‘Suddenly, without warning,’ he whispered as he wrote, ‘I saw the witch, yes I did,’ the anchorite glanced towards his cot bed, ‘climbing on to me. It greatly shocked me. I was so terrified I could not speak. In one hand the harridan carried a wooden coffin and in the other a sharpened scythe. She put a foot upon my chest to restrain me.’ The anchorite pushed his journal aside and crept back towards the aperture. He peered through at the painting on the far pillar, the evocation of his own nightmare which haunted him day and night, awake or asleep. He had executed that. At the time he’d been proud of it, and so had the good brothers who’d called it a vivid ‘Memento Mori’. Now the anchorite was not so sure as he gazed out in the juddering light of a torch fixed in an iron sconce above the painting. He had depicted Death as that night-hag, her face gnawed away to gleaming white bone. He’d intended to paint black hollow eye sockets but instead he had given her red glaring eyes, her teeth jutting up loose in a large jaw, arms stretched out like scaly bat wings. The anchorite turned away then froze at the rustling of a robe and the slither of soft buskins. He hurried back to the anker slit. He was sure she was there — Alice Rednal had returned to haunt him. The anchorite wanted to scream but he could not, he dare not.

‘Go back to hell!’ he whispered hoarsely. ‘Go back I sent you there! Go back! In the name of the Lord and all that is holy I adjure you to return and stay there.’ He grasped the stoup of holy water which stood just within the doorway and feverishly threw a few drops about, but the cold pricking of his spine and the nape of his neck only deepened. She had come. The anchorite closed his eyes trying to summon up images of the Virgin and Child but he could not. All he could picture was a chamber full of flames and filth where venomous demons danced.

‘Hangman of Rochester, I promised you would see me again. Alice is here.’ The woman’s voice sounded like the hissing of a curling viper.

‘What do you want?’ the anchorite pleaded. ‘In God’s name, what do you want?’

‘Your soul!’

‘That is the Lord’s.’

‘Then your blood money.’

The anchorite glanced at the small silver-hooped casket crammed with precious coins.

‘Never!’ He turned, looked and recoiled at the face leering through the aperture, chalky white with glaring eyes.

‘Remember me?’ the voice hissed. ‘At the hanging tomorrow I will see you there, perhaps?’

The anchorite grabbed the pole he kept near his bed and turned to thrust it through the gap, but the phantasm had disappeared. The anchorite closed his eyes and fell to his knees, sobbing in prayer. .

THREE

‘The day of their destruction draws near,

Doom comes on wings towards them. .’

The melodious chant of the black monks of St Fulcher rose and fell in the taper-lit darkness of their great oak-carved choir close to the high altar. Athelstan leaned against the raised stall and tried not to be distracted by the images clustering around him. The sculptures, the vivid wall paintings, the shimmering colour of stained-glass windows, the darkness brooding at the edge of flickering light, not to mention row upon row of black garbed monks, their faces hidden by cowls — all of these were a constant temptation to gaze around.

‘I have sharpened my flashing sword,’ the choir sang.

Athelstan smiled at the words of the psalmist. Coroner Cranston had decided to curb his sharpened thirst in the refectory of the guest house, though not before telling Athelstan that they would not be returning to the city that evening. Athelstan had reluctantly agreed. He wanted to return to St Erconwald’s. God knows he had enough work there but the business here was compelling. This great abbey absorbed him. In itself it was a small stone city. At its centre stood this hallowed cathedral with its transepts and arches, pillars and plinths, its great rood screen carved in the same fine oak as the latticed woodwork of the chantry chapels dedicated to this saint or that which ranged along each aisle. Athelstan would love to bring his parishioners around this church, show them the exciting wall paintings and frescoes, the great table tombs of former abbots, the elaborate pulpit surmounted by a gorgeous banner displaying the Five Wounds of Christ. Perhaps the swan-loving abbot would grant such permission? A Christmas treat with a feast of bread and ale in the abbey buttery? But not now!

Athelstan let his mind drift. He had visited the narrow chambers of all three dead men. A sad experience. He and Cranston had gone through a collection of paltry possessions: badges, scraps of letters, weapons, clothing and pieces of armour, be it a wrist brace or an ugly-looking dagger. Nothing remarkable except in William Chalk’s, those pieces of parchment bearing the crudely inscribed words, ‘Jesu Miserere — Jesus have mercy on me’, repeated time and again. Athelstan had asked Wenlock the reason for this. He simply pulled a face and said that Chalk, like any man, was fearful of approaching death. For the rest. .

Athelstan stared up at a statue of St Fulcher. Those bare, whitewashed chambers with their pathetic possessions intrigued him. Something was wrong, Athelstan reflected. Ah, that was it! He smiled. Yes, they were far too neat and tidy, as if someone had already searched the dead men’s possessions — to remove what? Any suspicion about their past, the Passio Christi or some other bloody deed they’d perpetrated during the long years of war. .?

‘Then would the waters have engulfed us.’

Before the leading cantor’s words could be answered by the choir, a voice low but carrying echoed through the church.

‘And they have engulfed me,’ the voice continued. ‘Yea, I am caught in the fowler’s net and the trap has been sprung.’ The voice faded.

‘The anchorite, God bless him,’ the monk next to Athelstan whispered. ‘He has to hang a man tomorrow.’

The cantor, now recovered from his surprise, repeated the verse and the plain chant continued. Athelstan peered down the church and quietly promised himself a visit to the anchorite sooner rather than later. At the end of compline Athelstan expected Father Abbot, seated in his elaborately carved stall, to rise garbed in all his pontificals and deliver the final blessing. Instead a strange ceremony ensued, the likes of which Athelstan had never seen before. The monks sat down in their stalls, cowled heads bowed. A side door in the nave opened. Four burly lay brothers, armed with iron-tipped staves, brought in a man dressed in a black tunic, feet bare, hands bound, his face hidden by a mask. Immediately the cantor rose and began singing the seven penitential psalms as the prisoner was forced to kneel between black cloths set over trestles. Athelstan had noticed these when he had first come under the rood screen into the choir. As the monks chanted, Prior Alexander left his stall and thrust a crucifix into the prisoner’s bound hands. Other brothers wheeled a coffin just inside the rood screen whilst the almoner brought a tray carrying a flagon of wine and a platter of bread, cheese and salted bacon. Athelstan recalled the coffin he had seen and the gallows near the watergate. The abbot must have seigneural jurisdiction. The prisoner now before them was undoubtedly condemned to hang on the morrow though not before his soul was shriven and his belly filled with food. Athelstan whispered a question to the monk in the next stall. The good brother broke off from chanting the ‘De Profundis’ — and swiftly answered, before the prior coughed dramatically in their direction, how the prisoner was a convicted river pirate who’d murdered one of their lay brothers. The felon had fled to a church further up the Thames to claim sanctuary but eventually surrendered himself to the abbot’s court. He had been tried and condemned to hang from the gallows after the Jesus Mass the following day.