Paul Doherty - Candle Flame

For a while Mooncalf stood in the tavern porch staring up at the clearing sky. This had been a cruel, iron-hard winter. Would spring ever come, but what then? Mooncalf was most fearful. London seethed with unrest like oil in a fiery hot skillet. The king was a child and his uncle, John of Gaunt, ruled with a mailed fist from his magnificent palace of the Savoy. Gaunt was depicted by his many enemies, and there were many, as the Prince of Hell and his ministers the Minions of Darkness. Opposition was growing like weeds on a dung hill. In the shires surrounding London and now the great city itself, the poor, taxed and tied to onerous burdens, had formed their own coven, the Great Community of the Realm; its leaders, the Upright Men, were feverishly plotting the Day of Swords, the Season of the Great Slaughter. On that fateful day the poor would rise in rebellion. They would create a new commonwealth free of any prince, prelate and pontiff; it would be a time of blood, when deep-rooted grievances would be settled and the ground cleared so the New Jerusalem could arise along the muddy banks of the Thames. The doggerel chant of the Upright Men, ‘When Adam delved and Eve span who was then the gentleman?’ was proclaimed all over the city, spiked on church doors, the Great Cross at St Paul’s, the Standard in Cheapside and even the splendid gateway to the Savoy palace. Gaunt retaliated with hangings, disembowellings and quarterings at the Elms in Smithfield, Tyburn and Cheapside. Severed heads, boiled, pickled and tarred, decorated the execution poles above the great gatehouse on London Bridge. Blood bred blood. The Upright Men fought savagely against the tightening, panther-like embrace of Gaunt, or so Mooncalf’s master Mine Host Thorne described it, and the taverner was well versed in his horn-book. The Upright Men had only to bray their trumpets and they would summon up all the dark dwellers from the Halls of Shadows, London’s squalid slums, be it Whitefriars or, Mooncalf shivered, here in Southwark. The Children of the Twilight, the Knights of the Knife, the Squires of the Sewer, the Pages of the Pit, all sharp as the tooth of any saw, waited impatiently for the black banner of anarchy to be raised. Hatred seeped the streets and alleyways of London like the curdling venom of a subtle serpent. The Upright Men encouraged, nourished and supported this, their envoys coursing through a London crowd like hungry pikes in a mere. The Earthworms, the horsemen of the Great Community of the Realm, all garbed to terrify, would appear abruptly in the city, pouring out of some alley mouth to clash with Gaunt’s mounted retainers. They had recently captured one of the Regent’s tax collectors, Owain Tabbard, in Cricklegate. The Earthworms had surrounded him, beat him, robbed and stripped him, then set him back on his mount with his face turned to the horse’s rump, holding its tail between his hands instead of a bridle. The Earthworms had paraded Tabbard through the streets before cropping his ears and nose and throwing him into a filthy lay stall. Another collector had suffered even worse. He had been ambushed and decapitated, his severed head left in blood-filled wineskin close to the main gate of the Savoy.

Mooncalf’s teeth chattered as he stared into the cold darkness. The ostler nourished his own secret plans to escape the impending conflagration. The Lollard, the heretic Sparwell, had been taken up and imprisoned in the Bocardo, Southwark’s vile prison; Sparwell’s arrest would warn others of the danger of belonging to any sect which disagreed with the Church. If Mooncalf’s plans came to fruition, and last night’s secret meeting was promising, then he would pack his belongings and move to more comfortable lodgings. In the meantime, the sky was lightening. Mooncalf dare not waken Marsen and his coven too early and so be greeted with foul curses and the slops of their night jars. Mooncalf, like his master, just wished the tax collector and coven would go: their very presence at The Candle-Flame was dangerous, whilst it provoked Mine Host’s worries about continuing to stay and manage the tavern. The Great Revolt would surely come. Southwark was a hotbed of unrest. Did not some of the inhabitants of the nearby parish of St Erconwald’s, men like Watkin the dung collector and Pike the ditcher, sit high in the councils of the Upright Men? What would happen to The Candle-Flame once the horror emerged? Would they, as Mine Host’s pretty new wife, Eleanor, wailed, be murdered whilst the tavern was put to the torch? Mooncalf glanced again at the sky; the weak light was strengthening. He grasped the lantern horn and moved out, bracing himself against the freezing air. He crossed the frost-hardened gardens, through the wicket gate and into the Palisade, stumbling over the harsh, uneven, ice-bound ground, the pool of light thrown by the lantern horn dancing and jittering around him. Mooncalf paused at a grunting sound. He lifted his lantern horn. The Palisade was a stretch of common land and Don Pedro the Cruel, the tavern’s huge boar pig, loved to browse there. The great pig had surprisingly spent the night out in the open. Mooncalf could glimpse the boar’s sleek skin as it lay prostrate beneath a bush snoring and gasping. Mooncalf lifted the lantern, his curiosity now quickening. Don Pedro liked his comforts – usually he would return to his sty. So why had he settled down here? Mooncalf moved towards the pig, only to be distracted by the dying fire of Marsen’s guard. Two of the Tower archers under their captain Hugh of Hornsey had set up camp outside the Barbican. Mooncalf wondered why this guard was not active; why had no challenge been issued? He peered through the murk and saw two bodies lay close to the flickering embers of the fire. A stomach-lurching dread seized the ostler: something was very wrong. A few yards away the Barbican loomed massive and sombre through the mist. The grey dawn-light was thinning. The breeze was cutting, yet it was the silence which frightened Mooncalf, as if some hell-born malevolence shifted in the shadows. Mooncalf glanced at the fire – nothing more than red-hot embers. The two archers were lying strange, not rolled in their cloaks. The ostler hurried over and stifled his scream. Both guards lay sprawled on the ground, open-eyed before their dying fire; the trickle of blood between their gaping lips had mingled with that from their noses, now frozen hard to form a hideous death mask. The weapons of both men, sword and dagger, lay close by but these had proved no defence against the harsh feathered bolts which had taken each of them deep in the chest. Mooncalf, moaning in terror, hand clutching his groin, stumbled over to the Barbican, which also lay quiet in all its stark bleakness. The ostler stared up at the donjon’s only window: it looked shuttered from within and out. He placed the lantern horn down and tried the heavy oaken door. He pressed hard only to realize that the door was bolted at both top and bottom. Shaking with unspoken terrors, Mooncalf crouched down to peer through the large keyhole but this was blocked by the heavy key on the other side. Mooncalf beat the door, shouting and screaming, but his voice trailed away at the ominous silence which answered him. He glanced back at the dying campfire, those glassy-eyed corpses frozen in death. The ostler’s courage gave way. He grabbed the lantern horn, stumbling across the Palisade and running blindly until he reached the tavern’s postern door. He hurled himself through this and found himself in the hallway, feverish with terror. He unlocked the main door, grasped the bell rope in its casing and pulled as hard as he could, shouting as loud as his dry, cracked throat would allow.

‘Harrow! Harrow!’

Mooncalf breathed out noisily. The hue and cry had been raised. Above him doors and window shutters were flung open, footsteps clattered on the stairs. Mine Host Simon Thorne, burly-faced, his hair all a-tumble, arrived shouting and cursing, followed by his black-haired, pretty-faced wife Eleanor. The taverner seized Mooncalf.

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