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Paul Doherty

The Cup of Ghosts

Prologue

Tolle Lege, Tolle Lege.

(Pick up and read, pick up and read. )

St Augustine of Hippo, Confessions VIII

‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It is many years since. . ’ I sat back on my heels and gazed at the white, waxen face of the corpse stretched out on the low bier before me. Father Guardian, at least eighty-five summers old, stitched in his shroud, ready for the good brothers to carry him to the church to lie ringed by purple candles before the sanctuary, a hallowed place where angels hover so that the hordes of demons who prowl, hunting the souls of the dead, cannot trespass. Later, those same brothers, the Poor Men of Grey Friars, which nestles under the shadow of St Paul’s, would chant their requiem mass, and afterwards bury Father Guardian in God’s Acre, to shelter beneath some battered cross until the elements melt and Christ comes again.

I describe Father Guardian as past his eighty-fifth summer; I’m not much younger. For months I had prepared myself to be shrived by him. To the rest of the community I am a simple anchorite from her lonely cell, more concerned about cleaning the garden paths or scrubbing the kitchen flagstones. Father Guardian, however, suspected my secret. Often, when the other brothers were busy, he’d search me out in the apple orchard or the sunken garden where I’d be weeding the fringes of the carp pond. He’d touch me gently on the shoulder or pluck at the sleeve of my gown, and invite me to some shady arbour or lonely garden nook where we could sit and talk about the old days. I never told him much, though he knew who I was. How I’d served the Queen Mother, Isabella of France.

How I had been with her from the time she descended into hell until she rose in glory, only to fall again. How I’d sheltered long in the shadow of the She-Wolf, been a disciple of ‘that New Jezebel’ (a clever play on her name). Oh yes, like a visored knight, I’d been in the heart of that bloody, tangled melee when the great ones toppled from gibbet ladders or knelt, as Edmund of Kent did, like a chained dog by a gate until a drunken felon severed their heads. I trusted Father Guardian. I dropped hints and told tales, sometimes referring to the great lords, all gone before God’s judgement seat. I described my dreams, about corpses rotting on scaffolds or men, cowled and daggered, stealing through courtyards at the dead of night. Of shadowy meetings in ill-lit chambers, the tramp of armies, the neigh of war-horses; of great feasts and banquets where the wines of Bordeaux and Spain flowed like water from a broken cask, of sweetmeats, gorgeous tapestries and exquisitely decorated chambers; of silent, soft-footed murder in all its hideous forms, of my pursuits of the sons and daughters of that old assassin Cain.

I have seen the days and Father Guardian recognised that. Sometimes, rarely, I would talk of Isabella, she of the lustrous skin and fiery blue eyes, her hair like spun gold and a body even a friar would lust after. Isabella ‘La Belle’, the Beautiful, of France, who tore her husband from his throne. She locked him in Berkeley Castle, sealing him up like some rabid animal until, so the chronicles report, killers slipped in and, turning him over on his face, thrust a red-hot poker up to burn his bowels and so leave no mark upon the corpse. Of Mortimer, proud as an antlered stag, a king in his own right, a Welsh prince with his secret dreams of power. Of Hugh Despenser, his hair and beard the colour of a weasel, with darting green eyes, fingers itching and heart bubbling with lust to possess Isabella. Edward himself, the golden-haired, blue-eyed king, great of body and small of brain, followed by all the others in their silks and satins and high-heeled pointed boots; lords of the soil who had their day before being murderously dispatched into eternal night.