At the crossroads, close to the Standard, market bailiffs were lashing the naked buttocks of two ale traders found guilty of adulterating their product. Butchers stood in the stocks, heads and hands clasped, forced to smell the putrid reek of the mouldy meat they had been caught selling. Nearby a bailiff wailed on a set of bagpipes to attract attention as well as drown the groans of the convicted miscreants. Cranston took direction from a stall holder and led Athelstan along an alleyway and into Fairlop Lane. A quiet street, formerly lined by shops, it had now been converted into dwelling places, their doors flung open to catch any breeze or coolness. Athelstan glimpsed scenes as they passed: a fat man at table gnawing a bone; beside him, his even fatter wife with a dish of cold meats being importuned by a plump child, a soiled loincloth around its ankles. In the next house a man garbed in outside clothes dozed on a pillow before an empty stone fireplace. A yard winder and spindler with thread stood idly by as his young wife primped herself in a hand-held mirror, more interested in that than the rosary beads wrapped around her fingers. Cranston beckoned her serving girl to come out and, for a penny, she led them to Whitfield’s chambers, a narrow, two-storey dwelling on the corner of an alleyway. The downstairs window, previously a shop front, was bricked and boarded up. She nodded at the door, loose off the latch.
‘Others been here,’ she said. ‘They forced the lock, went in and came out.’
‘Who?’ Athelstan asked.
‘King’s men.’ She patted her chest. ‘They wore the White Hart.’
‘Bowmen,’ Cranston declared, ‘Cheshire archers.’
‘The same,’ the girl smiled crookedly, ‘led by a man with hair and face as white as snow.’
‘Albinus,’ Cranston whispered, ‘with a company of archers. He ignored our request to leave things well alone. Oh dear!’ He thanked the girl and pushed open the door. Inside the dingy dwelling, a flagstone passage, greasy underfoot, led them to different chambers: a bedroom and chancery office next to a shabby kitchen and scullery.
‘Everything is bare,’ Cranston murmured. They went up the stairs to what must have been Lebarge’s chambers: a bed-loft and writing room with rickety furniture. The house seemed to have been swept clean, with little to show who actually lived there. They searched but found nothing except scraps of parchment, ragged remnants of clothes, discarded chancery items and an ancient, battered lanternhorn. The small walled garden at the rear of the house was no better: overgrown flower patches, herb plots with rubbish piled high. Athelstan glimpsed a broken money casket and two small coffers, their metal studs gleaming in the afternoon sunlight.
‘Truly a wasteland,’ he declared. ‘Sir John, there is nothing here for us and, I suspect, Thibault’s men found the same.’
They left the house and made their way up to St Mary Le Bow, standing at the heart of Cheapside. The crowds were now thinning as the day began to die. The breeze had turned cooler and stronger, blowing the saltpetre strewn in the streets to sting the eye and clog the throat. St Mary’s loomed, a turreted, gabled mass against the fading blue sky, its steeple pointing like a warning finger towards heaven. On its steps stood a storyteller delivering a tale about a fairy king in Essex who had cleared a swampy place near a pool, long overgrown with briar to form a coven for foxes. All this had been pruned to build a pretty, timber banqueting-house now known as ‘Pleasaunce-in-the-Marsh’.
Cranston and Athelstan brushed past him, as they did a wonder-teller proclaiming that he had seen a fleet of demons cross the Middle Sea. On the top step a public penitent, garbed completely in red, a mask covering his face with slits for eyes and mouth, brazenly declared, ‘I have lived in the Devil’s service with late suppers and even later risings. I must repent, otherwise after death my soul shall curse my body. I shall have demons for fellows, burn in fire and shiver on ice.’ The penitent gestured at Athelstan. ‘I’ll give you a blessing for a coin.’
‘And I will give you one for free,’ Athelstan retorted: he turned and went back down the steps and studied the church carefully. He had a feeling, an instinct that something was not quite right, though he could not say why. He had no evidence, nothing at all to justify his unease, except he did wonder about the storyteller and the public penitent. Once, deep in his cups, Pike the Ditcher had confessed to Athelstan that such eccentrics were often the spies and watchmen of the Great Community of the Realm.
‘It’s the wrong time of day,’ Athelstan murmured to himself. ‘The church won’t have many visitors now, so why tarry here?’ He returned to his study of the church. St Mary Le Bow stood in its own ground behind a low stone wall, a little removed from the busy clamour of Cheapside. An eerie sadness hovered around the church: a touch of menace, of baleful watchfulness. Athelstan walked back up the steps and stared at the evil-looking gargoyles guarding the door. He glanced over his shoulder; the public penitent was watching him carefully. The friar shrugged, turned away and led a bemused Cranston into the gloomy nave. On a pillar near the baptismal font, a leaping figure of St Christopher caught Cranston’s eye. The coroner wondered what was bothering the little friar but, as always, he’d let this sharp-minded ferret of a man have his way. They walked up the church. At the far end reared a huge rood screen dominated by a twisted figure of the crucified Christ. The light streaming through the windows, some of them filled with painted glass, was beginning to fade. Visitors scurried about, dark shapes in the gathering murk. Incense and candle smoke fragranced the air. On the left of the high altar, a host of tapers glowed before the Lady altar.
Athelstan led Cranston into the north transept, stretching beyond the drum-like pillars, which housed a number of small chantry chapels. Each of these was partitioned off by a polished, gleaming trellised screen. A small door led into a carpeted interior with a stained-glass window high in the outside wall, an altar on a slightly raised dais and a prie-dieu placed before it. Each chapel was adorned with statues, pictures and triptychs extolling the merits of the saint in whose name the chapel was dedicated. Some of the chantries contained tombs. Reginald Camoys’, at the far end, dedicated to St Stephen, housed two: simple table tombs with a knight in armour as an effigy, a naked sword clasped in his folded hands, the carved face almost hidden by the chainmail coif and nose guard of the conical war helmet. A sculptured frieze ran along the side of each tomb. Athelstan crouched down to examine these.
‘Look, Sir John, they are virtually the same. This,’ he traced the carving with his finger, ‘must be the Cross of Lothar with a kneeling knight, paying devotion as he would before the Sacrament, and this, repeated twice, is the cipher or cryptic symbol “IHSV” beneath the rising the sun, and the inscription to “The Unconquerable Sun”, an allusion, I suspect, to the resurrected Christ. The stone is costly, possibly Purbeck marble, specially imported.’
Athelstan straightened up and stared at the window above Penchen’s tomb. Filled with painted glass, it proclaimed the same message as the one found on the frieze. Reginald Camoys’ tomb, built along the wooden trellis screen which separated the chapel from the one beyond, was almost identical. Athelstan stared around, a comfortable, well-furnished chantry with its elmwood altar, white cloths, silver-chased candlesticks and a cross which undoubtedly replicated that of Lothar. Athelstan picked this up and examined the imitation treasure with its green and gold paint, a cameo of a Roman emperor at its centrepiece.