Having now established that the mummified body on Hackford Tor was that of Aelfgar, the coroner’s clerk set off for Sampford Spiney, complacently satisfied with the first part of his mission. This small village was the nearest to where the corpse had lain and the coroner had ordered his clerk to inquire covertly as to whether Aelfgar had been seen there in the recent past.
Thomas took directions from the priest in Totnes and rode north to Buckfastleigh, where he claimed a meal in the abbey, and carried on north-west over the most remote part of southern Dartmoor. Following further advice from the abbey cellarer, a locally born monk, he followed an ancient trackway known as the Abbot’s Way, which wound through a brown, desolate wilderness of dying bracken, heather and rock. All afternoon, the lonely little man rode up and down hillocks, through scrub-covered valleys and across bare plateaux of withered grass, keeping to an ill-defined pathway worn by shepherds and rare travellers such as himself.
Before the track reached the road across the moor from the Widecombe direction to Tavistock, he took the cellarer’s advice and turned west to cross Walkhampton Common. There were no signs or markers, apart from occasional stone cairns at intersections of pathways, and navigation was almost as difficult as on the sea, even in this clear weather. Twice he was lucky enough to come across a shepherd who gave directions, vague though they were, as most inhabitants of the county spent their lifetimes without going outside the boundaries of their own manor.
The wind, relentlessly whistling across from eastern England and the northern sea beyond, cut through his threadbare cloak and the nondescript garments underneath. He had a sack wound round his chest, tied on with cord, but his hands and feet were perished by the time he skirted Ingra Tor and came to the edge of a wooded valley that looked across to the hamlet of Sampford Spiney on the other side.
It was near dusk and he had been riding since dawn, apart from his brief rests at Totnes and Buckfastleigh. The fatigue ached through his bones and his backside was sore from sitting side-saddle on the back of the indefatigable mule.
He stopped for a moment, before setting the beast to scramble down the valley, through the little Walkham river and up the other side to the village. ‘What am I doing here?’ he asked himself, plaintively. A man with a good brain, who could read and write well, had been ordained as a priest and capable of high office in the Church, was now sitting in cold misery on the back of a flea-bitten mule in one of the most remote parts of England. All because of a momentary weakness of the flesh in Winchester, when the urge of his loins and the treachery of a female had ruined his life in a flash. He had no illusions about his physical failings, the crook back, the lazy eye and the bandy legs, but did God have to hand him losing cards every time? Was there nothing in him that was worthy of some commendation, at least a little comfort? Why was he always the butt of jokes, being pushed aside by Gwyn and peremptorily ordered about by John de Wolfe?
He was a good clerk – who else could write as fast or with such clarity? He was not evil, however unprepossessing he might look. He hated violence, he loved God and his Church, though not to excess. He even liked children and beasts, rare virtues in such a cruel and violent age – and yet he was treated like a leper or a beggar by most who knew him.
Sometimes he contemplated suicide, but knew he would never do it – not only because it would be a sin against God and lead to everlasting damnation, but because he was too squeamish to carry out any violent act.
All these were familiar thoughts, which came to him every day or two. He tried to be positive and look on the credit side. At least Crowner John had been persuaded to take him on as his clerk and not let him starve in the street. Also he had the benefit of sharing a mean lodging in the cathedral close, thanks to the Archdeacon’s influence.
Thomas sighed and kicked the old mule into motion, letting it pick its way down through the trees to splash through the river towards Sampford Spiney and the next stage of their investigation.
The next afternoon, a figure in the grey-white habit of a Cistercian monk walked slowly into the village of Peter Tavy. He had a long staff, recently cut from a hazel thicket, and when he begged food and a night’s lodging at the manor house, he said that he was returning to Sutton, near Plymouth, from a pilgrimage to St David’s in Wales.
The seneschal, the household bailiff, sent him over to one of the lean-to sheds against the tattered palisade, which housed the kitchen. He thought it odd that a monk should seek hospitality in a manor, when the huge monastery of St Mary and St Rumon was only an hour’s walk down the valley at Tavistock, but soon dismissed it from his mind, thinking that perhaps Cistercians had some dispute with the Benedictines.
In the kitchen, a lame young man and two giggling girls were preparing food for the evening meal in the hall. They were amiable enough and gave the monk generous helpings of boiled vegetables, coarse bread and slices of salt ham, washed down with the inevitable watery beer.
Always curious about travellers and eager for any news of the unknown world beyond their village, the cooks plied him with questions about his journey. Blessed with a fertile imagination, he lied endlessly to satisfy their curiosity, for he had never been nearer St David’s than Glastonbury.
Between their gossiping, the little man in the grey habit managed to slip in a few of his own questions and when Thomas, for of course it was he, bedded down on some clean straw in a corner of the undercroft later that evening, he was satisfied with his intelligence-seeking. He lay wrapped in the monk’s thick garment, worn over his own clothes, and felt warmer than he had for two days, especially as a glowing charcoal fire burned in the centre of the undercroft. A dozen other men and some children slept or talked around him, mostly house-serfs or manor workers who had no dwellings of their own.
Thomas stared out of one of the openings in the wall at the starlit sky, brilliantly clear in the threatened first frost of the year, and rehearsed the tale he would tell Crowner John when he returned to Exeter tomorrow.
At Sampford Spiney he had sought out the local priest, a fat, indolent man whose main interest was ale and cider rather than his pastoral duties. Thomas had claimed to be a priest on his way to take up a church in a remote part of Cornwall, posted there by the Bishop of Exeter. Knowing all the personalities and the ways of the Church, it was easy for him to get away with this fabrication to a largely ignorant and certainly uninterested colleague.
He wheedled a night’s lodging, which entailed having little food but an excess of drink, which loosened the tongue of his host to a satisfactory degree. Before they fell on to their hay-filled pallets in the single-roomed house attached to the wooden church, Thomas had extracted all that was known in Sampford Spiney about the dead man Aelfgar.