The Nightingale Gallery

sacristy to collect the church's one and only cope. A faded, red and gold garment, showing the Holy Spirit as a dove with one wing, sending faded rays down on an even more faded Christ. Athelstan wrapped the cope around him and, telling Crim to go forward, they left the church, processing down the steps and into the maze of Southwark streets. Athelstan was always surprised at the effect he caused; here he was in a place where men died for the price of a few coins, but at the sight of the lighted wax candle, the sound of the small tinkling bell and him swathed in a cope, the coarsest men and women stood aside as if they acknowledged the great mysteries he carried.
    Hob's cottage was a dour, earth-floored building divided into three rooms; one a bedroom for Hob and his wife, the second for his four children, the third a scullery and eating- place. It was poor but swept clean, a few pewter pots and pans, scrubbed in boiling water, hanging from nails in the wall. Inside, at the far end of the hut, Hob lay on a bed, his face white, the red blood frothing at his lips. Athelstan blessed the man, holding his hand, reassuring his good wife that all would be well whilst trying not to look at the blood. He gave the man the Viaticum and blessed him, anointing him on the head, chest, hands and feet. Afterwards he had a few words with Hob's wife, the children cowering around her. Athelstan promised he would do something to help her and left quietly, the cope still round his shoulders, Crim jumping up and down in front of him all the way back to the church.
    Ranulf the rat-catcher was waiting for him just outside the door, a sleek, well-fed Bonaventure in his hands. He waited until Athelstan had put the black pouch back into the tabernacle and Crim had taken his penny and fled like the wind, before putting the cat down and approaching Athelstan.
    'I found him waiting, Father, but if you want to sell him?'
    Athelstan smiled.
    'If you want him, Ranulf, he's yours. But I doubt if he will leave.'
    The friar knelt down and tickled the cat between his ears. He looked up at the lined, seamed face of the rat-catcher, framed by his black, tarry leather hood.
    'He's a mercenary. If you took him away, he'd be back tonight!'
    Bonaventure agreed, stretched, and walked back to his favourite place at the base of the pillar.
    Once Ranulf had gone, Athelstan sat on the altar steps, his mind going back to the corpses he had seen: Vechey's lying cold amongst those dreadful heads on the tower gate of London Bridge; Brampton's sheathed in dirty canvas in the death house of St Mary Le Bow; SpringalPs lying alone under its leather covering in the great four poster bed in his mansion. What eluded him still? He thought of Hob dying in his hovel, his wife frightened of the future. Surely he could get some money for her from somewhere? He lifted his hands to his face and smelt the chrism he had used on Hob's head, hands, chest and feet. The feet!
    Athelstan jumped up. Of course, that was it, Brampton's feet! The manservant hadn't committed suicide. He couldn't have done. He had been murdered!
    Athelstan looked around the church. He wished Cranston were here. The sun streamed through the horn- glazed windows and Bonaventure stretched out, relaxing after a good night's hunting. Athelstan turned from the familiar, domestic sight and knelt before the altar, his eyes fixed on the red light.
    'Oh, God,' he prayed, 'help me now. Please!' In his own private chamber at his house in Poultry Sir John also was thinking as he leant over his writing desk, quill in hand. He was engaged in the great love of his life: writing a treatise on the maintenance of law in the city of London. Cranston had a love of the law and, ever since his appointment as coroner, had been engaged in drawing up his own proposals for law reform. He would put them forward in a specially written book, bound in the finest calf, to some powerful patron who, in Cranston's dreams, would see them as the solution to all of London's problems.
    Sir John loved the city, knew every stone, every church, every highway, every alleyway. Immersed in London's history, he was constantly begging the monks of Westminster Abbey, or the clerks of the chancery in the Tower, to let him have access to manuscripts and documents. Some he would take home, copying them out most carefully before returning them in their leather cases to their proper places. In a sense Cranston never wished to finish his labour. He believed that