Candle Flame

PROLOGUE

‘Bloodletting’: a technique to restore the humours.

The Guardian of Sin, that Creature of Dread from Hell, had certainly set its mark on London during the freezing month of February, the year of Our Lord 1381. Candlemas had been honoured with taper-light and candle-bright in all the city churches, but the hiss of Hell’s adders and the venom of the ancient serpent, or so the chroniclers would have us believe, could be heard in the very air. The Demon of the Abyss had allegedly set up camp in the narrow spires of those same London churches. According to the monastic scribes, ‘The demons who sheltered there peered out between the bells to seek their prey before tripping merrily along the narrow alleys of Southwark to kiss and caress their legion of followers.’ Foul deeds were perpetrated, grievous sins committed and none more so than in the spacious Southwark tavern The Candle-Flame which lay along the riverside, a mere bow shot from the Church of St Mary Overy. The Candle-Flame was a majestic hostelry built, enlarged and developed on the profits of the recent war in France by Mine Host Simon Thorne, a former captain of hobelars who had served with such distinction under Sir Walter Manny. The Candle-Flame was certainly a house built on blood; nevertheless, it had prospered from the busy river trade and was established as a popular resting place for the constant pilgrimages to Canterbury, Glastonbury, Walsingham, the Holy Blood of Hailes and the Black Virgin of Willesden. The Fraternity of the Water Men, the Guild of Mudlarks who scavenged the banks, not to mention the Society for the Saving of Souls – former sailors prepared to go to help any craft in difficulty on the Thames – were all worthy covens that met at the tavern to discuss business and celebrate their achievements.

The Candle-Flame was a landmark in Southwark. The tavern’s shiny, grey-tiled roof capped a soaring three-storey mansion fashioned in brick and timber and eked out with lathe and plaster, its brickwork a smart red, the plaster snow white, its timbers a glossy black. The hostelry’s northern entrance facing the river consisted of a splendid water gate, a towered structure approached by a firmly embedded jetty which swept along to broad entrance steps. The southern side boasted a majestic battlemented gatehouse which led into an expansive cobbled stableyard bound by the tavern proper and on the other three sides a range of two-storey buildings comprising bake house, wash house, brew house, larder, stables, storerooms and a well-furnished smithy. The Candle-Flame was famous for its grotesquely carved gable ends with the grinning faces of monkeys, satyrs, wodwoses and fish-men. Inside stretched a great taproom called the Dark Parlour because of its polished oaken pillars, rafters, panelling and other woodwork. It was a truly comfortable taproom with proper tables, a cushioned stool area and window seats. The thick rope matting across the floor was scrupulously cleaned at least once a week. The tavern windows were filled with horn and close-shuttered both within and without; a few of these were even glazed in fine glass delicately painted with heraldic insignia. On either side of the Dark Parlour, with its great fire roaring in the cunningly carved mantled hearth, ranged the kitchens, refectories, butteries, herb parlours and pantry stores. Bread was baked on the premises and the sweet, fresh smell of the pure manchet mingled with the cured hams and flitches of smoked bacon, as well as the dried vegetables and herbs all hanging in their snow-white string baskets from the Dark Parlour’s polished beams. Above the ground floor stretched the middle chambers, as Mine Host proudly described them: well-furnished rooms with soft four-poster beds, warmed by dark-blue curtains and costly embroidered counterpanes. The rest of the furniture was handsomely carved and delicately inlaid. Pictures, triptychs and crucifixes, each covered with a gauze veil which could be pulled back, decorated the shiny cream plaster walls above gleaming wooden wainscoting. Candlesticks with a carved hand clasping the socket provided light. Wire-mesh braziers and silver chafing dishes exuded warmth whilst guests could use the elmwood coffers, aumbries and cypress chests to stow their belongings. On the floor above ranged less luxurious rooms and, just under the roof, lay the garrets and cocklofts with their truckle beds and meagre sticks of furniture.

