The Book of Fires Page 3

  ‘Master Fulchard, I insist you remain in my parish as I, according to canon law, must pass all this on to the curia, the council of the Bishop of London.’ Athelstan grasped his chancery satchel, laid out his writing implements and hastily drafted a letter to Master Henry Tuddenham, clerk to the Bishop of London’s council, detailing what had happened in his parish. He re-read this and, satisfied, swiftly sealed it, telling Fulchard to eat more oatmeal and drink another blackjack of ale. Athelstan left the priest’s house and re-entered the church. St Erconwald’s had been transformed. Usually at this hour the nave lay silent but now it was busy and frenetic as a Smithfield fair. Athelstan drew up his hood and pushed his way through the throng. His parishioners, true to form, were self-appointed keepers of the shrine and first-hand witnesses to what Watkin claimed to be ‘Southwark’s one and only Great Miracle’. All the sharp-witted denizens of the ward had swarmed in: the foists, the nips, the cunning men, conjurors, strumpets, pimps and their prostitutes along with tinkers, traders and relic-sellers. They rubbed shoulders and, in some cases, felt the pockets and purses of the ordinary gaping visitors. The noise was constant. The stench of packed, sweaty bodies in dirty clothes wafted everywhere. Someone intoned a hymn to St Erconwald only to be drowned by a coster shouting, ‘Mussels, fresh mussels blessed by St Erconwald himself!’ The trader bawled even louder over the laughter his remark provoked. Further down the nave, a travelling puppet show, a box with an opening at the top perched on a barrow, told the story of St Erconwald as Athelstan had never heard it before. The friar tried to remain tolerant but when he glimpsed an itinerant cook with heavily salted pork chops slung on a dirty cord around his neck, his good humour faded. He told the cook he could not fire his stove in church and strode off angrily towards the sanctuary. The Hangman of Rochester, on guard at the rood screen, took one look at Athelstan’s face and hastily opened the door. Athelstan swept into the sanctuary, beckoning the hangman to follow.

  ‘Giles, I want the entire parish council here, and I mean now before I finish reciting ten Aves or there will be no fair.’

  The hangman hurried off and, one by one, the parish council trooped into where their priest stood on the top step of the high altar.

  ‘Right, my beloveds, my little flock.’

  ‘The nave belongs to the people,’ Pike protested, ‘the sanctuary to the priest, if we …’ Pike swallowed the rest of his sentence as Benedicta brought the heel of her boot down on his toes whilst Athelstan took a step down, face white with anger.

  ‘Whatever you say, Father,’ Pike stammered.

  ‘Good, Pike. This is our parish, not the council of the Upright Men, and I am your priest. Mauger, I have a letter for you to take to Master Tuddenham. Joscelyn, collect Fulchard from my house and lodge him at the Piebald. Benedicta and Crim,’ he winked at the altar boy, ‘you and Giles will scour the sanctuary and sacristy to ensure all is well. The rest of my beloveds, including Pike, will clear the church. Pilgrims are most welcome – the rest can use the enclosure outside. Merrylegs,’ he beckoned at the pie-man, ‘I am going to take the Sacrament to your sick elderly father.’

  ‘The Ancient One of Days will be most pleased,’ Merrylegs lugubriously replied.

  ‘Which is more than I am,’ Athelstan snapped. ‘So, let us begin …’

  oOoOo

  Sir John Cranston, Lord High Coroner of London, rose from his judgement chair and walked over to the horn-filled window of his courtroom at the Guildhall. He opened the window and stared moodily down at the broad, cobbled bailey which stretched to the soaring, battlemented gatehouse leading into Cheapside. He had just finished reading the indictment against Ralph Tailor of Cripplegate: ‘That he did feloniously rape Alice Beggar of Queenhithe, and did carnally lie with her in her own house from day to day and night to night. The same said Ralph continued to indulge publicly in the shameful and abominable sin of debauchery …’

  ‘Satan’s tits!’ Cranston growled. ‘From one stew pot of wickedness to the next.’ He gazed round the judgement chamber; everything had been removed from the walls: crucifixes, triptychs, painted cloths, tapestries and other ornaments. All these, together with court rolls and other manuscripts, had been taken down to the steel-bound arca, the massive security chest in the Guildhall cellars.

