horse!’ He grinned broadly, but despite his bluster Cranston noticed how pale and ill his wife looked. He glanced away. Oh God! he thought. Am I to lose Maude? He tossed off his cloak and strode past his wife, touching her gently on the shoulder as he passed.
Athelstan was distributing communion, placing the thin white wafers on the tongues of his parishioners. Crim held the silver plate under their chins to catch any crumbs which might fall. Most of the parish council had turned up, some wandering in when Mass was half over.
The friar was about to return to the altar when he heard a tapping on the outside wall of the far aisle. Of course! He had forgotten the lepers, two unfortunates whom he’d allowed to shelter in the musty charnel house in the cemetery. Athelstan provided them with food and drink and a bowl of water infused with mulberry to wash in, but never once had he glimpsed their scabrous white faces, though from his clothes one was definitely a male. He wished he could do more for them but Canon Law was most insistent — a leper was not allowed to take communion with the rest of the congregation but could only receive it through the leper squint, a small hole in the wall of the church.
Crim remembered his duties and, picking up a thin twig of ash, handed it to the friar who placed a host on the end and pushed it through the leper squint. He repeated the action, whispered a prayer, and went back to finish the Mass.
Afterwards Athelstan disrobed in the sacristy, closing his ears to the crashing sounds from the nave as Watkin the dung-collector rearranged the benches for the meeting of the parish council. Athelstan knelt on his prie dieu, asked for guidance, and hoped to God his parishioners would overlook the dreadful events happening outside.
As soon as he stepped into the nave, he knew his prayers had been fruitless. Watkin was sitting in pride of place, the other members on benches on either side of him. Crim had placed Athelstan’s chair out of the sanctuary ready for him and, as he took it, Athelstan caught Watkin’s self-important look, the ominous flickering of the eyes and the mouth pursed as if on the brink of announcing something very important.
Ursula the pig woman had joined them, bringing her large fat sow into church with her in spite of the protests of the rest. The creature waddled around grunting with pleasure. Athelstan was sure the annoying beast was grinning at him. He did not object to its presence. Better here than outside. Ursula was a garrulous but a kindly old woman. Nevertheless the friar hid a blind hatred for her large, fat-bellied sow which periodically plundered his garden of any vegetables he tried to plant there.
Athelstan said a prayer to the Holy Ghost and leaned back in his chair.
‘Brothers and sisters,’ he began, ‘welcome to this meeting on our holiday feast of St Lucy.’ He ignored Watkin’s eye. ‘We have certain matters to discuss.’ He smiled at Benedicta then noticed with alarm how Watkin’s wife was glaring at Cecily the courtesan. A mutual antipathy existed between these two women, Watkin’s wife in the past loudly wondering why it was necessary for her husband to confer so often with Cecily on the cleaning of the church. Huddle the painter stared vacantly at a blank wall, probably dreaming of the mural he would like to put there if Athelstan gave him the monies.
Most of the parish business was a long litany of mundane items. Pike the ditcher’s daughter wished to marry Amisias the fuller’s eldest boy. The great Blood Book was consulted to ensure there were no lines of consanguinity. Athelstan was pleased to announce there were not and matters turned to the approaching Yuletide: the Ceremony of the Star which would take place in the church, the timing of the three Masses for Christmas Day, the non- payment of burial dues, and the children using the holy water stoup as a drinking fountain. Tab the tinker offered to fashion new candlesticks, two large ones, fronted with lions. Gamelyn the clerk volunteered to sing a pleasant carol at the end of each Mass at Yuletide. Athelstan agreed to a mummers’ play in the nave on St Stephen’s Day, and some discussion was held about who would play the role of the boy bishop at Childermass, the feast of the Holy Innocents, on the twenty-eighth of December.
Athelstan, however, noticed despairingly how Watkin just slumped on his bench, glaring impatiently as he clawed his codpiece and shuffled his muddy boots. Benedicta caught Athelstan’s concern and gazed anxiously at this man she loved but could not attain because he was an ordained priest. At last Athelstan ran out of things to say.
‘Well, Watkin,’ he commented drily. ‘You have a matter of great urgency?’
Watkin drew himself up to his full height. His greasy brow was furrowed under a shock of bright red hair, receding fast to leave a bushy fringe. His pale blue eyes, which seemed to fight each other for space next to a bulbous nose, glared around at his colleagues.
‘The cemetery has been looted!’ he blurted out.
Athelstan groaned and lowered his head.
‘What do you mean?’ shouted Ranulf the rat-catcher, his face sharp and pointed under a black, tarry hood.
‘In the last few days,’ Watkin announced, ‘corpses have been exhumed!’
Consternation broke out. Athelstan rose and clapped his hands for silence, and kept doing so until the clamour ceased. ‘You know,’ he began, ‘how our cemetery of St Erconwald’s is often used for the burial of corpses of strangers — beggars on whom no claim is made. No grave of any parishioner’s relative has been disturbed.’ He breathed deeply. ‘Nevertheless, Watkin is correct. Three graves have been robbed of their bodies. Each had been freshly interred. A young beggar woman, a Brabantine mercenary found dead after a tavern brawl, and an old man seen begging outside the hospital of St Thomas, who was found in the courtyard of the Tabard Inn, frozen dead.’ Athelstan licked his lips. ‘The ground is hard,’ he continued. ‘Watkin knows how difficult it is to dig with mattock and hoe to furnish a grave deep enough, so the very shallowness of the graves has assisted these blasphemous robbers.’
‘A guard should be placed,’ Pike the ditcher called out.
‘Will you do it?’ Benedicta asked softly. ‘Will you spend all night in the cemetery, Pike, and wait for the grave robbers?’ Her dark eyes took in the rest of the council. ‘Who will stand guard? And who knows,’ she continued, ‘if the robberies are committed at night? Perhaps they take place in the afternoon or eventide.’
Athelstan glanced at her gratefully. ‘I could watch,’ he interrupted. ‘Indeed, I have done so when I — er…’ he faltered.
‘When you study the stars, Brother,’ Ursula the pigwoman broke in, provoking a soft chorus of laughter for all the parishioners knew of their priest’s strange occupation.
Huddle the painter stirred himself. ‘You could ask Sir John Cranston to help us. Perhaps he could send soldiers to guard the graves?’
Athelstan shook his head. ‘My Lord Coroner,’ he replied, ‘has no authority to order the King’s soldiers hither and thither.’
‘What about the beadles?’ Watkin’s wife bellowed. ‘What about the ward watch?’
Yes, what about them? Athelstan bleakly thought. The alderman and officials of the ward scarcely bothered about St Erconwald’s, still less about its cemetery, and wouldn’t give a fig for the graves of the three unknowns being pillaged.
‘Who are they?’ Benedicta asked softly. ‘Why do they do it? What do they want?’
Her words created a pool of silence. All faces turned to their priest for an answer. This was the moment Athelstan feared. The cemetery was God’s Acre. When he had first come to the parish nine months ago he had been very strict about those who tried to set up market there or with the young boys who played games with the bones dug up by marauding dogs or pigs. ‘The cemetery,’ he had announced, ‘is God’s own land where the faithful wait for Christ to come again.’ Even then Athelstan had not given the full reason for his strictures; secretly he shared the Church’s fears of those who worshipped Satan, the Lord of the Crossroads and Master of the Gibbet, and often practised their black arts in cemeteries. Indeed, he had heard of a case in the parish of St Peter Cornhill where a black magician had used the blood drained from such corpses to raise demons and scorpions.
Athelstan coughed. How could he answer? Then the door was flung open and Cranston, his saviour, swept grandly into the church.
CHAPTER 2
