‘The hour of the bat and the screech owl,’ Cranston muttered. He just wished Athelstan was with him, not for bodily protection but that strange little friar was always balm for the soul with his shrewd observations and humorous asides. A man in the world but not of it, Cranston reflected, Athelstan was a priest as cunning as a serpent with the innocence of a dove. Cranston made the resolution to seek out the friar as soon as possible and walked on. Lanterns glowed on door posts. Candles flamed behind latticed windows or between the chinks of shutters; these threw some light on the filth-strewn cobbles as well as the narrow doorways and alley enclaves where the destitute sheltered. The coroner made his way around the slime-drenched mounds of refuse where dogs, cats and rats all foraged for morsels. Ahead of him trundled the dung cart and the evening breeze wafted back a smell so putrid Cranston had to cover both nose and mouth behind the folds of his cloak. Despite the poor light he was soon recognized and strident calls echoed like a ball bouncing up the runnel before him.
‘Cranston, here! Wary! Wary! Coroner, here!’
He walked on gripping his dagger, shadows slunk away. He was almost at the top of the alley when a beggar woman pushed her ragged boy towards him, his little arms outstretched for alms. Something in the boy’s eyes pricked Cranston’s suspicions. He dug into his belt wallet and thrust a coin into the boy’s scabby hand. The child stepped back and Cranston heard the whispered warning from the shadows.
‘Watch your back, Lord Coroner.’
He walked up to the mouth of the alleyway then swiftly turned. Shapes further down just as abruptly stepped back into the creeping shadows.
‘St Michael and all his angels.’ Cranston murmured a prayer for protection and walked on. He was determined to meet Vox Populi before the day was through. He turned right into the Shambles, the great fleshing market of London. The butchers and carvers were now unhooking the chunks of beef, chicken, poultry, duck, rabbit, venison and ham. The air reeked of salt, blood and messy entrails; even the cobbles glowed red in the dancing light of torches whilst the butchers and their boys seemed like demons in their gore-splattered leather aprons and hats. Beadles and bailiffs thronged to secure their blood-soaked linen packages of free meat. The poor and the needy also clustered, going down on hands and knees beneath the stalls searching for fresh gobbets of flesh, fighting off the curs and cats which also massed to feast in this place of slaughter. Traders and tinkers, selling the rejected to the rejected, shouted for business. Prostitutes, faces all painted, hair dyed and festooned with gaudy ribbons, sheltered together ready to entice customers into what Cranston called their ‘Temples of Mercenary Love’. Pimps touted for courtesans, even mixing with a small crowd who’d gathered round a Friar of the Sack. The Franciscan stood on a plinth intoning the office of the dead for the Guild of the Hanged, a pious group of men and women who assembled outside Newgate to pray for those inside condemned to death.
Cranston pushed himself through these and the horde of nighthawks, dark-walkers, gibbet lawyers and mountebanks; all assembled before the great iron prison gates hoping to visit friends within, coins at the ready to bribe janitors and turnkeys. Cranston recognized many familiar faces amongst these Pages of the Pit and Squires of the Sewer, who swiftly drew away as he marched up to the postern door and vigorously pulled at the bell. The door flew open. The bullnecked, grey-faced turnkey took one look and hurriedly stepped aside. Cranston entered that antechamber of hell. He met the keeper in the great yard, showed him his seal and demanded to see the Vox Populi. The keeper, dressed in black like a parson with the sanctimonious face to match, swiftly agreed. Cranston had little time for him. The keeper was a born rogue who, Cranston had often confided to Athelstan, was twice as fit for hell as those he guarded. They entered the murky, main gallery of the gloomy prison. Cranston took the proferred rags soaked in vinegar to cover his nose. The air was fetid, damp and reeking of putrefaction. The walls seemed to sweat slime which gathered like sludge over the flagstone floor. The light was poor. Torches flared, giving off trails of pitch and tar. Tallow candles, cheap and nasty smelling, flickered in niches and crevices. A thriving place for rats, cockroaches and other vermin, Cranston tried to ignore the lice crackling under his boots. They passed chambers and cells where prisoners laden with irons stood with hands outstretched, their pleading for alms almost drowned by the horrid howling and screaming which rang out constantly. They reached the condemned cell — nothing more than a filthy box guarded by a heavy oaken door. Inside it reeked like a midden heap, black as pitch with no light or vent for air. The prisoner was crouched in the corner on a palliasse of rotting straw. Cranston breathed in deeply on the rag as he shouted for lights, two stools and a jug of claret.
‘Bordeaux,’ he yelled. ‘I’ve had enough of your bloody vinegar.’
The keeper hurried to obey. Once he’d brought everything, Cranston ordered him out, leaving the door open. He sat on one stool, the prisoner on the other, drinking greedily from the goblet of claret. He raised his head, pushing back his filth-strewn hair to reveal the brand mark on his cheek close to where his left ear had been. Cranston studied the dirty face, the tangled moustache and beard; the eyes, however, were bright, not yet bereft of hope or courage.
‘Geoffrey Portsoken, known as a Vox Populi.’ Cranston lifted his goblet. ‘I salute thee.’
‘Sir Jack Cranston, I toast thee too, you and yours.’ The prisoner took another gulp. ‘I’m for the elms at Smithfield, Jack, condemned I was, beaten up by Gaunt’s henchmen. Anyway, why are you here? Not to gloat! No, that’s not for our Jack, so why?’
‘To offer you life.’
Vox Populi mockingly raised the goblet but his eyes brightened. ‘Gaunt will not let me skip away from this.’
‘Not skip, my friend, walk to the nearest port. Queenshithe will do, ship abroad never to return under pain of hanging, drawing and quartering. I mean that.’ Cranston clinked his pewter cup against the prisoner’s. ‘Out, never to return!’
‘I’ll need money.’
‘The city will pay for you to be shaved, clothed, booted with a water pannikin and a linen parcel of bread and dried bacon. You’ll also receive a thin purse.’
‘For what — information?’
‘The truth, so shut up and listen!”
Cranston spoke swiftly and succinctly about Kilverby’s murder, the disappearance of the Passio Christi and the slayings out at St Fulcher’s.
‘So,’ Vox Populi murmured. ‘Chalk has gone to his maker, followed by Hanep and Hyde. Chalk will have much to answer.’
‘Why?’
‘He was a defrocked priest, Sir Jack, a curate from the church of St Peter’s-in-the-wood in Leighton Manor in Essex where we all hailed from an eternity ago. It must be,’ Vox Populi paused to cough phlegm, ‘some thirty years ago now. All of us golden boys, archers swinging off down the tree-lined lanes bound for the glory of France.’
‘Very touching.’
‘No, Jack, very true. You know how it was. We were roaring boys. About twenty of us at first who answered the King’s writ from the commissioners of array; few of us are left now, only me and those hard-hearted bastards out at St Fulcher’s.’ He stared at Cranston. ‘I fought with them. In the year of our Lord 1353, we sealed an indenture with the Black Prince to serve him and him only as the Company of the Wyvern.’