asked Gwyn, as they strode down from the Bush to the quayside, Thomas limping along beside them on his short legs.
‘That forms no part of this enquiry,’ replied John. ‘That was homicide and as the perpetrators are well-known, I suppose I must let the sheriff have his way, as they are already in his gaol. My only dealings with them will be to record their hanging and confiscate their property, they being felons.’
He was still uneasy about this as, originally, the miscreants from Torre were to be kept in the gaol until the Justices of Assize trundled back to Exeter. Only because of his half-promise to Hubert Walter to try to placate the sheriff was he willing to turn the criminals over to de Revelle. He consoled himself with the certainty that, whatever judicial process was applied, they would inevitably hang.