The Medieval Murderers - House of Shadows

Margaret adopted a pious expression. ‘I happened to find documents that proved he had been cheating the Treasury for years. He said he could not bear the shame of being exposed as a regular sinner, and took the easy way out.’

Chaloner frowned. ‘Where are these documents now? No one has mentioned them before.’

Margaret’s face was cunning and rather malevolent. ‘Perhaps they never existed. But he was a wicked fellow, and I shall not lose any sleep over his demise. As I said, everything worked out very well. Very well indeed.’

HISTORICAL NOTE

Bermondsey Abbey was a victim of the Dissolution. Most of it was demolished then, although three gatehouses and sections of wall were spared, and Bermondsey House eventually rose in what was the inner courtyard. The mansion survived into the seventeenth century, although it was in a state of serious disrepair by the 1660s and its owners were unlikely to have lived in it. They would have rented it to tenants, although its shabby condition indicates they would not have been very grand ones.

John Browne, captain of Rosebush , died in April 1663, and contemporary records indicate he was killed by one of his own sailors, who lobbed a stone at him while drunk. The previous year, Browne had also quarrelled with his purser, Thomas Strutt, which had resulted in Strutt leaving Rosebush in a huff. William Hay owned the Hay’s Wharf Company, which operated on the south bank of the Thames, opposite the Tower of London. William Castell was a Bermondsey shipwright; his wife was named Margaret. Captain Richard York (died 1665) was commemorated on a tablet in Bermondsey’s old church, as was the cooper Edward Walduck. Richard Parr was Bermondsey’s rector in the mid-seventeenth century, famous for inflammatory sermons. Finally, Joseph Williamson was in charge of the government’s intelligence network from the early 1660s and was credited with suppressing a number of rebellions, some of them small and ill-conceived, like the fictional one at Bermondsey House.

June 2004

Faces peered down from the upper decks of the red buses that ran along Tower Bridge Road, beyond the wooden hoardings that shielded the excavations from the common gaze. At one point they looked almost straight down into a large hole, the passengers unaware that they were just crossing the cloister and frater of the old priory and abbey. Around the rectangular pit, a brace of archaeologists were moodily contemplating the damage done to their earlier meticulous excavation of the vault that must have been beneath the original cellarer’s building.

Edward Asprey pushed back his safety helmet and wiped the sweat from his forehead. He was a short man with a mop of black hair and a wispy beard. The summer sky was filling with ominous thunderclouds, and the oppressive afternoon was becoming too hot for comfort.

‘Bloody JCB!’ he muttered to his blonde assistant, Julia Masters. ‘The damned place is cursed! I suppose now we’ll have those officious sods from Health and Safety crawling all over us.’

She had to agree that this area of the rescue dig seemed to have a hoodoo on it. Three weeks ago, one of their student volunteers had slipped into the cellar excavation and broken a leg – and two days ago, an almost new mechanical digger had crashed into it when the end wall had unexpectedly given way. It was a miracle that the driver escaped serious injury, but all work had been halted until this morning, when a mobile crane arrived to hoist the damaged machine out.

They looked around the rest of the site, where low walls of dark stone stood exposed below ground level, like stumps of rotten teeth jutting from the brown earth and grey rubble. Built over repeatedly for almost a thousand years, the area was a confused mass of foundations from a score of previous ‘developments’, and only the painstaking work of the archaeologists had separated the many and varied eras of construction. Soon, a huge complex of offices, shops and apartments would rear into the sky above the remains of Bermondsey Abbey, but underneath it all would be preserved the roots of the monastic settlement that was an important part of England’s heritage. But time was pressing and the cement-mixers and pile-drivers were champing impatiently, eager to put another new silhouette on London’s skyline.

‘Better get down there and see how much damage that digger has done,’ sighed Asprey. He waved to two other assistants and a couple of graduate students from University College, who were on the other side of the hole. They all went gingerly down the laddered scaffolding and gathered on the floor which they had so laboriously cleaned of infill before the toppled machine brought down more stones and rubble. Walking to the far end they contemplated the collapsed wall, where it abutted on the side of the former chamber. Julia Masters looked dubiously at the ancient masonry.

‘That looks really unsafe, now that the top courses of stone have fallen in,’ she said.

‘It was a lousy bit of masonry to start with,’ agreed Edward Asprey.

‘Must have been yet another later alteration, as the other walls have much better stonework.’

The cellar was due to be filled in level with the original ground surface before construction work began, though all the other exposed walls were to be carefully preserved underneath the huge buildings that were to be built above. Even the piles needed to support the new edifice were to be placed where they would not damage the old foundations.

The small group went closer to the place where the JCB had fallen in and picked their way through the old stones and mortar that were strewn about the floor. Julia Masters looked up at the wall and saw that most of the top half had been thrown down over a length of about five yards, leaving a large bite-like defect that came down to chin level. She made her way close to the wall, wishing the liner of her yellow helmet was not so tight, as sweat was sticking it to her head.

‘Watch those stones; they look loose,’ warned one of the students, pointing to the upper row of the remaining masonry. Julia carefully clambered up on to the debris at the foot of the wall, interested to see how thick it was. ‘That’s odd, Edward,’ she called over her shoulder. ‘There seems to be another wall just behind it.’

He stumbled up to where she was perched and raised himself on tiptoe to look over the edge. ‘A twelfth-century cavity wall! We’ll be finding polystyrene insulation here next!’

His attempt at levity was ignored as Julia, almost a head taller, peered over the upper line of stones. ‘There’s a good eighteen-inch space here, running right across the width of the vault,’ she announced. ‘Anyone got a light?’

As one of the students was dispatched to their site cabin to fetch a torch, there was a rumble of thunder and a few large spots of rain plopped down, but after a few moments it ceased, though the sky was now heavy with purple-grey clouds. When the torch arrived, Asprey handed it to Julia, who craned her head over the shattered stonework as she shone the light downwards.

‘We’d better get the rest of this wall down straight away, Edward,’ she said sombrely.

An hour later a mini-digger had pulled away the remaining lower courses of masonry, and the archaeologists were crowding around what was revealed at the bottom of the cavity. The group was augmented by Mary McGowan, a burly middle-aged anthropologist who had been examining the bones from burials in the adjacent cemetery.

‘One male, probably under twenty-eight by the look of the inner ends of his collar bones and the edges of his pelvis,’ she announced as she squatted alongside a heap of rusted metal and brittle, brown stick-like objects. ‘And a young woman, almost certainly late teens.’