Stone of Destiny Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Paul Doherty

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Historical Note

  Part One

  Part Two

  Part Three

  Part Four

  Part Five

  Part Six

  Part Seven

  Author’s Note

  Also by Paul Doherty

  The Margaret Beaufort mysteries

  DARK QUEEN RISING *

  DARK QUEEN WAITING *

  The Brother Athelstan mysteries

  THE ANGER OF GOD

  BY MURDER’S BRIGHT LIGHT

  THE HOUSE OF CROWS

  THE ASSASSIN’S RIDDLE

  THE DEVIL’S DOMAIN

  THE FIELD OF BLOOD

  THE HOUSE OF SHADOWS

  BLOODSTONE *

  THE STRAW MEN *

  CANDLE FLAME *

  THE BOOK OF FIRES *

  THE HERALD OF HELL *

  THE GREAT REVOLT *

  A PILGRIMAGE TO MURDER *

  THE MANSIONS OF MURDER *

  THE GODLESS *

  The Canterbury Tales mysteries

  AN ANCIENT EVIL

  A TAPESTRY OF MURDERS

  A TOURNAMENT OF MURDERS

  GHOSTLY MURDERS

  THE HANGMAN’S HYMN

  A HAUNT OF MURDER

  THE MIDNIGHT MAN *

  * available from Severn House

  THE STONE OF DESTINY

  Paul Doherty

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  This first world edition published 2020

  in Great Britain and 2021 in the USA by

  Crème de la Crime an imprint of

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  Eardley House, 4 Uxbridge Street, London W8 7SY.

  Trade paperback edition first published

  in Great Britain and the USA 2021 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD.

  This eBook edition first published in 2021 by Severn House Digital

  an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited.

  Copyright © 2020 by Paul Doherty.

  All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. The right of Paul Doherty to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78029-114-7 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78029-750-7 (trade paper)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4483-0488-2 (e-book)

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is purely coincidental.

  This eBook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland

  To my beloved Grandson Caspar Doherty of Sheffield.

  HISTORICAL NOTE

  In 1296, Edward I of England, the so-called ‘Hammer of the Scots’ swept into Scotland to crush all opposition. He was tired of playing the role of the ‘honest broker’ between the different claimants to the Scottish Crown. Edward terrorized his opponents with fire and sword, by land and sea. A grim, harsh King, Edward struck at the very heart of the Scottish nation. He seized their most sacred relic, the Stone of Scone – the Stone of Destiny – from its royal abbey. Edward took the stone for himself: a crude, cruel and, in the long run, very unsuccessful campaign to crush all sense of independence amongst the Scots. Nevertheless, Edward I had sown dragon’s teeth. Scotland would never forget its rightful treasure and so more blood would have to be spilt …

  (The quotations before each chapter are from The Death of Pilate, a Medieval Miracle play from the Cornish Trilogy.)

  PART ONE

  ‘I am without equal about the rest of the world.’

  April 1360. The Parish of St Erconwald’s, Southwark

  The world had ceased to be a dark, murky prison full of stench, fresh with flame, all weeping and shrieking. The Great Pestilence was dying out. Its victims, with swollen buboes in groin and armpit, no longer crawled the streets. No longer was Southwark the teeming, filthy encampment of venomous demons, no longer a place of horrors. Order was being reimposed. Adele Puddlicot, crouching in the desolate, dark cellar of her rotting tenement in Weasel Lane, not far from the approaches to London Bridge, realized this. Adele was truly frightened, deeply concerned by what was happening. The season of the plague was over. Everything was about to change. The parish of St Erconwald’s had once been a desolate, neglected haunt: its priest had long gone, seizing what paltry treasure he could before fleeing for refuge in the southern shires. The priest, like others, was searching for a hiding place, a refuge well away from the horrors of the plague. The Great Pestilence had prowled the narrow runnels of the parish, moving like some great jawed monster, sweeping to the left and right with its poisonous sword. The dead had become more numerous than the living. Corpses were dragged out and stacked like so many slabs of putrid, maggot-infested meat. The stench of corruption drifted everywhere. Houses lay empty. Doors and windows pulled open. Of course the dark-dwellers emerged from the blackness to plunder, steal, rape and ravish. Little good it did them. Within the week they had died, gagging on the contents of their own bellies.

  The darkest night had descended over St Erconwald’s. However, in early summer the resurrection began. The Great Pestilence sloped away as if sated, and the Good and the God-fearing thanked the Lord and began their work. Burial pits were dug long and deep. Funeral pyres roared at night. Sewers were emptied and cleaned. Rotting, empty buildings were pulled down. True, no parson or priest occupied the parish church and house. Nevertheless, leading parishioners recalled ancient privileges granted to St Erconwald’s. The parish had been given the right to convoke a grand jury to investigate, summon, question, reach a verdict, and so impose judgement. A grand jury had in fact been empanelled to hear all complaints, pleas, allegations, accusations and grievances. Adele Puddlicot had heard of this and then, more alarming, how warrants had been issued for her arrest. She had warned her son, or so she called the Boy who lived with her. She had sent him away, telling him to hide in some mumpers’ castle deep in the slums of Southwark; that was the least she could do. Adele was now hiding herself. She took a deep drink from the wineskin, closing her eyes as she wondered what she might do.

