Candle Flame (23 page)

‘And the traitor?’

‘We know very little. He recently appeared in the shriving chair at St Mary-le-Bow. He was protected by the mercy screen. Let me hasten to add he made no confession, just gave Sparwell’s name, his trade and where he lived, then added that there would be more.’

‘Any indication of his identity?’ Athelstan glanced over Tuddenham’s shoulder; the smoke was thinning, the crowd clearing. He gestured for Tuddenham to follow him away from the throng now intent on slaking their thirst in the Dark Parlour. They walked over to a small enclosure shrouded by bushes.

‘We know nothing,’ Tuddenham replied. ‘The priest reported the spy had a coarse voice, how he’d caught the odour of the farmyard. Whoever he was, his information proved correct.’

‘And the Papal Inquisitor, Brother Marcel?’

‘What of him?’

‘He has talked to you?’

‘He knows of us. Of course, he presented his credentials to the bishop’s curia but apart from that little else. You know how it is, Brother: no bishop likes interference in his own diocese, whilst there are deep differences between religious and secular clergy.’ Athelstan nodded in agreement: papal and diocesan, foreign and domestic, religious and secular, the different rivalries between clerics were infamous.

‘You agree?’ Tuddenham asked.

‘I recall that quotation from the Book of Proverbs: “Brothers united are as a fortress.” It’s certainly doesn’t apply to us priests, does it? So you have had little to do with our visitor from the Holy Father?’

‘No. He has left us truly alone.’ Tuddenham stretched out a hand. ‘Athelstan, the day is going and so must I. Farewell.’

Athelstan clasped his hand. ‘What will you do?’

‘Seek a fresh benefice. Who knows?’ Tuddenham smiled. ‘I might even go to Blackfriars and become a Dominican.’

Athelstan laughed and watched Tuddenham stride away.

The friar remained where he was. He glimpsed Cranston leading the sheriff’s men into the tavern, bellowing at the top of his voice about the virtues of Thorne’s ale. Athelstan silently sketched a blessing in the coroner’s direction. Cranston would be deeply disturbed by Sparwell’s horrid death. The coroner had a good heart and he would hide his true feelings behind his usual exuberant bonhomie. Athelstan continued to wait. Now calm and composed he recited the ‘De Profundis’ and other prayers for the dead. Athelstan’s mind drifted back to the execution and the glimpses which had caught his eye and quickened his curiosity. He left the shelter and made his way back over the Palisade. Twilight time, the hour of the bat. The light drizzle had begun again. The execution ground was empty. The crowd had dispersed. All that remained of the burning was a mound of smouldering grey-white ash blown about by the breeze and an occasional spark breaking free to rise and vanish in the air. Athelstan murmured a prayer and stared around; there was no one. Strange, he thought, that despite the clamour and the busyness of so many to see a man burn, once he had people became highly fearful of the very place they had fought so hard to occupy only a short while beforehand. Were they frightened of his vengeful ghost or the powerful spirits such a violent death summoned into the affairs of men?

Athelstan, whispering the words of a psalm, walked towards the Barbican. He’d noticed earlier how the door hung off its latch. The fire had certainly ravaged that thick wedge of oak, blackening the wood, searing it deep with ash-filled gouges. The door hung drunkenly on its remaining heavy hinges. Athelstan found it difficult to push back but eventually he did and stepped into the lower chamber. The inside of the Barbican had been truly devastated by the fire. Nothing more than a stone cell, all the woodwork on both stories had simply disintegrated, with the occasional piece left hanging. ‘I was almost murdered here,’ Athelstan whispered to himself. ‘And God knows what evidence that inferno destroyed.’ Thorne had already begun to clear away the rubbish. Athelstan peered around; the light was murky but he noticed the deep, black stain on the far wall where refuse was still piled. The place, Athelstan reasoned, where the fire had probably started. He carefully made his way across and, taking a stick, began to sift amongst the rubbish. Athelstan paused at the clear stench of oil. He crouched, poked again and caught the same odour. He dropped the stick in surprise, rubbing his hands together to clear the dust. ‘I wonder,’ he declared. ‘I truly do but let us wait and see.’ A sound from outside alerted him. He rose and quietly turned to stand in the shadow of the main doorway. He looked out and, despite the deepening twilight, glimpsed two people, a man and a woman, both cloaked against the cold, digging and scraping around the execution stake. They worked feverishly and, once they were finished, hurried off into the darkness. Athelstan watched them go and followed them, pausing now and again so that he entered the tavern by himself.

