Hugh Corbett 17 - The Mysterium (3 page)

‘Archers, on my mark!’ he shouted.

They thronged forward, longbows notched, bearded faces beneath their steel sallets tense and watchful. Behind the row of bowmen stood a huge cartload of straw and oil waiting to be torched. From beyond the cemetery walls rose the muffled clatter of the citizens of London who had thronged to watch this deadly confrontation reach its bloody climax.

‘Sir Hugh, Sir Hugh Corbett?’ called a clear voice.

Corbett lowered his sword and groaned as Parson John, vicar of the parish, pushed his way through the thronging archers, holding a crucifix.

‘Sir Hugh, I beg you wait.’ Parson John grasped the wooden pole of the cross more tightly and knelt before the Keeper of the King’s Secret Seal. ‘I beg you.’ He lifted his unshaven face. It was thin, haggard, the green eyes red-rimmed. ‘No more of this. Let me talk to these malefactors.’ He paused and ran a hand through his cropped blond hair. Corbett noticed how the tonsure was neatly cut, the fringe over the broad brow laced with sweat, the furrowed cheeks stained with dust.

‘Father,’ Corbett crouched down to face him squarely, ‘look around you. Sixteen dead here, more in the church, your own people cruelly slain. These felons are condemned men, rifflers who broke out of Newgate. They have slaughtered again and again, not only here, but yesterday in Cheapside, along the streets of Cripplegate and more elsewhere. Then there are the women they abducted.’ He swallowed hard. ‘At least their screams have stopped. The church is now encircled, it has to be stormed.‘ He saw tears in Parson John’s eyes. ‘I know,’ whispered Corbett. ‘These are hard times for you. Your own father’s fall—’

‘My father has nothing to do with this.’

‘I don’t agree,’ hissed Corbett, his voice turning hard. ‘Your father may well have something to do with it. My orders are explicit. Sir Ralph Sandewic has now retaken Newgate. I will storm the church, your church, and bring this bloody mayhem to an end.’

‘Sir Hugh.’ Ranulf was pointing to the top of the church tower. Figures could be seen darting between the crenellations; similar ominous movements could be glimpsed at the narrow windows. Corbett followed Ranulf and put on his helmet, he then stood up, ignoring the priest, who still knelt grasping his cross.

‘Mark!’ Ranulf screamed. The mass of Welsh archers obeyed; their great yew bows, primed and curved, swung up. ‘Aim,’ Ranulf bellowed, ‘loose.’ A shower of barbed shafts, a cloud of feather-winged death, streaked into the sky. Most of the arrows clattered against the rough stone of the church, but screams and a body toppling from the tower top showed that some of the archers had found their mark. At Ranulf’s orders more volleys were loosed, driving the defenders from the parapet and the various windows. The bowmen advanced. Fresh clouds of arrows shattered against the stonework. The great war cart was dragged forward, its pointed battering ram jutting out. The combustibles were fired, the oil, tar and ancient kindling roaring like a furnace as a group of sweating archers, protected by their comrades, pushed at the long poles, driving the cart down the slight incline towards the great double doors of the church. Corbett flinched as an arrow whipped by his face. He screamed at the archers to push harder. The cart lurched forward, flames and smoke billowing up. He roared at the men to let go and retreat from the few enemy bowmen who still manned the windows. The cart held true, trundling down the slope and crashing into the main door. As the sharpened battering ram wedged deep into the wood, flames roared along it.

Corbett and Ranulf, protected by a screed of archers, now retreated out of bowshot. The Welsh kept up their arrow storm as the two man took off their helmets, pushed back their coifs and gratefully washed hands and faces in a bucket of rather dirty water. The captain of archers, Ap Ythel, brought blackjacks of ale and a platter of hard bread from a nearby tavern. As Ranulf chattered to the master bowman, Corbett ate and drank greedily, staring at the conflagration around the main door. He felt exhausted. He’d been in his chancery chamber at the exchequer in Westminster when the royal courier had arrived. The riffler leaders Giles Waldene and Hubert the Monk had been consigned to Newgate with at least two dozen of their coven, all victims of the sudden fall from grace of Walter Evesham, the chief justice. Corbett ruefully wished they’d been lodged in the Tower. Waldene and the Monk had been committed to the infamous pits, their followers left in the common yard, where Waldene’s gang had clashed with Hubert’s. The fighting had spread, other prisoners becoming involved. The Keeper of Newgate and his guards had proved woefully inadequate.The great prison yard had been reached and its gates stormed. The King’s chancery had dispatched urgent writs to the Constable of the Tower Sir Ralph Sandewic, a veteran experienced in crushing riots in Newgate and the Marshalsea. He in turn had called on Corbett as senior chancery clerk, who had summoned Welsh archers camped near the Bishop of Ely’s Inn.

