by Paul Doherty
‘Meanwhile,’ Sir John took up the story, ‘your accomplice sleeps on at the Silken Thomas. He has proven witnesses who will swear he never left the tavern. On Sunday he acts the distraught friend, riding hither and thither. Of course, he was waiting for nightfall.’ Sir John took a swig of wine. ‘Only the good Lord knows what you truly intended. Set fire to the old ruin where your husband’s corpse was hidden? Or take it out, under the cover of darkness, and bury it in some desolate spot never to be discovered?’ He pulled a face. ‘What do you care? No one will ever know the truth and the blame will be laid at the door of robbers or rebels.’
Cranston took another swig and offered Athelstan the wineskin but the friar shook his head. He did not like the look on Mistress Sholter’s face: arrogant, slightly mocking.
‘You didn’t really care, did you,’ the friar demanded, ‘who took the blame? My innocent parishioners would have to pay. You and your friend would play the roles you assumed. Time would pass, memory would dim. Tell me, when did you first plot it? Days, weeks, months ago? For what? So you could lie in adulterous passion and play the two-backed beast?’
Mistress Sholter moved some of the stacks of coins.
‘What a farrago of nonsense!’ she snapped. ‘How can you prove that I left Petty Wales and journeyed to the Silken Thomas disguised as my husband? True, he had two medals. Maybe he had forgotten that? Perhaps he was riding back for something else? Did he have a mistress in the city? Anyway, he’s ambushed on a lonely road. The saddle bears the royal insignia so it’s thrown in the river and the horse is taken and sold elsewhere.’ She paused. ‘I really don’t know what you are talking about!’ She preened herself.
‘You know full well!’ Athelstan insisted. ‘You were party to your husband’s murder; Eccleshall killed those other two because their arrival hindered his plans. One corpse is easy to hide or burn. But three? Did he panic? Did he flee? I am sure Mistress Sholter that, if you had been present, those corpses would never have been discovered.’
‘I don’t know what you are talking about,’ she repeated.
Sir John sprang to his feet as he heard raised voices outside and, before Athelstan could stop him, he grabbed the St Christopher medal from his hands and walked out of the door. Eccleshall was standing by the stall held back by Flaxwith. Sir John strode up to him, slamming the front door shut. He held up the St Christopher medal.
‘Pinion his arms!’ he ordered.
The bailiffs grabbed the royal messenger and, before he could protest, took cords from their belts and bound his wrists.
‘What is this?’ Eccleshall spluttered.
Cranston pushed him along past the stalls and down a narrow alleyway. The coroner quietly prayed that Athelstan would keep Mistress Sholter busy. He grasped Eccleshall by the chin and held up the medal.
‘She’s confessed all, you know. How she met you at the old miser’s house, stripped Miles’ body and then journeyed in disguise with you to the Silken Thomas’.
‘Eccleshall blinked and wetted his lips.
‘Our little songbird wishes to save her neck, doesn’t she, lads?’
The bemused bailiffs nodded.
‘She’s told us how she rode down to the Thames and threw the saddle into the river then cast the horse loose. How she used Miles’ second medal to distract the maid: a pretext for his supposed journey from the Silken Thomas. How you waited until Sunday evening to dispose of the corpse but then had to kill those two others who surprised you. She has turned King’s evidence in return for a pardon.’
‘The bitch!’ Spit bubbled on Eccleshall’s lips. He lunged to the mouth of the alleyway but the bailiffs held him fast. ‘She’s as guilty as me! She may be cold as ice now but she’s a whore in bed!’
‘Are you saying that she’s your accomplice?’
‘More than that! She plotted it from the start.’
‘And those two other corpses
Eccleshall sagged against his captors. ‘I had no choice,’ he mumbled. ‘I heard them coming. I loaded the arbalest I carried. The man died immediately. The young whore was going to scream.’
‘Thank you very much.’ Sir John gestured with his head. ‘Take him to Newgate! Keep him well away from his accomplice!’
Mistress Sholter’s face, when Sir John confronted her, twisted into a grimace of hatred. She cast the coins about and would have run to the door but he seized her by the wrist, twisting her round and throwing her against the wall.
