The Nightingale Gallery (12 page)

He leant over to where keys hung on hooks in the wall and took a huge, rusting one down. ‘You will need this.’ He went into the small scullery and came back with a pomander, a ball of cloth stuffed with cloves and herbs.

‘Hold it to your nose. The stench will be terrible.’

Athelstan took the key and the pomander, left the priest’s house and walked down the length of the church to the derelict hut beyond. The door was barred and bolted. The huge padlock seemed oddly out of pl ace for anyone could have broken in if they had wished. He inserted the key, released the padlock and the door creaked open. Inside it was dark and musty. A strange, sour smell pervaded the air. An ancient tallow candle stood fixed in its grease on one of the cross-beams, with a tinder beside it. Athelstan took it, lit the candle, and the room flared into life.

Brampton’s corpse lay on the ground, covered in a dirty, yellowing canvas sheet, inexpertly sewed up. Athelstan carefully ripped the canvas open with the small knife he always carried. The stench was terrible. Putrefaction had already set in. Used to the sight and the smell of the dead, Athelstan did not feel queasy, though now and again he held the pomander to his nose for a welcome respite. Brampton now looked hideous. His face had turned a blueish-yellow and his stomach was swollen, straining against the thin linen shirt. The friar studied the body carefully; the shirt, the hose, but there were no boots. He looked at the soles of the feet, making careful note of what he saw. He then made the sign of the cross, said a Requiem for the poor steward’s soul, re-locked the hut, returned the key to the priest and wandered back into Cheapside.

Athelstan stood there dreaming, wondering what was happening in St Erconwald’s. Who would feed Godric? Would Bonaventure return or take offence at not being fed by him and disappear forever into the stinking alleyways? He wished he was free of Cranston and this matter; free of Cheapside, back at the top of his tower, staring up at the stars. He leaned against the wall and analysed his guilt-laden thoughts. He missed Benedicta the widow. Her face, innocent and angelic, was always with him. How long had he known her? Six months? He breathed a prayer. He had sinned. Yes, he wished he was back in his church with his beloved sky and charts, standing on the tower, letting the evening breeze cool him as he stared up, lost in the vastness. Was he breaking his vows by wanting that? Should he have become a friar or a student? An astrologer, one of those cowled, bent figures who haunted the halls of Oxford.

And what was the attraction of the planets in the sky? Athelstan bit his lip. There was order there. Order in time. Order in motion. Was Aristotle correct? he wondered. Did the planets and spheres give off music when they turned in the universe? A cart crashed by, its driver mouthing oaths. Athelstan stepped back, free from his dreams, and looked around.

There was no order here. A beggar, his face covered in sores, his legs cut off just beneath the knees, scampered about on wooden crutches. A whore tripped by, her eyes ringed with black paint, her thick painted lips lustrous and red like rotting fruit. She smirked and dismissed Athelstan with a flicker of her eyes. He walked across the thoroughfare. In the centre of Cheapside stood the stocks, empty except for one person, a large, fat man, his head securely clasped between the wooden slats. Beneath him were the charred remains of a small fire. Athelstan studied the notice posted above the prisoner’s head and gathered that he was a butcher who had sold putrid meat. The friar stopped a water carrier, took his ladle and gave the fellow a drink. The prisoner slurped noisily, thanking him, bleary-eyed. A mounted soldier trotted by and Athelstan remembered the knight’s helmet as well as something he had glimpsed in the garret and at the tower gate of London Bridge . . .

Athelstan made his way north to the Elms near Newgate where a great three-branched scaffold stood stark against the sky; each bore its grisly burden, a corpse swinging by its neck, head askew, hands and feet securely tied. The crowd had gone and a serjeant-at-arms, wearing the florid livery of the city threw dice with his two companions, ignoring the grim carrion swaying just above their heads. The area around them was empty. Strange, Athelstan thought, how men liked to see their brothers die, yet feared the actual sight and stench of death. The serjeant looked up as he approached.

‘What is it, Brother?’

Athelstan pointed to the three dangling figures, trying to ignore their empurpled faces, black protruding tongues, popping eyes and stained breeches.

‘These men?’

‘They were shriven this morning, Friar,’ the soldier interrupted. ‘Before we turned them off the ladder.’

‘How long will they hang?’ he asked.

