Hugh Corbett 17 - The Mysterium

by Paul Doherty

  They passed a copse of trees and stepped on to the path leading down to St Lazarus’ chapel, which had stood here long before the abbey was ever built. According to Brother Cornelius the chronicler, it had been built by the Saxons. A previous abbot had tiled the roof with costly red slate and replaced the main door, yet it still remained an ancient place, its nave of coarse grey ragstone, windows mere arrow-loops, protected by shutters. Serlo paused to catch his breath and take in the view. He had always wanted to do something about this forbidding, sombre place built close to the curtain wall overlooking the river. Cornelius claimed the ancient chapel had once been called ‘the Church of the Drowned’, a place where corpses dragged from the nearby Thames could be brought. Stories and legends swirled of how the chapel was still haunted by the earthbound souls of those who’d drowned, either by suicide or the victims of accident or murder.

  ‘Father Abbot?’

  Serlo broke from his reverie. Cuthbert was looking strangely at him.

  ‘Father Abbot?’ he repeated.

  ‘Of course.’ Serlo smiled. He followed Cuthbert, the custos mortuorum – the keeper of the dead – off the grass and along the narrow, pebble-dashed path. Near the main door lounged Ogadon, Cuthbert’s guard dog. As the two robed figures approached, the great mastiff lumbered to his feet and walked as far as his clinking chain would permit. Serlo patted the the dog’s black head and followed Cuthbert into the church.

  It was a grim place, Serlo reflected, with its squat drum-like pillars and narrow windows through which slivers of morning light pierced. Torches flickered at the far end. Above the stark altar on its dais rose a huge bronze crucifix flanked by thick purple candles, their flames dancing in the breeze. Charcoal casks spluttered, their smoke perfumed with sprinkled incense. Pots and jars of crushed herbs were ranged along the walls in a futile attempt to hide the cloying smell of decay. Down the nave of the little chapel stood nine great tables in rows of three. On two lay corpses draped in black and gold cloths with a red cross sewn in the centre. Serlo recalled that one of these was old Brother Edmund who used to work in the infirmary; the second was a beggar found near the great gatehouse. He took the proffered pomander, and Cuthbert led him across the gloomy nave and down steep steps to the cellar beneath, where a paved passageway, lit by torches, stretched past three cells into the darkness. Two had their doors open; the third, at the far end, was heavily barred by a wooden beam held firmly in the iron clasps fixed to the oaken lintel on either side. Cuthbert led him to this.

  ‘I just knocked,’ the old lay brother whispered. ‘Father Abbot, I just knocked, but no sound. I looked through the grille, but the light is poor.’

  Helped by Cuthbert, Serlo climbed on to a wooden tub and peered through the iron grille fixed into the top of the door. Inside the cell it was dark; there were no windows, only a small slit high in the wall, wafer thin, no broader than a man’s finger, allowing a crack of light through the limestone brick at the base of the chapel wall. No lamp or candle burned, the murky darkness betrayed nothing except a shape sitting at a table.

  ‘Lord Walter,’ Serlo called. ‘Lord Walter!’ He banged on the door.

  ‘My lord abbot, perhaps he’s suffered a seizure?’ Cuthbert whispered. ‘His humours were much disturbed.’

  ‘He’s no prisoner, brother, despite what the King says.’ Serlo breathed heavily, stepping down from the tub. He kicked this away just as other lay brothers, summoned by the altar server, hurried down the steps shouting greetings to Brother Ogadon to quieten his grumbling bark. They crowded into the narrow passageway even as their abbot removed the outside bar and tried the door.

  ‘It is also secured from within,’ whispered Cuthbert. ‘My lord Walter always insisted on that. A bar is fastened to the inside lintel; it can be swung down. I don’t know why . . .’

  ‘Break it down!’ Serlo ordered.

  Cuthbert stood away.

  ‘Fetch what you have to.’ Serlo gestured at the door. ‘Just break it down.’

