The dung carts were out picking up the refuse left the day before. The burly, red-faced carters, swathed in a collection of garish rags, shouted and swore, their oaths hanging heavy in the thick, warm air. As Cranston and Athelstan passed they heard one of the dung-collectors give a cry for them to stop working as a corpse was rolled out from behind the buttress of an old house. Athelstan stopped. He glimpsed straggly, white hair, a face sunken in death, the, skeletal fingers of an elderly lady. Cranston looked at him and shrugged.

'She is dead, Brother,' he said. 'What can we do?'

Athelstan sketched a sign of the cross in the air and said a prayer that Christ, wherever he was, would receive the old woman's soul.

They went down past the Standard and the Conduit gaol with its open bars where courtesans and bawds caught plying their trade at night, stood for a day whilst being pelted with dirt and cursed by any passing citizen. Cranston asked him a question and Athelstan was about to reply when the stench from the poultry stalls suddenly made him gag: that terrible odour of stale flesh, rotting giblets and dried blood. Athelstan let Cranston chatter on as he held his breath, head down as he passed Scalding Alley where the gutted bodies of game birds were being cleaned and washed in great wooden vats of boiling hot water. At the Rose tavern on a corner of an alleyway they stopped to let a ward constable push by, leading a group of night felons, hands tied behind their backs, halters round their necks. These unfortunates were bound for the Poultry Compter, most of them still drunk, half asleep after their late night revels and roistering. The prisoners slipped and shoved each other. One young man was shouting how the Constables had taken his boots and his feet were already gashed and scarred. Athelstan pitied them.

'The gaol's so hot,' the friar murmured, 'it will either waken or kill them before Evensong.'