Several clutched the tools of their trade – picks and billhooks, axes and hammers. On any other day on these same streets, any one of them would have passed without comment – as commonplace and innocent as a broom or a milk pail. Now, they were wielded as weapons. Some, like Gisburne, stood and watched in bemusement as the throng pushed by; most were swept up by it, swelling its numbers as it advanced. Almost opposite him, Gisburne spied three familiar faces – women he knew by sight, who he believed to be three generations of the same family. Bemused by the street’s traffic, these gentle souls were earnestly questioning passers-by. Within moments, they had shut their doors and joined the rabble, and no more than fifty yards on he saw them shouting oaths and uttering threats with the best of them before the flood finally swallowed them up.
From this, one word rose clear. More than any other, this was the word Gisburne had been listening for these past weeks – the word whose arrival he had anticipated with the same confused mix of emotions he normally felt only before battle.
Murder.
He turned to see his squire’s face bobbing towards him in the swell. “Galfrid!” He raised an arm high. Galfrid did likewise, then fought his way across the stream of people.
“What is it?” said Gisburne. “What’s going on?”
“I’m not sure,” Galfrid looked about him as if still disorientated. “I’ve just been with Llewellyn,” he said. “There’s been another one, in Stibenhede. A Hospitaller. And he’s on the list.”
Gisburne frowned. Stibenhede was north.
Before he could speak, Hamon – heading from the west and struggling against the flow – burst through the crowd and crashed into Gisburne’s left side. Gisburne caught him by the shoulders.
“Murder, sire!” Hamon blurted. “’Orrible murder! Like what you said about. They’re mad wiv it!”
“Yes boy, we know,” said Galfrid still looking at the crowd as if trying to fathom their movements. “Jocelyn de Gaillard. But if that’s in Stibenhede, why are...”
“No, not there,” interrupted the boy. “Anuvver. On the bridge!” He pointed south, then darted off again, this time following the direction of the crowd – towards London Bridge.
GISBURNE AND GALFRID set off on foot, pushing with the throng towards the river.
It was barely four hundred yards from Widow Fleet’s door to the bridge, yet this journey, more than any other they had undertaken in recent weeks, seemed to take an age. But just as the crowd would not be stopped, neither would it be rushed.
When finally the old wooden bridge came into view ahead, Gisburne saw upon it a vast multitude of people, the majority of whom were clamouring towards the bridge’s right side, where work on the new stone bridge was in progress.
“What’s going on?” shouted Galfrid, struggling to get a clear view above the heads of the crowd. “Can you see it? Is it in the river?”
Gisburne could not see it – nor was he certain that he ever would. It seemed impossible that the old bridge could take any more bodies than were already packed upon it. He was sure that any minute all movement would grind to a halt, stranding them just yards short of their goal. But against expectation, their slow, shuffling progress continued, and as they neared he began to see people upon the wooden bridge pointing, not down, to the water, but across, towards the stout pillars of the new bridge. It was now in its seventeenth year of construction, but as yet stretched barely a third of the river’s width, its grey stone arches clad in a ramshackle lattice of timber scaffolding, a soaring span leading nowhere.
The crowd ahead had come to a standstill upon the wooden bridge. None now passed on to the other side. None could. And yet, as if more determined than ever to prove its worth in the presence of its new stone counterpart, the old, rickety structure – some of its lower supports still blackened from the great fire of 1135 – somehow accepted more and yet more of the advancing horde upon it, until finally Gisburne and Galfrid, crushed in upon every side, felt its uneven timbers creak beneath their feet.
With dogged resolve – and little regard for their neighbours – he and Galfrid pushed and edged their way through, towards the rail on the bridge’s western side. There were shouts, protests. But Gisburne – still openly wearing his sword against the general prohibition of the city, and with a look of fierce determination on him – attracted no challengers.
Jostling between the horrified onlookers – too rapt in what was before them to notice anything to either side – they at last planted their elbows upon the rail. And then they, too, saw.
