Paul Doherty - House of the Red Slayer

Sir Gerard’s mind slipped eagerly back into the past. He remembered the intense heat, the sunlight dancing off sword and dagger points, the roar of battle, the blood which pumped like a thousand fountains as men fell screaming from horrible wounds in head, body or thigh. Slowly he and his companions had edged up the steps, hacking their way through flesh until they reached a point above the main gate. Now who had it been? Of course! As always, Bartholomew. He’d jumped down, engaging in combat with a huge Mameluke. Bartholomew had moved with the grace of a dancer, his sword a silver hissing snake. One false feint to the groin, then up and round in a semi-arc to slice the enemy between helmet and hauberk. Ralph had followed. He had been an honourable knight then.

The great bar to the gate was lifted and the Caliph’s men had poured into the city. What a bloodletting! No quarter was asked and none was given. The narrow, hot streets dinned with the silver bray of trumpets and the shrieks of dying men and women. At least the knights had not been party to the massacre; they had achieved their task and now looked for suitable reward. They eventually found themselves in a huge square where a white marble fountain played in the centre. Nearby stood the banker’s empty house. Oh, the treasure they had found there! Adam had run knee-deep in silver ducats and jewelled goblets full of pearls!

Mowbray suddenly shook himself free from his memories. He thought he’d heard a sound, there towards the end of the parapet at the top of the steps. No, he concluded, it was only the wind. He went back to his memories. Strange, Mowbray pondered, that Adam had not come to see them this Christmas. Perhaps he was too frightened. Had the dead Sir Ralph and the now wealthy burgess Adam known something he did not? What had happened three years ago to frighten the Constable so much?

‘We are all frightened,’ Mowbray whispered to himself. This fear had changed them all. That’s what evil did to you, he thought, it corroded the will, rotted the soul, and fouled the chambers and passageways of the mind. What had been done in Outremer so many years ago had been evil! Bartholomew had been their leader. Half the treasure was rightfully his, and he had trusted them — a terrible mistake. Betrayal! Treachery! The words shrieked like tormented ghosts in the dark recesses of Mowbray’s soul. Ralph had planned it but they had all been party to his evil. Mowbray stirred against the cold. Oh, he had confessed his sins, walked barefoot to the shrine of St James at Compostela and both he and Fitzormonde had become hospitallers to make reparation. He stared out into the darkness.

‘Oh, sweet Christ!’ he murmured. ‘Wasn’t that enough?’ The hospitaller felt the black demons of Hell closing in around him. What terrors did the pit hold for traitors? To be basted with pitch in a dark pen full of brimstone where adders would suck at his eyes and snakes curl round his lying tongue! What could he do to break free of such phantasms? Tell Cranston? No! Perhaps Brother Athelstan? Mowbray remembered the dark eyes and closed face of the Dominican monk. Mowbray had met such men before; some of his commanders in the knights hospitaller had the same gift as Athelstan of sensing every thought. The friar knew there was something wrong, something evil and rotten, behind Sir Ralph’s death.

Mowbray jumped as a night bird shrieked beyond the Tower walls. A dog howled in protest. Was it a dog? he wondered. Or one of Satan’s scouts calling up the legions of the damned from the abyss of Hell? A bell clanged. Mowbray moaned in fear, caught now in his own fancies. The bell boomed as though it came from the bowels of the earth. He cursed and calmed himself.

The bell was the tocsin in the Tower! Mowbray’s hand fell to his sword hilt as he realised that great brass tongue only tolled when the Tower was under attack. He gripped the hilt of his sword tightly. Perhaps he had been wrong? Perhaps Sir Ralph’s death had been the work of rebels and now they were back? He ran along the gravel-strewn parapet. He wanted to fight. He wanted to kill, give vent to the fury boiling within him. Suddenly he stumbled. His arms flailed out like the wings of a bird, black against the sky, then he tipped and fell, his mind still gripped by delirium. He was a boy again, leaping from a rock into one of the sweet rivers of Yorkshire. He was the brave young knight storming the parapet of Alexandria, crying out for the rest to join him. Then, darkness.

Mowbray’s body crashed against the earth, his brains spattering as the sharp, icy cobbles crushed his skull. His body twitched then lay still, even as the dying hand edged towards the wallet containing a yellow piece of parchment depicting a crudely etched ship with dark crosses drawn in each corner.

Athelstan stood outside his church and stared in pleasant disbelief at the blue-washed sky and the early morning sun as its rays danced and shimmered over the snow-covered roofs of his parish. The friar took a deep breath and sighed. He had slept well, woken early, said Office, celebrated Mass, broken fast and then swept both his house and Philomel’s stable. He had been to the cemetery. The lepers had gone and none of the graves had been disturbed. Athelstan felt pleased, even more so as the great frost had been broken by this sudden bright snap as if Christ himself wanted the weather to improve for his great feast day. He looked over his shoulder and smiled at Cecily the courtesan as she swept the porch of the church. She simpered back before looking, sloe-eyed, towards a dreamy-faced Huddle, now sketching in charcoal the outlines of one of his vigorous paintings on the wall of the nave.

‘Keep your mind on the task in hand, Cecily,’ Athelstan murmured. He stretched, turning his face up to the sun. ‘Praise to thee, Lord,’ he muttered, ‘for Brother Day. Praise to thee, Lord,’ he continued St Francis of Assisi’s Canticle of the Sun, ‘for our sister, Mother Earth.’ Athelstan sniffed and wrinkled his nose. ‘Even though,’ he whispered, ‘in Southwark she smells of sour vegetables and putrid refuse!’ He suddenly remembered other beautiful mornings at his father’s farm in Sussex and the sun seemed to lose some of its brightness.

‘You are happy, Father?’

Athelstan grinned at Benedicta. ‘Yes, I am. You left Mass early?’ he queried.

‘I had to, Father, have you forgotten?’

Athelstan remembered the date and winced. No, he hadn’t forgotten Simon the carpenter, one of his more errant parishioners, a florid-faced, thickset man with an evil temper and a long Welsh dagger. Two weeks ago Simon had raped a girl whilst carousing in Old Fish Street then compounded his crime by brutally beating her. He had been tried for his life at the Guildhall and tomorrow would hang. Simon had neither family nor friends and three days ago the parish council had begged Athelstan and Benedicta to visit the unfortunate. The friar had even made a vain plea to Cranston to have the sentence commuted but the coroner had sorrowfully shaken his head.

‘Brother,’ he had replied, ‘I can do very little, even if I wanted to. The girl was only twelve and she’ll never walk again. The fellow has to die.’

Athelstan stared up at the sky. ‘God have mercy on Simon,’ he whispered. ‘And God help his poor victim!’

‘What was that, Father?’

‘Nothing, Benedicta, nothing.’ Athelstan turned to go back into his church just as a young pursuivant turned the corner of the alley, slipping and sliding on the ice as he bellowed the friar’s name. Athelstan groaned. ‘What is it, man?’ As if he didn’t know already.

‘Sir John Cranston awaits you, Father, at the Golden Lamb tavern near the Guildhall. Father, he says it is urgent. You must go there now!’