by Paul Doherty
‘That was fortuitous. Gurney may have confessed and implicated others higher in the tree of state.’
‘So many thought at the time.’ Cranston took a mouthful of wine. ‘A strange, eerie business, Athelstan. My advice would be to let sleeping dogs lie. But our king wants to have saints in his pedigree and the Papacy is malleable. I promise you, as I do with your parishioners, I shall do what I can to help.’
PART TWO
‘Falseness Does Reign In Every Flock.’
(The Letters of John Ball)
Athelstan, accompanied by Cranston and Benedicta, persuaded the friary bargemen to take them across the river to the Southwark side. The coroner believed the city on the north bank was too dangerous to travel through, whilst the bridge had already become a battleground between those in the city who welcomed the rebels and others such as Mayor Walworth, who had decided to resist. Thankfully their crossing was uneventful. The river seemed very quiet: wherries, fishing craft, herring ships and all the small boats which usually scurried backwards and forwards appeared to have vanished. Little moved along the Thames except for a solitary fighting cog making its way down to the estuary, and the occasional prowling war barge, packed with fighting men, pennants and banners now furled to conceal their true identity. Athelstan noticed how the dark smudges above London Bridge, shifting clouds against the light blue sky, had turned more lowering and threatening. Plumes of smoke rose fast on either side of the Thames, sinister curling heralds of more mayhem and murder.
They landed near the Stews on the Southwark side and made their way up from the filth-strewn quayside. They hurried along the gloomy runnels which served as streets, cutting through the darkness created by the rotting, dilapidated buildings four to five stories high, held up by crutches pushed under the gables yet still leaning close together as if conspiring to block out both light and air. Rotting shells of former glory, the windows of these houses were all boarded up, their reinforced doors slammed shut. Athelstan could almost taste and breathe the gathering tension. The dark ones, the shadow shifters, the brotherhood of the knife and the garrotte, the night-walkers and the gloom-men had all heard the news. The rebel armies were about to invade the city!
Already trickles of armed men were threading the crooked lanes. Unaccustomed to the city, they stumbled and slipped on the unclean cobbles glistening beneath a coat of bloated, swollen matter oozing from the piles of animal waste as well as the decaying midden heaps. Faces masked against the hideous stench, mounted men also gathered, horsemen from Hell under their fluttering, soot-coloured banners. More terrifying still, the dreaded Earthworms, the street warriors of the Upright Men, garbed in dyed cow-skin, hair all spiked with grease, faces covered with hideous masks, made their presence felt. They emerged out of the blackness as if slipping from another world where they had been watching and waiting. The Earthworms mingled with master bowmen, their loose-fitting, quilted jerkins belted around the waist, tight patched hose pushed into scuffed boots, quick-eyed archers who could hit an oyster at the centre of a butt. They had their longbows ready, quivers crammed with feathered shafts across their back or hanging from their waist.
Athelstan, in his black and white robes, was not troubled but Benedicta and Cranston were stopped. The dark-faced, hooded captain of the Earthworms hastily stepped back, however, after Benedicta whispered in his ear and produced the Upright Men’s insignia: a wax seal bearing the all-seeing eye. All three hurried on. Life in Southwark had not ceased but subtly changed. It was always a hotbed of unrest with its legion of pimps, whores, cunning men, nips and foists, but Athelstan sensed that the usual turbulence had been charged with a fresh menace which would swiftly descend into violence. Pillaging and arson had begun. Groups of rioters had already attacked a brothel housing Flemish prostitutes. Foreigners and lawyers, as Cranston whispered, were high on the attainder list drawn up by the Earthworms.
The brothel had stood at the gallows crossroad, one of the few open spaces between the cramped, crumbling houses. Earthworms were busy piling plunder on to a cart as others began to torch the brothel, the flames dancing in the window and along the main passageway. Rough, cruel justice had been meted out to the whores, who had been dragged out, stripped and summarily hanged from rusting iron wall brackets on the houses overlooking the crossroads. Athelstan glimpsed the choked, red faces, the dirty white corpses swaying as if in some macabre dance. Two lawyers, who’d crossed the river for a day’s revelry, had also been caught, dragged from the brothel, abused and decapitated, their torn, bloodied heads placed alongside their naked torsos.
