The Boy-Bishop's Glovemaker by Michael Jecks Read Free Book Online Page B

knife. His knife should have been here! While he searched, he heard the door open and shut as William left to stand in the street. Elias stopped and listened with every nerve in his body.
    He heard the Bailiff’s steps, the shuffle as the man tried to peer between the shutters into the room, the tentative rattle of the latch. With a lurch in his gut he heard the door to the shop open. Panicking, he went to the ladder and slid downstairs, bolting for the front door even as the Bailiff appeared, blocking it. His face was white and in his hand he held Elias’s knife.
    Elias could not help but stare at it. The blade was smeared with a thin oil-like layer of blood.
    ‘Get out here, you shit,’ William snarled.
    John Coppe, squatting on his haunches outside the Cathedral grounds, was the first to announce the news of the death to the porter and, through him, the rest of the Cathedral precinct.
    Janekyn Beyvyn was in his small room by the gate when he heard the excited murmur outside. A youngster, scarcely twelve years old, came scampering down the street cheerily declaring the news, but his voice was too high and his enthusiasm too great for Janekyn to understand him clearly. By the time Janekyn had left his porter’s lodge and got out to the roadway, the lad had disappeared, pelting along at speed to tell his friends the news.
    ‘It’s a terrible world,’ John Coppe declared grimly, ‘when you think how those who are evil can yet prosper, and a poor soul like Ralph is destroyed. It’s a cruel, terrible world.’ And so it was, he told himself. There were not many who could be relied upon every morning to give a penny to a beggar at Fissand Gate. Enough for food and drink for a day if you were careful and went to Joan’s alehouse. He shook his head with regret at his personal loss, tinged with compassion for the man whom he had personally considered kindly and generous.
    ‘Eh?’ Janekyn demanded, squinting. ‘What’s happened?’
    John Coppe peered up at the older man. ‘It’s the glover,’ he began.
    ‘Which bugger?’
    ‘Not bugger,
glover
! You know, Ralph – the fat man, always threw me a coin or two.’
    There was a spark of understanding. ‘Ah, him. What of him?’
    ‘Dead, Porter. Murdered! His own apprentice slew him.’
    Old Jankeyn shrugged. It was none of his concern that some foolish trader had chosen an apprentice with murderous tendencies. If anything, he was most aware of that special satisfaction which the old feel upon hearing of the death of others younger than themselves. Then reality hit him like a cudgel and he gaped. ‘Gracious God! The poor man. And what will happen to his goods now?’
    ‘The Good Lord only knows – but at least the city will have a good hanging. A servant killing his own master – that is treason of the worst sort! He’ll have to be hanged. I hope he thought it was worth it.’ Coppe felt he could afford to be jocular about it. True, he had lost a friend, but Ralph was not his only friend.
    Janekyn wasn’t listening. He turned sharply and went to the small lodge by the gate, where he spoke shortly to the cleric warming himself at the brazier. Soon the young man was running full tilt to the Treasurer’s offices.
    The Dean, a quiet and contemplative man in his early sixties, with a sparse fringe of white hair above an almost perfectly circular face, was today forced to wear a most unhabitual frown of concern. His wonted expression was one of mildly confused happiness, his smile that of a man to whom the world was a neverending source of wonder, as if he was convinced that there was a greater, logical plan to all the mayhem and lunacy if only he could understand it. But not today. Today his grimace owed more to his discontent at the failings of men than contentment with God’s works.
    Brother Stephen usually found his gentle, muddled demeanour intensely irritating, and the change from mildly befuddled Dean to bemused and annoyed Dean was no improvement. ‘The