The doctor still kept his back to the wall and watched the priest guardedly. ‘You are most observant, friar, Benedicta told me that.’
Athelstan flinched at the look in the doctor’s eyes. ‘Aye,’ the friar replied, slumping down on a stool. ‘But I should have been more observant I found chalk on my fingers after I had passed the Host through the leper’s squint’ He glared at the doctor. ‘That’s sacrilege, you know? To take the Eucharist as a cover for your blasphemous doings.’ Athelstan glared around him. ‘Yes,’ he rasped, ‘I should have been more observant I never saw you with a begging bowl, nor could I remember you in the streets around the church.’ He rose. ‘You broke God’s law as well as the King’s. I am leaving now but I will be back with the city guard. Tonight you will be in Newgate getting ready to stand trial before King’s Bench at Westminster!’
‘Benedicta also said you were a tolerant priest. Aren’t you going to ask me why, Father?’ Vincentius replied softly.
The physician suddenly had a wary, frightened look in his eyes. ‘I did wrong,’ he muttered, slumping into his chair. ‘But what real harm did I do? No, no!’ He waved his hand at Athelstan. ‘Listen to me! I have studied medicine in Bologna, with the Arabs in Spain and North Africa, and at the great school of physic in Salerno. But we doctors know nothing, Father, except how to apply leeches and bleed a man dry.’ Vincentius laced his fingers together and rested his elbows on the desk. ‘The only way we can learn about the human body is to open it up. Dissect each part; study the position of the heart, or the coursing of the blood, or the composition of the stomach. But the church forbids that.’ He held up a beringed hand. ‘I swear I meant no disrespect, but my hunger for medical knowledge, Father, is as great as yours for saving souls. And where could I go? To the execution yards or battlefields where the corpses are so mauled they are beyond recognition? So I came to Southwark, outside the jurisdiction of the city. Yes, yes.’ He saw the look of annoyance in Athelstan’s eyes. ‘To a poor parish where no one cared, just as they don’t for the famished children who roam the streets near your church.’ Vincentius played with a small knife. ‘I took to imitating a leper to spy on the graveyard, taking only those corpses over whom no one had a claim.’
‘I claimed them!’ Athelstan yelled. ‘God claimed them! The church claimed them!’
‘Yes, I took the corpses,’ Vincentius continued, ‘and dissected them. Gidaut and I buried them at night in the river, but then we stopped because of the great frost.’ He shook his head. ‘I did wrong but are you going to hound me for that? I did good work here, priest. Go out into the streets of Southwark, talk to the mother with the lanced cyst in her groin. To the urchin whose eyes are clean. To the labourer whose leg I set properly. And if I hang, what then, Brother? Who will give a damn? The poor will still die, and the physicians in Cheapside who milk their patients of both money and health will clap their hands to see me dance at the end of a rope.’
Athelstan sat down wearily on the stool.
‘I don’t want your death,’ he replied. ‘I want the dead in my cemetery to lie as God expects them to. I want you to go, doctor.’ Athelstan rose and dusted down his robe. ‘I am sorry I struck you.’ He stared at Vincentius. ‘But you must be gone from here. I don’t know where to, and don’t really care, but in a week I want you out of the city!’ Athelstan suddenly felt tired and weak, and realised he hadn’t eaten for some time. ‘I am sorry I struck you,’ he repeated, ‘but I was angry.’ He suddenly remembered Cranston was waiting for him and looked back at the doctor. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘you owe me one favour.’
Vincentius sat back in his chair. ‘What is that, Father?’
‘Well, two to be exact. First, you had a visitor here — Lady Maude Cranston. Why did she come?’
Vincentius grinned. ‘The Lady Maude, despite being in her thirtieth year, is now enceinte.’
Athelstan stared back in disbelief. ‘She’s with child!’
‘Yes, priest. About two months gone. Both she and the child are healthy but she is frightened of Sir John not believing her. She doesn’t want to disappoint him. I believe they lost a child some years ago?’
Athelstan nodded and the doctor enjoyed the look of stupefaction on the priest’s face.
‘She told me about Sir John. I advised her most carefully against the pleasures of the flesh. I believe her husband is a mountain of a man?’
‘Aye,’ Athelstan answered, still dumbstruck at what he had discovered. ‘Sir John is certainly that.’
‘And the second favour, Father?’
‘You served in Outremer?’
‘Yes, I did. For a time I practised in hospitals in both Tyre and Sidon.’
‘If you met someone there, how would you greet them?’
Now the physician looked surprised.
‘Shalom,’ he answered. ‘The usual Semitic phrase for “Peace be with you”.’
Athelstan lifted his hand. ‘Doctor Vincentius, I bid you farewell. I do not expect we will meet again.’
‘Priest?’
‘Yes, physician?’
‘Are you pleased that I am going because of what I have done, or pleased that I am leaving and will not see the widow Benedicta again? You love her, don’t you, priest? You, with your sharp accusations against others!’
‘No, I don’t love her!’ Athelstan snapped. But even as he closed the door behind him, he knew that, like St Peter, he was denying the truth.
Sir John Cranston, Coroner of the City, squatted bleary-eyed in a corner of the Holy Lamb tavern and stared self-pityingly across Cheapside. He had drunk a good quart of ale. Athelstan had not arrived so he’d decided to return home. He would deal with his wife like a man should, with abrupt accusations and sharp questions, but he wished the friar had come. He would have liked his advice on so many things.
Cranston leaned back against the wall and squinted across the tavern. The latest business at the Tower was dreadful. He had gone to see Fitzormonde’s badly mauled corpse: half the face had been torn away and the man’s body savaged almost beyond recognition. Cranston rubbed the side of his own face with his hand. At first Colebrooke had believed the death was an accident.
‘It was just after dusk,’ the lieutenant had informed him. ‘Fitzormonde, as was customary with him, had gone to watch the bear. One second everything was peaceful, the next Satan himself seemed to sweep out of hell. The bear broke loose and mauled the hapless hospitaller. I ordered archers down and the bear was killed.’ Colebrooke shrugged. ‘Sir John, we had no choice.’
‘Was it an accident?’ Cranston asked. ‘The bear breaking loose?’
‘At first we thought so, but when we examined the beast we found this in one of his hindquarters.’ The lieutenant handed Cranston a small bolt from the type of crossbow a lady would use for hunting.
‘Who was in the Tower at the time?’
‘Everyone,’ Colebrooke replied. ‘Myself, Mistress Philippa, Rastani, Sir Fulke, Hammond the chaplain — everyone except Master Geoffrey who had returned to his shop in the city.’
Cranston had thanked the lieutenant and gone over to the shabby, dank death-house near St Peter ad Vincula where Fitzormonde’s mangled remains lay, waiting to be sewn into their canvas shroud. The corpse was hideous, nothing more than a scarred, bloody pile of flesh. Cranston had left as quickly as he could, questioned those he found, and concluded that the crossbow bolt had been loosed by some secret archer: this had goaded the bear to fury and, snapping its chain, it had attacked Fitzormonde.
Cranston gazed one more time round the tavern, sighed and closed his eyes. Was there no way of resolving this problem? he thought. And where the bloody hell was Athelstan?