Crowner Royal (Crowner John Mysteries) (45 page)

De Wolfe shook his head, still suspicious of the situation.

‘I need some answers from you and Aubrey. Why did you choose this tavern to hide away, presumably to wait for a ship for Flanders?’

Ranulf stared at him. This was a question he had not expected.

‘Because I know it well, it has the best roast beef in London and clean beds upstairs. We need a decent night’s lodging, so where else but the Falcon?’

De Wolfe fixed him with a steely eye, his brooding hawk’s face searching the man’s features for the truth.

‘And not because you know it well from your visits here with Canon Simon Basset?’ he snapped.

Ranulf stared back at him guilelessly. ‘By Christ’s wounds, sir, you speak in riddles! We are merely waiting here until a cog is due to sail for Antwerp on tomorrow’s tide.’

The coroner looked across at William Aubrey, who remained as if turned to stone, only his frightened eyes watching every move. Then John moved to stand over Hawise d’Ayncourt, who looked at him as if he was something scraped from the midden in the inn’s backyard.

‘Your husband will be overjoyed to know that you are safe after your abduction, lady,’ he said sarcastically.

She glared up at him. ‘Abduction be damned! I have left that fat pig, the dullest man in Christendom!’

She was not to know that lifting her head to speak was the trigger for mayhem.

As she raised her chin defiantly, John saw a glint of gold appear above the neck of the pale-cream gown that she wore. Careless of any courtesy to a lady, he plunged his fingers into the space between the linen and her soft skin. Paying no heed to her scream of outrage, he pulled out a heavy necklace of solid gold, embellished with intricate designs typical of Saxon craftsmanship.

‘I think the last time I saw this, it was in the strongroom of the Great Tower!’ he roared at Ranulf. ‘So where’s the rest of it, you thieving bastard?’

Three men on the next table had leapt to their feet when they heard the scream and saw the bosom of a fine lady apparently being violated, but they backed away rapidly when Ranulf whipped out a long dagger from his belt and advanced on the coroner, waving it dangerously close to his face. Simultaneously, William Aubrey unsheathed a short sword and, with his dagger in the other hand, leapt over the table to stand back-to-back with his friend, facing the somewhat astonished Gwyn. The room went into pandemonium, as the other diners fell over themselves in haste, to get out of range of what looked like a fight to the death.

De Wolfe and Gwyn had left their long swords in their saddle-sheaths, as they had entered the tavern expecting only to search for information, so both had to grab for their own daggers, which never left their belts.

‘You stupid cow!’ roared Ranulf at his mistress. ‘I told you not to wear that damned thing until we left the country!’

At the same time, he lunged at John, who stepped back sharply and knocked over a fat dame who was desperately trying to get to the safety of the other side of the room.

‘You cannot escape the city, Ranulf!’ snarled de Wolfe. ‘You may as well surrender and put yourselves at the mercy of the court.’

For reply, Ranulf slashed out again at John, this time slicing into the sleeve of his grey tunic. ‘What mercy will we get?’ he yelled. ‘The choice between hanging or flaying alive?’

Behind him William Aubrey was challenging the big Cornishman and it became obvious that both these younger men, strong, fit and well trained from their frequent practice on the tourney fields, were expert fighters.

But the coroner and his officer, though more than a dozen years older, were crafty and experienced.

As Aubrey advanced on Gwyn, the ginger giant swept up a stool with one hand and swung it like a scythe, knocking the sword from the other man’s hand. As it flew across the room, there were redoubled screams from the unfortunate patrons of the Falcon, who were struggling to get out of the doorway.

Ranulf and John circled each other, knife hands outstretched, each making feints and retreats, knocking over benches and stools as they glared into each other’s eyes, watching to anticipate every new move. Hawise shrunk back on her bench, her face contorted partly by fear and partly by the thrill of having four reckless men fighting over her.