Cranston was in the Dark Parlour roistering with the sheriff’s men, regaling them with stories about his military service in France. Athelstan raised a hand in greeting and moved around the tavern, noting where everything was. Servants bustled by, now used to his presence and constant curiosity. Athelstan entered the spacious, cobbled tavern yard with its different buildings: smithy, stables, storerooms and wash house. As he passed the latter, a door was flung open and a woman bustled out with a tub of dirty water, which she tipped on to the cobbles.

‘Good evening, Father,’ she called out. ‘So many guests, so much to wash.’ She made to go back. ‘Oh, by the way, Father, are all you monks the same?’

‘I beg your pardon, mistress, but I am a friar.’

‘Just like the other one,’ the woman replied.

‘Brother Marcel?’

‘Yes, that’s him. Ever so clean, he is. Fresh robes every day and of the purest wool.’ She gestured at Athelstan’s dirt-stained robe. ‘Not like yours. But you see, pure wool is difficult to wash. Not that I am complaining …’ And the woman promptly disappeared back into the wash house. Athelstan was about to walk on when he remembered his conversation with the maid at The Golden Oliphant. He hastened back into the Dark Parlour, nodding at Roger and Marcel, who were closeted together in a window seat. At another table, Sir Robert Paston, Martha and Foulkes were deep in conversation. The friar tried to catch Cranston’s eye but failed. Sir John was now lecturing the sheriff’s men on the Black Prince’s campaign in Spain. Athelstan felt a touch on his arm. Eleanor, Thorne’s wife, beckoned at him pleadingly. Athelstan followed her out of the taproom into the small, well-furnished buttery, where her husband sat at the top of the table with Mooncalf beside him. Athelstan took a stool.

‘Master Thorne, mistress, what can I do? Why do you—?’

‘This.’ Thorne undid his wallet and placed six miniature caltrops on the table, very small but cruelly spiked barbs no bigger than polished pebbles. Athelstan picked one up and scrutinized it carefully. Once he had, he sent Mooncalf into the taproom to ask Sir John to join them urgently. He waited until the coroner swaggered in, face all red, lips smacking, in one hand a piece of capon pie, in the other a blackjack of ale. Cranston sat at the far end of the table toasting them all until he glimpsed the caltrops.

‘Satan’s tits,’ he breathed, putting down both food and drink. ‘It’s a long time since I’ve clapped eyes on such vicious instruments. Where did you find them?’

‘Let me explain.’ Eleanor Thorne, despite all her pretty ways, was now cold and determined. ‘On the night of the murders, my husband left our bed.’

‘Why?’ Athelstan asked.

‘I …’

‘Simon.’ Eleanor indicated that she would answer for him. ‘Well, we were both concerned about the goings and comings in our tavern. Earlier in the evening Mooncalf had glimpsed someone slip out of the stables.’

‘A mere shadow,’ the ostler added. Athelstan studied Mooncalf’s pocked and shaven face, his rough voice and leather garb all splattered with mud. The friar had promised himself to have close words with Mooncalf, though not now – that would have to wait.

‘A mere shadow?’ Athelstan repeated.

‘Mooncalf informed me.’ Thorne wiped his hands on a napkin and picked at the minced chicken on the platter before him. ‘I went down to the stableyard but I could not find anything wrong, yet you know how it is, Sir John. Like it was in the fields of Normandy when you can see or hear no enemy but you know they are close by. I was uneasy. I checked the horses but could discover nothing. After I retired, what with Marsen and his coven carousing and others moving about the tavern, I still remained agitated about the stables. I couldn’t rest.’ He waved a hand. ‘I went down again. I was away some time but I truly searched, yet all remained quiet. The horses were having their evening feed, saddles and harnesses were hung drying after the day’s rain. I found this close by.’ Thorne tossed across a pouch. Athelstan examined it, battered and empty, the ragged neck pulled tight by a filthy cord. ‘I wondered why it was lying there and who had dropped it. I continued my search but I eventually gave up. What with the hideous murders, the deaths here, I didn’t give it a second thought until this morning. I was preparing to send back Marsen and Mauclerc’s possessions to Master Thibault. I decided to clean the harnesses of their horses. I brought the saddles down from their rests and discovered these caltrops embedded deep in the woollen underbelly of both Marsen and Mauclerc’s saddles.’

‘I have seen the likes before,’ Athelstan spoke up.

