Herald of Hell

by Paul Doherty

  ‘Sir John?’ He tapped the coroner’s arm.

  ‘Yes, Brother?’

  ‘The Leaping Horse, Odo Gray’s ship, is berthed at Queenshithe. Let us seek it out.’ Cranston had a word with the master and the barge swung slightly and made its way past the ships moored close to the north bank of the Thames. The Leaping Horse came into view, its name scrolled on the high stern and gilded bow strip, a powerful, two-masted, big-bellied war cog. Cranston stood and peered up.

  ‘It’s ready for sea,’ he murmured, ‘on the evening tide. Wouldn’t you say so, barge master?’

  The fellow agreed, pointing out how the sails were loosened, and crew men were scurrying about the deck whilst others were busy in the rigging.

  ‘Sir John, should we approach and board?’

  ‘No, no.’ The coroner shook his head. ‘Interesting, however, isn’t it, my floating friar? How Captain Odo Gray believed he would be up and away before this day was out? Well, he won’t be, so let’s continue.’

  The barge master shouted at the oarsmen and the craft pulled away before turning to run alongside the landing place at Queen’s Steps. Cranston told Flaxwith and his bailiffs that he no longer needed them before leading Athelstan up one of the alleyways into Cheapside. The afternoon was drawing on yet the heat in the narrow streets was stifling. Worthy burgesses pushed by, sweating heavily in their high-necked shirts, ermine-lined robes and fur-edged caps. Their wives were equally splendid in gorgeous coloured gowns and robes, faces almost hidden by the studded pomanders pressed to their noses against the ever pervasive stench. Traders and stall-holders, tinkers and costermongers shouted the cries of their trade. Nips, foists and other petty thieves slunk amongst the crowd looking for prey or plunder only to flee at the sight of Cranston. The dung carts were out, the self-important rakers shoving people aside so as to empty laystalls and cesspits. Tavern doors hung open, ale fumes and cooking smells wafting into the streets to mingle with the myriad of odours swirling about.

  At the crossroads, close to the Standard, market bailiffs were lashing the naked buttocks of two ale traders found guilty of adulterating their product. Butchers stood in the stocks, heads and hands clasped, forced to smell the putrid reek of the mouldy meat they had been caught selling. Nearby a bailiff wailed on a set of bagpipes to attract attention as well as drown the groans of the convicted miscreants. Cranston took direction from a stall holder and led Athelstan along an alleyway and into Fairlop Lane. A quiet street, formerly lined by shops, it had now been converted into dwelling places, their doors flung open to catch any breeze or coolness. Athelstan glimpsed scenes as they passed: a fat man at table gnawing a bone; beside him, his even fatter wife with a dish of cold meats being importuned by a plump child, a soiled loincloth around its ankles. In the next house a man garbed in outside clothes dozed on a pillow before an empty stone fireplace. A yard winder and spindler with thread stood idly by as his young wife primped herself in a hand-held mirror, more interested in that than the rosary beads wrapped around her fingers. Cranston beckoned her serving girl to come out and, for a penny, she led them to Whitfield’s chambers, a narrow, two-storey dwelling on the corner of an alleyway. The downstairs window, previously a shop front, was bricked and boarded up. She nodded at the door, loose off the latch.

  ‘Others been here,’ she said. ‘They forced the lock, went in and came out.’

  ‘Who?’ Athelstan asked.

  ‘King’s men.’ She patted her chest. ‘They wore the White Hart.’

  ‘Bowmen,’ Cranston declared, ‘Cheshire archers.’

  ‘The same,’ the girl smiled crookedly, ‘led by a man with hair and face as white as snow.’

  ‘Albinus,’ Cranston whispered, ‘with a company of archers. He ignored our request to leave things well alone. Oh dear!’ He thanked the girl and pushed open the door. Inside the dingy dwelling, a flagstone passage, greasy underfoot, led them to different chambers: a bedroom and chancery office next to a shabby kitchen and scullery.

  ‘Everything is bare,’ Cranston murmured. They went up the stairs to what must have been Lebarge’s chambers: a bed-loft and writing room with rickety furniture. The house seemed to have been swept clean, with little to show who actually lived there. They searched but found nothing except scraps of parchment, ragged remnants of clothes, discarded chancery items and an ancient, battered lanternhorn. The small walled garden at the rear of the house was no better: overgrown flower patches, herb plots with rubbish piled high. Athelstan glimpsed a broken money casket and two small coffers, their metal studs gleaming in the afternoon sunlight.

