Gwyn reached out to tear off a chunk of coarse rye bread from the loaf on the table, the crust burnt black on top by a careless village baker. He used his dagger to hack off a slice of hard cheese from the lump provided by the landlady but paused with the food halfway to his mouth to ask a question. 'This Keeper of the Peace is some new-fangled official, is he?'
Thomas, always the best informed about current affairs, looked scornfully at his big colleague. 'If you ignorant Cornishmen spent less time eating, drinking and gambling, you might know more about what's going on in the world!' His head stuck out of his shabby black cassock like a rabbit peering from its burrow. 'Just as the Chief Justiciar established coroners eighteen months ago, last December he carried out the king's orders to set up knights in every county to keep the peace - or try to, in this disorderly realm where people seem to have conveniently forgotten the Ten Commandments!' He crossed himself piously, as he did a score of times each day in a habit as compulsive as Gwyn scratching his armpits or his crotch.
John de Wolfe added to his clerk's explanation, forgetting his sore bottom for a moment. 'The bailiffs and serjeants of the Hundreds have been such a dismal failure at keeping law and order that the king decided to augment them with men made of sterner stuff. Now that the Crusade has ended, there are plenty of unemployed knights knocking about the countryside who could help the sheriffs to seek out and arrest wrongdoers. '
The Cornishman champed on his food for a moment, then washed it down with a mouthful of sour ale. 'I thought that was our job, Crowner?' he said.
De Wolfe grinned sardonically. 'Only because the last sheriff was a crook and the present one is bone idle! I'm supposed to present the evidence to the courts, not go out and catch the bloody criminals as well!'
Thomas's dark little eyes flicked from one, man to the other. 'Do you know this new Keeper, Sir John? I'd never heard of him until now.'
The coroner shook his head, his black hair swinging over the back of his collar. Unlike most Norman gentry, he wore it long, instead of shaving his neck right up to leave a thick mop on top of the head.
'He's from this eastern edge of Devon, a foreign land to me!' De Wolfe came from Stoke-in-Teignhead, down towards Torbay. 'He was never in Ireland nor the Holy Land with us, Gwyn, though I think he fought in France.'
Draining his pot, he stood up and slapped a penny on the table in payment for their refreshment. 'Time we went. I'd like to get back to Exeter tonight; I've not seen Nesta for a few days, you know. She gets irritable if I leave her too long.'
Gwyn smirked. He had a great fondness for de Wolfe's mistress but was constantly amused by their bickering.
De Wolfe grunted a farewell to the ale-wife and ducked his head under the low lintel to lead them into the road outside. Both he and Gwyn were six feet tall, though he was as lean and spare as his officer was massively built. A slight stoop and his habit of always dressing in black or grey made him look like some predatory crow. His great hooked nose, black eyebrows and pugnacious chin combined to make most men step hurriedly aside when he bore down upon them.
When their horses were brought around, John climbed gingerly into his saddle, his old warhorse Odin waiting patiently while he arranged his posterior in the position of least discomfort.
'We're well over halfway, I reckon,' advised Gwyn as they set off over the little bridge. 'I came up here many years ago to the harbour in Axmouth, when my father came to buy a new boat.'
Gwyn, who for almost twenty years had been de Wolfe's squire, bodyguard and now coroner's officer, had previously been a fisherman in his native village of Polruan, at the mouth of the Fowey river in Cornwall. He had followed his master to campaigns in Ireland, France and to the Third Crusade in Palestine, but now that they were both over forty, their fighting days seemed over.
It took them almost another two hours to pass through the village of Colyford, on the western side of the wide valley of the Axe. Across the vale, a barrier of green hills ran north and south, dividing Devon from Dorset and ending in an abrupt headland where the estuary opened into the sea. The tide was in and a great expanse of water lay below them, like a fjord reaching almost two miles inland, being up to half a mile wide. They trotted their horses down to the marshy ground, where the track became a crude causeway leading to a small bridge, where at this stage of the tide the water was lapping almost to the edges of the boards. The bank rose on the other side as they reached the lower slope of the ridge where there was a crossroads. When they stopped, the knowledgeable Thomas pointed up the road to their left, where the valley vanished northwards. 'That's a branch of the Fosse Way, built by the Romans,' he announced with the air of a pedagogue. 'Goes all the way to Lincoln!'