NEXT MORNING, the thirty,first of May, was hotter than ever. Again we left early on horseback; the way to St Bartholomew’s lay due northward so we could not use the river. The sun was. still low in the sky, turning a bank of thin cloud on the horizon to bright pink. Barak had gone out again the evening before and I had been asleep when he returned. At breakfast he seemed in a surly mood; perhaps he had a hangover, or a girl had sent him packing and dented his vanity. I packed a couple of the alchemical books into the battered old leather satchel my father had given me when first I came to London. I wanted Guy to look at them later.
The City was coming to life after the Sunday rest; shutters and shelves clattered as the shopkeepers made ready for the new week, shifting beggars from their doorways with curses. The homeless ones stumbled into the street, faces red and chapped with constant exposure to the sun. One, a little girl, almost stumbled into Chancery.
‘Careful there,’ I called.
‘Careful yourself, shitting hunchback bastard!’ Furious eyes stared at me from a filthy face, and I recognized the girl who had caused the commotion at the baker’s shop. I watched her limp away, dragging one leg. ‘Poor creature,’ I said. ‘When people say that beggars lick the sweat from the true labourers’ brows, I wonder if they think of waifs like that?’
‘Ay.’ Barak paused. ‘Did you manage to ferret any more out of those old papers last night?’
‘There is a lot about the Greek wars in those manuscripts. There was much trickery in them. Once, to deceive their opponents into thinking they had more troops than they did, Alexander tied torches to the tails of a flock of sheep. The Persians, looking at his camp at night, thought he had far more men than was true.’
Barak grunted. ‘Sounds like balls. The sheep would have bolted. Anyway, what’s that to do with our business?’
‘The story stuck in my head for some reason. There is reference as well to some sort of liquid being used in Rome’s wars in Babylonia. There are a few books on the Roman wars at Lincoln’s Inn; I’ll try to find them.’
‘So long as it doesn’t take too much time.’
‘Did you write to Lord Cromwell about Bealknap and the customs?’
‘Ay. And last night I tried to find some more about that man who followed us. No luck.’
‘We haven’t seen him again. Perhaps he’s given up.’
‘Maybe, but I’ll keep my eyes open.’
We passed a dead mastiff in an alleyway, its bloated carcass stinking to heaven. Why did people flock to the City, I wondered, to the ratlike scrabble for subsistence that so often ended in begging on the streets? The lure of money, I supposed; hopes of scraping a living and dreams of becoming rich.
St Sepulchre’s was one of a number of streets giving onto the wide open space of Smithfield. It was quiet this morning, for it was not one of the fair days when drovers brought hundreds of cattle in to market. To one side the hospital of St Bartholomew’s stood silent and empty behind its high wall, an Augmentations guard at the gate. When the monastery went down the year before, the patients had been turned out to fend for themselves as best they could; talk of a new hospital paid for by subscriptions from the rich had come to nothing yet.
The monastery itself stood at right angles to the hospital, its high buildings dominating the square, although some of those had gone now. Here too a guard stood outside the gatehouse. I saw workmen were bringing out boxes and stacking them against the wall, where a group of blue robed apprentices buzzed around them.
‘Can’t see Kytchyn anywhere,’ Barak said. ‘We’ll have to ask the guard.’
We rode across the open space, where paths led between clumps of scrubby grass. There was one large patch of earth where no grass grew and the earth was mixed with blackened cinders; the site where heretics were burned. I remembered Lord Cromwell once telling me he longed to burn a papist using his own images for fuel and two years ago he had: a wooden saint had fed the pyre when Father Forest was burned there, suspended above the fire in chains to prolong his agony before ten thousand spectators. Forest had denied the king’s supremacy over the Church, so legally he should have been executed as a traitor, not burned, but Cromwell could afford to ignore such niceties. I had not been there, but as I averted my eyes from the spot I could not help reflecting on that terrible death; the flames making the skin shrivel away, the blood beneath hissing as it dropped into the fire. I shook my head to clear it as I pulled Chancery to a halt before the gatehouse and dismounted.
I saw the boxes were full of bones, brown and ancient. A group of apprentices was delving inside them, casting pieces of tattered winding sheets onto the pavement, hauling out skulls and carefully scraping away the greenish moss that clung to some of them. The watchman, a huge fat fellow, watched indifferently. We tied the horses to a post. Barak went over to the watchman and nodded at the apprentices. ‘God’s teeth, what are they at?’