House of the Red Slayer Read online

  Athelstan was distributing communion, placing the thin white wafers on the tongues of his parishioners. Crim held the silver plate under their chins to catch any crumbs which might fall. Most of the parish council had turned up, some wandering in when Mass was half over.

  The friar was about to return to the altar when he heard a tapping on the outside wall of the far aisle. Of course! He had forgotten the lepers, two unfortunates whom he’d allowed to shelter in the musty charnel house in the cemetery. Athelstan provided them with food and drink and a bowl of water infused with mulberry to wash in, but never once had he glimpsed their scabrous white faces, though from his clothes one was definitely a male. He wished he could do more for them but Canon Law was most insistent – a leper was not allowed to take communion with the rest of the congregation but could only receive it through the leper squint, a small hole in the wall of the church.

  Crim remembered his duties and, picking up a thin twig of ash, handed it to the friar who placed a host on the end and pushed it through the leper squint. He repeated the action, whispered a prayer, and went back to finish the Mass.

  Afterwards Athelstan disrobed in the sacristy, closing his ears to the crashing sounds from the nave as Watkin the dung-collector rearranged the benches for the meeting of the parish council. Athelstan knelt on his prie dieu, asked for guidance, and hoped to God his parishioners would overlook the dreadful events happening outside.

  As soon as he stepped into the nave, he knew his prayers had been fruitless. Watkin was sitting in pride of place, the other members on benches on either side of him. Crim had placed Athelstan’s chair out of the sanctuary ready for him and, as he took it, Athelstan caught Watkin’s self-important look, the ominous flickering of the eyes and the mouth pursed as if on the brink of announcing something very important.

  Ursula the pig woman had joined them, bringing her large fat sow into church with her in spite of the protests of the rest. The creature waddled around grunting with pleasure. Athelstan was sure the annoying beast was grinning at him. He did not object to its presence. Better here than outside. Ursula was a garrulous but a kindly old woman. Nevertheless the friar hid a blind hatred for her large, fat-bellied sow which periodically plundered his garden of any vegetables he tried to plant there.

  Athelstan said a prayer to the Holy Ghost and leaned back in his chair.

  ‘Brothers and sisters,’ he began, ‘welcome to this meeting on our holiday feast of St Lucy.’ He ignored Watkin’s eye. ‘We have certain matters to discuss.’ He smiled at Benedicta then noticed with alarm how Watkin’s wife was glaring at Cecily the courtesan. A mutual antipathy existed between these two women, Watkin’s wife in the past loudly wondering why it was necessary for her husband to confer so often with Cecily on the cleaning of the church. Huddle the painter stared vacantly at a blank wall, probably dreaming of the mural he would like to put there if Athelstan gave him the monies.

  Most of the parish business was a long litany of mundane items. Pike the ditcher’s daughter wished to marry Amisias the fuller’s eldest boy. The great Blood Book was consulted to ensure there were no lines of consanguinity. Athelstan was pleased to announce there were not and matters turned to the approaching Yuletide: the Ceremony of the Star which would take place in the church, the timing of the three Masses for Christmas Day, the non-payment of burial dues, and the children using the holy water stoup as a drinking fountain. Tab the tinker offered to fashion new candlesticks, two large ones, fronted with lions. Gamelyn the clerk volunteered to sing a pleasant carol at the end of each Mass at Yuletide. Athelstan agreed to a mummers’ play in the nave on St Stephen’s Day, and some discussion was held about who would play the role of the boy bishop at Childermass, the feast of the Holy Innocents, on the twenty-eighth of December.

  Athelstan, however, noticed despairingly how Watkin just slumped on his bench, glaring impatiently as he clawed his codpiece and shuffled his muddy boots. Benedicta caught Athelstan’s concern and gazed anxiously at this man she loved but could not attain because he was an ordained priest. At last Athelstan ran out of things to say.

  ‘Well, Watkin,’ he commented drily. ‘You have a matter of great urgency?’

  Watkin drew himself up to his full height. His greasy brow was furrowed under a shock of bright red hair, receding fast to leave a bushy fringe. His pale blue eyes, which seemed to fight each other for space next to a bulbous nose, glared around at his colleagues.

  ‘The cemetery has been looted!’ he blurted out.

