Fear in the Forest (41 page)

‘No wonder the hounds were so excited,’ he said with his usual infuriating slowness in imparting information. ‘How long has this man been missing?’

A jabber of consternation broke out among the watchers as Gwyn held up his hand to show a piece of greenish skin stuck to his palm.

‘Is that human?’ demanded Guy Ferrars.

‘It slid off something with five fingers and a thumb!’ answered the Cornishman with black humour. ‘I think he’s in head first, with the legs under this earth.’ He clambered to his feet and pointed to the soil that was still piled below the hole. Now the baron snapped into activity, shouting orders at his retainers, while de Wolfe and his henchman stood and watched. The dogs were called off and three Lustleigh men energetically began scraping away the earth with pieces of wood. Within a couple of minutes one of them gave a yell and bent to brush away loose soil with his hand, exposing a bare foot. It was white and wrinkled but not decomposed, and very soon both legs were uncovered.

‘Can you drag it out now?’ demanded the manor-reeve, who was hovering over the three villagers. They dropped their branches and heaved on the ankles of the corpse. After a momentary hesitation, there was a minor avalanche of powdery earth and the body slid out of the hole, into which it had been pushed up to the knees, then covered with loose soil. One arm below the elbow had been exposed within the tunnel, and it was this that Gwyn had felt. The diggers brushed off most of the earth from the body and stood back to allow everyone to see the dead man.

‘There’s no doubt it’s William Gurnon,’ said the reeve. ‘He’s not too mortified, considering it’s a week since he died.’

‘The earth helps preserve them,’ said John de Wolfe, an expert on corpses. ‘Only that hand is green and slimy, because it was out in the air.’

‘Some animal, rats or a fox, must have unearthed it,’ added Gwyn, not to be outdone in matters of death. ‘All the tendons on the back have been laid bare where it’s been nibbled.’

Guy Ferrars was more interested in what had killed his servant, rather than the effects of death. ‘Have a look at him, de Wolfe. He’s a coroner’s responsibility now.’

John and his officer went into their familiar routine of examining the cadaver. As he squatted by the body. de Wolfe observed aloud that someone had already committed several offences, by failing to report a sudden death to him and by concealing the corpse from his view. A week’s hot weather had begun to affect the body, though as John had already pointed out, being buried in a cool wood had markedly slowed down putrefaction. The dead man wore a short tunic and knee-length breeches, his feet being bare. The upper garment had ridden up over his worn leather belt and the exposed belly was greenish and slightly swollen. His face was somewhat flattened from the weight of soil on it and the eyes were collapsed and opaque, but the features were still recognisable to the other men from Lustleigh.

‘Here’s the trouble, Crowner!’ said Gwyn, pointing to ominous brown staining on the neutral-coloured wool of the tunic. On both sides, coming around under the armpits, the staining was partly obscured by adherent loose soil, but when Gwyn rolled the corpse over, the whole of the back of the clothing, from shoulder blades down to waist, was stiff with dried blood. When the belt was removed and the tunic pulled right up, the cause was obvious.

‘Stabbed in the back – twice!’ barked Ferrars, who was peering over John’s shoulder.

‘Bloody cowards! Two with arrows in their backs, and now a knife in the same place,’ added his son belligerently.

The coroner traced out the two wounds with his finger. One was a few inches from the centre of the back on the right side, where the lower ribs began. It was two finger-breadths wide and shaped like a teardrop, with a sharply pointed lower end and a rounded top.

‘A single-edged knife, that!’ said Gwyn. ‘Quite a wide blade, too.’

‘Probably the same weapon did this other one,’ observed de Wolfe. He rested his forefinger alongside the second stab wound, which was slightly higher and in the exact centre of the back, over the knobs of the spine. It was half the length of the other, but had the same shape.

‘A tapered blade couldn’t go in so deeply, because of the bone underneath,’ he muttered, half to himself. He poked his finger into the hole to measure the depth and gave a short exclamation as he jerked his digit out again and examined the tip, which now had a small cut on it.

With a curse, he wiped it on the dead man’s coarse tunic, then sucked it vigorously, spitting repeatedly on to the ground.

‘Careful with that, Crowner!’ growled Gwyn. ‘Corpse juice can give you a nasty septic wound. Was it a spike of bone that you hit?’