However, The Candle-Flame was famous for more than its magnificent appearance, hot stews of venison and pike and delicious ale brewed on the premises or even its comfortable lodgings. The tavern also possessed the Barbican: a grey-stone, two-storey soaring tower which stood, solitary and forbidding in the Palisade, a broad stretch of wasteland to the east of the tavern. The Palisade still served as the execution ground for Southwark, the gallows and execution block being erected close to the Barbican. Gossips hotly debated this grim donjon’s origins. Some argued that it had been built during the reign of the present king’s great, great grandfather, when the Crown of England used the ancient wharves and quaysides of Southwark to provision war cogs ready to sail out and fight the galleys of France, which nosed like savage wolves into the Thames Estuary and along London’s great river. Over the years the Barbican had ceased to be a weapon store or fighting tower. Mine Host Simon Thorne often hired it out to parties who might need seclusion, privacy or protection. On 13 February 1381, the eve of the Feast of St Valentine, Edmund Marsen, collector of the poll tax along with Mauclerc, his scribe, Hugh of Hornsey, a captain of archers, and five bowmen had arrived at The Candle-Flame and taken up lodgings in the Barbican. They could well need such a strongly fortified tower, with its heavy oaken door, latticed eyelet and solitary shuttered window on the second storey. Marsen was responsible for collecting the poll tax along the south bank of the Thames. He had been most ruthless in pursuit of what was due to his master, John of Gaunt, uncle to the boy king, Richard II, and self-styled Regent to the kingdom during the minority of his nephew. Marsen’s name was hated, both high and low. A cruel, avar-icious man, Marsen had squeezed the families and communities to the south of London in a grip as tight as any hunter’s snare. No one dare oppose him, at least not yet. Marsen, full of malicious glee at his achievement, had broken his journey at The Candle-Flame to rest, take stock and plot even further plundering on behalf of his royal master. Marsen was a land pirate, the most feared of his kind. He had swept into the hostelry demanding the very best for himself. Mine Host Simon Thorne, tall and rubicund-faced, who acted the ever-smiling, ever-merry tavern master, had been expecting him. The Palisade, that stretch of rough, common ground which ran down to the river bank, had been cleared and the Barbican prepared for Marsen, Mauclerc and their military escort. Marsen had demanded the very best food, so he dined on the likes of charlet and pork with eggs, as well as roast capon in a highly spiced black-pepper sauce, tansy cakes and other delicious dishes, accompanied by tankards of The Candle-Flame’s famous ale brewed by Thorne himself and popular all along the riverbank for its taste and potency.

Mooncalf, chief ostler and cleaner of the latrines and garderobes at the tavern, was the one to rouse Marsen after his nights of gluttony, drunkenness and lechery. Early on the morning of 17 February, Mooncalf reluctantly prepared to do this. He wrapped a cloak about himself, gripped the lantern horn more tightly in his ragged, mittened hand, using the other to pull over the deep capuchon to protect his head against the icy cold breeze which bit as sharp as a razor. For a while Mooncalf stood in the tavern porch staring up at the clearing sky. This had been a cruel, iron-hard winter. Would spring ever come, but what then? Mooncalf was most fearful. London seethed with unrest like oil in a fiery hot skillet. The king was a child and his uncle, John of Gaunt, ruled with a mailed fist from his magnificent palace of the Savoy. Gaunt was depicted by his many enemies, and there were many, as the Prince of Hell and his ministers the Minions of Darkness. Opposition was growing like weeds on a dung hill. In the shires surrounding London and now the great city itself, the poor, taxed and tied to onerous burdens, had formed their own coven, the Great Community of the Realm; its leaders, the Upright Men, were feverishly plotting the Day of Swords, the Season of the Great Slaughter. On that fateful day the poor would rise in rebellion. They would create a new commonwealth free of any prince, prelate and pontiff; it would be a time of blood, when deep-rooted grievances would be settled and the ground cleared so the New Jerusalem could arise along the muddy banks of the Thames. The doggerel chant of the Upright Men, ‘When Adam delved and Eve span who was then the gentleman?’ was proclaimed all over the city, spiked on church doors, the Great Cross at St Paul’s, the Standard in Cheapside and even the splendid gateway to the Savoy palace. Gaunt retaliated with hangings, disembowellings and quarterings at the Elms in Smithfield, Tyburn and Cheapside. Severed heads, boiled, pickled and tarred, decorated the execution poles above the great gatehouse on London Bridge. Blood bred blood. The Upright Men fought savagely against the tightening, panther-like embrace of Gaunt, or so Mooncalf’s master Mine Host Thorne described it, and the taverner was well versed in his horn-book. The Upright Men had only to bray their trumpets and they would summon up all the dark dwellers from the Halls of Shadows, London’s squalid slums, be it Whitefriars or, Mooncalf shivered, here in Southwark. The Children of the Twilight, the Knights of the Knife, the Squires of the Sewer, the Pages of the Pit, all sharp as the tooth of any saw, waited impatiently for the black banner of anarchy to be raised. Hatred seeped the streets and alleyways of London like the curdling venom of a subtle serpent. The Upright Men encouraged, nourished and supported this, their envoys coursing through a London crowd like hungry pikes in a mere. The Earthworms, the horsemen of the Great Community of the Realm, all garbed to terrify, would appear abruptly in the city, pouring out of some alley mouth to clash with Gaunt’s mounted retainers. They had recently captured one of the Regent’s tax collectors, Owain Tabbard, in Cricklegate. The Earthworms had surrounded him, beat him, robbed and stripped him, then set him back on his mount with his face turned to the horse’s rump, holding its tail between his hands instead of a bridle. The Earthworms had paraded Tabbard through the streets before cropping his ears and nose and throwing him into a filthy lay stall. Another collector had suffered even worse. He had been ambushed and decapitated, his severed head left in blood-filled wineskin close to the main gate of the Savoy.

