Candle Flame (7 page)

‘Master Lascelles, Master Lascelles?’ A ragged boy, face all dirty, his tunic no more than a discarded flour sack with holes cut for head and arms and tied around the waist with a dirty rope, caught Athelstan’s attention. He came running into the yard yelling Lascelles’ name, which he stumbled over as he held up the scrap of parchment in his grubby hand. Athelstan felt a cold, prickling premonition. The stableyard was busy. Local traders, tinkers and craftsmen were drifting in to break their fast. Slatterns and scullions hurried across. Doors slammed. Windows were unshuttered. Slops were being emptied, horses led in and out. The smith had begun his clanging. Thorne stood in the doorway shouting orders at a washer woman. Athelstan, however, watched that beggar boy. Lascelles was approaching him. The urchin handed over the scrap of parchment and fled like the wind through the main gate. Lascelles uncurled the parchment; he glanced up as Athelstan hurried towards him.

‘Brother, what is this?’ Athelstan lunged forward, knocking Lascelles away from his horse, which reared, hooves flailing as a crossbow bolt whipped the air between it and its rider. Athelstan crouched even as Lascelles tried to calm his horse, turning it to use a shield. Cries of ‘Harrow!’ were raised. The stableyard erupted in uproar as another bolt whistled through the air, smacking into the wall of an outhouse. Women screamed and grabbed their frightened children. Dogs snarled, racing about, agitating the horses further. Lascelles’ escort hurriedly grabbed kite-shaped shields from their saddle horns to form a protective ring around their master and Athelstan. For a while both men just sheltered. Athelstan closed his eyes and murmured the Jesus prayer whilst Lascelles cursed a litany of filth. Athelstan thanked God he could not understand it. At last, order was imposed. Cranston shouted how the mysterious bowman must have disappeared. The shield wall broke up. Lascelles grasped Athelstan’s hand, squeezing it, thanking him with his eyes before screaming a spate of abuse at his escort.

‘He’s gone!’ Cranston declared.

‘Where, Sir John, where was he?’ Athelstan asked.

‘Brother, God only knows! A window or somewhere here in the tavern yard, or did Beowulf – and I think it was our mutual friend – simply slip in from the street? The tavern is thronged with every rogue under the sun, the usual beauties, the school of Tyburn scholars and Newgate nuns.’ Athelstan walked over and picked up the deadly message. This time the parchment was faded and grease-marked, the scrawling hand uncouth, but the message was the same in all its stark menace.

‘Our assassin changes his hand,’ Athelstan remarked. ‘Sir John, we should be gone.’ People were now emerging from the tavern, all busy and inquisitive. Cranston had a word with Lascelles and the order was given to mount. They were joined by a smiling Father Roger, who asked if he could join their comitatus. Lascelles shrugged and the friar pushed his sorry-looking mount alongside Athelstan. They left the tavern yard and made their way towards the battlemented gatehouse and walls of London Bridge. Athelstan immediately experienced the inner panic that washed over him whenever he entered the turbulent, frenetic streets of Southwark. He became acutely aware of what he glimpsed, as if he was studying scenes from a stained-glass window or the intricate details of one of the Hangman of Rochester’s wall paintings at St Erconwald’s. Friar Roger was chattering like a sparrow on a twig, but Athelstan was distracted by the swirling images which surged out towards him on that brisk, cold February morning. Church bells clanged, marking the end of morning Mass and the beginning of the eleventh hour. Market horns brayed. Whores screamed and cursed as they were led down to the thews to the sound of blaring bagpipes. Traders, tinkers, fripperers and geegaw-sellers set up stalls and booths, ringing the air with their shouted offers of mousetraps, ratkillers, bird cages, bottles, ribbons, collops of meat and fresh fruit. Itinerant cooks, dressed in rotten, stinking weeds, pushed their battered barrows with portable stoves; around the cooks’ unwashed necks hung strips of ancient but heavily salted meat ready for grilling. An enterprising water-seller with a tub on his back trailed behind these offering ‘the freshest water from St Mary’s spring’ to slake, salted throats. The crowd pushed backwards and forwards, thronging down the narrow lanes where the grotesquely carved gables of shops and houses jutted out above dark and dingy chambers. Slops were being emptied into the already fetid, crammed sewers. Space was narrow; people had to step aside for Lascelles’ cavalcade. Curses and threats were hurled and, on a few occasions, slops from upper chambers narrowly missed them as night jars were emptied. Southwark, however, was different from the city, where resentments rankled deeper. In Southwark the dog-leeches, sow-gelders, rumagates, runaways, jingle-brains, tooth-drawers, broom men and a multitude of lowlife were hotly against any titled authority. All these denizens from their ‘ruffians’ hall’, as Cranston described them, wandered the streets looking for mischief or anything which might brighten their lives.

