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

Sir John pulled back his cloak and tipped his beaver hat to the back of his head.

‘Come on, Brother!’ he bawled, winking at Benedicta. ‘We are needed at the Tower. Apparently Murder does not wait upon the weather.’

For once Athelstan was pleased by Cranston’s dramatic style of entry. The friar peered closely at him.

‘You have been at the claret, Sir John?’

Cranston tapped the side of his fleshy nose. ‘A little,’ he slurred.

‘What about the cemetery?’ Watkin wailed. ‘Sir John, our priest has to see to that!’

‘Sod off, you smelly little man!’

Watkin’s wife rose and looked balefully at Cranston.

‘My Lord Coroner, I shall be with you presently,’ Athelstan smoothly intervened. ‘Watkin, I shall attend to this business on my return. In the meantime, make sure that Bonaventura is fed and the torches doused. Cecily, you will put out food for the lepers?’

The girl stared vacuously and nodded.

‘Mind you,’ Athelstan muttered, ‘they tend to wander and look after themselves during the day.’

He smiled beatifically around his favourite group of parishioners and made a quick departure down the icy steps of the church and across to the priest’s house. He cut himself a slice of bread but spat it out as it tasted sour and stale. ‘I’ll eat on my journey,’ he murmured, and packed his saddlebags with vellum, pen cases and ink horns. Philomel, his old war horse, snickered and nudged him, a real nuisance as Athelstan tried to fasten the girths beneath the aged destrier’s ponderous belly.

‘You’re getting more like Cranston every day!’ Athelstan muttered.

He led Philomel back to the front of the church and ran up the porch steps. Cranston was leaning against the pillar, leering at Cecily whilst trying to keep Bonaventura from brushing against his leg. The coroner couldn’t stand cats ever since his campaigns in France when the French had catapulted their corpses into a small castle he was holding, in an attempt to spread contagious diseases. Bonaventura, however, adored the coroner. The cat seemed to know when he was in the vicinity and always put in an appearance.

Athelstan murmured a few words to Benedicta, smiled apologetically at Watkin and the rest; he collected his deep-hooded cloak from the sanctuary and returned just in the nick of time to prevent Cranston from toppling head over heels over Ursula’s fat-bellied sow. The coroner stormed out, glaring at Athelstan and daring him to laugh. Cranston mounted his horse, roaring oaths about pigs in church and how he would like nothing better than a succulent piece of roast pork. Athelstan swung his saddlebags across Philomel, mounted and, before Cranston could do further damage, led him away from the church into Fennel Alleyway.

‘Why the Tower, Sir John?’ he asked quickly, trying to divert the coroner’s rage.

‘In a while, monk!’ Cranston rasped back.

‘I’m a friar, not a monk,’ Athelstan muttered.

Cranston belched and took another swig from his wineskin. ‘What was going on back there?’ he asked.

‘A parish council meeting.’

‘No, I mean about the cemetery.’

Athelstan informed him and the coroner’s face grew serious.

‘Do you think it’s Satanists? The Black Lords of the graveyard?’ he whispered, reining his horse closer to Athelstan’s.

The friar grimaced. ‘It may well be.’

‘It must be!’ Cranston snapped back. ‘Who else would be interested in decaying corpses?’

The coroner steadied his horse as Philomel, conscious of the narrowing alleyway, tossed his head angrily at Cranston’s mount.

‘I’d like to root the lot out!’ the coroner slurred. ‘In my treatise on the governance of London… Two blue eyes glared at Athelstan, scrutinising the friar’s face for any trace of boredom as the coroner expounded on his favourite theme. ‘In my treatise,’ he continued, ‘anyone practising the black arts would suffer heavy fines for the first offence and death for the second.’ He shrugged. ‘But perhaps it’s just some petty nastiness.’

Athelstan shook his head. ‘Such matters are never petty,’ he replied. ‘I attended an exorcism once at a little church near Blackfriars. A young boy possessed by demons was speaking in strange tongues and levitating himself from the ground. He claimed the demons entered him after a ceremony in which the corpse of a hanged man was the altar.’

Cranston shuddered. ‘If you need any help…’ the coroner tentatively offered.

Athelstan smiled. ‘That’s most kind of you, My Lord Coroner. As usual your generosity of spirit takes my breath away.’

‘Any friend of the Good Lord is a friend of mine,’ Cranston quipped. ‘Even if he is a monk.’

‘I’m a friar,’ Athelstan replied. ‘Not a monk.’ He glared at Cranston but the coroner threw back his head and roared with laughter at his perennial joke against Athelstan.

At last they left the congested alleyways, taking care to avoid the snow which slid from the high, sloped roofs, and turned on to the main thoroughfare down to London Bridge. The cobbled area was sheeted with ice, coated with a thin layer of snow which a biting wind stirred into sudden, sharp flurries. A few stalls were out, but their keepers hid behind tattered canvas awnings against the biting wind now packing the sky with deep, dark snow clouds.

‘A time to keep secret house,’ Cranston murmured.

A relic-seller stood outside the Abbot of Hyde’s inn trying to sell a staff which, he claimed, had once belonged to Moses. Two prisoners, manacled together and released from the Marshalsea where debtors were held, begged for alms for themselves and other poor unfortunates. Athelstan threw them some pennies, moved to compassion by their ice-blue feet. Both Cranston’s and Athelstan’s horses were well shod but the few people who were about slipped and slithered on the treacherous black ice. These hardy walkers made their way gingerly along, grasping the frames of the houses they passed. Nevertheless, as Cranston remarked, justice was active; outside the hospital of St Thomas a baker had been fastened on a hurdle as punishment for selling mouldy bread. Athelstan remembered the stale food he had spat out earlier and watched as the unfortunate was pulled along by a donkey. A drunken bagpipe player slipped and slid along behind, playing a raucous tune to hide the baker’s groans. In the stocks a taverner, wry-mouthed, was being made to drink sour wine, whilst a whore, fastened to the thews, was whipped by a sweating bailiff who lashed the poor woman’s back with long thick twigs of holly.