by Paul Doherty
‘I will go unto the altar of God,’ he intoned, and so the Mass began sweeping towards its climax, the consecration and elevation of Christ’s body and blood under the appearance of bread and wine. The singing bread was distributed, the osculum pacis, the kiss of peace, exchanged, the Eucharist given. Athelstan delivered the final blessing.
‘The Mass is finished,’ he declared. ‘Go in peace, but not just yet.’
Athelstan ushered his parishioners out into the nave. He dramatically pointed to the small, self-standing cubicle of oak which stood near the small Galilee porch on the far side of the church.
‘Remember,’ he declared, ‘on one side is a pew for the penitent. On the other, separated by a partition with that lattice grille in the centre, is the seat for the priest.’ He paused. ‘Crispin and Tab built that; it’s our new shriving pew. We must use it. We must all go to confession.’ He smiled at the red, chapped faces of his parishioners, mittened fingers scratching their hair or tugging at ragged cloaks against the cold. ‘I shall be hearing confessions every evening during the last week of Advent to shrive you of your sins.’ His smile widened. ‘I hope to journey to Blackfriars to have my own pardoned.’
‘Do you sin?’ Watkin shouted. ‘You, a friar?’
‘Friars especially,’ Athelstan retorted, ‘then monks and even coroners. By the way, Huddle, I must have a chat with you about your most recent painting. Now,’ Athelstan hurried on, ‘as you know there’ll be no Nativity play. You also know the reason.’
He glimpsed Imelda dig Pike viciously in the ribs.
‘I will not rehearse the sorry reasons why. We took a vote and decided to form our own choir. Now, I have translated the “O Antiphons”.’ Athelstan gestured at the bell clerk, who officiously began to distribute the stained, dog-eared but precious scraps of parchment. ‘I know some of you cannot read.’
‘All of us!’ Tab joked.
‘Perhaps.’ Athelstan clasped his hands. ‘However, we’ve been through the words, we have learnt them. Now let us arrange ourselves in the proper voices.’
The usual confusion ensued but at last Athelstan had his choir ready. The gravel-hard, deep voices of Watkin, Pike and Ranulf at the back, the clear, lucid singers of Benedicta, Crim and Pernel at the front with the others in between. Once he had silence the front line, under Athelstan’s direction, began:
‘Alleluia, Oh Root of Jesse thrusting up, a sign to all the nations.’
The line of singers behind repeated it, and so on. Athelstan caught Benedicta’s eyes and smiled in delight.
‘Wonderful,’ he whispered as he directed them with his hands. These poor but grace-enriched souls sang so strong, so passionately, with all their hearts the great hymn to the Divine Child. Athelstan felt the tears prick his eyes. The antiphons continued.
‘Oh, Morning Star. . Oh, Key of David. .’
When they had finished, Athelstan shook his head in wonderment.
‘All I can do.’ He opened the wallet on his cord and took out a silver coin, a gift from Cranston. He twirled this between his fingers. ‘The labourer, or rather in this case,’ he proclaimed, ‘the singers, deserve their wages. Merrylegs, your pies are baked fresh and piping hot. .?’
Athelstan’s parishioners needed no further encouragement. The coin was snatched and Athelstan had never seen his church empty so swiftly.
‘Was it so good, Father?’
‘Benedicta, even the angels of God must have wept.’ Athelstan walked over and grasped her hands, warm in their black woollen mittens. ‘Benedicta, I am starving. Would you please look after the church and put the vessels back in the fosser?’
With Benedicta’s assurances ringing in his ears, Athelstan left by the corpse door. Bracing himself against the cold, the friar walked back up the lane to the priest house. He opened the door and stared at the huge figure seated on the stool, horn spoon in one hand, crouched over a steaming bowl of oatmeal. Beside Athelstan’s guest, watching every mouthful disappear, was Bonaventure, waiting so when Sir John Cranston, Lord High Coroner of London, finished the bowl he could lick it really clean.
‘Judas,’ Athelstan whispered. ‘Cat, your name is Judas.’ He raised his voice. ‘My Lord Coroner, what is the penalty for stealing a poor friar’s breakfast?’
‘Murder.’ Cranston, wrapped in a Lincoln green war cloak, a brocaded beaver hat of the same colour on his head, turned, his rubicund, white be-whiskered face wreathed in a smile. ‘Murder, my little friar! I have left enough for you then we must go. The sons and daughters of Cain await us.’
