Roseblood (3 page)

The barber was shaving the head of a greasy kill-calf, a butcher from the Newgate shambles who had shuffled into Smithfield to walk among the cattle pens as well as see the condemned dancing in the air. Deep in his cups, he lashed out with his bloody fingers against the strings of false teeth the barber had tied to a overhanging branch that danced and clattered close to the flesher’s face. Nearby, a Friar of the Sack thundered against the evils of drink, especially the London beers known as Mad-Dog, Angel’s Food, Dragon’s Milk and Merry-go-Dance. Unlike the hapless Pannikin, the friar had drawn a good audience, eager to be diverted in their wait for the execution carts. They stood and listened as he pointed out the many drunks staggering across the great open expanse before St Bartholomew’s church, dismissing them as ‘tosspots, swill bowls, drunken swine who’ll end their day sleeping, snorting in their vomit, more fit for the dunghill than the house’. His makeshift congregation loved that. They would recall such rich language and use it themselves when they caroused to the chimes of midnight in some Cheapside tavern. The barber, however, roared for silence when his customer began to curse the friar, threatening to slice the butcher’s nose and hang it alongside the dangling teeth.

A quiet did descend, even the dust billowing away, as a funeral cortège appeared on its way to St Andrew Undershaft. Sir Richard Workin, knight and merchant tailor, recently departed, was being escorted to his requiem mass with torches, tapers, pennants and glorious banners all festooned with the insignia of his guild and carried by squires clothed in black worsted livery and blood-red hoods. A priest, garbed in a black and gold chasuble, preceded the coffin, carrying a cross. Beside him walked two altar boys, one carrying a lofty beeswax candle whilst the other lustily swung a thurible, which incensed the air with the most fragrant smoke. Every so often the procession would pause so that one of the livery men could bawl out, ‘Rest be to his ashes. He tailored well and served God and his guild.’ As if in answer, a distant church bell began to toll.

Once the mourners were gone, the tumult across Smithfield broke out even more stridently. Lazarus seized his opportunity. He scuttled closer to his prey, who turned, deep-set eyes watchful. Lazarus prided himself on both his patter and his skill. He held his cutter very close to his side as he began his beggar’s chant.

‘For the love of God…’ His left hand, all scabbed and wrinkled, went out to distract his prey. ‘Look at me, Lord, with merciful eye, so lamed by a cankerous worm that gnaws the flesh from my bones—’ He stopped abruptly as the clerk brought up his cleverly concealed Italian stiletto with its long, wicked-looking blade and sharp dagger point. He pressed its serrated edge against Lazarus’s neck.

‘Sir,’ the clerk’s voice was soft, ‘I recognise you. You are Lazarus, leader of a pack of scavengers who prowl Queenhithe ward. You are known for your thievery and your brutality. You see, sir, I have been there and watched you.’ He pressed on the dagger. ‘Because I am Amadeus Sevigny, nephew of Sir Philip Malpas, sheriff of this city. A former schoolman of Balliol Hall in Oxford, serjeant of law, trained by the Crown and now principal clerk in the secret chancery of Richard, Duke of York. I am here to watch the execution of one gang of malefactors and go hunting for another. You, sir, have a knife in your right hand. You intend me harm. I have introduced myself, so when you enter Hell, you can inform Lord Satan who sent you there.’

Lazarus lunged, but he was too slow. Sevigny’s dagger opened the beggar’s throat in one swipe, and the blood spurted out like juice from a split ripe plum. Sevigny took a step closer, watching the soul light die in Lazarus’s eyes. He caught the beggar as he slumped to his knees, and laid him gently on the mud-strewn cobbles. The sight of blood drew in the crowd. A woman screamed. Someone shouted, ‘Harrow!’ even as Sevigny rose to his feet, hands extended, one holding his own knife, the other that of the dying man.

‘Self-defence!’ he cried. ‘I am a clerk, tonsured and protected by Holy Mother Church, henchman of his Grace the Duke of York.’ He pointed down at Lazarus, still jerking slightly in his death throes. ‘This man attempted murder.’

‘I was witness to that.’ A group of serjeants, all wearing the red and white livery of the city, now pushed their way through. Their leader, Skulkin, a burly, pig-faced man, grasped the thick leather belt attached to the collar of a great war mastiff; its huge jaws were tightly muzzled, though the fury raging in its red-brown eyes was frightening enough. ‘I witnessed that,’ the chief bailiff repeated, his words being chorused by his companions.

