Paul Doherty: Nightshade

‘And you are sure, none of the Free Brethren survived?’

‘I doubt it. Father Thomas reports there were fourteen in number, and there were fourteen corpses, each carrying the brand of their guild upon them. A cross,’ Edward patted his chest just beneath his throat, ‘here. Father Thomas tried to reason with Scrope, but that ruthless bastard is adamant. The corpses still remain unburied. No one escaped.’ The King sucked on his lips, then gestured round. ‘You must be wondering why I brought you here. This is my treasure house, Corbett – evilly looted. I kept my precious goods here, gifts from old friends and Eleanor …’ He blinked away the tears that always came when he mentioned his beloved first wife, Eleanor of Castile, now buried beneath her marble mausoleum in the abbey above them. ‘You know the story, Corbett? I was in Outremer when my father died. Eleanor was with me. A secret sect of assassins who lived with their master, the Old Man of the Mountains, in their rocky eyrie in the Syrian desert, had marked me down for death. They struck, the assassin stealing into my tent with a poisoned dagger. I killed him but he still wounded me. Eleanor, God love her, sucked the poison from the gash and saved me.’ Edward sighed noisily. ‘I dedicated the dagger to St Edward the Confessor and placed it here in the crypt.Those whoresons stole it! One of the gang, John Le Riche, tried to sell it in Mistleham, but he was trapped by Scrope and his minion Claypole. They hanged Le Riche out of hand and now hold the dagger. Scrope, to impress me, is acting the hero-saviour, but I don’t believe his tale. I want that dagger back and the truth behind Le Riche’s abrupt capture and even swifter execution. Do what you have to.’ Edward searched in his wallet, pulled out a small scroll and handed this to Corbett, who unrolled it. The writing was in the King’s hand, the writ sealed with his privy seal: ‘To all officers of the Crown, sheriffs, bailiffs and mayors. What the bearer of this letter has done, or is doing, is in the King’s name and for the benefit of both Crown and Realm …’

‘Sir Hugh, master!’ Hugh broke from his reverie and glanced quickly to his right. Ranulf, who had been studying him closely ever since they left Westminster, gestured ahead. ‘We are approaching London Bridge, master.’ He smiled. ‘It’s best if we are vigilant.’

Corbett gazed around. This was a part of the city where one’s wits and sword must be sharp and ready. A bank of mist was rolling in from the Thames. The roar of the river as it poured through the arches of London Bridge, breaking around the protective starlings, sounded like a roll of drums, not quite drowning the clamour of people surging along the busy thoroughfare overlooking the river bank. The cries and yells of watermen, bargemasters and weary rowers mingled with the shouts of traders and their apprentices offering a variety of goods from hot pies to leather bottles. A group of enterprising hawkers had set up stalls to sell wineskins, purses, leather laces, deerskin bags, belts and all sorts of medicinal herbs to those making their way down toWestminster, up on to the bridge or further north to the gloomy mass of the Tower. Another line of suspicious-looking marketeers offered fur from ‘monstrous, mysterious beasts in the East with fair heads, bodies as black as mulberry, with crimson backs and multicoloured tails’. These itinerant traders were now being carefully questioned by market beadles over their licence to sell in the area.

Corbett surveyed the crowd, watchful against any violence or protest at the royal standard Chanson had displayed, yet apart from a yell deep in the crowd about how the King’s testicles should be enshrined in a hog’s turd, there was no open resentment. Business certainly looked brisk, as was royal justice. The stocks and thews were full of street-walkers, ribalds and drunkards, not to mention the sky-farmers, counterfeit men caught red-handed in their trickery. A butcher guilty of selling foul meat had been singled out for special treatment; he was forced to stand in a cart beneath the gallows with the rotting entrails of a pig wound around his throat and the lower part of his face to rest just beneath his nose. A man who’d pulled the hair of an archdeacon in a brawl was now having his own plucked out. The screaming victim was being stridently lectured how, when punishment was finished, he must walk barefoot across the bridge three times with scourgers following behind. A little further on a wandering preacher pointed to an execution cart, its wicker baskets full of the remains of Scottish rebels, beheaded, quartered and pickled, to be displayed on London Bridge. He openly warned: ‘Man born of a woman lives only for an hour. His days are bound in wretchedness and woe! He bursts forth like blossom only to fall quickly to the ground, to pass away like a shadow, nowhere to be found.’

Closer to the entrance to London Bridge, great beacon fires blazed in empty pitch casks. Around these gathered the poor, the infirm, drooling beggars and the dribbling insane. Franciscans dressed in coarse brown robes moved amongst these offering bread and strips of boiled meat. The sick and their ministers rubbed shoulders with the serjeants-at-law moving up and down to the courts of Westminster, all adorned in their splendid scarlet robes and pure white silk coifs. Along the river’s edge ranged a line of scaffolds decorated with stiffened frozen cadavers on whose shoulders kites, ravens and crows settled to pick and pluck at brain or eye whilst women squatting beneath the gibbets offered scraps of clothing from the hanged as talismans against ill luck.

Corbett took in all these scenes, the tawdry, the macabre, the swirl of evil and good. He pulled up his cowl and stared at a group of Flagellantes, garbed only in linen shifts from waist to ankle, their backs laid bare. These shuffled in a line, intoning the verse of a psalm as they hit each other with whips tied into thongs and pierced with needles; the blood cascaded down their bodies to soak their linen shifts and stain their feet. Corbett muttered a prayer to himself. He must leave the soft warmth of Maeve’s world. He was about to enter the Meadows of Murder, go through the Valley of the Deadly Shadow. Behind him, Ranulf noticed his master’s agitation and breathed a sigh of relief. Master Long Face, as he secretly called Corbett, was breaking free of his Christmas dream.

Ranulf, if the truth be known, had been bored during the holy days, more concerned about his own career prospects and very wary of the sharp-eyed, keen-witted Lady Maeve. Now, he clickedhis tongue, the game had begun again. He recalled with relish his own secret meeting with the King after the Jesus Mass earlier that day. Corbett and Lady Maeve had followed the King out of St Stephen’s Chapel, then moved to greet the Chief Justices, Hengham and Staunton. The King had plucked Ranulf by the sleeve and shepherded him into a window embrasure overlooking the old palace yard. Edward had pulled him close, eyes gleaming like those of a hunting cat.

‘You’ll be off to Mistleham in Essex, Master Ranulf.’

‘Yes, your grace.’

‘Take care of Brother Corbett.’

‘Yes, your grace.’

‘You’re ambitious, Master Ranulf, keen as a limner. I can do much for you.’ The King was so close Ranulf smelt the fragrance of the sweet altar wine he had drank at the Eucharist. ‘Keep a sharp eye on Lord Scrope, a bustling, evil man with a vile temper and murderous moods.’

‘Yes, your grace.’

‘Yes, your grace,’ Edward echoed. ‘Yet I tell you this, Master Ranulf, if Scrope threatens Corbett, if he is a danger with that foul temper of his …’ He glanced away.

‘Your grace?’

‘Kill him, Master Ranulf, kill Scrope! Show no mercy to that rebel who has taken the law into his own hands!’