‘Meryen the bailiff!’ one of the customers cried. ‘He’s warning that drunken funeral cortege. I’d recognize his trumpet voice across the city.’
Athelstan glanced sharply at the door as Meryen the bailiff swaggered into the alehouse. ‘All clear now,’ he roared.
Athelstan grabbed his chancery satchel and made his way out. He hurried along the streets, past the stocks crammed with miscreants fastened by the neck, wrist and ankle, and the moveable gibbets with their grisly burden of tarred corpses. He reached London Bridge and whispered a prayer as he made his way along the thoroughfare which cut between the lines of houses on each side. He always found the giddying height disconcerting, the rattle of nearby watermills, the roar of the water through the starlings, but he was determined to conquer such fears as he did when he climbed to the top of St Erconwald’s tower to view the stars at night. He thought of the mummer’s play his parish council was rehearsing and their use of the tower as well as Crispin the Carpenter’s repairs. He paused, fingers to his lips; he also recalled the bell clerk of St Mary Le Bow. Athelstan blinked furiously. Wasn’t St Mary one of the saints in that strange litany written out by Whitfield? What was that a reference to?
‘Saints and bell towers,’ he murmured, ‘I must remember that.’
‘Brother, are you moonstruck?’
Athelstan turned and smiled at the young courtesan whom he’d glimpsed earlier sidling along beside him.
‘No,’ he grinned, ‘just struck by your beauty.’ The young woman simpered. Athelstan blessed her and hurried on. He had almost reached the end of the bridge when he heard his name called. He recognized the voice and quietly groaned but turned to stare up at Master Robert Burdon, Custos of the Bridge and Keeper of the Heads. A true mannikin scarcely five feet tall, Burdon was a diminutive, barrel-bellied man who gloried in always being garbed in blood-red taffeta, the colour of the Fraternity of the Shearing Knife, the Worshipful Guild of Executioners and Hangmen. Burdon was standing on the top step of the side gatehouse, the iron-studded door behind him half open. He gestured at Athelstan to join him.
The friar forced a smile and, hiding his weariness, climbed the steep steps into a gloomy, narrow chamber lit only by a few candles. The floor was scrubbed clean, as was the long table running down the centre of the room. On shelves against the wall were ranged rows of recently severed heads, each washed in brine and tarred at the neck. A truly macabre scene, their glassy eyes staring blindly from beneath half-closed lids; blood-crusted mouths gaping as if about to speak. Athelstan tried to ignore the gruesome sight as he was ushered to a stool. From the chamber above he could hear Burdon’s brood of children readying themselves for bed.
‘What is it, Robert?’
‘Brother, I am terrified.’ Burdon gave vent to his fear in a rush of words. ‘Rebels from the southern shires will seize the approaches to the bridge. They will storm this gatehouse, they will put me and mine to the sword, they will …’
‘Hush now.’ Athelstan seized the mannikin’s small, gloved hand. ‘Robert, you are the King’s officer, you must do your duty, but the rebels mean you no harm.’ He fought to keep the doubt from his voice.
‘Yes, they do,’ Burdon replied mournfully. He rose, crossed to a shelf and brought back a cracked beaker brimming with blood; it also contained a number of sharpened sticks, each with an onion on the end, two large, the rest small. The message was blunt and stark.
‘The Herald of Hell?’ Athelstan asked.
Burdon closed his eyes. ‘He left a warning.’ The mannikin lisped:
‘Brother Burdon be not so bold,
For Gaunt your master has been both bought and sold.
Listen now and listen well
To this final warning from the Herald of Hell.’
‘Quite the poet,’ Athelstan retorted but softened as the panic flared in Burdon’s eyes. ‘Now, Robert, peace, when did this happen?’
‘A few nights ago, in the early hours, before the bell for matins tolled.’
‘The Herald talked of a final warning?’
‘Oh, yes. The Upright Men have asked me before where my allegiances lie, but nothing so threatening as this.’
‘In the early hours, you said?’
‘Yes, Brother, and I know what you are going to say! The bridge is sealed after the curfew bell so, whoever the Herald was, he must have swum the river, climbed the starlings and left the same way.’
‘Or he lives on the bridge,’ Athelstan made a face, ‘but, there again, that would create other problems. How does he get off the bridge at night to appear elsewhere in the city?’
Athelstan recalled Meryen the bailiff roaring outside that alehouse near Cheapside. He lifted his head and his gaze caught the sightless glare of one of the severed heads. The friar swiftly glanced away. He fully understood Burdon’s panic and fear and how this was being exploited by the likes of the Herald of Hell. The dark was truly rising. Time was flittering on. The harrowing of Hell was fast approaching. The chalice was cracked, the wine of life draining into the soil. Athelstan grew even more aware of impending disaster, conscious of a creeping, crawling malevolence seeping out to envelop the city. He had recently visited his mother house at Blackfriars and listened to the brothers who had been out amongst the villages in the surrounding shires. According to them, an eerie restlessness could be felt. ‘Nature’s struck and Earth is quaking,’ was how Brother Cedric described it, quoting a line from the ‘Dies Irae’. Owl hoots, prophecies of imminent disaster, haunted the night whilst during the day, birds of such ill-omen clattered around the high-branched trees before swirling darkly over sun-washed fields. The rebels were massing, gathering like some malevolent fruit coming to fullness. They kept well away from the main highways but slipped like ghosts along the coffin lanes, pilgrim paths and other ancient byways. Burdon was right to be fearful, Athelstan conceded to himself. When the rebels reached London their very first task would be to seize the bridge.
‘Brother?’
Athelstan smiled even as his heart sank at the sheer fear in Burdon’s face.
‘Robert, as I said, you are the King’s officer.’
‘My wife isn’t, or the beloveds. They are not the King’s officers.’
Athelstan sighed and opened his chancery satchel. Taking out a piece of parchment, he set up his writing tray and carefully wrote his message to Prior Anselm of Blackfriars. He then signed and sealed the piece of vellum and handed it to Burdon, who read it slowly, lips mouthing the words. The mannikin’s face became transformed, all anxiety draining from it.
‘Pax et bonum,’ Athelstan whispered. ‘Be at peace, my friend. If the terrors …’ He shrugged. ‘When they come, do your duty, Robert. However, at the first sign of real trouble, send your family to Blackfriars. Prior Anselm will provide them and you, once you have done what your conscience dictates, with safe and holy sanctuary. No one will dare touch you there.’
Athelstan gathered his writing material back into his chancery satchel. ‘Now I must go …’
He made his way down the alleyway leading to the concourse which fronted St Erconwald’s. He passed Merrylegs’ cook shop but the pastry maker and his many sons had apparently locked up for the day and adjourned to the Piebald Tavern, to sample the ale of its one-armed owner Joscelyn. The tavern door hung open, its shutters flung back. As he hastily walked by, sniffing the ale-fumed air, Athelstan heard the laughter and the doggerel chants of the Upright Men. Something had happened but he did not stay to find out what. He reached the precincts of his parish church, skirting the cemetery wall, then stopped and groaned. Godbless the beggar, together with his omnivorous goat Thaddeus, stood lurking in the shade of the lychgate. The only consolation Athelstan could thank heaven for was that neither Godbless nor Thaddeus appeared drunk; moreover, the goat was still firmly tethered, even though it still managed to lunge at Athelstan’s chancery bag.