Bloodstone Read Online Free PDF

owl  . . .’
    ‘Come on, Friar.’ Cranston, face almost hidden behind his muffler, pointed to where his principal bailiff Flaxwith with his hideous-looking mastiff Samson stood waiting ready to clear a way before the coroner. ‘Come on,’ Cranston repeated, ‘I’ve got a better tale to tell you.’
    Athelstan dug into his wallet, dropped a penny into the storyteller’s box and, cowl pulled well over his head, joined Cranston to battle through the surging crowd. Despite a cutting breeze from the river and the stench of uncleared refuse on the slippery paths, London’s citizens had flocked out hacking and sneezing in the freezing air, oblivious to the leaden, brooding clouds which threatened more snow. They hurried down to the tawdry markets around the bridge to gawp, purchase or just gossip. The more vigorous also thronged around the stocks close to the river to fling refuse at Guillaume Lederer, who sat imprisoned for calling Bertram Mitford ‘a covetous snot, a vagabond, a wagwallet’ not to mention, ‘a side-tailed knave’. Guillaume’s name and crime were proclaimed on a placard around his neck, which also invited passing citizens to hurl abuse as well as anything else they could lay their hands on. Further down a more serious business was drawing to an end: the hanging of two women, Dulcea and her companion Katerina, who’d feloniously murdered Alice Willard of Rotherhithe – strangled her, no less, during a pilgrimage to Canterbury. The crowds swirled around the execution cart which abruptly pulled away just as Athelstan and Cranston passed. Both women were left to dance in the air as they slowly strangled on the hempen noose dangling down from the sooty, four-branched scaffold.
    Death, of course, especially executions, was good for business and Athelstan was constantly distracted by the charlatans who always emerged on such occasions. One conjurer who, despite it being bleak midwinter, loudly boasted that the small pouch in his right hand contained three bumble bees which he could summon out, one by one each by their own name, as given to him by an angel he’d met on the road outside Havering-atte-Bowe. Other cozeners and conjurers had given up their tricks to plunder the corpses of the hanged and sell their ill-gotten items for a profit. A few of these knights of the dark just hoped the macabre scenes would influence the minds of those they hoped to cheat. Outside the Chapel of St Mary Overy a journeyman, his black capuchon, cotehardie and chausses embroidered with gold stars and silver moons, proclaimed how he, John Crok of Tedworth, had in the scarlet-blue fosser beside him a man’s head in a book. He proclaimed how the head was that of a Saracen. How he had bought it in Toledo in order to enclose a certain spirit which could answer questions about the future. Apparently the said spirit had not informed him about the approach of the coroner. One look at the burly Flaxwith and the equally fearsome Samson sent John Crok of Tedworth, his precious fosser clutched under one arm, fleeing through the crowds. Cranston just grunted noisily and muttered about some other time.
    They passed under the gatehouse to the bridge, its crenellations ornamented with long poles bearing the severed heads of executed traitors, pirates and other criminals. On the steps leading up to the gatehouse sat the diminutive Robert Burdon, the keeper surrounded by his brood of children. Burdon was preparing another head, all pickled and tarred, to decorate the end of a pole. He glimpsed Cranston and Athelstan, shouted a greeting and continued with his macabre task of combing the long hair on the severed head.
    Athelstan was now finding it difficult to keep up with Cranston’s stride. He still wasn’t sure where they were going or what they were doing. Cranston had told him little except that his wife, the diminutive Lady Maude, and their two sons the poppets were all ‘in fine fettle’. Then he added something, just as they