Paul Doherty - Candle Flame

‘He’s gone!’ Cranston declared.

‘Where, Sir John, where was he?’ Athelstan asked.

‘Brother, God only knows! A window or somewhere here in the tavern yard, or did Beowulf – and I think it was our mutual friend – simply slip in from the street? The tavern is thronged with every rogue under the sun, the usual beauties, the school of Tyburn scholars and Newgate nuns.’ Athelstan walked over and picked up the deadly message. This time the parchment was faded and grease-marked, the scrawling hand uncouth, but the message was the same in all its stark menace.

‘Our assassin changes his hand,’ Athelstan remarked. ‘Sir John, we should be gone.’ People were now emerging from the tavern, all busy and inquisitive. Cranston had a word with Lascelles and the order was given to mount. They were joined by a smiling Father Roger, who asked if he could join their comitatus. Lascelles shrugged and the friar pushed his sorry-looking mount alongside Athelstan. They left the tavern yard and made their way towards the battlemented gatehouse and walls of London Bridge. Athelstan immediately experienced the inner panic that washed over him whenever he entered the turbulent, frenetic streets of Southwark. He became acutely aware of what he glimpsed, as if he was studying scenes from a stained-glass window or the intricate details of one of the Hangman of Rochester’s wall paintings at St Erconwald’s. Friar Roger was chattering like a sparrow on a twig, but Athelstan was distracted by the swirling images which surged out towards him on that brisk, cold February morning. Church bells clanged, marking the end of morning Mass and the beginning of the eleventh hour. Market horns brayed. Whores screamed and cursed as they were led down to the thews to the sound of blaring bagpipes. Traders, tinkers, fripperers and geegaw-sellers set up stalls and booths, ringing the air with their shouted offers of mousetraps, ratkillers, bird cages, bottles, ribbons, collops of meat and fresh fruit. Itinerant cooks, dressed in rotten, stinking weeds, pushed their battered barrows with portable stoves; around the cooks’ unwashed necks hung strips of ancient but heavily salted meat ready for grilling. An enterprising water-seller with a tub on his back trailed behind these offering ‘the freshest water from St Mary’s spring’ to slake, salted throats. The crowd pushed backwards and forwards, thronging down the narrow lanes where the grotesquely carved gables of shops and houses jutted out above dark and dingy chambers. Slops were being emptied into the already fetid, crammed sewers. Space was narrow; people had to step aside for Lascelles’ cavalcade. Curses and threats were hurled and, on a few occasions, slops from upper chambers narrowly missed them as night jars were emptied. Southwark, however, was different from the city, where resentments rankled deeper. In Southwark the dog-leeches, sow-gelders, rumagates, runaways, jingle-brains, tooth-drawers, broom men and a multitude of lowlife were hotly against any titled authority. All these denizens from their ‘ruffians’ hall’, as Cranston described them, wandered the streets looking for mischief or anything which might brighten their lives.

Justice was also busy. The Carnifex, the Southwark executioner, was performing his grisly trade on the approaches to the bridge. A moveable three-armed scaffold was being pushed along the riverside with a strangled, purple-faced malefactor hanging from each branch of the gallows; notices pinned to their filthy nightshirts proclaimed how these criminals were guilty of committing arson in the royal dockyards. A failed magician, who’d tricked people out of their coins for nothing in return and aptly rejoiced in the name of ‘Littlebit’ was being fastened in the stocks. Former customers had gathered, picking up rotting rubbish and even filth from the sewer running down the centre of the lane, intent on pelting him. A mad woman, her hair painted purple and garbed in rabbit skins, stood on a broken barrel. She proclaimed how once upon a time she had been a luxuriously adorned maiden who used to sit in a hazel grove until Satan had appeared in the guise of a bird-catcher and snared her soul. Next to her, three whores, whose grey, grimy naked buttocks had been soundly birched, were being fastened in the pillary for ‘lechery beyond their threshold’. Athelstan noticed with grim amusement the placards hanging around their clamped necks; these declared how the two younger ones were ‘ Mea Culpa ’ and ‘ Mea Culpa ’ - ‘my fault’ and ‘my fault’, whilst the third, their mother, was named ‘ Maxima Culpa’ – ‘my most grievous fault’.

