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of ale in him, from the way he belched and grinned, sprawled on the ground at the foot of the wall.
    ‘How long have you been here?’
    Bleary eyes peered up at him. ‘Me? Since I left the Boar’s Head.’
    ‘Did you see a man come this way a little while ago?’
    ‘Someone. Yes. A knight, I think. I din’t interrupt him. He was in a hurry.’
    ‘What did he look like?’
    ‘Oh, tall. Big.’ His companion smiled. ‘And he had a long tunic. I remember that.’
    ‘What colour?’
    ‘I don’t know.’
    ‘Come with me.’ Alured grabbed the old man’s arm and pulled him up. He hauled the fellow along until they came to the two youngsters’ bodies.
    ‘Oh, God’s cods!’ the man bleated.
    ‘That’s why you’d best come with me,’ Alured said. He pulled him along the alley until they were back with Bill again.
    ‘Thanks be to God you’re back. I thought you’d been killed too,’ Bill said nervously, eyeing the drunk without pleasure.
    ‘There are two more up there,’ Alured said. ‘This man saw their killer. Come on, have you sent for the coroner?’
    ‘No,’ Bill said.
    But the drunk had dropped to his rump by the body. He stared at the man lying there with an expression of curiosity on his old, wrinkled face. ‘Why’s he here?’
    ‘Someone killed him,’ Bill said shortly.
    ‘But he’s not dead.’
    And Matteo Bardi coughed weakly, retched, and closed his eyes from the pain, as he muttered in his native tongue: ‘The King’s Gold . . . He’ll take the King’s Gold . . .’
    ‘ Christ’s ballocks!’ Bill sprang away as though the man was a ghost.
    ‘What did he say?’ Alured asked.
    ‘He’s raving,’ Bill said. ‘He needs a physician.’

 

CHAPTER THREE
    Fourth Friday after the Feast of St Michael 6
    Newgate Prison
    The mob had taken over the prison. All those accused of supporting the King or his friends were thrown in here, and as Dolwyn was servant to a banker, he too was incarcerated.
    Another man had died in the night, Dolwyn saw, glancing at the men huddled in the filth below the long shaft of light. There was a window twenty, thirty feet above them, and the prisoners clung to each other beneath it as though it offered escape. It didn’t.
    They had thrown the body to lie in the shadow towards the middle of the room, only a scrap of linen about his groin. All his other clothes were gone. Not that he had been dressed for a night here when he came. Dolwyn remembered thinking that his thin clothing would be no protection against the chill and the foul miasma that pervaded this place. Even those who squeezed together for warmth against the cold and damp suffered. That man wouldn’t be the last to die here.
    They would all die soon enough.
    The dank cell was fifteen feet square, with curved ceilings like an abbey’s undercroft. Blackened stone glistened in the darkness, running with moisture, and in the gloom the only sound was a constant, maddening dripping. It went on at the same slow rate all through the day and night. If water could tear at a man’s soul, this did.
    There were plenty of other noises vying to drown it out, but without success: screams from those demented enough to think their voices could interest the gaoler; the low mumble of the utterly lunatic; the sudden shrieks of a man being beaten by his cell-mate; the sobbing; the pathetic wailing of the boy in a chamber farther along the passageway; the scurrying of rats’ paws . . .
    Dolwyn had been in gaol before and the thought of death did not frighten him: rather, it was the manner of death that concerned him.
    Hunger and thirst were the two constants of his exixtence here in Newgate Prison, but at least he could slake his thirst with a sip at the brackish, water-soaked walls. It tasted foul from the urine of the men in the chamber above them – but he didn’t care; not now. The hunger was much worse.
    Newgate Prison. It was hard to believe that he was in the foulest gaol in London because of a