‘There!’ Watkin wiped the sweat from his face. There you are, Father. And,’ he added quickly, his hairy nostrils quivering in the full fury of his self-righteousness, ‘in the play, I’m going to be God, aren’t I?’ He lowered his voice. ‘Pike can’t be God. I am leader of the parish council.’
Pike the ditcher came round the cart. Athelstan sensed that, despite the impending marriage between Pike’s son and Watkin’s daughter, the old animosity between these two men was beginning to reappear.
‘I heard that, Watkin!’ Pike snapped. ‘I’m to be God in the play!’
‘No, you’re not!’ Watkin shouted back childishly.
Both men looked at Athelstan to arbitrate. The priest groaned quietly to himself.
‘Well, Father?’ Pike demanded. ‘Who is God?’
Athelstan smiled. ‘We all are. We are all made in God’s image so, if we are like God, God must be something like us.’
‘But what about the play?’ Watkin insisted.
‘Yes, what about it?’ Hig the pig-man, square-jawed and narrow-eyed, came around the cart and stood beside Watkin. Hig worked in the fleshing yards and his brown gown was stained with offal and blood from the carcases he cleaned. He always wore the same gown and his thick hair was cut as if the barber had just thrust a bowl on his head and trimmed around it. Athelstan didn’t like him. Hig was a born troublemaker, very conscious of his rights and ever ready to shatter the peace of parish-council meetings by fishing in troubled waters.
‘Hig, you stay out of this!’ Athelstan warned.
The pig-man’s close-set eyes narrowed.
‘I know what we can do.’ Athelstan looked at Watkin and Pike. ‘As I said, we are like God. So, Watkin can be God the Father, I can play God the Son and you, Pike, dressed in a white gown with the wings of a dove attached to your back, can be God the Holy Ghost. Now, remember what Holy Mother Church teaches, there are three persons in God and all three are equal.’ He lowered his voice and looked darkly at them. ‘Unless you are going to contradict the teaching of Holy Mother Church?’
Watkin and Pike just stared open-mouthed, then glanced at each other.
‘Agreed,’ said Watkin. ‘But God the Father always does more than God the Holy Ghost.’
‘No, he doesn’t.’
They both stamped off, merrily discussing the finer points of theological dogma. Athelstan heaved a sigh of relief. The rest of the parishioners milled around the cart, loudly talking to each other but never bothering to listen. Athelstan slipped out of the church and across to his house.
‘Father, a word?’
Athelstan, his hand on the latch, spun around.
The two cloaked women must have walked over quietly. They stood, white-faced, staring at him.
‘Emma Roffel.’ She pulled back her hood. ‘You remember me, Father?’
Emma’s face was drawn and her grey hair was unruly, as if she had hardly bothered to finish her toilet. Tabitha Velour, standing just a pace behind her, looked similarly drawn and tired.
‘You’d best come in.’ Athelstan led them into the kitchen and sat them down. He offered some bread and wine but they declined. He sat at the head of the table, gently stroking a purring Bonaventure, who had jumped into his lap.
‘Why are you here?’ he asked Emma. ‘I thought your husband was to be buried this morning?’
‘He is to be, within the hour,’ Emma replied. ‘I’m here because of what happened at St Mary Magdalene church last night.’ Her eyes widened. ‘I had to ask you, Father. Have you found the culprit? Why should anyone do so disgusting a thing?’
‘You have come across the river to ask me that?’ Athelstan asked. ‘Sir John and I did intend to visit you today.’
‘I went to Sir John’s house,’ Emma said, ‘but he was not there. He had been summoned to the Guildhall. I just want to know who did it.’
‘Madam, we don’t know who or why but your husband had few friends and many enemies.’
Emma sighed heavily.
‘He was a hard man, Father.’
Athelstan peered at her. That’s not really why you came,’ he said. ‘There’s something else, isn’t there?’
‘I will speak for her.’ Tabitha Velour leaned forward. ‘When we went to St Mary Magdalene church this morning, Father Stephen was still very upset. He overheard you tell Sir John that Captain Roffel may have been poisoned. Is this true?’
