The Book of Fires: A Novel of Medieval London Featuring Brother Athelstan by Paul Doherty

Author:Paul Doherty [Doherty, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781780290669
Google: e974oAEACAAJ
Amazon: B00P6NG7Q2
Publisher: Severn House Digital
Published: 2014-09-30T04:00:00+00:00

PART FIVE

‘Take petroleum, black petroleum, liquid pitch and oil of sulphur. Put all these in a pottery jar buried in horse manure for fifteen days.’

Mark the Greek’s ‘The Book of Fires’

‘Days of darkness and the deepest gloom. A day of blackest clouds and thick shadows like some sombre dawn. These spread across the horizon as if some vast and mighty host approaches such as has never been seen before. All the power of Hell has swept up to confront the wickedness of man …’

Athelstan stood outside the grim, gloomy portals of Newgate and stared at the preacher perched on an overturned barrel surrounded by blazing bonfires. Their light made the ragged, bony itinerant preacher even more eerie and grotesque. The friar drew a deep breath. He was glad to be out of the prison now, waiting for Sir John, who was arranging for Rosamund Clifford to be taken back to Firecrest Manor as well as greasing the palms of Tweng, the turnkey, Master Binny, Scrimshaw and the rest. The great fleshing markets, the butchers’ stalls outside Newgate, had ceased trading. Night had fallen. It was now the hour for others. Fishmongers from Billingsgate wheeled their barrows crammed with silvery salmon, white-bellied turbot, scarlet lobsters, dun-coloured crabs and mackerels with their gleaming green backs. Here to greet them clustered the real poor, the shirtless, shoeless, breadless and homeless. They would buy the stinking fish and take over this busy part of the city. They gathered like a tribe, their blue, bootless feet ulcerous from the cold, to feast on whatever globules of meat or fish they could filch or buy. Bonfires of the day’s rubbish had been torched to provide some light and warmth in the freezing night. The air stank with the odour of the rancid food now being toasted. The grisly-faced fripperers gathered, their barrows full of rags, discarded clothing and half-putrid hare-skins. Costermongers offered pickled herring in a slimy sauce, or salted whelks which looked like huge snails floating in a sea of brine. Athelstan looked pityingly at this horde of beggars and recalled Garman’s revolutionary fervour. Was the prison chaplain right? he wondered. Would the great revolt sweep all this squalid poverty away, burn it up like a fire sweeping through stubble? Athelstan felt a hand on his shoulder. Cranston, leading a group of bailiffs, had come quietly up behind him.

‘Little friar,’ he remarked, ‘the day is done and we are for the dark.’

‘Sir John, we have no choice, for the darkness seeks us …’

Athelstan recalled the events of the day as he sat at table in the kitchen of his priest’s house. Outside the faded hubbub of noise of the pilgrims still intent on the vigil echoed faintly. Matters, however, were now more orderly in the parish of St Erconwald’s. Admission to the church, as well as supervision of the stalls offering food, drink or relics of the Great Miracle, was now in the iron grip of the parish council led by Watkin and Pike. Queues were now more orderly and, at the agreed time, an hour before midnight, the church would be closed.

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