London (47 page)

The other two had floated. They were all guilty. Now, upon the king’s particular orders, the sentence was to be carried out at once. Silversleeves trembled.

It was just then that he caught sight of the stout figure with the white patch in his hair. He was only thirty feet away and he had just turned round. Silversleeves tried to duck, but the master craftsman had seen him and a second later was jostling through the crowd. It was useless to try to get away. Silversleeves froze.

Simon the armourer was a conservative fellow. He lived in the house and followed the craft of his great-grandfather, Alfred. He still held several strips of land in the hamlet near Windsor, for which he paid rent. And he was proud of his skill as a master craftsman.

But he was far from the rich wholesale merchants, the aldermen, who ran the ever-growing city. “They never dirty their hands with work like we do,” he would say. “They hardly ever touch their goods. Their children are too proud to work at all, half of them. Think they’re nobles.” Here he would spit. “But they aren’t. They’re just merchants, no better than me.”

The intrusion of the young bloods into his house and the murder of his favourite apprentice had not only shocked and saddened him, it had positively infuriated him precisely because of the contempt for his class that it showed. “They’re no better than us. They’re worse,” he had raged. “They’re just criminals.” And that was just what he would show them to be. Justice would be done. He had come to Smithfield that day to witness his revenge.

But watching the young men as they were found guilty, and knowing what was to follow, he could not help feeling a pang of remorse. “They did a terrible thing,” he muttered. “But even so. Poor devils.”

Then he had seen Silversleeves.

He did not hurry, or make a scene. Carefully making his way through the throng, he came up to the long-nosed young man trying so uselessly to ignore him, sidled close until his beard was brushing Pentecost’s ear, and gently whispered: “You’re slime. You know that, don’t you?” He saw the scarlet blush start across the youth’s pale cheek. “You’re a murderer too, as much as them. But you’re worse. Because they’re going to die and you aren’t, Judas. You’re too much of a coward.” He saw Silversleeves stiffen. “Slime,” he whispered again, softly, then moved away.

Pentecost stayed to see the hanging. In a near daze, he forced himself, with fascinated horror, to watch as the three young men, all stripped, were led to the elms over whose high branches ropes were now tossed. He saw the nooses fitted, saw the three hauled up as the crowd cried out “Heave”, saw his friends’ beseeching faces contort and turn red, then purple, saw their bodies frantically kicking in the air, and saw one of their loincloths fall down pathetically. Then the three pale bodies hung limply, gyrating slowly in the faint breeze.

An hour later, when Silversleeves entered, the Exchequer court was hard at work. Normally by now the Easter session would be over, but with the extra business of the prince’s coronation there was still much to do. Grateful for something to take his mind off the executions, Pentecost made himself busy.

How quiet and normal it seemed, the scribes bent to their tablets, the faint click and murmur from the great table at the far end. Only gradually did he realize that the silence was unnatural. The scribes were studiously ignoring him. If he glanced towards them, the courtiers by the door looked awkward. He knew what it meant: it was embarrassment for a person who has just become an official outcast. He tried to take no notice, but after a while he went out. He walked about the Palace of Westminster for some time, his head bowed, trying to sort out the pictures that crowded into his mind.

His parents when he had told them. His mother, tall, pale, shocked, unable to comprehend that her son could do such a thing. His father, terrible in his silent anger, but effective in getting his son cleared. The trial. The bishop’s eyes. The bodies turning in the breeze. The silence in the Exchequer chamber.

He was finished as a cleric as long as Foliot lived, but what about the Exchequer? Was he really finished there too, all for one youthful indiscretion? It was too early to know. “Perhaps it will pass,” he murmured.

He had just come to this conclusion when, turning into a broad passage, he looked up to see two painters at work on a wall.

Many of the walls in the chambers around Westminster Hall were painted; this one consisted of a series of moral scenes from the lives of Old Testament kings and prophets. In the centre, half finished, was a single wheel.

