31 - City of Fiends Read Online Free PDF Page A

in the hope that his prayers might succeed in winning him work with the
masons. He must earn some money somehow, and he had tried every other possible avenue.
    He had hoped that sheer determination and persistence would persuade a mason or carpenter to hire him, but they only laughed at him.
    ‘Come here, boy,’ one had called, a heavy-set man a clear six inches shorter than William. He’d been to a barber recently, so his beard and head were well shaven as he pinched
and prodded William’s arms. ‘Did you ever have a muscle on them, boy?’ he laughed.
    Another man was behind him, and he squeezed the flesh of William’s thighs and buttocks hard enough to hurt. ‘He couldn’t carry a hod, and those spindleshank legs of his
won’t drive the treadmill.’
    The first was eyeing him up and down. ‘Give me your hands . . . thought so. You’ve never done a day’s real work, have you, boy?’
    ‘I can add, write and read, and I’m used to accounting.’
    ‘Then go and speak to someone who has need of such skills. We don’t. We need carpenters, masons, plumbers and all the others who can help build a cathedral, not parchment-scratchers.
Well?’ he said, standing back, arms akimbo. ‘Go on, get up there.’
    ‘Where?’
    The mason pointed to the nearest ladder. ‘There. That one’ll do.’
    William stared at it. The thing was immensely long, reaching up to the third level. The larch poles of the scaffolding had some kind of rope that bound the cross members to each other, and while
William had heard that sailors tended to be used for lashing the poles to each other, he could see clearly that the ladder had nothing to hold it steady.
    ‘What ails you?’ the mason said, and the others all laughed.
    He walked to the ladder, set his hands on the rough rung, and began to climb. He did so with a steady carefulness, and a rising panic as, after ten or twelve feet, the whole contraption began to
bounce. It felt as though he must be catapulted from it, and his speed slowed as he approached the middle. Here it was terrifying. He clung with knuckles whitened, as the ladder sprang in and out,
towards the new cathedral walls, and away again. His thighs turned to water. He could no more climb than jump, and he must set his entire body flat against the madly bouncing contraption, his eyes
shut. Surely it would fly away from the wall at any moment.
    Looking down, he saw that all the masons had left. He was alone, desolate in his failure. Slowly, he let himself down to solid ground once more.
    Thrusting his thumbs in his belt, he walked down the Close and went out by the Bear Gate. While there, he saw the old beggar woman who had her post there. Reaching into his purse, he was about
to throw her a penny, when he realised he had nothing. She had more money than he. With a mumbled apology, shame firing his face a dull beetroot, he scurried past her, and out to Southgate
Street.
    Here he almost bumped into someone. William tried to apologise, but his tongue clove to the roof of his mouth.
    The man was his height, with pale, waxen features, and a long, straggling beard that reached to his middle-breast. His clothing was a mixture of tattered shreds: there was a once-good tunic that
was sorely worn, a fustian cloak, and hessian sacking covered his legs. In a bundle he clutched to his chest were all his worldly belongings. But it was his eyes that caught William’s
attention. They were wild, terrified. The eyes of a man who had lost everything, and knew that life would never improve. He must walk, and hope to find food. That was his entire life.
    William stared after him. That sight, he felt, was a revelation. An appalling picture of how he might look in a short time, if he and Philip could find no work and money: a desperate vagrant
dependent upon the alms of the Church just to exist.
    Petreshayes
    Sir Charles stood at the gateway and donned his worn riding gloves as he watched the three men. They were gathering with