Paul Doherty - The Book of Fires

Athelstan fastened his sandals, donned his cloak, pulled up its deep hood and slipped out into the night. The cemetery and the great enclosure before the church were busy. Cresset torches glowed on the end of poles or were stuck into wall crevices. Makeshift braziers crackled their heat. Bonfires fed with rubbish flamed the darkness. The pilgrims and visitors gathered close to these to warm themselves or to cook scraps of meat pushed on to ready-made skillets, pans or prongs. The air bubbled with the stench of sweaty bodies, roasting meat and wood smoke. The noise was constant. A babble of voices broken by the occasional hymn, shouted psalms as well as noisy salutations, laugher, curses and oaths. People swarmed in and out of the church under the watchful eye of Bladdersmith and his comitatus of bailiffs. Benedicta and other women of the parish assisted. Imelda, Pike’s wife, a true virago, stood on the top step of the church directing people as well as collecting pennies in a sealed wooden box with a slit on top. All the denizens of Southwark and beyond had crawled out of their rookeries and mumpers’ castles, or what Cranston called ‘the Dungeons of Darkness and the Halls of Hell’. They’d all assembled to make a profit: apple-women, watercress-sellers, onion pickers with their produce slung on ropes around their necks; vendors of sheep and pig’s trotters pushed and shoved by milk and water men. Poachers from the fields around, garbed in hare and rabbit skins, offered the pink, glistening flesh of their quarry hanging from poles over their shoulders. Boners and grubbers who scoured the midden heaps and simplers who foraged for herbs, mushrooms, snails and grubs offered their potions along with chunks of cat meat. Despite the late hour, this ragged, motley garbed mob surged backwards and forwards, desperate to sell to the pilgrims pushing their way up and down the church steps. Jongleurs, troubadours, firedrakes, puppet masters along with street musicians tried to entertain the crowd. Men-at-arms from the Tower and the gatehouse at the Bridge swaggered around trying to catch the eye of the orange-wigged whores who, under the pretence of prayer and pilgrimage, solicited ever so quietly for custom.

Athelstan walked through God’s Acre. He stopped to check on Godbless and Thaddeus. Both were fast asleep, so he made his way carefully out into the enclosure, past bothies and tents set up by the pilgrims. He entered the church. More people thronged there, going up and down the transepts or queuing for entrance to St Erconwald’s chapel. Everyone paused to admire Fulchard’s crutch, now discarded but given pride of place, hanging above the saintly bishop’s tomb. Fulchard, flanked by an ever-so-demure Cecily the courtesan on one side, her sister Clarissa on the other, sat in a throne-like chair before the rood screen so pilgrims could touch and talk to him in return for an offering placed in a sealed box at his feet. Athelstan sketched a blessing in the air and passed quietly on, praying for guidance as he wondered how long this feast of miracles would last. He left the church and took a vantage point on the top step, staring over the concourse and the people milling there. The friar studied the crowd carefully and felt a chill of apprehension as he noted the large number of young, able-bodied men who moved amongst it. Intrigued, he went back into the church and stared around. Crim and the ladies of the parish were busy arguing, assisting and organizing, but Athelstan couldn’t glimpse Watkin, Pike, Ranulf and the rest of that coven of mischief. He left the church, pushing his way through the crowd. He strode swiftly down the lane, past Merrylegs’ darkened pie shop and stopped beneath the garish sign of the Piebald. He was about to knock on the door when a man stepped out of the darkness; the meagre light from a lanthorn hanging on its hook glittered in the blade of a half-drawn dagger.

‘Who are you and what do you want?’ The guard slid between Athelstan and the door.

‘The Archangel Gabriel,’ Athelstan snapped. He pushed the man aside and rapped on the obviously locked door. The guard came back just as the door swung open and Watkin stepped into the pool of light.

‘Why, Father?’

‘Why, Watkin?’ Athelstan mimicked back. ‘Please tell this gentleman to leave your priest alone.’ The guard hastily withdrew. Athelstan stepped into the warm mustiness of the taproom. The chamber lay in darkness except for the ghostly pool of light cast around the great common table on which Merrylegs senior, garbed in his funeral clothes, lay stretched out, his bare feet sticking up, his grizzled head and thin-lined face almost hidden by the corpse wimple wound tightly about. The corpse’s closed eyes were sealed by two coins, whilst a small wafer of bread rested between his bloodless lips. Votive candles, about sixty in number, ringed the corpse. Along each side of the table sat the men of the parish with Watkin at the top and Pike seated at the other end. They all clutched tankards of Joscelyn’s choice ale and used the blackjacks to hide their faces as Athelstan walked across to greet them with a blessing.

