The Book of Fires Read Online Free PDF Page A

beckoned at the pie-man, ‘I am going to take the Sacrament to your sick elderly father.’
    ‘The Ancient One of Days will be most pleased,’ Merrylegs lugubriously replied.
    ‘Which is more than I am,’ Athelstan snapped. ‘So, let us begin …’
    oOoOo
    Sir John Cranston, Lord High Coroner of London, rose from his judgement chair and walked over to the horn-filled window of his courtroom at the Guildhall. He opened the window and stared moodily down at the broad, cobbled bailey which stretched to the soaring, battlemented gatehouse leading into Cheapside. He had just finished reading the indictment against Ralph Tailor of Cripplegate: ‘That he did feloniously rape Alice Beggar of Queenhithe, and did carnally lie with her in her own house from day to day and night to night. The same said Ralph continued to indulge publicly in the shameful and abominable sin of debauchery …’
    ‘Satan’s tits!’ Cranston growled. ‘From one stew pot of wickedness to the next.’ He gazed round the judgement chamber; everything had been removed from the walls: crucifixes, triptychs, painted cloths, tapestries and other ornaments. All these, together with court rolls and other manuscripts, had been taken down to the steel-bound arca, the massive security chest in the Guildhall cellars.
    ‘Everything which can be stored away has been,’ Cranston murmured to himself. This included his own buxom wife, the Lady Maude, his poppets Stephen and Francis the twins, his wolfhounds Gog and Magog, together with his household retainers. Cranston had sent them deep into the countryside and the protection of a moated, fortified manor house. He’d also arranged for the families of Oswald and Simon, his scrivener and clerk, to join them. Brother Athelstan, however, was a different matter. The little Dominican priest was obdurate. He would not flee when the Great Revolt broke out, even though he conceded that London would be sacked. Cranston certainly agreed with that. He had clashed openly with the Regent, John of Gaunt, and others of the Royal Council who believed the mailed might of royal troops would prevail. How they would fortify the Tower and crush all dissent from there …
    ‘Nonsense,’ Cranston whispered to himself. ‘The Tower will fall. The Upright Men have their own agents deep in that gloomy fortress.’ He stared down at the bailey, watching people slither and slide on the frost-encrusted cobbles. A sumpter pony skittered, provoking the destrier of a knight banneret guarding the Guildhall to rear, whinnying noisily, its sharpened metal hooves slicing the air. Oh, yes, Cranston reflected, when the Day of the Great Slaughter occurred, the citadels would certainly fall and it would take more than mounted knights to crush the bloody eruption. Cranston knew the city underworld, the mummers’ halls and castles which housed the London mob, that demon with ten thousand heads. They were waiting, and when the sign was given they would rise. The masters of misrule, the captains of the canting crews, the rulers of the rifflers would sound their horns and unfurl their ragged banners. Their followers would swarm like rats from a burning hayrick, stream from their damp, mildewed, rotting tenements to feast on the fat of the city. Hordes of other rebels would pour in from the north, south and west. They would certainly seize London Bridge and cut the city into two. Cranston narrowed his eyes and chewed the corner of his lip. Gaunt would not compromise. The hated poll tax continued to be levied and the Commons sitting at Westminster provided very little relief for the poor. Not only London was threatened but the surrounding shires and, more importantly, even further north in the eastern counties. The Upright Men were busy fortifying the Fens in Lincolnshire, drawing in the dispossessed, the runaways and rebels as well as the outlaws, sharp as any hawk’s beak at the prospect of plunder. At least Gaunt recognized the real threat the Fens