The House of the Red Slayer

murderers would gather here in the Tower. He rocked himself gently to and fro. The trial would begin, the warnings were already prepared. He stretched his hands up against the night sky.
    ‘Let the blood flow,’ he murmured. ‘Let Murder be my weapon!’
    The cross of St Peter Ad Vincula caught his eye. ‘Let God be my judge,’ he whispered, thrusting his hands beneath his cloak, his eyes staring into the black night. He remembered the past and rocked himself gently, crooning a song only he understood. Now he felt warm. He would bathe his soul’s wounds in the blood of his victims.

CHAPTER 1

    Brother Athelstan stood on the tower of St Erconwald’s Church in Southwark and stared up at the sky. He chewed on his lip and quietly cursed. He’d thought the clouds would have broken up by now; they had for a while, and the stars had glittered down like jewels against a velvet cushion. Athelstan had wanted to study the constellations as the longest night of the year approached and see if the writer of the Equatorie of the Planets was correct. However, the wind had drawn the snow clouds like a thick veil across the sky.
    The friar stamped his sandalled feet and blew on his freezing fingers. He picked up his ink horn, quill, astrolabe and roll of parchment, lifted the trap door and cautiously went down the steps. The church was freezing and dark. He took a tinder and lit the tapers in front of Our Lady’s statue, the sconce torches down the nave and the fat, white beeswax candles on the altar. Athelstan went back down the sanctuary steps and under the newly carved chancel screen, freshly painted by Huddle with a tableau depicting Christ leading souls from Limbo. Athelstan admired the painter’s vigorous brush strokes in green, red, blue and gold colours.
    ‘The young man has a genius,’ he muttered to himself, standing back to scrutinise the figures delineated there. He just wished Huddle had been a little more delicate in his depiction of a young lady with rounded juicy breasts whom Cecily the courtesan claimed was a fair representation of her.
    ‘Well, let’s see!’ Tab the tinker had shouted out before Ursula the pig woman jabbed a sharp elbow in his ribs.
    Athelstan shook his head and went across to warm his hands over the small charcoal brazier which glowingly offered some heat against the freezing night air. He looked down the nave of the church, noticing the boughs of evergreens, the holly and ivy which Watkin the dung-collector’s wife had wound round the great broad pillars. Athelstan was pleased. The roof was mended, the windows glazed with horn. ‘More like a church now,’ he muttered, ‘than a long, dark tunnel with holes in the walls.’ Soon Advent would be over. The greenery had been placed there to welcome the newborn Christ. ‘Evergreen,’ the friar murmured. ‘For the evergreen Lord.’ A small shadow, deeper than the rest, slunk from the darkened aisle.
    ‘You always know when to appear, Bonaventure.’
    The great tom cat padded across, stopped and stretched in front of Athelstan, then brushed imploringly against the friar’s black robe. Athelstan glanced down.
    ‘No mice here,’ he whispered. ‘Thank God!‘
    He’d never forget how Ranulf the rat-catcher had secreted traps in the rushes and Cecily had caught her toe in one of them as she cleaned the church one morning. Athelstan had lived for thirty years and served with soldiers, but never had he heard such a litany of ripe oaths as those which had poured from Cecily’s pretty mouth.
    The friar crouched and picked up the cat, studying the great black and white face, the tattered ears. ‘Bonaventure the Great Mouser,’ he murmured. ‘So you have come for your reward.’ Athelstan went into one of the darkened transepts and took a bowl of freezing milk and sliced pilchard from the window sill. ‘Whose life is more rewarding, Bona-venture,’ he murmured as he crouched to feed the animal, ‘a tom cat’s in Southwark or that of a Dominican monk who likes the stars but has to work in the mud?’
    The cat blinked back, squatted down and gobbled the food from a pewter platter, one eye alert on a small flurry where the rushes lay thick against a pillar. Athelstan returned to the bottom of the sanctuary steps, knelt, crossed himself and began the first prayer of Divine Office.
    ‘ Veni, veni, Emmanuel! ’ Come, O come, Emmanuel!
    When would Christ come again? Athelstan idly wondered. To heal the wounds and enforce justice...