Aubrey, having lost his sword, was now on equal terms with Gwyn but arrogantly thought that he would easily dispatch this lumpish oaf from Cornwall. He made a sudden thrust, but the big man was not where he expected him to be – on the point of his dagger. Gwyn had stepped sideways and in a flash sunk his own knife deep into William’s belly. He dragged it upwards under his ribs and a scream from the younger man was almost instantly staunched as a gout of blood erupted from his mouth.

As he pulled out his dagger, his opponent crashed to the floor, to the accompaniment of more shouts, curses and screams from the remaining bemused and frightened patrons.

‘Settled this sod, Crowner!’ yelled Gwyn. Moving towards the coroner and his adversary, he hesitated, wondering when to intervene and bring this fracas to a speedy end.

‘Don’t kill this bastard as well!’ hollered de Wolfe. ‘Or we’ll never know what happened.’

But Ranulf had other ideas in his desperate situation. Suddenly stepping back from the coroner, he threw an arm around Hawise’s waist and hoisted her to her feet, putting the point of his knife against her throat.

‘Now back off, both of you!’ he screamed, pressing the dagger so that a drop of blood appeared on the woman’s white skin. ‘Let us through and out into the yard, or she’ll die!’

De Wolfe was outraged at his lack of chivalry. ‘Is this what you won your spurs for, damn you? To shelter behind a woman’s skirts?’

His contempt was far outmatched by Hawise. She screamed some obscenities that no high-born lady should have known as she wriggled in his grasp, but the knife bit even deeper and she subsided.

‘I thought you were enamoured of this woman!’ raged John. ‘Now you are prepared to kill her!’

The knight gave a twisted grin. ‘She is a demon in bed, for which I give thanks. But if it is a matter of her life or mine, then mine wins every time!’

Frustrated, but afraid that Ranulf would keep his promise and drive the knife deeper into her neck, John could only stand impotently while the other man began to pull her towards the door.

‘Shall I have him, Crowner?’ shouted Gwyn, waving his dagger hopefully. John shook his head. ‘The swine is mad enough to slay her. Leave it, he can’t get far.’

In fact, he got nowhere at all.

Suddenly, a glazed look came over Ranulf’s face and he slid down Hawise’s body to a crumpled heap on the floor. Astonished, John and his officer looked down at him, and saw that his eyes were open and his arms were flailing weakly, though the dagger had dropped from his fingers. Hawise was still on her feet, also looking down with a hand to her mouth in surprised consternation.

‘She’s stabbed the sod!’ hissed Gwyn. ‘There’s a little knife sticking out of his back.’

An onlooker, in butcher’s tunic and apron, gaped at the victim.

‘He’s been pithed!’ he shouted, with professional expertise. ‘The blade has gone into his backbone, between the chops.’

By now, the landlord had returned from market, to find his dining chamber resembling the shambles at Smithfield that he had just left. A corpse lay on the floor, covered in blood and another man had fallen, partly paralysed, against one of his tables. Now that the violent action had ceased, the room was a babble of excited talk, some of which apprised the landlord of what had happened. John went across to him as Gwyn and the butcher knelt by Ranulf’s side.

‘Good man, I am the king’s coroner and that is my officer. We came across these two men who are urgently wanted by the Chief Justiciar for most serious crimes. They resisted and one is dead. The other seems badly wounded and we need to find a physician to attend to him.’

John was afraid that Ranulf would die before he could discover what had happened, and the landlord said that he would get some men to carry him to St Bartholomew’s, this being the only place nearby with reputable medical care.

As he went off to organise this, John went over to the fallen marshal, who was slumped forwards, murmuring indistinctly.

Gwyn had kicked his dagger away for safety, but there seemed little chance of Ranulf becoming a danger ever again. Hawise was sitting weeping on her bench, but when John placed a consoling hand on her shoulder, she looked up defiantly.

‘Have I killed him? He was going to murder me, after all we’ve been to each other these past two weeks.’

John looked down at the small ivory-handled knife, still sticking out from the centre of the man’s back, below the shoulder blades. ‘That was your eating knife?’ he asked gently.