LITTLE MORE THAN twenty yards away – close enough for every detail to be clearly visible – hung a body. It was impaled upon a scaffold pole, whose sharpened top protruded from the dead man’s upturned mouth like some gruesome, gore-stained tongue. Lips drew back from bloody teeth, and dead eyes stared. The tang of fresh blood, blended with the thick stench of the Thames, wafted on the warm westerly breeze. Beneath him, a cascade of red coloured the complex wooden structure and still dripped into the two dozen yards of grey water that separated them.
Sometimes the mere departure of the spirit renders the dead so alien that their wives and husbands will not recognise them. At other times, even disfigured flesh will cling so doggedly to its animate likeness as to seem uncanny. Gisburne had not looked upon the face of the dead man for a dozen years at least. Yet when he did so – even in this grotesquely deformed state – the man’s identity was as clear as if he had stepped from the room only moments before.
“I know him,” he said, his voice emotionless. “Mortimer de Vere. A friend to my father.”
He was not how his father would have remembered him. The elder knight’s right hand was missing – a single, clean cut. His once-fine tunic had been ripped or cut apart to reveal his chest, and carved upon it, like some grim heraldic device, were three crude figures: xxx.
“Thirty days...” muttered Gisburne. “Thirty days left.”
Close by, a man with a face like a hog, having heard Gisburne utter the name, repeated a hoarse approximation of it, then bellowed something unintelligible. Whatever the exclamation had meant to articulate, its pure rage inflamed the crowd further. They surged forward again, pressing Gisburne against the rail, and the rotting timbers groaned. As he stared down into the dark water far below, Gisburne fancied he could feel the whole bridge swaying under the weight of the bodies upon it.
“We must get out,” he said. “Get over there...” They turned to shoulder their way back towards the north bank. No sooner had they quit the rail than new, eager sightseers squeezed into their places.
AT THE ABUTMENT of the new bridge – an area cluttered with stone blocks, timber, tools and stout rope – a party of armed men was barely holding back the jeering crowd. They appeared hastily-equipped, and, though making a decent fist of it, ill-prepared for the task. Gisburne supposed them to be civic militia. If seriously challenged, they would not stand fast.
Parting the rabble like reeds, he advanced on the youngest of the guards. “We must see the body,” he said. “Let us past, in the name of the Crown!” And without waiting for a response, he pushed past and onto the bridge’s stonework, with Galfrid, chin held high, close behind him. The startled militiamen did nothing to prevent them. Having spied Gisburne’s sword, they perhaps took him for a noble – or if they doubted it, had not the nerve to put it to the test. Seeing this incursion, the crowd pushed forward and offered fresh protests, and the guards’ attention was then taken up with them once more.
There was an eerie stillness upon the new bridge – a weird sense of separation from the world. Just yards away, all eyes upon this spot, half of London roared and gestured. But here, on this ghostly stage – thick with white mason’s dust – there was not another soul, not another sound.
“We must find out what we can before they come to their senses and try to remove us,” said Gisburne. “I have only my sword and John’s authority to back me up – and of the two, I think my sword the more reliable.”
&n
bsp; He scanned the surface of the smooth stone. A dark stain caught his eye. He knelt, tested it with a finger. Blood.
“This pole,” called Galfrid. “What do you make of it?”
Gisburne stood, and joined his squire at the parapet. The end of the scaffold pole upon which Mortimer de Vere had been impaled was immediately below them, no more than an arm’s length away. Flies buzzed about the body. Gisburne shuddered. The Red Hand had stood where they now did.
“It’s been sharpened,” he said. “No workman upon this bridge did that. But neither can I believe the Red Hand whittled away at it with a body draped over his shoulder.”
“Christ,” said Galfrid. “He did it in advance. He came here beforehand and cut the stake in readiness...”
“...making sure it was in just the right place, so his victim would be as visible as possible from the old bridge.”
