As de Wolfe sat gloomily before the fire, staring into the flames while replaying these events in his mind, his wife regarded him steadily through cold eyes. She, too, regretted her marriage, wishing more strongly every day that she had entered a nunnery. As the disappointments of life mounted with every passing year, she found increasing solace in worshipping God. She had discovered early in her marriage that she disliked almost every aspect of her wifely duties, from going to the market to the expected humiliation in bed. Yet she still had the urge for social advancement, drilled into her by her mother, who had single-mindedly schemed towards the best matches for her three children. She had managed to marry her son Richard off to Lady Eleanor de Clavelle, who was distantly related to the great Mortimer dynasty, and was satisfied, too, with the deal she had struck with Simon de Wolfe for his son to marry Matilda, even though John was six years younger.
The de Wolfes had two manors near the coast, at Stoke-in-Teignhead and Holcombe, and both Matilda and her late mother had hoped that the warrior John might rise high in the service of the King. That ambition peaked with the Lionheart’s capture when John returned home, exhausted and disillusioned. At forty it was not easy to find a war to fight, so he had been persuaded to accept the coroner’s appointment — especially as his beloved king and Hubert Walter were keen for him to take it.
Now Matilda looked at this long dark man, brooding at her fireside — and wondered if she had ever really known him. Unusually tall and spare, he was slightly stooped, and gave most men the impression that he was hovering over them. His long black hair, which curled down on to his neck, framed a somewhat morose, saturnine face with bushy jet eyebrows and a great hooked nose. He had no beard or moustache, but always had a dark stubble between his weekly shaves. He dressed in nothing but black or grey, which, with his great crow’s head, had long earned him the nickname ‘Black John’ in the armies.
Now, he was hunched over the fire, his mind somewhere on the battlefields of Palestine or Ireland, and Matilda found it hard to believe that she had ever loved him. Maybe the transient affection she had felt for him sixteen years ago had been a hysterical self-deception whipped up by her mother’s persuasive tongue. Within a month he had left her for the French campaigns and in the succeeding thirteen years he had been at home for little more than twelve months. Their love-life had been a disaster and thankfully, as far as she was concerned, their infrequent and embarrassing couplings had not resulted in children. Yet he was a passionate man, as his rather full lips suggested, and Matilda was well aware of his healthy sexual appetite, which he satisfied with a succession of mistresses, of whom the latest was that Welsh whore down at the Bush Inn.
Almost as if reading her thoughts, her husband suddenly rose to his feet. ‘I have to go to my chamber at the castle,’ he said gruffly. ‘There may have been deaths reported since I left yesterday.’ He felt an overwhelming desire to get out into the air again, away from her glowering presence.
‘Are you sure that it’s to Rougement you’re going?’ she sneered. ‘Not down to that alehouse in Idle Lane?’
Her accurate deduction so nettled him that he altered his plans just to confound her. ‘I said the castle and that’s where I’ll be. I’ll even call on that scheming brother of yours and bring him back to our table.’
Feeling self-righteous, even though he had deprived himself of a visit to Nesta, his mistress, he stalked out, taking a short mantle and street shoes from the vestibule before he stepped into the street. A moment later, he rapped on the outside of the window shutters as a defiant signal that he was turning left towards the high street, rather than right for the Bush Inn.
There was indeed news of a fresh death to be investigated when de Wolfe reached his office. This miserable chamber was at the top of the tall gatehouse of Exeter’s castle, called Rougemont from the red stone of which William the Bastard had built it soon after the Conquest. The castle was on the high ground at the northern corner of the city, in an angle of the walls originally built by the Romans. John laboured up the steep, twisting stairs of the gatehouse and pushed through the sacking that hung as a feeble draught-excluder over the doorway at the top. He was confronted by a giant of a man waving a slab of cheese in one hand and a jug of rough cider in the other.
‘We’ve got a new corpse to look at, Crowner,’ he announced. ‘An odd one, too.’
John lowered himself on to a bench behind a trestle table, virtually the only furniture in the bare room apart from a couple of three-legged milking stools. He looked up at his henchman, a huge man with wild red hair and a great drooping moustache to match. What could be seen of his face through the gingery foliage was roughened and red, with a glowing bulbous nose and a massive lantern jaw. The hands that held the cheese and pot were the size of hams, yet his forbidding appearance was lightened by a pair of twinkling blue eyes.
‘What’s so odd about it, Gwyn?’ demanded his master.
‘A dead tinner — beheaded in his own stream-working.’
De Wolfe’s black eyebrows rose, almost meeting the fringe that hung over his forehead. ‘A tinner? That’s unusual. That lot usually look after their own affairs.’
‘The bailiff from Chagford, Justin Green, rode in early this morning,’ said Gwyn, banging his cider pot down on the table. ‘He’s over in the keep now, getting some food, if you want to talk to him.’
‘Give me some of that cider first. Arguing with my wife has given me a thirst.’
The big Cornishman lumbered to a small alcove built into the thickness of the wall, took down another pottery mug and wiped the dust from it with a grubby rag. He poured into it a murky stream of rough cider until it slopped over the brim. In the same alcove was a loaf of bread and some more hard cheese, wrapped in a slightly less soiled cloth. Gwyn slid his dagger from his belt, cut two hunks of bread and divided the cheese into three, offering some to his master.
‘Better keep some for that little turd when he arrives,’ he grumbled, referring to their clerk, the third member of the coroner’s team.
‘Where is he? He’s usually here by this time.’
‘Gone down to the cathedral scriptorium, to cadge some ink. He complained that it was too expensive to buy, given all the work he has to do.’
De Wolfe stretched out his long legs under the table, then shivered in the dank air of the spartan chamber as Gwyn settled himself on a window-sill. A pair of unshuttered slits looked down on the city, letting both light and a cold draught into the room. The sheriff had grudgingly provided the worst accommodation he could find for his brother-in-law, to emphasise his opposition to the new post of coroner.
‘Tell me about this Chagford business,’ he ordered, biting into the rough horse-bread.
‘The overman of a gang of stream-workers was found dead yesterday morning when the men arrived. His body was lying under the washing trough, but he had no head.’
‘Was it nearby?’
‘Not a sign of it, not within the workings.’
De Wolfe scowled — he often did so, as an aid to thought. ‘Were they sure it was the overman, if he had no face?’
Gwyn pulled at the ends of his bushy red moustache, which hung down to his collar-bones. ‘No doubt about it. The men recognised his clothes, and he had a finger missing from his left hand, so the bailiff says. He never returned home to his wife the previous night nor has he been seen since.’
The coroner pondered this. ‘Who does the working belong to?’
‘Walter Knapman of Chagford. He has at least a dozen stream-works on the east side of the moor.’
‘Did they leave the body there?’
‘His men hauled it from the trough, it seems. But they had the sense to leave it at the workings in a hut.’
John swallowed his bread and cheese and finished off his cider before rising to his feet. ‘We’ll have to go there today. I’ve got the sheriff coming to eat at the house first, but we’ll leave in the early afternoon.’ He walked to the doorway and bent his head under the lintel. ‘Find that bailiff — and that scrawny clerk of ours — and be at the West Gate well before the Vespers bell. We’ll be away from home again tonight, which’ll give my dear wife something more to whine about.’