She nodded, wiping her eyes angrily with the hem of her sleeve.

‘He was stabbing my neck, I could feel the blood running.’ She lifted her chin to prove it. ‘I thought he was going to kill me there and then, so I reached behind me to the table and grabbed the knife. I thrust it at the nearest part of him I could reach, to make him stop hurting me!’

She burst into tears again and he patted her shoulder awkwardly. Crying women frightened him more than a horde of Saracens.

‘We’ll get you taken back to Westminster as soon as we can arrange it. But you had better let me have that necklace, it would be better for you not to be seen wearing it.’

As she took it off, he made sure that she was not in possession of any more of the looted treasure. ‘It’s all in his saddlebag in the chamber upstairs,’ she confessed. ‘He said we would be rich when it was sold in Germany and that he’d win even more in the great tournaments.’

Gwyn came up and muttered in his ear. ‘I reckon this fellow’s going to die. If you want to get him to talk, we’d better look sharp about it.’

As if they had heard him, two servants pushed their way into the chamber with a door unhinged from one of the bedrooms.

They laid it alongside the injured man, then looked at John.

‘We can’t lie him down with that knife in his spine. Shall I pull it out?’

De Wolfe looked at Ranulf’s back, where a thin stream of blood was running from around the knife blade staining the green cloth of his tunic. He shook his head.

‘It might kill him, for all I know, stuck in his backbone like that. Put him face down, with his head turned to the side.’

As they jogged off up the road, John had a grim memory of Canon Simon being carted off to the same hospital in much the same fashion.

‘You are going to die, my son, do you understand?’

These solemn words were uttered by Brother Philip, the same Augustinian monk that had attended the poisoned canon.

Ranulf nodded weakly. ‘I need to confess and be shrived, father,’ he said. With the knife now removed, he lay on his back on a mattress on the floor of a cubicle in the hospital.

The monk-physician had earlier told John and Gwyn that there was no hope for the younger knight. ‘The point has not only cut the vital pith that runs inside the backbone, but the amount of bleeding both outside and under the flesh, shows that some major vessel has been punctured. It is only a matter of time before he dies.’

‘How long has he got?’ asked Gwyn.

The monk turned up his palms. ‘Impossible to say. It could be minutes, if the bleeding increases. Or it may be weeks, but he has lost the use of his bladder as well as his legs and that usually means that corruption of the kidneys will come sooner or later.’

He stopped and crossed himself. ‘It would be better that a fit young man like that dies soon, rather than suffer the distress and indignity of his paralysed condition.’

‘I had best speak with him right away,’ said de Wolfe. ‘He has committed heinous crimes against both the king and his fellow men. I suspect he was the one who poisoned the canon you treated some time ago.’

They went back into the small ward and John crouched alongside Ranulf of Abingdon.

‘William Aubrey is dead and I fear that you will be joining him before long. You now have nothing to lose and perhaps by full confession, your soul will have something to gain in purgatory. Do you understand?’

The under-marshal nodded, tears in his eyes as he realised that his legs would never move again, even for the short time he was expected to survive. Brother Philip pressed a crucifix into his hands and murmured a prayer.

‘Tell me all about it, Ranulf,’ urged de Wolfe. ‘Simon Basset was another of your conspirators, eh?’

‘Yes, it was his idea from the start,’ muttered Ranulf, fumbling with the rosary attached to the cross. ‘He was overfond of the good life. You have seen his house, his rich furnishings, his love of the best food and wine – especially his fondness for whoring. Well, he has an even grander house in Lichfield and he was always in need of money to buy more luxuries and to pay his debts for the ones he had.’

‘So he came to you with a plan? But how did you come to conspire with a canon?’

‘As marshals, we have several times brought treasure boxes from Winchester, which were received by Simon as a senior Exchequer official. He also was fond of secret gaming, and we came to know him well from that. He said that if we could get an impression of both keys of one of the money chests, he could manage to steal from the strongroom and we could share the proceeds.’