The two painters were obviously father and son. Both were short with bandy legs, stubby hands, large round heads and solemn eyes. They gazed at him placidly as he paused to admire their work. “What is this wheel to be?” he asked.

“This is the wheel of fortune, sir,” the father replied.

“And what does that signify, fellow?”

“Why, sir, that a man may rise to fame and fortune, then just as quickly fall again. Or the other way round. It signifies that life is like a wheel, sir, always turning. And it teaches us to be humble, sir. For even when we are high, we may be brought low.”

Silversleeves nodded. Every literate man knew about the wheel of fortune. It was the Roman philosopher Boethius, much admired in contemporary schools, who, himself cast into prison after a political reverse, had urged a stoic acceptance of fate and likened men’s fortunes to a constantly turning wheel. So popular had the idea become that even humble painters like these, who knew nothing of the philosopher, knew all about his wheel. He smiled to himself. How apt. He would be philosophical about his own reverse. No doubt if he was down now, the wheel would turn again. He passed on.

It was a few minutes later, standing in the huge, cavernous space of Westminster Hall, that he saw a group of men coming towards him. There were half a dozen of them, in rich cloaks; they were walking quickly to keep up with the figure in the middle. And as soon as he saw who it was, Silversleeves caught his breath and ducked behind a pillar.

Unlike his courtiers, King Henry II of England was as usual simply dressed in plain green hose and jerkin, like a huntsman. Of medium height and strongly built, he might have inclined to fat if his ceaseless, driven activity had not always burned it up. This morning, as at all times, he was brisk, trim and all-seeing.

Perhaps, if Pentecost had not tried to hide behind his pillar, he might have been ignored. Instead, as he instinctively pressed himself against the grey, Norman stone, he heard a harsh voice call out in French: “Bring me that man.” King Henry did not like people hiding from him.

A moment later, they were face to face.

Though he worked in Westminster Palace, Silversleeves had never seen King Henry close before. This was not surprising. His northern kingdom occupied only part of Henry Plantagenet’s time, and even when he was on the island he was constantly travelling from place to place, hunting as he went.

A freckled face. Norman, ginger hair, close-cropped and flecked with grey. Dear God, the Conqueror’s great-grandson. Hands nervously twisting a length of twine. A restless Plantagenet, too. A terrifying combination. Eyes grey and piercing.

“Who are you?”

“A clerk, sire.”

“Why were you hiding?”

“I wasn’t, sire.” A stupid lie.

“You still haven’t told me your name.”

“Pentecost, sire.”

“Any more? Pentecost what? Of where?”

It was no use. “Silversleeves, sire.”

“Silversleeves.” Henry Plantagenet frowned, searched his mind, and remembered. “Silversleeves. Aren’t you one of those louts who attacked my armourer?” Silversleeves was very pale, Henry’s eyes suddenly harder than stone. “Why weren’t you hanged this morning?” He turned to the courtiers. “Weren’t they hanged?” The courtiers nodded. “Why hasn’t this one been hanged? Why weren’t you hanged?”

“I am innocent, sire.”

“Who says so?”

“The Bishop of London, sire.”

For a moment King Henry was silent. Then a flush began to appear just below his left ear, quickly spreading over his face. There was a sound like a snort from his nose. Silversleeves noticed that the courtiers were starting to back away.

“A criminous clerk,” he hissed. A rogue hiding from the king’s justice behind the skirts of the Church. It was the very matter that had poisoned his relationship with his old friend Becket. A criminous clerk skulking in his own hall at Westminster. He snorted again.

And then Silversleeves had the privilege of witnessing the other characteristic for which the king’s family was famous: a Plantagenet rage.

“Viper!” King Henry’s face had suddenly become so suffused with blood that it darkened to ochre, as though some wooden effigy from an antique royal tomb had come to life. His eyes were so bloodshot they seemed to glow. He brought his face close to Pentecost’s until they almost touched, and in his nasal French, beginning in a harsh whisper and rising to a furious shout, he spoke his kingly mind.