  ‘Truly a wasteland,’ he declared. ‘Sir John, there is nothing here for us and, I suspect, Thibault’s men found the same.’

  They left the house and made their way up to St Mary Le Bow, standing at the heart of Cheapside. The crowds were now thinning as the day began to die. The breeze had turned cooler and stronger, blowing the saltpetre strewn in the streets to sting the eye and clog the throat. St Mary’s loomed, a turreted, gabled mass against the fading blue sky, its steeple pointing like a warning finger towards heaven. On its steps stood a storyteller delivering a tale about a fairy king in Essex who had cleared a swampy place near a pool, long overgrown with briar to form a coven for foxes. All this had been pruned to build a pretty, timber banqueting-house now known as ‘Pleasaunce-in-the-Marsh’.

  Cranston and Athelstan brushed past him, as they did a wonder-teller proclaiming that he had seen a fleet of demons cross the Middle Sea. On the top step a public penitent, garbed completely in red, a mask covering his face with slits for eyes and mouth, brazenly declared, ‘I have lived in the Devil’s service with late suppers and even later risings. I must repent, otherwise after death my soul shall curse my body. I shall have demons for fellows, burn in fire and shiver on ice.’ The penitent gestured at Athelstan. ‘I’ll give you a blessing for a coin.’

  ‘And I will give you one for free,’ Athelstan retorted: he turned and went back down the steps and studied the church carefully. He had a feeling, an instinct that something was not quite right, though he could not say why. He had no evidence, nothing at all to justify his unease, except he did wonder about the storyteller and the public penitent. Once, deep in his cups, Pike the Ditcher had confessed to Athelstan that such eccentrics were often the spies and watchmen of the Great Community of the Realm.

  ‘It’s the wrong time of day,’ Athelstan murmured to himself. ‘The church won’t have many visitors now, so why tarry here?’ He returned to his study of the church. St Mary Le Bow stood in its own ground behind a low stone wall, a little removed from the busy clamour of Cheapside. An eerie sadness hovered around the church: a touch of menace, of baleful watchfulness. Athelstan walked back up the steps and stared at the evil-looking gargoyles guarding the door. He glanced over his shoulder; the public penitent was watching him carefully. The friar shrugged, turned away and led a bemused Cranston into the gloomy nave. On a pillar near the baptismal font, a leaping figure of St Christopher caught Cranston’s eye. The coroner wondered what was bothering the little friar but, as always, he’d let this sharp-minded ferret of a man have his way. They walked up the church. At the far end reared a huge rood screen dominated by a twisted figure of the crucified Christ. The light streaming through the windows, some of them filled with painted glass, was beginning to fade. Visitors scurried about, dark shapes in the gathering murk. Incense and candle smoke fragranced the air. On the left of the high altar, a host of tapers glowed before the Lady altar.

  Athelstan led Cranston into the north transept, stretching beyond the drum-like pillars, which housed a number of small chantry chapels. Each of these was partitioned off by a polished, gleaming trellised screen. A small door led into a carpeted interior with a stained-glass window high in the outside wall, an altar on a slightly raised dais and a prie-dieu placed before it. Each chapel was adorned with statues, pictures and triptychs extolling the merits of the saint in whose name the chapel was dedicated. Some of the chantries containe
d tombs. Reginald Camoys’, at the far end, dedicated to St Stephen, housed two: simple table tombs with a knight in armour as an effigy, a naked sword clasped in his folded hands, the carved face almost hidden by the chainmail coif and nose guard of the conical war helmet. A sculptured frieze ran along the side of each tomb. Athelstan crouched down to examine these.

  ‘Look, Sir John, they are virtually the same. This,’ he traced the carving with his finger, ‘must be the Cross of Lothar with a kneeling knight, paying devotion as he would before the Sacrament, and this, repeated twice, is the cipher or cryptic symbol “IHSV” beneath the rising the sun, and the inscription to “The Unconquerable Sun”, an allusion, I suspect, to the resurrected Christ. The stone is costly, possibly Purbeck marble, specially imported.’

