Stone of destiny, p.5
Stone of Destiny, page 5
‘Prior Sinclair,’ Brother Athelstan asked, ‘let us cut to the quick. What do you want?’
‘I would dearly love to meet with, indeed, reside in this community.’ He shrugged. ‘I need to find out as much as I can about the Great Revolt.’ He leaned forward. ‘Can you imagine how important such evidence would be when I write my chronicle? I can declare that my history is not hearsay but drawn on the real experiences of those who plotted and planned the Great Revolt. Brother Athelstan, I would love to become a member of your parish …’
‘You wish to lodge with me?’
‘No, Brother Athelstan, many thanks for your kindness, but I do not wish to impose. Moreover, I know all about The Piebald. I will take lodgings there. I understand,’ he lowered his voice, ‘so Sir John has informed me, that The Piebald itself was a prime meeting place for those plotting and leading the revolt.’
‘Too true, too true,’ Cranston murmured. ‘There were those in the royal council who would have loved to have seen The Piebald reduced to ashes. Oh, they were all there, the leaders and captains but,’ Cranston got to his feet, ‘Brother Athelstan, Prior Sinclair, let us share this good news with our beloveds.’
‘The beloveds,’ as Cranston described them, fell silent when Athelstan approached the lectern. He blessed them and then announced what Prior Sinclair had told him. At first the news was received in stunned silence, then the council erupted in cheering and shouted assurances that Prior Sinclair could not have chosen a better place. Joscelyn the taverner, who could smell a profit from a mile away, fair danced with joy. Merrylegs the cook clapped his hands in glee, for his pastry shop would do good business. Even Cecily the courtesan and Clarissa her sister sensed that good times were coming. Athelstan and his two companions let the elation run its course. The friar, standing close to Prior Sinclair, listened carefully to what his visitor would like. Once the clamour began to peter out, Athelstan again stepped up to the lectern whilst Mauger rang his bell as if demented. Once silence was imposed, Athelstan smiled around at his parishioners.
‘Prior Sinclair,’ he declared, ‘will reside at The Piebald. He has politely refused any help from me. He insists on paying for everything, including your time and your help. He would also like to talk to others who served in the Great Community of the Realm, be it Upright Men or captains of the Earthworms.’ Athelstan paused. The most vociferous of the parish council, the likes of Watkin, Pike, Crispin and others, now sat silent. Moleskin the boatman leaned over and whispered heatedly at Watkin. Others became involved. Athelstan strained to hear, only to realize that these former Upright Men were now gabbling in their own tongue, the coarse patois of the alleyways, a habit they invoked whenever they wished to exclude Athelstan from their conversation. After a while, he’d had enough. He clapped his hands, glaring at Watkin.
‘What is this about?’ he demanded.
‘Nothing really, Father. We were simply discussing whom we could invite to The Piebald, former Upright Men who secured a pardon and cheated the gallows.’ Watkin turned and bowed towards the hangman. ‘I say this with all due respect.’
‘And?’
‘Well, Father, we couldn’t choose better than Halpen the Hare and his henchman Mildew.’
‘Oh yes,’ Athelstan murmured, ‘I have heard their names and know about their sins.’
‘Two mischief makers,’ Cranston declared, ‘more fit for both the gallows and hell than many of their companions.’
‘What did they do?’ Prior Sinclair queried.
‘Halpen and Mildew were couriers and scurriers, envoys and messengers of the Great Community of the Realm, highly trusted by the Upright Men such as Tyler, Straw, and others of that canting crew. Those two, that precious pair, two cheeks of the same arse, escaped the hangman’s noose by a jump and a whistle.’
Athelstan nodded. ‘Oh I see! Once the revolt looked to be doomed, Halpen and Mildew turned King’s evidence.’
‘In a word, yes – like so many others.’
‘And now?’
‘Oh,’ Cranston pulled a face, ‘they are protected and rewarded. No one dares go against them. It’s a good choice, Prior Sinclair. Halpen and Mildew still dine out on what they know. I wish you well with them. Oh yes,’ Cranston continued, legs apart, cloak thrown back, ‘as I said, a good choice. What Halpen and Mildew know about the Great Revolt would be of great interest. However, I think I am done here.’ Cranston glanced swiftly at Athelstan, a pleading look. ‘Brother, I need you now. It is time to go.’