“You long-nosed son of a whore! You hypocritical, half-baked priest. You think you’ve dodged the gallows?” Here his voice began to rise. “You think you can cheat the king, you crapulous toad? Do you?” He glared straight into his eyes. “Well? Do you?”

“No, sire,” Pentecost stammered.

“Good!” His voice rose further. “Because you shall not. By the bowels of Christ, I promise you, you shall not! I, personally, will have your case reopened. I’ll pluck you from the bishop’s skirts. I’ll slit you open. You’ll hang until you rot. You understand?” And now, summoning all his Plantagenet fury: “You shall taste my justice, you stitched-up sack of slime. You shall smell death!” The last was not so much a shout as a guttural scream that echoed all round the cavernous spaces of Westminster Hall.

Pentecost Silversleeves turned and fled. He could not help himself. He fled down Westminster Hall from the Court of Common Pleas, past rows of pillars to the Court of the King’s Bench and out through the great, ribbed doorway into the yard. He fled out past the Abbey, through the water gate and over the Tyburn stream; he fled along the banks of the Thames to the Aldwych and beyond; he fled past the Temple and over the River Fleet; he fled into the city up Ludgate Hill; he fled into the sanctuary of St Mary-le-Bow. And there he sat quaking for upwards of an hour.

On a warm afternoon near the end of September, a man and a woman sat quietly on a bench in front of a large range of buildings along the eastern edge of Smithfield, and waited. The man, who wore a grey habit and sandals, was Brother Michael.

The woman was an ageless twenty-two. She was short and stout; her face wore a perpetual frown of friendly determination; her left eye stared out at a rakish angle; and only her red hair, pulled severely back, gave a clue that she was one of the Danish family of Barnikel. Perhaps the faint air of confusion behind her determination hinted at something else. “I have to think very hard,” she would often say, “because otherwise I get things all muddled up.” But this did not take away from the central feature of her personality: she knew her own opinion. She, too, wore a grey habit. She was called Sister Mabel.

The buildings behind them were comparatively new. Less than five decades had passed since a worldly courtier, loved by the king for his wit and his jests, had suddenly experienced a vision, turned from the world and founded the priory and hospital dedicated to St Bartholomew. The priory was rich and grand. The hospital was humble.

It was to the Hospital of St Bartholomew that Brother Michael and Sister Mabel belonged. Now she turned to him.

“Perhaps he will not come.” She was not afraid, not for herself, but she was afraid for gentle Brother Michael. “You take care,” she had earnestly warned him. “He has a black heart.” The jaws of hell were already open; the fiends would drag him down. For the man they were awaiting was, she was sure, the wickedest in London. And their task that day was to save his soul.

“He’ll come,” Brother Michael said serenely. Then, with a smile: “Mother will make him.” And then, seeing her still looking doubtful: “I’m not afraid, Sister Mabel, with you to protect me.”

Mabel Barnikel was the sister of the fishmonger who had inadvertently caused such damage to the ship of Alderman Bull. Many people thought her a joke. Yet if they laughed at her behind her back, they were wrong to do so, for she was a humble soul.

She had always, ever since childhood, listened very carefully to anyone she thought was wise, trying as hard as she could to make sense of the puzzling world she saw around her. As a result, when she did finally satisfy herself that she had got an idea straight, she clung to it with all the doggedness of a shipwrecked man who has found a raft in perilous seas.

She was thirteen and just going through puberty when she had discovered that she was in danger of suffering hellfire. The reason for this sad state of affairs was very simple. She was born that way.

“The trouble is,” she would state matter-of-factly, “I’m a woman.”

It was the parish priest who had explained it to her. He had preached a sermon on the subject of Adam and Eve and used the occasion to deliver a stern warning to his female parishioners. “Women, if you would save your souls, remember Eve. For it is the nature of woman to incline to frivolity and the sins of the flesh, and mortal sin as well. Women are in special danger of hell.”