Paul Doherty: The Nightingale Gallery

Athelstan thought of Benedicta and knew what the novice master had meant.

'Oh, sweet Christ!' he murmured.

He rose and dusted down his robe. Bonaventure, his milk finished, padded across and stared up.

'Catholic or Catolic, Bonaventure?' Athelstan laughed at his feeble jest. 'Is Father Prior playing a joke on me?' he murmured. 'I am past my twenty-eighth summer and I go from pillar to post.' Perhaps his superiors were testing him, sending him from the rigours of the novitiate to the academic glories of Exeter Hall, then pulling him back to menial duties at Blackfriars and finally to work as the Lord Coroner's clerk and parish priest of St Erconwald.

The friar knelt, crossed himself, and began softly to recite a psalm when he heard a disturbance at the back of the church. He rose in alarm, thinking that perhaps the city authorities had sent retainers to take Godric. Even in the slums of Southwark, Athelstan realised he lived in turbulent times. Edward III was dead; his heir, Richard II, a mere boy. The powerful, noble hawks still had their way in most matters. Athelstan took a taper, lit it from the candle burning before the Madonna and hurried down the church, splashing through the puddles left by the violent rain storm a few days before. He opened the door, thrust his head out and smiled. The city guards, roused from their sleep, were now locked in fierce argument with Sir John Cranston who boomed as soon as he saw his clerk: 'For God's sake, Brother, tell these oafs who I am!' Cranston patted the neck of his huge horse and glared around. 'We have work to do, Brother, another death, murder in Cheapside! One of the great ones of the land. Come on, ignore these dolts!'

'They do not know you, Sir John,' Athelstan replied. 'You go round muffled in cloak and hood, worse than any monk.'

The coroner blew his great cheeks out, pulled back his hood and roared at his tormentors, 'I am Sir John Cranston, coroner in the city, and you, sirs, are disturbing the king's peace! Now back off!'

The men retreated like beaten mastiffs, their dark faces glowering with a mixture of anger and fear.

'Come on, Athelstan,' Cranston bellowed. He looked down at the friar's feet. 'And put that bloody cat away! I hate it.'

Bonaventure, however, seemed to regard Cranston as its long lost friend. The cat skipped friskily down the steps to sit beneath the coroner's horse, staring up at the big man affectionately as if he was the bearer of a pail of thick creamy milk or a platter of the tastiest fish. Cranston just turned his head away and spat.

'Leave Godric be,' Athelstan warned the city guards. 'You are not to enter my church.'

They nodded. Athelstan locked the door and went over to his own house next to the church. He stuffed his battered leather panniers with parchment, quills and ink, saddled Philomel and joined Sir John. The coroner was in good spirits, thoroughly enjoying his altercation with the city guard as he hated officialdom. He damned the city guards loudly, along with goldsmiths, priests and, looking slyly at Athelstan, Dominican monks who studied the stars. Athelstan ignored him, urging Philomel on.

'Come, Sir John. You said we had business.'

But Cranston was thoroughly roused by now. He shouted abuse once more at the guards, kicked his horse forward and drew noisily alongside Athelstan.

'I suppose you had no sleep last night, Brother? What with your damned stars, your bloody cat, your prayers and your Masses!'

'Ever heavenwards,' Athelstan quipped in reply. 'You, too, should look up at the sky and study the stars.'

'Why?' Cranston asked brusquely. 'Surely you do not believe in that nonsense about planets and heavenly bodies governing our lives? Even the church fathers condemn it.'

'In which case,' Athelstan answered, they condemn the star of Bethlehem!'

Sir John belched, grabbed the ever-present wineskin slung over his saddle horn, took a deep gulp and, raising one buttock, farted as loudly as he could. Athelstan decided to ignore Sir John's sentiments, verbal or otherwise. He knew the coroner to be at heart kindly and well intentioned.

'What business takes us to Cheapside?' he asked.

'Sir Thomas Springall,' Cranston replied. 'Or rather, the late Sir Thomas Springall, once a powerful merchant and goldsmith. Now he is as dead as that rat over there.' Cranston pointed to a pile of rubbish, a mixture of animal and human excrement, broken pots, and, lying on top, a mangy rat, its white and russet body swollen with corruption.

'So a goldsmith has died?'

'Has been murdered! Apparently citizen Springall was not beloved of his servant, Edmund Brampton. Last night Brampton left a poisoned cup in his master's chamber. Sir Thomas was found dead and Brampton discovered later hanging from a beam in one of the garrets.'

'So we are to go there now?'

'Not immediately,' Cranston retorted. 'First, Chief Justice Fortescue wishes to see us at his home Alphen House, in Castle Yard off Holborn.'

Athelstan closed his eyes. Chief Justice Fortescue ranked foremost among the people he did not want to see. A powerful courtier, a corrupt judge, a man who took bribes and ran errands for those more powerful than he, the Chief Justice's ruthlessness was a byword amongst the petty law breakers of Southwark.

'So,' Cranston interrupted jovially,*we meet the Chief Justice and then go to examine death in Cheapside. Merchants who are murdered by their servants! Servants who hang themselves! Tut, tut! What is the world coming to?'

'God only knows,' replied Athelstan. 'When coroners drink and fart and make cutting remarks about men who are still men with all their failings, be they priest or merchant.'

Sir John laughed, pushed his horse closer and slapped Athelstan affectionately on the back.

'I like you, Brother,' he bellowed. 'But God knows why your Order sent you to Southwark, and your prior ordered you to be a coroner's clerk!'

Athelstan made no reply. They'd had this conversation before, Sir John probing whilst he defended. Some day, Athelstan decided, he would tell Sir John the full truth, although he suspected the coroner knew it already.

'Is it reparation?' Cranston queried now.

'Curiosity,' Athelstan replied, 'can be a grave sin, Sir John.'

Again the coroner laughed and deftly turned the conversation to other matters.

They continued along the narrow stinking streets, following the river towards London Bridge, pushing across market places where the houses reared up to block out the rising sun. Near the bridge they met others, great swaggering lords who rode about on their fierce, iron-shod destriers in a blaze of silk and furs, their heads held high – proud, arrogant, and as ruthless as the hawks they carried. Athelstan studied them. Their women were no better, with their plucked eyebrows and white pasty faces, their soft sensuous bodies clothed in lawn and samite, their heads covered with a profusion of lacy veils. He knew that only a coin's throw away a woman, pale and skeletal, sat crooning over her dying baby, begging for a crust to eat. Athelstan felt his own soul dim, darken with depression. God should send fire, he thought, or a leader to raise up the poor. He bit his lip. If he preached what he thought, he would be guilty of sedition and the prior had kept him under a solemn vow to remain silent, to serve but not to complain.

Cranston and Athelstan had to stop and wait a while. The entrance to the bridge was thronged with people preparing to cross to the northern parts of the city to the great market place and shops in Cheapside. Athelstan pulled his hood over his head and pinched his nostrils against the odour from an open sewer full of the turds of nearby households, dregs from the dye houses and wash houses, and rotting carrion which had been dumped there. The area was thick with the foul, tarry smell from the tattered cottages where tanners and leather workers plied their trade. Cranston nudged him and pointed across to where an inquest was being held over a dead pig, and two constables in striped gowns were scurrying about trying to discover whether there were any bawds, strumpets or scalds in the area in order to arrest them.