by Paul Doherty
Skulkin and his men retreated. Roseblood helped the priests with the wounded fugitive, now jerking in and out of consciousness, his belly wound spluttering blood. They laid him on the cold paving stones of the nave and Roseblood pulled back the man’s cowl. His heart skipped a beat. Bolt-Head! He recognised that bony face, the head shaved as smooth as a pigeon’s. Whatever his baptismal name, the wounded man had acquired his title from his protruding skull, used in many a street fight.
‘You recognise him?’ Father Roger whispered.
‘Bolt-Head is a raker from Cripplegate ward, often seen in the company of Candlemas. He has been lying hidden for some days.’
The wounded man abruptly stirred. Arching in pain, he stared bulbous-eyed up at Roseblood.
‘Master Simon,’ he gasped, ‘thanks be to God. I was coming here when Skulkin’s men recognised me. I thought I was safe. I stopped…’
Roseblood leaned down; the smell of ale was rich on Bolt-Head’s blood-bubbling breath.
‘You stopped at some alehouse, where you would stand out like a friar amongst nuns! Come, let’s lift him into the sanctuary.’
They carried him up into the recess for fugitives. Father Benedict fetched some wine from the sacristy. Roseblood coaxed the wounded man to drink.
‘A physician?’ Father Roger murmured.
‘Not for me,’ Bolt-Head murmured. ‘I know belly wounds. The knife ripped deep and harsh; soon it will get worse.’
Roseblood pulled back the man’s tattered jerkin to reveal a savage black-red rent across the stomach. He shook his head.
‘Absolution?’ Father Benedict, nervous as ever, pulled a set of Ave beads through his fingers. ‘He must be absolved.’
‘Not yet, Father.’ Bolt-Head gagged at the pain. ‘Just you and me, master, for a while.’
The priests withdrew. Outside, the agitation and tumult had subsided. Simon knew that Ignacio had left, speeding like a lurcher to take care of certain matters, but others of his guard would be assembling.
‘What is it?’ Simon knelt down, his face almost touching that of the dying man.
‘Master, I went into hiding. You know I had to. I told you what I knew. Rumours milled about how there was no silver. How Candlemas and his company were either killed or taken up. People now smell trickery.’ He clutched Simon’s hand. ‘Master, who was behind that robbery? Who persuaded Candlemas?’ He coughed on his blood. ‘Was the silver replaced with sacks of rubbish? They are saying that Candlemas is going to blame you for the robbery.’
‘Hush now,’ Simon soothed.
‘I feel so cold,’ the dying man groaned. ‘So very cold. I had to come. I am your sworn man, aren’t I?’
‘You are a comrade,’ Simon assured him, ‘but why did you creep out of hiding now?’
‘Strange tales are told. Candlemas has turned King’s Approver.’ Bolt-Head shivered; the bloody froth between his lips had thickened. ‘They – I don’t know who; perhaps your enemies at the Guildhall – are sending all kinds of rumours to run like ferrets in a warren.’ He gasped noisily. ‘Last night, in the Palm of Jerusalem, three Essex wolfsheads – you might know them, Blackshanks, Gull-Groper and Scalding-Boy – announced that they would be taking over all the raking and scavenging in Cripplegate ward. They would hold an indenture from the city council.’ He coughed blood and gratefully sipped at the wine, only to jerk at another searing jab of pain that convulsed his entire body. ‘That is all I have to tell you, master. They say you will be indicted.’ His eyes pleaded with Roseblood. ‘Do what you have to do. Jesu miserere! Master, are men like us redeemed?’
‘We are sinners,’ Simon was already distracted by Bolt-Head’s news, ‘and we do what we are good at: sinning.’
He called across, and Father Benedict hurried to shrive the dying man. Simon withdrew until the priest had finished, making the sign of the cross in the air above Bolt-Head, who now lay against the sanctuary cushion coughing and spluttering.
‘Do what you have to,’ Father Benedict whispered to Simon as he passed. ‘There is nothing we can do. You know that. According to the law of sanctuary, not even medicine can be brought in.’
Simon crossed himself and knelt beside Bolt-Head, whose face was now as white as snow, mouth gaping in pain.
‘Please,’ the fugitive opened his eyes, ‘the mercy cut.’
