The Manor of Death (33 page)

'But annulment does happen sometimes?' said the coroner, clutching at the last few straws.

'If a man and his wife both enter religious orders, then to all intents and purposes the marriage ceases to exist - but even that is in the eyes of men, not God. The cases where rulers and princes obtain annulments for political purposes are usually founded on often dubious claims of consanguinity. The Holy Father in Rome is usually involved in their granting, and it would be blasphemous of me to even hint at the wisdom of some of those decisions.'

'There is nothing else that could be used? What if one of the pair went mad?'

De Alençon shook his head again. 'Only if it was evident at the very outset, usually before consummation. And the madness would have to be extreme. It has been said that if magic was involved in the obtaining of a wife or husband, then that might be considered as grounds by Rome, but I doubt that you could persuade anyone that Matilda's behaviour has been either lunatic or involved sorcery!'

They talked for a few more minutes, but it was evident that Thomas's careful research was confirmed by the archdeacon's own knowledge. Despondent but unsurprised, de Wolfe let his friend get on with his dinner, while he himself went back to Martin's Lane and Mary's salt fish and boiled beans.

Two hours after noon the coroner collected his officer and clerk from the gatehouse and led them across the now muddy inner ward of Rougemont to the keep, where they filed into the sheriff's chamber.

They found Henry already closeted with Ralph Morin, the castle constable, and Gabriel, the sergeant of Rougemont's men-at-arms. They sat on stools around the sheriff's desk in a conspiratorial huddle.

'I've told the sentry outside to let no one in on any account,' boomed Morin. 'We don't want our discussion bandied abroad.'

De Furnellis bobbed his head, the loose skin under his sagging neck making him look more like an old bloodhound than ever. 'The coroner has a plan to flush out these pirates, if they do exist,' he began. 'So, de Wolfe, let us hear what you propose.'

John dragged his stool a little nearer to the table. 'Our attempt to catch them unawares at Axmouth by searching their storehouses went astray, as the sods were too clever for us,' he began. 'I'm convinced that some of the goods they have there and which they transport away to sell as soon as possible are the spoils of callous theft and murder on the high seas. But we have to catch them at it; that's the only way we'll ever defeat this barbarous trade.'

Morin voiced the obvious objection. 'That may well be, John, but the chances of being in the right place at the right time to see them pillaging some vessel are so slight as to be useless! The Channel is a huge area and, even if we knew where they hoped to strike, how could we get there?'

De Wolfe' s long saturnine face managed to produce a cunning smile. 'Exactly the problem, Ralph! The only way to be there when it happens is to be the intended victims ourselves.'

The furrowed brows of his listeners showed that they did not follow his reasoning, so he explained his plan. 'We have to offer a very tempting target, one they can hardly resist,' he growled. 'If it was known that a ship full of treasure was setting sail on a certain day, then such a prize would surely be hard to ignore!'

The sheriff sighed. 'Come on, John, let's hear about it, you devious devil!'

'There are precious few treasure ships sailing out of these ports,' objected Ralph. 'Why should they believe that any particular cog was worth the risk?'

The sharp-minded Thomas already saw the way his master's mind was working. 'Silver - that would be a temptation. Though tin is the main metal sent from these harbours, there is a fair bit of silver mined alongside it.'

He was right, as the panning of the hundreds of streams on Dartmoor, and now increasingly the digging deep into the banks to follow lodes, was producing enough silver to keep a mint going in Exeter.

'But we don't export silver from here,' grunted Gwyn. 'Surely there's only enough of it to make our own coinage.'

John shook his head emphatically. 'There is silver going away, but not in ships from these ports. King Richard has to pay his troops in Normandy and some Cornish and Dartmoor silver is taken up to Winchester and then across the Channel by shorter and safer sea routes.'

Henry de Furnellis nodded. 'The Exchequer sends an escort down for it every now and then. Between you and me, lately some of the so-called silver coinage sent to the Lionheart's army has had a fair proportion of Dartmoor tin in it, as Hubert Walter is running desperately low in funds.'

