The Rose Demon

they always listened avidly to the doings of Great Ones. Not far from here, in the Temple garden near Fleet Street, or so popular legend had it, the Dukes of York and Lancaster had each plucked a rose, white for York and red for Lancaster, as badges for their opposing armies. All because their king, Henry VI, was feckless. Oh yes, a living saint but too weak to rule effectively. The two great factions had fought the length and breadth of the kingdom. Now York was in the ascendant, led by the golden Edward and his two warrior brothers, Richard and George. Having smashed a Lancastrian army at Barnet, to the north of the city, they now intended to sweep west to bring to battle and kill weak Henry’s French wife, Margaret of Anjou, and her young son.

    The journeyman continued his harangue, extolling the prowess of Edward of York. A black-garbed preacher, standing with his back to a buttress of the cathedral, smiled bleakly. He studied the journeyman’s clothes, his broad leather belt, well-fashioned boots, the dagger in its embroidered pouch.

    You are no journeyman, he thought, but a Yorkist spy, travelling the length and breadth of the kingdom on your master’s work.

    The Preacher’s smile faded. He, too, was on his master’s work. He pushed his scrawny, black hair away up above his ears. He wetted his lips, calling across to a water-tippler to bring him a stoup. The man did so: the water tasted brackish, but at least the tippler refused the Preacher’s penny.

    ‘No, no, brother!’ he declared. ‘I can see you are a holy man.’

    The Preacher did not contradict him. After all, he was a messenger from God, a man whose skin had been scorched by the sun and wind of Outremer.

    A lay brother in the Order of the Hospitallers, the Preacher had travelled the roads of Europe seeking out that great opponent, the Demon, described to him in hushed tones by Sir Raymond Grandison, his commander in the Order of the Hospitallers. The Preacher had become accustomed to his task. He had delivered the same sermon on the banks of the Rhine, in the piazzas of the great Italian cities, even under the towering gibbet of Montfaucon in Paris. Now he would give it here. The Preacher’s eyes wandered to a buxom young courtesan. She was dressed simply in a costly blue samite dress tied at the throat by a pure white cord. She moved her hips provocatively and, sensing she was being studied, glanced over her shoulder and smiled enticingly at the Preacher. The self-styled man of God swallowed hard and looked away. The temptations of the flesh, he thought, were ever present. But, oh, the woman was beautiful: soft, golden skin, mocking eyes, lips meant to be kissed and hair like fire. She made to move towards him but the Preacher, seeing the journeyman, the Yorkist spy, had finished his declamation, moved quickly to take his place on the steps.

    ‘Listen to me!’ he shouted, arms flung wide. ‘Listen to me, people of God, because I am His messenger!’

    The crowd, on the point of breaking up, now clustered together again, congratulating themselves on a good morning’s entertainment, a welcome break from the humdrum of trading. The Preacher did look interesting. Dressed in black sackcloth, bound round his waist by a dirty cord, wooden sandals on his feet, he had a face which attracted attention: wild, staring eyes in a dark, seamed face, like one of the prophets from the Old Testament which they had seen painted on the walls of their parish church.

    The Preacher dramatically lowered his hands.

    ‘The Rose of the World,’ he began in a hoarse whisper, ‘is cankered and rotten to its core!’

    The people strained to listen. The Preacher caught their collective sigh as if savouring what was coming.

    ‘The Devil walks!’ His voice rose like a rumble of thunder. ‘I have seen his stallion, black and swift as a storm cloud. Satan has come to ransack the treasures of the earth!’ He spread his arms out. ‘I have seen at night the horned goats of Hell and, on their backs, flesh-shrivelled hags. I have, in the howling of the wind, heard the squawking of crows and the hiss of serpents!’

    The crowd nodded. Nothing was more interesting than the workings of the Devil and his legions of demons who ran through their world turning milk sour, causing fire in hay ricks, plague in the streets or pollution in the water.

    ‘I have seen one too!’ an old man shouted out. ‘A grotesque shape with goggling eyes which burnt like