  Months previously, Adele had moved through Southwark like a Queen of the Night. She was a corpse-dresser. She prepared cadavers for burial. People generously paid her for that. They’d leave the corpse of some loved one out on the streets. They’d hand over a fee and she would cart the corpse away on her barrow, ostensibly to have them buried deep in some lime pit. In truth Adele would, as soon as she could, take the coin and dispose of the corpse in some rotting lay stall. Adele herself seemed impervious to the pestilence. She’d worked at the very heart of the raging pestilence yet she suffered no
infection herself. Adele in fact became fascinated by the dead and the dying. Some of the latter would come crawling in to this tenement in the hope of solace and comfort. They would creep in here offering coins, presents, even themselves. Adele would grasp them by the arm and, in doing so, she became aware of how beautiful the human skin felt. She had once bought a piece of silk, smooth and soft; human skin was similar, particularly that of young women. One of her victims, a pretty streetwalker, a whore whom Adele had found slumped on the corner of Weasel Lane, had nudged Adele into the realization of her fantasies. Adele had helped the whore back to this dark cellar, garnished and refurbished by the items she had plundered from different houses.

  Once back, the young woman began to sob. She would not stop. Adele, leaning beside her, tried to stroke her face and smooth silky neck; this disturbed her humours. Adele had swiftly recalled how the fleshers and flayers of Newgate carry out their tasks. This was no different. Adele, frustrated by what she saw and felt, grasped a mallet; one swift blow to the front of the head and the whore had ceased her moaning. Adele however continued to caress her victim’s soft fleshy shoulders and so it had begun. Adele loved nothing better than to peel the skin of the freshly dead as well as those on the verge of slipping through the veil. Adele would help them on their way. She saw this as a mercy, an end to their suffering as well as a means to continue her own pleasure. She peeled her victims and tenderly treated the skins as a housewife would valuable cloth or precious linen: she kept them in the drawers of a beautifully crafted cabinet looted from a merchant’s mansion close to London Bridge.

  Adele did not know why she was so fascinated except, when she retreated into herself, she would recall that terrible day so many years ago outside Westminster. Oh yes, she could remember it so clearly. A cold, harsh day with a gibbet soaring up above the execution platform outside the abbey gates. Despite being well past her sixtieth summer, Adele could still experience that fear-drenched day. The executioners in elaborately horned masks, their long leather aprons smeared with blood, then her beloved father garbed in nothing more than a filthy shift. A place of terror! The braziers on the execution platform glowed like the fires of hell, tongues of flame leaping up to be drenched by a hard frost. Royal men at arms, archers and hobelars, a mass of steel, guarded the scaffold. And so the end: her father Richard Puddlicot, who had first been dragged in a barrow from the Tower, was readied for death. Bruised and bloodied, he was stripped of his filthy shift and made to climb the long narrow ladder to the hangman now waiting on the one alongside. Once there, her father was cast off to dangle and dance, a grotesque, gruesome shadow against the light evening sky. Adele, her mother and other kin had been forced to stay and watch her father’s corpse being cut down then carefully peeled by a flesher from the Newgate meat market.

  Adele recalled her father in his prime, the adventurer, the robber, the great friend of the monks of Westminster, who had been his firm allies in that audacious robbery of the Crown Jewels stored in the cavernous crypt of Westminster Abbey. Her father had been most successful and plundered the royal treasure hoard to his heart’s content. He had even brought some of the plunder to the family home in Farringdon Ward. Deep in his cups, he had decorated himself with the royal regalia of Scotland: the crown, the orb and, above all, the Black Rood of St Margaret’s, which contained a fragment of the True Cross. Oh, how her father had glorified himself! Of course it all ended in disaster. Royal clerks, mailed and dangerous, prowled through the city like lurchers. They were the King’s mastiffs and they tracked, hunted and cornered her father. The dragged him out of sanctuary and committed him for trial before a military tribunal in the Tower. Richard Puddlicot had been found guilty and paraded through London in a wheelbarrow. He had then been condemned to death. They hanged her handsome father but worse, they skinned him, flaying his corpse, peeling it as you would an apple. Adele’s mother, racked with illness, had pleaded for the skin to be given to her for burial along with her husband’s mangled remains: this had been refused. Instead, the King had ordered that Pudlicott’s skin be nailed to an abbey door close to the crypt, a hideous warning to any other would-be robber.

  Adele closed her eyes then opened them, she was sure she had heard a sound. The Boy? She called him her son and he played the role: in truth he was an orphan, an urchin, a street-swallow who had befriended her some years ago. The Boy had helped her in her work. Adele would entertain him by allowing him to watch her flay the corpses and, when it was finished, she would pipe on her flute and do a silly jig to make him laugh. However, all that was in the past. Times had changed, as they did so abruptly during her childhood. Life’s candle had burnt away. Adele had found herself as an orphan, forsaken by all because of her father. She had passed from one harsh convent to another. She had drunk deep of the waters of bitterness and eaten the harsh bread of rejection.