Simon drew his misericord dagger and gently put his hand behind the dying man’s head. ‘Look at me, old friend.’ Bolt-Head did so, and Simon expertly drew the dagger across his throat, holding his comrade as he jerked and trembled. Once he was still, he withdrew his arm and knelt for a while reciting the requiem, trying to recall all those other comrades he’d sent into the dark; the friends lying gashed and wounded in the war-ravished fields of Normandy.
‘Simon.’ Father Benedict touched his shoulder, ‘Go now. Roger and I will dress the corpse. I will sing the requiem mass tomorrow and bury him in God’s Acre with a fine cross and a posy of spring flowers on the grave.’
Simon cleaned his dagger, shook Benedict’s hand, nodded at Father Roger and walked out through the corpse door. A beautiful evening; the sun was still strong and the market horn had yet to bray. The cemetery, God’s Acre, stretched down to its red-brick curtain wall and massive oaken lychgate. The crowd had thinned. A few city bailiffs, watched by Roseblood’s men, still lounged in the long grass around the stone tombs and wooden crosses. The wild roses and other late spring flowers had bloomed rich and full to incense the air with their perfume. As he walked along the path to stand in the shadow of the lychgate, his mind was elsewhere, swirling and turning like a lurcher hunting a hare. A sea of troubles was boiling up. York would soon march south, and what could Simon do except defend himself?
The sounds and smells of the ward wafted towards him. A market beadle – Simon couldn’t recall his name – was ringing a bell, his shrivelled face all furious, his hooked nose cutting the air. He bawled a proclamation ‘Against rotten mutton, beef that is turnip-fed, lean measly pork from hogs glutted on city muck. Against all meats charred and sweaty and thrice roasted.’ Simon recalled the delicious dishes served at his own tavern. A group of courtiers passed in their ridiculously padded jerkins, multicoloured hose and hats of the same florid design. Clean-shaven, they allowed their hair to fall down almost to cover their eyes and to lie ringleted and curled on their shoulders. All of them were armed.
‘You are the dangerous ones,’ Simon whispered, ‘the city bully boys. When the black banner is raised, you’ll be there to rob and rape.’ He closed his eyes and murmured a prayer. If he fell from power, those same deadly fops would swagger into the Roseblood tavern to take what they wanted. The same could be said of many who flowed by the lychgate. The peasants pushing their barrows, merchants strolling arm in arm, storytellers full of eerie tales about elves and fairies, changelings and witches. Prior Aelred claimed that the city mob remained hidden, concealed behind ten thousand masks; in truth, it was a beast in waiting. Cade’s invasion had proven that.
‘Master Simon Roseblood!’ He glanced up. A dust haze had risen, stirred by the iron wheels of heavy carts. A line of strumpets, Venus’s children, went by dancing and stamping their feet, garish wigs askew, low-slung bodices open to reveal all. The dust cloud shifted to reveal a gallant in padded doublet, black hose and costly riding boots. He had long dark hair, his face hidden by a silver satyr’s mask, which he held elegantly in place with one gauntleted hand, the other resting on the stabbing dirk thrust into an embroidered scabbard. ‘Master Roseblood?’ The figure stepped closer. Simon glimpsed the insignia on the left shoulder of the blood-red jerkin: a crow in full flight against a blue field. ‘My name is LeCorbeil—’
Roseblood started forward. ‘My brother!’ he protested. ‘My brother mentioned you the night he died. You meddle in our affairs, a constant refrain—’
‘Monsieur, I beg you. Your men are some distance away, whilst I…’ LeCorbeil gestured at the crossbowmen, three in number, now standing behind him. ‘I believe,�
�� he continued, his melodious voice tinged with a French accent, ‘that the time is opportune for me to introduce myself yet again.’
‘Yet again? We have met before?’
‘Oh yes, many years ago.’
‘You are York’s creature?’ Simon demanded.
‘Monseigneur of York has his part to play in this, but so do you, Master Roseblood.’
‘Why?’
‘Don’t you remember, Englishman? You should, for I am LeCorbeil, come for vengeance!’ And the mysterious figure, protected by his henchmen, disappeared into the noisy jostling crowd.
Katherine Roseblood
London, April 1455
‘And we shall all go to Avalon, kiss the Holy Thorn and peer into the golden Eternal West.’ Katherine, daughter of Simon Roseblood and Rohesia, now departed, whispered her mythical incantation as she gingerly climbed the massive ancient oak. The tree stood in the furthest corner of the great garden of the orchard that lay to the west of the magnificent Roseblood, a three-storey tavern built of gleaming honey-coloured Cotswold stone. The sloping roofs of the tavern, which Katherine glimpsed as she climbed, were tiled with gleaming slates, its chimney stacks firmly constructed to withstand the gales that swept along the nearby Thames.