  Athelstan groaned and lowered his head.

  ‘What do you mean?’ shouted Ranulf the rat-catcher, his face sharp and pointed under a black, tarry hood.

  ‘In the last few days,’ Watkin announced, ‘corpses have been exhumed!’

  Consternation broke out. Athelstan rose and clapped his hands for silence, and kept doing so until the clamour ceased. ‘You know,’ he began, ‘how our cemetery of St Erconwald’s is often used for the burial of corpses of strangers – beggars on whom no claim is made. No grave of any parishioner’s relative has been disturbed.’ He breathed deeply. ‘Nevertheless, Watkin is correct. Three graves have been robbed of their bodies. Each had been freshly interred. A young beggar woman, a Brabantine mercenary found dead after a tavern brawl, and an old man seen begging outside the hospital of St Thomas, who was found in the courtyard of the Tabard Inn, frozen dead.’ Athelstan licked his lips. ‘The ground is hard,’ he continued. ‘Watkin knows how difficult it is to dig with mattock and hoe to furnish a grave deep enough, so the very shallowness of the graves has assisted these blasphemous robbers.’

  ‘A guard should be placed,’ Pike the ditcher called out.

  ‘Will you do it?’ Benedicta asked softly. ‘Will you spend all night in the cemetery, Pike, and wait for the grave robbers?’ Her dark eyes took in the rest of the council. ‘Who will stand guard? And who knows,’ she continued, ‘if the robberies are committed at night? Perhaps they take place in the afternoon or eventide.’

  Athelstan glanced at her gratefully. ‘I could watch,’ he interrupted. ‘Indeed, I have done so when I – er . . .’ he faltered.

  ‘When you study the stars, Brother,’ Ursula the pigwoman broke in, provoking a soft chorus of laughter for all the parishioners knew of their priest’s strange occupation.

  Huddle the painter stirred himself. ‘You could ask Sir John Cranston to help us. Perhaps he could send soldiers to guard the graves?’

  Athelstan shook his head. ‘My Lord Coroner,’ he replied, ‘has no authority to order the King’s soldiers hither and thither.’

  ‘What about the beadles?’ Watkin’s wife bellowed. ‘What about the ward watch?’

  Yes, what about them? Athelstan bleakly thought. The alderman and officials of the ward scarcely bothered about St Erconwald’s, still less about its cemetery, and wouldn’t give a fig for the graves of the three unknowns being pillaged.

  ‘Who are they?’ Benedicta asked softly. ‘Why do they do it? What do they want?’

  Her words created a pool of silence. All faces turned to their priest for an answer. This was the moment Athelstan feared. The cemetery was God’s Acre. When he had first come to the parish nine months ago he had been very strict about those who tried to set up market there or with the young boys who played games with the bones dug up by marauding dogs or pigs. ‘The cemetery,’ he had announced, ‘is God’s own land where the faithful wait for Christ to come again.’ Even then Athelstan had not given the full reason for his strictures; secretly he shared the Church’s fears of those who worshipped Satan, the Lord of the Crossroads and Master of the Gibbet, and often practised their black arts in cemeteries. Indeed, he had heard of a case in the parish of St Peter Cornhill where a black magician had used the blood drained from such corpses to raise demons and scorpions.

  Athelstan coughed. How could he answer? Then the door was flung open and Cranston, his saviour, swept grandly into the church.

  CHAPTER 2

  Sir John pulled back his cl
oak and tipped his beaver hat to the back of his head.

  ‘Come on, Brother!’ he bawled, winking at Benedicta. ‘We are needed at the Tower. Apparently Murder does not wait upon the weather.’

  For once Athelstan was pleased by Cranston’s dramatic style of entry. The friar peered closely at him.

  ‘You have been at the claret, Sir John?’

  Cranston tapped the side of his fleshy nose. ‘A little,’ he slurred.

  ‘What about the cemetery?’ Watkin wailed. ‘Sir John, our priest has to see to that!’

  ‘Sod off, you smelly little man!’

  Watkin’s wife rose and looked balefully at Cranston.

  ‘My Lord Coroner, I shall be with you presently,’ Athelstan smoothly intervened. ‘Watkin, I shall attend to this business on my return. In the meantime, make sure that Bonaventura is fed and the torches doused. Cecily, you will put out food for the lepers?’

