Crowner Royal (Crowner John Mysteries) (3 page)

‘Still, I’m glad we’re out of that bloody palace,’ persisted the big Cornishman. ‘The airs and graces of that lot got right up my nose!’

John grunted, his favourite form of response. ‘Thomas seems to enjoy it, though he always loved being with all those damned clerks and priests. But I agree, it’s easier being in our own dwelling.’ He had rented the cottage to get away from the stifling atmosphere of the palace staff quarters where they had spent the first week.

They finished up their stew and waited for Osanna to waddle in and take away their bowls to the kitchen hut in the backyard. The wife of their obsequious landlord Aedwulf, Osanna was an immensely fat woman who did the cooking, washing and perfunctory cleaning of the house in Long Ditch.

As they sat on their stools in expectation of the next course, John went over yet again in his mind the events of the past two months. He was not all that happy with what had taken place, but he consoled himself with the thought that he had had no choice. As a knight of the Crown, he had little option but to obey orders – especially when they came directly from the mouth of his king! For more than eighteen months, he had been the coroner for Devon, but Richard the Lionheart in his wisdom had recently decided that he needed a coroner dedicated to the English court, similar to the one that existed in his Normandy capital of Rouen. Given the past association of de Wolfe with the king and his chief minister Hubert Walter, John had been the obvious choice, so now here he was in Westminster, like it or not.

The move had coincided with an upheaval in his private life, as his mistress Nesta had despaired of any future for them together and gone home to Wales to get married. His surly wife Matilda, equally exasperated by his infidelities, had once again taken herself to a nunnery and this time seemed determined to stay there. To round off the situation, he had resumed his affair with an old flame, Hilda of Dawlish, though distance now seemed to have frustrated this particular liaison.

Gwyn’s deep voice broke through his reverie.

‘We could do with a couple of good murders or a rape to cheer us up, Crowner!’ he boomed, only half in jest. ‘Too damned quiet in this holy village.’

He was referring to the small town of Westminster, which was a unique enclave ruled by the abbot, William Postard. Though geographically part of the county of Middlesex, it lay outside its jurisdiction on both religious and political grounds, as it contained both the great abbey of Edward the Confessor and the Royal Palace, the residence of the Norman kings since William the Conqueror had moved out of the Great Tower.

De Wolfe grunted his agreement, as the caseload so far had been derisory compared with the number they had dealt with across the large county of Devon. He wondered again why the king had been so insistent on having a ‘Coroner of the Verge’, when there seemed so little business for him.

Osanna came in with a platter containing a boiled salmon, which the two men looked at with resignation. It was Tuesday, not a Friday fish day and they had already had salmon twice in the past week. The fish was so plentiful in the Thames and its tributaries that it appeared on the menu with depressing regularity. However, they were hungry and there were buttered carrots and onions to go with it, as well as more fresh bread.

‘I’ve got eels for tomorrow, you’ll like those!’ she announced cheerfully, ignoring the glowering look from the coroner. Her accented English was strange after the West Country dialect, but he understood her well enough to be depressed by the prospect of yet another meal dredged from the river.

‘A nice leg of mutton or a joint of beef wouldn’t come amiss!’ grumbled Gwyn, as he filtered the last of his stew through the luxuriant ginger moustache that hung down both sides of his mouth, the colour matching the unruly mop of hair on his head. The Cornishman was huge, both in height and width, with a prominent red nose and pair of twinkling blue eyes.

His colouring was in marked contrast to that of his lean master, who though as tall as Gwyn, exuded blackness, from the jet of his long, swept-back hair to the stubble on his gaunt cheeks. Heavy eyebrows of the same hue overhung deep-set eyes, between which was a hooked nose that gave him the menacing appearance of a predatory hawk. To complete this sombre appearance, his long tunics and surcoats were always black or grey. In campaigns in Ireland, France and the Holy Land, the troops had known him as ‘Black John’, though this was partly from the grim moods that could assail him when things went wrong.

