‘Come up, if you must,’ said a voice from the stairs at the back. The lower half of Fitzosbern, now dressed in a sombre tunic, could be seen going back up to his living chamber. They all followed, Matilda solicitously supporting the anxious figure of Christina. Upstairs, the silversmith stood defiantly in the centre of the room, his back against his dining table.
‘What do you want of me? Let us get this nonsense over as quickly as possible to avoid embarrassing these ladies more than necessary,’ he snapped. Though he was still pale and had trembling fingers, he looked better than he had a few hours earlier.
‘This is the crowner’s idea, Fitzosbern, not mine,’ said Richard de Revelle, immediately backing out of any responsibility that might rebound on him.
John took the arm of the beautiful brunette and led her forward to face Fitzosbern. ‘Take your time, Christina. Look at this man from various angles. Listen to his voice, shut your eyes, and see if any memories come back to you.’
The guild-master snorted in disbelief. ‘What nonsense this is, de Wolfe! She has seen me around the town for most of her life – and recently she has been to my shop half a dozen times. We have stood together and touched hands while I fitted her bracelet. How in God’s name can she not recognise me?’
Privately, John had sympathy with his views, as this was not like picking out a stranger from a crowd. But he wanted to settle her recollections once and for all, to satisfy Joseph, Edgar and Henry Rifford.
At a sign from the coroner, Godfrey turned himself through a full circle, a sneer of contempt on his face at these antics. Then Christina walked round him, and did it again with her eyes shut.
‘Say nothing now, my girl. We will discuss it outside,’ commanded John.
Suddenly, Christina burst into tears and sank to her knees in abject distress. Matilda rushed to her and pulled her up, her arms around her, cooing into her ear. She gave a nasty look to her husband and even her brother, as representing everything masculine who battened upon poor women, then guided the sobbing girl to the stairs and took her back next door.
John was strangely touched by his wife’s tenderness, something she had never showed him in the slightest degree. As the unexpected motherliness suddenly blossomed in the hard-faced woman, he wondered what she might have been like if they had had children.
‘Have you finished this stupid game?’ demanded Fitzosbern dropping heavily on to a bench.
‘Let’s hope this is the end of the matter,’ said Richard, in a placatory tone. ‘I think I have some other avenues to follow in this matter.’
John had no idea what he meant by that, but they followed the women back to the house next door where they found Christina, red-eyed and sniffing, slumped on a settle near the great fireplace, with Matilda still comforting her.
‘I hope you’re satisfied, upsetting the poor girl like this,’ she grated. ‘All to no purpose, I’ll be bound.’
John went over to Christina and looked down at her. ‘Well, any impressions at all, Mistress Rifford?’ he asked gently. She sniffed and dabbed at her nose with a kerchief pulled from the wide sleeve of her red surcoat. ‘It is as he said – I know him so well, especially from visiting his shop, as I did on the night … the night it happened.’
John was disappointed, but not in the least surprised. ‘So there was nothing at all?’
‘No, not really,’ Christina answered, so slowly that the keen ear of the coroner picked up a small element of doubt.
‘Wait a moment – are you sure there was nothing?’
The girl looked up at him, her lovely face framed in the white linen circle of her gorget and headband. ‘I told you before, I saw no one, he was behind me. But just now, something … not a sight, it was when my eyes were shut.’ She shook her head in despair. ‘Maybe it was imagination.’
‘What, Christina? What was it?’ he asked urgently.
‘A smell – no, not even a smell. A sensation in my nose. I don’t know what it was, I can’t tell. But something reminded me – and upset me.’
She promptly burst into tears again and the newly discovered maternal spirit in Matilda fiercely drove the two men away.
The fortnightly shire court was due to be held on the next day, Friday, and John spent the early part of the afternoon in his cramped office, getting Thomas to go through the cases that were due to be heard. Though presided over by the sheriff, except when the King’s Justices were in town, the coroner was entitled – and usually obliged – to be present for a variety of reasons, either financial or administrative.
As his reading ability was still negligible, he depended on Thomas to record all matters as they came up, then to relay them back to him in the court. As the crook-backed little clerk droned through the list of fines, amercements, attachments, securities to attend trial and other odd jobs that came to the coroner, Gwyn stood at the window opening, carefully touching up the edges of their swords on the soft sandstone of the sill. He regretted the rarity of chances to use his own weapon, these days, compared to when he and Sir John had so often been in the thick of fighting, but he kept his blade sharp in the hope that some unexpected combat might come along.
A few moments later, while the coroner and his clerk still worked their way through the court list, Gwyn’s rhythmical honing was interrupted by the sound of shouting down below. From the narrow window slit, when the shutters were fully open, a view could just be glimpsed of a few yards of the road leading up to the steep drawbridge below. The yells of protest and the deeper answering commands of soldiers drew his eye to a tight group of people who rapidly passed his narrow line of vision.
The Cornishman, his unruly hair looking like a hayrick in a gale, turned to the coroner. ‘That’s odd. Gabriel and a couple of his men have just brought in those two men from Fitzosbern’s workshop – and I’m sure that young Edgar and his apothecary master were with them.’
De Wolfe looked up quickly. ‘Brought in? You mean they were under guard?’
‘Looked like it, especially from the noise they were making.’
John got to his feet and picked up his mantle from where it lay across the table. ‘What’s that bloody man up to now? Maybe that’s what he meant this morning when he said something about following other avenues.’ He slung the cloak over his shoulders and made for the stairs. ‘You’d better come with me, Gwyn – and you can check through the rest of those tasks for tomorrow, Thomas. I must go to see what new mischief the sheriff is planning.’
They tracked the prisoners to the undercroft of the keep and found them herded together in the cold and dismal area outside the gateway to the gaol. The place always reminded John of a cave in which he had once hidden during a French campaign, with a musty smell of old dampness, and water slithering down green walls. At the back of the low hall, under one of the arches of the vaulting, the obese gaoler, Stigand, was stoking a small fire with logs.
The sergeant-at-arms was in charge of the party, looking slightly awkward as he knew of the difference in views between sheriff and coroner over this affair. ‘Sir Richard himself sent the orders to bring them in, Crowner, not more than an hour ago,’ he said apologetically.
Of the four detainees, the only one to be voluble was Edgar of Topsham, whose voice Gwyn now recognised as that of the protester he had heard from the window. Struggling vainly in the grip of a soldier, his dishevelled fair hair fell even more into his eyes than usual. ‘He promised my father that this was all over!’ he shouted at John. ‘This is the second time that the sheriff has dragged me here. What does he hope to gain from it?’
There was a new voice from behind them, as Richard de Revelle had come in unnoticed, together with Ralph Morin, the castle constable. ‘I hope to gain the truth at last for my patience has run out with these milk-and-water methods.’ He turned to the coroner. ‘The failure of Mistress Rifford to give any credence to these unjust accusations against Godfrey Fitzosbern, and that news you gave me about this apothecary here, make me determined to resort to more effective methods.’