‘The eyes of the dark robe of night. The shadow lands which stretch past evensong, these are all part of my story. .’ The enterprising taleteller, perched on an overturned barrel at the end of the lane leading on to the thoroughfare down to London Bridge caught Athelstan’s attention. The friar plucked at Cranston’s arm and paused to catch the dramatic words and colourful images which he hoped to use in a future sermon.
‘There,’ the teller of tales bawled, ‘the larvae of human souls wander whispering like bats twittering in a cave, for this truly is the realm of the screech owl. .’
‘Come on, Friar.’ Cranston, face almost hidden behind his muffler, pointed to where his principal bailiff Flaxwith with his hideous-looking mastiff Samson stood waiting ready to clear a way before the coroner. ‘Come on,’ Cranston repeated, ‘I’ve got a better tale to tell you.’
Athelstan dug into his wallet, dropped a penny into the storyteller’s box and, cowl pulled well over his head, joined Cranston to battle through the surging crowd. Despite a cutting breeze from the river and the stench of uncleared refuse on the slippery paths, London’s citizens had flocked out hacking and sneezing in the freezing air, oblivious to the leaden, brooding clouds which threatened more snow. They hurried down to the tawdry markets around the bridge to gawp, purchase or just gossip. The more vigorous also thronged around the stocks close to the river to fling refuse at Guillaume Lederer, who sat imprisoned for calling Bertram Mitford ‘a covetous snot, a vagabond, a wagwallet’ not to mention, ‘a side-tailed knave’. Guillaume’s name and crime were proclaimed on a placard around his neck, which also invited passing citizens to hurl abuse as well as anything else they could lay their hands on. Further down a more serious business was drawing to an end: the hanging of two women, Dulcea and her companion Katerina, who’d feloniously murdered Alice Willard of Rotherhithe — strangled her, no less, during a pilgrimage to Canterbury. The crowds swirled around the execution cart which abruptly pulled away just as Athelstan and Cranston passed. Both women were left to dance in the air as they slowly strangled on the hempen noose dangling down from the sooty, four-branched scaffold.
Death, of course, especially executions, was good for business and Athelstan was constantly distracted by the charlatans who always emerged on such occasions. One conjurer who, despite it being bleak midwinter, loudly boasted that the small pouch in his right hand contained three bumble bees which he could summon out, one by one each by their own name, as given to him by an angel he’d met on the road outside Havering-atte-Bowe. Other cozeners and conjurers had given up their tricks to plunder the corpses of the hanged and sell their ill-gotten items for a profit. A few of these knights of the dark just hoped the macabre scenes would influence the minds of those they hoped to cheat. Outside the Chapel of St Mary Overy a journeyman, his black capuchon, cotehardie and chausses embroidered with gold stars and silver moons, proclaimed how he, John Crok of Tedworth, had in the scarlet-blue fosser beside him a man’s head in a book. He proclaimed how the head was that of a Saracen. How he had bought it in Toledo in order to enclose a certain spirit which could answer questions about the future. Apparently the said spirit had not informed him about the approach of the coroner. One look at the burly Flaxwith and the equally fearsome Samson sent John Crok of Tedworth, his precious fosser clutched under one arm, fleeing through the crowds. Cranston just grunted noisily and muttered about some other time.
They passed under the gatehouse t
o the bridge, its crenellations ornamented with long poles bearing the severed heads of executed traitors, pirates and other criminals. On the steps leading up to the gatehouse sat the diminutive Robert Burdon, the keeper surrounded by his brood of children. Burdon was preparing another head, all pickled and tarred, to decorate the end of a pole. He glimpsed Cranston and Athelstan, shouted a greeting and continued with his macabre task of combing the long hair on the severed head.
