Coroner Robert nodded, but he was not persuaded. Sir Baldwin was clearly a man who enjoyed power and the trappings of power. ‘You have been keeper for long?’
‘It will be ten years next year, I think. Is that right, Simon?’
The bailiff nodded.
To the coroner’s eye, the bailiff looked the grimmer, less trustworthy of the two. He had a bleak expression in his sunburned face, like a man who was constantly waiting to hear an insult so that he may avenge it. There was a bleakness about him that made the coroner feel wary.
Ten years. There were few keepers who had held their positions for that length of time. Usually their corruption was discovered much sooner.
‘And you, Coroner? How long have you been in post?’
‘I’ve been here for some six years now.’
Baldwin’s eyebrows rose a little. Then he nodded slowly.
To the coroner’s acute annoyance, it felt as though Sir Baldwin was having the same kind of thoughts about the coroner as the coroner was having about him. Admittedly, there were some coroners who were venal and unfaithful, but that was no reason to lump Coroner Robert into the same group. He was an honourable man.
‘What of you, Bailiff?’
‘Me? Well, I’m not really a bailiff any more.’
‘No?’ Ah. No doubt the man had been taking bribes or-
‘I was made the Abbot of Tavistock’s personal representative to the Port of Dartmouth. Now I only hope to become bailiff once more.’
‘You hope? You have lost your post at the port?’
‘It did not suit me. I’m happier away from the sea.’
‘But it must have been a rewarding position.’
‘Fairly, yes.’ His expression darkened as though he resented the coroner’s assumption that this could have had any bearing on his decision to leave his post.
The prior was clearly growing irritable. ‘Coroner, are you going to discuss the matter or not? If you will not broach it, I shall.’
‘What subject is that?’ Baldwin demanded.
‘Can I have some wine first, please?’ Simon asked plaintively.
In the guest chamber, the guards ate their food and for the most part did not speak. Why would they? They were not comrades by friendship, but merely associates who had been thrown together by their service to the Bishop. It did not make for the refreshing sharing of confidences or the offer of sympathy, Jack of Oxford told himself.
He glanced across at the others as they ate, and winced inwardly. It was very difficult to have any feelings other than contempt for such fellows — and it was a mark of his own disgrace that he was here in their company.
Those two, André, his head swathed in linen after his wound had been stitched, and Pons, were both sitting a little apart. They were no different from any of the others, although today they were more reserved. The others were avoiding direct contact with them, as though they already had the ropes about their necks for their murders.
It was unfair, of course. If he had been there, Jack would have reacted in the same manner, drawing his sword in order to defend himself, especially if he’d seen someone throwing dung at him. The peasants in a city like this had no respect for their betters! Still, the pair of them were quiet now, fearing that here in this strange town their bishop might not be able to protect them. Now, without even the friendship of their peers, they sat solitary and grim-faced, contemplating their fate, should their master fail to defend them.
These fellows had nothing in common other than their master, and there was nothing to bind them either to him or to each other, really, except the money which he offered. For his own part, Jack felt no bond to the Bishop. He was not a warmhearted man who inspired devotion. He was too lawyerly in his manner, looking at anybody as though he was peering at an interesting specimen, rather than a human.
Most of the men here had been in the service of the Bishop for some years. It was a large household, and life with the Bishop had great advantages. No man would go hungry living with a bishop. And that was an important consideration — especially after the dreadful years of famine.
Jack remembered them, all right. All too clearly.
He had been barely eighteen when the rain began in that awful year of 1315, and he had watched as the fields flooded and the grain rotted on the stems. All the food which they had expected to farm that year was lost, and there wasn’t enough to feed the people, let alone the animals. Within two years, the herds and flocks had been all but wiped out, and the grain stored went rotten each winter. Although that was not what Jack remembered most of all. What he remembered most clearly was the sight of the bodies lying at the side of the road, the peasants who tried to work their lands, only to collapse and die, thin and racked with hunger, where they fell. It had been a time of misery, of grim, unremitting hell. The devil himself could not have imagined such scenes.
Jack’s family had been moderately well-to-do at the time. They had been small farmers, but they were at least free men. His older brother Peter was to inherit their farm on the death of their father, but when his father died, Peter was already two months dead. And by then Jack had decided that there was nothing for him there. He packed his bags and left the homestead which had grown hateful to him.
Those days had been appalling. People were dying all over the land, and he had been fortunate to find a fisherman who wanted help. He had lost his own son, and took Jack on, teaching him how to use the wind and the sea. It was only when the old man had himself died that Jack had taken his vessel and crossed to France, where he had hoped to find work. But so many were seeking food, that all were forced at one time or another, to find food in the oldest manner possible. Jack had, too, first by robbing, and then by killing.
He had never tried to count the dead. In his time he had waylaid and cut the throats of many, he guessed, but at last he had found salvation. He had been with a small band, trailing after some merchants travelling to a great fair, when he had seen a woman. She had been walking tiredly by the side of the road, and for some reason he had not indulged his whim with her as he had so often before, but instead had spoken to her, and learned a little about her. She was a maid to a lord, a kindly man, in a small manor nearby, he learned. He had stayed there with Anne-Marie for some little while, and when her priest came to talk to him, Jack had remained, out of affection for her. The few days became a couple of weeks, and then some months, and gradually he found himself slipping into the old ways of life, helping with the harvest, then with the ploughing and the sowing, until he suddenly realised he had been there a year.
This and his growing love for Anne-Marie, his love of the vill and the affection he felt for the area, made him offer his heart to her, and it was only then, when the people realised he wanted to take her for his wife, that the atmosphere changed. Suddenly he was ostracised, and his lovely little woman would not speak to him. He was foreign. He came from England. They would not let him have their girl, and she felt the same. She had never meant to lead him to believe that she could love him, she said. No. Of course not, he told himself cynically. He didn’t believe her, of course. He reckoned she was just saying what the others in the vill wanted her to say, and so he did what he felt any man might.
He left the same day, bitter, and disillusioned. When he saw a man being attacked in Tours shortly afterwards, he, a natural fighter, entered the fray himself. It was more than trying to aid a man in need, though. He was seeking the peace that would come from battle. He allowed his rage to overwhelm him.
It was fortunate that the scruffy, foul little man whom he leapt to help had been the Bishop’s own servant, and soon he was hired by the Bishop to join his bodyguards. At least, so he reasoned, it was safer for him to be there than to be out in the open where his rape could be punished.