Mooncalf’s teeth chattered as he stared into the cold darkness. The ostler nourished his own secret plans to escape the impending conflagration. The Lollard, the heretic Sparwell, had been taken up and imprisoned in the Bocardo, Southwark’s vile prison; Sparwell’s arrest would warn others of the danger of belonging to any sect which disagreed with the Church. If Mooncalf’s plans came to fruition, and last night’s secret meeting was promising, then he would pack his belongings and move to more comfortable lodgings. In the meantime, the sky was lightening. Mooncalf dare not waken Marsen and his coven too early and so be greeted with foul curses and the slops of their night jars. Mooncalf, like his master, just wished the tax collector and coven would go: their very presence at The Candle-Flame was dangerous, whilst it provoked Mine Host’s worries about continuing to stay and manage the tavern. The Great Revolt would surely come. Southwark was a hotbed of unrest. Did not some of the inhabitants of the nearby parish of St Erconwald’s, men like Watkin the dung collector and Pike the ditcher, sit high in the councils of the Upright Men? What would happen to The Candle-Flame once the horror emerged? Would they, as Mine Host’s pretty new wife, Eleanor, wailed, be murdered whilst the tavern was put to the torch? Mooncalf glanced again at the sky; the weak light was strengthening. He grasped the lantern horn and moved out, bracing himself against the freezing air. He crossed the frost-hardened gardens, through the wicket gate and into the Palisade, stumbling over the harsh, uneven, ice-bound ground, the pool of light thrown by the lantern horn dancing and jittering around him. Mooncalf paused at a grunting sound. He lifted his lantern horn. The Palisade was a stretch of common land and Don Pedro the Cruel, the tavern’s huge boar pig, loved to browse there. The great pig had surprisingly spent the night out in the open. Mooncalf could glimpse the boar’s sleek skin as it lay prostrate beneath a bush snoring and gasping. Mooncalf lifted the lantern, his curiosity now quickening. Don Pedro liked his comforts – usually he would return to his sty. So why had he settled down here? Mooncalf moved towards the pig, only to be distracted by the dying fire of Marsen’s guard. Two of the Tower archers under their captain Hugh of Hornsey had set up camp outside the Barbican. Mooncalf wondered why this guard was not active; why had no challenge been issued? He peered through the murk and saw two bodies lay close to the flickering embers of the fire. A stomach-lurching dread seized the ostler: something was very wrong. A few yards away the Barbican loomed massive and sombre through the mist. The grey dawn-light was thinning. The breeze was cutting, yet it was the silence which frightened Mooncalf, as if some hell-born malevolence shifted in the shadows. Mooncalf glanced at the fire – nothing more than red-hot embers. The two archers were lying strange, not rolled in their cloaks. The ostler hurried over and stifled his scream. Both guards lay sprawled on the ground, open-eyed before their dying fire; the trickle of blood between their gaping lips had mingled with that from their noses, now frozen hard to form a hideous death mask. The weapons of both men, sword and dagger, lay close by but these had proved no defence against the harsh feathered bolts which had taken each of them deep in the chest. Mooncalf, moaning in terror, hand clutching his groin, stumbled over to the Barbican, which also lay quiet in all its stark bleakness. The ostler stared up at the donjon’s only window: it looked shuttered from within and out. He placed the lantern horn down and tried the heavy oaken door. He pressed hard only to realize that the door was bolted at both top and bottom. Shaking with unspoken terrors, Mooncalf crouched down to peer through the large keyhole but this was blocked by the heavy key on the other side. Mooncalf beat the door, shouting and screaming, but his voice trailed away at the ominous silence which answered him. He glanced back at the dying campfire, those glassy-eyed corpses frozen in death. The ostler’s courage gave way. He grabbed the lantern horn, stumbling across the Palisade and running blindly until he reached the tavern’s postern door. He hurled himself through this and found himself in the hallway, feverish with terror. He unlocked the main door, grasped the bell rope in its casing and pulled as hard as he could, shouting as loud as his dry, cracked throat would allow.

‘Harrow! Harrow!’

Mooncalf breathed out noisily. The hue and cry had been raised. Above him doors and window shutters were flung open, footsteps clattered on the stairs. Mine Host Simon Thorne, burly-faced, his hair all a-tumble, arrived shouting and cursing, followed by his black-haired, pretty-faced wife Eleanor. The taverner seized Mooncalf.

‘What is it, boy?’

