The House of Crows

and the bailiff Bladdersniff had all taken the sacrament at Mass this morning then solemnly sworn how they had seen a demon crouching in the death-house.
    ‘It was black,’ Watkin trumpeted so loudly that even the hairs in his great flared nostrils seemed to bristle with anger. ‘It was huge with bright eyes, hideous face, blue and red round the mouth and it moved like lightning.’
    ‘You were drunk,’ Mugwort the bell-ringer snorted. ‘Pernell the Fleming woman saw the three of you: you had not one good leg amongst the six.’
    ‘More like nine,’ Crispin the carpenter added, but no one seemed to understand this salacious reference.
    ‘Drunk or not,’ Pike screeched, tilting his face and pointing to the great red weals across his cheeks. ‘Who did that, eh?’
    Athelstan pushed his hands further up the sleeves of his gown and rocked gently to and fro. He stole a look at Benedicta: he expected to find her eyes dancing with merriment and those lovely lips fighting hard not to smile, but the widow-woman looked concerned.
    ‘What do you think, Benedicta?’ Athelstan asked before Watkin’s bellicose wife could intervene to take up the cudgels on her husband’s behalf.
    ‘I believe they saw something, Father.’ Benedicta played with the tassel of the belt round her slim waist. ‘I dressed Pike’ s wound: savage claw marks. Any higher,’ she added, ‘and he could have lost an eye.’
    ‘You are always telling us...’ Tab the tinker spoke up. ‘You are always telling us, Father,’ he repeated, ‘how Satan prowls, seeking those whom he may devour.’
    ‘Yes, Tab, but I was speaking in a spiritual sense, about that unseen world of which we are only a part.’
    ‘But that’s not true,’ Watkin’s wife intervened. ‘In St Olave’s Parish, Merry Legs claimed a devil was dancing round the steeple as I would a maypole.’
    ‘And I have heard imps whispering in the corner,’ Pernell the Fleming intervened. ‘Small, Father, no bigger than your fingers. I heard them scrabbling at the woodwork.’
    Athelstan closed his eyes and prayed for patience.
    ‘What did it look like?’ Huddle the painter asked, and Pointed to the far wall of the church where he was busily sketching out, in charcoal, a marvellous vision of Christ’s harrowing of hell.
    ‘Never mind,’ Athelstan intervened. He glanced quickly at Simplicatas, a young woman from Stinking Alley who had whispered after Mass how she wanted to talk to him about her missing husband. ‘We have other matters to discuss.’
    ‘But this is important.’ Bladdersniff drew himself up on his stool, wrinkling his fiery red nose and blinking drink-sodden eyes. ‘If you don’t believe us, Father, let’s go to the death-house. Let’s see for ourselves.’
    His colleagues did not seem quite as enthusiastic, but Athelstan saw it as a way of pacifying them all.
    ‘Come on.’ He got to his feet.
    ‘Father, I’m frightened,’ Pernell wailed.
    ‘Don’t worry.’ Athelstan fingered the wooden crucifix hanging round his neck. He shooed Bonaventure off the baptismal font, unlocked and lifted the wooden lid then, taking the small enamel bowl held by Mugwort, scooped some of the holy water out.
    ‘If there’s a devil in the death-house,’ he declared, ‘the cross and holy water will soon make him flee.’
    Led by their priest, Bonaventure stalking solemnly beside him, the parish council left the church. They crossed the cemetery, following the beaten path around the headstones and crosses to the great black-painted shed in the far corner. The door was still flung back on its hinges, a sure sign of the three men’s flight the previous night. Athelstan turned and winked at Benedicta.
    ‘Now, stay here. All of you.’
    Holding the crucifix in one hand, the cup of holy water in the other, Athelstan strode across and stopped outside the death-house. He looked at the earth, scuffed where Pike and his two companions had fought to get out.
    I never asked them what they were doing, he thought. Probably drunk: I just hope they didn’t have Cecily the courtesan with them. The only people who are supposed to lie in this graveyard are the dead. Athelstan went into the death-house and, as soon as he did, caught a fetid, pungent smell.
    ‘For God’s sake, man!’ he whispered to himself.
    He put the cup of holy water on the long, stained table and stared around. The smell caught the back of his throat and made him cough. Athelstan took a tinder out of his