The Rose Demon

‘he loved her not, or perhaps too much.’

    Matthias could take no more. He sprang to his feet, threw a penny at the surprised lay brother and fled the death house. He was across the bridge, back in the city, before he recovered his wits.

    The sun had disappeared. The sky had turned a leaden grey, the clouds pressing down, threatening rain. The stall-holders were already pulling sheets over their goods. Matthias loosened the clasp on his shirt. Pulling down his jerkin, he allowed the cool breeze to bathe the sweat on his neck. For a while he wandered amongst the stalls, past the clothiers, the baturs, who smoothed the coarse cloth: the cuissiers with their cushions heaped high on the stalls. An apprentice came running out, trying to clasp a spur on Matthias’ boot, but he caught Matthias’ glance and fled back into his shop.

    Matthias wanted such commonplace things to soothe the turmoil in his soul but a young man with a falcon on his wrist reminded him of the hermit. A priest leading a funeral cortège recalled Parson Osbert. Matthias was sure that the young woman in front of him with a child holding a pig’s bladder was Christina. And was that not Fulcher the blacksmith sitting at a table staring through a tavern window?

    Matthias turned into Ivy Lane, a broad alleyway which led down to one of his favourite ale houses, the Pestle and Mortar. Yet, even here, Matthias felt he was in a nightmare. A makeshift gallows had been erected halfway down: the corpse of a felon swung there, neck awry, face turned a purplish hue. The placard round his neck proclaimed he was a thrice-caught housebreaker. Some drunken students stood around, carolling the corpse with a favourite goliard song ‘Jove cum laude’. They tried to entice Matthias to join in but he shouldered by them. The students, led by a golden-haired, baby-faced young man, screamed obscenities back. Matthias hurried on into the taproom of the Pestle and Mortar. He drank two cups of wine before he felt the panic recede.

    Across the tavern a physician, a quack, his vein-streaked face coarsened by alcohol, his silvery-grey hair shrouding his face like that of a woman, was trying to sell his potions to the saggy-faced, bleary-eyed customers. To one old woman, her skin a blotchy, purplish grey, the quack offered a potion to cure toothache: a copper needle steeped in the juice of a woodlouse. To another a piece of Spanish jade, a sure remedy for pains in the side. When he failed to sell these, the quack brought his tray across and offered Matthias a whole range of herbs: nasturtium, sour thistle, wood sorrel, wood sage, liverwort, fennel.

    ‘And,’ the fellow screeched, thin fingers snaking out, ‘milk of roses: a love potion . . .’ He stopped gabbling and stared down at the tip of the dagger only an inch from his nose. The fellow’s mouth cracked into a smile. ‘The young sir does not want to buy?’

    ‘Piss off!’ Matthias retorted. ‘Take your rubbish and piss off!’

    The quack seized his goods and scurried like a squirrel through the doorway. The rest of the customers, who had grown tired of the charlatan, applauded Matthias, but the student resheathed his dagger, already lost in his own thoughts.

    The nightmare had returned! He thought he had locked it into the darkness of the past, ever since that morning when he had woken in a chamber in Baron Sanguis’ manor house and those young women, maids of the household, clustered round his bed. He could tell by their eyes that something horrible had happened. Matthias felt inside his pouch and pulled out a piece of parchment. It was not the same one his father had given him that last, dreadful night in the parish church but it was a fair copy. Time and again he had studied the citations Parson Osbert had scrawled on that greasy piece of parchment.

    The first Genesis was from Chapter 6, Verse 2: ‘The sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose.’ And a text from Chapter 14 of the prophet Isaiah. ‘Art thou also become weak as we? Art thou become like unto us? Thy pomp is brought down to the grave . . . How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground.’

    The next text was from the Book of Tobit, Chapter 3, Verse 8, about a young woman Sarah: ‘She had been married to seven husbands whom Asmadeus, the evil spirit, had killed before they had lain with her.’ Finally, there was a