After Thomas had left, the drab daughter of the reeve silently limped in with a pitcher of her own brewed ale, together with some misshapen clay drinking pots. The coroner and his officer poured their beer and squatted near the fire, which smouldered in its clay-lined pit in the middle of the room. The only light came from the glowing logs, as the woman had blown out the wick that floated in a dish, to save her precious tallow.
‘Where’s this fellow gone?’ muttered Gwyn suspiciously. ‘It’s a hell of a long time to see to a few horses.’
‘I’m wondering if he’s arranging for a few matters to be attended to down at the seashore.’ John’s black eyebrows came down in a frown as he contemplated the potential misdeeds of his countrymen.
‘I could persuade him to answer a few questions when he comes back,’ suggested the Cornish giant, hopefully raising his clenched fist. He had been with Sir John for many years, acting as his bodyguard: he was of too lowly origins for squiredom. Originally a fisherman from the far-western village of Polruan at the mouth of the Fowey river, he had taken service in various wars as a mercenary until John de Wolfe had taken him on.
De Wolfe, who possessed little sense of humour, shook his head at Gwyn’s offer of violence. ‘I’ll just get his version of what happened. Then in the morning we’ll see for ourselves – though they’ll lie through their teeth if it suits them.’
When Aelfric came back some time later, the coroner told him curtly to give him the full story. Hunkering down near the fire, the reeve pulled a ragged sheepskin tighter around his shoulders to keep off some of the draught that whistled through the ill-fitting door and shutters. ‘Three days now, God sent this gale to plague us,’ he grumbled, pouring some of his daughter’s beer into a pot. ‘The night before last – Sunday that would be, as we went to the church that day – it blew like the end of the world was coming. And in the morning, we found wreckage and bodies on the beach.’
‘How many bodies – and who found them?’ demanded John.
‘Three corpses, lying at the high-water mark among a scatter of planks and cordage that spread from the Livermead rocks up the beach. They were first seen by Oswald, a fisherman who lives in a hut down by the water’s edge.’
‘I’ll need to speak to him, if he was the First Finder, he should have reported it straight away.’
Aelfric looked blankly at him, his loose-lipped mouth gaping to show yellow stumps of rotten teeth.
‘Well, he did! He came and told me right away,’ objected the old Saxon.
‘And did you tell your lord or his steward at the manor?’
Under the new arrangements, any failure of individuals or the community to keep to the letter of the law, led to fines that helped to boost the king’s sagging finances. One such failure was to neglect to follow the complex procedures about protecting a dead body until the coroner was notified and came to inspect it and hold an inquest.
‘But here you are, Crowner. You were notified as soon as possible.’
‘No thanks to you, reeve! We had to depend on the good offices of a hermit and the White Canons. That may yet cost you and your village a few marks.’
Aelfric groaned. ‘We are poor here – it’s bad ground for crops so close to the salt water. And the fishing is not so good as it is at Brixham, across the bay there.’
John ignored the familiar pleas of poverty. Everyone was poor in England since the Lionheart had squeezed them dry for the Crusade and his ransom – and now to pay for the French wars to regain land lost by his brother John while Richard was abroad.
‘How did this hermit get involved?’ asked Gwyn, putting another log on the fire.
‘Wulfstan comes down to the beach to collect driftwood and to seek shellfish in the pools. He was there soon after Oswald found the dead ’uns and when we buried them in the sand. As he was there, we thought he may as well say a prayer over them to shrive them, even though he’s not in Holy Orders.’
‘Why not get your parish priest to do it? That’s what he’s there for.’
The reeve shifted uneasily in the gloom. ‘He wasn’t well that day, Crowner.’
‘Drunk, you mean,’ sneered Gwyn, who had a poor opinion of priests, including Thomas de Peyne.
‘Burying the bodies before I could examine them is also a misdeed that attracts a fine,’ observed the coroner sternly.
‘We didn’t know that, sir,’ grumbled the reeve. ‘And we couldn’t let them lie on the beach where we found them. The tides are rising with the moon, for one thing. By today, they’d have been sucked out to sea again.’
John saw the logic of this, but said nothing.
‘How do we know they drowned, then?’ demanded Gwyn.
Aelfric looked at him as if he was a simple child. ‘How else should wrecked sailors die?’ he asked. ‘And when we lifted them spurts of water came from their mouths.’
‘That’s no guide to drowning, man! Drop a dry corpse into a millpond and he’ll fill with water. Did you see froth at their noses and mouths?’
The reeve nodded, glad of this leading question. ‘Yes, one of them. A young fellow, little more than a youth.’
John interrupted them. ‘Have you any idea what vessel this might have been?’
Aelfric shook his head, the greasy grey hair swinging about his pinched face. ‘There were planks and rigging all about – and a few broken casks. One of the planks had something carved upon it, but no one can read here except the priest – and I told you he was unwell.’
John’s own illiteracy prevented him from commenting on the villager’s inability to identify the ship. ‘Any cargo washed up? Were any goods salvaged?’
The village headman held up his hands in the universal gesture of denial. ‘Wreckage only, sir. There was a lot of dried fruit along the water’s edge, but it was ruined by salt and sand, not even good enough for us to feed to the swine.’
‘What about these casks?’ demanded John.
The reeve took a deep swallow of his ale before answering. ‘I’ve never seen wine barrels, Crowner, but I know our manor lord had one at Christmas two years ago. These bent staves could have been from shattered casks – though I have heard that this Frenchy fruit do get transported in barrels, too.’
There was little else that Aelfric could – or would – tell them, and soon they were sleeping on the piles of bracken, the reeve with his daughter and sons along one wall, Sir John and his officer along the other, furthest from the stench of the cow-byre.
Before he slept, the coroner’s mind wandered over a variety of problems. He wondered if his clerk was worming out any better information than they had squeezed from the reeve. John respected the intelligence of the former priest, just as he envied his prowess with book and quill, but the soldier in him could not fail to feel derision for the puny body and craven timidity of the little clerk. He had taken him in at the express pleading of his friend John de Alecon, one of the few senior churchmen for whom he had any respect.
‘He’s my nephew, God forgive me,’ the priest had said. ‘My sister will never speak to me again if I let the damned fellow starve. He’s a genius with pen and parchment, even if he’s over-fond of putting his hand up young girls’ skirts.’
The opportunity arose to hire someone who could read and write properly, rather than painfully scrawl a signature, it had seemed too good to miss. Now Thomas was on a stipend of twopence a day and had a pallet to sleep on in the servant’s quarters of a canon’s house in the cathedral Close.