The House of the Red Slayer

on my journey,’ he murmured, and packed his saddlebags with vellum, pen cases and ink horns. Philomel, his old war horse, snickered and nudged him, a real nuisance as Athelstan tried to fasten the girths beneath the aged destrier’s ponderous belly.
    ‘You’re getting more like Cranston every day!’ Athelstan muttered.
    He led Philomel back to the front of the church and ran up the porch steps. Cranston was leaning against the pillar, leering at Cecily whilst trying to keep Bonaventure from brushing against his leg. The coroner couldn’t stand cats ever since his campaigns in France when the French had catapaulted their corpses into a small castle he was holding, in an attempt to spread contagious diseases. Bonaventure, however, adored the coroner. The cat seemed to know when he was in the vicinity and always put in an appearance.
    Athelstan murmured a few words to Benedicta, smiled apologetically at Watkin and the rest; he collected his deep-hooded cloak from the sanctuary and returned just in the nick of time to prevent Cranston from toppling head over heels over Ursula’s fat-bellied sow. The coroner stormed out, glaring at Athelstan and daring him to laugh. Cranston mounted his horse, roaring oaths about pigs in church and how he would like nothing better than a succulent piece of roast pork. Athelstan swung his saddlebags across Philomel, mounted and, before Cranston could do further damage, led him away from the church into Fennel Alleyway.
    ‘Why the Tower, Sir John?’ he asked quickly, trying to divert the coroner’s rage.
    ‘In a while, monk!‘ Cranston rasped back.
    ‘I’m a friar, not a monk,’ Athelstan muttered.
    Cranston belched and took another swig from his wineskin. ‘What was going on back there?’ he asked.
    ‘A parish council meeting.’
    ‘No, I mean about the cemetery.’
    Athelstan informed him and the coroner’s face grew serious.
    ‘Do you think it’s Satanists? The Black Lords of the graveyard?’ he whispered, reining his horse closer to Athelstan’s.
    The friar grimaced. ‘It may well be.’
    ‘It must be!’ Cranston snapped back. ‘Who else would be interested in decaying corpses?’
    The coroner steadied his horse as Philomel, conscious of the narrowing alleyway, tossed his head angrily at Cranston’s mount.
    ‘I’d like to root the lot out!’ the coroner slurred. ‘In my treatise on the governance of London...’ Two blue eyes glared at Athelstan, scrutinising the friar’s face for any trace of boredom as the coroner expounded on his favourite theme. ‘In my treatise,’ he continued, ‘anyone practising the black arts would suffer heavy fines for the first offence and death for the second.’ He shrugged. ‘But perhaps it’s just some petty nastiness.’
    Athelstan shook his head. ‘Such matters are never petty,’ he replied. ‘I attended an exorcism once at a little church near Blackfriars. A young boy possessed by demons was speaking in strange tongues and levitating himself from the ground. He claimed the demons entered him after a ceremony in which the corpse of a hanged man was the altar.’ Cranston shuddered. ‘If you need any help...’ the coroner tentatively offered.
    Athelstan smiled. ‘That’s most kind of you, My Lord Coroner. As usual your generosity of spirit takes my breath away.’
    ‘Any friend of the Good Lord is a friend of mine,’ Cranston quipped. ‘Even if he is a monk.‘
    ‘I’m a friar,’ Athelstan replied. ‘Not a monk.’ He glared at Cranston but the coroner threw back his head and roared with laughter at his perennial joke against Athelstan.
    At last they left the congested alleyways, taking care to avoid the snow which slid from the high, sloped roofs, and turned on to the main thoroughfare down to London Bridge. The cobbled area was sheeted with ice, coated with a thin layer of snow which a biting wind stirred into sudden, sharp flurries. A few stalls were out, but their keepers hid behind tattered canvas awnings against the biting wind now packing the sky with deep, dark snow clouds.
    ‘A time to keep secret house,’ Cranston murmured.
    A relic-seller stood outside the Abbot of Hydes inn trying to sell a staff which, he claimed, had once belonged to Moses. Two prisoners, manacled together and released from the Marshalsea where debtors were held, begged for alms for themselves and other poor unfortunates. Athelstan threw them some pennies, moved to compassion by their ice-blue feet. Both Cranston’s