‘An evil trick,’ Cranston declared. ‘The saddle is thrown over the horse’s back, the girths and stirrups are fastened. These sharp pebbles might graze the horse and cause some petty discomfort …’

‘But when the rider mounts,’ Athelstan picked up where Sir John had left off, ‘his full weight in the saddle drives the spikes down into the horse, which will rear in agony, certainly throwing its rider.’ Athelstan rolled a spiked ball from one hand to the other. It was sharp to the touch. He recalled the mysterious attack on Lascelles the morning after the murders. ‘I wonder,’ he murmured, ‘if these belong to our good friend, Beowulf, a plot which never came to fruition? Can you imagine …’ He broke off. ‘Never mind, it certainly proves one thing.’

‘Which is?’ Thorne asked anxiously.

‘Nothing for the moment, Mine Host, but I have a question for you. On the afternoon before the murders took place, a Hainault sailor Ruat came into The Candle-Flame. He claimed to have visited a shrine much loved by his fellow countrymen, the Virgin of the Narrow Seas at St Mary Overy. Do you remember him?’

‘Oh, yes,’ Thorne replied. ‘I remember him well, replete with good humour and even better silver. He was about to join his ship at Queenhithe. He drank and drank again, then left.’

‘Did anyone accost him here?’

‘No, the company was jovial.’

‘And what was he talking about?’

Thorne pulled a face. ‘Like all sailors, he was looking forward to going home. He seemed very pleased with himself, like a gambler who has won at hazard or a merchant who has made a good profit from his trade.’

‘Or a man,’ Athelstan asked, ‘who has just been paid for carrying out a task?’

‘Certainly, Brother; as I said, he had a heavy purse. I suspect he had just acquired it because he talked about his family and what he would like to buy them, but that would have to wait until he reached home because his ship was leaving on the evening tide.’

‘Can you remember anyone leaving with him at the same time?’

‘No.’

‘Did he meet anyone here, anyone in particular?’

‘Brother, I assure you he did not. He came in here, ate and drank, grew very jovial then left.’

‘As must we.’ Athelstan caught at Sir John’s sleeve. ‘Darkness is falling and our day’s work is not yet done …’

‘What were you going to say in there?’ Cranston asked once they were free of the tavern, striding through the wet evening.

‘Very simple, Sir John. Thorne was correct,’ Athelstan declared. ‘Someone stole into those stables that evening. They placed those spikes into the woollen flock beneath the saddles – mere pebbles, very difficult to detect. I suspect it was Beowulf. Can you imagine what would have happened the following morning? Marsen and Mauclerc swinging themselves into the saddle, their horses rearing violently, throwing their riders, who could be injured, perhaps even killed, and, just to make sure, somewhere close by is Beowulf with his crossbow all primed. Our two tax collectors would be an easy target. Two of Thibault’s creatures humiliated then killed. Which means,’ Athelstan paused and stared up at the night sky, ‘if Beowulf was already planning his murders, those which took place at the Barbican were, despite that note, not his work. Beowulf was waiting for the morning. Of course Mauclerc and Marsen were killed, but Beowulf wouldn’t let an opportunity slip. Lascelles appeared and Beowulf struck.’

‘I agree, little friar. But who is this mysterious assassin?’

‘I don’t know. Our killer may have already been murdered or indeed one of those slain might have been an accomplice who had to be disposed of. But, I am making progress, Sir John. God help me, but I am. Now, let’s visit the nearby quayside where Sir Robert Paston’s cog,
The Five Wounds,
lies berthed in splendid isolation.’

The Southwark quayside was deserted when they reached it. The long wharf shone in the light of bonfires torched to burn the day’s rubbish as well as provide warmth for the beggars and ragamuffins who haunted that place. These stood, dark shapes in their tattered clothes, warming themselves or trying to roast scraps of meat collected earlier in the day. Athelstan’s stomach lurched at the smell, which brought back memories of poor Sparwell’s burning.
The Five Wounds
was also illuminated by these fires as well as by the torches fixed either side of the gangplank, guarded by three fully armed men. The ship itself was handsome; it’s raised prow and stern brilliantly painted, the two masts, fore and main, gilded brightly amidst all the cordage and reefed-white canvas sails. There was a cabin under the stern and the deep-bellied hold meant the cog was both a fighting ship and a merchantman. Cranston strode straight towards the gangplank and, when one of the guards tried to block his path, the coroner drew his sword whilst pulling down the rim of his heavy cloak to display his chain of office.