Crowner's Crusade (25 page)

John and Ralph went with him to assist the pair of nuns, who were clutching each other as they sat in the dirt. One was elderly and was muttering prayers with her eyes firmly shut, while her companion was a much younger woman, doing her best to console her sister-in-God.

‘Are you hurt, ladies?' asked John gently, looking at their torn habits and the dirt on their white wimples.

The younger one smiled bravely and shook her head. ‘Thank you, sir, not wounded, but bruised and shaken from being pitched from that litter.'

The soldiers had now managed to force the fallen horses to their feet and as they struggled up, the covered litter, supported by long poles slung between the harnesses, righted itself. Leaving Justin and two of the other servants to get the two nuns back aboard, John and Ralph went to assess the damage to the ecclesiastical party.

‘The priest is stone dead, I fear,' growled Gwyn, who was standing over the inert shape of a fat, middle-aged cleric. ‘He's had a blow on the head that's stove in his skull.'

The other injured man was one of the cathedral servants, who had suffered a severe blow from a mace to his shoulder and chest. ‘His arm's broken and I think some ribs are stove in,' announced Gabriel. ‘But he should live, if we get him back to the cathedral infirmary.'

Gwyn had appointed himself gaoler to the two injured robbers, as he had grabbed the one with the broken shoulder and dragged him across to lie in the weeds of the verge, alongside the man with the arrow still projecting from his chest. This one was already
in extremis,
being semi-conscious and gasping for breath as blood began bubbling from his mouth. The other one was bleeding from a wound across the top of his shoulder. He was moaning with pain, but Gwyn felt that his shifty eyes were looking for a chance to leap up and make a run for the trees.

Meanwhile, John went across to the litter to see how the two nuns were faring. They had been helped back into the long, hammock-like device which had a tent-like roof and side curtains. The younger one, who sat behind the one with the thin, lined face, again thanked their rescuers, but was herself crying at the death of their priestly colleague.

‘Father Edward was escorting us to Glastonbury, where we are to join the community of sisters at the abbey,' she sniffed. ‘We have come from Tavistock, stopping at Buckfast Abbey and Polsloe Priory in Exeter. We left there several hours ago, with a new escort kindly arranged by the Archdeacon.'

Justin, the man from the cathedral, told John that Father Edward was a canon of Tavistock Abbey and had been killed when he tried to stop one of the outlaws seizing the purse of silver he carried for expenses on the journey.

Within a quarter of an hour, order had been restored and Ralph Morin announced that he would take the travellers back to Exeter, escorted by his men. ‘We can take the ladies to Polsloe, where the injured fellow can be treated.'

Polsloe was a small convent a mile outside the city, run by a few sisters whose main function was medical care, especially of women's ailments. John said that he would stay with Gwyn and deal with the two remnants of the robber band, one dead, one alive. After the cavalcade had gone, they went to stand over the survivor, a skinny fellow of about thirty, dressed in a dirty red tunic with gold embroidery, obviously stolen from a previous victim. He had a few blackened teeth in his mouth, visible when he cursed both of them, using some of the foulest language that even the campaign-hardened de Wolfe had ever heard.

Gwyn gave him a hefty kick in the ribs as he lay in the grass. ‘Keep that filthy tongue in your head, you murdering bastard!' he growled. ‘Or use it to say your last prayers for killing a priest and attacking nuns!'

‘Are you going to kill me here and now?' snarled the man.

John looked down at him with distaste. ‘You're going to die, that's for sure – either at the end of a rope or having your head taken off.'

‘That's the best way,' said Gwyn. ‘We can get five shillings bounty for it if we take it to the sheriff.' In an undertone, he added: ‘If we had a sheriff.'

John knew he could not bring himself to kill the man in cold blood. Since Acre, where he had seen several thousand Saracen prisoners beheaded in a mass execution, he could not contemplate the act, even though it was perfectly legal for anyone to kill an outlaw on sight. ‘There's some rope on my saddlebow, Gwyn. Tie his hands and he can walk back to Rougemont behind your horse. If he can't keep up, just drag him along, it's far less than he deserves.'

