The Midnight Man (14 page)

‘I thought I saw him in the shriving queue at the beginning of Lent, I am sure.' Almaric caught the annoyance in Parson Smollat's face. ‘Anyway,' the curate shrugged, ‘he has gone to God now.'

Stephen stared around the table. Sir William and Beauchamp sat lost in their own thoughts. Gascelyn murmured he should return to the cemetery but then made a plaintive plea about how long was he supposed to keep up supervision of that hell-haunted place? Sir William cut him short with an abrupt gesture of his hands. Servants came in to clear the platters. Anselm plucked at Stephen's sleeve, a sign they should leave. They bade farewell, collected their cloaks, panniers and satchels and made their way out. Darkness had fallen. The streets were emptying. This was lamp-lighting time, when shutters and doors were slammed shut. The only glow of gold was the flare between the chinks of wood or from the lanterns slung on door hooks. The rain had turned the dirt underneath to a squelchy mess. Shadows moved. Cries and shouts echoed eerily. They passed houses where doors were abruptly flung open to reveal scenes inside. It was like passing paintings on a church wall. A drunk collapsed inside a hallway; a corpse sheeted in white resting on a wheelbarrow ready to be moved elsewhere; a group of dicers gathered around a pool of light from a shabby table lamp, pinched faces intent on their game. Different smells and odours wafted out. The sickening reek of raw meat being fried in cheap oil, the pungent aroma of rotting vegetables, the faint fragrance from incense pots; all these competed with the offensive odour of the slops being deposited on the streets from jakes' jars and urine bowls, as well as pails and buckets of filthy water.

‘Magister, where are we going?'

Anselm pulled his cowl forward. ‘Stephen, we shall be busy this eve of Saint Mark's. First, we shall visit Hogled Lane to pay our respects to Mistress Bardolph. Truth,' he peered through the dark, ‘will break through eventually.' With that enigmatic remark the exorcist strode on. They took directions from a woman trimming a doorway lantern, turned up an alleyway and entered Hogled Lane, a mean, shabby runnel with a narrow, evil-smelling sewer channel along its centre. They found the alehouse, the sheaf of decaying greenery pushed into a crack above its doorway hung next to a peeling sign which proclaimed: The Burning Bush. The taproom inside was as bleak and squalid as the exterior, a low-ceilinged room with square open windows on the far wall. Bread, cheese and other perishables hung in nets from the rafters well away from the vermin which scuttled and squeaked between the ale barrels on either side. Under foot the dry rushes had snapped, split and corrupted to a mushy slime by those who had come in to pay their final respects to Master Bardolph. The dead man lay in his shroud, only his face exposed, on the long common table down the centre of the room. Cheap tallow candles ranged either side; these made Bardolph's face even more gruesome, while the small pots of smoking incense around the swathed feet did little to make the hot, close air any less offensive.

The assembled mourners moved like sinister ghouls through the gloom. They huddled in the dark either side of the candlelight watching the sin-eater, a gnarled old man with long dirty hair, moustache and beard. He wore a crown of ivy, his face was painted black, his eyelids and lips a deep scarlet hue. He muttered some chant as he moved along the corpse, picking up with painted lips the offerings of sin symbolized by pieces of bread and dried meat. Now and again he would stop and chew noisily, throwing his head back like a dog, clap his hands softly, gesture towards the ceiling and move on to the next piece. Stephen expected Anselm to intervene but the exorcist just stood and watched. The old man's chanting grew louder. Greedily and noisily he devoured the sin offerings. Stephen did not like the ceremony; other beings were busy thronging in. Stephen could see, and he was sure Anselm also did, their swarthy, worn faces. These flocked close to his own, cheek by jowl, with pointed beards, glittering, dagger-like eyes, their chattering tongues crudely imitating the sin-eater's words. Stephen stared at the corpse; the more he did the stronger the visions grew: a road was opening up, long and dark, lit by a full moon and lined by shiny green cypresses, the moon-washed path glittered as the light sparkled on its polished pebbles. An owl, wings extended, passed like a ghost over the bedraggled figure staggering down the path. Stephen recognized the mud-splattered Bardolph. The dead gravedigger had lost his swagger and used the spade he carried as a crutch. As this hideous figure staggered closer, Stephen recoiled at the sight of Bardolph's eyes and mouth tightly stitched with black twine.