‘Didn’t feel like it. Let’s have a better look.’

He pulled out his own dagger from the back of his belt and enlarged the stab wound over the spine with a slash a few inches long. Taking the free edge of the dead man’s tunic, he carefully mopped up the blood and tissue fluid from the wound, revealing a metallic glint inside. Using the point of his dagger, he levered out a piece of steel, which he displayed on his palm.

‘Whoever did this snapped off the tip of his knife in the bone,’ he announced to the heads craning over him to see what he was doing. ‘The other wound was the one that killed him. It’s gone deep into his chest and belly.’

He displayed the small triangle of sharp metal, which had an irregular edge where it had been snapped off. As he wrapped it in a dock leaf and put it away carefully in his belt-pouch, he turned to Guy Ferrars.

‘At least we’ve found your man and you can take him back to his family for a decent burial.’

The baron glowered at the corpse. ‘I want the swine who killed him. Was it these outlaws or the foresters? Whoever it is will be sorry when I catch up with them.’

‘The King’s law will deal with them. But we have to find them first.’

Ferrars ordered his men to make a rough bier of branches to carry the body home and they then set out on the tramp back to Lustleigh.

‘De Wolfe, I’ve been thinking about your journey to Winchester. In the circumstances, I’ve decided to come with you. I need to go there soon on other business, but you may need a little extra persuasion to get the Curia to send a force down here. To them, Devon is a distant country full of yokels and savages, good only for producing tin and wool for their benefit.’

Privately, John felt that his personal connections, especially with his old crusading commander, Hubert Walter, would be sufficient, but he was in no position to contradict Lord Ferrars. He accepted with good grace, and on reflection thought that however proficient he and Gwyn were with swords, a larger party would be that much safer on the long road to Hampshire.

When they arrived back in Lustleigh, they delivered the dead man to his wailing wife and grieving family. For formality’s sake, to fulfil the legal requirements, John held a five-minute inquest using the members of the search party as jurors, to deliver a verdict of murder by persons as yet unknown. Thomas was not there to record the very abbreviated proceedings, but de Wolfe could dictate the essentials when he returned to Exeter.

Ferrars and his son and steward were going back to Tiverton, so John bade them farewell at Lustleigh, arranging to meet them at Honiton, on the road to the east, at noon in two days’ time, all prepared for the journey to England’s royal capital.

John debated whether or not to take Thomas de Peyne with them to Winchester. He doubted whether such a poor horseman could keep up with the party, especially as Ferrars was such a short-tempered, intolerant man. However, on Gwyn’s suggestion, they hired a better horse from the farrier’s stables for the clerk, a sturdy but docile palfrey, meant for a lady’s mount. In the one day they had before leaving, Gwyn insisted that Thomas give up his side saddle and ‘sit on a horse like a man’, as he put it. Ignoring Thomas’s protests, he made him practise up and down Canon’s Row for an hour until the little fellow learned not to fall off. On Friday morning, the three of them set of for Honiton, which was a convenient meeting point for riders from both Exeter and Tiverton. Guy and Hugh Ferrars arrived with half a dozen men-at-arms in leather cuirasses. These were covered with tabards bearing Ferrars’ armorial emblem, in the new fashion for displaying the family crest – in this case a golden arm grasping a hammer, on a field of crimson. De Wolfe suspected that Ferrars was developing political ambitions to match his increasing lands and wealth and wanted to make an impression on the established grandees who ran England in the continued absence of the King. It was probably this motive, as much as concern about the forest problem, which was taking him to Winchester.

The journey was long but uneventful, apart from Thomas slipping from his saddle near Wimbourne Minster, to the great amusement of Ferrars’ soldiers. The distance from Exeter was over a hundred miles, and at a steady pace the journey took them three days.

They stopped overnight at Dorchester and Ringwood, where Ferrars claimed hospitality from manorial lords that he knew – in one case, he actually owned the manor himself. He, together with his son, steward and John de Wolfe, fed and slept in the manor houses, while Gwyn, Thomas and the men-at-arms found a heap of straw in the outhouses and barns and ate well in the kitchens, to the delight and amusement of the maids.