Athelstan was now finding it difficult to keep up with Cranston’s stride. He still wasn’t sure where they were going or what they were doing. Cranston had told him little except that his wife, the diminutive Lady Maude, and their two sons the poppets were all ‘in fine fettle’. Then he added something, just as they left the priest house, about the mysterious death of Kilverby the Cheapside merchant as well as the gruesome slaying of one Gilbert Hanep at the great Benedictine Abbey of St Fulcher-on-Thames. The coroner also mentioned John of Gaunt, a precious bloodstone called the ‘Passio Christi — the Passion of Christ’ and that was it. Athelstan was curious for more but decided he would have to wait, especially here on London Bridge with its crowded shops, booths and stalls. The houses packed on either side soared up against the grey sky, forcing them and others to push up the broad narrow lane between, already packed with carts rattling on iron-bound wheels, braying sumpter ponies and apprentices bawling, ‘What do ye lack, what do ye lack?’ The sheer crush, the rancid stench of unwashed bodies, the clatter of waterwheels and the pounding of the angry river against the starlings of the bridge were a stark contrast to the silence Athelstan was accustomed to. He felt slightly dizzy as if he’d not eaten, even though he had. Cranston, thankfully, had not devoured all the oatmeal. Athelstan crossed himself and murmured the ‘Veni Creator Spiritus’. He certainly needed God’s help. He was about to enter the meadows of murder, creep along the twisted alleyways along which padded the silent, soft-footed assassin. The age old duel was about to begin; as always, it would be ‘lutte à l’outrance, usque ad mortem — a fight to the death’. Would it be his? Athelstan wondered. Would he draw too close, make a mistake?
Athelstan touched Cranston’s arm for comfort; the coroner pressed his hand reassuringly and they left the bridge, entering the wealthy part of the city. The streets, paths and alleyways here were packed with fatter, fuller bodies encased in gaily caparisoned houppelandes, capuchons, cloaks, poltocks and tabards. Merchants, shimmering in their jewellery pompously paraded, accompanied by wives bedecked in gorgeous clothes and elaborately decorated headdresses. Knights in half-armour on plump, powerful destriers trotted by. Lawyers, resplendent in red silks, hastened down to the ‘Si Quis’ door at St Paul’s. The stalls and booths were open and business was brisk. Merchants and traders offered silver tasselled dorsers and thick woollen cushions for benches. Priests and monks, armed with cross and thuribles, processed to this ritual or that. The air was rich with the many smells from the public bakehouse as well as the fragrance of the vegetable stalls stacked high with onions, leeks, cabbages and garlic. Next to these the fleshers’ booths offered suckling pigs and capons freshly slaughtered and drained of blood. Pilgrims to the shrine of Becket’s parents rubbed shoulders with those fingering pardon beads as the Fraternity of the Salve Regina made their way down to one of the city churches.
Squalor and brutality also made themselves felt. Beggars, covered in sores and garbed in rags, clustered at the mouth of alleyways and the spindle-thin runnels which cut between the mansions and shops. Outside the churches the poor swarmed, desperate for the Marymeat and Marybread given out by the parish beadles in honour of the Virgin. Fripperers pushed their handcarts full of old clothes, ever quick to escape the sharp eyes of the market bailiffs. A clerk, who’d begged after hiding his tonsure with cattle dung, was being fastened in the stocks, next to him a woman who’d stolen a baby so she could plead for alms. The noise, bustle, smell and colour deafened the ear and blurred the mind. The forest of steepled churches continuously clanged, their bells marking the hour for Mass or another recitation of the divine office. Smoke, fumes and smells from smithies, cook shops, tanneries, fullers, taverns and alehouses mingled and merged. Dung carts crashed by, full of ordure collected from the streets. Night-walkers, faces the colour of box-wood, were being marched, manacled together, to stand in the cage on the Tun in Cheapside. Children, dogs and cats raced through gaps in the crowds, spreading their own noise and confusion and drowning the shouts of tinkers and traders.
Athelstan, who’d taken to fingering his Ave beads, sighed with relief when Flaxwith, Samson trotting behind him, abruptly turned into Rosenip Lane, leaning towards the great mansions of Cheapside. Each of these stood behind its own towering curtain wall, their rims protected by shards of pottery and broken glass. The noise, stench and clatter died away. They stopped before one mansion. A porter let them through the smartly painted black gates and into the broad gardens where small square plots of herbs, shrubs and plants lay dormant in the severe grip of winter. Athelstan gazed around. There were clumps of apple and other fruit trees, their branches stark black whilst the large stew pond was nothing more than a thick sheet of ice. Athelstan hurried to keep up with Cranston as he strode along the white-pebbled path leading towards an enclosed porch built around the main door.