‘You’ll both hang,’ he said quietly, ‘for the deaths of three innocents.’ He opened the door and gestured Athelstan out. ‘Take one last look around your house, Mistress Sholter: it’s Newgate for you.’
After Sir John left instructions with the bailiffs, he and Athelstan walked up Mincham Lane.
‘You did very well, Brother. Very well indeed.’
And that was quick of you, Sir John. If they had met, Mistress Sholter’s guilt would have been hard to prove.’ The friar nudged the coroner playfully in the ribs. ‘So it’s true what they say about you, Jack? Swift as a greyhound, more tenacious than a swooping hawk!
Sir John stood in the middle of the street and took a quick gulp from his wineskin.
‘You think I’m swift now, Brother. Let me tell you about the time before Poitiers. We were going along a country lane . . .’
Athelstan closed his eyes. He’d heard this story at least six times and jumped when he heard his name being shrieked.
‘Brother Athelstan! Brother Athelstan!’
Crim the altar boy came speeding from an alleyway, his face covered in the remains of a meat pie, black hair sticking up. He stopped before the friar, grasping his robe.
‘Brother!’ he gasped. ‘Brother, I’ve . . .!’
Athelstan patted him gently on the shoulder.
‘Come over here.’
He led the little altar boy between two stalls and made him sit on a makeshift bench outside an alehouse.
‘Has the church burned down?’ Athelstan asked.
Crim shook his head.
‘Are Watkin and Pike at daggers drawn?’
Again the shake of the head.
‘It’s Mistress Benedicta,’ Crim gasped.
Athelstan went cold. ‘What’s happened to her?’
‘Come on, lad!’ Sir John sat beside the boy. He opened his wallet and took out a piece of marchpane. ‘One of my poppets put that in my purse this morning. They don’t like to think of Daddy being hungry. I only found it after I had left. Now, tell us what’s happened.’
Athelstan found it difficult to breathe.
‘Benedicta,’ Crim gasped. ‘Benedicta,’ grim . . .’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Benedicta, grim . . . No, grimoire!’
Athelstan recalled the book he had given to Benedicta.
‘She’s in our house, Brother. She’s all excited. She says you’ve got to come now.’
‘Well, in which case, we’ll go.’
Together they strode down Eastchepe, fought their way through the fish stalls at Billingsgate and hired a barge, Sir John offering the rowers an extra penny. The wherrymen needed no further bidding but pulled at their oars. Crim, his mouth now full of marchpane, sat wedged between the coroner and Athelstan, who had to give up in despair at questioning him further.
The wherry turned midstream, gathering speed as it headed towards the arches under London Bridge. Crim sat wide-eyed, looking up at the poles jutting out, bearing the severed heads of traitors and river pirates. They entered the shadows of the bridge, the wherrymen pulling their oars in as the river gathered speed, carrying them by its own force under the arch and out to the other side.
A short while later they reached the Southwark quayside and clambered out. Sir John strode along the lanes, shoving people aside, Athelstan and Crim bustling behind him. Athelstan expected to find the yard in front of St Erconwald’s busy and thronging but it was deserted. Only Bonaventure slept like some lazy sentry on the top step of the church.
&n
bsp; ‘She’s in the house,’ Crim explained. ‘She said she hadn’t told anyone. She wanted to show you first.’
‘Jack, you needn’t have come!’ Athelstan said.
‘Brother, if you find it exciting, so do I. Anyway, I like to see Benedicta.’
The widow woman opened the door and gave a gasp of surprise as Sir John embraced her, kissing her loudly on the cheeks.
‘You are a lovely woman, Benedicta, and what’s all this clamour about?’
Benedicta was certainly excited. She had taken her veil off, her raven-black hair tumbling down to her shoulders. She skipped away from Sir John, clapped her hands and pointed to the parchment littering Athelstan’s table.
‘It’s the grimoire,’ she explained, taking a seat at the top. ‘Now, when William Fitzwolfe, the former priest, had this bound he used parts of the old blood book and different parish records to stiffen the binding.’
Athelstan sat down at the table. Benedicta had undone the red binding which held the grimoire together, loosened the pages and pulled these apart.