The Roseblood was a monument to English victories in France and the vast profits accrued from them. The old timber and plaster tavern had been torn down, and Master Simon had hired the finest artisans, stonemasons, carpenters, plumbers and tilers. He had imported stone by road and river from Cotswold quarries, paying his bills from the treasures and ransoms he had collected fighting in France under the Beaufort banner. The tavern, built in squares, could equal any stately manor house. Its northern arched gatehouse opened up on to the city; its southern to that stretch of lonely riverside carpeted by grass, briar, bramble and sandy shale that swept down to the busy port of Queenhithe.
The Roseblood imitated the great courtyards of France. The Great Cloister, as the central square enclosure was called, did not contain stableyard, washroom, bakery or slaughterhouse like other taverns. Instead it was modelled on the enclosure of an abbey: a rich grassy garth in the middle, with flower beds along its four sides. In the centre of the cloister garth rose an elegant fountain carved in the shape of a kingfisher standing over a deep bowl of water where lily pads bobbed, reeds thrust up long, lovely and lush and small golden fish darted. Each corner of the garth contained a shady arbour with turfed seats and stone benches. The air was constantly sweet with the perfume of plants and flowers: holly and ivy for Christmas; yew and hazel to be carried as palms during Holy Week; birch boughs for Easter, sweet woodruff for chaplets and garlands at Corpus Christi and white lilies and red roses for the Great Lady days. The bailey – the working courtyard with stables, well, smithy, bakehouse and other storerooms – lay to the east of the Great Cloister, connected by an arched gateway. On the west, a similar gate led into the tavern’s various gardens and orchards; a true paradise, with stew ponds, dovecotes and even a small warren.
Katherine, garbed in a russet smock, stout boots on her feet, pushed herself further up the oak tree to what she and her brothers always called Merlin’s Nest, her greensward bower, a great tangle of ancient branches that provided a canopied platform. Years ago her brothers used to join her, but Gabriel was now a novice with the Franciscans, while Raphael was a serjeant at law and her redoubtable father’s principal henchman. She stopped and turned to her mythical companion, Melisaunde.
‘No one comes here, you know. This,’ she gestured towards the gardens, ‘is our Avalon. Here Galahad will come bearing the Grail and Morgan le Fay to spin her web of dreams.’ She stared out over the gardens, with their turf-topped stone seats, their fruit trees, herbers and flower plots, the patchwork of paths across the lawn. ‘They claim that I am fey,’ she murmured, ‘but Avalon is definitely here.’
Katherine smiled. She knew she was imprisoned in the past. Father had been raised on the Glastonbury estates, and had crammed her mind with stories of the great abbey where Arthur and Guinevere had slept; the Holy Thorn planted by Joseph of Arimathea; the ghostly knights; and the whereabouts of the Grail and the Crystal Cave where Merlin rested until he came again. In the principal tavern refectory her father had nailed swords to the wall above the inscribed names of their owners, Arthur’s knights: Lancelot, Galahad, Gawain, Bors and all the others. Tapestries in the elegantly furnished solar, the Camelot Chamber, proclaimed the story of the Green Knight and the Lady of the Lake. In the centre of that chamber stood a huge round table, modelled on the original kept at Winchester, with silver arrows painted on it proclaiming the titles and positions of Arthur and his glorious chivalry.
‘But when will Mordred come?’ Katherine whispered. ‘Mordred, Melisaunde, Morgan le Fay’s death-bearing son? Will he come and shatter Avalon? Is this our time of sunset? Will Father take his special sword, Excalibur, from its carved chest?’
Undoubtedly, she reflected, the shadows were stretching closer and deeper. Five years ago, around her thirteenth summer, the terrors had sprung out of the darkness: Cade’s minions milling about the tavern, only driven off by a host of spears and clusters of notched bows. Nights of fire and horror. A time of chaos and sorrow, when Uncle Edmund had slipped away. They’d eventually brought his body back in an arrow chest, his severed head resting against his blood-soaked trunk. Father Benedict and his curate Father Roger, who according to Malkin, master of the taproom, were closer than man and wife – though God knows what he meant by that – had tended to the corpse. The two priests, who had served in Father’s retinue in France, had sewn the head back on, and cleaned and waxed the corpse for burial in its elm-wood casket, but even then Aunt Eleanor could not bring herself to look. Mad with grief, she had withdrawn to All Hallows and remained there ever since. Why? What had Uncle Edmund intended by slipping out that summer evening? Who was he to meet? Katherine, who had honed the skill of eavesdropping, had heard the name LeCorbeil mentioned, but who or what they were remained a tangled mystery.