  ‘Everything which can be stored away has been,’ Cranston murmured to himself. This included his own buxom wife, the Lady Maude, his poppets Stephen and Francis the twins, his wolfhounds Gog and Magog, together with his household retainers. Cranston had sent them deep into the countryside and the protection of a moated, fortified manor house. He’d also arranged for the families of Oswald and Simon, his scrivener and clerk, to join them. Brother Athelstan, however, was a different matter. The little Dominican priest was obdurate. He would not flee when the Great Revolt broke out, even though he conceded that London would be sacked. Cranston certainly agreed with that. He had clashed openly with the Regent, John of Gaunt, and others of the Royal Council who believed the mailed might of royal troops would prevail. How they would fortify the Tower and crush all dissent from there …

  ‘Nonsense,’ Cranston whispered to himself. ‘The Tower will fall. The Upright Men have their own agents deep in that gloomy fortress.’ He stared down at the bailey, watching people slither and slide on the frost-encrusted cobbles. A sumpter pony skittered, provoking the destrier of a knight banneret guarding the Guildhall to rear, whinnying noisily, its sharpened metal hooves slicing the air. Oh, yes, Cranston reflected, when the Day of the Great Slaughter occurred, the citadels would certainly fall and it would take more than mounted knights to crush the bloody eruption. Cranston knew the city underworld, the mummers’ halls and castles which housed the London mob, that demon with ten thousand heads. They were waiting, and when the sign was given they would rise. The masters of misrule, the captains of the canting crews, the rulers of the rifflers would sound their horns and unfurl their ragged banners. Their followers would swarm like rats from a burning hayrick, stream from their damp, mildewed, rotting tenements to feast on the fat of the city. Hordes of other rebels would pour in from the north, south and west. They would certainly seize London Bridge and cut the city into two. Cranston narrowed his eyes and chewed the corner of his lip. Gaunt would not compromise. The hated poll tax continued to be levied and the Commons sitting at Westminster provided very little relief for the poor. Not only London was threatened but the surrounding shires and, more importantly, even further north in the eastern counties. The Upright Men were busy fortifying the Fens in Lincolnshire, drawing in the dispossessed, the runaways and rebels as well as the outlaws, sharp as any hawk’s beak at the prospect of plunder. At least Gaunt recognized the real threat the Fens posed, with their marshes, morasses and narrow-snaking shallows hidden by reeds that sprouted in thick clusters. The Fens were fast becoming a fortress, a mustering place for all those ready to wage war against the Crown. Gaunt had ordered the construction of a vast flotilla of punts – flat-bottomed, easily assembled barges which could thread the needle-thin waterways of the Fens. The barges were being built on the Southwark side and would soon be transported by land and sea in time for a great chevauchée once spring broke.