When they had finished their meal, the two men buckled on their sword belts and left their rented house, one of several two-storey thatched cottages facing a muddy channel known as the Long Ditch, which drained into a stream called the Clowson Brook. At the southern end, the track joined the ominously named Thieving Lane, which curved around the landward side of the abbey towards the river. Here the main gates to the abbey and the palace stood together, at the point where King Street formed the start of the ‘Royal Way’ which led along the river towards the bustling city of London, almost two miles away.

The great church of Edward the Confessor loomed above them on their right as they walked slowly towards the palace, where government administration was now largely centred, having been gradually transferred from the Saxon capital of Winchester. The heat was intense and dust lifted from the road as they walked. They took care to keep clear of the central stone-edged gully which was filled with a drying slurry of sewage and rubbish, now stinking in the summer sun.

The north side of the lane was lined with small houses and cottages, built either of planks or wattle-and-daub, mostly with roofs of thatch or wooden shingles. One or two better dwellings were stone-built, with tiled roofs which were less hazardous than straw or reeds, which had caused many disastrous town fires.

The heat was keeping some people indoors, but many remained on the streets. The busiest time was the early morning market, when people were out buying their food for the day, but there were still some haggling at the stalls that sold a whole range of goods. Handcarts and barrows trundled up and down and Gwyn and the coroner had to stand aside as a flock of goats were driven past on their way to the water meadows that lay beyond Tothill Street.

It was little more than a five-minute walk from their door to the palace and it was with some relief that they passed through the arched gate into New Palace Yard, where a sentry struck the butt of his pike on the ground in salute to the king’s coroner.

The palace was a rambling collection of buildings of various types and ages, the major feature being the huge hall built almost a century ago by the Conqueror’s son, William Rufus. Behind and to the sides of that, an extensive collection of stone and wooden buildings had sprung up without much attempt at organised planning. More buildings, stables and houses lay behind the hall, including another hall, a chapel and a large block which formed the king’s accommodation. This was largely unused, as Richard the Lionheart had spent barely a few months in the country during the whole of his reign, preferring to be across the Channel in Normandy or his homeland of Aquitaine. At the farther end, a wall and then the Tyburn stream demarcated the palace precinct from the marshy pastures beyond.

The coroner and his officer walked down the landward side past the great hall and turned into a small doorway in a two-storeyed stone building that housed the Chancery clerks. A gloomy corridor gave immediate relief from the heat; they pushed past worried-looking clerics clutching rolls of parchment as they scuttled between various offices.

‘I’m starting to get the hang of this place at last,’ muttered Gwyn. ‘For the first couple of weeks, I didn’t know where the bloody hell I was!’

He turned left at a junction in the passageway, walking with a sailor’s roll, a legacy of his youth as a fisherman. De Wolfe loped alongside him with characteristic long strides like the forbidding animal whose name he bore.

‘It’s very different from Rougemont,’ he agreed, thinking with some nostalgia of Exeter Castle where his brother-in-law, the former sheriff, had grudgingly allotted them an attic room in the gatehouse.

Another dozen yards brought them to another junction, but here a flight of stone stairs rose to the upper level. At the top, another corridor abruptly changed from stone to timber construction as they entered an older part of the palace. Clumping across the planks, Gwyn led the way to one of half a dozen doors set along a passage. They were now above and to the river side of the block housing the royal apartments.

Gwyn lifted the wooden latch and stood aside for his master to enter. Though there was a hasp and staple on the doorpost, there was no lock, as apparently it was felt that there was unlikely to be anything worth stealing in a coroner’s office.

‘It’s cooler in here, thank God,’ muttered de Wolfe. He strode across the almost bare room to the window, whose shutter was propped wide open on an iron hook. Leaning on the worn timber of the unglazed frames, he stared out at the river, whose brown waters flowed sluggishly past as the tide began to ebb.

