By Murder's bright light

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The great storm that had ravaged the south coast of England had now swept over the northern seas towards the ice lands where men, clad in deerskins, lit fires to nameless gods. The monkish chroniclers from London to Cornwall commented in detail how the storm was God’s judgement on a sinful kingdom. Indeed, God’s anger had been more than apparent in the last few months. A great French fleet under its pirate captain, Eustace the monk, had pillaged and plundered towns along the south coast. At Rye, in Sussex, the villagers had fled for sanctuary to their church. The French privateers had simply locked them in then burnt the place to the ground; they ignored the cries of those within as they loaded stolen carts with the silver objects, tapestries and food-stuffs looted from the ransacked houses.

The French fleet had withdrawn. Now London and its defences rested quietly as bleak autumn turned into freezing winter. Ships rode at anchor in the Thames, straining at their hawsers, their seamen resting and revelling in the city, leaving only skeleton crews on board to cry out the hours. But one ship, the big cog God’s Bright Light, was silent. The lantern high on its mast winked and blinked in the cold, grey light of dawn. The ship moved and creaked, floating gently to and fro on its anchor rope in the black, sluggish Thames. The cranes along St Paul’s Wharf opposite the ship were silent, the warehouse doors shuttered and padlocked. Only the occasional cat, foraging for fat-bellied mice and sleek rats, padded across the coils of oil-soaked ropes, the stacks of wood and the great hooped barrels of salt left there.

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