Athelstan agreed. He left Prior Sinclair in the care of Benedicta, asking Watkin and Pike to watch over their visitor and ensure both he and any baggage were safely lodged at The Piebald. The leaders of the parish council cheerfully agreed, even as Athelstan wondered about why they seemed so deeply excited by their visitor. Nevertheless, as Cranston whispered in his ear, time was passing and he needed to show Athelstan something before they reached Westminster. Athelstan hastily donned his cloak, pulling up its deep capuchon to protect his head and face. He tugged on his mittens, snatched his chancery satchel, made hasty farewells of his parish council and followed Cranston out of St Erconwald’s.
The broad, open precinct before the church was now busy with traders, hucksters and chapmen setting up their makeshift stalls. They loudly advertised their tawdry goods to entice potential customers, the shabbily dressed residents of the parish as well as travellers leaving the city for the main thoroughfare into Kent. Here, Cranston was joined by his chief bailiff Flaxwith, and the latter’s constant companion, his ugly-faced mastiff Samson, along with a small cohort of Guildhall bailiffs who went before the coroner to clear the way. Such assistance was desperately needed as they went along the narrow, reeking runnels leading down to London Bridge.
Despite the biting cold, the ice-strewn cobbles and the threat of snow, the streets were frenetically busy. The approaches to the bridge were thronged by makeshift markets, with traders selling everything from buttons to pig trotters, boiled and roasted, spiced and ready to eat. The air reeked with different smells and odours, some sweet and delicate, others so foul they made passers-by gag and splutter. Food and drink traders, hot-pot girls and platter-boys tried to entice customers into ale booths and wine tents. Cooks, pastry sellers and spicers offered delicacies – fresh, they claimed – from carcasses where the blood had readily spilled and the offal hooked out. Athelstan took a pomander from his satchel to cover both nose and mouth. He faithfully plodded after Cranston, who pushed his way through the throng, ignoring the curses and foul insults from the sharp-eyed naps and foists as they promptly disappeared, eager to hide from the keen-eyed coroner.
Justice was also busy along the thoroughfare. The stock and pillories were in full use, with petty criminals held fast by neck, wrist or ankle, so they could be insulted and pelted with filth by passers-by. Market beadles, city bully-boys, made their presence felt. These ‘rogues in livery’, as Cranston described them, lashed out with sharp, white wands to drive away the legion of urchins desperate to filch and steal from the stalls. The beadles also beat and whipped the dogs and cats hunting both the vermin and scraps of food on the steaming midden heaps. Early morning hangings had just taken place on the soaring, three-branched gibbet where the naked corpses of two housebreakers caught red-handed hung next to that of a ballad seller. This unfortunate had been found guilty of composing a story that the real John of Gaunt had been accidentally smothered as a baby and replaced with a butcher’s son. Cranston read the proclamation pinned on the hanged man’s naked chest. The coroner laughed sharply, crossed himself and passed on.
At last, they approached the bridge. Athelstan murmured a prayer for protection. He always felt panic stricken, anxious, in a throng of surging people, and never more so than on London Bridge. Athelstan fought to compose himself. True, he was passing between heaven and earth, but he would soon be across. The friar tried to ignore the fast-flowing river beneath thundering against the starlings. He could also hear the clacking of the mills and the screams and shouts of those in boats and barges as different craft threaded their way through the gaps under the bridge where the Thames roared like some savage beast. Shops and houses lined either side of the thoroughfare: these only deepened the feeling that this narrow crossing was not of this world but an eerie passageway between heaven and earth.
Athelstan whispered a prayer and kept his eye on Cranston, surging through the press like some war barge along the waters below. Athelstan was fully aware of the different sights and sounds, even though he kept his hooded head down. They passed the small bridge church of Saint Thomas a Becket. A choir of altar boys stood outside its door singing an Advent hymn to the Virgin. A group of Friars of the Sack occupied the lower steps, listening attentively to the words and joining in when the choir reached the antiphon. Funeral parties barged their way through, the coffins they carried bobbing on the shoulders of mourners like corks on water. Dung collectors were emptying the lay stalls between the houses, hurling the steaming, stinking filth into high-sided carts. What they couldn’t, including the decaying corpses of cats and dogs, they cast into the river below. Beadles played the bagpipes so their wail could drown the sounds of the cries and curses of those locked in the finger stocks close to St Thomas’s.