‘Mordred’s time has certainly come, Melisaunde,’ Katherine whispered, half listening to the cooing from the dovecote, which was answered by the heart-thrilling song of a thrush hidden in a hedgerow. ‘Father is concerned. Rumour has it that he could be indicted.’ She wished her mother was here, and swiftly crossed herself. Father had intimated that tonight he would convoke a consilium juratorum, a council of sworn men. She would be part of that. Father had insisted on it, overruling her taciturn brother Raphael. They would meet in the Camelot Chamber, gathering round Arthur’s table. Raphael would be present; Ignacio too, with his soul-dead eyes, long fingers fluttering as he and her father talked their silent speech.
Gabriel never came. He would meet Raphael when his elder brother brought in the wine smuggled from cogs in the river – barrels and tuns unstamped by the keepers of the custom – along with corpses culled from the water. Sometimes her father would go on such nightly expeditions. Under cover of dark, as the barrels and corpses were unloaded on to the friary carts, he would hurry ahead to Greyfriars to secretly meet the Lancastrian lords, Stafford of Buckingham and, above all, Edmund Beaufort, second Duke of Somerset. Such meetings were necessary. Beaufort could no longer move openly in the city, so strong was York’s growing grip. Moreover, rumours that Queen Margaret’s son was Beaufort’s, not the King’s, had caught the attention of the songsters, balladeers and minstrels, though none would dare proclaim such scandal in the Roseblood.
Others would also attend tonight’s consilium juratorum, including the two priests. ‘I hope, Melisaunde,’ whispered Katherine, flicking at the scraps of bark on her smock, ‘that Father Roger has stopped crying. He went to Colchester recently to bury his poor mother, and since his return he has not been the same. But there again, that’s what I love about the Roseblood. Like Avalon, all is shrouded in mystery and intrigue.’
She fell silent as she heard servants pass by to collect herbs – mint, parsley and sorrel – for the kitchens and buttery. Once the
y’d gone, she returned to her musing. Father swirled like some knight clothed in a magical mist confronting his enemies, be it on the city council or along the filthy maze of Queenhithe’s alleyways. Strangers came and went in the dead of night. Courier pigeons were dispatched, messages attached in thin copper sheaths. The grotesques of London, her father’s gangs organised into their various companies, slid in and out of the tavern with a host of others who looked to Simon Roseblood for sustenance and protection: relic sellers, pardoners, tinkers and traders, moon people and mummers, quacks and conjurors, pimps and prostitutes, beggars and rifflers. He greeted all these with open hands. No one who begged for a platter of food or a black jack of ale was ever turned away.
Other visitors remained mysterious, such as a present guest, Master Reginald Bray, who professed to be on pilgrimage to the house of St Thomas of Becket’s parents in Cheapside. Perhaps he was, though Katherine had noticed how he was most observant about all that happened in the tavern. Even more mysterious was the small, rather plump lady who had visited the tavern all hooded and visored at least once a fortnight over the last few months, arriving just before the Vespers bell on Friday. She was always given the Medlar, a spacious bedchamber on the second storey overlooking the Great Cloister, and would move straight up the private staircase, clinging to the balustrade. No less a person than the trusty Ignacio would escort her and take care of the little baggage she brought.
Curious, Katherine had set up close vigil on this enigmatic lady, who was visited by various young men in their padded jerkins and tight-fitting hose, hair all coiffed, jewellery glinting at throat, chest and wrist. Ignacio would always bring up a jug of white wine, together with some sweet subtlety such as marchpane, prunes and syrup, or succade of lemon peels. The mysterious woman would leave long after dark, and Katherine had heard the squeals and cries of lovemaking from the chamber; very similar to those she heard whilst hiding in the Great Tithe barn, when she was forced to witness one of the grooms tumble a maid in a flash of white flesh and threshing legs on the straw below. ‘I asked Father, only once, who our mysterious woman was, Melisaunde. He just grasped me by the shoulder, tapped me on the nose, called me his little squirrel, and told me to be careful of the circling hawks. Now what could that mean?’