The Tinner's Corpse (17 page)

The little man perched nervously on the seat, pulling his threadbare black mantle closer around his narrow shoulders. ‘I have suffered more than two years of torment, Crowner, since they threw me from the bosom of the Church in Winchester. I have often wished to die since then, to get peace from both my poverty and my shame.’

De Wolfe regarded him steadily, wondering how such a poor bodily frame could house so clever a mind – and one that had such a genuine love for his calling. ‘You have recovered well enough, Thomas,’ he chided, as gently as his normally abrasive nature would allow. ‘From near-starvation, according to your uncle the Archdeacon, you now at least have a roof over your head and a bed in the cathedral Close. I give you pennies enough for you to eat, do I not?’

The clerk almost fell off his stool in his eagerness to show his gratitude. ‘Sir, you and my uncle have been kindness itself. Without you, I surely would have died. Yet sometimes I wish that I had been allowed to slip away, for my ejection from the Church, which has been my life since I was seven years old when I first went to school, has been unbearable.’ His dark eyes filled with tears. ‘Especially as the charge brought against me was false. That girl, she teased me and led me on. I did nothing but give her a kiss – and then she screams, “Rape!” I am in despair, Crowner!’

De Wolfe fidgeted in embarrassment. Fearless in battle, indomitable in a fight, he was hopeless when faced with raw emotion, especially from another man. He cleared his throat loudly, and his hands scrabbled aimlessly at some parchments lying on the table. ‘This state of affairs has been with you a long time, Thomas. What now has changed?’

‘
I
have changed, sir. You are right, the needs of my flesh, food, drink and sleep, are provided for well enough, for I require little. But food for my soul is a different matter. I am starving without my beloved Church.’

He gulped and passed fingers across his face to wipe away the moisture from his eyes. ‘Living in the Close makes it worse. I thought the company of priests and acolytes, with the fabric of the sacred building so near, might make up for some of my loss. But all it does is emphasise it. I am a sham, living within an enclave of God yet no more a true part of it than the mice who share my abode.’

De Wolfe looked down at his servant with mixed feelings. He had never had a son, and God forbid he would ever have one like Thomas, a scrawny elf with a lame leg, a slight squint and a crooked back. But the teasing fingers of paternal instinct touched him as this young man, who was totally dependent on him, sought his help as the only one who could raise him from his despair.

‘What would you have me do, Thomas?’

‘Speak to my uncle, John of Alençon. Ask him if there is any way in which I might seek redemption and, eventually, reinstatement in Holy Orders.’

De Wolfe looked doubtful. ‘The decision in Winchester was very definite, from what the Archdeacon once told me. It seems you were lucky not to be hanged. Only your cloth saved you.’

‘But the evidence was false! They relied upon the word of that evil girl, who denounced me merely for sport,’ sobbed Thomas, in anguish. ‘For the sake of some moments of excitement to spice up her dull life, I am condemned to ruination until I die. Please speak to my uncle, Crowner, I beseech you.’

De Wolfe grunted his assent, as much to end his clerk’s unwelcome exhibition of emotion as desire to help him. ‘I will bring the matter up with the Archdeacon but I place little hope on the outcome, Thomas. Without fresh evidence to clear your name, I fail to see why the Church should wish to reopen the issue. But I will speak to your uncle.’

And there the matter had to lie for the moment. Thomas was effusive in his thanks, and one small bonus for de Wolfe was that his clerk’s face became less doleful than before, even if there was little prospect of a favourable outcome.

At a dinner table some sixteen miles to the west, one stool remained empty, to the puzzlement and concern of the household. It was mid-afternoon, several hours past the usual time for the main meal of the day in the Knapman residence, but Walter had not returned.

‘Where did he go this morning?’ asked his brother Matthew, who had just arrived. He came about once a month to confer with Walter about the disposal of tin, arranging transport to Exeter and reporting on sales both at home and abroad.

Joan Knapman answered, annoyance at the lateness of their meal adding a sharper cadence to her voice. ‘He set off early, saying that he was riding to his mill near Dunsford, but would be home in time for his dinner,’ she said, with more than a touch of petulance.