‘I think so,’ Athelstan replied. ‘Probably white arsenic. It’s cheap and easy to obtain.’
‘But how?’ Emma Roffel asked. ‘My husband was very careful on board ship, only eating and drinking what the crew did.’
‘That’s not quite true,’ Athelstan said. ‘Your husband was Scottish. He had a special flask which he filled at a tavern near Queen’s hithe with a fiery Scottish drink called usquebaugh.’
Emma Roffel put her finger to her lips. ‘Of course,’ she whispered. ‘Where he went, so did that flask.’ She stared at Athelstan. ‘But he always filled it at that tavern! He took it there himself, because he paid the landlord to import a special cask from the port of Leith in Scotland.’
‘Did he always carry the flask around with him?’ Athelstan asked.
‘He never drank from it on land,’ Emma answered. ‘But at sea, always. He would never leave it in his cabin but carried it on his person.’
‘And at sea, of course, he could not refill it,’ Athelstan mused.
Emma suddenly stood up. ‘Father, you must excuse us. The funeral Mass is at ten o’clock. There will only be the two of us there. We must go.’
‘We may visit you afterwards?’ Athelstan asked.
‘Yes, yes,’ she said impatiently and, followed by her maid, hurried out of the house.
Athelstan banked the fire. He collected the leather bag containing his writing materials, filled Bonaventure’s bowl with milk and went out to saddle the protesting Philomel.
‘Come on, old man,’ he whispered as he gingerly heaved himself into the saddle. ‘Let’s go and see old Jack Cranston, eh?’
Philomel snickered in pleasure. The old destrier liked nothing better than butting the fat coroner’s protuberant stomach or expansive backside. As they passed the church door, Athelstan glimpsed Marston and two other of Sir Henry’s retainers lurking in the alley opposite. Athelstan did not stop. His parishioners had now spilled out on to the steps. Neatly divided into two groups, one led by Watkin and the other by Pike, they were fiercely debating whether God the Father was, in fact, superior to God the Holy Ghost.
Lord help us, Athelstan thought, perhaps I should be Three Persons in One and Watkin and Pike could be two of the archangels. He turned Philomel out of the church grounds and into the alleyway, smilingly sketching a blessing towards where Marston and his accomplices lurked. Then he forced his way through the smelly, noisy throngs in Southwark’s narrow alleyways. Outside the Piebald tavern, two of his parishioners, Tab the tinker and Roisia his wife, were engaged in a bitter verbal battle, much to the delight of a growing crowd of onlookers. Athelstan stopped to watch and listen.
‘We’ve been happily married for twenty years till this!’ Roisia, red in the face, shouted at her husband.
‘Yes,’ Tab retorted. ‘You’ve been happy and I’ve been married!’
This was too much for Roisia, who swung her tankard at Tab’s head. He ducked and she went sprawling in the mud.
‘Tab!’ Athelstan shouted. ‘Stop this nonsense! Pick Roisia up and go into the church! The cart for our pageant’s arrived.’
Roisia, kneeling in the mud, caught her husband’s arm.
‘You’re supposed to be St Peter!’ she shouted. ‘But Watkin will distribute the parts as he thinks fit.’
Husband and wife, now firm allies, headed off in the direction of St Erconwald’s. Athelstan continued on his way, past the priory of St Mary Overy to the approaches of London Bridge. At the roadside the beadles were busy meting out punishments. Two dyers, who had used dog turds to make a brown dye that washed out in the first shower, were standing, bare-arsed, with only a scrap of cloth covering their privy parts, tied hand and foot to each other. They would stand there until sunset. The stocks and pillories were also full with the usual malefactors – footpads and other petty villains who regarded capture and a day’s confinement as an occupational hazard. However, the death-cart had arrived and stood now beneath the high-beamed scaffold. A felon, the noose already around his neck, was proclaiming, to the utter indifference of the crowd, that he was an innocent man. The condemned man’s face, almost hidden by his ragged hair and beard, was sunburnt. When he saw Athelstan, he jumped up and down in the cart.