‘Open it, man,’ snapped John, as they stood in a ragged half-circle around the gaping grave.
The sexton took an old rusty sword with a broken blade and rammed it into the joint of the coffin lid. He levered up and, with some cracking and splintering of wood, the two rough planks were torn off. Thomas hopped back like a frightened sparrow, his hand to his mouth, while the others looked on impassively, Gervaise’s face pallid.
An aura of sweet-sour corruption wafted from the box, but soon drifted away on the slight breeze. Within the coffin was a crude cross, made of two sticks lashed with cord. This lay on a length of soiled linen that covered the body, the fabric marred by greenish yellow patches where it lay over the face, chest and belly. Without ceremony or hesitation, Gwyn stepped forward, took out the cross and whipped off the cloth, revealing the victim’s naked body.
In spite of Thomas’s apprehensions, the corpse was not much changed from the day of the inquest. The skin was more tense, moist and slimy, and was beginning to peel in places. Along the flanks were large blisters filled with bloody fluid and the abdomen and genitals were grossly swollen and green. The face, though, was only moderately puffy and blurred.
‘Cover him, for decency’s sake!’ grated Baldwyn tensely. Gwyn spread the linen over the lower half of the cadaver and turned to look inquiringly at Gervaise de Bonneville. The coroner’s eyes also swivelled to the young man. ‘Well, sir, is this your brother or not?’
Gervaise stood transfixed, staring at the putrefying body in the splintered box. For a long moment he was as motionless as the corpse, then he turned slowly to the coroner, his face even paler than it had been before.
‘It is Hubert, God rest his soul.’ His voice cracked and his squire took his arm.
Thomas edged forward, made the sign of the cross in the air over the open box and began to mutter some incantation in Latin.
The coroner turned to Baldwyn of Beer. ‘You must have known him well. Do you agree that this is your master’s kin?’
Baldwyn dropped his hand from Gervaise’s shoulder, stepped forward and bent to look more closely at the cadaver. Like John and Gwyn, he seemed immune to the sights and odours of death.
‘There is no doubt, sir. Though the face is swollen and the eyes squeezed shut, it is certainly Hubert. The build, the hair, the features and, above all, that disfigurement he was born with, they all prove it.’ He pointed at the raised brown mark on the side of the dead man’s neck, its colour and hair virtually unchanged, though it now sat on a slimed waxy bed of mottled skin.
John waved a hand imperiously at the sexton. ‘Seal the box and put him to rest.’
He turned to Thomas. ‘See to it that everything is done decorously – and tell that lurking priest to say a few words over the grave.’
As the party turned from the graveside, Gwyn nudged the coroner and pointed into the crude coffin. ‘Those bruises on the arms have come out since we last saw the corpse,’ he muttered.
John squatted to looked at the greening skin between each elbow and shoulder. On either side, three or four reddish purple marks, the size of a thumbnail, were now prominent on the shiny, peeling surface.
‘Grip marks, where fingers have pinioned his arms,’ he said.
‘Held by one man, while another stabbed him in the back, already disarmed by a slash into his sword arm,’ completed the Cornishman.
The coroner rose and shrugged at his henchman. ‘Nothing we didn’t know before, but it confirms that he was ambushed by more than one assailant.’ He led the way out of the churchyard and back to the ale-house, his black cloak billowing behind him.
Waiting for him was Ralph the reeve, who had been out in the fields when they arrived. He had been supervising the villeins as they ploughed some of the harvest stubble ready for next year’s crop, leaving the rest fallow as part of the rotation system that he had to organise.
Immediately John put him to work again. ‘Collect as many men from the village as you can muster for an inquest jury. Especially find those who were at the first inquiry a few days back.’
Ralph’s mouth opened in surprise. ‘What, now?’
John dropped heavily on to the log outside the tavern door and sat with his hands planted aggressively on his parted knees. ‘Yes, now! And hurry, it will be dark in a couple of hours, too late to ride back either to Exeter or to Peter Tavy, so we must sleep here tonight. We may as well use the remaining daylight to complete the inquest formalities and make an early start in the morning.’
Muttering under his breath, Ralph hurried off, shouting at every villager he saw to assemble at the tithe barn, set just beyond the church. As he went, Gwyn’s bright blue observant eyes lit on something else, this time at a distance. He tapped John’s shoulder. ‘Look over there, in the reeve’s croft,’ he said.
John followed his man’s pointing finger to where a horse was contently cropping the thin winter grass in the fenced plot of land that lay behind the hut. He yelled after the reeve, in a voice that could be heard up on the moor, ‘Come back here, damn you!’
Ralph, who had been giving orders to a couple of villagers to gather up a jury, plodded back to the coroner and his officer.
John grabbed him by the arm of his coarse tunic and turned him round, none too gently, so that he faced his own house. ‘Is that your dwelling there?’ he boomed, gesturing with his free hand.
Ralph looked surprised. ‘Of course it is – you ate and rested there last week.’
‘And is that your croft behind it?’ John indicated the patch of grass between the back of the house and the cultivated strip that stretched towards the field system.
‘It is … yes.’ The reeve was more puzzled than ever and apprehension crept into his voice.
‘And is that your horse?’
There was a slight hesitation, but Ralph had to admit that the beast tethered to a peg in the plot behind his house belonged to him.
‘A dappled grey mare with a singular black ring around her right eye!’ said John, with a rising note of triumphant accusation in his voice.
‘What of it? It’s just a horse,’ retorted Ralph, with tremulous defiance.
‘What of it? What of it, man?’ roared John. ‘That horse belonged to the dead man, as can be testified from when they were last seen together in Honiton.’
Gervaise de Bonneville and Baldwyn listened intently to this exchange, as did Gwyn, Thomas and the group of inquisitive jurymen. Village reeves were as unpopular as sheriffs or coroners: they were the agents of the manorial lord and chivvied the serfs from dawn to dusk.
Ralph turned this way and that like a cornered fox, but the coroner allowed him no escape.
‘I don’t know where the beast came from,’ he muttered desperately.
John sneered, ‘It just walked into your croft and tied itself to your peg. Are you going to have the audacity to tell me that a dead man turns up in the village and a horse, identified as his, also appears by sheer coincidence?’
Ralph stared at the ground.
‘I found her,’ was all he could manage to mutter.
‘Speak up, man! Let’s all hear what you have to say!’ shouted the coroner.
‘I found her, I tell you! She was wandering the woods between here and Dunstone, grazing among the trees. She was without an owner – I thought he may have been thrown and injured or killed, maybe miles away, so I brought the mare back here for safe keeping until she was claimed.’
‘Ha! A likely story. Did you make any effort to find the owner? This man who may have been thrown from his horse and injured or killed?’
The reeve was silent.
‘When did you “find” this animal?’
‘Er, about a week ago … a week last Sunday. I was taking my ease and walking to Dunstone to visit the reeve there.’