‘It’s not like Walter to be this late for his food. He’s an able trencherman,’ added her mother, looking expectantly at the door to the yard, where the kitchen-shed lay.

Matthew reached across the table to top up the wine cups of the two ladies, then filled his own. ‘That’s strange. If he went to Dunsford. I came that way little more than an hour ago, but saw no sign of Walter. Are you sure it was Dunsford?’

‘Of course it was,’ replied Joan irritably. ‘How many corn-mills do you think he owns? He’s a tin-master, not a miller. I can’t see why he bothered to buy it last autumn, only it was going cheap when the miller died.’

‘I want my dinner,’ whined the old lady. ‘Are we going to wait for ever for Walter? Matthew has ridden for almost three hours and he needs some food.’

Matthew was certainly hungry, and even this good wine was no substitute for a full stomach. He was so unlike Walter in appearance that they would hardly have been taken for brothers, let alone twins. Matthew was two hands’ breadths shorter and had sparse gingery hair in place of Walter’s springy fair thatch. His face was fatter and there were unhealthy-looking brownish patches on his otherwise pink skin, which bore the scars of old acne scattered across it. He dressed expensively, but not well, with a clash of colours between his bright red tunic and blue surcoat. His manner displayed a shifty type of bonhomie, superficially amiable and courteous but leaving the impression that he would be gossiping about someone the moment his back was turned.

Joan heartily disliked him, though she was beginning to dislike everything to do with the Knapman clan, apart from their money. She signalled to their steward, who lurked anxiously in the background. ‘We will eat, Alfred. God alone knows when the master will come.’

He hurried out, and within minutes returned with one of the maids, bearing trenchers of bread, bowls of onion broth and a fat roast goose.

As they ate, Joan wondered how soon she might risk getting away to meet Stephen Acland. Unfaithfulness was always difficult to pursue in a small community like Chagford. Her mother knew what was going on, and was terrified that her daughter’s marriage to the rich tinner might be in danger, if Walter discovered that he was being cuckolded. However, she covered for Joan when she needed excuses to go out and claimed to chaperone her on walks around the town and into the surrounding countryside, as well as on some fictitious visits to the church.

Joan remained abstracted during the meal and her garrulous mother kept a conversation going with Matthew, who as time went on began to express his increasing concern at Walter’s absence. ‘There’s much business to discuss, especially as the next coinage session is due here within a few days. That means a great deal more tin being ready for shipment down to Exeter – and I need to know how much and its likely quality for pricing.’ He was careful not to add that he needed the same information to calculate how much extra he could skim off the top of the commission he earned for arranging its sale and export.

By the time they had eaten their fill, there was still no sign of Walter and Matthew suggested sending a groom to the mill to see what had befallen him. Alfred, the steward, dispatched a stableman on a good horse, with orders to follow the track through Moretonhampstead, the next large village, and on through Doccombe towards Dunsford. The mill was at Steps Ford, on the Teign, about six miles from home, less than an hour on a good horse.

Some three hours later the man was back, leading another stallion on a long rein behind him as he clattered into the yard. He ran breathlessly to find the steward and gabbled out his ominous story on the back steps of the house. ‘I was within half a mile of the mill when I met the master’s horse wandering home, riderless. I went down to the mill, looking in the road to see if he had fallen somewhere, but there was nothing.’

‘Had the miller seen the master?’ demanded the steward, poised to take the news indoors.

‘Yes, he had been there and done his business long before, then left as usual, well before noon. We called out the men from the mill and searched each side of the track and into the woods a fair way, from the mill to where I saw the stallion, but there was nothing. I left them widening the search – but he’s gone! Vanished!’

While Chagford was thrown into consternation by the disappearance of one of its most prominent townsmen, the King’s coroner was carrying out his promise to his clerk. In the endless round of devotions that were the life-blood of cathedrals, the quietest period was in the late afternoon when the service of Compline, the last of the canonical hours, had ended, and there were a few hours for eating and sleeping before Matins at midnight. These Offices meant little to de Wolfe, but he chose a time when his friend John of Alençon would most likely be free.