  Meanwhile, the harsh mills of justice had to grind on. Gaunt had asked the coroner to investigate the bloody, tangled mystery surrounding the execution of the city beauty, Lady Isolda Beaumont. Cranston had met her on a number of occasions and he knew something about the woman’s hideous death and its equally horrific aftermath. The coroner glanced at the hour candle on its copper stand. The flame was approaching the ninth ring – time for him to be gone! Cranston hurriedly strapped on his warbelt and seized his cloak and beaver hat before bellowing instructions and farewells to Simon and Oswald, who were crouched over their chancery desks in the adjoining chamber. The coroner stamped down the stairs and out into the freezing cold of the grey day. The business of the Guildhall had now begun, its dungeons and cells being swiftly emptied. A long line of city bailiffs garbed in the red and murr
ey livery of the city led by Flaxwith, Cranston’s chief bailiff, with his constant companion, the ugly-faced mastiff Samson, were herding out a gaggle of prisoners for punishment. The felons would be taken down to the different stocks, pillories and thews to be exhibited and mocked until their sentences were complete. The prisoners, manacled and dazed, staggered about. To drown their cries, a few of the bailiffs carried drums, trumpets, cymbals and three sets of bagpipes. Cranston walked down the line of hapless miscreants, reading the placards slung around their necks which proclaimed their offences. A woman had created a vile nuisance by constructing a pipe from her own privy chamber to her neighbour’s garden and ignored a court writ to remove it. The justices had ruled that she was to carry part of that pipe for a half a day in the thews of Poultry. A counterfeit physician had fed a patient a nostrum so noxious the poor man had found it almost impossible to urinate for a week. The counterfeit physician was being mounted on the back of a bony street nag. He would face the rear with the horse’s tail in his hand for a bridle. Around his neck hung two dirty urine flasks and a pisspot. Behind him a vintner would be compelled to drink, wry-mouthed, the corrupt wines he had attempted to palm off on others. There was a fisherman who had freshened a stale catch with blood; a milk-seller found guilty of mixing chalk with his drink; four strumpets caught drunk and soliciting beyond Cock Lane; and finally two wrestlers who had decided to engage naked in a raucous fight on the steps of a London church. Cranston walked down the line. He had a swift word with Flaxwith and strode off to the gateway just as the bagpipes began to screech and the punishment procession moved off.

  Once in Cheapside, Cranston walked purposefully, one hand on the hilt of his sword, the other close to the purse beneath his cloak. Cheapside was busying for another day’s frenetic trading. War might come. Revolt might threaten but trade was London’s blood. Shop shutters rattled up and sheets were removed from the great broad stalls that ranged in long lines down the mercantile thoroughfare. Church bells chimed the hour of divine office as market horns brayed to commence business. Apprentices scurried as swift and nimble as monkeys to set out wares, all quick-eyed, searching out passers-by for any potential customer. A songster had already set up his pitch on a broken barrow and trilled loudly about a maiden with ‘skin white as snow on ice’. Shop signs, a bush for the vintner, three gilded quills for the apothecary, a unicorn for the goldsmith and a horse’s head for the saddler, creaked noisily in the brisk breeze. The food purveyors were out, offering fat capons and plump rabbits. Geese tied to the stalls honked. Chickens and ducks, trussed tightly by the legs, floundered in a welter of feathery wings. Pastry shops offered sweet wafers and even sweeter wines. Milk-sellers, with pails slopping either end of their yolks, bawled a price which would gradually decrease as the day progressed and the milk staled. Market beadles were arguing with a cheese-seller who allegedly had made his product richer by soaking it in broth. The discussion had provoked a quarrel upturning a spice stall so the spilled powder of sage, fennel, basil and coriander was being crushed under foot to sweeten the air now turning rather rancid from the pack of unwashed bodies. Odour from a nearby soap-maker, busy mixing soda and wood and animal fat, thickened the stench. Cranston surveyed the crowds in all its varying colours and glimpses of city life: the priest, garbed only in his shirt, walking barefoot, a white wand in one hand, an incense bowl in the other, public punishment for his sin of lechery. A blacksmith, his open-fronted shed next to a tavern, supervised sweaty-faced apprentices serving a table-high furnace. A tanner collected warm dog dung to soften scraped hides. A wine crier, standing in the entrance to an alehouse, readied himself for a proclamation. Itinerant coal-sellers, hay merchants, barbers and dish-menders touted noisily for business. A market beadle proclaimed what must be: bead makers must use perfectly round beads; butchers should not mix tallow with their lard or sell the flesh of dog, cat or horse. Makers of bone handles must not trim their products with silver to make them look like ivory. Candles must be what they are, pure beeswax or tallow and not adulterated with cooking fat or any other base substances. Schoolboys, their hair cropped close, horn-books under their arms, stopped to listen to these market heralds before hurrying on to the aisle schools of St Paul’s and elsewhere. Funeral processions wound their way through the crowd, the thuribles of the altar-servers fragrancing the air. Wedding parties, cymbals clashing and flower petals fluttering, processed to the place of festivity. Gong cart gangs tried to clear the filthy refuse heaped in laystalls and elsewhere. A wonder-worker, or so he called himself, ‘From Nicaea and other cities of the east’, offered in a ringing voice a marvellous cure for impotence, namely the head of a ram which had never meddled with a ewe, its horns knocked off and boiled in holy water from the Jordan.