  Athelstan straightened up and stared at the window above Penchen’s tomb. Filled with painted glass, it proclaimed the same message as the one found on the frieze. Reginald Camoys’ tomb, built along the wooden trellis screen which separated the chapel from the one beyond, was almost identical. Athelstan stared around, a comfortable, well-furnished chantry with its elmwood altar, white cloths, silver-chased candlesticks and a cross which undoubtedly replicated that of Lothar. Athelstan picked this up and examined the imitation treasure with its green and gold paint, a cameo of a Roman emperor at its centrepiece.

  ‘Can I help you?’ a voice grated. A man stood in the doorway to the chantry chapel, tall and thin, with sparse black locks falling in wisps to his shoulders. The stranger’s face was mere bone, the white skin stretched across tight and transparent. He stepped closer to meet Athelstan, his milky-blue eyes sunk deep in their sockets, his nose hooked like a hawk’s, his thin-lipped mouth all pursed. He was dressed in a stained yellow jerkin and hose of the same colour. From his belt hung a naked dagger and a couple of tooth drawers; around his neck two rosaries fashioned out of human teeth.

  ‘And who are you?’ Cranston stepped out of the shadows. The stranger glimpsed the coroner’s badge and hastily retreated.

  ‘Well?’ Athelstan asked.

  ‘Raoul Malfort, bell clerk of St Mary Le Bow.’

  ‘Ah yes, recently appointed following the murder of the previous office holder, Edmund Lacy, stabbed to death in a tavern by the villain Reynard now dangling at Tyburn.’

  ‘Not so, not so.’ The bell clerk shook his head. ‘You’ve not heard the news?’ He sniffed and abruptly changed the conversation. ‘I am also a tooth-drawer. I still practise my trade.’ He gestured with his head. ‘I use the bell tower now Lacy has gone.’

  ‘You disliked him?’

  ‘Until he died he was the master,’ Malfort declared. ‘Now he has departed this vale of tears and I have taken over his position.’ He beckoned. ‘Do you want to see my chamber?’

  ‘No, no,’ Athelstan replied hastily, glimpsing a bloodied tooth on the macabre necklace. The friar smiled to himself. No wonder, he thought, Matthias Camoys believed this church was haunted with strange cries and sounds – it was no more than some poor soul losing a tooth! Nevertheless, Athelstan shivered. This eerie-looking bell clerk only deepened the apprehension he’d felt before entering this so-called hallowed place.

  ‘You talked about news?’ he demanded.

  ‘Oh, yes, Reynard.’ Malfort grinned in a show of yellowing, broken teeth. ‘He did not dance in the air at Tyburn. Murdered, he was, in the death closet at Newgate, killed by two felons Hydrus and Wyvern. Now, when they reached Tyburn …’ In brusque sentences, Malfort described the riot around the execution ground. Once he’d finished, Cranston whistled under his breath.

  ‘Brother,’ he gestured, ‘we should leave and reflect on all that has happened.’

  ‘True, true.’

  Athelstan and Cranston left the chantry chapel accompanied by Malfort and crossed the church to the other transept. Athelstan walked through its shadows, stopped and pointed to a door at the far end.

  ‘Where does that lead?’

  ‘Down to the crypt. Nothing there except bones and ancient ruins.’

  ‘I would like to visit it.’

  Malfort shrugged and walked back to take a cresset from its wall niche.

  ‘Brother?’ Cranston asked. ‘Why the curiosity?’

  ‘Because I am curious,’ Athelstan smiled, ‘and I am curious because I am uneasy.’ He rubbed his forehead. ‘Perhaps I am growing tired, I just sense something’s amiss. Anyway …’ He paused as Malfort brought back the cresset, its flame dancing merrily in the draught.

  The bell clerk led them to the crypt door and, taking out a bunch of keys, opened it and ushered them in. They went down mildewed, decaying steps into a spacious cavern, its floor covered in cracked white bones, scraps of skulls and decaying shards of wood and cloth. A truly ghostly place with its litter of battered bones and all the refuse thrown here when the parish cemetery was cleared of the dead to make room for more corpses. A shadow-filled, shape-dancing chamber where the darkness seemed to lurk in the cobwebbed recesses, ready to spring out. Athelstan took the torch and moved over to inspect a crumbling wall, obviously much more ancient than the crypt which enclosed it.

  ‘Romans.’ Malfort’s voice echoed. ‘They say they built a temple here, but, Brother, Sir John – it is the Lord High Coroner, with his secretarius Athelstan?’