‘Stephen!' Anselm shook him vigorously; the figure disappeared. The sin-eater had gobbled all the offerings. Someone was playing a lute. The mourners were drifting back to the casks where dirty-winged chickens roosted on their iron-hooped rims. A woman broke away from the rest and came towards them. She had a heavy, leathery face, hard eyes and a rat-trap mouth. She brusquely asked their business while she scratched her face, fingers glittering with tawdry rings. She forced a smile when Anselm courteously introduced himself and Stephen. She replied that she was Adele, Bardolph's relict or widow. Anselm leaned down and whispered in her ear. Her puffy arrogance and shrewish ways abruptly faded. She stared, mouth gaping, and gestured that they follow her into the buttery at the back of the alehouse.

‘What did you say?' Stephen hissed.

‘I told her that, unless she told the truth,' Anselm whispered, ‘I had a vision of how, within a year and a day, she would join her husband in purgatory.' He nudged Stephen playfully. ‘It always works; it still might.'

Adele took them into the buttery, a squalid room with chipped shelves, battered cups and tranchers, small casks and barrels. ‘What do you want?' She sat down on a stool and nodded back at the taproom where raucous singing had begun. ‘I have guests to cater for.'

‘And a tidy profit to make on your husband's death, Mistress Adele? I will be brief. You do not seem to be the grieving widow?'

‘That, Reverend Brother, is because I am not.' Adele wiped her nose on the back of her hand. ‘I am no hypocrite. Bardolph was dead to me long before he was pushed from that tower.'

‘Pushed?'

‘Yes, Brother, pushed! What was Bardolph, a gravedigger and womanizer, doing on the top of Saint Michael's tower? Why go there?' She shook her head. ‘I don't know.'

‘Did he ever go there before?'

‘Never. I tell you, Bardolph didn't like heights.'

‘So why should someone push him? Did he have enemies?'

‘Were you your husband's enemy?' Stephen asked.

‘Bardolph had no time for me. We were indifferent to each other. He was only interested in his whores from that nugging house, The Oil of Gladness in Gullet Lane.'

‘Nugging house?' Stephen asked.

‘Brothel,' Anselm whispered.

‘He was a mutton-monger.' Adele paused to listen to a cackle of laughter from the taproom. Stephen scrutinized this cunning woman, her soul steeped in malice. She had an aura of squalid unease, a dirtiness of spirit.

‘He was always one for the ladybirds.' She continued: ‘Prostitutes.' Adele sniggered. ‘Well, not now.' She fingered the silver chain around her thick, sweaty neck: a small gold swan hung delicately from it. Both looked out of place next to the dirt-lined seams and wrinkles of her skin. ‘One in particular.' Adele sniffed. ‘Edith Swan-neck is what that princess of the night called herself. Bought her this as a present, he did.'

‘And?'

‘The little whore disappeared, God knows where. Bardolph searched but even her sisters of the night at The Oil of Gladness couldn't tell him.'

‘So the necklace?' Anselm asked.

‘Bardolph claimed he found it in the cemetery at Saint Michael's, lying in the grass. Oh, that was some time ago. Anyway, after that he'd say strange things . . .'

‘Mistress?' Anselm drew a coin from his belt purse and put it on top of an upturned barrel.

‘He said he would have his revenge against Parson Smollat.'

‘Revenge?'

‘I don't know why. Bardolph also boasted how he would be rich one day – then I would see him in a different light. I have, haven't I?' she sneered. ‘Corpse light!' Again, she sniffed. ‘I can tell you no more. He left this morning as usual, told me to look after the alehouse. God alone knows what happened.' Adele's fingers edged towards the coin on the barrel but Anselm picked it up and slipped it back into his purse.

‘If you have anything more, Mistress, but not until then.'

They left the alehouse and walked through the gloaming towards the torches flickering on the main thoroughfare. These had been lit by the wardsmen who had also fired the rubbish heaps to create more light and some warmth for the destitute slinking out of their corners and recesses. Some of these brought scraps of raw meat to grill and cook over the flames. The smell of rancid fat swirled everywhere. Stephen kept close to Anselm for this was the haunt of the night-walkers, the brothers and sisters of the dark, the fraternity of the bone: carrion-hunters, snakes-men, moonrakers, slop-collectors and all the rest who waited for the cover of night to do their work. The two Carmelites were swiftly inspected and ignored. A group of mounted archers appeared and the bobbing shadows and weasel-faces, all cowled and hooded, quickly disappeared. Anselm took advantage of this, stopping by a fire, watching the archers clatter by.

‘Magister, Bardolph?'

‘What do you think, Stephen?' Anselm replied. ‘What do I think? Are we thinking what we are supposed to be thinking?'

