The Grail Murders by Paul Doherty Read Free Book Online Page A

murmured. 'When the person is too important to be a spectacle for the mob, a scaffold's set up here and the head lopped off.'
    Strange, isn't it? There was I sitting next to the place where Anne Boleyn, who hired her own executioner from Calais, later put her neck on the block, as did poor Catherine Howard who spent the night before her death practising her poise for the execution stroke. Here died poor Tom More, old Fisher, Margaret, Countess of Salisbury and her three sons. Ah, well!
    Benjamin was lost in his own thoughts so I gazed round, half-wondering what might happen to us, when a cart entered the inner bailey bearing a plain wooden coffin. The two waggoners were cursing and laughing between themselves.
    'What do you carry, friends?' I asked. The men smiled at each other, got down and hobbled the horses.
    'Half the Earl of Stafford!' one of them quipped. He saw the look of stupefaction on my face. 'Well, the head's on London Bridge!' the fellow continued. 'And the rest—' He gestured towards the small, grey stone church of St Peter ad Vincula, the Tower chapel. 'The rest will go beneath the stones like all the others.'
    He turned away as an officer and a group of soldiers hurried up to carry the loose-lidded coffin out of the cart and along the gravel path into the darkening chapel. A strange place, St Peter's! All the corpses of men and women executed on Tower Hill or Tower Green lie buried there. Now few people know this but, beneath the chapel, runs a secret passageway or gallery and, years later, I had to hide there. What a dreadful sight! The floor under the chapel awash with headless bodies, all dressed in the glittering rags in which they died. The coffins were simple and soon fell apart so I crawled across the skeletons of Lord Hastings, Anne Boleyn, the de la Poles, Catherine Howard and Thomas Cromwell. (A cunning bastard! I was one of those who arrested him after he had dinner in the Tower.)
    Can you imagine it? Wedged between the foundations and the floor of the chapel, a sea of headless corpses? Good Lord, even today at the very thought of it I awake sweating, bawling for a cup of claret, Phoebe's fat buttocks and the plump tits of young Margot. No wonder they say the Tower is infested with ghosts!
    I tell you, one time I was there at night, secretly visiting young Elizabeth when her sister Bloody Mary had imprisoned her. The gates were locked and I was shut inside so hid behind a rose bush which grows alongside the chapel of St Peter ad Vincula. At one o'clock in the morning I awoke, the hairs on my neck prickling. Deep fear seized me, freezing my heart and twisting my bowels. Looking up I saw a faint bluish glow at one of the chapel windows and heard strange music. I tell you this and I don't lie! I, Roger Shallot, who have seen the will o' the wisps glow above the marsh and witnessed the terrors that stalk the lonely moors, scaled the walls of St Peter ad Vincula and stared through the window. There, in ghostly procession, a long line of figures, including all those who had died at the Tower, swept in stately procession towards the high altar. Oh Lord, I half-fainted in fear. And if you don't believe me, go there, just sit in that chapel for half an hour, and you'll feel the ghosts gather round you.
    Mind you, on that distant autumn's day I was more terrified of the living and wondered what the mysterious Agrippa was involving us in. We must have sat there for a full hour, subdued and rather morose, until the doctor suddenly reappeared, coming up the steps dressed in the garb of a priest.
    "Hopkins has told me everything,' he murmured, sitting down between us like a benevolent uncle.
    'What do you mean, sir?' snapped Benjamin. 'And why are you dressed like that?'
    'Well, I heard his last confession.'
    Benjamin stood up in surprise. 'Sir, you tricked the man! What is revealed in confession is sacred, and you are no priest!'
    Agrippa smiled benignly. 'Who said I wasn't a priest, Benjamin?' He looked at my