Candle Flame (2 page)

Mooncalf’s teeth chattered as he stared into the cold darkness. The ostler nourished his own secret plans to escape the impending conflagration. The Lollard, the heretic Sparwell, had been taken up and imprisoned in the Bocardo, Southwark’s vile prison; Sparwell’s arrest would warn others of the danger of belonging to any sect which disagreed with the Church. If Mooncalf’s plans came to fruition, and last night’s secret meeting was promising, then he would pack his belongings and move to more comfortable lodgings. In the meantime, the sky was lightening. Mooncalf dare not waken Marsen and his coven too early and so be greeted with foul curses and the slops of their night jars. Mooncalf, like his master, just wished the tax collector and coven would go: their very presence at The Candle-Flame was dangerous, whilst it provoked Mine Host’s worries about continuing to stay and manage the tavern. The Great Revolt would surely come. Southwark was a hotbed of unrest. Did not some of the inhabitants of the nearby parish of St Erconwald’s, men like Watkin the dung collector and Pike the ditcher, sit high in the councils of the Upright Men? What would happen to The Candle-Flame once the horror emerged? Would they, as Mine Host’s pretty new wife, Eleanor, wailed, be murdered whilst the tavern was put to the torch? Mooncalf glanced again at the sky; the weak light was strengthening. He grasped the lantern horn and moved out, bracing himself against the freezing air. He crossed the frost-hardened gardens, through the wicket gate and into the Palisade, stumbling over the harsh, uneven, ice-bound ground, the pool of light thrown by the lantern horn dancing and jittering around him. Mooncalf paused at a grunting sound. He lifted his lantern horn. The Palisade was a stretch of common land and Don Pedro the Cruel, the tavern’s huge boar pig, loved to browse there. The great pig had surprisingly spent the night out in the open. Mooncalf could glimpse the boar’s sleek skin as it lay prostrate beneath a bush snoring and gasping. Mooncalf lifted the lantern, his curiosity now quickening. Don Pedro liked his comforts – usually he would return to his sty. So why had he settled down here? Mooncalf moved towards the pig, only to be distracted by the dying fire of Marsen’s guard. Two of the Tower archers under their captain Hugh of Hornsey had set up camp outside the Barbican. Mooncalf wondered why this guard was not active; why had no challenge been issued? He peered through the murk and saw two bodies lay close to the flickering embers of the fire. A stomach-lurching dread seized the ostler: something was very wrong. A few yards away the Barbican loomed massive and sombre through the mist. The grey dawn-light was thinning. The breeze was cutting, yet it was the silence which frightened Mooncalf, as if some hell-born malevolence shifted in the shadows. Mooncalf glanced at the fire – nothing more than red-hot embers. The two archers were lying strange, not rolled in their cloaks. The ostler hurried over and stifled his scream. Both guards lay sprawled on the ground, open-eyed before their dying fire; the trickle of blood between their gaping lips had mingled with that from their noses, now frozen hard to form a hideous death mask. The weapons of both men, sword and dagger, lay close by but these had proved no defence against the harsh feathered bolts which had taken each of them deep in the chest. Mooncalf, moaning in terror, hand clutching his groin, stumbled over to the Barbican, which also lay quiet in all its stark bleakness. The ostler stared up at the donjon’s only window: it looked shuttered from within and out. He placed the lantern horn down and tried the heavy oaken door. He pressed hard only to realize that the door was bolted at both top and bottom. Shaking with unspoken terrors, Mooncalf crouched down to peer through the large keyhole but this was blocked by the heavy key on the other side. Mooncalf beat the door, shouting and screaming, but his voice trailed away at the ominous silence which answered him. He glanced back at the dying campfire, those glassy-eyed corpses frozen in death. The ostler’s courage gave way. He grabbed the lantern horn, stumbling across the Palisade and running blindly until he reached the tavern’s postern door. He hurled himself through this and found himself in the hallway, feverish with terror. He unlocked the main door, grasped the bell rope in its casing and pulled as hard as he could, shouting as loud as his dry, cracked throat would allow.

‘Harrow! Harrow!’

Mooncalf breathed out noisily. The hue and cry had been raised. Above him doors and window shutters were flung open, footsteps clattered on the stairs. Mine Host Simon Thorne, burly-faced, his hair all a-tumble, arrived shouting and cursing, followed by his black-haired, pretty-faced wife Eleanor. The taverner seized Mooncalf.

‘What is it, boy?’

Thorne’s fierce eyes, red-rimmed with sleep, glared at the trembling ostler. Behind him mustered the servants armed with clubs, cudgels, ladles and anything they could snatch from the kitchen. Nightingale the candle boy even had a cooking pot on his head whilst Thomasinus the turnspit had snatched an ancient battleaxe from the wall.