Athelstan whispered a requiem as well as a prayer against the gathering evil. They were walking the thoroughfares of Hell. No sunlight, only billowing smoke, foul smells and hideous scenes. Athelstan wished he could stop and administer the last rites, do something to challenge the gathering darkness, but he dare not. Cranston was recognised and, despite Athelstan’s presence and that of Benedicta, the coroner was truly vulnerable. The bloodletting had begun. The devil was beating his drum. The demons piped their tunes. The calls were going out, the cry for the hunt and the prospect of villainy growing more real by the hour. The dwellers of the dark, the scavengers and polluters, were swarming from their tunnels, dungeons and fetid cellars. They would pour out in their hordes, eyes glittering sharp for the vulnerable, the weak, the defenceless, all in the pursuit of easy profit.
The Earthworms, terrifying as they were, could not fully control what Cranston called the ‘Legions of the Damned’. Southwark and London would descend into chaos. Some of the rioters were already dressed in the discarded, bloodied clothes that had been stripped from the Flemish prostitutes. The dyed orange horsehair wigs of the whores were pulled drunkenly over shaven heads to make the filthy, pock-marked, weather-whipped faces of the rifflers even more grotesque. Smoke billowed across the crossroads. Athelstan glimpsed fiery glows against the narrow strip of blue sky. Somewhere bagpipes wailed and a kettledrum began to beat and then was answered by the bray of hunting horns. Voices shouted curses and slogans whilst the Earthworms declaimed the names of fresh victims, the most wanted being Richard Imworth, Keeper of Prisons and one of the most hated royal officials in Southwark.
‘Let his bones be affrighted!’ an Earthworm shouted hoarsely. ‘Let the hair of his flesh stand up in terror!’ He broke off as a pack of half-wild dogs burst out of a gate and raced forward to lap the curdling blood of the executed lawyers. One of the mastiffs snatched a severed head as if it was a ball, dragging it away. Athelstan turned to retch even as Benedicta pushed him on. They broke away from the milling crowd, hurrying down lanes where the violence was spreading like some red, murderous mist seeping along the runnels of Southwark. They passed corpses knifed and garrotted as people settled private scores or attacked the vulnerable. Corpses dangled from shop and tavern signs. Gangs of rifflers from the city were pillaging an ironmonger’s shop whilst flames licked greedily at a clothing stall opposite. Benedicta led them on. Occasionally they would be stopped but the seal she carried and her assertion that she was ‘loyal to the True Commons and King Richard’ gained them swift passage.
‘We should be gone from here,’ Cranston said grimly. ‘I have been in cities like this. Bloodletting begets bloodletting.’ Athelstan could only nod his agreement and cross himself. Southwark seemed to be caught up in a fevered dream of slaughter and savagery. Yet, at the same time, it might seem as if nothing was happening. They passed Simeon the shoemaker’s shop and, as if impervious to the violence erupting around him, the cobbler was busy shaping leather footwear with a sharp knife and leather blackened with dye, sewing shoes together using pig’s bristles for thread. Next to him before a narrow front door, a blood-letter was busy with a patient. Both men gazed blearily at Athelstan as he passed. Others too were busy within their trade as if oblivious to the gathering storm. Bridles and spurs continued to be made; metals fashioned; fabrics pricked; cups, drinking vessels, rings, thimbles and pins were still on sale. William the wax seller and Peter
the pepper merchant along with Oliver the oil man, all stood at the doors of their shops, heads cocked as if listening keenly to the growing tumult.
Athelstan could never understand the human condition. People were being brutally murdered, yet, as they turned into Balsam Lane where the herbalists did business, he glimpsed Adam the apothecary treating a patient’s wound with a bowl of egg white and a finger of calamine. Nevertheless, the violence was creeping closer like some malignant spirit summoning up its retainers: these now crept out of their filthy kennels, sores on their faces, naked arms and legs covered in scabs, grotesque and misshapen in their fluttering rags, monsters from a nightmare.