No one objected. Those sharp-eyed and keen-witted enough glimpsed the chancery ring on Sevigny’s left hand, as well as his silver-gilt-embossed sword in its embroidered scabbard. The crowd drifted away. Black-robed members of the Fraternity of the Hanged moved in to place Lazarus’s corpse on a stretcher and take it to the waiting paradise cart for burial in some poor man’s lot. Sevigny went back to studying the thronging crowd. He lifted a gloved hand, beckoning the chief bailiff closer.

‘I cannot see our quarry,’ he murmured, ‘but he must come here. Sir Philip is sure of that.’

‘And the scavenger?’

‘Lazarus?’ Sevigny wiped the blade of his dagger on Skulkin’s sleeve. ‘He may have intended to kill me, or just rob me. I have recently arrived here, Master Skulkin. My reputation is not yet known.’ He grinned boyishly. ‘Though it is time it was. Lazarus was a help in that. He drew a dagger and crept up on me. You, Master Skulkin, were sent to guard me. Next time,’ Sevigny leaned down and patted the mastiff on its huge bony head, ‘next time it may be
your
throat. Now tell your comrades to keep strict watch. Four of the gang are to be executed as traitors; however, their leader Candlemas and two of his henchmen escaped.’

‘And the Lord Sheriff thinks they will come here to watch their comrades being turned off?’

‘Sir Philip does think that, and I tend to agree,’ Sevigny retorted, standing on tiptoe, eyes on the great wooden scaffold on its dais. The fires in the braziers either side of the soaring four-branched gallows were now being blown fiercer by a blacksmith with his bellows. ‘They will come,’ Sevigny declared. ‘Felons always do, as a last courtesy to their comrades. Most of the gangs of London are represented here.’

‘But they have not been seen in the city, whilst Simon Roseblood would not dare shelter them.’

‘Oh they are in the city all right!’ Sevigny laughed softly, staring across the shoal of people thronging the spacious marketplace. ‘Oh yes, they are here, Skulkin.’ The clerk tapped his boot on the hard-packed earth. ‘I suspect they are very close. Perhaps even beneath us. Stay vigilant. Candlemas will come like a thief in the night.’

‘How will we recognise him?’

‘Look for three Friars of the Sack who go cowled, faces down, hands in the sleeves of their gowns.’

‘Master Sevigny?’

‘I know. Such friars are common at executions, but these three will be different. They will not seem as interested as they should be in the people around them.’

Sevigny fell silent and stared around. Lazarus’s corpse had now been removed. The noise of the marketplace had grown to a true babel of clamour, shouts and screams. Somewhere horns blew and bagpipes shrilled as malefactors were led to the great stocks, thews and pillories on the far side of Smithfield. Traders and hucksters bawled out the sale of spiced bread, custard suckets and portingales. There were shouts about spices and salt from Worcester being available, along with pepper mills, hot oatcakes, brooms, the latest mousetraps as well as the best protection against fleas. Vendors offered stopples for garderobes in order to keep the feet warm whilst sitting on the jakes. These raucous boasts and invitations rang above the lowing of cattle and the bloodcurdling scream of hogs being driven down to the slaughter pens.

Sevigny, a mailed clerk who had stood in the shield wall of York’s forces in France, carefully studied the shifting currents among the crowd. He noted the various colours and watched any individual who caught his curiosity: the black-robed monk with his shaven pate blistering in the sun; the juggler with his pet monkey sitting on his shoulder; the moon man in his cheap glittering finery; archers, sweaty in their leather jerkins, on leave from the Tower. He wondered what his own escort, Bowman Bardolph, would be doing. Perhaps he should have brought him here. He dismissed the thought. Bardolph was a taciturn, morose Dalesman who seemed to resent even being with him. Sevigny chewed the corner of his lip. And Argentine, Giles Argentine, that elusive former royal physician? Would he dare venture out into a place like this? No, too dangerous, Sevigny concluded.

Abruptly a trumpet blast stilled all clamour and movement. A further shrill clarion call caught everyone’s attention. On the far side of Smithfield, close to the thoroughfare leading up to Cock Lane, Greyfriars and the towering Mass of St Paul’s, city banners and pennants were fluttering in the breeze. Horsemen appeared. Serjeants in their polished brigandines; archers with glistening sallets on their heads, longbows slung across their backs. Immediately on the high gallows stage, the towering cressets, iron baskets crammed with logs, coals, pitch and tar, were set alight. The executioners, garbed in black leather, their faces hidden behind devils’ masks with projecting silver horns, climbed their ladders to stand beneath the gallows. The crowd glimpsed these and the cry went up.

