‘Did Bardolph ever climb to the top of the tower?’ Anselm asked.
‘No,’ Parson Smollat replied between mouthfuls of meat.
‘Did he talk about anything untoward before his death?’
‘You heard what we all heard,’ Parson Smollat replied, ‘the night you attempted your exorcism. Bardolph explained how he fiercely resented what was happening at Saint Michael’s: the disturbance to his routine, the lack of fees, not to mention that Sir William had asked Gascelyn to guard the cemetery. Brother Anselm, we knew very little about the man, except. .’ Parson Smollat glanced at Sir William and raised his eyes heavenwards.
‘Except what?’ Anselm pressed.
‘Bardolph liked the ladies. Meet his widow,’ Sir William declared. ‘She will hardly mourn him. Bardolph bewailed his lack of fees but also felt he had been driven from what I can only call his rutting meadow.’
‘He brought his whores into the cemetery,’ Parson Smollat explained. ‘During inclement weather into the old death house or, if the season was warm enough, they would lie amongst the gravestones. Bardolph would stretch out with this drab or that. He seemed to enjoy such lewdry. He ignored my strictures, saying he didn’t give a fig.’
Anselm stared down at his platter. ‘Dusk is falling,’ he murmured. ‘Soon the darkness will shroud us all. I cannot understand why Bardolph fell from that tower. Was he driven up there by some malignant spirit? Was he forced to commit suicide? God save him, because he went to God unshriven. You gave him the last rites?’
Parson Smollat nodded.
‘Yes,’ Anselm murmured. ‘It is a terrible thing for any soul to fall into the hands of the living God.’ The exorcist stared hard at Parson Smollat, who had retreated deeper into the shadows. ‘Did Bardolph ever confide in you, parson?’
‘Why, no. Why should he?’
‘I thought he did.’ Amalric, who’d drunk copiously, declared.
‘No, no,’ the parson became flustered, ‘Bardolph was not the kind.’
‘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.
