Satan in St Mary

from a great distance, but he did not care. He felt the room turn and spin, his mouth was dry and he felt nauseous and weak. He rose, the small black glove clutched tightly in his hand. He heard Burnell call out but he walked from the chamber, pushing aside startled officials who might have objected but swallowed their words when they saw Corbett's harassed face.
    Eventually, Corbett fought his way out of the Hall and almost ran down to the riverside wharf where, out of breath, he slumped down at the top of some crumbling weather-beaten steps. He tried to calm his breath, to still his thudding heart. Alice was gone, dead, the world was empty without her. Above him, a gull screeched against a steel-grey sky. Corbett smelt the glove, Alice's faint perfume recalling the very essence of her being. It was almost warm against the icy coldness of his face. He held the glove gently in his hand, then let it drop like some rare black flower into the river below. It bobbed, stirred, and then the current caught and pulled it. The river lapped round the glove before driving it out to the vastness of the open sea.
    Author's Note
    The reader may be interested in the following extract from a London chronicle written in Latin at the time. The translation runs as follows: -
    "In that year Lawrence Duket, a London goldsmith, mortally wounded Ralph Crepyn in Cheapside and fled to the church of Saint Mary Le Bow. Afterwards certain evil men from the party of the said Ralph entered the church by night, killed the said Lawrence by hanging him from a window bar. A postmortem was held on this and the verdict reached that the said Lawrence had committed suicide; on account of this the body was dragged by the feet outside the city and interred in a ditch. Soon afterwards, because of the confession of a certain boy who had lain with the said Lawrence on the night of his death but then escaped, the truth of the matter came out. On account of which a certain woman, Alice atte Bowe, who was the author of this crime, together with sixteen men were imprisoned and afterwards many of these were hanged and the woman burnt. The said church was put under interdict by the Archbishop of Canterbury, the doors and windows being blocked up with thorns. Lawrence Duket was exhumed from the place where he had been buried and re-interred in hallowed ground. "
    Alice atte Bowe, therefore, did exist. She was the organizer of a gang or coven which committed sacrilege and murder in the church of Saint Mary Le Bow in 1284. London at that time was in the middle of political change and tumult and the crime may well have been something to do with the murky politics of the time. De Montfort was destroyed at Evesham in a bloody and barbaric way and his followers did later carry out assassinations. The church of Saint Mary Le Bow was the centre of Satanic practices, for Fitz-Osbert was a historical person, who for a short time wielded considerable political power in the capital.