Arnulph de Bonneville, a shadow of his former self, lay dying in his own excretions. John thought that it would be a Christian mercy if one of his retainers were to hold a pillow over his face finally to extinguish the miserable mockery of a life he now endured. ‘Leave the poor man in peace,’ he murmured, and they moved back into the hall.
Gervaise led the way to benches set near a smouldering fire, where hurrying servants brought them cups of heated wine.
‘Our parish priest spends much of his time here, waiting to shrive him in case he suddenly stops breathing.’ Martyn sighed unhappily.
John sipped his wine. ‘I have a sad duty to carry out. Until I saw you both, I thought there might be room for doubt, but the similarity of your features tell me that almost certainly your brother is dead.’
There was a stunned silence.
‘You have heard from Palestine, then?’ asked Gervaise, in a hollow voice. ‘But why didn’t the news come straight to us?’
The coroner shook his head. ‘He died not in Palestine but in Devon, not twenty-five miles from here in Widecombe.’
The younger brother looked bewildered, his fresh, ingenuous face uncomprehending. ‘But Hubert is abroad. We had news of him last Eastertide when a soldier returning to Plymouth from Jaffa called upon us with a message from him.’
‘Yes, he said that he was alive and well,’ added Gervaise, ‘and that he hoped to be home within a year or so.’
‘You’ve heard nothing of him since?’
‘Not a word,’ replied the elder brother, sombrely. ‘But neither did we expect to. None of us has the gift of reading or writing, so any message from such distant lands can only come by word of mouth.’
‘But what has happened to him?’ Martyn persisted. ‘What is all this about Widecombe?’
Crowner John explained the whole story as he knew it, the stricken brothers listening silently and Baldwyn edging closer, as if both to hear better and to offer support to his master and to Martyn.
This sudden news was more of a shock than a reason for overwhelming grief but, even so, John realised that it had hit the family hard. Gervaise moved closer to his younger brother and put an arm around his shoulder and they stared silently into each other’s eyes. The squire Baldwyn came nearer, as if to console them with his powerful presence. After a moment, Gervaise turned back to the coroner. ‘What would you have us do about this, sir? As you saw, it is useless trying to tell our father. Unless he improves, which is unlikely, he is incapable of understanding.’
The coroner spread his bony hands in a gesture of regret. ‘I must have a positive identification of the murdered man. We must be sure that it is your brother before I complete the inquest, though I am afraid that I have little doubt. You must ride back with us to Widecombe to view the body, distressing though that might be.’
The brothers murmured together, Baldwyn also putting his head into the discussion. Then Gervaise turned back to John. ‘I will ride with you, together with my squire. Martyn will remain here as, with our lord so sick, someone must be on hand in case he dies, as well as having to attend to the daily business of running the manor.’
John nodded. ‘I must be back in Exeter by the morning, so we should leave for Widecombe now, to have enough light left for what we have to do there. You are already dressed for the saddle, so nothing need delay us.’
Chapter Eleven
In which Crowner John attends an exhumation
In the churchyard at Widecombe, a heap of fresh earth proved that Thomas de Peyne had carried out his master’s instructions. By the time the coroner and his small party arrived in the mid-afternoon, the clerk had ordered Ralph the reeve to complete the digging and two serfs had removed all the soil from the new grave.
Before he took Gervaise de Bonneville and the squire into the churchyard, John adjourned to the large hut on the other side of the village green, which did service as a tavern. Here, the widow of a freeman crushed to death two years before by a bull supported her three children by brewing beer and selling oat-cakes. Her thatched wattle hut stood in the dip of the track that came down from the moor and led on towards Dunstone. The green was humped, as was most of the land around the village: the church was on one side of the slope and the tavern on the other, the green hillside rising steeply behind.
The travellers sat outside the door on a large log that served as a bench, while the toothless young widow brought them bread and ale, to which John added the remains of Mary’s ham and some hard cheese. For a few moments they ate and drank, Gervaise and Baldwyn uneasy as they anticipated the moment of truth at the graveside.
John looked across the open green space to the low dry-stone wall of the churchyard, from where he could hear the final sounds of the raising of the coffin. The rise of the land prevented him seeing their activities and, as he chewed the rough bread, his eye fell instead on three straw mats, held up vertically on poles stuck into the ground at the further end of the green.
‘They seem keen archers in this place,’ he commented to Gwyn.
The woman, refilling his beer mug, grinned a gummy smile. ‘Good for my business. Shooting at those targets is thirsty work. The lord of our manor, FitzRalph, insists that every man above fourteen practises with the bow at least once a week. He wants plenty of good shots if he has to raise men for an army.’
When the food was finished, the coroner got down to business. ‘Show them the effects of the dead man, Gwyn,’ he commanded.
The cornishman went to his tethered horse and took a hessian-wrapped bundle from a pannier. He unrolled it on the ground before then and displayed the ornate sword belt, the empty scabbard and sheathed dagger.
The two men leaned over to study and then handle the objects. Gervaise sank back on to the log. ‘I’ve not seen these before, but they are undoubtedly foreign so it means little. If they were Hubert’s then he must have obtained them in the East.’ Baldwyn nodded in silent agreement.
‘What about this, then?’ asked John, unrolling a green surcoat from the bundle. It had been washed, but the tear in the back was still obvious.
Gervaise and Baldwyn looked doubtfully at each other. ‘Certainly Hubert had some green clothing – he was fond of the colour. But so are half the men in England,’ Gervaise said.
‘There’s nothing special about this one,’ added Baldwyn. ‘It would be about his size, but there are thousands of men it would fit.’
John motioned to Gwyn to roll up the artefacts again, and they all rose to their feet. ‘Then it remains only to view the body, painful though that might be to you.’
He led the way across the green to the church. It was a poor structure of old wood, with peeling whitewash, dating back to Saxon days, but a new tower had been built in stone during the past decade, presumably a gift from the manorial lord.
Thomas was waiting at the gap in the wall, standing with bowed head, his hands together before him, and turned to lead the procession solemnly to the graveside, as if he was still a priest and conducting a funeral. At the heap of earth – grey here, not red like Exeter – Thomas turned and crossed himself. ‘The box is ready to open, Crowner,’ he said sonorously.
The two village men, one of whom habitually acted as sexton, stood by the crude coffin, which rested at the end of the hole. The parish priest, a thin soul with a furtive, hunted look, stood well back against the church wall, as if to distance himself from these unwelcome goings-on in his churchyard.