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he lazily waved a hand, ‘you are free. However, at your first meeting at the Guildhall, heavy recognisances will be demanded of you.’
    Sevigny pushed Ramler out of the chapel. Roseblood followed them to the corpse door, trying to curb his anger.
    ‘Sevigny?’ he called.
    The clerk turned.
    ‘Listen well. Tell you and yours that this is
à l’outrance
,
usque ad mortem
, to the death.’
    Sevigny sketched a bow, fingers on the hilt of his sword, and left the church. Simon closed the door and leaned against it, the parchment still in his hands. He crumpled it into a ball, put it into his purse and walked back into the chantry chapel. ‘To the death,’ he whispered. Fury surged within him. He had been baited, taunted and threatened here at the very heart of his life.
    He glimpsed a shadow shift to his right, and Ignacio moved into the pool of light. The Castilian was thin and angular, eyes worried in his dark-lined face, hands tapping the war belt around his waist. Roseblood winked at him and made a sign: ‘Peace and goodness.’ Ignacio relaxed, his fingers flickering and fluttering as he described what he’d seen and felt. Roseblood sensed the Castilian’s profound anxiety. Amadeus Sevigny was truly dangerous, and they were involved in a fight to the death. Using signs, he told Ignacio all he had learnt, both from the clerk and from his own spy in the sheriff’s household: Candlemas and Cross-Biter had turned King’s Approver; they would probably indict him, serve as witnesses against him, so they must die. Ignacio’s reply was swift and brutal: they would!
    Roseblood watched him leave. Ignacio would certainly take care of it. Candlemas and Cross-Biter might think they were safe in the Shadows of Purgatory, a special house put aside for important prisoners, which stood along an alleyway off Cheapside. Ignacio would prove them wrong.
    As Roseblood crossed the nave, walking down to the anchorite’s cell, his gaze was caught by a wall painting,
The Torments of Hell
, a compelling vision of the damned. A horde of demons, hairy, humpbacked creatures with swollen bellies and bulging calves and buttocks, prowling a blighted wasteland. Trying to clear his mind of Sevigny’s threats, he crouched to study the various colours, noting how the demons, half human, half animal, were in constant conflict with the golden-haloed, sword-wielding angels.
    ‘What are you, Simon Roseblood, angel or demon?’ Eleanor the anchorite could glimpse him through the squint gap of her cell.
    ‘A mere man,’ Roseblood replied, walking towards the Swan’s-Nest. ‘A very tired, rather worried one. My sleep is disturbed by demons and my waking hours by those who hate me.’
    ‘Then come and be shriven.’
    Roseblood approached the anchorhold. This had once been another side chapel, but he had persuaded the parish priest, Father Benedict, to remove the wooden trellis screen and replace it with a heavy stone wall containing both a squint and a narrow door under a black Hospitaller cross. Now the door opened and Eleanor ushered him into the Swan’s-Nest. Sunlight poured through the large window high in the wall, its shutters pulled fully back.
    Eleanor smiled at him, her beautiful ivory-pale face framed by a starched white wimple beneath the brown veil of a nun of St Clare. She ushered him to the only chair, while she sat on a stool close to his knees. Embarrassed, as he always was by this woman whom he loved, had loved and would love beyond all telling, Roseblood stared round as if seeing the simple contents of the cell for the first time. A cot bed stood beneath the window, next to it a table that also served as a desk. A diptych depicting the Five Wounds of Christ and the Seven Sorrows of Mary hung on the wall alongside a coloured cloth proclaiming the Jesus Prayer beneath the Franciscan Tauist symbol. He shuffled his feet on the coarse rope matting and stared at the lectern, which bore a book of hours containing the divine