‘It was when I looked at the cover I noticed how thick it was.’
Athelstan picked it up. It was nothing more than a strip of leather laid out flat and strongly reinforced with a thick wadge of parchment glued together at the edges and then placed against the leather to strengthen it. He leafed through the pages. He saw entries: ‘Fulke, son of Thurston the labourer and Hawisia his wife . . .’ Athelstan smiled: that as Watkin’s father. Page after page was filled with these faded, scrawled ink entries made by successive priests over the years.
‘Now, look at this!’ Benedicta took the pages from him and pointed to one entry already marked with a piece of ash from the fireplace. ‘If you check again, Brother, you will find that these two women are the great-grandmothers, respectively, of Joscelyn the tavern-keeper and Basil the blacksmith. They were apparently married on the same day.’
Athelstan read the entry on Agnes Fitz-Joscelyn and Ann, daughter of William the warrener.
‘They definitely had different fathers,’ Athelstan said. ‘But they are described as “soroies”, sisters, in the marriage entry.’
‘Ah yes.’
Benedicta took the parchment from him. She leafed through and showed another entry. This time the page had a title, written neatly by a learned clerk: ‘The Confraternity of St Erconwald’. The first column listed ‘brothers of the Confraternity’, the second a similar list of ‘sisters’. Agnes Fitz-Joscelyn and Ann, daughter of William the warrener, were grouped together as ‘sisters’.
Sir John, Who had been looking over his shoulder, chulcked.
‘You’ve told me about this problem, Brother.’ He tapped the parchment. ‘And there’s your answer. In my treatise “On the Governace of this City”, I have come across many such confraternities. At one time they were very strong in different parishes. The Confraternity of the Blessed Sacrament, the Confraternity of the Angels, the Confraternity of St Luke.’
Athelstan gazed wistfully at the piece of parchment.
‘It’s a very good idea,’ he said.’ And there must have been one here: the Confraternity of St Erconwald’s. What I supect happened is this. Agnes and Ann were bosom friends; that’s apparent from the fact that they married on the same day. They were also members, perhaps leading ones, of the parish confraternity. They called each other sister. When the blood book disappeared there was no explanation for why they did this. The Venerable Veronica was speaking the truth. These two women lived and died many years ago. All Veronica could remember is that they called each other sister, hence the mistake.’
‘Benedicta!’
The widow woman backed away from Sir John who came, arms stretched out, towards her.
‘You should have been a coroner. I mean, after all, you can’t be a friar.’
‘Benedicta,’ Athelstan echoed. ‘Your sharp eyes and keen wit have made two young lovers very, very happy.’
‘Will that mean there’s going to be more feasting?’ Crim spoke up from where he stood just within the doorway.
‘Oh, Yes,’ Athelstan replied, ‘Feasting and dancing, Crim. Now, haste away. Don’t tell them what we’ve found but bring Eleanor and Oswald here!’
Chapter 12
Alice Brokestreet was unaware that she was only minutes away from the death she thought she had so cleverly cheated. She sat in her cell of the gatehouse at Newgate and contemplated the table bearing a pewter jug, cup and a trauncher covered with a linen cloth: gifts, the gaoler had said, from a benefactor. Deciding these could wait, she got up and went to the window to look down in to the yard. Fowls and pigs roamed freely about; fierce-looking dogs preyed on the garbage heaps, competing with marauding crows. These scattered as huge vats of water, used for washing were emptied out to cleans the yard
Alice was about to turn away when she was noticed two bailiffs drag a cunning man out from the dungeons on the far side. The man was to be branded as a forger, the letter ‘F’ burned in to his cheek. The executioners trailed out after him, their branding-irons already red–hot. One of the bailiffs hastily read out how ‘Richard Bracklett, forger, perjurer, had sold false relics, including a piece of Elijah’s mantle, two legs of one of the Holy Innocents, a skull of one of the Eleven Thousand Virgins from Cologne.’
‘Yet,’ the bailiff bawled across the yard, ‘the said Richard knew that these were nothing but items of rubbish and the certificates he bore were forged.’