  Oh, Adele comforted herself, she had lived by her wits and, if she had to die, she would go bravely into the dark. She was no coward, nevertheless she had become wary. A week ago the Boy had informed her of how a proclamation, pinned to the door of St Erconwald’s, had promised a reward for the arrest of ‘Adele Puddlicot, thief, reprobate, murderer, witch and warlock and self-styled corpse-dresser.’ Adele Puddlicot was formally summoned to answer sundry charges levelled against her. Once the Boy had informed her of this, Adele had immediately fled here, what she called her little palace, adorned and furnished with the plunder snatched from corpses and their houses. Precious goods, cloths and artefacts had been loaded on to her barrow and brought here to enhance her comfort. Adele tried to relax but she heard that sound again. She rose and fumbled for the arbalest, the crossbow primed and ready on top of a coffer. As she seized this, the door to the cellar crashed open. Figures garbed in cloak, cowl and mask thronged into the cellar. Adele raised the arbalest but this was knocked from her hand. She was pushed and shoved up and out of the cellar, more hooded figures waited for her in the street. Adele twisted and turned. As she did so she glimpsed the Boy, white faced, round eyed, standing in a pool of light thrown by one of the lanterns.

  ‘Judas,’ Adele screamed at him. ‘You little, miserable …’

  A blow to the mouth silenced her and she was dragged away. The escort pulling her cruelly with coarse ropes lashed around her chest and middle. She stumbled down the narrow, reeking lanes, slipping and slithering on the greasy, dirty cobbles. Cats raced across her path in hot pursuit of the legion of rats which still roamed free. Somewhere a dog howled at the moon. In corners, doorways and alcoves, Adele glimpsed the destitute with their pallid white, skeletal faces, clacking dishes held out before them: these were swiftly withdrawn as this group of sinister-looking figures emerged out of the dark. One of these outcasts however, glimpsed Adele. A rock was thrown followed by pieces of ordure. The escort drew their swords and the hail of filth abruptly ceased.

  They turned a corner going down the alleyway past The Piebald tavern and up towards the soaring mass of St Erconwald’s. The ancient church stood an ominously dark building against a sky now brightening under the first signs of dawn. They reached the church steps, Adele was pushed and shoved up into the porch. She moaned at the sight which greeted her. The sombre atrium of St Erconwald’s was now lit by flaring cresset torches and large lanternhorns. A court had been set up on a makeshift dais. To the right of this ranged two benches with a high stool placed in the centre before the judgement bench: the top of this table was covered by a velvet cloth and ornamented with a crucifix, a rusty sword, a tattered Book of the Gospels and a freshly fashioned noose.

  Adele realized what was going to happen. This court was as dreadful and dire as King’s Bench in Westminster or any commission presided over by a justice. The parish of St Erconwald’s had decided to exert itself. Adele realized she could not plead for mercy, seek a pardon or even bribe her way out of the closing trap. She had acted like a Queen of the Night, now this was judgement day. Adele was forced to sit on the stool, a guard either side of her. One of the hooded fi
gures took the judgement chair, the rest sat on benches. The court was ready. The judge banged hard on the table, blessed himself and told one of the guards to bring forward the principal witness. Adele closed her eyes and cursed as the Boy sloped out of the darkness to her left. At the judge’s insistence, the Boy stood on the dais facing her and the jurors sitting so silently on their benches.

  ‘Well, Boy?’ The judge’s voice grated. ‘Tell us again what you have seen and heard.’

  The Boy did so in a loud, carrying voice. He gave his account. The church echoed to his words as he described Adele’s depredations. The plunder seized from houses, the killing of victims with a blow to the head, the flaying of their corpses and the preservation of their skins. Adele could only sit and listen. She tried to interrupt but a vicious blow to her mouth by one of the guards silenced her. Once the Boy had finished, she protested again, only to receive a second blow which bloodied her nose and lips. Adele strained against the bonds. She stared around at what was now her judgement chamber: a place of rippling light and dancing shadows. She recognized who the jurors truly were, the ghosts of her victims come for vengeance! She was cold, lonely, but above all she was trapped, and there was nothing she could do.

  ‘Adele Puddlicot,’ the judge declared, ‘do you have any answer or defence to the dreadful accusations levelled against you?’ The judge paused as someone came into the church, stepped onto the dais and whispered heatedly into the judge’s ear.

  ‘It is as we thought.’ The judge signalled for the messenger to withdraw. ‘We have ransacked your chamber, Adele Puddlicot. We have discovered more evidence of theft, as well as hideous cruelty to your victims.’ The judge turned. ‘Members of the jury, how do you say?’

  ‘Guilty.’ The full-throated response of the jurors rang through the church.