‘Sir Hugh, master!’ Hugh broke from his reverie and glanced quickly to his right. Ranulf, who had been studying him closely ever since they left Westminster, gestured ahead. ‘We are approaching London Bridge, master.’ He smiled. ‘It’s best if we are vigilant.’
Corbett gazed around. This was a part of the city where one’s wits and sword must be sharp and ready. A bank of mist was rolling in from the Thames. The roar of the river as it poured through the arches of London Bridge, breaking around the protective starlings, sounded like a roll of drums, not quite drowning the clamour of people surging along the busy thoroughfare overlooking the river bank. The cries and yells of watermen, bargemasters and weary rowers mingled with the shouts of traders and their apprentices offering a variety of goods from hot pies to leather bottles. A group of enterprising hawkers had set up stalls to sell wineskins, purses, leather laces, deerskin bags, belts and all sorts of medicinal herbs to those making their way down toWestminster, up on to the bridge or further north to the gloomy mass of the Tower. Another line of suspicious-looking marketeers offered fur from ‘monstrous, mysterious beasts in the East with fair heads, bodies as black as mulberry, with crimson backs and multicoloured tails’. These itinerant traders were now being carefully questioned by market beadles over their licence to sell in the area.
Corbett surveyed the crowd, watchful against any violence or protest at the royal standard Chanson had displayed, yet apart from a yell deep in the crowd about how the King’s testicles should be enshrined in a hog’s turd, there was no open resentment. Business certainly looked brisk, as was royal justice. The stocks and thews were full of street-walkers, ribalds and drunkards, not to mention the sky-farmers, counterfeit men caught red-handed in their trickery. A butcher guilty of selling foul meat had been singled out for special treatment; he was forced to stand in a cart beneath the gallows with the rotting entrails of a pig wound around his throat and the lower part of his face to rest just beneath his nose. A man who’d pulled the hair of an archdeacon in a brawl was now having his own plucked out. The screaming victim was being stridently lectured how, when punishment was finished, he must walk barefoot across the bridge three times with scourgers following behind. A little further on a wandering preacher pointed to an execution cart, its wicker baskets full of the remains of Scottish rebels, beheaded, quartered and pickled, to be displayed on London Bridge. He openly warned: ‘Man born of a woman lives only for an hour. His days are bound in wretchedness and woe! He bursts forth like blossom only to fall quickly to the ground, to pass away like a shadow, nowhere to be found.’
Closer to the entrance to London Bridge, great beacon fires blazed in empty pitch casks. Around these gathered the poor, the infirm, drooling beggars and the dribbling insane. Franciscans dressed in coarse brown robes moved amongst these offering bread and strips of boiled meat. The sick and their ministers rubbed shoulders with the serjeants-at-law moving up and down to the courts of Westminster, all adorned in their splendid scarlet robes and pure white silk coifs. Along the river’s edge ranged a line of scaffolds decorated with stiffened frozen cadavers on whose shoulders kites, ravens and crows settled to pick and pluck at brain or eye whilst women squatting beneath the gibbets offered scraps of clothing from the hanged as talismans against ill luck.
Corbett took in all these scenes, the tawdry, the macabre, the swirl of evil and good. He pulled up his cowl and stared at a group of Flagellantes, garbed only in linen shifts from waist to ankle, their backs laid bare. These shuffled in a line, intoning the verse of a psalm as they hit each other with whips tied into thongs and pierced with needles; the blood cascaded down their bodies to soak their linen shifts and stain their feet. Corbett muttered a prayer to himself. He must leave the soft warmth of Maeve’s world. He was about to enter the Meadows of Murder, go through the Valley of the Deadly Shadow. Behind him, Ranulf noticed his master’s agitation and breathed a sigh of relief. Master Long Face, as he secretly called Corbett, was breaking free of his Christmas dream.
Ranulf, if the truth be known, had been bored during the holy days, more concerned about his own career prospects and very wary of the sharp-eyed, keen-witted Lady Maeve. Now, he clickedhis tongue, the game had begun again. He recalled with relish his own secret meeting with the King after the Jesus Mass earlier that day. Corbett and Lady Maeve had followed the King out of St Stephen’s Chapel, then moved to greet the Chief Justices, Hengham and Staunton. The King had plucked Ranulf by the sleeve and shepherded him into a window embrasure overlooking the old palace yard. Edward had pulled him close, eyes gleaming like those of a hunting cat.
‘You’ll be off to Mistleham in Essex, Master Ranulf.’
‘Yes, your grace.’
‘Take care of Brother Corbett.’
‘Yes, your grace.’
‘You’re ambitious, Master Ranulf, keen as a limner. I can do much for you.’ The King was so close Ranulf smelt the fragrance of the sweet altar wine he had drank at the Eucharist. ‘Keep a sharp eye on Lord Scrope, a bustling, evil man with a vile temper and murderous moods.’
‘Yes, your grace.’
‘Yes, your grace,’ Edward echoed. ‘Yet I tell you this, Master Ranulf, if Scrope threatens Corbett, if he is a danger with that foul temper of his …’ He glanced away.
‘Your grace?’
‘Kill him, Master Ranulf, kill Scrope! Show no mercy to that rebel who has taken the law into his own hands!’
‘By what right, your grace?’
‘By my right, Master Ranulf. Keep this close, for you and you only.’ Edward pushed a sealed scroll into Ranulf’s hand and left.
The Principal Clerk in the Chancery of the Green Wax hadopened the scroll and read the message: ‘Edward the King to all officials of the Crown, sheriffs, bailiffs and mayor, know this, what the bearer of this letter has done he has done for the good of the King and the safety of the realm.’
2
On that day the justices began their deliberations.
Father Thomas knelt beneath the rood screen in the freezing darkness of his parish church. On trestles before him, draped in purple and surrounded by ghostly glowing funeral candles, lay the corpses of Wilfred and Eadburga, faces white as wax, their horrid wounds now dried, nothing more than purple stains, their limbs all washed and anointed. Tomorrow Father Thomas would sing their requiem mass and take the coffins out through the corpse door into God’s Acre for burial. He moved, trying to ease the cramp in his legs and thighs. How many had been killed now? Seven? Yes, seven. These two unfortunates, and then there was Edith and Hilda, slain while leaving their cottage, and Elwood the blacksmith’s son, cut down as he trotted out a horse for his father to inspect, Gwatkin the carter and Theobald the fuller. Father Thomas was distracted by the glittering sanctuary lamp. He stared into the darkness, glanced up at the tortured face of Christ on the cross then back at the pyx hanging on its thick silver chain above the high altar. Was all this the truth? he wondered. Did Christ die and rise again? Did the appearance of bread house the resurrected body of Christ? He adjusted the purple stole around his neck and shifted his bonyknees on the hard, cold paving stones. He gazed fearfully around. Blackness! Silence, except for the scurry of mice in shadowy corners. A freezing cold night! Father Thomas thought of his warm cot bed and the diced stewed meat bubbling in that heavy cauldron above the hearth fire, hot and spicy. He shook his head, grasped the ave beads wrapped round his fingers more tightly and intoned a verse from the psalm: