Burnell had instructed him to begin his assignment immediately and Corbett did not delay. He thought of using his writ to draw monies from the Exchequer but he knew this would be a laborious task. The Exchequer clerks were suspicious of everyone, particularly other clerks. They would make him wait, examine the writ and then sparingly dole out the money. No, he decided, wrapping his cloak round him, he would draw some of his own money from a goldsmith in Cheapside, and then submit his account direct to Burnell. After all, money was no problem to him, he was

paid good fees and the property in Sussex had been sold. Why keep a house when you have no home? Corbett tried to clear the depression from his mind as he left the Palace of Westminster. An hour candle fixed in an iron socket on one of the benches of the court told him it was three in the afternoon. The crowds were dispersing. The litigants with their pile of documents, lawyers elated or depressed, the serjeants, in their multicoloured robes, led lines of prisoners chained together out of the courts to be marched under guard to the Tun, Marshalsea or Newgate Prison.

Corbett threaded his way through them all out of the palace and down to the river bank. He decided to brave the weather and hired a wherry sculled by the ugliest boatman Corbett had ever seen, who insisted on regaling him with the finer parts of his visit to the stews of the city the night before. Eventually, damp and cold, his ears ringing with the waterman's vivid description of his sex life, Hugh reached Queenshithe Wharf and made his way up towards St. Pauls. It was already dark. The last desperate tradesmen, eel-sellers and water carriers, were trying to squeeze as much trade as possible out of the day. The streets were emptying. Children pulled indoors, apprentices putting up the boards and setting out the horn lanterns, as ordered by the City Fathers to give some poor light to the streets at night.