‘What is it, boy?’ Thorne repeated. Mooncalf gabbled what he had seen. Mine Host’s jaw sagged as he stared in disbelief at the ostler.

‘It can’t be,’ he muttered, ‘no, not here!’ He shook off his wife’s hand, bellowing orders as he struggled to put on the leggings and boots his wife brought. Once ready, Thorne led his horde of servants out of the tavern and into the Palisade. Pedro the Cruel, now recovering from his slumber, struggled to its feet, snuffling and snorting at the bitter cold breeze. Thorne, mindful of what Mooncalf had told him, ordered Porcus the pig boy to drive the boar back to its sty, well away from the corpses of the two archers. The morning light did nothing to lessen the horror. The cadavers of both archers were blood-soaked, their bearded faces whitened by the hoar frost, full of glassy-eyed terror at their sudden, violent death. Thorne strode towards the Barbican. Mooncalf watched intently as his master thundered against the heavy oaken door before stepping back to stare up at the square, shuttered window.

‘We would need a battering ram to shatter the door,’ he called over his shoulder, ‘and we don’t have a ladder high enough for that window.’ The taverner pointed to a nearby tangle of carts, barrows and ladders under a heavy, dirt-encrusted tarpaulin. ‘Pull that back and you’ll find what we need. Mooncalf, Nightingale – swiftly now.’ They hurried off with others and pushed back a handcart used to carry the filth from the pigsty on the far side of the Palisade. They positioned this under the window and brought a siege ladder, resting it secure so its hooks grasped the deep sill beneath the Barbican’s only window. Thorne tested it was secure and climbed cautiously up. The cart provided an extra two yards in length to the ladder. Mooncalf stood holding the bottom rungs. Thorne was now at the top. He had drawn his dagger and pushed this between the gap in the shutters, trying to prise up the iron-hook clasp. Eventually he pulled back the shutters.

‘I will have to cut the horn,’ he shouted down. Mooncalf watched his master slit the horn and put his hand through to lift the latch. He pulled back the door window and began to hack at the inner shutter. At length this too gave way. Mine Host made to climb through but then thought again and stared down. ‘I am too bulky, too fat. Mooncalf …’ The taverner came down and Mooncalf reluctantly went up. He reached the top rung and clambered over the sill, pushing back both windows and shutters, and climbed into the horrors awaiting him. The candles had long guttered out, the great lantern on its table had been snuffed, but the grey morning light revealed a grotesque scene. Tables, stools and other sticks of furniture had been overturned, yet it was the four corpses which caught Mooncalf’s terror-filled gaze. The two whores brought in by Marsen lay tumbled on the floor. One had suffered a thrust to the heart, her naked breasts now crusted with blood from the other’s severed throat. She leaned drunkenly back over a stool, belly and breasts thrust up into the air, her slender throat gaping like another mouth. Marsen the tax collector lay against the wall, sword and dagger close to his lifeless fingers, his chest speared by a deep thrust. Nearby Mauclerc had suffered a savage belly wound which seemed to have drained his body of all fluid. Mooncalf could only stand and stare, his throat and mouth bone dry, his tongue thickening so he could hardly breathe.

‘Why this?’ he murmured, then remembered the iron-bound exchequer coffer, Marsen’s pride and joy: it now stood on a footstool, the concave lid thrown back, empty as a spendthrift’s purse. Mooncalf glanced back towards the window and noticed a square of vellum pinned to the inner shutter. Mooncalf, who had been instructed in his numbers and letters by his parish priest, went across and quietly mouthed the letters written there. In fact, as soon as he had whispered the first word he realized what it was. He had heard the chatter in the taproom about this quotation from the Bible. Mooncalf pointed out the letters to himself as he mouthed the words, recalling what Nightingale had told him, something about ‘
mene, mene
’. Mooncalf let his hand drop and stepped back. He would leave that to others. He walked towards the trapdoor, pulled back the bolts and lifted the great wooden slab. He clumsily scrambled down the ladder. The ground floor of the Barbican held fresh, gruesome sights. The three archers on guard lay soaking in thickening pools of blood, weapons not far from their hands. Mooncalf, mouth gaping, eyes blinking, could only shake his head. The Upright Men were performing all kinds of mischief, but how could all this be explained? Two archers lay dead outside with shafts to their hearts? And here in the Barbican, its window, entrance and trapdoor all bolted, locked and secured? Nevertheless, some misty messenger from Hell had swept through this tower and dealt out bloody judgement.

