Roseblood Read Online Free

in his cheap glittering finery; archers, sweaty in their leather jerkins, on leave from the Tower. He wondered what his own escort, Bowman Bardolph, would be doing. Perhaps he should have brought him here. He dismissed the thought. Bardolph was a taciturn, morose Dalesman who seemed to resent even being with him. Sevigny chewed the corner of his lip. And Argentine, Giles Argentine, that elusive former royal physician? Would he dare venture out into a place like this? No, too dangerous, Sevigny concluded.
    Abruptly a trumpet blast stilled all clamour and movement. A further shrill clarion call caught everyone’s attention. On the far side of Smithfield, close to the thoroughfare leading up to Cock Lane, Greyfriars and the towering Mass of St Paul’s, city banners and pennants were fluttering in the breeze. Horsemen appeared. Serjeants in their polished brigandines; archers with glistening sallets on their heads, longbows slung across their backs. Immediately on the high gallows stage, the towering cressets, iron baskets crammed with logs, coals, pitch and tar, were set alight. The executioners, garbed in black leather, their faces hidden behind devils’ masks with projecting silver horns, climbed their ladders to stand beneath the gallows. The crowd glimpsed these and the cry went up.
    ‘The condemned are here! Hats off, heads bare!’
    Sevigny pushed his way through the throng, almost oblivious to the hurdy-gurdy around him: the fiddlers, the tumblers, the painted dwarves who bawled how they had the horse of knowledge and a learned pig in a makeshift booth nearby. Other grotesques appeared before him: the stone-eater, the fire-swallower, the self-proclaimed magicians in black gowns spangled with gold. All these were now being ignored as a more macabre masque was about to unfold. Sevigny kept his eyes on the scaffold. Escorted by the bailiffs, their great war mastiff Caradoc padding like fury incarnate, he reached the cordon of soldiers. The undersheriffs in their long gowns were already forming a ring around the execution biers, leather sledges, each carrying a bound prisoner, naked except for a loincloth, pulled by sturdy plough horses, their hogged manes festooned with ribbon.
    People were shouting and screaming. The executioner’s assistants scrambled down like imps from Hell to assist. The prisoners, groaning and crying after their long and brutal haul along the sharpened cobbles, covered in hideous bruises, were released from their hurdles, pushed up the scaffold steps and forced to face the people. A herald, garbed in a glorious tabard boasting the city arms, proclaimed them to be outlaws and traitors. He described how they had attacked a comitatus taking silver to the Tower mint and feloniously killed a royal serjeant. How they must have been suborned by the Devil to commit such horrid treason and so were deserving of death. He cleared his throat before continuing to describe how the condemned would be half hanged, their bodies sliced open and their entrails and hearts plucked out to be burnt before their eyes, after which their heads would be severed and their bodies quartered, then boiled and tarred so that they could decorate the gates of the city.
    The herald’s powerful voice pealed out over the shouting and crying, the lamentations, the songs of mourning and the psalms for the dead. Beside Sevigny, a ballad monger bawled out his doggerel verse:
    Think sinners on your sins all seven,
    Think how merry it is in heaven.
    So pray to God and with him stay
    So he will forgive you on Domesday.
    The prisoners were more concerned about the executioners now painting blue lines on their naked white bodies where they intended to make the cuts. Nooses were lowered and placed around necks, ladders brought. Fire and smoke billowed. The shouting rose to a roar. Jongleurs chanted about the day of desolation. The prisoners began to scream as the ropes were roughly hauled up by the sweaty executioners. Bodies danced, legs