‘We would need a battering ram to shatter the door,’ he called over his shoulder, ‘and we don’t have a ladder high enough for that window.’ The taverner pointed to a nearby tangle of carts, barrows and ladders under a heavy, dirt-encrusted tarpaulin. ‘Pull that back and you’ll find what we need. Mooncalf, Nightingale – swiftly now.’ They hurried off with others and pushed back a handcart used to carry the filth from the pigsty on the far side of the Palisade. They positioned this under the window and brought a siege ladder, resting it secure so its hooks grasped the deep sill beneath the Barbican’s only window. Thorne tested it was secure and climbed cautiously up. The cart provided an extra two yards in length to the ladder. Mooncalf stood holding the bottom rungs. Thorne was now at the top. He had drawn his dagger and pushed this between the gap in the shutters, trying to prise up the iron-hook clasp. Eventually he pulled back the shutters.
‘I will have to cut the horn,’ he shouted down. Mooncalf watched his master slit the horn and put his hand through to lift the latch. He pulled back the door window and began to hack at the inner shutter. At length this too gave way. Mine Host made to climb through but then thought again and stared down. ‘I am too bulky, too fat. Mooncalf …’ The taverner came down and Mooncalf reluctantly went up. He reached the top rung and clambered over the sill, pushing back both windows and shutters, and climbed into the horrors awaiting him. The candles had long guttered out, the great lantern on its table had been snuffed, but the grey morning light revealed a grotesque scene. Tables, stools and other sticks of furniture had been overturned, yet it was the four corpses which caught Mooncalf’s terror-filled gaze. The two whores brought in by Marsen lay tumbled on the floor. One had suffered a thrust to the heart, her naked breasts now crusted with blood from the other’s severed throat. She leaned drunkenly back over a stool, belly and breasts thrust up into the air, her slender throat gaping like another mouth. Marsen the tax collector lay against the wall, sword and dagger close to his lifeless fingers, his chest speared by a deep thrust. Nearby Mauclerc had suffered a savage belly wound which seemed to have drained his body of all fluid. Mooncalf could only stand and stare, his throat and mouth bone dry, his tongue thickening so he could hardly breathe.
‘Why this?’ he murmured, then remembered the iron-bound exchequer coffer, Marsen’s pride and joy: it now stood on a footstool, the concave lid thrown back, empty as a spendthrift’s purse. Mooncalf glanced back towards the window and noticed a square of vellum pinned to the inner shutter. Mooncalf, who had been instructed in his numbers and letters by his parish priest, went across and quietly mouthed the letters written there. In fact, as soon as he had whispered the first word he realized what it was. He had heard the chatter in the taproom about this quotation from the Bible. Mooncalf pointed out the letters to himself as he mouthed the words, recalling what Nightingale had told him, something about ‘mene, mene’. Mooncalf let his hand drop and stepped back. He would leave that to others. He walked towards the trapdoor, pulled back the bolts and lifted the great wooden slab. He clumsily scrambled down the ladder. The ground floor of the Barbican held fresh, gruesome sights. The three archers on guard lay soaking in thickening pools of blood, weapons not far from their hands. Mooncalf, mouth gaping, eyes blinking, could only shake his head. The Upright Men were performing all kinds of mischief, but how could all this be explained? Two archers lay dead outside with shafts to their hearts? And here in the Barbican, its window, entrance and trapdoor all bolted, locked and secured? Nevertheless, some misty messenger from Hell had swept through this tower and dealt out bloody judgement.
PART ONE
‘Flesh-Shambles’: butchers’ yard.
‘Oh City of Dreadful Night!’ Athelstan whispered. The Dominican parish priest of St Erconwald’s in Southwark, secretarius atque clericus – secretary and clerk to Sir John Cranston, Lord High Coroner in the City of London – could only close his eyes and pray. Once again he and Sir John were about to enter the treacherous mire of murder. The hunt for the sons and daughters of Cain would begin afresh; God only knew what sinister paths their pursuit would lead them down. Athelstan’s olive-skinned face was sharp with stubble, his black-and-white gown not too clean, his sandals wrongly latched, whilst his empty belly grumbled noisily. The little friar, his dark eyes heavy with sleep, had been pulled from his cot bed by Cranston, who now stood behind him. The coroner had been most insistent. The Angel of Murder had swept The Candle-Flame tavern and brushed many with its killing wings. Edmund Marsen, his clerk, two whores and five Tower archers had been brutally murdered. The gold and silver, harvested south of the Thames and intended for the ever-yawning coffers of John of Gaunt had been stolen. Thibault, master of the Regent’s secret chancery, had sent that raven of a henchman Lascelles to rouse Sir John to discover what had happened and, above all, recover the looted treasure.
Athelstan stood just within the wicket gate leading into the Palisade. He peered through the misty murk at the forbidding donjon, the Barbican, and, beyond it, the expanse of rough land which stretched down to the piggeries and slaughter pens.
‘Lord,’ Athelstan whispered, ‘I am about to enter the domain of murder. If I become so busy as to forget you, do not thou forget me.’ He crossed himself and turned to where Cranston stood in hushed conversation with the burly taverner Thorne. Two great hulking men, though Mine Host was clean-shaven and more wiry than the generously proportioned coroner. Both men wore close-fitting beaver hats and heavy military cloaks. Cranston had whispered to his ‘good friar’, as he called Athelstan, how he and Thorne had both served in France under the Black Prince’s banner. Thorne was a veteran, a captain of hobelars who had secured enough ransoms to make him a wealthy man and buy The Candle-Flame.
‘Sir John,’ Athelstan called, ‘we should shelter from the cold and view this place of slaughter.’ All three walked over to the remains of the campfire, where a few embers glowed and sparked. Athelstan crouched down, staring at the shifting heap of grey ash.
‘A cold night,’ he murmured. ‘Yet this fire has not been fed for hours.’ He rose and walked over to the corpses of the bowmen, knelt between them, closed his eyes and whispered the words of absolution. Opening the wallet on the cord around his waist, he pulled out the stoppered phial of holy oil and sketched a cross on the dead men’s foreheads. Their skin was ice cold; the blood which they coughed up through their noses and mouths was as frozen as the congealed mess on their chests. Both men had been armed but there was little evidence that they had used the weapons lying beside them.
‘They were killed. I am sorry.’ Athelstan held up a hand. ‘They were murdered, foully so, in the early hours. The fire has burnt low, their corpses are icy to the touch and their hot blood is frozen.’ Athelstan pointed into the darkness. ‘Their assassin crept very close.’ Athelstan indicated the blackjacks drained of ale and a half-full waterskin lying near the corpses. ‘These two unfortunates were crouching, warming themselves by the fire enjoying their drink. They would make easy targets against the flame light.’ Athelstan sighed, sketched a blessing in the air and rose to his feet. He stared around at a bleak, stark stretch of land frozen hard by winter, the trees stripped of leaves, their empty branches twisted, dark shapes against the light and that Barbican, solitary and forbidding.