Candle Flame (20 page)

‘Of course they would,’ Athelstan agreed, ‘a story as old as the hills. Some poor seaman, his purse well lined with silver, goes into a tavern and attracts the wrong kind of attention. I suppose he was followed from Southwark to Queenhithe. An easy victim, his belly full of ale and his purse full of coins.’ Athelstan turned back to the window. He was tempted to leave the identity of the spy as that Hainaulter, but that would be wrong. The sailor had a berth on his own ship, which was ready to sail on the next tide, yet the document Thibault seized claimed the spy would be residing at The Candle-Flame on 16 February when the Hainaulter and his ship would be long gone. Athelstan ran a finger round his lips. And what did Mooncalf, Mistress Martha and William Foulkes have so much in common? He recalled meeting the two lovebirds in the refectory the morning after the murders. He was sure he had noticed something amiss.

‘Brother?’ Cranston called. The friar walked back to his seat.

‘You are sure of that?’ Athelstan asked the maid. He hid a spasm of excitement. All these mysteries were perhaps not so tangled; matters were drifting apart. Perhaps he could find a path through them.

‘Sure of what, Brother?’

‘The Hainaulter, Ruat?’

‘Of course I am. I went up into the gallery to meet Sir Robert. I’d told Master Thorne I had a message for him. When I came down the taverner asked me if I wanted refreshment.’ She glanced swiftly at her mistress. ‘We have a good relationship with Master Thorne.’

‘You mean he sends you custom?’ Cranston asked.

‘You could say that. Anyway, I joined the drinking dirge. Of course, everyone was talking about the man we were mourning for.’

Athelstan sat, nodding his head. Did the sailor come to The Candle-Flame, he wondered, to meet someone? The friar mentally listed all those who had been at The Candle-Flame that day …

‘Sir John, Brother Athelstan, are we finished here?’

‘Yes, yes,’ Athelstan replied absent-mindedly. ‘We certainly are. I thank you.’

They left The Golden Oliphant, tramping back through the damp day. Athelstan, concerned about Pike and Watkin, insisted they visit the Bocardo prison to ensure all was as well as it could be. He also needed to question his two wayward parishioners on certain matters. They entered the grimy, dark heart of Southwark’s slums, making their way down arrow-thin runnels called Nosegay, across small enclosures known as Pillory Place or the Whipping Post. All along the way the makeshift stalls and booths set up in any available space offered a wide range of paltry goods and putrid food probably stolen from elsewhere in Southwark or beyond. The tenements, on either side, their wood and plaster walls held up by heavy wooden crutches, teetered close over their heads. Brothels and whorehouses of every kind did a flourishing business, offering services not to be found elsewhere in the city. Athelstan glimpsed the well fed and richly cloaked, the would-be customers of such establishments, slipping in and out of doorways. This part of Southwark was different from St Erconwald’s – that was a parish where everybody knew each other, but this was the world’s thoroughfare, where names were forged, no questions asked, and certainly no answers given. Everyone looked after their own. It was a place to pass through but not to stay. Wandering minstrels, chanteurs, troubadours, jesters and magicians offered entertainment. One group, the Brotherhood of the Bear, their faces plastered a thick white, their teeth deliberately blackened, had brought their tame bear to dance for pennies. Apparently the animal loved London ale; it had drunk too much and had promptly fallen asleep, a great huddle of slumbering fur almost blocking the lane. A dispute had broken out between the Brotherhood and a tinker selling powders and philtres. He was being accused of slipping a sleeping potion into the tankard the bear had drunk from, an allegation the tinker hotly disputed.

‘Where is the proof?’ the gap-toothed trader shrieked.

‘Such a potion leaves no trace!’ one of the Brotherhood screamed back.

Athelstan and Cranston passed on, dodging a high-backed execution cart painted a garish red and attended by three men dressed in devil’s masks. They had been clearing the gallows of the cadavers of the hanged who had been displayed and gibbeted; these now sprawled under a dirty canvas sheet, ready for the common burial pit. Such macabre squalor was swiftly swept aside by the delightful carolling of three altar boys from St Mary Overy who were escorting a funeral bier down to the church. Athelstan stopped and pulled back his hood to listen to the exquisite refrain, ‘
In paradisum te seraphi portent
– may the Seraphim carry you into paradise’. The boys’ faces were angelic, an impression heightened by the surplices which had miraculously escaped being stained by the grime and floating filth of the streets. The three boys led the funeral cortege down the alleyway. Merriment was caused by a St Anthony’s pig following a mourner who had given it something to eat; such generosity is never forgotten by a pig, and this one now resolutely pursued its benefactor. Athelstan studied the scene and recalled the sleeping bear, Ursula’s great sow and the lumbering mass of Pedro the Cruel being roused from its slumbers on the Palisade at The Candle-Flame. So lost in his thoughts was he that Cranston had to pull Athelstan aside as the window door above them was opened and the contents of a night jar tossed into the air.