‘What about the corpsed one?' asked Gwyn, as the arrowed victim was now well and truly dead.

‘Leave him, like the ones in Haldon Forest. Our furry friends will soon get rid of him.'

In spite of their threats, the two horsemen went at a sedate pace back to Exeter, so that the prisoner could keep up with them without falling down and being dragged. Exhausted, he toiled up the slope to the castle and was hauled over to the keep, where the prison was situated in the undercroft. This was the basement, partly underground and completely separated from the upper levels. The only entrance to the keep itself was up the wooden stairs to the main door on the first floor, a safety measure in case of siege.

The warder was an evil, obese Saxon called Stigand, a sadistic man of low mentality who was both gaoler, torturer and storeman. The undercroft, a gloomy vault bounded by the slimy stone arches that supported the upper storeys, was divided in half by a rusty iron fence into an area which held the stinking cells, the rest being storage. Stigand lived here, in a foul nest under one of the arches, where a mattress accompanied a brazier that both cooked his food and heated the branding irons and ploughshares for Ordeals.

Gwyn untied his prisoner, who claimed to be Arnulf of Devizes, and prodded him down the few steps that led from the inner ward into the semi-darkness of the undercroft.

Stigand appeared from his den, his waxy face and piggy eyes gloating with anticipation. ‘I heard from the others who came back just now, that you were bringing an outlaw. Is he to hang straight away or do you want me to first make him suffer a little?'

‘Just put him in a cell until we know what's to happen to him,' snapped de Wolfe, who could not stand the sight of the foul custodian.

Before Arnulf was pulled away towards a gate in the iron stockade, he pointed a finger of his uninjured arm at John's belt. ‘How did you get hold of that, then?' he croaked. ‘I've only seen one like that before, a dragon in a circle.'

Surprised, John held up a hand to stop Stigand tugging at the prisoner. ‘Where did you see it?' he demanded, putting a thumb behind his belt to push Roger Smale's buckle forwards.

Arnulf shrugged indifferently, with the desperate bravado of a man already marked for execution. ‘I'm going to be hanged whatever happens, so I may as well tell you. It was on the belt of a man we slew, up Crediton way. Never seen a design like that before.'

‘When was this? Another highway robbery?'

Arnulf shook his head wearily. ‘No, it was a bit unusual, that killing. A month or two back, our leader, Walter Hamelin, was paid to ambush a certain man, kill him and steal any parchments he might be carrying.'

Gwyn gave the man a hefty push in the chest, which made him howl, as his arm was dangling uselessly by his side. ‘Are you spinning us some bloody yarn?' growled the Cornishman. ‘It sounds like a pack of lies. Who would pay for such a killing?'

Arnulf cringed as Gwyn raised his fist again. ‘It's the truth, I tell you. On my dear mother's grave, I swear it! Walter was told a few days before that this man would be travelling alone down from Crediton and we were to lie in wait for him and slay him. He described him as a fair-headed fellow, riding a big strawberry roan.'

‘So who ordered it and what happened to any documents you found?' demanded John. ‘How did he know how to meet your leader, this bastard Walter you speak of?'

‘I don't know, it was privy to Walter and this young man who ordered it. Walter got a bag of silver, that I do recollect, for he gave the rest of us each five pence as our share, though it was Walter himself as cut his throat. We just grabbed him off his horse and threw his body into the river.'

‘So who was this young man you speak of, you cold-blooded swine?' persisted John, glowering at the self-confessed murderer's accomplice.

Arnulf sagged, seeing any hope of earning himself a reprieve fading. ‘Some smart fellow, looked like a knight's squire. He met Walter at some arranged place on the road, but I know that Walter had seen him before in Crediton. Though an outlaw like the rest of us, he was always sloping off into town.'

‘Do you know this squire's name or where he was from?' shouted Gwyn, thrusting his ferocious face towards the man.

‘Never heard his name, but I did catch that he had to take these bits of written parchment back to Berry when he came again to see if Walter had carried out his task.'

‘Berry? You mean Pomeroy's castle near Totnes?' snapped John, alert now that names were being named.

Arnulf tried to shrug, but his shoulder was too painful. ‘I don't know, it was no concern of mine. I got my few pence, that's all I cared about.'