A hundred paces away, the scrubby grass shelved down to a rim of dirty gravel at the edge of the water, but John knew that in a few hours the shallow river would shrink to half its width between wide stretches of thick mud. Indeed, only half a mile upstream, it was possible for carts and horses to cross at the lowest point of the tide.

‘Where’s our saintly clerk? Still saying his prayers, I suppose,’ grunted Gwyn, as he closed the door. The coroner turned away and sat behind his table to stare around the room. It shared one feature with their previous accommodation in Exeter – the sparsity of furniture. A bare trestle table occupied the centre, pitted and stained with years of spilt ink and aimless disfigurement with dagger points. John had a chair, a clumsy folding device with a leather back and on the opposite side of the table was a plank-like bench and two three-legged stools, which Gwyn had ‘acquired’ from a neighbouring empty room.

‘Thomas could have shared the house with us, but he obviously prefers the company of those monks and clerics across the road,’ observed de Wolfe. He said this without sarcasm or rancour, as after three years of dismal exclusion from his beloved Church after being defrocked, John did not begrudge his clerk’s delight in his recent reinstatement.

Gwyn pulled a stool over to the window and sat with his elbow on the sill, catching the slight breeze that came off the river.

‘I reckon we’d be more use back in Devon that sitting on our arses up here, Crowner,’ he growled. ‘Not even a decent hanging to attend!’

One of the coroner’s duties was attendance at all executions to record it and confiscate any property the felon might possess. But so far there had not been one hanging during the six weeks that they had been living in Westminster.

‘I don’t even know where the damned gallows is!’ complained the Cornishman, almost plaintively.

‘They’ve just started using a place up on the Tyburn stream, where it’s crossed by the Oxford road,’ replied John. ‘They strung up those rebels there a couple of months ago – William Longbeard and his followers. Now it’s used as much as the Smithfield elms.’

He was interrupted by a patter of feet on the boards of the passageway outside and the door opened to admit a scrawny young man with a slight hump on one shoulder. He wore a faded black cassock and his lank brown hair was shaved off the crown of his head to form a clerical tonsure. Thin and short of stature, Thomas de Peyne had a sharp nose and a receding chin, but this unprepossessing appearance hid an agile mind crammed with a compendious knowledge about all manner of subjects.

‘I regret my lateness, Crowner,’ he panted. ‘But the archivist engaged me in a discussion about the Venerable Bede and I could hardly detach myself from such an eminent man.’

De Wolfe grunted his indifference as Thomas hurriedly sat himself at the other side of the table. He scrabbled in his shapeless shoulder bag for his quills, ink horn and parchment, and set them on the table, ready to get on with copying the proceedings of a previous inquest on a child who had been crushed by the collapse of a wall in King Street.

‘Take your time over that, little fellow,’ rumbled Gwyn cynically. ‘There’s little else for you to write, so make it last!’

‘Gwyn is right, I’m afraid,’ agreed de Wolfe. ‘Our duties seem very light here. I’m beginning to wonder why the king was so keen to drag us away from Exeter.’

Thomas looked up from spreading a roll of parchment on the table and weighing down the curling ends with pebbles.

‘Sir, perhaps things will soon be different when the court moves away from Westminster into the shires.’

John detected a slight hint of smug satisfaction in the clerk’s voice and stared at him suspiciously. Thomas was always a mine of information, which had often proved useful to the coroner.

‘Going into the shires?’ he demanded. ‘Have you heard anything about that?’

‘It is common knowledge that the old queen is expected to arrive in the near future,’ answered de Peyne. ‘And I did overhear a suggestion that she wishes to progress with the whole court to visit her youngest son at Gloucester.’

There was a snort of disgust from across the room. ‘That bastard Lackland! Do we have to go anywhere near that treacherous swine?’ Gwyn turned and spat through the window to express his feelings about Prince John, Count of Mortain.

‘We must admit he’s kept his head down lately,’ conceded de Wolfe. ‘I think Hubert Walter has got his measure after all the problems John caused our king.’