At last they rounded a corner into St Erconwald’s parish, hurrying down the lane past the Piebald Tavern and Merrylegs’ pie shop, both boarded up and eerily silent. The same was true of the concourse stretching up to the parish church, empty, deserted of all the usual life and colour. Dust swirled in the breeze. The song of crickets echoed from God’s Acre, the ancient, sprawling cemetery behind its high grey-stone wall. The heavy lychgate was closed and when he peered through the bars, Athelstan could see nothing out of the ordinary. The grass, weeds and summer flowers sprang long, lovely and lush, bending under a stiffening breeze. The old death house in the centre, converted into a cottage for the beggar Godbless and his constant companion, the evil-smelling, omnivorous goat Thaddeus, seemed deserted. But then Athelstan caught a glimpse of colour amongst two of the ancient yew trees close to the cottage. He glanced quickly over his shoulder at the church: the main door was closed and locked. Benedicta had assured him that she had secured both church and priest house; these would have to wait.
Athelstan strode through the lychgate, Benedicta and Cranston hurrying behind as the friar made his way up the coffin path, past the ancient hummocks, rotting headboards and crumbling crosses. The thick grass and the clusters of wild flowers were a magnet for a host of dazzling butterflies and buzzing bees. A serene place, yet Athelstan was determined to discover who was hiding in the graveyard. He reached the ancient yew trees, their branches stretched and bent to form a natural cave. Inside, Godbless the beggar, with Thaddeus standing beside him, was sharing a pot of ale with Ursula the pig woman whose enormous sow stretched on the ground, its plump, glistening flanks billowing with every snort.
‘God bless you, Father!’ the beggar man shouted drunkenly. ‘God bless you too, Sir John and whatever is in your codpiece.’ He caught sight of the widow woman standing outside the branches. ‘Oh dear, Benedicta. Heaven protect you all!’
‘Godbless!’ Athelstan warned. The beggar man was as mad as a March hare, and Ursula was no better. The friar gazed at the slumbering sow which had caused such devastation to his vegetable garden. Godbless, for all his moonstruck madness and the ale he had downed, sensed Athelstan’s mood.
‘Don’t worry, Father,’ he slurred, ‘your garden is safe. Hubert the hedgehog is ensconced in the Hermitage whilst Philomel your old warhorse is asleep in his stable.’
‘And Bonaventure?’
‘The cat with nine lives,’ Ursula exclaimed, ‘and nine more. I have seen him prowling about.’
Athelstan nodded understandingly. Bonaventure had no love for Ursula or her sow.
‘We were worried about you, Brother, weren’t we, Godbless?’ Ursula patted the sleeping sow. ‘All is changed. The men have been taken away. We saw a caged cart rattling away, guarded by monsters in armour. All is now quiet. We lie with the dead here. Oh, truly Sion is deserted, Jerusalem a sea of ruins.’
Athelstan, despite the circumstances, smiled and shook his head in wonderment at the secrets of his parishioners. How on earth, he marvelled, did Ursula, a poor old pig woman, learn such biblical illusions?
‘God bless you, Brother,’ the beggar man exclaimed, ‘but all had gone. So Ursula, Pernel the Fleming and myself held a council with Thaddeus and the sow in attendance. We couldn’t find Benedicta, so we sat and thought.’ He waved a hand. ‘Then we sat and thought again. The men had been taken away. We couldn’t find Benedicta but we knew Father had gone to Blackfriars, so Pernel said she would go and see you.’ Godbless restrained Thaddeus from lunging at Athelstan’s sleeve. ‘She said she wanted to visit that place anyway.’
‘When was this?’
‘Yesterday, but she hasn’t come back yet, Father. She went, I know she did. I accompanied her down to the Stews’ quayside. Perhaps these present troubles have delayed her, or,’ Godbless leaned closer like a conspirator, ‘she has gone to get her hair dyed even redder. She said she might do that. A sign of the times. Blood will be spilt, Brother. Pernel said she wished she was back in her nunnery.’
‘Her nunnery?’
‘She made things up.’ Ursula patted her still sleeping sow. ‘Said she had been in love, said she had been a nun. Pernel’s wits wandered. She seemed more interested in dyeing her hair than anything else.’ Athelstan, however, was only half listening. He peered through the leafy branches and saw Cranston and Benedicta standing close together, talking softly. Beyond them, the sun bathed everything in its golden glory. Athelstan’s unease deepened. Something about this present conversation pricked his memory, but what? The friar stiffened as he recalled the death house, the mortuary at Blackfriars: those corpses sprawled on tables covered by stiffened cloths reeking of pine juice. A vein-streaked arm of one of the corpses had escaped from beneath a sheet, hanging down, fingers curled like a claw, whilst on the table and floor beneath swirled reddish-tinged pools of water.