  The lay brothers organised themselves. Stout logs were brought. Abbot Serlo went up and knelt before the bleak altar in the corpse chapel. He recited the requiem for those who lay there and tried to suppress a deep chill of apprehension. Something was wrong. The King would not be pleased. Lord Walter Evesham had been a high and mighty justice, the terror of outlaws and wolfsheads, be it in the cavernous darkness of Westminster Hall or out on commissions of eyre, delivering jails and decorating scaffolds and gibbets the length and breath of the kingdom. Then he had fallen like a shooting star. The King had returned from Scotland to investigate matters in the city. Lord Walter had been weighed in the balance and found very much wanting. Serlo lowered his head, listening to the battering against the door below. Walter Evesham had fled here seeking sanctuary. He’d proclaimed that he was tired of the world, exchanging his silk and samite robes for the coarse hair shirt and rough sacking of a Benedictine recluse and demanding shelter and protection. Edward of England had openly jeered at this so-called conversion, but allowed his former justice to stay on one condition: that he never left the grounds or precincts of the Abbey of Syon. That had been two weeks ago . . .

  The crashing below and the sounds of ripping wood brought Serlo to his feet. Brother Cuthbert clattered up the steps.

  ‘Father Abbot, Father Abbot, you’d best come.’

  Serlo hurried to join him. Down in the eerie vaulted passageway, the lay brothers clustered together like frightened children. The door to the former justice’s cell had been ripped off its leather hinges and lay to one side, the wood around it much damaged where the inside bar had been torn away. The abbot stood on the threshold. A former soldier, a knight who’d served in Wales and along the Scottish march, he recognised, as he would an old enemy, the reek of violent death and spilt blood. He took the lantern horn from Cuthbert’s rheumatic hands, and walked through the shattered doorway and across to the table. The pool of dancing lanternlight picked out all the gory horror.Walter Evesham, former Chief Justice in the Court of King’s Bench and Lord of the Manor of Ingachin, lay slumped, head slightly to one side, his throat cut so deep it seemed like a second mouth. Blood caked Evesham’s dead face and drenched the top of his jerkin, forming a dark crust over the table and the pieces of jewellery littered there.

  1

  Botleas: a crime so serious, there can be no financial compensation

  ‘Archers forward, notch!’ Ranulf-atte-Newgate, Clerk in the Chancery of Green Wax, raised his sword and stared across the sprawling cemetery that ringed the ancient church of St Botulph’s Cripplegate in the King’s own city of London. Ranulf was in armour, a mailed clerk, hauberked and helmeted. In one hand a kite-shaped shield was raised against the bowmen peering from those arrow-slit windows in St Botulph’s tower. This full-square, sturdy donjon towered over the cemetery, an ideal refuge for the miscreants who had escaped from nearby Newgate. Ranulf felt exhausted. The chain-mail coat weighed heavy, his arms ached and the cold morning breeze was chilling his sweaty body. The helmet with its broad nose guard pressed down tightly and his cropped red hair itched. He stared across at his master Sir Hugh Corbett, Keeper of the Secret Seal, who was similarly armed, though he had not yet donned his helmet. Corbett’s olive-skinned face was drawn, dark shadows circled his deep-set eyes and his black hair was streaked with glistening grey. He was so sweat-soaked he had pulled back his chain-mail coif, and was staring fixedly at the church.

  ‘Sir Hugh, on your mark?’

  Corbett gripped his sword and stared around what used to be God’s acre at St Botulph’s but was now a battlefield. The dead sprawled under rough sacking that hid the gruesome sword and axe wounds to face, neck, chest and belly. Corbett closed his eyes and muttered a requiem for the dead. He should not be here in this slaughter yard. On this mist-hung morning he should be in his own manor at Leighton, sitting in his chancery chamber with his beloved books or walking out with the Lady Maeve. He opened his eyes and stared at the Welsh archers in their brown leggings, their L
incoln-green jerkins now covered in blue, red and gold royal tabards.

  ‘Archers, on my mark!’ he shouted.

  They thronged forward, longbows notched, bearded faces beneath their steel sallets tense and watchful. Behind the row of bowmen stood a huge cartload of straw and oil waiting to be torched. From beyond the cemetery walls rose the muffled clatter of the citizens of London who had thronged to watch this deadly confrontation reach its bloody climax.

  ‘Sir Hugh, Sir Hugh Corbett?’ called a clear voice.

  Corbett lowered his sword and groaned as Parson John, vicar of the parish, pushed his way through the thronging archers, holding a crucifix.

  ‘Sir Hugh, I beg you wait.’ Parson John grasped the wooden pole of the cross more tightly and knelt before the Keeper of the King’s Secret Seal. ‘I beg you.’ He lifted his unshaven face. It was thin, haggard, the green eyes red-rimmed. ‘No more of this. Let me talk to these malefactors.’ He paused and ran a hand through his cropped blond hair. Corbett noticed how the tonsure was neatly cut, the fringe over the broad brow laced with sweat, the furrowed cheeks stained with dust.

