Roseblood Read Free

and breathed in. Simon would avenge him; Simon always did, in his own time and in a place of his own choosing.
    ‘You have one last boon, a final favour,’ LeCorbeil repeated. ‘More than you gave my people.’
    ‘I am innocent.’
    ‘No one is innocent. Well?’
    Edmund indicated with his head. ‘Untie my hands. Where can I go? To whom can I flee?’
    LeCorbeil whispered an order. One of his company approached, boots crunching on the shale. Edmund felt the knife sawing at the bonds about his wrists. He shook these free, drawing himself up. He made sure his shirt collar was clear of his neck and caught a sob in his throat. Eleanor had sewn that collar. She had been there when he had put this shirt on.
    ‘I’ll stretch out my hands,’ he shouted over his shoulder. ‘Do it then.’
    Edmund closed his eyes and summoned up Eleanor’s sweet face, so perfectly formed: the arching brows, the lustrous grey eyes, the full lips he’d kissed so merrily. Yet Eleanor was the reason he was here. She had persuaded him to try and escape from the past, as well as from his own brother. Now all that was gone…
    ‘May you walk the rest of your life in peace and friendship.’ he whispered. ‘May your path stretch long and straight before you. May the sun always be on your back. May you drink the cup of life in all its richness. May you see the length of days, and when your day is done, the shadows lengthen and the hush descends, come out to meet me as I will always wait for you.’
    Edmund opened his eyes and stretched out his hands, and LeCorbeil’s great two-handed sword severed his head in one clean cut.

Amadeus Sevigny
    London, April 1455
    S mithfield was in gloriously hideous turmoil. Executions always drew the crowds, especially when the sun burnt strong and a swift breeze wafted away some of the more pungent odours. The beggars had assembled in all their tawdry glory, with their lank bellies, hemp-like hair, hammer heads, beetle brows and bottled noses, their cheeks festooned with warts and carbuncles, their jagged teeth turning yellow or black. One of these ancient beauties, Pannikin, who styled himself a story-teller, perched on an overturned barrel to report the wondrous news from Oxford. According to Pannikin, a monster had been born with only one hand, one leg and no nose, with one eye in the centre of its forehead and its two ears sprouting from the nape of its neck. The crowd laughed this to scorn, as Pannikin was regarded as a born liar, twice as fit for Hell as any Southwark rogue.
    A more enterprising character, Lazarus, named because of the multitude of black spots that mottled his shrivelled face, was closely studying the clerk who stood next to the barber’s stool under the sprawling ancient elm tree formerly used for hangings. A court clerk, Lazarus decided, scrutinising his intended victim’s expensive dark robes and snowy-white cambric shirt, yet he had the shorn head, shaven face and harsh look of a soldier. Lazarus noted the war belt strapped around the clerk’s slim waist, as well as the clinking silver spurs on his high-heeled Castilian riding boots. The scavenger’s real quarry, however, was the bulging coin purse hanging by cords from that belt. Lazarus, a skilled foist and nip, drew his needle-thin dagger and edged closer.
    The barber was shaving the head of a greasy kill-calf, a butcher from the Newgate shambles who had shuffled into Smithfield to walk among the cattle pens as well as see the condemned dancing in the air. Deep in his cups, he lashed out with his bloody fingers against the strings of false teeth the barber had tied to a overhanging branch that danced and clattered close to the flesher’s face. Nearby, a Friar of the Sack thundered against the evils of drink, especially the London beers known as Mad-Dog, Angel’s Food, Dragon’s Milk and Merry-go-Dance. Unlike the hapless Pannikin, the friar had drawn a good audience, eager to be diverted in their wait for the execution carts.