  The girl stared vacuously and nodded.

  ‘Mind you,’ Athelstan muttered, ‘they tend to wander and look after themselves during the day.’

  He smiled beatifically around his favourite group of parishioners and made a quick departure down the icy steps of the church and across to the priest’s house. He cut himself a slice of bread but spat it out as it tasted sour and stale. ‘I’ll eat on my journey,’ he murmured, and packed his saddlebags with vellum, pen cases and ink horns. Philomel, his old war horse, snickered and nudged him, a real nuisance as Athelstan tried to fasten the girths beneath the aged destrier’s ponderous belly.

  ‘You’re getting more like Cranston every day!’ Athelstan muttered.

  He led Philomel back to the front of the church and ran up the porch steps. Cranston was leaning against the pillar, leering at Cecily whilst trying to keep Bonaventura from brushing against his leg. The coroner couldn’t stand cats ever since his campaigns in France when the French had catapulted their corpses into a small castle he was holding, in an attempt to spread contagious diseases. Bonaventura, however, adored the coroner. The cat seemed to know when he was in the vicinity and always put in an appearance.

  Athelstan murmured a few words to Benedicta, smiled apologetically at Watkin and the rest; he collected his deep-hooded cloak from the sanctuary and returned just in the nick of time to prevent Cranston from toppling head over heels over Ursula’s fat-bellied sow. The coroner stormed out, glaring at Athelstan and daring him to laugh. Cranston mounted his horse, roaring oaths about pigs in church and how he would like nothing better than a succulent piece of roast pork. Athelstan swung his saddlebags across Philomel, mounted and, before Cranston could do further damage, led him away from the church into Fennel Alleyway.

  ‘Why the Tower, Sir John?’ he asked quickly, trying to divert the coroner’s rage.

  ‘In a while, monk!’ Cranston rasped back.

  ‘I’m a friar, not a monk,’ Athelstan muttered.

  Cranston belched and took another swig from his wineskin. ‘What was going on back there?’ he asked.

  ‘A parish council meeting.’

  ‘No, I mean about the cemetery.’

  Athelstan informed him and the coroner’s face grew serious.

  ‘Do you think it’s Satanists? The Black Lords of the graveyard?’ he whispered, reining his horse closer to Athelstan’s.

  The friar grimaced. ‘It may well be.’

  ‘It must be!’ Cranston snapped back. ‘Who else would be interested in decaying corpses?’

  The coroner steadied his horse as Philomel, conscious of the narrowing alleyway, tossed his head angrily at Cranston’s mount.

  ‘I’d like to root the lot out!’ the coroner slurred. ‘In my treatise on the governance of London . . . Two blue eyes glared at Athelstan, scrutinising the friar’s face for any trace of boredom as the coroner expounded on his favourite theme. ‘In my treatise,’ he continued, ‘anyone practising the black arts would suffer heavy fines for the first offence and death for the second.’ He shrugged. ‘But perhaps it’s just some petty nastiness.’

  Athelstan shook his head. ‘Such matters are never petty,’ he replied. ‘I attended an exorcism once at a little church near Blackfriars. A young boy possessed by demons was speaking in strange tongues and levitating himself from the ground. He claimed the demons entered him after a ceremony in which the corpse of a hanged man was the altar.’

  Cranston shuddered. ‘If you need any help . . .’ the coroner tentatively offered.

  Athelstan smiled. ‘That’s most kind of you, My Lord Coroner. As usual your generosity of spirit takes my breath away.’

  ‘Any friend of the Good Lord is a friend of mine,’ Cranston quipped. ‘Even if he is a monk.’

  ‘I’m a friar,’ Athelstan replied. ‘Not a monk.’ He glared at Cranston but the coroner threw back his head and roared with laughter at his perennial joke against Athelstan.

  At last they left the congested alleyways, taking care to avoid the snow which slid from the high, sloped roofs, and turned on to the main thoroughfare down to London Bridge. The cobbled area was sheeted with ice, coated with a thin layer of snow which a biting wind stirred into sudden, sharp flurries. A few stalls were out, but their keepers hid behind tattered canvas awnings against the biting wind now packing the sky with deep, dark snow clouds.