‘The condemned are here! Hats off, heads bare!’

Sevigny pushed his way through the throng, almost oblivious to the hurdy-gurdy around him: the fiddlers, the tumblers, the painted dwarves who bawled how they had the horse of knowledge and a learned pig in a makeshift booth nearby. Other grotesques appeared before him: the stone-eater, the fire-swallower, the self-proclaimed magicians in black gowns spangled with gold. All these were now being ignored as a more macabre masque was about to unfold. Sevigny kept his eyes on the scaffold. Escorted by the bailiffs, their great war mastiff Caradoc padding like fury incarnate, he reached the cordon of soldiers. The undersheriffs in their long gowns were already forming a ring around the execution biers, leather sledges, each carrying a bound prisoner, naked except for a loincloth, pulled by sturdy plough horses, their hogged manes festooned with ribbon.

People were shouting and screaming. The executioner’s assistants scrambled down like imps from Hell to assist. The prisoners, groaning and crying after their long and brutal haul along the sharpened cobbles, covered in hideous bruises, were released from their hurdles, pushed up the scaffold steps and forced to face the people. A herald, garbed in a glorious tabard boasting the city arms, proclaimed them to be outlaws and traitors. He described how they had attacked a comitatus taking silver to the Tower mint and feloniously killed a royal serjeant. How they must have been suborned by the Devil to commit such horrid treason and so were deserving of death. He cleared his throat before continuing to describe how the condemned would be half hanged, their bodies sliced open and their entrails and hearts plucked out to be burnt before their eyes, after which their heads would be severed and their bodies quartered, then boiled and tarred so that they could decorate the gates of the city.

The herald’s powerful voice pealed out over the shouting and crying, the lamentations, the songs of mourning and the psalms for the dead. Beside Sevigny, a ballad monger bawled out his doggerel verse:

The prisoners were more concerned about the executioners now painting blue lines on their naked white bodies where they intended to make the cuts. Nooses were lowered and placed around necks, ladders brought. Fire and smoke billowed. The shouting rose to a roar. Jongleurs chanted about the day of desolation. The prisoners began to scream as the ropes were roughly hauled up by the sweaty executioners. Bodies danced, legs kicked, feet fluttering for the ground.

Sevigny did not watch; he never could. It reminded him of his own swift, brutal brush with death’s dark cloak on that lonely moonlit road in Normandy. Even now, years later, he could recall the Jacquerie, the rebel French peasants, milling about him, the noose tight about his throat, hands bound behind his back, his horse moving perilously beneath him, the rope tightening. His breath had choked until those goose-quilled arrow shafts came whipping out of the darkness… He opened his eyes, trying to ignore the hideous choking sound coming from the scaffold above him. The air reeked of blood, fire and iron. Plumes of dark smoke eddied. Sevigny recalled a grotesque vision of Hell on a church wall outside Formigny. ‘Stop, stop!’ he whispered to himself. He tried to concentrate on the crowd. More shrill screams from the scaffold as the condemned had their bodies split open.

‘Jesu miserere!’ a woman shouted. A Franciscan began to recite the absolution. Horses neighed and reared at the stench of fresh blood. The city archers guarding the scaffold plucked at their bowstrings. People shoved and pushed; a few turned away to vomit.

Sevigny stared around and glimpsed three friars, cowls pulled forward to shield their faces, dressed in mud-coloured robes, sandals on their feet, hands hidden in their sleeves. He and his bailiffs started forward. A relic seller, bearing scraps of parchment that had allegedly touched the True Cross, was pushed aside. The man screeched. One of the hooded figures raised his head, his cowl sliding back to reveal the fiery red hair and thin, candle-white face that gave Candlemas his nickname. He stared at Skulkin and Sevigny, then plucked the sleeves of this companions and all three turned and fled, even as the first of the condemned screamed his last.

Sevigny burst into a run, followed by the bailiffs, knocking aside everyone in their path. They pursued Candlemas and his coven up the slight hill, the Compter on one side, Cock Lane on the other. The mouth of this notorious alleyway was packed with prostitutes, faces painted under fire-red wigs, bodies garbed in garish gowns. They hooted and hurled all kinds of obscenities at the fleeing felons. Candlemas and his two companions turned down a runnel, a stinking narrow alleyway, a black tunnel that twisted beneath the decaying houses leaning over either side. At the sound of pursuit, windows were shut, shutters pulled fast and doors slammed.