Justice was also busy. The Carnifex, the Southwark executioner, was performing his grisly trade on the approaches to the bridge. A moveable three-armed scaffold was being pushed along the riverside with a strangled, purple-faced malefactor hanging from each branch of the gallows; notices pinned to their filthy nightshirts proclaimed how these criminals were guilty of committing arson in the royal dockyards. A failed magician, who’d tricked people out of their coins for nothing in return and aptly rejoiced in the name of ‘Littlebit’ was being fastened in the stocks. Former customers had gathered, picking up rotting rubbish and even filth from the sewer running down the centre of the lane, intent on pelting him. A mad woman, her hair painted purple and garbed in rabbit skins, stood on a broken barrel. She proclaimed how once upon a time she had been a luxuriously adorned maiden who used to sit in a hazel grove until Satan had appeared in the guise of a bird-catcher and snared her soul. Next to her, three whores, whose grey, grimy naked buttocks had been soundly birched, were being fastened in the pillary for ‘lechery beyond their threshold’. Athelstan noticed with grim amusement the placards hanging around their clamped necks; these declared how the two younger ones were ‘
Mea Culpa
’ and ‘
Mea Culpa
’
–
‘my fault’ and ‘my fault’, whilst the third, their mother, was named ‘
Maxima Culpa’
– ‘my most grievous fault’.

On the corner of the lane a preacher and his travelling troupe had rented the Eyrie, a plot of ground reserved for mummers and their plays. The preacher – Athelstan could not decide if he was acting or genuine – was garbed in horsehide, his sun-darkened face almost hidden by lank hair through which his eyes gleamed feverishly. He had attracted a good crowd. Athelstan, with a start, noticed a fellow Dominican garbed in the black-and-white robes of his order, standing a little forward of the crowd, fascinated by what was being enacted. The crowd was noisy. The air reeked with a fug of odours which mingled with the ever-present stench of stale, salted fish, rotting vegetables and human sweat. Nevertheless, the Dominican, tall and rugged, his black hair neatly tonsured, seemed impervious to his surroundings but listened intently to the rant of the preacher’s most scathing diatribe against the Church. Behind the preacher, the rest of his troupe was assembling cleverly painted panels, each depicting a message. On one a fiend jeeringly pulled the ropes of a prayer bell torturing a damned, fiery-red soul who served as the bell’s clapper. Below that on the same panel, a rat-headed demon was throttling a banker whilst another stabbed a goldsmith with a candle prick. On the second panel, a hare carrying a hunting horn, game-bag and a deer-spear was striding towards a castle with a wench slung by her feet to the spear. At the castle gate, a thorn-beaked lizard devil, dressed as an abbess, waited to welcome them. The third panel depicted the Prince of Hell, Lord Satan, with a gigantic sparrow hawk’s head and a spindle-shank thin body. The master of demons was busy devouring a damned spirit, whose perjured red-hot soul slipped from the Devil’s anus in the form of a swarm of ravens.

Lascelles stopped his cavalcade here. One of his lackies dismounted, pushed through the crowd and whispered to the Dominican; he reluctantly nodded and followed the man back, hoisting himself into the saddle of a spare horse. Athelstan caught his breath; he was sure he recognized that round, serene face from his days in the novitiate at Blackfriars. Athelstan stared again. He noted the sharp eyes, full lips, skin burnt brown by the sun and rather delicate hand gestures and how fastidiously clean this fellow friar appeared to be.

‘Brother Marcel.’ Friar Roger had been watching just as closely. ‘Don’t you recognize him, Athelstan, a man much loved by your order? Some say he will become Minister General of the Dominicans. Brother Marcel of St Sardos – the Papal Inquisitor from our Holy Father in Rome.’

Athelstan closed his eyes. He certainly remembered Marcel, the son of Anglo-Gascon parents born in English-held Bordeaux, a brilliant canon lawyer who particularly excelled in the disputation, the sharp cut and thrust of question and answer so popular in the halls of Oxford and Cambridge. What on earth was he doing in London? Athelstan glanced back at the mummers as Lascelles urged his cavalcade on. Such dramatic presentations were certainly not orthodox and, if what he recalled about Marcel was correct, would certainly be frowned on by the Papal Inquisitor.

