John was not an enthusiastic churchgoer, but every few weeks and on the major religious festivals he stirred himself to accompany his wife, mainly out of a sense of duty and propriety. This day, he donned his best grey tunic and a short black cloak, both of them displaying the only colours he ever wore, to Matilda's eternal disgust. She would have preferred him to be more colourful, like the majority of upper-class citizens, but he was obdurate in his choice of clothes.
Matilda had already been to a service at Prime, before the eighth hour, but now urged him out of the house an hour later to watch the procession before Lauds and High Mass. A great winding serpent of figures came out of the West Front of the cathedral, bearing crosses and banners as incense was wafted about. The canons and vicars, the secondaries, choristers and the parish priests preceded the portreeves, burgesses and guild wardens as the cortege chanted and sang its way around the Close to the Palace Gate and out into the streets to perambulate the city.
When the procession finished its circuit, it came back into the cathedral to celebrate Lauds, Matilda and John joining the throng to enter the huge building. As they stood with hundreds of others on the bare flagstones of the great nave, watching and listening to the arcane performance of the quire and canons beyond the carved screen, Matilda nudged her husband with an elbow.
'That's the one you were asking about, over there with the wife wearing the red-velvet mantle'
John looked across a few heads and saw a tall dark-haired man dressed in an expensive green tunic under a long surcoat of cream wool. 'Who is he?' he muttered, not understanding what she was talking about.
'That's Robert de Helion, the manor-lord of Bridport and a very rich merchant,' she murmured impatiently. 'You said he was the owner of that ship you were concerned about.'
De Wolfe stared again, as this was the man he wanted to speak to about the cog The Tiger, which had not yet returned to Axmouth, as far as he was aware. He resolved to go and visit the man in the very near future, though Easter Week was a difficult time to conduct official business.
Soon, the service came to its climax with the High Mass, and before long John found himself outside again, on the steps at the West Front. He hung about awkwardly while his wife gossiped with her cronies, which seemed mainly an opportunity for them to show off their new clothes and their old husbands, if they were men of note or successful at commerce. Matilda had long ago given up trying to inveigle John into these huddles to display him as the king's coroner, and he stood silently on the margins, hunched like some large black crow in his sombre raiment. Eventually, the groups and cliques dispersed and they made their way home to Mary's dinner, before Matilda made off again to St Olave's for another round of kneeling and praying.
De Wolfe declined to suffer any more religion that day and, after taking Brutus down to Exe Island for a run around on the grassy mudflats, he came home and slept in front of his beloved hearth until Matilda returned in time for supper. To him, the inertia of the Sabbath was a boring interruption of the week's work, and as he nodded off into slumber he resolved to do all he could in the coming days to get to the bottom of the murderous problems in the east of the county.
When the new week began, the coroner's plans to pursue the Axmouth mystery were frustrated by new cases. First of all, he had to spend a full day in Crediton, investigating a house fire in which a man was killed by a falling beam when he tried to rescue his treasure chest. On Tuesday morning, after attending three hangings out at the gallows in Heavitree, he had a summons to ride to Totnes, where a felon awaiting execution had escaped with the connivance of the gaolers and had sought sanctuary in the nearest church. The fugitive had already spent twenty of his allotted forty days' grace sitting near the altar, to the annoyance of the priest, but now wished to abjure the realm. John had to ride down there with his officer and clerk and go through the ritual of confession, then send the man, arrayed in sackcloth and carrying a crude wooden cross, down to Dartmouth to catch the first ship that could take him out of England.
With insufficient daylight to ride back home that night, he claimed lodging in Totnes Castle, an impressive circular fortification perched above the town, before setting off next day. It was late on Wednesday afternoon when they arrived back in Exeter at the end of the twenty-five-mile journey, and after enduring a stony-faced Matilda, who always complained when he spent a night away, he felt too tired to stir himself after supper to tramp down to the Bush. Though his boil had subsided, the long ride had made it ache, so he was glad to crawl into his bed as soon as it grew dark, ignoring the snores of his wife on the other side of the wide mattress. He knew that this new series of absences from the tavern in Idle Lane would not endear him to Nesta and promised himself that he would get down there on the following day, come what may.