The fellow shrugged and Athelstan tried not to concentrate on the great yellowing ulcer on the right side of his face, the pus now suppurating, bubbling out, staining his cheek. The soldier, his eyes dead and full of drink, shrugged and grinned at his two companions, sallow, pimply youths already much the worse for wine.

‘They will hang, Father, till sunset. Why do you ask?’

‘I want to look at them.’

‘They are to hang until sunset,’ the serjeant repeated.

‘Their clothes and belongings are ours. There is a canvas sheet for each of them, a swift prayer, and then into some forsaken grave to meet their maker.’ He tapped one of the swaying bodies. ‘Don’t feel sorry for any of them, Father. They murdered a woman, cut her throat, after they brutally sliced her breasts, raped and burnt her over a fire!’

‘Sweet Jesus have mercy on them!’ Athelstan whispered. ‘But I am here on the orders of Sir John Cranston, coroner of the city. I want to see them.’

He felt in his purse and threw down a couple of copper coins. The serjeant rubbed his chin and looked at them and then at the friar, sucking in air noisily through his blackened teeth. At last he rose and barked an order at one of the young men who placed the ladder lying on the ground against the scaffold, then gestured dramatically at Athelstan.

‘Brother, the ladder awaits. Do what you want!’

Athelstan climbed the ladder slowly. He studied each of the corpses, noting how the rope had been tied firmly behind one ear. He moved around, inspecting each body carefully, holding his breath against the sour smell of corruption. At last he came down. Another coin was thrown on the ground. The serjeant looked up.

‘What now, Brother?’

‘Who hanged these men?’

‘Well, we all did.’

‘No, I mean who tied the ropes around their necks?’

‘I did!’ One of the pimply youths got up. ‘I did, Brother. I do it expertly.’

‘Would you say,’ Athelstan asked, trying to hide his distaste at the glee in the young man’s face, ‘that each hangman arranges the knot in his own way?’

‘Of, of course!’

‘And from the noose you could tell which man you’d hanged and which you had not?’

‘Naturally. A goldsmith has his mark, leaves his insignia on a plate. An artist who sketches a painting can recognise his own work. The same with the hangman. My knots are unique. I place them carefully.’ The young man beamed expansively. ‘I am skilled in my trade, Brother. I always make sure they take a long time to die.’

‘Why?’

The fellow shrugged.

‘Why not?’

‘Do you enjoy it?’

‘Well, the bastards deserve to suffer long.’

‘And how do they suffer?’

‘Oh, they kick a lot. They always kick.’

Athelstan pointed to the feet of the corpses.

‘So, you always hang them without their boots on?’

‘Yes, of course. Otherwise they would kick them off and we’d lose them. Some thief from the crowd might steal them and we’d be all the poorer. Why do you ask, Brother?’

The friar smiled and sketched a sign of the cross in the air.

‘Nothing, my son, nothing at all.’

Athelstan turned and left the grisly bodies and walked back up Cheapside towards the Holy Lamb of God. He was convinced that Brampton and Vechey had been brutally murdered, though by whom he could not say.

He found Cranston dozing, comfortably ensconced in the inglenook of the tavern, a number of large empty pewter tankards arranged on the table before him. The ale wife walked over. Athelstan tossed her a coin and asked her to bring a fresh tankard and some wine whilst he roused Sir John. The coroner woke like a child, mumbling to himself, wondering where he was. Athelstan told him of the visits to the death house and the gibbet. The coroner nodded off to sleep again so, crossing to a barrel of dirty water, Athelstan filled the ladle and splashed it over Cranston’s face. This time Sir John woke, shaking himself like a dog, mouthing the most terrible curses. He was only placated by the ale wife placing a frothing tankard in front of him and throwing him the most longing and sly of glances, as if he was Paris and she Helen of Troy. In the presence of such flattery and with the taste of ale once more on his lips, Sir John regained his good temper and this time listened attentively as Athelstan spoke. He belched loudly when the account was finished and picked at his teeth with a sliver of wood. Athelstan thought he was going off to sleep again but the coroner took one further gulp from his tankard.

‘Sir John,’ Athelstan said testily, ‘we must discuss matters!’

‘Yes, yes,’ the coroner bellowed. ‘Buy me another one of these and I will listen to you again!’