‘O
h City of Dreadful Night!’ Athelstan whispered. The Dominican parish priest of St Erconwald’s in Southwark,
secretarius atque clericus
– secretary and clerk to Sir John Cranston, Lord High Coroner in the City of London – could only close his eyes and pray. Once again he and Sir John were about to enter the treacherous mire of murder. The hunt for the sons and daughters of Cain would begin afresh; God only knew what sinister paths their pursuit would lead them down. Athelstan’s olive-skinned face was sharp with stubble, his black-and-white gown not too clean, his sandals wrongly latched, whilst his empty belly grumbled noisily. The little friar, his dark eyes heavy with sleep, had been pulled from his cot bed by Cranston, who now stood behind him. The coroner had been most insistent. The Angel of Murder had swept The Candle-Flame tavern and brushed many with its killing wings. Edmund Marsen, his clerk, two whores and five Tower archers had been brutally murdered. The gold and silver, harvested south of the Thames and intended for the ever-yawning coffers of John of Gaunt had been stolen. Thibault, master of the Regent’s secret chancery, had sent that raven of a henchman Lascelles to rouse Sir John to discover what had happened and, above all, recover the looted treasure.

Athelstan stood just within the wicket gate leading into the Palisade. He peered through the misty murk at the forbidding donjon, the Barbican, and, beyond it, the expanse of rough land which stretched down to the piggeries and slaughter pens.

‘Lord,’ Athelstan whispered, ‘I am about to enter the domain of murder. If I become so busy as to forget you, do not thou forget me.’ He crossed himself and turned to where Cranston stood in hushed conversation with the burly taverner Thorne. Two great hulking men, though Mine Host was clean-shaven and more wiry than the generously proportioned coroner. Both men wore close-fitting beaver hats and heavy military cloaks. Cranston had whispered to his ‘good friar’, as he called Athelstan, how he and Thorne had both served in France under the Black Prince’s banner. Thorne was a veteran, a captain of hobelars who had secured enough ransoms to make him a wealthy man and buy The Candle-Flame.

‘Sir John,’ Athelstan called, ‘we should shelter from the cold and view this place of slaughter.’ All three walked over to the remains of the campfire, where a few embers glowed and sparked. Athelstan crouched down, staring at the shifting heap of grey ash.

‘A cold night,’ he murmured. ‘Yet this fire has not been fed for hours.’ He rose and walked over to the corpses of the bowmen, knelt between them, closed his eyes and whispered the words of absolution. Opening the wallet on the cord around his waist, he pulled out the stoppered phial of holy oil and sketched a cross on the dead men’s foreheads. Their skin was ice cold; the blood which they coughed up through their noses and mouths was as frozen as the congealed mess on their chests. Both men had been armed but there was little evidence that they had used the weapons lying beside them.

‘They were killed. I am sorry.’ Athelstan held up a hand. ‘They were murdered, foully so, in the early hours. The fire has burnt low, their corpses are icy to the touch and their hot blood is frozen.’ Athelstan pointed into the darkness. ‘Their assassin crept very close.’ Athelstan indicated the blackjacks drained of ale and a half-full waterskin lying near the corpses. ‘These two unfortunates were crouching, warming themselves by the fire enjoying their drink. They would make easy targets against the flame light.’ Athelstan sighed, sketched a blessing in the air and rose to his feet. He stared around at a bleak, stark stretch of land frozen hard by winter, the trees stripped of leaves, their empty branches twisted, dark shapes against the light and that Barbican, solitary and forbidding.

‘Executions take place here, don’t they?’

‘Yes, Brother,’ Thorne replied. ‘By ancient charter the Palisade must serve, when required, as a gallows field.’

‘It’s certainly a field of blood,’ Cranston declared, bringing out the miraculous wineskin from beneath his cloak and offering this to Thorne then Athelstan. Both refused. The friar stared at the larger-than-life coroner. Sir John stood legs apart, white hair, beard and moustache bristling, beaver hat pulled low, almost covering those large, bulbous blue eyes which could dance with glee, though Sir John was not so merry now. Athelstan could sense the shadow lying across his great friend’s generous soul. London bubbled and crackled with unrest. The dirt and filth of the city’s restless soul was being stirred. The monster within, the city mob, was honing its greedy appetite as well as its weapons. John of Gaunt was plotting a military expedition, a great
chevauchée
against the Scots. Cranston and others feared that once Gaunt left for the north the Great Community of the Realm would make its move. The Upright Men would raise their red and black banners of revolt and London would slide into bloody strife and turmoil. Cranston had already sent his buxom wife, the Lady Maude, together with the two poppets, their twin sons Stephen and Francis, into the country for shelter. Cranston’s personal steward with the coroner’s great wolfhounds, Gog and Magog, had followed, leaving Sir John alone. As for the future? Athelstan gnawed his lip. He agreed with Sir John: London would burn and he knew from chatter amongst his parishioners that Gaunt’s palace of the Savoy would be the scene of a great riot. Athelstan had begged his portly friend that when this happened Cranston would seek sanctuary in the Tower. The coroner had gruffly agreed, as long as Athelstan joined him. Ah, well … The friar felt beneath his cloak to ensure his chancery satchel was secure.