Paul Doherty - The Book of Fires

The coroner slipped silently out of his bedchamber, along the gallery and down the polished oaken staircase. Night candles glowed in their capped glass holders, emitting pools of golden light. Sir John paused on the bottom step wondering who the intruder might be. The Upright Men? Usually they were not so silent. Those Greeks? Cranston paused to control his breathing. The Greeks were allies rather than enemies. The Ignifer? He crept through the buttery and into the great kitchen beyond. He raced swiftly across and opened the door to the scullery; the latch on the garden door at the far end rattled. He stepped inside. He sniffed a perfume, one he knew, the light fragrance of crushed lilies. The floor was greasy. The shutters to his right rattled. Cranston abruptly realized what was about to happen. Sliding and slithering, the coroner hurled himself across the chamber. He ignored the door but crashed into the shutters, even as he felt the intruder press heavily against them. The Ignifer was here! Cranston realized this heavy shutter had been prised open from outside. The Ignifer had entered and the floor was covered in highly flammable oil, waiting to be fired. The assassin had plotted to lure a half-sleeping Cranston across the slippery floor towards the door whilst he pulled open the shutters and threw in a flame. If he had stepped into the trap the scullery would have been turned into an inferno. He pressed his bulk against the shutters. Again he smelt the faint traces of that perfume, of crushed lilies. Lady Maude had once worn it, a gift from the court. Cranston was now calm. Eventually he could feel no pressure. He kept a wary eye on the door and opened the shutter slightly, his sword piercing the gap, its broad, sharp blade jabbing forward before swinging to the left and right. He closed the shutters, refastening the inside hook and opened the garden door. Dawn was about to break. The garden stretched frozen white, bleak and empty. The Ignifer had escaped.

Athelstan, cloaked and hooded against the cutting wind, stood in the copse of ancient trees which lay at the heart of the great garden at Firecrest Manor. Sir Henry had arranged for open braziers to be stoked and fired. The crackling charcoal glowed fiercely, exuding gusts of scented heat and smoke. Beside Athelstan was a taciturn Sir John, his beaver hat pulled fully down, the muffler of his thick cloak raised as high as it could be. Athelstan stretched out his mittened fingers towards the blaze. Those he had summoned had almost arrived, complaining under their breath. They fell silent at the sight of this little friar standing so ominously quiet, in this haunted glade close to the edge of the green-slimed mere; a ghostly place, away from the pleasantries of the rest of the garden. The trees here rose like stark black figures, their outstretched branches frozen solid, bereft of all greenery. No birdsong or rustling in the undergrowth, just a brooding stillness, as if the copse hid a dreadful secret. Athelstan knew it did, but he would wait to uncover it and so would everybody else. Athelstan was furious at the turn of events. He had slept very little and been roused by Tiptoft, who informed him about the attack on the coroner. The messenger had reassured Athelstan that Sir John was safe and well. The friar had given thanks to this but hid his anger in swift preparations to leave. He and Tiptoft had hurried down to the Southwark quayside where Moleskin lay fast asleep in his barge. Athelstan had roused him and they had braved the swollen, mist-hung river to cross to Blackfriars wharf. Tiptoft had hurried away on other errands including messages for Sir John, whilst Athelstan entered the Dominican mother house. After he’d greeted the different brothers, Brother Caradoc the sacristan arranged for Athelstan to say his dawn Mass at a side altar in the main church. Cranston had arrived just in time for the Eucharist. Afterwards both coroner and friar had broken their fast in the great refectory dominated by a huge crucifix with a banner displaying the Five Holy Wounds hanging from the hammer-beam roof. Cranston had described the assault on him, Athelstan listened with deepening disquiet.

‘Three times, Sir John,’ he declared. ‘Three attacks on us. The first was not on Lady Anne but on thee and me as was the second and the third. It’s time we cleared the board of distractions and diversions, fascinating though they may be. Now listen …’

Athelstan had informed Cranston of what he wanted and now they waited in the gloomy, wooded glade with a winter wind rippling the icy surface of the mere. Sir Henry and Rohesia, Buckholt, Rosamund, Falke, Parson Garman, Lady Anne and Turgot, as well as Cranston’s posse of bailiffs and six royal archers from the Tower. The ‘guests’, as Athelstan called his array of suspects, were all protesting. The friar did not care. Some of these were liars and deceivers and one of them could be a hideous assassin secretly plotting the destruction of both himself and Sir John. He would now show them, to quote the scriptures, that ‘God did still raise prophets in the cities of the earth’.

‘Sir John, Brother Athelstan,’ Flaxwith called, ‘they are here.’ Both friar and coroner turned to greet the strange torchlight procession making its way through the trees led by the Fisher of Men. This eerie official of the city council had left his ‘Mortuary of the Sea’, which stood on a deserted quayside just beyond La Reole. A figure of mystery with a highly colourful past as a knight of St Lazarus, the Fisher of Men’s principal task was to harvest the Thames of corpses, the victims of suicide, accident or murder. The Fisher gathered his grisly finds in his Chapel of the Drowned Men: the bloated, river-slimed corpses would be stretched out, washed and covered with a shroud drenched in pine juice whilst they waited inspection and collection. The Fisher was assisted by a coven of rejects and outcasts who rejoiced in such names as Maggot, Brick-Face and Hackum. Leader of these was Icthus, the Fisher’s henchman, garbed as always in black. He had assumed the Greek name for fish, Icthus, a fitting title. He was a young man who had no hair even on his brows or eyelids, whilst his oval-shaped face, jutting cod mouth and webbed fingers and toes made him even more fishlike. He was in truth a superb swimmer. Fast and as slippery as any porpoise, Icthus could thread the waters of the Thames night or day, in high summer or midwinter.

Athelstan ignored the swelling murmurs and protests as he greeted the Fisher and his entourage; they immediately sank to one knee and chorused their salutation to which Athelstan responded with a solemn blessing. They all stood and, like some well-trained choir, burst into the hymn ‘ Ave Maris Stella ’ – ‘Hail, Star of the Sea’, a paean of praise to the Virgin. Afterwards the Fisher of Men, his bald head and skeletal features shrouded by a black leather hood fringed with the purest lambswool, his body hidden beneath a thick military cloak which hung down to the ankles of costly leather walking boots, raised gauntleted hands.

‘We have come,’ he proclaimed. ‘The waters of this earth are no mystery to us. Brother Athelstan, Sir John, we have brought ropes! We are ready to do God’s will and that of the King. Sir John, if we find what you are looking for … we will double the price?’

‘And a little more.’ Cranston took a slurp of the miraculous wineskin and handed it to the Fisher, who took a most generous mouthful before passing it back.

‘Sir John, Brother Athelstan,’ Sir Henry bustled forward, ‘this is my property, demesne …’

‘And I am on the King’s business,’ Cranston snarled. ‘My guests have come by barge. I ordered your porter at the watergate to let them through. Sir Henry, you get on with your own business and let me get on with mine. Brother?’