“He’s got balls, I’ll give him that,” said Galfrid. “But when? How?”
“Last night,” said Gisburne, as certain as if he had done it himself. “Under cover of darkness.”
“And the murder...?”
“I don’t believe de Vere was killed here,” said Gisburne. “If he had come to the bridge of his own accord, it could only have been by chance, and this killing was not opportunistic. No, the bridge was part of the plan – which means it was done elsewhere.” He thought of the sharpened pole, the spot of blood. “He must have waited until work was done for the day. The bridge almost deserted. There would be none to see or stop him. Though how he got the body here in the first place, through crowded streets...” He sighed and turned about. Something nearby – something that had previously seemed of no consequence – caught his eye.
“A barrow!” he said. He strode towards it, and hauled back the crumpled oilcloth that covered the top of the handcart. The wood beneath was stained with blood. “Wheeled through the streets, in plain sight, the body under the cloth. And straight onto this bridge, unchallenged...”
“Just a common workman hunched over a barrow,” said Galfrid. “But that would mean he was not in his armour.”
The realisation hit Gisburne full force. The Red Hand would have been vulnerable – as vulnerable as any man. For the first time – perhaps the only time. With a roar of frustration, Gisburne swung his boot into the handcart, rocking it onto one wheel, then walked to the bridge’s eastern side and leaned on the parapet.
“We could have had him,” he said. “With an arrow. With a damned knife!”
“If he made the mistake once, he may do so again,” said Galfrid.
“It wasn’t a mistake,” said Gisburne. “It was calculated. But he’s fearless. Cares little for his own safety. And so he will do things people could not possibly expect.”
“Like Hood,” mused Galfrid.
Gisburne thought on it for a moment. “No, not like Hood,” he said. “Hood cares about nothing. But this one... There is something he cares a great deal about. So much so that nothing else matters.”
Galfrid looked at the staring faces packing the bridge opposite. “This is hardly an out-of-the-way spot,” he said. “Once the body was revealed, the reaction would have been immediate. So, how did he escape?” He turned back to where the half-bridge joined the crowded bank. “Not the same way, surely?”
“It’s never the obvious way with him,” said Gisburne. “Never the easy way.” He peered down past the web of scaffolding on the bridge’s eastern side to the lapping water beneath.
“Boat?” said Galfrid, looking over the parapet.
Gisburne nodded. “I’m sure of it.” Because that was precisely what he would have done. “But still, someone must have seen him.”
“I’m guessing he did,” said Galfrid, pointing down towards the water’s edge.
Near the north bank, in an eddy of swirling tidewater caught against a broken paling, floated a body. By the manner of his dress, he had been a mason. What had happened to the man’s head, Gisburne could not tell – but it now flapped in the current like an empty sack.
“You!”
Gisburne looked up to see four armed men approaching – more formidable than the others. At their head was a stout, bow-legged man with a thatch of straight white hair between his hat and the shoulders of his fine robes. He had a gold chain about his neck, and an elaborate staff in his fist. A worthy of the commune, Gisburne had no doubt. His face was pink with fury.
“Our time is up,” said Gisburne, and turned back to the parapet.
The stout man huffed to a halt beside him. “What do you think you are doing?” he demanded gruffly, a little too close to Gisburne’s ear.
“We’re on royal business,” said Gisburne.
“Royal!” scoffed the man. He grabbed Gisburne’s shoulder and attempted to turn him back around. Gisburne resisted – then turned to face the man of his own volition. He was in no mood for this. “The last person to do that will never remember what happened next,” he said.
“Are you threatening me?” said the man, his tone was incredulous, his cheeks red as a ham. But then he caught sight of the knight’s sword, and for a moment his resolve faltered.
“State your business,” he barked.
“What’s it to do with you, anyway?” said Gisburne. He did not like to be pushed – not when people had not even had the courtesy to introduce themselves.
“In my city, your business is my business,” the man said.
