Murder Wears a Cowl

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The creaking of the scaffold rope was the only sound to disturb the dark silence which hung like a cloud over the great open expanse outside St Bartholomew’s in West Smithfield. During the day the area bustled with colour and noise but, at night, the ghosts would claim it for their own. The great scaffold with its out-jutting beams and yellow knotted ropes was a common sight, as were the corpses which dangled there, necks twisted, eyes protruding, swollen tongues clenched between yellow teeth. The city fathers decreed that executed malefactors should always hang for three days until their bodies started to rot and the sharp-beaked ravens began to gouge the eyes and soft flesh of the face.

No one ever approached that scaffold at night. The old hags claimed the Lords of Hell came to dance there. Even the dogs, cats and kites of the city left the place alone once darkness had fallen. Ragwort, the beggar, however, thought different. During the day Ragwort always sat at the corner of St Martin’s Lane in West Cheap, his copper-begging bowl extended as he whined for alms from the faithful, the rich and the patronising as they crossed London’s great market place to do business at St Paul’s. At night, however, Ragwort moved back to Smithfield, to sleep beneath the scaffold. He felt protected there. No one would dare accost him and he accepted the grisly corpses hanging above him as his companions, even protectors against the robbers, thieves and nightwalkers who plagued the narrow alleyways of London. Sometimes, when he could not sleep, Ragwort would crouch on the wooden slats he used as legs and chatter like a magpie to the corpses. He would wonder about their lives and what had gone wrong.

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