The escaped prisoners, ruthless and merciless, had fought their way along Cripplegate or escaped out on to the wild heathland beyond the walls, where Sandewic was waiting with his men-at-arms. The old constable had shown no mercy. Any prisoner caught was asked one question: ‘Are you from the Land of Cockaigne?’ Sir Hugh Corbett, for his own mysterious purposes, had insisted on this. A blank look or a refusal meant immediate decapitation. The severed heads of the fugitives, tarred and pickled, already decorated the spikes along London Bridge. Other felons had fought their way into St Botulph’s yesterday evening, just as the compline bell tolled. Parson John had been surpliced, ready to chant the day’s last praises to God, when they had burst in. The priest had escaped; others were not so fortunate. Robbed and slain, they were tossed through the open door before this was sealed and blocked. Several women had been taken prisoner, and when Corbett and his archers reached St Botulph’s, they could hear the screams of the unfortunates who were being raped time and time again. Eventually the terrible screaming had ceased, and Corbett believed the women were dead. Once organised, he’d launched an assault, which was savagely repulsed; only then did he learn that the escaped prisoners had also pillaged the barbican tower at Newgate and seized bows, arrows and all the armour of battle.

‘Sir Hugh?’ Ranulf, red hair damp, green eyes in his white face bright with the fury of battle, was eager to finish this. ‘Soon?’ he demanded. ‘Soon we’ll attack?’

Corbett nodded. Ranulf saw this as an opportunity to excel, to prove that he, a chancery scribe, was as valiant as any knight in battle. Corbett looked beyond Ranulf at the cart, which was now a blazing bonfire.

‘It’s caught the door,’ Ranulf murmured. ‘Master, we are ready.’

Corbett rose and followed Ranulf out into the cemetery, keeping to the trees and crumbling crosses of the headstones. They moved down the side of the church, where a group of men-at-arms stood waiting with a makeshift battering ram, a long sharpened log swung by chains from a wooden framework. Corbett stared at the narrow corpse door. It was undoubtedly blocked, but it was still vulnerable.

‘Listen.’ He pulled the chain-mail coif over his head. ‘Bring the ram up as quickly as possible. The felons will be gathering near the main entrance. There are no windows above the corpse door, and those to the side are narrow. We must force that entrance as quickly as possible.’ The men-at-arms, all liveried in the arms of the royal household, grunted their assent.

Corbett and Ranulf helped lumber the ram across the broken ground, squeezing past the funeral monuments. They reached the church without trouble. Immediately the ram was swung back, crashing into the corpse door so hard it began to buckle. Corbett quietly prayed that the felons would remain massed near the main entrance. The pounding continued. Welsh archers began to feed their way across, bows at the ready; others armed with round shields and short stabbing swords followed. The pounding hammered on remorselessly. An ear-splitting crack and the corpse door snapped back on its hinges. An arrow whipped through the air, skimming over their heads. In reply, the Welsh archers loosed a shower of shafts. Screams and yells echoed. Ranulf, helmet on, followed Corbett into the darkness of the church. Shadows emerged. Corbett parried and thrust with a hulking brute garbed in a woman’s dress, his painted face all bloodied. The stink from his body was foul. Corbett drove the monstrosity back, fending off the huge mallet his opponent whirled. An arrow cut through the air, taking the felon full in the face, and he toppled to the ground, writhing in his death throes.

Corbett wiped the sweat from his face. Smoke from the main door seeped through the nave, which was now riven with the clash of steel, the hiss of arrows, groans and screams. Men staggered away clutching blood-bubbling wounds. As the burning door at the main entrance began to crumble, the ram that pierced it, still smouldering and licked by dying flames, was pushed deeper into the nave. The door finally collapsed, and archers, braving the fire flickering around the lintel, clambered over the smoking wood and poured into the church. The battle was over.