They passed the house of Robert Burdon, Keeper of the Gates and a leading member of the Fraternity of the Knife, London’s Guild of Executioners. The keeper was busy on the top step of the gatehouse; a trestle table had been set up and along this stood a line of severed heads. Each of these was receiving what Burdon always called ‘his loving ministrations’. Before the heads were poled, they were washed, pickled and dried; the hair, if there was any, neatly combed. Garbed in his usual blood-red taffeta, Burdon was, as always, ripe for gossip. Athelstan, however, sighed with relief. The beggar man, the frenetic lunatic toad-eater, garbed in horse-skin from head to toe, had taken up position on the lowest step of the gatehouse. This madman, who haunted the bridge from dawn to dusk, was loudly proclaiming how a severed head always housed the soul of the executed felon. So, for a coin, the toad-eater would chant a lament, a song of mourning.
Cranston and Athelstan hurried on. They reached the end of the bridge and turned right into what Cranston called ‘a true den of darkness’, the rows of derelict tenements which lined the alleyways under the shadow of the Tower. The decaying and dilapidated houses squatted like old, slimy toads; fat, ugly buildings, their bloated walls coated with a thick sheen of filth. These dwellings of the damned couldn’t even stand straight but leaned across, blocking the light along the twisted alleyways below. ‘The meadows of hell’, as people described this collection of streets and alleys. No light shone here, only the occasional fitful glow of lantern, candle or fire flame. Sometimes, very rarely, a shaft of daylight would pierce the murk but, as Athelstan quietly conceded to himself, this only emphasized the gathering murk through which indistinct shapes moved swiftly and furtively. Here and there, a door, gate or window slammed shut. Voices called, strident and carrying, proclaiming how the King’s coroner was passing with Athelstan of Southwark. The friar recognized that such declarations kept them safe. No one would dare accost them. The only people allowed through this filthy labyrinth were either soldiers or bailiffs armoured, ready for a fight or a priest such as himself.
They turned a corner. A bonfire blazed before the battered doors of a derelict house; this was guarded by more of Cranston’s bailiffs who stood, swords drawn, cudgels at the ready. Cranston had words with one of these who kicked open the door and, taking two cresset torches, led Cranston and his party down a stinking, shabby passageway. The ground underfoot was covered in crackling, grey dirt: rats, long, black sloping shapes, scampered and squeaked. The vermin brushed cobwebs which spread thick and full like fishnets across every corner, ledge and shelf. They entered a narrow chamber. Athelstan glimpsed the abomination laid out along the floor, vividly illuminated by the leaping flames of the fire dishes carefully placed around the skinned corpse. Athelstan, covering his mouth and nose, closed his eyes and whispered a prayer for help. He then crouched down by the corpse, Cranston standing behind him.
‘The mortal remains of some poor wench,’ Cranston lugubriously declared. ‘Look at her forehead, Brother.’
Athelstan did and noticed the hole, an ugly, black wound in the centre of the forehead.
‘A butcher’s blow,’ Flaxwith muttered. The chief bailiff had wisely left his mastiff outside. ‘Felled like some cow or sheep,’ Flaxwith continued. ‘I have seen the likes done many a time in the shambles outside Newgate and the slaughter sheds of Smithfield. The bastard stunned her then skinned the corpse.’
Athelstan nodded in agreement before taking a generous mouthful from the miraculous wineskin Cranston thrust at him.
‘This is not the first?’
‘No, Brother, it certainly isn’t. This must be about the tenth victim.’
‘When did it begin?’
‘Around the beginning of autumn.’
‘The Eve of the Feast of St Matthew,’ Flaxwith interjected. ‘Twentieth of September.’
‘God preserve us,’ Cranston breathed, ‘that’s my marriage day. Anyway,’ the coroner continued, ‘I thought it was just one of those grotesque slayings perpetrated by some passing madcap. I was wrong. The killer is a lunatic who hastens from slaughter to slaughter.’
‘And his victims?’
