Murder most holy

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    ‘Home is where the heart is,’ Athelstan quipped, trying to hide his own disappointment at his fruitless visits. ‘Now it is time to confront the Lady Maude.’
    By the time they reached Sir John’s house just off Cheap-side both men were exhausted. The day proved hot, the streets were dusty and packed with traders. In Cheapside the crowd had been so dense, they almost had to fight their way through traders, apprentices, officious market beadles, beggars whining for alms and a line of malefactors being taken up to stand in a cage near the Great Conduit. Matters were not helped by a mummer’s group near the great market cross who had erected a makeshift platform and were busy enacting a miracle play about the fall of Jezebel. Unfortunately Cranston and Athelstan arrived at the play’s climax when the painted whore queen was being condemned by the prophet Elijah to be eaten alive by dogs. The crowd, drawn into the drama, ‘oohed’ and ‘ahed’ and decided to ‘help’ the prophet by throwing every bit of refuse they could on to the stage. Cranston had to send a pickpocket, whom he had glimpsed in the crowd, crashing to the ground with a blow to the ear.
    ‘Bugger off, you little foist!’ the coroner roared.
    Unfortunately his trumpet-like voice carried to the stage where the man playing the role of the prophet thought Sir John was talking to him. If it hadn’t been for Athelstan’s intervention, an even greater drama would have been enacted as Cranston drew himself up to his full height and began to roar insults at the stage, dismissing the mummers as fiends from hell, claiming that they had no licence to perform. Others joined in and Athelstan was grateful when he managed to push Sir John through the crowd, past the coroner’s favourite drinking place, the Holy Lamb of God tavern, and up against the coroner’s front door.
    ‘Sir John,’ Athelstan breathed, ‘walking with you through London is an experience never to be forgotten — and certainly never to be repeated!’
    Cranston glared furiously at the crowd.
    ‘In my treatise on the government of this city,’ he intoned, ‘mummers will be told to perform their tricks in certain places and will have to seek a licence. Moreover…’
    Athelstan had heard enough. He turned and rapped furiously at the front door.
    ‘Please yourself,’ Cranston mumbled. ‘If I had more time and patience, I’d settle those buggers!’
    A thin, pinch-faced maid answered the door. Sir John, grinning wickedly, pushed by her.
    ‘Sir John!’ she gasped. ‘We did not expect you!’
    ‘I come like a thief in the night!’ Cranston boomed. ‘Now, please tell the Lady Maude her lord and master has returned!’
    ‘The Lady Maude is in the flesh markets at the Shambles, master. She will be home shortly.’
    ‘And my little poppet princes?’
    ‘They’re upstairs, Sir John, in the solar with the wet nurse.’ Cranston lurched up the stairs, Athelstan following swiftly behind as Sir John imperiously beckoned him on. In the solar, a pleasant, sun-lit room with tapestries on the wall and carpets on the floor, the wet nurse sat on one of the cushioned window seats, gently rocking the huge, wooden cradle beside her. She rose and curtseyed as Cranston entered.
    ‘Leave us,’ the coroner said airily.
    ‘Lady Maude said,’ the comely wench answered pleadingly, ‘not to leave the poppets alone!’
    Cranston drew his brows together. ‘I am the poppets’ father,’ he proclaimed. ‘They will be all right with me.’
    The wet nurse, throwing anxious glances over her shoulder, left the room as Sir John gestured Athelstan forward.
    ‘Look!’ the coroner whispered. He bent over the huge wooden cradle and drew back the pure woollen blanket under which his two little poppets, as he described them, lay fast asleep. Sir John pushed his head deeper under the high linen canopy, breathing wine fumes down on his beloved sons. ‘Fine boys!’ he growled. ‘Fine boys!’
    Athelstan peered round the coroner’s white grizzled head and once again vowed to keep his face straight. The two ‘fine boys’ and ‘poppet princes’ were indeed sturdy babies. Fat, bald heads, dimples in their cheeks, red-faced, without any hair, they looked so like Sir John that, if Athelstan had found them in Cheapside , he would have known to which family they belonged. Cranston pushed Athelstan away.
    ‘Fine contented lads,’ he muttered. ‘Even when they are asleep, they smile. Watch