House of the Red Slayer Read Online Free PDF Page B

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.
    ‘Sir John,’ Athelstan whispered, ‘the poor woman has had enough.’
    ‘Sod her!’ Cranston snarled back. ‘She probably deserved it!’
    Athelstan looked closer at the coroner’s round red face.
    ‘Sir John, for pity’s sake, what is the matter?’
    Beneath the false bonhomie and wine-guzzling, Athelstan sensed the coroner was either very angry or very anxious. Cranston blinked and smiled falsely. He drew his sword and, turning his horse aside, moved over to the whipping post and slashed at the ropes which held the whore. The woman collapsed in a bloody heap on the ice. The bailiff, a snarl making his ugly face more grotesque, walked threateningly towards Cranston. Sir John waved his sword and pulled the muffler from his face.
    ‘I am Cranston the City Coroner!’ he yelled.
    The man backed off hastily. Sir John delved under his cloak, brought out a few pennies and tossed them to the whore.
    ‘Earn an honest crust!’ he snapped.
    He glared at his companion, daring him to comment before continuing down past the stews and on to the wide expanse of London Bridge. The entire trackway of the bridge was coated with ice and shrouded in mist. Athelstan stopped, his hand on Cranston’s arm.
    ‘Sir John, something is wrong! It’s so quiet!’
    Cranston grinned. ‘Haven’t you realised, Brother? Look down, the river is frozen.’
    Athelstan stared in disbelief over the railings of the bridge. Usually the water beneath surged and boiled. Now it seemed the river had been replaced by a field of white ice which stretched as far as the eye could see. Athelstan