The Book of Fires Read Online Free PDF Page B

Shop signs, a bush for the vintner, three gilded quills for the apothecary, a unicorn for the goldsmith and a horse’s head for the saddler, creaked noisily in the brisk breeze. The food purveyors were out, offering fat capons and plump rabbits. Geese tied to the stalls honked. Chickens and ducks, trussed tightly by the legs, floundered in a welter of feathery wings. Pastry shops offered sweet wafers and even sweeter wines. Milk-sellers, with pails slopping either end of their yolks, bawled a price which would gradually decrease as the day progressed and the milk staled. Market beadles were arguing with a cheese-seller who allegedly had made his product richer by soaking it in broth. The discussion had provoked a quarrel upturning a spice stall so the spilled powder of sage, fennel, basil and coriander was being crushed under foot to sweeten the air now turning rather rancid from the pack of unwashed bodies. Odour from a nearby soap-maker, busy mixing soda and wood and animal fat, thickened the stench. Cranston surveyed the crowds in all its varying colours and glimpses of city life: the priest, garbed only in his shirt, walking barefoot, a white wand in one hand, an incense bowl in the other, public punishment for his sin of lechery. A blacksmith, his open-fronted shed next to a tavern, supervised sweaty-faced apprentices serving a table-high furnace. A tanner collected warm dog dung to soften scraped hides. A wine crier, standing in the entrance to an alehouse, readied himself for a proclamation. Itinerant coal-sellers, hay merchants, barbers and dish-menders touted noisily for business. A market beadle proclaimed what must be: bead makers must use perfectly round beads; butchers should not mix tallow with their lard or sell the flesh of dog, cat or horse. Makers of bone handles must not trim their products with silver to make them look like ivory. Candles must be what they are, pure beeswax or tallow and not adulterated with cooking fat or any other base substances. Schoolboys, their hair cropped close, horn-books under their arms, stopped to listen to these market heralds before hurrying on to the aisle schools of St Paul’s and elsewhere. Funeral processions wound their way through the crowd, the thuribles of the altar-servers fragrancing the air. Wedding parties, cymbals clashing and flower petals fluttering, processed to the place of festivity. Gong cart gangs tried to clear the filthy refuse heaped in laystalls and elsewhere. A wonder-worker, or so he called himself, ‘From Nicaea and other cities of the east’, offered in a ringing voice a marvellous cure for impotence, namely the head of a ram which had never meddled with a ewe, its horns knocked off and boiled in holy water from the Jordan.
    Cranston grinned at the sheer effrontery of such a claim as he continued to inspect the crowd he pushed through. The legion of pickpockets and petty thieves had already seen the coroner and slunk away. Cranston had a habit of recognizing the likes of Fairy Fingers, Robber Red Breast and Peter the Pilferer and bellowing a warning about them to all and sundry. Cranston was equally vigilant over a more sinister enemy, the Upright Men, whose assassins were known to seek out Crown officials and strike with sword or dagger. Cranston drew comfort that his friendship with Brother Athelstan tempered resentment against him. Nevertheless, the coroner was wary. The Upright Men were plotting furiously, though Cranston was growing mystified as he sensed an unexpected abeyance in the dread creeping through the city. The Earthworms, the fantastically garbed horsemen despatched by the Upright Men into Cheapside or elsewhere to cause chaos and mock the power of the Regent, had abruptly ceased their attacks. Cranston’s spies had also reported a lack of activity by the Upright Men in those bastions of the city underworld around Whitefriars and elsewhere.
    Cranston wondered why as he turned into Parsnip Lane, where Justice Gavelkind had his