The Rose Demon

fire!’

    ‘You’ve been drinking again!’ someone shouted.

    ‘No, the good citizen is right!’ the Preacher shouted back, hands clawing the air. ‘Look around you! Kings go to war! Battles rage but these are only the precursors of things to come!’ He stared in satisfaction as his audience, gape-mouthed, stared back. ‘Oh yes,’ he continued in a loud whisper, ‘a great demon has been loosed upon the earth. Terrible will his work be. So be on your guard!’

    ‘How do we know?’ a man asked.

    ‘This devil drinks human blood!’ the Preacher replied, and paused, one finger pointing to the sky. ‘For sustenance and strength he must drink our blood, a travesty of the Mass.’

    The Preacher felt his stomach clench in disappointment. He glimpsed the disbelief in their eyes and knew that, at least in London, the great Demon, the Rosifer whom Sir Raymond had described, was not known. Only twice on his travels around Europe had the Preacher’s claims ever been vindicated by a witness who could describe, in graphic and horrifying detail, some corpse found in a ditch or alleyway, its throat slashed from ear to ear, drained of blood like an ox slung above a butcher’s stall. It was ever the same. The Demon seemed to stay well away from great cities. The Preacher added a few more phrases, telling the people to be on their guard. He sketched a blessing in the air and wandered back down the steps.

    ‘Is that really true?’

    He turned. The red-haired, pretty-mouthed courtesan was standing, arms folded, staring coolly at him.

    ‘It’s true, my child.’

    He would have walked away but she caught him by the hand.

    ‘Come,’ she invited soothingly. ‘A drink of ale to clear the throat and sweeten the mouth?’

    The Preacher smiled and squeezed her fingers.

4

    The Woods of Sutton Courteny,
Gloucestershire, May 1471

    In Paradise, in the glades of Eden,
Eve was tempted twice: first by Lucifer
Then by Rosifer who offered her
A rose plucked from Heaven.

    Edith, daughter of Fulcher the blacksmith, sat in a sun-filled glade half listening to the voices of the women washing the clothes in the brook at the foot of the hill. She really should be with them but, as her father said, Edith was for ever a dreamer. This was her favourite spot: a small wood which stood on the brow of a hill. The trees were the walls of her castle, the grassy glade the most velvet of carpets and the flowers which lined the edge of the brook - teasel, bird’s-foot, mallow and elder - the ornaments of her solar. She stared around. The glade was now covered in a carpet of bluebells, dog rose, mercury and primrose. A quiet, restful place where she could hide and dream. Edith was now sixteen summers old, three years since her courses had begun and her mother had sent her out into the garden to lie down naked to enrich the soil. Edith was a woman, or so her mother kept repeating, and Edith marvelled in her new-found power. Only weeks ago a troop of Yorkist horse had stopped in the village, hiring all the chambers at the Hungry Man tavern. Of course they needed their horses shod and seen to. Edith had been there when the young squire, Aymer Valance, or so he called himself, had come down to watch her father heat the furnace and turn the iron red-hot. He had paid sweet but secret court to her and she had brought him here. They had lain beneath the trees naked as worms, wrapped round each other. He had promised to come back but her father, sharp of eye, must have sensed what had happened. He cuffed her round the ear, shouting, ‘Such men come and go, girl. We mean nothing to them!’

    Edith ran her hand across her stomach and down the folds of her simple linen dress. Perhaps tomorrow, when the village gathered on the green after sunset to carouse and dance around the maypole, she might meet someone else. Her mother was now washing her best smock before laying it out along the fence at the back of the smithy to dry in the afternoon sun.

    Edith heard a twig snap and her head came up, the buttercups in her hand slipping between her fingers.

    ‘Who’s there?’ she called.

    She sniffed the air and caught a fragrance: she had smelt it before, of roses. Once at Easter, when her mother bathed, Edith had been allowed to use the water afterwards. She still remembered the rose petals floating there and the sweet fragrance which tickled her nose. The scent was stronger now. Edith, a little alarmed, got to her feet. She’d heard stories,