  ‘Father,’ Corbett crouched down to face him squarely, ‘look around you. Sixteen dead here, more in the church, your own people cruelly slain. These felons are condemned men, rifflers who broke out of Newgate. They have slaughtered again and again, not only here, but yesterday in Cheapside, along the streets of Cripplegate and more elsewhere. Then there are the women they abducted.’ He swallowed hard. ‘At least their screams have stopped. The church is now encircled, it has to be stormed.‘ He saw tears in Parson John’s eyes. ‘I know,’ whispered Corbett. ‘These are hard times for you. Your own father’s fall—’

  ‘My father has nothing to do with this.’

  ‘I don’t agree,’ hissed Corbett, his voice turning hard. ‘Your father may well have something to do with it. My orders are explicit. Sir Ralph Sandewic has now retaken Newgate. I will storm the church, your church, and bring this bloody mayhem to an end.’

  ‘Sir Hugh.’ Ranulf was pointing to the top of the church tower. Figures could be seen darting between the crenellations; similar ominous movements could be glimpsed at the narrow windows. Corbett followed Ranulf and put on his helmet, he then stood up, ignoring the priest, who still knelt grasping his cross.

  ‘Mark!’ Ranulf screamed. The mass of Welsh archers obeyed; their great yew bows, primed and curved, swung up. ‘Aim,’ Ranulf bellowed, ‘loose.’ A shower of barbed shafts, a cloud of feather-winged death, streaked into the sky. Most of the arrows clattered against the rough stone of the church, but screams and a body toppling from the tower top showed that some of the archers had found their mark. At Ranulf’s orders more volleys were loosed, driving the defenders from the parapet and the various windows. The bowmen advanced. Fresh clouds of arrows shattered against the stonework. The great war cart was dragged forward, its pointed battering ram jutting out. The combustibles were fired, the oil, tar and ancient kindling roaring like a furnace as a group of sweating archers, protected by their comrades, pushed at the long poles, driving the cart down the slight incline towards the great double doors of the church. Corbett flinched as an arrow whipped by his face. He screamed at the archers to push harder. The cart lurched forward, flames and smoke billowing up. He roared at the men to let go and retreat from the few enemy bowmen who still manned the windows. The cart held true, trundling down the slope and crashing into the main door. As the sharpened battering ram wedged deep into the wood, flames roared along it.

  Corbett and Ranulf, protected by a screed of archers, now retreated out of bowshot. The Welsh kept up their arrow storm as the two man took off their helmets, pushed back their coifs and gratefully washed hands and faces in a bucket of rather dirty water. The captain of archers, Ap Ythel, brought blackjacks of ale and a platter of hard bread from a nearby tavern. As Ranulf chattered to the master bowman, Corbett ate and drank greedily, staring at the conflagration around the main door. He felt exhausted. He’d been in his chancery chamber at the exchequer in Westminster when the royal courier had arrived. The riffler leaders Giles Waldene and Hubert the Monk had been consigned to Newgate with at least two dozen of their coven, all victims of the sudden fall from grace of Walter Evesham, the chief justice. Corbett ruefully wished they’d been lodged in the Tower. Waldene and the Monk had been committed to the infamous pits, their followers left in the common yard, where Waldene’s gang had clashed with Hubert’s. The fighting had spread, other prisoners becoming involved. The Keeper of Newgate and his guards had proved woefully inadequate.The great prison yard had been reached and its gates stormed. The King’s chancery had dispatched urgent writs to the Constable of the Tower Sir Ralph Sandewic, a veteran experienced in crushing riots in Newgate and the Marshalsea. He in turn had called on Corbett as senior chancery clerk, who had summoned Welsh archers camped near the Bishop of Ely’s Inn.

  The escaped prisoners, ruthless and merciless, had fought their way along Cripplegate or escaped out on to the wild heathland beyond the walls, where Sandewic was waiting with his men-at-arms. The old constable had shown no mercy. Any prisoner caught was asked one question: ‘Are you from the Land of Cockaigne?’ Sir Hugh Corbett, for his own mysterious purposes, had insisted on this. A blank look or a refusal meant immediate decapitation. The severed heads of the fugitives, tarred and pickled, already decorated the spikes along London Bridge. Other felons had fought their way into St Botulph’s yesterday evening, just as the compline bell tolled. Parson John had been surpliced, ready to chant the day’s last praises to God, when they had burst in. The priest had escaped; others were not so fortunate. Robbed and slain, they were tossed through the open door before this was sealed and blocked. Several women had been taken prisoner, and when Corbett and his archers reached St Botulph’s, they could hear the screams of the unfortunates who were being raped time and time again. Eventually the terrible screaming had ceased, and Corbett believed the women were dead. Once organised, he’d launched an assault, which was savagely repulsed; only then did he learn that the escaped prisoners had also pillaged the barbican tower at Newgate and seized bows, arrows and all the armour of battle.