  ‘It certainly is,’ Cranston’s voice boomed.

  ‘Sir, I have other tasks. I must ring the bell for evening prayer, trim the candles …’

  ‘Yes, yes.’ Athelstan walked back. ‘Do you have many dealings with Matthias Camoys?’

  ‘He often comes here asking questions and studying those tombs, even coming down here to stare and search. That young man likes to haunt solitary places, his sleep broken by garish dreams as he pines to discover the whereabouts of the Cross of Lothar. But, gentlemen, if you have finished …’

  Cranston and Athelstan left the church. They had reached the bottom step when there was a flurry of movement in the church porch behind them. Alarmed by the sudden patter of footsteps, Cranston turned nimble as a greyhound, pushing Athelstan behind him as he drew both sword and dagger. Their attackers paused, giving Cranston more time to ready himself into a half-crouch, sword and dagger out, moving to the left and right. The three hooded and masked assailants swirled in, then one of them screamed and staggered back, clutching his arm, at Cranston’s sudden parry. His two companions immediately retreated, grabbed their wounded comrade and promptly disappeared, running across the steps, jumping down and vanishing into the alleyway running alongside the church.

  ‘Well I never! Satan’s tits!’ Cranston murmured, gesturing away the curious bystanders who were now drifting over to view the effects of the brief but furious encounter. ‘Well I never!’ The coroner resheathed both sword and dagger.

  Athelstan just stood clutching his chancery satchel, staring up at the tympanum of Christ in glory carved above the entrance to the church with its inscription sculptured around its edges: Hic est locus terribilis, Domus Dei et Porta Caeli – ‘This is a terrifying place,’ Athelstan translated, ‘the House of God and the Gate of Heaven.’ He patted Cranston’s arm. ‘Well, it certainly is! Why did they attack like that, Sir John? They came out of the church behind us; they let us pass and then they struck. I truly believe they did not mean to harm us. I suspect,’ Athelstan stared up again at the tympanum, ‘they wished to seize me.’ He grinned. ‘It would have taken more than three to hold you.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I suggest they wanted this.’ Athelstan held up his chancery satchel. ‘I have no real proof for what I say, yet I am sure of it. Why else should they attack and then, as soon as you became Sir Galahad, flee like the wind?’

  ‘And what does that chancery satchel hold? Of course,’ Cranston answered his own question, ‘the scraps of parchment Thibault gave us at the Golden Oliphant. But why not wait until you are in your lonely priest’s house at the dead of night?’

  ‘I am protected there,’ Athelstan grinned, ‘and that’s the paradox. The very p
eople who keep an eye on me at St Erconwald’s want this.’

  ‘The Upright Men?’ Cranston rehitched his warbelt. ‘I would agree. They wanted those pieces of parchment before you had time to copy and memorize them.’

  ‘Precisely, Sir John, which is what I suggest we do now.’ Athelstan poked the coroner’s generous stomach. ‘My stalwart knight, you have done well. It’s time to feed the inner man.’

  Cranston needed no extra urging and led Athelstan at what the friar considered to be a charge through a maze of alleyways and into Sir John’s favourite retreat, the Lamb of God in Cheapside. Mine Hostess, as always, came bustling across holding napkins and a jug of the finest Bordeaux with two deep-bowled goblets. Pleasantries were exchanged, kisses bestowed and compliments passed, before Cranston decided on chicken in white wine, a meat porridge, roast pork slices in caraway sauce and fresh white bread softened with herbal butter. Athelstan murmured he would eat what Sir John left.

  No sooner had Mine Hostess hastened back to the kitchen, the odours of which were making the coroner’s mouth water like a fountain, than Leif the one-eyed beggar and Rawbum, his constant companion, made their way into the tavern having ‘espied’, as both screeched like choirboys, the King’s Lord High Coroner. Cranston groaned but patiently sat as he always did to listen to their half-mad gossip. Leif rested on a stool but Rawbum, ever since he’d sat on a pot of bubbling oil, stood nodding wisely as Leif ranted about various different signs and portents. How red rain as bitter as vinegar had fallen over Cripplegate, a sign, Leif assured Cranston, that the sun was about to turn black, the moon disappear and the stars fall from heaven, a sure prophecy that they were now living in the End of Times. Cranston politely thanked them. The coroner parted with two coins and both self-proclaimed prophets of doom merrily jigged out of the taproom.