Eventually they reached the lane stretching down to the dark, sinister mass of the black-stoned Bocardo prison, with iron bars over its arrow-thin windows and a massive reinforced main door. On either side of the entrance rose a two-branched gibbet. From each arm dangled a corpse sheeted in tarred black cloth. Deliberately beneath the dangling corpse stood the stocks with a prisoner held fast, a crude placard slung around their necks proclaiming their offence. The broad steps sweeping up to the main door were guarded by mail-shirted turnkeys armed with morning stars. Cranston showed his warrants. The two guards didn’t move swift enough, so the coroner drew his sword and, fiddling with his cloak, let his badge of office boasting the royal arms be clearly seen.

‘I will ask you again,’ he growled. ‘If you try to dilly-dally I am off to the Guildhall, where I will swear out warrants for your arrest on charges of treason. So open that door and get me Blanchard or—’

The door hastily swung open. Athelstan stepped into what Cranston called ‘the black heart of the darkest hell’. A stark, whitewashed chamber stood to the right – the keeper’s room, where he kept a faithful record in his
Book of Crimes
. The room opposite was a cell sealed by a thick, iron-studded door. Cranston whispered how freshly arrived prisoners were detained there to be stripped and searched.

‘And worse,’ Cranston murmured, ‘if you are pretty.’ Both chambers flanked a long, murky tunnel which ran steeply down into the gloomy bowels of the prison. The air was rancid with foul smells blown up from the ‘pits’, as the dungeons were called. A man dressed in a white gown came out of the keeper’s room. He just stood on the threshold, hands hanging by his side. For a few heartbeats Cranston ignored him as if fascinated with something further down the passageway. At last he turned.

‘Master Blanchard.’ Cranston threw his hands in the air. ‘What a pleasure …’ The keeper’s deep-set eyes in his furrowed face glowed with a suppressed rage. Athelstan recalled Cranston speaking of this official as a man who did more to shatter the king’s peace than any Cheapside cunning man, a prison official who had more than a close relationship with many of the leading gangs of the city, a corrupt servant of the Crown who, Cranston had publicly vowed, he’d watch being strangled at Tyburn. In turn Blanchard nurtured and nourished a deep resentment, even hatred for the coroner. A malignant soul, Athelstan considered, with his shaven pate, beaked nose, yellow-skinned face and sour, twisted mouth.

‘Sir John, Brother Athelstan, welcome to my kingdom.’

‘And welcome to mine, Blanchard.’ Cranston took a step closer. ‘I represent the king. I exercise royal power here. I will see what I want. I will go where I want. I will do what I want …’ He paused as a soul-wrenching scream rang along the cavernous passageway.

‘Richard Sparwell,’ Blanchard jeered, ‘heretic, Lollard, follower of Wycliffe, condemned to be burnt alive at noon at Smithfield. The sheriff’s men will be arriving soon.’

‘Why the scream?’ Athelstan asked. ‘Is he being tortured?’

‘Oh, no, no, no,’ Blanchard lisped mockingly. ‘We wouldn’t do that here, would we, Sir John? Richard Sparwell mourns because he is going to die alone, bereft of any spiritual con-solation. No priest would tolerate being seen with a convicted Lollard. Now, Sir John, it is truly lovely to see you.’ Blanchard forced a smile. ‘I am sure you are here to visit Pike the ditcher and Watkin the dung collector, two birds being primed to have their necks twisted at the Crown’s earliest convenience.’

