De Wolfe shut the door behind him and walked reluctantly towards the fire, past the heavy oaken table flanked by benches. His feet slapped against the cold flagstones, an innovation demanded by his wife, who considered the usual rushes over beaten earth fit only for peasants. Brutus had slunk in craftily with him and now made for the hearth. He lay down with his face on his paws before a heap of glowing logs. His nose was almost on a pair of embroidered shoes, whose owner was sitting on a settle on the further side of the fireplace.
‘Out all night again, sir! I wonder what trollop suffered your favours this time?’ Matilda’s voice was vibrant, almost harsh, her thin-lipped mouth a slash across her square face. She sat bolt upright, her small eyes glaring at him from above the furrowed half-circles of lax skin that hung below the lower lids. Her sparse fair hair had been tortured into tight ringlets with hot tongs wielded by her French maid Lucille, and was further confined by a cap of silvered mesh squeezed over her head. She wore a long gown of blue wool over her stocky figure, covered by a surcoat of the same colour with a rabbit-fur collar against the draughts of early April.
Her husband ignored the taunt until he had sat down in a cowled monk’s chair set on the opposite side of the hearth. ‘As it happens, Matilda, I spent the night wrapped in my cloak, on the floor of de Warren’s hall in Crediton. And for sleeping companions, I had Gwyn, Thomas and half a dozen of de Warren’s servants. At least there was a good fire there and a decent meal before we left.’
Not put off her stride by his measured response, Matilda continued her attack. ‘You’ve been out of this house and my bed three nights this week, John. And last month, you were away for days on end, carousing about the north of the county, claiming that you were chasing pirates.’
‘Your own brother was with me then, with twenty of his men-at-arms, so I had little chance of carousing.’
She ignored this, and ranted on in full spate. ‘I might as well have stayed a spinster as bother to get married to you. I hardly saw you for the first thirteen years after we were wed.’
His sigh of resignation was interrupted by Mary, who bustled in with a stoneware jug of ale and a pint pot, which she set on the edge of the hearth. While her back was turned to her mistress, she winked at him, bobbed her head and hurried out.
‘I seem to have heard all this before, wife,’ de Wolfe answered mildly, pouring himself some ale.
‘And you’ll hear it again, until you see some sense,’ retorted Matilda. ‘I’ve been talking to Richard and we agree that something must be done.’
He took a deep draught of the sour ale and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘You’re the one who wanted me to become coroner — and you’ve complained ever since.’
His wife’s mouth clamped shut like a vice and she glared at him across the width of the great hearth. ‘I wanted you to become a coroner, not the coroner!’ she grated. ‘Your precious friend the Chief Justiciar proclaimed that three knights in every county were to be appointed — not just one!’
De Wolfe shrugged. ‘We couldn’t find three in Devon. You know as well as I do that Robert Fitzrogo was also appointed, but within a fortnight the damned fool had fallen from his horse and been killed. Since then, I’ve been stuck with the whole job, except when I was laid up with my broken leg.’
‘And that showed you weren’t indispensable,’ she flashed triumphantly. ‘For six weeks, the county got on quite well without you. You use all this traipsing about as an excuse for visiting aleshops and bawdy-houses. Well, this drinking and wenching will have to stop. Richard and I have decided upon it.’
It was de Wolfe’s turn to sit bolt upright — in sheer indignation. ‘You and your bloody brother have decided, have you? I presume it’s too much to ask what you and our dear sheriff have arranged for me?’
Matilda leaned forward, her prominent jaw jutting pugnaciously at him. ‘We’ve found another candidate for coroner — not making the full three, but certainly two are better than a solitary one. It will help keep you at home at nights.’
De Wolfe scowled at her over the brim of his pot. ‘You’ve found a new coroner? I thought that was the job of the King’s justices — not a provincial sheriff and his sister!’
His sarcasm was lost on Matilda, who now had the bit firmly between her teeth. ‘Don’t you want to know who we found?’ she demanded.
John grunted, staring suspiciously at her over his ale.
‘Theobald Fitz-Ivo!’ she cried triumphantly.
His eyes widened in scornful astonishment. ‘Ha! Not that drunken old fart from Frithelstock? He couldn’t investigate a penny lost in a privy!’
His wife bridled at his scornful response. ‘Beggars can’t be choosers — you need help and he lives in just the right place, near Torrington. He could cover the north of the county and leave the rest to you. God knows, that’s more than enough for one man, all of Dartmoor and the south and east.’
De Wolfe jumped up and paced back and forth in front of the hearth, waving his ale mug. ‘He must be well over fifty, fat and unfit. The man’s useless, he drinks like a fish. His manor, small though it is, depends entirely on his bailiff.’
‘He must be doing well enough — a coroner has to have at least twenty pounds a year to be eligible and he’s proved more than that to Richard. And Richard should know — he has to collect the taxes.’
If de Wolfe had not been so incensed about Fitz-Ivo, he might have taken the opportunity to suggest that not all the taxes the sheriff collected from the county ever reached the royal treasure chest in Winchester. ‘Theobald is a lazy, incompetent fool, who is almost too fat to get astride a horse, let alone travel the county like I do. And where’s he going to get a clerk who can read and write well enough to keep the coroner’s rolls, eh?’
Matilda shrugged her thick shoulders. ‘You can ask Richard. He’s coming to dinner to talk about it.’
De Wolfe groaned again. After a day away, an uncomfortable night sleeping on a floor and ten miles on horseback since dawn, the last thing he needed was the company of his odious brother-in-law at the midday meal. He sat down again and supped his ale silently, thinking what a disaster it had been for his late father, Simon, to insist on his marrying into the de Revelle family. It may have prodded him up one rung on the ladder of Devon county aristocracy and into a richer family than his own, but at what price?
That had been sixteen years ago, though John had managed to stay away from home for most of that time, in the French and Irish wars and later at the Third Crusade. But since coming home two years ago, soon after King Richard had been captured in Austria, he had found no excuse for chasing off to war. He had settled uneasily to his role as a gentleman of leisure, his income assured by his investment in a wool export business with Hugh de Relaga, one of Exeter’s most prominent burgesses, and by a share in the profit from the manors of his own family in the south of the county.
When the ambitious Matilda had suggested to her brother last autumn that her husband should be nominated as one of the new coroners, de Wolfe had been lukewarm about the idea. But Hubert Walter, Archbishop of Canterbury and Chief Justiciar of England, had welcomed him to the post with open arms — as had the Lionheart when he was told of it in Normandy. De Wolfe had been a staunch member of the King’s bodyguard in the Holy Land, where Hubert Walter had been left in military charge after Richard had sailed away on his disastrous voyage home. John had been with the King, and always blamed himself for his failure to prevent the capture of his monarch near Vienna — a débâcle that had plunged England into years of debt after she had raised a hundred and fifty thousand marks for his ransom.