‘Always female, the lowest streetwalkers, the cheapest of whores, women raddled with disease, desperate for a penny. The killer, we now know as the Flayer, brings them to a benighted place like this and, well, you can see what happens.’
‘Yes, yes I can.’ Athelstan’s stomach was now more settled. He blessed the corpse and murmured a requiem then returned to his study of the remains of some poor creature created by God and despatched back to Him in such a gruesome fashion. He stared, hiding his horror at the mass of red and blue flayed flesh, which still had a human form, an impression helped by the fact that the reddish hair and eyebrows had not been touched. Athelstan wondered what could compel one human being to inflict this on another. Was Prior Anselm correct, he wondered? Was there a darkness in the human soul? Some malignant growth which, when it reached full flower, could spill into a savagery even a demon in hell would weep at?
‘Why?’
‘God knows why, Brother.’
‘No, that’s not my question. Sir John, this is a dreadful death, a truly hideous slaying as the others must have been. However, murder prowls London and its name is legion. So why is the Lord High Coroner and his secretarius being drawn into this hideous litany of killings?’
‘Oh, quite simple, Brother. The remains of all the Flayer’s victims have been removed for burial to the Minoresses, close to the Tower and …’
‘Oh yes. Mother Abbess is a powerful woman, much revered and respected by our young King. The abbess is well-known for her care and compassion towards the poorest streetwalkers of the city. I am sure that, disgusted and angry, she has made her views known very clearly to our noble Prince.’
‘Your arrow has hit the target, Brother. I am … we are to investigate these killings, trap the Flayer and hang him.’
‘I have seen enough. Oh, before you go, let me anoint the remains.’
Athelstan swiftly unstrapped his chancery satchel and took out the phials of sacred oil. He murmured a benediction then quickly intoned the ‘De Profundis’, ending with the requiem. Once he had finished, Athelstan drew a deep breath and brusquely anointed the gruesome remains of a woman the friar had never met or known. He tried to ignore the grisly feel of the skinned flesh beneath his fingers as he thumbed a cross on the forehead, eyes and sagging mouth.
‘I’ve done all I can,’ he whispered. He blessed himself and got to his feet. ‘Sir John, I would be grateful if you could see that this unfortunate corpse be gently removed and given honourable burial.’
Cranston said he would. They left the rotting tenement, Cranston striding quickly along the street, which twisted like a snake until they reached a broader thoroughfare leading to the quayside. Cranston shouted that they had to go to Westminster. Athelstan quietly groaned but followed the coroner and his retinue down to the icy-cold quayside, which reeked of smoke, brine and rotting fish. Cranston commandeered a six-oared barge for himself and Athelstan, yelling at Flaxwith to have the corpse removed then go back to the Guildhall where Cranston would meet him.
The barge pulled away. Athelstan resigned himself to sitting in the canopied stern, wiping the river spray from his face as he watched the oarsmen, their captain sitting in the prow, bending in unison over the oars. Next to the captain sat a boy with a tambour which he beat to establish a rhythm for the crew. Now and again the boy would pick up a hunting horn and blow lustily upon it, a warning to other craft, which responded with their own trumpet blast. Lanterns glowed, tongues of glowing flame in the mist, which shifted and danced above the racing, turbulent river. Athelstan, to distract himself from the constant pitching, stared around the edge of the canopy.
The river was certainly busy. A magnificent Venetian galley, its paintwork a brilliant hue of colours, thrust its way through, scattering the herring boats, fishing smacks and other small craft crawling across the river like water beetles. The galley was escorted by two royal war cogs; massive, fat-bellied vessels with soaring masts, raised sterns and jutting bowsprits. Behind these, an even more compelling sight: a majestic, formidable barge; a towering high-prowed craft, painted blood-red from stern to poop. Six oarsmen on either side, all cowled in deep capuchons and dressed in inky-black garb. Athelstan immediately recognized the vessel and its owner standing in the high stern, the Fisher of Men, cloaked in the robes of a Benedictine monk. The Fisher wore a stiffened velvet mask over his face, whilst metal-studded gauntlets protected his hands. The funeral barge was leaving some quayside heading back to the Chapel of the Drowned Men on a deserted quayside just past La Réole.