Finally, Gisburne understood. Stood before him was none other than Henry Fitz Ailwyn, Mayor of London. Here, he was king. Inwardly, Gisburne cursed. Threatening the Mayor was perhaps not the wisest course.
“My business is to bring order,” Gisburne said.
“Bring order?” Fitz Ailwyn laughed and looked Gisburne up and down. “You?”
Fitz Ailwyn’s captain stepped forward and whispered something in his master’s ear. Gisburne did not hear the words, but they knocked some of the haughtiness out of the mayor’s expression.
“You are Guy of Gisburne?” he said.
“Sir Guy of Gisburne.”
“And you serve Prince John?”
“I do.”
Fitz Ailwyn huffed. “That is a mixed blessing.”
“It is the same Prince John who granted Londoners the freedoms they now enjoy,” said Gisburne, holding Fitz Ailwyn’s hard gaze. “Who allowed them to have a mayor.”
Fitz Ailwyn narrowed his eyes. Gisburne saw the muscles of his jaw clench. Clearly, this was a debt of which he did not wish to be reminded.
“You know what people are saying?” said Fitz Ailwyn. “That these disasters – for all know full well there have been others – arrived with the Prince. That they accompanied his progress from the North. That they are a curse upon him – and now upon us.”
“Do you believe that?” said Gisburne.
“It doesn’t matter what I believe,” hissed Fitz Ailwyn. He gestured wildly towards the old wooden bridge. “They believe it.”
Gisburne took a step forward. Fitz Ailwyn’s guards gripped their weapons. Gisburne lowered his voice so only Fitz Ailwyn could hear. “I am charged with stopping the man responsible for this outrage – for causing these upheavals among your people. Is that not in your interest? You can help me, or you can leave me be, but whatever you do now will be remembered – if John should become king.”
Fitz Ailwyn considered Gisburne’s words in silence.
“I am satisfied,” he announced. “You may go about your business. But you will vacate the bridge forthwith.” He turned to his guard. “See that they do.” And with that, he marched off to perform his own examination of the scene. Fitz Ailwyn was every inch the politician, but Gisburne could allow him this one token victory. They were done here.
“He’s hedging his bets,” muttered Galfrid as they were escorted back towards the north bank. “We can expect no help from him.”
“I’ll be happy simply to be left alone,” said Gisburne.
At the abutment of the bridge a larger contingent of militia had
now arrived. Passing them, Gisburne saw three other men with rope and a barrow, come to take the body down.
“Thirty days...” said Gisburne as they headed back up Bridge Street. “There are now exactly thirty days until Hood’s execution.”
As they walked, the crowds fell away – until, if anything, the streets were emptier than usual. The sun was setting, casting them into deep shadow. A few scattered figures loitered aimlessly – one or two ran past them towards the bridge. Around them now was now the same eerie stillness that Gisburne had felt upon the bridge, as if the infected air of the murder were spreading into the whole city.
“Two in one day,” said Galfrid, shaking his head.
“This is how he responds to failure,” said Gisburne. “One missed target, and he doubles his efforts.”
“In public. And in broad daylight,” muttered Galfrid. “Christ...”
“He’s showing us what he can do – making sure he has our attention.”
“Our attention? He’s done this because of us?”
Gisburne said nothing.
Galfrid nodded in mute acceptance. “Then he knows we are here.”
“I am certain of it.”
Suddenly, Galfrid stopped and snapped his fingers. “I almost forgot...” he said, and, scrabbling in his bag, pulled out a mottled scroll of parchment. “The Milford Roll,” he said, and slapped it into his master’s palm. “Arrived just ahead of you.”
Gisburne immediately unrolled it and scanned the list of names. There was Bardulf and Wendenal, de Mortville and de Rosseley. And there was de Vere.
“What was the name of the other knight?” he said. “The one who died earlier today?”
Guy of Gisburne- The Omnibus Page 68
