Paul Doherty - House of the Red Slayer

Watkin drew himself up to his full height. His greasy brow was furrowed under a shock of bright red hair, receding fast to leave a bushy fringe. His pale blue eyes, which seemed to fight each other for space next to a bulbous nose, glared around at his colleagues.

‘The cemetery has been looted!’ he blurted out.

Athelstan groaned and lowered his head.

‘What do you mean?’ shouted Ranulf the rat-catcher, his face sharp and pointed under a black, tarry hood.

‘In the last few days,’ Watkin announced, ‘corpses have been exhumed!’

Consternation broke out. Athelstan rose and clapped his hands for silence, and kept doing so until the clamour ceased. ‘You know,’ he began, ‘how our cemetery of St Erconwald’s is often used for the burial of corpses of strangers — beggars on whom no claim is made. No grave of any parishioner’s relative has been disturbed.’ He breathed deeply. ‘Nevertheless, Watkin is correct. Three graves have been robbed of their bodies. Each had been freshly interred. A young beggar woman, a Brabantine mercenary found dead after a tavern brawl, and an old man seen begging outside the hospital of St Thomas, who was found in the courtyard of the Tabard Inn, frozen dead.’ Athelstan licked his lips. ‘The ground is hard,’ he continued. ‘Watkin knows how difficult it is to dig with mattock and hoe to furnish a grave deep enough, so the very shallowness of the graves has assisted these blasphemous robbers.’

‘A guard should be placed,’ Pike the ditcher called out.

‘Will you do it?’ Benedicta asked softly. ‘Will you spend all night in the cemetery, Pike, and wait for the grave robbers?’ Her dark eyes took in the rest of the council. ‘Who will stand guard? And who knows,’ she continued, ‘if the robberies are committed at night? Perhaps they take place in the afternoon or eventide.’

Athelstan glanced at her gratefully. ‘I could watch,’ he interrupted. ‘Indeed, I have done so when I — er…’ he faltered.

‘When you study the stars, Brother,’ Ursula the pigwoman broke in, provoking a soft chorus of laughter for all the parishioners knew of their priest’s strange occupation.

Huddle the painter stirred himself. ‘You could ask Sir John Cranston to help us. Perhaps he could send soldiers to guard the graves?’

Athelstan shook his head. ‘My Lord Coroner,’ he replied, ‘has no authority to order the King’s soldiers hither and thither.’

‘What about the beadles?’ Watkin’s wife bellowed. ‘What about the ward watch?’

Yes, what about them? Athelstan bleakly thought. The alderman and officials of the ward scarcely bothered about St Erconwald’s, still less about its cemetery, and wouldn’t give a fig for the graves of the three unknowns being pillaged.

‘Who are they?’ Benedicta asked softly. ‘Why do they do it? What do they want?’

Her words created a pool of silence. All faces turned to their priest for an answer. This was the moment Athelstan feared. The cemetery was God’s Acre. When he had first come to the parish nine months ago he had been very strict about those who tried to set up market there or with the young boys who played games with the bones dug up by marauding dogs or pigs. ‘The cemetery,’ he had announced, ‘is God’s own land where the faithful wait for Christ to come again.’ Even then Athelstan had not given the full reason for his strictures; secretly he shared the Church’s fears of those who worshipped Satan, the Lord of the Crossroads and Master of the Gibbet, and often practised their black arts in cemeteries. Indeed, he had heard of a case in the parish of St Peter Cornhill where a black magician had used the blood drained from such corpses to raise demons and scorpions.

Athelstan coughed. How could he answer? Then the door was flung open and Cranston, his saviour, swept grandly into the church.

Sir John pulled back his cloak and tipped his beaver hat to the back of his head.

‘Come on, Brother!’ he bawled, winking at Benedicta. ‘We are needed at the Tower. Apparently Murder does not wait upon the weather.’

For once Athelstan was pleased by Cranston’s dramatic style of entry. The friar peered closely at him.

‘You have been at the claret, Sir John?’

Cranston tapped the side of his fleshy nose. ‘A little,’ he slurred.

‘What about the cemetery?’ Watkin wailed. ‘Sir John, our priest has to see to that!’

‘Sod off, you smelly little man!’

Watkin’s wife rose and looked balefully at Cranston.

‘My Lord Coroner, I shall be with you presently,’ Athelstan smoothly intervened. ‘Watkin, I shall attend to this business on my return. In the meantime, make sure that Bonaventura is fed and the torches doused. Cecily, you will put out food for the lepers?’

The girl stared vacuously and nodded.

‘Mind you,’ Athelstan muttered, ‘they tend to wander and look after themselves during the day.’

He smiled beatifically around his favourite group of parishioners and made a quick departure down the icy steps of the church and across to the priest’s house. He cut himself a slice of bread but spat it out as it tasted sour and stale. ‘I’ll eat on my journey,’ he murmured, and packed his saddlebags with vellum, pen cases and ink horns. Philomel, his old war horse, snickered and nudged him, a real nuisance as Athelstan tried to fasten the girths beneath the aged destrier’s ponderous belly.

‘You’re getting more like Cranston every day!’ Athelstan muttered.

He led Philomel back to the front of the church and ran up the porch steps. Cranston was leaning against the pillar, leering at Cecily whilst trying to keep Bonaventura from brushing against his leg. The coroner couldn’t stand cats ever since his campaigns in France when the French had catapulted their corpses into a small castle he was holding, in an attempt to spread contagious diseases. Bonaventura, however, adored the coroner. The cat seemed to know when he was in the vicinity and always put in an appearance.

Athelstan murmured a few words to Benedicta, smiled apologetically at Watkin and the rest; he collected his deep-hooded cloak from the sanctuary and returned just in the nick of time to prevent Cranston from toppling head over heels over Ursula’s fat-bellied sow. The coroner stormed out, glaring at Athelstan and daring him to laugh. Cranston mounted his horse, roaring oaths about pigs in church and how he would like nothing better than a succulent piece of roast pork. Athelstan swung his saddlebags across Philomel, mounted and, before Cranston could do further damage, led him away from the church into Fennel Alleyway.

‘Why the Tower, Sir John?’ he asked quickly, trying to divert the coroner’s rage.

‘In a while, monk!’ Cranston rasped back.

‘I’m a friar, not a monk,’ Athelstan muttered.

Cranston belched and took another swig from his wineskin. ‘What was going on back there?’ he asked.

‘A parish council meeting.’

‘No, I mean about the cemetery.’

Athelstan informed him and the coroner’s face grew serious.

‘Do you think it’s Satanists? The Black Lords of the graveyard?’ he whispered, reining his horse closer to Athelstan’s.

The friar grimaced. ‘It may well be.’

‘It must be!’ Cranston snapped back. ‘Who else would be interested in decaying corpses?’

The coroner steadied his horse as Philomel, conscious of the narrowing alleyway, tossed his head angrily at Cranston’s mount.

‘I’d like to root the lot out!’ the coroner slurred. ‘In my treatise on the governance of London… Two blue eyes glared at Athelstan, scrutinising the friar’s face for any trace of boredom as the coroner expounded on his favourite theme. ‘In my treatise,’ he continued, ‘anyone practising the black arts would suffer heavy fines for the first offence and death for the second.’ He shrugged. ‘But perhaps it’s just some petty nastiness.’