At last they reached London Bridge. A firedrake was performing magic tricks with a torch he had inveigled from the keeper of the gatehouse, Robert Burden, that diminutive dresser of the severed heads of traitors which hung like black balls on their poles against the lightening sky. Burden, dressed in the usual blood-red taffeta, had assembled his large brood of offspring to watch the fire-swallower. Athelstan called out a greeting but Burden, engrossed in the spectacle, simply raised a hand in reply. They entered the lane which cut through the houses and shops which ranged either side of the bridge. As usual, Athelstan found such a journey frightening, literally crossing between heaven and earth. The sights and sounds always disturbed him. The clatter of nearby windmills, the stench from the tanneries, the stink of the lay stalls and that ever-crashing thunder as the river poured through the bridge’s twenty arches, pounding the lozenge-shaped starlings protecting the pillars below. Nevertheless, this was also a busy marketplace where everything was sold: Baltic furs, Muscovite leather, Paris linen, lace from Lieges and cloth from Arras. An apprentice ran up to offer a laver, a tripod pitcher with a nipped-in neck and spinous spout which ended in a dragon’s head. Athelstan examined the inscription around the bowl, ‘I am called a laver because I serve with love.’ In his other hand, the lad offered a shining bronze aquamanile from Lubeck carved in the shape of a naked man riding a roaring lion. Athelstan smilingly refused, though he quietly promised to remember both items as possible purchases by the parish council. He just wished they could just cross London Bridge, but they had to pause for a while as one of the lay stalls, heaped to fullness with smoking-hot filth, had collapsed to the merriment of some and the disgust of many, for the reeking stench crawled like a poisonous snake along the bridge.

Eventually they passed through the towered structures on the bridge’s northern side and made their way up into the city. The reaction to Gaunt’s party became more hostile. Oaths and curses followed them and, at one point, the escort had to draw swords against the flurry of flung filth. They passed under the shadow of high-towered St Paul’s, which, despite its spire being crammed with relics, had been recently struck by lightning. At last they reached the broad trading thoroughfare of Cheape. On either side elaborately hung stalls, shops and booths offered fabrics, precious metals, foodstuffs, footwear and weaponry of every kind. Here the court fops, resplendent in their elaborate headgear, brocaded short jackets, tight leggings, protuberant codpieces and fantastical long-toed shoes, brushed shoulders with the poor from the midden-heap manors and the dank, dark cellars of Whitefriars. The air was rich with a mixture of cooking smells from bakeries and pastry shops. Here also gathered Cranston’s ‘beloved parishioners’, the underworld of London: the Pages of the Pit, the Brotherhood of the Knife, the Squires of the Sewer, the nips and the foists, the glimmerers and the gold-droppers as well as whores both male and female. These surged about like dirt through water, all intent on seeking their prey: a heavy-bellied merchant’s pouch, a drunk’s half-open wallet, a young lady with an untied satchel or some distracted stall-owner. Cranston recognized them all, shouting out their names so everyone else would be wary: Spindleshank the foist, Short-pot the pickpocket, Shoulder-sham the counterfeit, Poison-pate the snatcher and Needle-point the sharper. Most of these disappeared like snow under the sun. Nevertheless, as they passed the great water conduit, the prison cage on its top crammed with more of Cranston’s ‘parishioners’, Athelstan sensed true danger. Mischief was being plotted. The crowd around was growing openly hostile.

A cart abruptly appeared and it stopped just near The Holy Lamb of God tavern. On it stood a puppet booth, narrow and curtained with a small stage on which gloved puppets shouted shrilly. One glance at these told everything. The central puppet had golden hair and a crown, the second was a plump cleric and the third, a mitred bishop, a clear allusion to Gaunt, Master Thibault and the hated Archbishop of Canterbury, Simon Sudbury. A fourth suddenly appeared, dressed in the mud-coloured garb of a peasant, who promptly began to beat the other three figures with a club, much to the merriment of the fast-gathering crowd. Lascelles’ party was noticed and the mob around them hemmed tighter. A hunting horn brayed and the puppetry immediately ceased. Cranston, swearing loudly, drew his sword. Out of the side streets debouched clusters of horsemen. Faces blackened, they all carried red cowhide shields, spears and clubs. Their hair was heavily greased and rolled up to resemble the horns of a goat.

‘Earthworms!’ Cranston shouted. ‘The Upright Men!’ The horsemen forced their way into the throng whilst the few footmen who followed opened the necks of the bulging grain sacks they carried to release an entire warren of rabbits loose in the crowd. Chaos and confusion immediately descended. Dogs snarled and broke free to pursue the rabbits, as did the horde of beggars who saw them as free fresh meat for the pot. The legion of ragged urchins who always frequented the market joined in the mad hunt. Horses skittered. Stalls overturned. Carts and barrows crashed on to their side. Apprentices tried to defend their masters’ goods from wholesale pilfering; others tried to rescue themselves from the cutting press. The real danger to Athelstan’s party were the fearsome Earthworms. Cranston, who had now taken over the cavalcade, ordered shields up and swords out but fresh danger emerged: more horsemen were spilling out of the side streets on the far side of Cheapside. Cranston urged the cavalcade forward. The Earthworms drew closer. One hurled his spear, which bounced off a raised shield; another followed, narrowly missing Lascelles, shattering against the helmet of one of his escort. Friar Roger snatched a club from an apprentice and grinned at Athelstan.