‘Look at this land. Desolate, wind-swept, cold and foggy even in summer, and during the winter, you have to avoid almost all of it because of the bogs and mires. It’s no wonder people like to make up tales about the place. So there’s a mad monk here too, is there? Folk in Tavvie would believe that easily enough.’ He cast Baldwin a swift glance. ‘I suppose you won’t tell me any more. Well enough. But I think you have more information that you could give me, if you had a mind.’
‘I assure you, I have told you all I can,’ Baldwin said disingenuously.
‘Hah! Is that the truth? Anyway, I won’t put you under any more pressure. If you’re keeping something back it’s because you either can’t trust me with the truth, which I’d find hard to believe after the cases we have investigated together, or that someone with more power has ordered you to keep it to yourself. And the abbot is a powerful man, isn’t he?’ He held up his hand to stop Baldwin’s quick denial. ‘Enough! Your protestations prove my guess. Very well, so we need to consider whether this miner could have been tied to the abbey in some way. Certainly he was at the coining, so he could have had some sort of contact with the abbey. Perhaps he went to pray at the shrine? Or simply bumped into a monk he knew?’
Baldwin wasn’t convinced. He glanced over his shoulder, and seeing Simon talking to the old miner Hal, he led the way to them.
‘Simon, may we ask this miner some questions?’ Baldwin asked.
There it was again, Baldwin thought to himself. The usually cheerful bailiff gave a most ungracious nod without meeting Baldwin’s eye. It made him look almost shifty, and Baldwin was convinced that there was a block between them, a wall of resentment. He couldn’t understand it. Simon and he had never had a hard word. They had been friends for six years now, and Baldwin was sure he had not given his friend any reason to be angry with him. Perversely, he began to feel a reciprocal bitterness rather than a desire to offer sympathy and find out where the problem lay, and he turned a little from Simon to face Hal.
‘You knew this man Walwynus?’
‘I’ve told the bailiff all I know.’
‘And now you’re going to tell us as well,’ the coroner said happily.
Hal glared at him, but said nothing.
Baldwin said, ‘Did he go to the town often?’
‘No. Hardly had a penny to spend. He only went for the coinings. Four, five times a year.’
‘Was he friendly with any of the monks?’
Hal shrugged, glancing at Simon, who was standing a short way off, listening intently. ‘Don’t know.’
‘Do you often see monks out here?’ Coroner Roger asked. Hal tilted his head and flung an arm out towards a tall cross at the top of a nearby hill. ‘See that? That’s a way-marker for the Abbot’s Path. There are always monks wandering from Buckfast to Buckland to Tavistock. We see them all the time. When they aren’t walking about and being a nuisance, they’re talking to folk and getting in the way, or sometimes preaching. They’re a pain in the cods.’
‘Are they always monks?’
‘What do you mean?’
Baldwin smiled reassuringly. ‘There are others who wear the habit, aren’t there? Friars, for example. And novices.’
‘Oh, yes. The almoner, Peter, he sometimes has younger lads up here. I think it’s to teach them safety on the moors, in case they are ever sent out to Buckfast.’
‘This almoner is a regular visitor up here?’
Asking the question, Baldwin heard Simon make a tiny sound, like a grunt, as though he was suddenly listening so carefully that he had all but forgotten to breathe.
‘Peter’s often up here, yes. There’s a shepherd boy over toward Ashburton – John, he’s called. Orphaned, he’s been looked after by the abbot for some years. Recently he was crushed by a falling tree-limb and broke his leg. The abbot’s almoner is often up that way to see him and pay him.’
‘Pay him?’ Baldwin asked.
‘Yes. He has a half-wage while he’s ill. The abbot takes his charity seriously,’ Hal said without irony.
‘Are you aware of the almoner or any of these novices talking to Walwynus?’
‘What would an almoner have to do with a man like him?’
‘He was a poor man; a poor man is often provided for by alms.’
‘What, you think Brother Peter would give out his money to a miner who fell on hard times? Wally would have to have been beggared in the town itself for Brother Peter to consider him; Wally had land and the ability to work.’
‘Perhaps one of the novices knew Walwynus before taking the tonsure?’
‘It’s possible. But if you reckon to suggest Wally was father to any of them, well, I’d guess you’d be wrong. He enjoyed the whores when he could, but I doubt he’d have had a child without me knowing. If he had, it’d be living in Tavistock still, not out Ashburton way.’
There was no way to put that to the test, Baldwin noted, yet it could be a useful line of enquiry for the future. He was worried about the disappearance of the novice still; the idea of the lad running away was attractive, if only because the other possibility, that he had been killed, was so repellent. That would surely mean that another novice, or monk, was a murderer.
That thought led him to muse, ‘This Peter… some monks have fathered their own children, and…’
‘Brother Peter only came here-a few years ago,’ Simon said. ‘If this boy was a shepherd, he must be more than eight years old.’
‘He’s fourteen,’ Hal supplied.
‘Not his own, then,’ Baldwin said reluctantly. He glanced, at Simon, acknowledging his help, and Simon tried to smile. He looked as though he was suffering from piles. What on earth was the matter with his