  ‘Sir Hugh?’ Ranulf, red hair damp, green eyes in his white face bright with the fury of battle, was eager to finish this. ‘Soon?’ he demanded. ‘Soon we’ll attack?’

  Corbett nodded. Ranulf saw this as an opportunity to excel, to prove that he, a chancery scribe, was as valiant as any knight in battle. Corbett looked beyond Ranulf at the cart, which was now a blazing bonfire.

  ‘It’s caught the door,’ Ranulf murmured. ‘Master, we are ready.’

  Corbett rose and followed Ranulf out into the cemetery, keeping to the trees and crumbling crosses of the headstones. They moved down the side of the church, where a group of men-at-arms stood waiting with a makeshift battering ram, a long sharpened log swung by chains from a wooden framework. Corbett stared at the narrow corpse door. It was undoubtedly blocked, but it was still vulnerable.

  ‘Listen.’ He pulled the chain-mail coif over his head. ‘Bring the ram up as quickly as possible. The felons will be gathering near the main entrance. There are no windows above the corpse door, and those to the side are narrow. We must force that entrance as quickly as possible.’ The men-at-arms, all liveried in the arms of the royal household, grunted their assent.

  Corbett and Ranulf helped lumber the ram across the broken ground, squeezing past the funeral monuments. They reached the church without trouble. Immediately the ram was swung back, crashing into the corpse door so hard it began to buckle. Corbett quietly prayed that the felons would remain massed near the main entrance. The pounding continued. Welsh archers began to feed their way across, bows at the ready; others armed with round shields and short stabbing swords followed. The pounding hammered on remorselessly. An ear-splitting crack and the corpse door snapped back on its hinges. An arrow whipped through the air, skimming over their heads. In reply, the Welsh archers loosed a shower of shafts. Screams and yells ec
hoed. Ranulf, helmet on, followed Corbett into the darkness of the church. Shadows emerged. Corbett parried and thrust with a hulking brute garbed in a woman’s dress, his painted face all bloodied. The stink from his body was foul. Corbett drove the monstrosity back, fending off the huge mallet his opponent whirled. An arrow cut through the air, taking the felon full in the face, and he toppled to the ground, writhing in his death throes.

  Corbett wiped the sweat from his face. Smoke from the main door seeped through the nave, which was now riven with the clash of steel, the hiss of arrows, groans and screams. Men staggered away clutching blood-bubbling wounds. As the burning door at the main entrance began to crumble, the ram that pierced it, still smouldering and licked by dying flames, was pushed deeper into the nave. The door finally collapsed, and archers, braving the fire flickering around the lintel, clambered over the smoking wood and poured into the church. The battle was over.

  Some of the prisoners tried to escape, only to be cut down or forced back. A few attempted to hold out in the tower; they were pushed to the top, but none chose to jump, as Ranulf remarked, and resistance faded. Corbett ordered chains and ropes to be brought. At last a long line of felons, about twenty in number, lay shackled in one of the darkening aisles, kicked and cursed by the archers. Corbett, joined by Parson John and Ranulf, watched as the bodies of the victims, men and women, some very young, were brought out. They had all been stripped, horribly abused and tortured, their skins scorched by candle flame. Corbett ordered them to be decently tended, and Parson John had all the corpses, including two archers, laid out along the centre of the nave. Corbett had wandered many a battlefield, but this sight was truly piteous. Some of the victims had perished quickly from arrows embedded deep in their chests, others had taken time to die.

  ‘Harrowing and hideous!’ Corbett crossed himself and stared around. The church was like a flesher’s stall, awash with blood, littered with the detritus of battle. Sheets were brought out and flung over the corpses. Master Fleschner, the parish clerk, was summoned. He first retched and vomited, then began the grisly task of listing those killed: Margaret-atte-Wood, spinster of Jewry, Aegidius Markell, vintner of Moletrap Alley, along with all the other innocent victims of the murderous anarchy.