The House of Shadows

take another oath, regretting I ever drew him into this business. I know as much now as I did the morning after the great robbery. Now, these murders in the Night in Jerusalem ...’
    Athelstan described what had happened; John of Gaunt sat shaking his head, keeping his face down, and the friar’s unease deepened. Gaunt wasn’t telling a lie, but was he withholding something? He looked guilty; why?
    Athelstan asked the same question as he and Cranston , after being dismissed by the Regent, made their way up into Fleet Street and through Bowyers Row into the City. The day was now drawing on, lanterns and torches spluttered against the misty, murky nightfall; the market horn had sounded, a sign that the day’s trading was ending. The bells of the city tolled, booming across the rooftops, reminding the citizens of evening prayer. They went up past the soaring mass of St Paul’s. A group of the sheriff’s men had ringed the cathedral cemetery, shaking their fists and shouting curses at the wolfsheads who had taken sanctuary beyond the cemetery wall and so could not be touched. The criminals and felons answered with a hail of rocks and mud. One scoundrel recognised Cranston and started shouting a litany of abuse, brought to an abrupt end by the appearance of a funeral party. A Carmelite, face hidden in his cowl, chanted the prayers of the dead as he led the procession from the cathedral towards the main gate of the cemetery. He was followed by a cross bearer, and a little boy who carried a lantern in one hand and a bell in the other which he shook vigorously. The mourners carried the cathedral coffin chest covered by black and gold pall. On either side acolytes swung censers; their perfumed smoke billowing out did something to hide the pungent stench, whilst the lowing sound of the funeral bell stilled the clamour. Athelstan used the occasion to hurry Sir John on up into Cheapside .
    ‘Sir John, His Grace the Regent could tell us little.’ He smiled mischievously at the coroner. ‘His silence told us much more.’
    ‘Like what?’ Cranston glared across Cheapside at the stocks filled full of pilferers caught during the day’s trading.
    ‘I truly don’t know, Sir John. Gaunt regrets Mortimer’s death, and I agree with him: those two knights and the boatmen were foully murdered, though how and why?’ He caught the coroner’s arm. ‘Now I’ll stay here. You must visit that goldsmith, the one who helped Helena Mortimer; goldsmiths are very scrupulous, they keep excellent records. I want you to ask him two things.’
    Athelstan tapped his wallet and remembered how the ring of St Erconwald was safely hidden away in the parish church.
    ‘Ask the goldsmith if he has the list of the Lombard treasure distributed by John of Gaunt and that Italian banker.’
    ‘Why? Don’t you think that they did?’
    ‘Oh yes, Sir John, I believe him. Ask him also if he has a second list, distributed by the Benedictine monk Malachi.’
    Cranston made to protest.
    ‘Please, Sir John, it’s very important! If he doesn’t have it we will have to try elsewhere. I know, I know,’ Athelstan declared, ‘I already have a list from Tonnelli, but I have to be sure.’
    Cranston , grumbling under his breath, strode across Cheapside . Athelstan found a plinth and sat down. He pulled up his cowl and, as the bells tolled for vespers, quietly recited the opening psalm of the divine office.
    ‘Oh Lord, come to my aid, make haste to help me.’
    He was halfway through the third psalm when Cranston returned brandishing two lists, both written on good vellum. Athelstan took them over to a lantern on a door-post hook, then turned, smiling brilliantly at Cranston .
    ‘I have found it, Sir John!’

    Athelstan left a bemused Cranston and hurried down to the riverside, along Thames Street into the Vintry, and took a barge from Dowgate across to Southwark. Night was falling, growing colder by the moment, so he was pleased to find that Malachi had built up the fire in the priest’s house. The Benedictine was sitting at a table reading the treatise Athelstan had borrowed from the library at Blackfriars. The friar did his best to be pleasant, but found the pretence difficult, so he immersed himself in a whole series of petty tasks. He went backwards and forwards to the church, taking across his writing satchel, pots of ink and fresh sheets of vellum, as well as a small desk he kept stored under the bed loft. When he moved the truckle bed across