The constable tugged at the twin forks of his beard as he digested the argument. 'So you are going to load a vessel with silver and hope that this will attract the attentions of anyone bent on piracy?' he asked.

De Wolfe gave one of his lopsided grins. 'Not silver, but a few boxes full of stones! This ruse depends totally on our spreading false information, which is the main object of our meeting today - and why not a word must get out about the deception.'

As light dawned upon his audience, he elaborated on his plan. 'We can use one of our partnership cogs, perhaps the
St Radegund
, as she is the largest. We need room in the hold to hide at least a dozen of Gabriel's best soldiers to create an ambush if these bastards do set upon the vessel.'

'So why do we need boxes of stones, if the whole affair is a sham?' grunted Gwyn.

'Something heavy has to be seen being carried aboard at Exeter or Topsham, for we want it to appear as if our story is true. A story that must seem like a secret, that is carefully leaked well in advance.'

Thomas bobbed his scraggy head in understanding. 'It will take some cunning, to spread the rumour without giving the game away,' he observed. 'How do we set about that, for not a word of the real truth must escape from this room?'

De Wolfe looked around at the faces seeking his leadership. 'We need to start with the alleged treasure itself, arriving in Exeter soon. I think five hundred pounds' worth would be a credible but attractive prize to tempt anyone.'

The constable whistled at the amount. He was unable to read or write, but he was no sluggard when it came to calculating money. 'That's a hundred and twenty thousand silver pennies! We'll need half a dozen boxes of stones on packhorses or in a cart to shift that lot!'

'With a strong escort of your men, Ralph,' agreed John. 'They can be said to have come from the Bristol mint, so you could send out your men to, say, Taunton to fetch them from the castle there. We could send empty boxes up there beforehand, concealed in a wagon, and you can bring them back heavy with rocks.'

'And make sure that plenty of people see them arriving as a badly kept secret,' added Henry, who was warming to the deception.

'But we need more leakage than that and at an earlier stage,' warned the coroner. 'We have to make sure that the news filters through as far as Axmouth and soon enough for them to decide to act and get a ship ready to intercept the treasure vessel.'

'But subtly enough not to make them suspicious that this is a trap,' cautioned Thomas, as far-sighted as usual.

For the next hour they hammered out the details of the plot. Each was given his allotted task, and eventually they left feeling like arch conspirators in some ancient Roman intrigue.

CHAPTER TWELVE

In which the coroner visits a different priory

After his cool reception at the Bush the previous evening, de Wolfe decided to give it a miss that night and sat gloomily drinking alone at his own fireside, before taking himself early to bed in the lonely solar built above the back yard. He tossed and turned on the big hessian bag stuffed with feathers that lay on a low plinth on the floor, restless under the woollen blankets that now replaced the winter bearskin. It would be wrong to say that he missed Matilda's company there, but he had become used to her lumpy body breathing heavily on the other side of the bed, with the occasional strangled snore.

He went over his plan to try to entice pirates into his trap but was realistic enough to know that it had a slim chance of success. Even if the news of the 'treasure' reached Axmouth, would they want to act on it? Perhaps they would suspect a trick and, even if they did decide to attack, they would have to know exactly when the
St Radegund
left harbour to have any chance of intercepting her. This could not be done within sight of land, so they would have to identify the cog and then follow her for at least some hours. And what if some other pirate beat them to it? If the news was disseminated as well as John hoped, maybe privateers well known to operate out of Lyme or even Dartmouth might decide to try their luck against a hoard of silver.

Obviously, it did not matter greatly which pirates were ambushed, but John felt a particular need to squash whatever was going on in Axmouth. From piracy, the turmoil in his mind moved on to Matilda and her apparent implacable resolve to remain in Polsloe. He felt that part of her motive was to spite and punish him, but he had to admit that she had always inclined towards the religious life. Soon after their wedding, she had admitted to him that she had never wanted marriage. She had yearned as a girl to take the veil, but her forceful parents had insisted that she make a socially acceptable marriage and her heartfelt inclinations to the Church had been denied. There was now nothing he could do about it, and he accepted philosophically the disappointment of the archdeacon's final opinion concerning the impossibility of an annulment. They were saddled with each other until death parted them, so taking a new wife was probably denied him for ever.

