Paul Doherty: The Mysterium

A cold wind swept the Thames. The river, a broad ribbon of inky blackness lit here and there by the glow of lamp or candlelight, surged powerfully between its banks. The late winter rains had lashed the King’s great city of London, drenching the thatched roofs of the poor and cascading down the dark red tiles of the stately Cheapside mansions. The year was turning. Spring was easing its way into the ice-bound countryside beyond the Tower. Soon the harsh rigour of Lent would be imposed, fasting, sackcloth and penance. The shriving pews of London churches would become busy. Those seeking absolution would creep to the cross hoisted high on the rood screen to confess their sins: pride, avarice, greed, lust and, above all, murder.

The chroniclers, sitting in the scriptoria of their monasteries and abbeys, cowls pushed over shaven sculls, mittened, ink-stained fingers fluttering over plates of fiery coal, were strident in their judgement. Murder had made London its haunt. The Beast of the Apocalypse, begotten by Cain, prowled the sordid, spindle-thin alleys of the city. Murder lurked in the runnels of Cheapside and flittered like some darting shadow along the corridors of palaces, across the galleries of stately mansions and even through the paved cloister walks of their own houses. With the horned features of a babewyn or a gargoyle, it seemed to strike, strike and strike again. It battened fat, waxed strong on other sins, some fresh and bloody like hunks of meat sliced by a hunter: power, lust, greed, revenge, hatred or passions freed by too much ale or wine. It also nourished itself on ancient sins supposedly long forgotten, the roots of which had dug deep like weeds in a graveyard, stretching down to break through the coffin wood or the linen shroud to draw a morbid strength and vigour from the ill-named dead. The chroniclers listed such horrid deeds, as did the coroners’ rolls at the Guildhall with their litany of ‘death other than their natural death’. Murder erupted from the dark on Fleet Street, on the highway through Holborn, outside the gates of the Temple, in the shadow of Aldgate and Cripplegate, within bowshot of the Tower and on the approaches to London Bridge.

On 6 March, the year of Our Lord 1304, the thirty-second year of King Edward I, the eve of the Feast of St Perpetua and Felicitas, who died as martyrs in the Roman arena, murder unfolded its standard on the banks of the Thames at Queenshithe close to the small Chapel of the Oak. Its victim, Ignacio Engleat, lying bound and gagged against the slime-covered wall of an alleyway, faced the soul-cutting terror of his own swift-approaching violent death. He stared in terror at the dark shape busy about him, all hooded and visored, humming a Goliard song about a scholar walking a flower-fringed lane to meet his love-sweet. Ignacio wanted to live, but if he was to die, he must be shriven, confess his many sins, his cloying lusts, his deep thirst for the glee cup of the richest Bordeaux. He had sinned that very evening, visiting the whorehouse the Comfort of Bathsheba, doing business with the strumpet-mongers and lying with a maid soft and tender, her skin smooth as silk and white as milk, hair as red as the sun, lips sweeter than the honeycomb. Afterwards he’d gone downstairs to the tavern next door, the Halls of Purgatory, where he’d demanded and drunk a goblet of the best claret. He had fallen asleep and woken here in this freezing, filthy antechamber of hell. He could not remember how. He must have been drugged with some malignant potion mingled with his wine.

Ignacio watched in horror: that shifting shape, breathing heavily, was dragging a corpse towards him, the decaying cadaver of a river pirate hanged and left on the banks of the Thames for three turns of the tide. A corpse washed by the river but still slimed with corruption. In those few heartbeats after he had woken, the moon had bathed the horrid sight in its ghostly light — the scaffold arm, the dangling corpse, the flitting shape of his attacker humming that damnable song as he’d crept across and cut the corpse down — and he had realised immediately what was about to happen. After all, he was a clericus peritus lege — a clerk skilled in the law. Hadn’t he sat in Westminster Hall as scribe to the Court of King’s Bench? Hadn’t he been out on assize in the shires? Hadn’t he been sworn as a commissioner of oyer and terminer, ‘to hear and decide’? Wasn’t he an experienced jurist, close friend and servant of Chief Justice Walter Evesham, appointed directly by the King? So why was he here? Why was he going to be punished in such a heinous way? He strained against the gag and bonds that held him tight. He should have known. He should have read the signs when Justice Evesham fell like Lucifer, never to rise again. All this for what? Justice Evesham now sheltered in the Abbey of Syon on Thames, a recluse, a sanctuary seeker from the law he had once exercised so imperiously. And he, Ignacio Engleat, Evesham’s clerk, was bound and gagged like a malefactor in this fetid runnel.

Ignacio blinked away the rain and sweat running down his balding brow. The shadowy assassin hovered over him. Ignacio tried to plead, but it was to no avail. He was seized and stretched out along the ground, the stinking corpse of the river pirate placed on top of him. He turned his head from the putrid stench, that horrid face, eyes all pecked by the gulls, the scabby skin hanging in shreds, the flesh nothing but the seeping softness of corruption. He tried to beg, but the assassin, still humming, tightened the cords around him. Ignacio, terror-stricken, tried to move, but both he and the dead pirate, lashed to him, his rottenness now clinging to him like a cloak, were dragged across the rutted trackway, its sharp cobbles cutting his flesh.

The assassin paused. Ignacio blinked and screamed silently as his assailant dug the tip of the knife into his forehead, etching a symbol. Now, at the moment of death, Ignacio abruptly recalled the morbid memories of his own past. The Angel of Death had singled him out. Justice had recalled ancient sins. The Mysterium! Hadn’t he marked his victims in such a way? Hadn’t he, Ignacio Engleat, Evesham’s personal clerk and scribe, listed the macabre details of such ghastly killings? But the Mysterium was gone, surely? Boniface Ippegrave had been exposed and disgraced by no less a person than Walter Evesham. Of course, like all Evesham had done, that was a lie. Now the ghost of Boniface Ippegrave had returned to carry out vengeance. Ignacio whimpered. He tried to recall the opening verse of Psalm 50, but all he could remember as, lashed to that corpse, he was pulled like a sledge across the cobbles were the words of scripture: ‘Israel prepare to meet your God.’ That was Ignacio Engleat’s last conscious thought as he and his dead companion were tipped over the edge of the quayside into the freezing black river.

A few hours later, Abbot Serlo of Syon on Thames finished his dawn Mass in honour of St Perpetua and Felicitas in the chantry chapel of St Patrick. He thanked the lay brother who’d acted as server, then took off the red robes of the liturgy for that feast. As he did so, his keen blue eyes made out St Patrick’s prayer inscribed in gold on a black panel against the chantry wall to the right of the altar. ‘I bind unto myself this day, the strong name of the Trinity by invocation of the same, Three in One and One in Three. From the snares of demons, from the sedition of vice and any man who plots against me near and far. .’

Abbot Serlo scratched his tonsure and wondered if that was a warning. As if in answer, Brother Cuthbert, brown robe fluttering, hobbled into the chapel as fast as his aching limbs would let him, hard sandals rapping the paved floor.