More questions drew nothing useful and the doomed man was dragged off by Stigand to spend the short remainder of his miserable life in a rat-infested cell with a slate slab as a bed and leather bucket for his ablutions.

John and Gwyn went up to the floor above and sought out Ralph Morin, who was eating and drinking to fortify himself after their escapade at the forest's edge. John told him of what Arnulf had said and the castellan whistled through his beard at its significance.

‘So now you've got something you can tell Hubert Walter! If that squire was from Berry, then it incriminates Henry de la Pomeroy, which is no great surprise.'

The de la Pomeroys were a widespread dynasty named after their apple orchards in Normandy, whose early members had come over to fight with William of Falaise at the Battle of Hastings and as a reward, had vast tracts of land given them in several parts of England. The present lord in the south-west was Henry, whose main residence was at Berry Pomeroy Castle, twenty miles south-west of Exeter. He was known to be a keen supporter of the Count of Mortain and had fortified the island of St Michael's Mount at the extreme end of Cornwall, to act as one of the prince's strongholds.

‘The Justiciar will already be well aware of Henry's partiality to John,' observed de Wolfe. ‘But for him to slay a king's servant and steal his dispatches must surely be a new development, suggesting that the prince is contemplating open revolt again.'

The constable agreed and said that he would get an urgent report drafted by his clerk and send it to Hubert Walter by a herald who was due to return to Winchester in the next few days.

‘What about this Walter Hamelin, who was the actual killer, according to that piece of scum down below?' asked Gwyn.

John rasped a finger over his black stubble. ‘Yes, he deserves a rope around his neck, too. That Arnulf says he visits Crediton openly, so maybe one of these days we can spare a few hours to flush him out!'

The murder of Roger Smale preyed on John's mind, especially now that they knew the name of his killer, as well as a strong suspicion that it was done at the behest of Prince John.

He thought about it during that night as he lay in bed, with Matilda snoring a few feet away under the heavy coverlet. What was the point of hanging little rogues, when those higher in the chain went unpunished? Hubert Walter had asked him to keep his ear to the ground in the West Country, but when something happened, there was no one in authority to take any action. John turned over restlessly and decided that Roger Smale must not rot away unavenged under his mound of damp earth outside the cathedral.

Next morning, he went back to the undercroft at Rougemont and ordered Stigand to let him into the cells. Grumbling at being interrupted while frying his breakfast of eggs and bread on a skillet over the branding brazier, the gaoler opened the outer gate for him and went back to his crude cooking. The half-dozen rusty cages inside the prison area were empty apart from Arnulf's and John strode down to glare in at the solitary occupant. The outlaw was sitting dejectedly on the slate slab that served as his bed, his feet in the sodden, filthy straw that covered the floor, watching a pair of rats squabbling over some refuse in the corner. It was dark, cold and stinking and although John was hardened to misery, he felt that a man's last days in a condemned cell need not be as cruel as this.

The man looked up listlessly as he became aware of someone outside his cell. ‘What do you want now?' he rasped. ‘Have you come to gloat over me?'

De Wolfe folded his arms and stared at the prisoner. ‘I need some more information about this man you spoke of, this Walter Hamelin.'

This seemed to spur Arnulf out of his apathy and he scowled angrily at the tall man in the long grey tunic, a broadsword slung at his waist. ‘Why should I? What's in it for me? You're going to gibbet me whatever happens.'

‘Listen to me! Only God knows when the justices will come to try you, it may be months yet,' growled John. ‘Do you want to stay as filthy as this for all that time?' He gestured at the dirty pan of drinking water, in which floated soiled straw and rat droppings – and at the slop bucket, overturned under the slate slab.

‘What choice do I have?' snarled Arnulf. ‘I'd like to kill myself, but there's no way of managing that in here.'

‘Tell me what I want to know and I'll get that evil bastard out there to give you clean straw and a blanket. I'll even bribe the swine to get you some food that would at least be fit for dogs.'

The outlaw looked suspiciously at his visitor, then decided that he had nothing to lose and possibly something to gain. ‘What do you want to know?' he muttered.