  Cranston grinned at the sheer effrontery of such a claim as he continued to inspect the crowd he pushed through. The legion of pickpockets and petty thieves had already seen the coroner and slunk away. Cranston had a habit of recognizing the likes of Fairy Fingers, Robber Red Breast and Peter the Pilferer and bellowing a warning about them to all and sundry. Cranston was equally vigilant over a more sinister enemy, the Upright Men, whose assassins were known to seek out Crown officials and strike with sword or dagger. Cranston drew comfort that his friendship with Brother Athelstan tempered resentment against him. Nevertheless, the coroner was wary. The Upright Men were plotting furiously, though Cranston was growing mystified as he sensed an unexpected abeyance in the dread creeping through the city. The Earthworms, the fantastically garbed horsemen despatched by the Upright Men into Cheapside or elsewhere to cause chaos and mock the power of the Regent, had abruptly ceased their attacks. Cranston’s spies had also reported a lack of activity by the Upright Men in those bastions of the city underworld around Whitefriars and elsewhere.

  Cranston wondered why as he turned into Parsnip Lane, where Justice Gavelkind had his town house squeezed between a tavern, the Hoop in Splendour, and the St Mary Magdalene, the workshop of one of London’s leading perfumers. Cranston had agreed to meet Gavelkind outside the latter and strode down the long, narrow lane. He glimpsed the justice leave his house then the coroner stopped in astonishment. A figure, shrouded in black like a Benedictine monk, stepped out of an alley mouth holding a bucket. Gavelkind paused and turned as if greeted by this mysterious figure, who then hurled the contents of the bucket over him. Gavelkind staggered back. The black-garbed figure followed; dropping the bucket, he opened a lanthorn hanging on a door post, took out the flaming tallow candle and hurled it at the justice. For a few heartbeats nothing happened. Gavelkind was beating at the mess covering him until blue-gold sparks appeared. These flickered momentarily before erupting into tongues of flame which overwhelmed him. Cranston raced forward but it was too late. The lane was deserted. Gavelkind, engulfed in the raging fire, staggered to the right and left blocking the path. The fire-thrower had disappeared. Cranston could only stare in disbelief as Gavelkind, no more than a mass of flame, stumbled screaming towards him. Customers from the tavern hurried out to view the horror as Cranston took off his cloak and tried to douse the blazing inferno …

  oOoOo

  The market horn was sounding the end of trading and the bells of the city churches clanged for vespers when Athelstan, summoned by Cranston’s messenger, the green-garbed Tiptoft, slipped into the Holy Lamb of God in Cheapside. This was, in the coroner’s own words, Cranston’s ‘private chantry chapel’. Sir John was determined to bring Athelstan into the gruesome mysteries confronting him. The coroner had already seen off the two beggars lurking as usual near the door: Leif the one-legged and Leif’s constant companion, Rawbum. Now he rose to exchange the kiss of peace with Athelstan before asking the buxom Mine Hostess to serve fresh pots of ale and a dish of cold meat for both himself and, as he joked, ‘his Father Confessor’. For a while, Athelstan and Cranston ate and drank in silence. Once finished, the coroner sat back, polishing his horn-spoon on a snow-white napkin.

  ‘Thank you for coming, Brother.’ He turned
to face the friar, who had become such an important part of his life.

  ‘Sir John, you have a tale for me; I certainly have one for you.’