Alice turned away as the executioner advanced on the pinioned man, closing her ears to the terrible screams which rang up from the yard. She sat down on the bed. She was nervous. Tomorrow morning she would be taken into court and the case against Kathryn Vestler would be presented.
‘All I have to do,’ She murmed, ‘is tell the truth.’ She smiled to herself. ‘Well, as I see it!’
She would repeat her story. How Kathryn Vestler, full of frustrated passion, poisoned the clerk Bartholomew Menster and the tavern wench, Margot Haden, and forced her, Alice to help her bury them out in Black Meadow.
She breathed in. She felt safe with Master Whittock, that hawk-eyed man with his searching eyes and harsh, guttural voice. He had learned surprising amount about the Paradise Tree and its owner: stories of hidden treasure, of visitors at night. Time and again he’d refer to other evidence. Time and again he would make her repeat her story. Alice chewed her lip. She had been promised a pardon but was there something else? Whittock had been deeply interested in the stories about the hidden treasure of Gundulf. She had seen Whittock wet his lips and noticed the gleam in his eyes. If Mistress Vestler hanged, she wondered, would the serjeant-at-law buy the tavern and continue the search?
Alice felt her stomach rumble. She went and took the linen cloth from the trauncher revealing a pastry. Then she removed the piece of parchment over the jug and filled the tin cup. Taking that and the pastry, she sat on a stool and began to eat. She also drank rather quickly so the poison in the wine soon made its presence felt with searing pains in her belly which ran up into her chest, sealing of her throat. Alice dropped the cup, spilling the dregs out on to her gown. She staggered towards the door but the pain was dagger-sharp, she couldn’t breathe and collapsed on the floor. She stretched out her hand, opened her mouth to scream but no sound came. All she could think of, strangely enough, was Black Meadow, that great oak tree and those graves beneath it.
In St Erconwald’s the celebrations were well under way. Athelstan had informed the happy couple that he could now see no impediment to their marriage: at Mass, the following Sunday, he would proclaim their forthcoming nuptials for all to hear. Eleanor and Oswald fairly danced with joy and the news had quickly spread. The Piebald tavern was closed. Basil the Blacksmith did the same with his forge. Watkin and Pike, only too eager to hurry from their work, also spread the good news and the parishioners thronged in front of the church steps. Athelstan, Sir John smiling beatifically beside him, announced that they would not pay the fine. The assassins responsible for the murder of Mil
es Sholter had been unmasked and were now already lodged in the King’s prison of Newgate.
‘We’ll have a celebration!’ Pike shouted.
‘The parish council will have a celebration!’ Watkin declared, eager to exercise his authority. He glared spitefully at Pike’s sour-faced wife who kept in the shadows, muttering that she was glad ‘the difficulty had been resolved.’
Tables were set up, benches brought from the church; Watkin brought his bagpipes; Ranulf the rat catcher his lute; Manger the hangman his tambours. Merry Legs provided pies and pastries which, he proclaimed, were only two days old. Other offerings were made and Joscelyn was cheered to the heavens when he rolled barrels of ale and beer along from the Piebald. Athelstan promised that some of the expense would be met from the parish coffers.
Sir John, of course, was determined to stay. He drank two blackjacks of ale and, when challenged by Watkin and Pike, drank another faster than they. Afterwards he danced a jig with Ursula the pig woman and Pernell the Fleming: even Crim declared him light on his feet and nimble as a juggler.
Athelstan sat on the steps and watched it all. He drank his stoup of ale a little too fast and felt rather tired. Eventually he and sir Jack left the parishioners and retired to the priest’s house where the coroner threw his beaver hat and cloak into a corner, took off his doublet and sat on a bench opposite Athelstan, mopping his face.
‘I sometimes curse your parishioners, Athelstan, yet they are a merry lot: it’s so good to dance! Did I tell you I was at Windsor when the Countness of Salisbury lost her garter?’
‘Tomorrow, Sir John, another lady will lose more than her garter!’
Sir John sobered up, ‘Aye, Athelstan. What we’ve learned is bad enough but only the good Lord knows how much Master Whittock has unearthed. I hope Hengan’s wits are sharp and keen for he is going to need all of his power to defend Mistress Vestler.’