There were four archdeacons for the different areas of the diocese and John of Alençon was responsible for Exeter itself, as Bishop Henry Marshal’s senior assistant for the city. Like most of the twenty-four canons, he lived in the cathedral precinct and had the second house in Canons’ Row, the road that formed the northern boundary of the Close, a continuation of Martin’s Lane.

Some of his fellow prebendaries lived in considerable style, with many servants, good stables and well-furnished accommodation, but John of Alençon was of a spartan nature and lived the ascetic life. Exeter was a secular establishment, not monastic like some other cathedrals, and its priests were not monks. However, though standards had slipped in recent years, allowing many priests to indulge in a life of luxury, some of the canons, especially John, still clung to the old Rule of St Chrodegang, a strict code of conduct laid down by Bishop Leofric more than a century earlier.

When de Wolfe was shown into the Archdeacon’s living chamber by a servant, he found his friend sitting on a hard stool at a bare oak table, reading a leatherbound book before a large wooden crucifix hanging on the wall. There was no other furniture and the coroner knew from past visits that the priest slept on a simple palliasse on the floor of an adjacent room.

‘Am I disturbing you at your devotions, John?’

The thin face, with cheekbones of almost skull-like prominence, broke into a charming smile. Wiry grey hair complemented grey-blue eyes that smiled with the rest of his face, and all who saw him were convinced that here was a good man in every sense of the word.

His spare frame was clothed in a long plain cassock; the chasuble and alb were reserved for saying the Offices in the cathedral across the way. He assured his friend that he was not interrupting any great religious study and, in fact, looked slightly guilty. ‘To tell the truth, I am reading a most secular book, John.’ He laid a hand on the now closed volume on the table. ‘It’s Geoffrey of Monmouth’s
History of the Kings of Britain
. I am still trying to decide if the man was a genius, a charlatan – or just plain mad.’

De Wolfe had heard of the volume – it had created a sensation when it was written half a century earlier – but his illiteracy prevented him from enjoying it. For some months, he had been covertly taking instruction in reading and writing, and could sign his name and stumble slowly through some of the coroner’s rolls that Thomas prepared, but in recent weeks he had been too busy to persevere and already what he had learned was slipping away.

The archdeacon signalled to his servant, who hovered at the door, and ordered some wine. His asceticism did not extend to eschewing the juice of the grape, as long as it was a good vintage. His family came from Alençon in Normandy, and there drinking fine wine was as natural as breathing.

‘Is this a welcome social visit, John? Or have you some special purpose?’

Over two cups of wine, John de Wolfe explained the problem concerning Thomas de Peyne. ‘The man’s becoming more morose with every new day,’ he explained. ‘He was born to be a priest, and he says life outside your cosy community of God is not worth living.’

The archdeacon was well used to his friend’s marginally sacrilegious way of speech and smiled gently at him. ‘I can well understand his anguish, poor lad. If I were to be cast out, I doubt if I would have the will to continue living.’

‘He claims he was innocent of the crime alleged,’ commented de Wolfe, ‘which makes it so much worse. I tend to believe him – he is too devout to be a good liar.’

They discussed the problem for a time, but de Alençon was doubtful of any prospect of successful reinstatement. ‘Any appeal to a Consistory Court would have to be in Winchester, where he was ejected, not here in Exeter. Robust testimonials would have to be produced from senior ecclesiastical figures concerning his behaviour and character during the time since he was unfrocked, and I would certainly provide a good character for him. But there are political factors to be taken into account, John.’

The coroner looked questioningly at the Archdeacon over the rim of his wine cup. ‘Political factors?’

‘It is well known in this precinct – and in the city outside – that you and I are good friends and of like mind, especially in our avowed loyalty to the King. Any glowing testimonial from me about your clerk, especially as he is related to me, would be seen as favouritism, especially by those who have been opposed to us – and, indeed, humiliated by us in the recent past.’

De Wolfe looked glumly at his friend. ‘You mean those inclined to Prince John – men like Thomas de Boterellis?’ He named the precentor, the canon responsible for organising the services and the chanting, who had supported the abortive rebellion a few months back.