  ‘A time to keep secret house,’ Cranston murmured.

  A relic-seller stood outside the Abbot of Hyde’s inn trying to sell a staff which, he claimed, had once belonged to Moses. Two prisoners, manacled together and released from the Marshalsea where debtors were held, begged for alms for themselves and other poor unfortunates. Athelstan threw them some pennies, moved to compassion by their ice-blue feet. Both Cranston’s and Athelstan’s horses were well shod but the few people who were about slipped and slithered on the treacherous black ice. These hardy walkers made their way gingerly along, grasping the frames of the houses they passed. Nevertheless, as Cranston remarked, justice was active; outside the hospital of St Thomas a baker had been fastened on a hurdle as punishment for selling mouldy bread. Athelstan remembered the stale food he had spat out earlier and watched as the unfortunate was pulled along by a donkey. A drunken bagpipe player slipped and slid along behind, playing a raucous tune to hide the baker’s groans. In the stocks a taverner, wry-mouthed, was being made to drink sour wine, whilst a whore, fastened to the thews, was whipped by a sweating bailiff who lashed the poor woman’s back with long thick twigs of holly.

  ‘Sir John,’ Athelstan whispered, ‘the poor woman has had enough.’

  ‘Sod her!’ Cranston snarled back. ‘She probably deserved it!’

  Athelstan looked closer at the coroner’s round red face.

  ‘Sir John, for pity’s sake, what is the matter?’

  Beneath the false bonhomie and wine-guzzling, Athelstan sensed the coroner was either very angry or very anxious. Cranston blinked and smiled falsely. He drew his sword and, turning his horse aside, moved over to the whipping post and slashed at the ropes which held the whore. The woman collapsed in a bloody heap on the ice. The bailiff, a snarl making his ugly face more grotesque, walked threateningly towards Cranston. Sir John waved his sword and pulled the muffler from his face.

  ‘I am Cranston the City Coroner!’ he yelled.

  The man backed off hastily. Sir John delved under his cloak, brought out a few pennies and tossed them to the whore.

  ‘Earn an honest crust!’ he snapped.

  He glared at his companion, daring him to comment before continuing down past the stews and on to the wide expanse of London Bridge. The entire trackway of the bridge was coated with ice and shrouded in mist. Athelstan stopped, his hand on Cranston’s arm.

  ‘Sir John, something is wrong! It’s so quiet!’

  Cranston grinned. ‘Haven’t you realised, Brother? Look down, the river is frozen.’

  Athelstan stared in disbelief over the railings of the bridge. Usually the water beneath surged and boiled. Now it seemed the river had been replaced by a field of white ice which stretched a
s far as the eye could see. Athelstan craned his neck and heard the shouts of boys skating there, using the shin bones of an ox for skates. Someone had even opened a stall and Athelstan’s stomach clenched with hunger as he caught the fragrant smell of hot beef pies. They continued past the chapel of St Thomas on to Bridge street, into Billingsgate and up Botolph’s Lane to Eastcheap. The city seemed to be caught under the spell of an ice witch. Few stalls were out and the usual roar of apprentices and merchants had been silenced by winter’s vice-like grip. They stopped at a pie shop. Athelstan bought and bit deeply into a hot mince pie, savouring the juices which swirled there and the delightful fragrance of freshly baked pastry and highly spiced meat. Cranston watched him eat.

  ‘You are enjoying that, Brother?’

  Yes, My Lord. Why don’t you join me?’

  Cranston smiled wickedly. ‘I would love to,’ he replied. ‘But have you not forgotten, friar? It’s Advent. You are supposed to abstain from meat!’

  Athelstan looked longingly at the half-eaten pie, then smiled, finished his meal and licked his fingers. Cranston shook his head.

  ‘What are we to do?’ he wailed mockingly. ‘When friars ignore Canon Law’.

  Athelstan licked his lips and leaned closer.

  ‘You’re wrong, Sir John. Today is the thirteenth of December, a holy day, the feast of St Lucy, virgin and martyr. So I am allowed to eat meat.’ He sketched a sign of the cross in the air. ‘And you can drink twice as much claret as you usually do!’ The friar gathered the reins of the horse in his hands. ‘So, Sir John, what takes us to the Tower?’