‘Father,’ Pike started to rise and the others followed suit, ‘we are having a funeral vigil.’

‘I am sure you are.’ Athelstan smiled. He glanced around. They were all there, even the hangman, along with a number of hard-faced, solemn-eyed strangers. Athelstan decided not to stay. He realized this was no funeral vigil. This was a meeting of the Upright Men from this ward and probably every other in Southwark. He talked quickly about the arrangements for the requiem Mass tomorrow, blessed the gathering and left. Once outside, Athelstan walked halfway along the lane and stared up at the slit of starry sky.

‘I wonder, Lord,’ he whispered, ‘do forgive me yet I truly do, if this Great Miracle has anything to do with the mischief being plotted back there …’

Thomas Pynchon, linen draper par excellence, or so he styled himself, spent his last night alive feeding and rewarding those fleshy appetites so roundly condemned by the preachers whom Pynchon half-listened to during Sunday Mass as he leaned against the wall of St Mildred’s in Bread Street. The church stood close to his three-storey town house: a fair dwelling of pink and cream plaster, gleaming black timbers and glazed windows though the top ones were covered in oil-thickened linen. On that particular night, his last one on earth, Thomas Pynchon had been trying to stifle the terrors which dogged his soul during previous evenings. He waked sweat-soaked, fearful that some boneless wraith might be rising like a plume of black smoke in the corner of his bedchamber. He sat in terror wondering if the wraith had a gripping hunger, a feverish thirst for his immortal soul. During the day, busy amongst his apprentices, Pynchon would glimpse some blonde-haired, bright-eyed girl and all his fears would blossom afresh. Once again he’d wonder if some demon, some life-thief, was stalking him. Pynchon stopped on the corner of Bread Street and gazed back at the three stout mercenaries hired to guard him. He glimpsed the tavern door under which a glow of light beckoned invitingly.

‘I will take a stoup of ale,’ he called out, ‘then I will return.’ The mercenaries grunted their agreement. Pynchon slipped into the comfortable sweet-smelling taproom and made his way over to a window seat. A slattern fetched his order, a tankard of the strongest frothy ale. Pynchon took a deep sip, leaned back and sighed. Despite his terrors this had been a most enjoyable evening. He had dined sumptuously at the Full Delight, a discreet tavern for the well-to-do bachelor about town, and Pynchon was indeed a very wealthy bachelor. He had feasted on minced chicken in almond and rosemary sauce, venison steaks broiled in vinegar, red wine, ginger and a little cinnamon, followed by quiche of fish with a green topping. Delicious sweet wafers in a hippocras sauce had finished the meal before Pynchon had climbed the tavern stairs to sample the pleasures of a generously endowed, buxom chambermaid with olive skin and hair as dark as the night. Pynchon had insisted on that. He wanted no golden-haired woman with fair skin and ice-blue eyes. Such a sight would only thresh his soul with a flail of fresh terrors. It would remind him of Isolda Beaumont standing erect and proud at the bar before the King’s Bench, glaring furiously as Thomas Pynchon, foreman of the jury, solemnly pronounced the guilty verdict. Looking back, that proud face, those arrogant eyes had invoked a curse through which all the ghastly horsemen of the Apocalypse had stormed – at least in Pynchon’s mind. At the time he had been proud of what he had done. He had boasted how he’d argued with others of the jury that a unanimous guilty verdict was the only one they could reach. Afterwards he had regaled colleagues in the Guild as well as his many customers about what he had achieved. How he had been resolute as an iron gate against any plea for mercy. Indeed, as foreman of the jury, Pynchon had attended Isolda’s execution, determined that the Carnifex show no mercy and that the crowd did not hurl blocks of wood or stone to render the victim senseless. Justice had been done and that should have been the end of the matter, but not now. The mysterious Ignifer had appeared in the city dealing out terror and death to all involved in Isolda’s execution. Two of the judges and prosecutor Sutler had perished by fire, burnt to death as easily as some rubbish heap on a sweltering hot day. More recently a similar murderous attack had been mounted against Lady Anne Lesures, with whom Isolda Beaumont had publicly quarrelled. The terror was spreading. Justice Danyel and six other members of the jury had fled to the fastness of the Tower. Three others had taken sanctuary at St Paul’s. Pynchon, however, could not leave his trade nor, after his recent pronouncements, did he want to be a laughing stock dismissed as a coward. Consequently he had hired those three stout fellows and taken careful precautions in the cellar of his town house. He had proclaimed as much, openly mocking the Ignifer.