During the many hours of riding through the long summer days, John had plenty of time to mull over his personal affairs back in Exeter, not that such prolonged meditation brought him any nearer a solution. What did he really feel about the women in his life? Similar to his devotion to King Richard, his ingrained sense of honour tilted him towards his duty to Matilda, much as she exasperated and annoyed him for most of his waking hours. It had been a marriage of convenience, and though John had had virtually no say in the decision, the bond had been made under the judicial and spiritual laws and was almost impossible to put asunder. His hopes that Matilda’s entry into a nunnery would annul the marriage contract seemed doomed, as John de Alençon, who should be best informed, seemed to be pessimistic about his chances.

In any case, would Matilda stay in Polsloe? After more than sixteen years of wedded purgatory, he knew his wife’s character very well indeed, and was all too aware of her fondness for good food and fine clothes. Though he did not doubt her genuine regard for the Church and all its appurtenances, as well as her faith in God and all his saints, he also well knew that there was a large social element in her endless attendances at St Olave’s and the cathedral. They were the places to be seen with the wives of burgesses, knights and guildmasters – venues for showing off her newest kirtles and mantles and currying invitations to feasts in the Guildhall.

As they trotted along through endless lines of trees and past a legion of strip-fields around the villages on the Winchester road, his thoughts turned to Nesta, whom he had left still pale and fragile in a priory cell.

She had changed somehow, he reflected. In the weeks since she had announced her pregnancy, she seemed to have shrunk away from him, though since her miscarriage her attitude had slanted a different way, one that his blunt masculine sensibility could not fathom. He felt recently that even Thomas now had more of a rapport with Nesta that he did himself. Though it would be ludicrous to feel any jealousy for the little clerk, he had the impression that there was some secret between them to which he was not privy. He loved Nesta, he decided with some trepidation – and having got used to the idea of becoming father to her child, the sudden ending of that prospect seemed to have left him adrift.

Was he being punished for his sins? he wondered. Like everyone – with the possible exception of Gwyn – he believed in the Almighty. He had never even contemplated not believing, as faith was an ingrained part of life, like sleeping, eating and making love. It was dinned into everyone from the moment they could crawl – mothers, fathers and the priests built up a solidly tangible milieu of God, Jesus Christ, the Virgin Mary, the saints and angels, as well as heaven, hell and the Devil. Sin was inescapable: the clerics thundered that every child was born with original sin and you should spend the rest of your life trying to diminish its burden before you died. Most people lost no sleep over this, and though they never dreamt of questioning it most never gave it a thought, except perhaps during the hour spent standing in a cold church being harangued by the parish priest.

But maybe he had done something so wrong that his burden of sin had increased almost beyond redemption, and now he was being warned to be vigilant before it was too late. As he rode along, he went over all his potential mortal sins during the past forty-one years. He had killed plenty of men, God knew – and, of course, God did know. But they were all slain in battle or self-defence, so surely that was no sin? He had dispatched two in the forest only a few days ago, but it was him or them. He had killed dozens in Palestine, but surely ridding the Holy Land of Mohammedans was the whole point of the Crusades! Did not the Church actively canvas for recruits to liberate Jerusalem? John himself had accompanied Archbishop Baldwin around Wales in ’88 in an intensive recruiting campaign for the Third Crusade. In the Irish and French campaigns, again he had slain countless men, but that was for his King, the anointed of God. No, a soldier’s duty could be no sin.

He had never raped a woman, though he had had plenty of willing ones. He had never robbed anyone, for looting in war was legitimate. What other transgressions could have been responsible for his present state? Yes, he had been jealous on occasions and covetous of other men’s wives – who hadn’t? If avarice, extortion and embezzlement were heinous sins, then why was his brother-in-law apparently so comfortable with himself? He should be frying in hell by now.

At the end of it all, John was driven back on his love life to explain his present unease. He had been constantly unfaithful to Matilda all his married life, but he would be hard pressed to think of a man of his acquaintance who was different. In his many years away at the wars, he had lechered and whored like anyone else – and since he had been home, he had dallied with the delicious Hilda of Dawlish whenever he had the chance, as well as their maid Mary and a certain widow in Sidmouth – and a few more he could hardly recall. And, of course, Nesta, sweet Nesta, was the culmination of them all. So that must be the answer, he concluded gloomily – his infidelity had been punished by taking away his first son before it was even born, leaving him in limbo between an absent wife and a mistress whose attitude towards him seemed to have become strange.