‘Magister, you are talking in riddles.'

‘So I am – my apologies. Was Bardolph's death the result of the haunting? Did he become possessed? Was he forced up to the top of that tower and made to jump? Or was he fleeing from some horror which crawled out of the walls?'

‘I don't think so,' Stephen replied, looking to his right as the people of the dark began to gather again. ‘I reflected on what happened while Adele was chattering. I saw Bardolph's corpse, all pure in its white shroud, except for that sin-eater.'

‘Paganism,' Anselm intervened, ‘but continue, Stephen.'

‘In life Bardolph was a man cloaked in dirt and mud. We found traces of that on the tower near the place where he fell.'

‘And?'

‘I watched you, Magister, as we went down that tower. You found no trace of mud or dirt on the steps or stairwell. Is that right?'

‘Yes, correct. You are the most observant of novices. What else?'

‘Bardolph didn't like heights. True, he could have been possessed but why should demons take someone they already have? A man immersed in the lusts of the flesh.'

Anselm softly clapped his hands. ‘The most subtle of novices. And?'

‘I believe Bardolph was carried to the top of that tower and thrown down. He was probably taken up wrapped in a sheet or a piece of canvas which would account for no trace of mud being left on the stairs or steps.'

‘Stephen, I believe the same. Yet, when Bardolph fell, was not everybody clustered around that table in Sir William's house?'

‘Except for the Midnight Man and his coven?'

‘I agree. Bardolph's assassins, whoever they may be, want us to regard Bardolph as the victim of secret, dark forces. He was, but those powers were of this world rather than the next.'

‘Magister, what do you think is happening?'

‘It is very simple.' Anselm stretched his hands out to the flame. ‘Now you are cold, you draw close to this fire. What came first? Why, the idea, of course. If you were warm would you even give this bonfire a second glance? Now, Stephen, think of something unpleasant.'

‘My father!'

Anselm laughed softly. ‘If you must. However, do you feel your body react at the thought of this man who believes you are madcap and fey-witted, so much so that he wanted to lock you away in some convent home? He dismissed what you saw, heard and felt, as the result of upset humours. He cast you out. Now, Stephen, what do you feel? A beating of the heart? A tumult in the stomach and bowels? So, change your thoughts and think of something pleasant. Alice Palmer, the maid who kissed you?' He nudged Stephen. ‘That will not be difficult. Think of her lovely lips, the gentle cusp of her cheek, her pretty eyes. Oh, God be thanked,' Anselm murmured, ‘for the vision of women. You feel happy, contented, flattered?' Anselm grasped a piece of stick and prodded the flames making the sparks flutter and rise. ‘The business of Saint Michael's and the abbey is very similar. Powerful emotions are expressing themselves in the phenomena we see. The cause is not human weakness but something much darker: ice-cold malice.'

‘Such as?'

‘Murder, Stephen – horrid, cruel, calculating murder allied to a malicious interference from the spirit world.'

‘Murder?'

‘Oh, yes, Stephen – the slaughter of innocents. Some hideous crime which shrieks for justice – not Bardolph's, but whose, as yet, we do not know. Now,' he sighed, ‘your august but severe father asked me to educate you and so I shall.' Anselm swiftly glanced over his shoulder. ‘Oh, by the way,' he whispered, ‘I think we are being followed. Anyway, Stephen, have you ever been to a brothel? No, I don't think you have. Well, it's The Oil of Gladness in Gutter Lane for us.'

Anselm asked directions from a surprised beadle supervising the feeding of the different bonfires now burning merrily along the runnel. The Carmelites strode off, pushing through the now gathering throng as the Worms of London, the poor and all their associates, swarmed out of their rat-like dens to search for what the city had left them. The streets were busy as the different fraternities from the guilds dispensed their charity: the Brotherhood of the Heavenly Manna, the Society of the Crumb, the Sisterhood of Martha, the Brethren of Lazarus – men and women garbed in penitential robes pulling hand-carts and barrows full of food, meat, bread and fruit rejected by the markets. Torches glowed. Flames juddered against the whipping breeze. Smells and cries carried. Beadles, bailiffs and wardsmen wandered armed with cudgels, swords, pikes and ropes, searching for those sanctuary men who thought they could leave the safety of their havens at St Paul's and St Martin's to wander the streets hunting for food, plunder and further mischief. London's underworld had opened up. Anselm, clutching his satchel, walked fast. He kept to the centre of the street though he was careful of the filth-crammed sewer.