‘Why dig for a badger in the middle of an open pasture, boy?’
Simon looked back innocently. ‘We’ve had our turnips dug up at night — some with claw marks on them. I saw a hole, so I thought maybe I could raise a badger if I made it a bit bigger and sent the dog down there.’
John believed this as much as he believed that the moon was made of cheese, but decided to give the youth the benefit of the doubt. Just then, the silent girl padded barefoot into the room with a grubby board on which was a loaf cut into half a dozen chunks, together with a heap of sliced mutton. She wiped her running nose with her fingers, then handed out the bread to each of the visitors, leaving the meat board on the ring of stones around the fireplace.
‘So what did you find instead of your badger?’ demanded de Wolfe.
The young man hawked in his throat and spat on the floor before replying. ‘The turf had fallen in, because there was a hollow underneath. All that bloody rain had made holes everywhere, washing out the soil below. I stuck my spade in and straightway it hit something hard.’
‘An old box, it was,’ broke in Henry. ‘A bit rotten, but it was oak with some iron bands, so it kept together, just about.’
‘Where is it now?’ asked Gwyn.
‘In the church, only safe place we’ve got. The parson is guarding it himself.’
The coroner had less faith than the reeve in the honesty of parish priests, but recognised that there were few secure places in a remote hamlet like Cadbury. He drank down the rest of his ale and put the remnants of his crust down, together with the mutton, conscious that the little girl was eyeing it hungrily, waiting for them to go in the hope that something would be left for her.
He rose and jerked his head at Thomas and the still-champing Gwyn. ‘Let’s go and look this great treasure, then.’
Across the village green, the little Saxon church stood forlornly within its ring of old yews. It was stone built, but hardly more than a large room, with a small arched belfry perched on one end of the roof, which was made of overlapping flat stones. The inside was almost bare, a hard-packed earth floor leading up to a small apse where a table covered with a cloth did service as an altar, supporting a bronze cross and a pair of wooden candlesticks. The walls were whitewashed and some crude coloured paintings of biblical scenes were placed between the slit windows. More recent coatings of white lime had blurred the edges of some of the pictures, where the brush of a careless painter had slipped.
Squatting on the edge of the wooden platform that supported the altar was a thin figure dressed in a rough hessian smock, belted around his waist so that the hem came above his bandy knees. Wooden-soled working shoes were on the ends of his spindly legs and the only indication that this was the parish priest and not another villein from the fields was his shaven tonsure. A long-handled shovel, its wooden blade edged with an iron strip, leaned against the wall near by, increasing the impression that this was just a bald-headed labourer.
He climbed to his feet as the coroner’s party entered. Thomas was in the rear, crossing himself as he genuflected to the altar.
‘This is Michael, priest of St Mary’s, Crowner,’ said the reeve. ‘He has cared for this box since it was found.’ The priest was a slender man of about thirty, who to John’s eyes looked chronically ill, his eyes sunken in deep sockets above a wasted face where the cheekbones stuck as if in a skull.
‘Forgive my appearance, sir,’ he said in a surprisingly deep and firm voice. ‘But my pastoral duties in a place like this are light and I must work in the fields with my flock if we are to avoid starvation next winter, after this terrible year.’
De Wolfe was well aware that many priests, especially in tiny parishes with a scanty living, had to work hard to feed themselves, but this man seemed to be killing himself with toil. However, this was none of his business, although he determined to ask John de Alençon when he returned to Exeter, why the inordinately rich Church seemed indifferent to the poverty of many of its servants.
‘You will want to see the thing that young Simon discovered. I have placed it in the aumbry for safe-keeping. It is the only place in the village that possesses a lock!’
He led them to the north side of the semicircular apse where there was a large chest, made of blackened planks secured with large iron nails. He fished a large key from a pouch on his belt and opened the crude lock, pushing back the lid with a creak to reveal what was inside. A chalice, paten and cruet of a poor-quality mix of tin and silver were stored there between celebrations of the Mass, along with a breviary and a manual, the only sacred books the priest possessed. These had been pushed to one end of the chest and de Wolfe saw that most of the space was taken up with a battered box, with crumbly soil still adhering to its rough sides.
He motioned to the brawny Gwyn, who lifted it out with a grunt and dropped it on the edge of the dais.
‘Bloody heavy, that!’ he said, getting a poisonous glance from Thomas for using such language in the house of God.
He squatted alongside the box, almost nose to nose with the coroner on the other side. Usually they adopted this pose across a corpse, so this made a novel change.
‘It’s just a box, not a proper chest,’ observed the Cornishman.
The object that the lad had dug from the side of the mound was about four hands-spread long and three wide and deep. It seemed to be made of thick boards, now brittle and split, but was held together by two bands of thin beaten iron, almost completely rusted through. The remnants of a few nails were visible at the edges, where the boards had originally been butted together to make a rough box.
The reeve stooped above them, pointing at one end. ‘We saw silver coins through that broken part, so we didn’t go any farther.’
John again thought that the honesty of the Cadbury inhabitants was remarkable, but the next words of Michael the priest tempered his opinion a little.
‘I was up at the top of the fields when Simon came running from the mound. I stopped him and he took me back to show me what he had found. When we walked back to the road, we found that Robert Hereward was drinking ale after visiting his mill to collect the dues. He was the one who first saw the treasure through that crack and told us to report it straightway to you, Crowner.’
De Wolfe wondered whether the villagers, including their priest, would have been so honest if the manor-lord had not happened to be on the scene.
‘Where is Robert now?’ he asked.
‘He said he would come down here as soon as you arrived,’ replied Michael. ‘I sent a boy up there to tell him when I heard your horses coming.’
John turned his attention back to the box. A gap in the clouds must have passed overhead at that moment, as a shaft of sunlight struck through one of the narrow window slits and illuminated it in an eerie fashion.
‘Can you get the top off, Gwyn?’
His officer reached behind to his belt and pulled out a large dagger. Putting the thick blade flat under one of the fragile bands, he levered up and the parchment-thin metal snapped in a shower of rust. He did the same to the other one, then prised up the rotting remains of the top boards. Shreds of a decomposed linen bag failed to hide the closely packed coins that filled the box. Most were tarnished to a deep grey colour, but when the coroner disturbed them with his fingers, those beneath, which had been lying tightly face to face, showed the brighter glint of silver.
‘There’s another bag underneath,’ said Michael, jabbing a finger at the mass of coins. Where John had moved some aside, the top of a more intact pouch could be seen, tied with a thong. When de Wolfe pulled, it ripped, but enough material came up to reveal a leather purse.