On the corner of the lane a preacher and his travelling troupe had rented the Eyrie, a plot of ground reserved for mummers and their plays. The preacher – Athelstan could not decide if he was acting or genuine – was garbed in horsehide, his sun-darkened face almost hidden by lank hair through which his eyes gleamed feverishly. He had attracted a good crowd. Athelstan, with a start, noticed a fellow Dominican garbed in the black-and-white robes of his order, standing a little forward of the crowd, fascinated by what was being enacted. The crowd was noisy. The air reeked with a fug of odours which mingled with the ever-present stench of stale, salted fish, rotting vegetables and human sweat. Nevertheless, the Dominican, tall and rugged, his black hair neatly tonsured, seemed impervious to his surroundings but listened intently to the rant of the preacher’s most scathing diatribe against the Church. Behind the preacher, the rest of his troupe was assembling cleverly painted panels, each depicting a message. On one a fiend jeeringly pulled the ropes of a prayer bell torturing a damned, fiery-red soul who served as the bell’s clapper. Below that on the same panel, a rat-headed demon was throttling a banker whilst another stabbed a goldsmith with a candle prick. On the second panel, a hare carrying a hunting horn, game-bag and a deer-spear was striding towards a castle with a wench slung by her feet to the spear. At the castle gate, a thorn-beaked lizard devil, dressed as an abbess, waited to welcome them. The third panel depicted the Prince of Hell, Lord Satan, with a gigantic sparrow hawk’s head and a spindle-shank thin body. The master of demons was busy devouring a damned spirit, whose perjured red-hot soul slipped from the Devil’s anus in the form of a swarm of ravens.

Lascelles stopped his cavalcade here. One of his lackies dismounted, pushed through the crowd and whispered to the Dominican; he reluctantly nodded and followed the man back, hoisting himself into the saddle of a spare horse. Athelstan caught his breath; he was sure he recognized that round, serene face from his days in the novitiate at Blackfriars. Athelstan stared again. He noted the sharp eyes, full lips, skin burnt brown by the sun and rather delicate hand gestures and how fastidiously clean this fellow friar appeared to be.

‘Brother Marcel.’ Friar Roger had been watching just as closely. ‘Don’t you recognize him, Athelstan, a man much loved by your order? Some say he will become Minister General of the Dominicans. Brother Marcel of St Sardos – the Papal Inquisitor from our Holy Father in Rome.’

Athelstan closed his eyes. He certainly remembered Marcel, the son of Anglo-Gascon parents born in English-held Bordeaux, a brilliant canon lawyer who particularly excelled in the disputation, the sharp cut and thrust of question and answer so popular in the halls of Oxford and Cambridge. What on earth was he doing in London? Athelstan glanced back at the mummers as Lascelles urged his cavalcade on. Such dramatic presentations were certainly not orthodox and, if what he recalled about Marcel was correct, would certainly be frowned on by the Papal Inquisitor.

At last they reached London Bridge. A firedrake was performing magic tricks with a torch he had inveigled from the keeper of the gatehouse, Robert Burden, that diminutive dresser of the severed heads of traitors which hung like black balls on their poles against the lightening sky. Burden, dressed in the usual blood-red taffeta, had assembled his large brood of offspring to watch the fire-swallower. Athelstan called out a greeting but Burden, engrossed in the spectacle, simply raised a hand in reply. They entered the lane which cut through the houses and shops which ranged either side of the bridge. As usual, Athelstan found such a journey frightening, literally crossing between heaven and earth. The sights and sounds always disturbed him. The clatter of nearby windmills, the stench from the tanneries, the stink of the lay stalls and that ever-crashing thunder as the river poured through the bridge’s twenty arches, pounding the lozenge-shaped starlings protecting the pillars below. Nevertheless, this was also a busy marketplace where everything was sold: Baltic furs, Muscovite leather, Paris linen, lace from Lieges and cloth from Arras. An apprentice ran up to offer a laver, a tripod pitcher with a nipped-in neck and spinous spout which ended in a dragon’s head. Athelstan examined the inscription around the bowl, ‘I am called a laver because I serve with love.’ In his other hand, the lad offered a shining bronze aquamanile from Lubeck carved in the shape of a naked man riding a roaring lion. Athelstan smilingly refused, though he quietly promised to remember both items as possible purchases by the parish council. He just wished they could just cross London Bridge, but they had to pause for a while as one of the lay stalls, heaped to fullness with smoking-hot filth, had collapsed to the merriment of some and the disgust of many, for the reeking stench crawled like a poisonous snake along the bridge.