Thorne’s fierce eyes, red-rimmed with sleep, glared at the trembling ostler. Behind him mustered the servants armed with clubs, cudgels, ladles and anything they could snatch from the kitchen. Nightingale the candle boy even had a cooking pot on his head whilst Thomasinus the turnspit had snatched an ancient battleaxe from the wall.

‘What is it, boy?’ Thorne repeated. Mooncalf gabbled what he had seen. Mine Host’s jaw sagged as he stared in disbelief at the ostler.

‘It can’t be,’ he muttered, ‘no, not here!’ He shook off his wife’s hand, bellowing orders as he struggled to put on the leggings and boots his wife brought. Once ready, Thorne led his horde of servants out of the tavern and into the Palisade. Pedro the Cruel, now recovering from his slumber, struggled to its feet, snuffling and snorting at the bitter cold breeze. Thorne, mindful of what Mooncalf had told him, ordered Porcus the pig boy to drive the boar back to its sty, well away from the corpses of the two archers. The morning light did nothing to lessen the horror. The cadavers of both archers were blood-soaked, their bearded faces whitened by the hoar frost, full of glassy-eyed terror at their sudden, violent death. Thorne strode towards the Barbican. Mooncalf watched intently as his master thundered against the heavy oaken door before stepping back to stare up at the square, shuttered window.

‘We would need a battering ram to shatter the door,’ he called over his shoulder, ‘and we don’t have a ladder high enough for that window.’ The taverner pointed to a nearby tangle of carts, barrows and ladders under a heavy, dirt-encrusted tarpaulin. ‘Pull that back and you’ll find what we need. Mooncalf, Nightingale – swiftly now.’ They hurried off with others and pushed back a handcart used to carry the filth from the pigsty on the far side of the Palisade. They positioned this under the window and brought a siege ladder, resting it secure so its hooks grasped the deep sill beneath the Barbican’s only window. Thorne tested it was secure and climbed cautiously up. The cart provided an extra two yards in length to the ladder. Mooncalf stood holding the bottom rungs. Thorne was now at the top. He had drawn his dagger and pushed this between the gap in the shutters, trying to prise up the iron-hook clasp. Eventually he pulled back the shutters.

‘I will have to cut the horn,’ he shouted down. Mooncalf watched his master slit the horn and put his hand through to lift the latch. He pulled back the door window and began to hack at the inner shutter. At length this too gave way. Mine Host made to climb through but then thought again and stared down. ‘I am too bulky, too fat. Mooncalf …’ The taverner came down and Mooncalf reluctantly went up. He reached the top rung and clambered over the sill, pushing back both windows and shutters, and climbed into the horrors awaiting him. The candles had long guttered out, the great lantern on its table had been snuffed, but the grey morning light revealed a grotesque scene. Tables, stools and other sticks of furniture had been overturned, yet it was the four corpses which caught Mooncalf’s terror-filled gaze. The two whores brought in by Marsen lay tumbled on the floor. One had suffered a thrust to the heart, her naked breasts now crusted with blood from the other’s severed throat. She leaned drunkenly back over a stool, belly and breasts thrust up into the air, her slender throat gaping like another mouth. Marsen the tax collector lay against the wall, sword and dagger close to his lifeless fingers, his chest speared by a deep thrust. Nearby Mauclerc had suffered a savage belly wound which seemed to have drained his body of all fluid. Mooncalf could only stand and stare, his throat and mouth bone dry, his tongue thickening so he could hardly breathe.

‘Why this?’ he murmured, then remembered the iron-bound exchequer coffer, Marsen’s pride and joy: it now stood on a footstool, the concave lid thrown back, empty as a spendthrift’s purse. Mooncalf glanced back towards the window and noticed a square of vellum pinned to the inner shutter. Mooncalf, who had been instructed in his numbers and letters by his parish priest, went across and quietly mouthed the letters written there. In fact, as soon as he had whispered the first word he realized what it was. He had heard the chatter in the taproom about this quotation from the Bible. Mooncalf pointed out the letters to himself as he mouthed the words, recalling what Nightingale had told him, something about ‘mene, mene’. Mooncalf let his hand drop and stepped back. He would leave that to others. He walked towards the trapdoor, pulled back the bolts and lifted the great wooden slab. He clumsily scrambled down the ladder. The ground floor of the Barbican held fresh, gruesome sights. The three archers on guard lay soaking in thickening pools of blood, weapons not far from their hands. Mooncalf, mouth gaping, eyes blinking, could only shake his head. The Upright Men were performing all kinds of mischief, but how could all this be explained? Two archers lay dead outside with shafts to their hearts? And here in the Barbican, its window, entrance and trapdoor all bolted, locked and secured? Nevertheless, some misty messenger from Hell had swept through this tower and dealt out bloody judgement.