‘After their trial,’ Cranston snapped, ‘and they have yet to be convicted. I want to see them now.’ Blanchard shrugged and, taking a set of keys from a hook on the wall, led them down into what he called his ‘underworld’. Athelstan blessed himself. He felt as if he was walking through a truly wicked place; a malignant evil hung here, nourished by the breath of crushed spirits, tortured souls and torn bodies. The atmosphere seemed to seep from the very stones. The Bocardo’s deep, perpetual night of murk and gloom were lit by evil-smelling tallow candles and fiercely burning cressets, their flames leaping like demons in the sharp draught. The Bocardo was not far from the river and the prison was soaked in a constantly dripping, foul-smelling dampness. Rats and other vermin criss-crossed the ground in front of them. Lice and other filth crackled under their feet. Hard-rending shouts and cries echoed eerily like the mourning of some lost ghost. Now and again they would pass through open chambers where the turnkeys squatted and lounged around barrel tables, or busied themselves at the moveable grills, cooking food which looked as disgusting as it smelt: fat wedges of pork roasted in skillets bubbling with dirty oil. Other open chambers were reserved for the interrogation of prisoners, heavy with chains. Blanchard pointed out the Lollard Richard Sparwell; the convicted heretic sat chained in a hand barrow being fed sips of water from a bucket. The prisoner would gulp then stretch out his hands for more. He jolted around as Cranston and Athelstan entered, peering through the gloom.

‘A friar!’ he shouted. ‘Father, help me, some consolation.’ Athelstan stared pityingly at the bruised, dirty face of the prisoner, his hair and his beard thick with greasy dirt and dried blood, eyes frenetic with the fear of death. ‘Please,’ the prisoner whispered hoarsely. ‘For the love of God, to burn is hideous, but to die uncomforted is even worse.’

‘You have been judged a heretic.’ Athelstan hated his own reply even as the words slipped from his lips. ‘What need do you have for the rites of Holy Mother Church?’

‘I am not asking for them.’ Sparwell jerked back in the barrow as Blanchard struck him full in the face.

‘Do that again …’ Cranston warned, lifting his sword. ‘Come, Brother.’

‘I shall return,’ Athelstan called. ‘I promise you.’ Blanchard led them deeper into the darkness, the foul vapours thickening, the squeak and scamper of rodents constant. Athelstan stopped and smiled as he heard a hymn, the one practised in his parish, being chanted by two deep carrying voices, ‘
Christus factus obediens usque ad mortem, mortem autem crucis
– Christ was obedient unto death, even death on the cross.’ Watkin and Pike!

‘They have been singing since their arrival,’ Blanchard grumbled.

‘And I want them singing on their release,’ Athelstan retorted. The keeper stopped at a great wedge of a door. He unlocked this and beckoned Cranston and Athelstan inside; the cell was a filthy box, the mush of straw on the floor ankle-deep. Cranston demanded candles be brought. Athelstan approached the two men, weighted in clattering gyves, sitting on a rotting sack mattress which served as a bed.

‘Father?’ One of the figures half-rose in a jangle of chains.

‘Pike, Watkin. It’s good to see you, though not here. I am glad you are in fine voice.’

‘Father, we expected you.’ Athelstan took the stool Blanchard fetched, indicating that the two prisoners remain seated on the bed. The keeper also brought in candles and a cresset torch which provided meagre light. The two prisoners were garbed only in their tunics and, as the flames strengthened, Athelstan saw the bruises on the two men’s faces and along their arms. Their legs and feet were caked with prison dirt.

‘Give Master Blanchard some coins.’ Athelstan spoke over his shoulder to Cranston. ‘Once we go, these prisoners must have rushlights, good food and strong ale: their possessions must be returned, bruises and cuts tended to, their persons kept safe. If not, I will go to Westminster and go down on my knees before the king. His Grace Richard of Bordeaux once swore that he would grant any request of mine. In the meantime,’ Athelstan continued evenly, ‘you and I will be alone with these men. Master Blanchard will step outside and be busy on what I ask or, as God lives, by vespers he will be in a worse state than these.’ Athelstan’s soft but menacing tone even alarmed Sir John. He bundled Blanchard out of the cell, spitting out promises that this little friar was as good as his word. The coroner came back, slamming the door shut and standing behind Athelstan.

‘Very well,’ the friar began, ‘Pike, Watkin, let us begin. First, your families are well but fearful. Secondly, Sir John and I will do what we can, though at the moment that will not be much.’ Athelstan paused as a fearful cry rang through the prison.

‘Sparwell,’ Watkin grunted. ‘The poor bastard is for the fire.’

‘And poor Watkin,’ Athelstan countered, ‘is being prepared for the noose. Now look, we do not want to know the secrets of the Upright Men, but I do require certain information and I do not want to perform a May Day dance to learn it. Do you understand?’ Both men gave their agreement. ‘The night you visited The Candle-Flame with the likes of Cecily, you were hunting Marsen, weren’t you?’

‘Yes. We wanted to spy out both him and his escort.’