‘Oh, Lord have mercy,’ Athelstan whispered.
‘What, Father?’
‘Nothing,’ Athelstan murmured, getting to his feet. ‘Godbless, Ursula,’ he sketched a blessing in the air, ‘may the Lord smile on you.’
He pushed his way through the cave of overhanging branches, gesturing at Cranston and Benedicta to join him. He ignored their questions and led them up to the main door of the church. Benedicta fetched the keys from their secret hiding place. Athelstan unlocked the door and walked into the nave. St Erconwald’s lay silent. Light poured through the lancet windows where the dust motes danced, but the rest of the church lay in deep shifting shadows. No candle flame flickered. No patter of prayer, scurrying of feet or whispered murmuring of people gathered here to gossip and do business. The nave was usually as busy as a market place with Watkin, Pike and their coven swaggering here and there. Now St Erconwald’s lay gripped in the silence of the tomb, a shadow-filled house of ghosts.
‘I’ve hidden all the sacred and precious objects,’ Benedicta whispered, ‘the pyx, ciborium, chalice and cruets are all hidden in the arca beneath the sacristy floor. Nothing to plunder here, Brother. The alms box has been emptied, the altar stripped; we have even hidden the sanctuary chair.’
Cranston, fingers playing on the hilt of his dagger, walked through the pools of light thrown by the windows. ‘Athelstan, what is the …?’ He paused, as they all did at a distant roar of hundreds of voices followed by the faint clatter of weaponry.
‘Something is happening down at the bridge,’ Athelstan murmured. ‘All seems well here. Benedicta, it’s best if Sir John stays hidden from view. Lock the church, take him to the priest’s house. Allow no one in—’
‘Brother, what do you—’
‘No, Benedicta, please do as I say. Sir John, now is not the time for questions.’
Athelstan hurried out of the church. Everything seemed safe enough, yet a chilling premonition had seized his soul, a brooding sense of menace. Pernel was a garrulous ancient who sucked on her gums, constantly dyed her hair and wandered the parish, wide-eyed and curious. She would chatter like a magpie on a branch but she was gentle. Surely no one would hurt her? Yet that corpse in Blackfriars death house, the spindly vein-streaked arm and the pool of dyed water worried him deeply. He left the church precincts, and as if to echo his mood, the sombre sounds of conflict carried from the direction of the bridge, the roar of many voices, the clash and clatter of steel and the strident neighing of warhorses caught up in bl
oody conflict. Yet, at the same time, the sun shone magnificently in a clear blue sky whilst a refreshing breeze cooled his sweaty skin.
Athelstan wished he did not feel so haunted and recalled his prayer asking for deliverance from the demon who had prowled after him at midday. Hell was undoubtedly casting its long shadow. The parish streets were eerily empty, doors and windows firmly shuttered, blind to the outside world. The occasional dog nosed among the rubbish piles. Rats scrabbled across the dried midden heaps, ever alert to the feral cats lurking like assassins in the shadows. Athelstan felt as if he was being closely watched, though no one came out to greet him. It was if he was walking along some deserted coffin path in the depths of the countryside rather than the streets of his parish. A furious billow of noise from the direction of the bridge made him pause and look back over his shoulder. The sky was not so blue now. Fresh, swift moving columns of black smoke were darkening this summer’s day.
He hurried on until he reached Pernel’s cottage, a grey ragstone box with a tiled roof and fire stack. The Fleming’s house, like other cottages, had been built of stone after a furious storm which had swept the Thames a decade ago, destroying everything made of wood. The cottage stood in its own small garden ringed with a wicker fence, its battered gate hanging open. Athelstan went up the pebble path, mentally beating his breast at having been so judgemental about Pernel. The flower beds and herb plots either side of the path were well cultivated, the black soil newly turned, the shrubs looked fresh and vigorous. The cottage door was on the latch but unlocked. Athelstan pushed it open and went into the warm, dark chamber which reminded him of his own priest’s house, except the floor was of beaten earth. There was a small hearth with an oven either side; the mantelpiece above was decorated with statues and small crosses. The cottage also included a buttery and pantry, a bed-loft as well as closet chamber which housed a washtub, lavarium and jake’s stool.