Some of the prisoners tried to escape, only to be cut down or forced back. A few attempted to hold out in the tower; they were pushed to the top, but none chose to jump, as Ranulf remarked, and resistance faded. Corbett ordered chains and ropes to be brought. At last a long line of felons, about twenty in number, lay shackled in one of the darkening aisles, kicked and cursed by the archers. Corbett, joined by Parson John and Ranulf, watched as the bodies of the victims, men and women, some very young, were brought out. They had all been stripped, horribly abused and tortured, their skins scorched by candle flame. Corbett ordered them to be decently tended, and Parson John had all the corpses, including two archers, laid out along the centre of the nave. Corbett had wandered many a battlefield, but this sight was truly piteous. Some of the victims had perished quickly from arrows embedded deep in their chests, others had taken time to die.

‘Harrowing and hideous!’ Corbett crossed himself and stared around. The church was like a flesher’s stall, awash with blood, littered with the detritus of battle. Sheets were brought out and flung over the corpses. Master Fleschner, the parish clerk, was summoned. He first retched and vomited, then began the grisly task of listing those killed: Margaret-atte-Wood, spinster of Jewry, Aegidius Markell, vintner of Moletrap Alley, along with all the other innocent victims of the murderous anarchy.

The archers, with stronger bellies, complained of being hungry. Ranulf, who’d walked the length of the long line of gruesome corpses, ordered their captain to requisition food and drink from nearby taverns and cook shops. Corbett just stared at a wall painting of a demon with bat-like ears, the torso and cloven feet of a goat, its eyes grisly black in a fiery red face.

‘There are demons and there are demons,’ Ranulf remarked, coming up behind him. ‘Those in the flesh are worse.’

‘Much worse,’ Corbett whispered. ‘See what they did, Ranulf? God knows why. Some souls like nothing better than to see the world crack and collapse in a welter of killing.’

‘I have to anoint the dead.’

Corbett looked over his shoulder at Parson John, eyes staring in a pallid face.

‘I’ll give them general absolution but I want to anoint each one. I think I should do that, and afterwards . . .’ The parson gestured round. ‘This church is polluted; it will have to be reconsecrated. It happened so quickly, Sir Hugh. Early yesterday evening we had gathered, as we always do, the Guild of St Botulph’s, to sing compline . . .’

‘Father, go home.’ Corbett beckoned an archer across. ‘Take Parson John to the priest’s house,’ he ordered quietly. ‘Make sure he drinks a deep cup of claret. Only then let him come back and do what he wants.’

Parson John looked as if he was going to object, then he shrugged and walked off. Screams and groans echoed from the shadowy transepts where the prisoners lay huddled. Ranulf had gone amongst them, kicking and lashing out with the flat of his sword. Corbett went and grasped his arm. Ranulf turned, fist raised, his lean face tense with anger. His green eyes seemed larger, red hair fanned his face like a halo of flame, spittle frothed at the corner of his mouth.

‘Leave it,’ Corbett ordered. He stared Ranulf down, gripping him by the wrist. ‘Leave it, Ranulf. We’ll try them by due process of law, then,’ he glanced down at the prisoners, ‘we’ll send them to God’s tribunal.’

‘Aye, and I’ll join you in that.’

Corbett looked round. Sir Ralph Sandewic, Constable of the Tower, emerged from the shadows, his craggy face wreathed in a smile, his snow-white hair, parted along the middle, tumbling down to his shoulders. Dressed in half-armour, he stood fingering the hilt of his great sword, then he raised a hand and snapped his fingers. Two men-at-arms wheeled their barrow forward. Corbett stared down at the severed heads piled there: the jagged necks, half-closed eyes popping out, mouths and noses encrusted in blood. Flies and insects crawled over the mottled skin of the dead faces. Corbett swallowed hard. He’d seen too much. He walked away even as Ranulf helped Sandewic push the barrow in amongst the chained prisoners so that they could stare, as Sandewic put it, on their own future.

Corbett went outside. The cemetery was now being cleared, all the corpses removed, only black stains on the icy grass showing where they had sprawled. Archers were collecting spears and arrows, scraps of clothing and armour. The fire at the great door had been doused, the half-charred battering ram pulled away. An archer brought across a tankard of ale. Corbett thanked him and gulped it to clear the smoke and dirt from his mouth. He breathed in deeply, then summoned an archer and sent him out of the cemetery beyond the lychgate, where a horde of city bailiffs and men-at-arms kept the curious at bay. A short while later the archer returned with a Friar of the Sack he’d found preaching from a cart on the approaches to Cripplegate. A beanpole of a man, the friar’s lugubrious face was redeemed by merry eyes. Corbett fished in his purse and brought out a coin.