The Crippled Angel. Sara Douglass

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       I Tuesday 21st May 1381 —i—

      The nave of St Paul’s in London was crowded with people but, strangely, nevertheless completely hushed. Many had queued patiently in the courtyard since many hours before dawn, hoping to be among the first admitted inside.

      To see.

      Two days ago King Richard’s corpse had arrived in London from Pontefract Castle in West Yorkshire. One hundred men-at-arms had accompanied the coffin on its black-draped bier, protecting it from the curious, subdued, close-pressed crowds. Behind the men-at-arms came nineteen hessian-wrapped and ash-painted professional mourners, one for each year of Richard’s life. They had accompanied the corpse to St Paul’s where six of the men-at-arms had carried it inside, the cathedral’s doors closing promptly behind them.

      The dean and his monks had spent two days preparing both display and corpse. That amount of time had set tongues a-wagging all the faster. Why did they need so long? Was it proving hard to stitch up the dagger holes? Or to smooth his poison-ravaged face with flesh-coloured wax?

      But now St Paul’s and Richard’s remains were thrown open to the inspection of the curious, and the Londoners had flocked to the occasion in their thousands.

      Richard lay in an open, solid oaken coffin, its joints well sealed with wax and other substances, set on its bier before the altar. Candles and incense surrounded the bier save for a space directly before the coffin where a single person could step close for a quick viewing.

      To one side stood an ever-changing guard of several priests and friars, there to ensure that the individual’s viewing was only quick, and that he or she did not attempt to snatch a lock of the dead king’s hair, or a scraping from under his fingernails to sell at a local relic market.

      Dick Whittington stood in line with everyone else, and was as curious as everyone else. Whittington was no fool, and had understood very well that Bolingbroke could not have allowed the former king to survive as a lodestone for every disaffected person in the kingdom. Nevertheless, he thought, it was a shame that Bolingbroke couldn’t have arranged for Richard to fall off a horse in front of a score of impartial witnesses, or arrange his drowning in a swollen river as Richard and his party were attempting to cross. The rumours sweeping London ever since news of Richard’s death had ranged from the bizarre to the almost certainly correct: Lancaster’s ghost had so terrified Richard one dark night he had fallen down dead (or Lancaster’s ghost had set fire to Richard, or flayed him, or torn off his genitals and eaten them, leaving Richard to bleed to death); a band of Scottish soldiers had infiltrated Pontefract Castle in an attempt to kidnap Richard and make him their king, but had mistaken Richard for a guard, killed him, and then kidnapped the guard and installed him on the Scottish throne; Richard had choked to death on a frog which had taken up residence in the damp castle; Richard had pined to death over his lover, Robert de Vere; Bolingbroke had sent a band of assassins to Pontefract to murder Richard by means most foul.

      Worse were the rumours that Richard was not dead at all, and that news of his death was only an official attempt to disguise the truth—that Richard had escaped Pontefract and was even now riding on London with an avenging army of tens of thousands behind him.

      God had anointed Richard, therefore would God allow Richard to be so destroyed? And if Richard were truly murdered, would God allow his murder to go unpunished?

      The truth, Whittington thought, as he slowly shuffled forward a few places in the queue, was that the Londoners, as many other among the English, were starting to feel a trifle guilty about their role in Richard’s downfall. They had abandoned Richard with an indecent haste, supporting “fair Prince Hal’s” counterclaim to the throne. While Richard had been festering in Pontefract, awaiting his murder, they’d been crowding about Westminster Abbey, shouting Bolingbroke’s name as if it were a charm against evil.

      Now they were here in their droves, impelled not only by curiosity but by guilt.

      Starting to get impatient, and finding that his joints ached greatly in the chill damp of the cathedral’s nave, Whittington craned his head, trying to see how much longer he might have to wait. The queue appeared to stretch for some thirty or forty persons before him, but the priests standing about the coffin were making sure that people were moving briskly, and not loitering too long over Richard’s open casket.

      No one showed any signs of wanting to loiter, however. Perhaps, Whittington surmised, the stench was putting off even the most guilty or ardent of viewers.

      Loiter they might not, but Whittington noticed that every man and woman who turned aside from the coffin had pale faces as they crossed themselves, halting briefly for the blessings of the priest. And they were quiet as they walked away, not pausing to whisper or gossip.

      Some drew their wraps tighter about themselves, and looked nervously over their shoulders with darting eyes.

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