Athelstan did so. Sir John, now fully awake but still in his cups, belched and gazed around the tavern, murmuring what an excellent place it was. Athelstan remembered the hen roosting over the beer barrel and kept his own counsel. He sipped slowly at a cup of watered wine and decided to return to his church. The roof might not have been repaired. Cecily the courtesan might still be plying her trade. And what would happen to Godric? Fleetingly, he wondered once again if Benedicta had missed him. He looked through the narrow tavern window. The sun was beginning to set, it was time he was gone. The Springall business was hidden by a tissue of lies. He was too tired to probe and Cranston too drunk.

Athelstan rose to his feet. ‘Sir John, look!’

The coroner glanced up blearily.

‘Sir John, I can do nothing with you. I must go back to my church. Tomorrow or the day after, when you are in a better frame of mind, join me there.’

Athelstan picked up his leather bag, marched out of the tavern, collected Philomel and made his way slowly through the empty streets to London Bridge.

Cranston watched him go, then leaned back against the wall.

‘Christ!’ he murmured. ‘I wish you’d stay, Athelstan, just for once!’

He groaned and pushed the tankard away. He had drunk enough and wished he hadn’t. But the friar was not the only one with secrets and Sir John drank to drown his. No one remembered, except Maude who kept her thoughts to herself, that seven years ago this week his little child, Matthew, died suddenly, the victim of the plague which stalked the alleyways and streets of London. Cranston tightened his lips, blinking his eyes furiously as he always did when the tears threatened to return. Every day he thought of Matthew, the small angelic face, the blue eyes shimmering with innocence. Christ could not blame him for drinking. He’d drink and drink until the memory was gone. And why not? Yet drink clouded his mind, and in his heart Cranston knew that Athelstan was right to disapprove. His maudlin drunkenness was not helping matters. There had been murder, deliberate and malicious, perpetrated in the Springall household. But where was the proof? He vaguely tried to remember what the friar had told him. Something about neither Brampton nor Vechey killing themselves. But where was the proof? Cranston tried to clear his thoughts. He, too, knew there was something wrong. Something was bothering him, something he had seen this morning at the bridge . . . He looked at the half-empty tankard.

‘Christ, Matthew, I miss you!’ he murmured. ‘Oh, let the world hang itself!’

He was about to order another when he thought of Maude and his promise to her. At least tonight he would return halfway sober. Cranston pushed the tankard away and waddled out of the tavern to collect his horse and return to his house in Poultry.

Two days after he returned from the city, Athelstan rose early and went to examine his small garden. Outside he glared angrily about. Someone’s pig had been rooting amongst the cabbage patch. Athelstan cursed in some of the language Cranston used on such occasions. He felt angry, agitated. He had come back to find his church safe but Godric gone.

‘You see, Father,’ Watkin the dung-collector explained, ‘the silly bastard thought he could slip out, so he did, through the sacristy door. Of course, they were waiting for him, the sheriffs men. They beat him up in the alleyway, tied his hands and led him off to the Marshalsea. He’ll probably hang!’

‘Yes, Watkin,’ Athelstan replied, ‘he’ll probably hang.’

Apart from that, everything had been in order except for Bonaventure, who had slipped away and had not been seen since. Athelstan hoped he was safe and would come padding back when he was hungry, tail in the air, miaowing for food and comfort.

The friar looked up. The sky was still blue; the sun, growing in strength, promised a hot sweltering day. He sighed. He’d said his prayers and celebrated Mass, Benedicta just slipping in at the door and kneeling next to the baptismal font instead of coming further up the nave. Athelstan wondered if there was anything wrong. He moved down the side of his church to see if Crim was waiting on the steps but they were empty. He went back, took a hoe from inside the door of his house and stabbed furiously at the cabbage patch, trying to rearrange the furrows in neat order. Once Crim had arrived he would go and see Hob the grave-digger, dying they said after he had slipped and fallen under a cartwheel which had crushed his ribs.

Athelstan tired of his task. He threw the hoe to the ground, hoped that at least the pig had had a good meal, and went back inside his church. He looked around and felt happier. Simon the tiler had done a good job. The roof was secure against the coming winter rains. Huddle the painter had scraped the wall and begun a new fresco, his first church painting. Athelstan had requested that Huddle should first draw charcoal sketches, from these giving the gifted young man scriptural advice to the effect that there was no evidence whatsoever that Herod had eventually stabbed Pilate in the back! So the charcoaled drawings had been wiped out and Huddle had begun again, a lovely vigorous painting of the Annunciation and birth of Christ. The church floor was swept and washed clean, thanks to Cecily the courtesan who had earned her pennies honestly by scrubbing every inch.