From here his thoughts wandered on to the linked problems of Nesta and the royal command to leave Exeter. Here, he felt confused and uncertain, as there were too many unknowns for him to see any clear pathway through the maze of possibilities. He loved Nesta, but did she still love him? Was her fondness for him cooling, given her oft-repeated conviction that they could never live together? Was this new factor, the Welshman, a real threat or just a product of his own latent jealousy? And hovering on the margins of his consciousness was the slim figure of his childhood sweetheart and first lover, the elegant Hilda. He was almost afraid to think of her, for fear that he would admit to himself how much he desired her, even though he loved Nesta.

John knew he would soon have to go down to Dawlish to talk to one of his shipmasters about using the
St Radegund
for his trap - and he knew that, when he did, the temptation to visit Hilda again would be irresistible.

He hauled his naked body over in the bed with a groan, his head swirling with all these imponderables. As he tried to sleep, his final debate with himself was about moving to London. Would this really be just a trial period or would he never live in Devon again? His mother, sister and brother were not many miles away in Stoke, so how many times would he see them again in this life? In spite of his reassurances to Mary, would he keep his house here? His partnership in the wool trade was no problem - Hugh de Relaga would continue to administer that, as he had done all along - and it seemed that Gwyn and Thomas were resigned to going with him. But what of Nesta - and even Hilda, he dared think? How much of his familiar life would survive the desires of his king? John de Wolfe was a doer, not a thinker, and the effort of juggling these sudden complications in his life made his head ache. Mercifully, sleep eventually overtook him, and in spite of all the problems it was a dreamless coma until the first light of dawn crept through the cracks in the shutters.

Next morning saw a number of new cases that needed the coroner's attention, a welcome diversion from his worries. An alleged rape in St Sidwell's, a man stabbed to death in a brawl in the Saracen Inn, the lowest drinking house in the city, and a rotten body fished out of the river at Exe Island occupied the coroner's trio until the evening.

However, with nothing remaining to be dealt with the following day, in the early morning de Wolfe and his staff were once more in the saddle, a place never much appreciated by Thomas. John had decided that they needed at least a week or two to set up their trap and allow the rumours to be spread around Devon. In the meantime he decided to visit the Prior of Loders, the manor-lord of Axmouth. After meeting Brother Absalom, John was suspicious about his activities on the Axmouth scene. He claimed to be the assistant to the priory cellarer, the obedientiary responsible for the material needs of a religious house. John had taken an instant dislike to the man. Though such aversions were nothing new for de Wolfe, he wanted to see Loders for himself and gauge how Absalom fitted into the picture.

So once again they were traversing the east of the county, taking the whole morning to reach Axmouth, where they received a frosty reception. The surly landlord of the Harbour Inn grudgingly provided poor rye-and-barley bread with cheese that tasted as if it had been buried in the village midden for a week.

'My mare passes better ale than this stuff,' growled Gwyn, grimacing over his jug. Thomas, who refused anything other than a slice of bread, asked his master why they had called yet again at Axmouth. 'We seem to learn less at each visit, Crowner,' he complained.

'As we are on the way to Loders, we might as well show our faces here, to show them that we have them under our eye,' replied de Wolfe. 'If I could only catch them out in even one misdemeanour, we could drag them back to Rougemont and shake them a little to see what fell out.'

With this ominous threat, which was largely wishful thinking, they left their poor meal and walked their mounts along the river's edge towards the sea, looking at the vessels tied up there. It was low tide, and five cogs were sitting on the stony mud, leaning against the bank. Three of them were loading wool, a line of men carrying bales on their backs from the warehouses opposite, to trot up the tilted gangplanks.