A grey-haired, grey-faced, grey-eyed servant, who introduced himself as Crispin, Sir Robert Kilverby’s secretarius or clerk, ushered them in. Athelstan had been struck by the gorgeous wealth of this red-brick mansion with its blue slated roof, glass-filled windows and soaring chimney stacks. The interior was no different. Athelstan and Cranston walked across tiled floors of black and white lozenges. Drapes and tapestries decorated the pink-washed plaster above gleaming wooden panelling. A gorgeous riot of colours: emeralds, deep blues, argents, purples and gleaming reds pleased the eye. Beeswax tapers glowed on spigots and candelabra, shimmering in the sheen of oaken sideboards boasting gold and silver gilt cups, mazers, dishes and goblets. Thick turkey cloths covered some floors whilst heraldic devices decorated the walls of the broad staircase they climbed. The air was fragrant with the smell of scented woodsmoke as well as the perfumes from small heated herb pots pushed into corners or on sills, a pleasing mixture of black poplar, green grape and elder oil. Nevertheless, Athelstan detected a tension, a watching silence beneath all this opulence.
Crispin eventually ushered them both into the magnificent solar, assuring Sir John that Master Flaxwith would be made most comfortable in the kitchen below. The group of people seated on chairs, stools and settles before the roaring fire rose to greet them. Lady Helen, Kilverby’s widow, was dressed in a sumptuously green and gold gown with a white lace headdress. Beautiful but as hard as flint, Athelstan thought, with a temper sharper than the panther’s tooth. Adam Lestral, whom Lady Helen introduced as ‘her kinsman’, was pasty-faced with shifting eyes and a weak mouth, his long black hair sleek with nard. A man of dark design, Athelstan considered, full of arrogance, kinsman Adam dismissed both Cranston and the friar with a look of flickering contempt. Alesia, Kilverby’s daughter, was fair-headed with crystal-grey eyes and cherry lips. She kept smoothing down the gem-encrusted stomacher of her long, tawny gown whilst glancing across at her imperious stepmother with a venom Athelstan considered to be past all understanding. The introductions were finished. Mulled spice wine and wafer thin doucettes were offered and taken. Cranston emptied his small silver dish and downed his wine in noisy gulps whilst he stood with his back to the fire, stamping his feet. Athelstan sipped his wine partly to hide his smile. Cranston, as ever, was acting the bluff, hearty old soldier as he offered his condolences to the family. The coroner refused to sit down and gestured at Athelstan to undo the leather satchel containing his writing tray.
‘My Lady,’ Cranston began, ‘your husband’s corpse?’
‘Left in the chancery chamber,’ Alesia replied before her stepmother could, ‘on the floor. I thought it was best.’ She motioned at Crispin. ‘My father’s secretarius, Crispin, found him.’
‘Lamp lighting time,’ Crispin replied sonorously. ‘Just before dawn, I knocked. .’
‘Let us see.’ Cranston interrupted harshly, all bonhomie draining from his face. He pointed at Crispin who shrugged and led them out of the solar, along a gleaming, wood-panelled passageway and up a short flight of stairs.
‘My father’s chancery or counting house,’ Alesia called from behind them.
Athelstan turned and stared at the group from the solar. Alesia, Helen, Adam and Crispin. He sensed the rancid hatred and resentment curdling in this family. Even though Sir Robert lay dead they were all determined on their rights, certainly Mistress Alesia and Lady Helen were openly competing over who exercised authority now.
‘We’ll need help.’ Cranston stepped back. The heavy oaken door had been snapped off its hinges, causing severe damage to the surrounding lintel. It now blocked the entrance to the chancery.
‘It had to be done,’ Lady Helen declared. She pointed back down the gallery where a group of servants clustered. ‘My husband would not answer. The door was both locked and bolted from the inside. It had to be forced.’
‘I had it placed back,’ Alesia added sharply, ‘to seal the chamber. My father, Sir John, did not die. He was murdered.’
‘Nonsense,’ Lady Helen whispered, ‘who would. .’
Athelstan came back down the steps. ‘Whatever is the cause, that is why we are here.’
Athelstan and Cranston waited until the servants moved the door. They then told the household to wait outside and walked into the chamber. Athelstan stared round that comfortable, luxurious room. He crossed himself then knelt and removed the sheet over the corpse lying on its makeshift bed of turkey rugs. Kilverby, an old man with scrawny white hair, had certainly died in agony: eyes popping, throat constricted, his partly opened lips had turned faintly blueish. The skin of his face was slightly liverish, the flesh swiftly hardening.