A Wicked Deed (3 page)

The sun shone through the leaves of the trees, making dappled patterns on the grassy path. To one side, bluebells and buttercups added a splash of colour to the sludge of brown, rotting leaves from the year before, and to the other, a stream sparkled silver as it meandered south. The only sounds, other than birdsong, were the occasional clink of a harness and the gentle thud of horses’ hooves on the turf. A butterfly danced across the path and then was gone, while a group of rabbits, probably escapees from some nobleman’s warren, darted down a sandy hole with flicks of their white tails as the horsemen approached. Bartholomew took a deep breath, laden with the scent of warm, damp earth. He closed his eyes, relishing the feel of the sun on his face and the peace of the countryside.

‘Suffolk is a godforsaken place,’ grumbled Michael, riding next to him and glancing around disparagingly. He wore a wide-brimmed black hat to shade his face from the sun, and his skin was alabaster white against his dark Benedictine habit. Strands of lank brown hair dangled limply from under the hat, already wet with sweat, despite the cool, early-morning air. ‘I have never been anywhere so dismal.’

‘I suppose you miss the stench of the King’s Ditch in Cambridge?’ asked Bartholomew. ‘Or the pleasure of strolling along the High Street, with its piles of offal, sewage and dead animals?’

Michael shot him an unpleasant look. ‘At least it is good town filth,’ he said. ‘Not like this vile, endless scrub, and these miserable, tree-infested pathways that stink of grass. But look at Roger Alcote! He sits in his saddle like a ploughboy!’

‘And that Franciscan is just as bad,’ Michael continued contemptuously, shifting his disdain from Alcote to William on his long-suffering donkey. ‘He looks like a peasant astride a pig!’

Since there was some truth in Michael’s observation, Bartholomew was unable to suppress a smile. ‘You are in a fine mood today. Are you ill? Did you overeat again last night?’

‘No, I did not overeat!’ snapped Michael. ‘I am just weary of this interminable journey. Do you know, the only one other than me who has the slightest grace is that Rob Deynman.’ He looked over his shoulder to where Deynman and his two fellow students dawdled behind them. Seeing the obese monk glance backward, Deynman quickly slipped something out of sight and assumed a guileless expression. Michael’s eyes narrowed suspiciously.

‘Coming from such a wealthy family, Deynman could probably ride before he could walk,’ said Bartholomew to distract him. Like Michael, the students were bored by the long journey, and Bartholomew had been impressed, but not particularly surprised, when they had devised a way of playing illicit games of dice as they rode.

‘Deynman will never make a physician, Matt,’ said Michael, fixing the uneasy student with a stony glower. ‘I cannot imagine why you persist in trying to teach him.’

‘You know very well why I continue to teach him, Brother,’ said Bartholomew, ‘since it was you who made the arrangements. The extortionate fees his father pays for his tuition keep Michaelhouse in bread and ale for at least half the year.’

‘This has nothing to do with the Master,’ said Alcote, overhearing and reining back so that he could join in the conversation. ‘It was my doing that Sir Thomas Tuddenham offered us the living of Grundisburgh’s church. I hope you will remember that, Brother.’

‘I certainly will,’ muttered Michael bitterly. ‘And all I can say is that if this living does not swell the College coffers beyond my wildest dreams, there will be hell to pay.’

‘Grundisburgh is a very wealthy parish,’ said Alcote. ‘It has about two hundred occupants, most of whom pay annual tithes to the church. These will provide Unwin with a respectable stipend, and there will be enough left over for the College to make even the greediest Fellow happy.’ He treated Michael to a nasty smile, head on one side in his bird-like way.

‘I do not see why we had to come here at all,’ Michael continued. ‘If Tuddenham feels as much admiration for Michaelhouse as you claim, then he should have travelled to Cambridge to prepare the deed, not had us traipsing over the country after him. We are still in the middle of term, and I have teaching to do.’

‘Then you should not have volunteered to come, Brother,’ said Alcote coldly. ‘None of you should. It is for me, as Senior Fellow, to oversee the writing of this deed – the advowson, as it is called – and it has nothing to do with anyone else.’

‘It has a lot to do with Unwin,’ Bartholomew pointed out. ‘Once Tuddenham signs the advowson giving Michaelhouse the church, we will go home, but he will have to stay.’

‘I expect he would ask to stay in Michaelhouse and study,’ said Bartholomew. ‘He does not want to be a village priest.’

‘Has he told you that?’ asked Michael, surprised.

‘He does not need to,’ said Bartholomew. ‘Have you not noticed how he has grown steadily more terrified the farther we have come from Cambridge?’ He saw Alcote frowning, and hurried on. ‘He will try his best – he is too obedient a friar to do otherwise – but the thought of being a parish priest does not appeal to him.’

‘Then that is just too bad,’ declared Alcote. ‘He is our most promising student, and Tuddenham must be rewarded for his generosity by being given the best Michaelhouse can offer.’ He glanced disdainfully at his companions, particularly at Bartholomew’s frayed cuffs and threadbare tabard, and brushed an imaginary speck of dust from his own expensive robe.

Alcote had taken orders with the Cluniacs, once he had realised that life as a monk in the University could be comfortably lucrative. Previously, there had been a brief and unsatisfactory allegiance with the Carmelites. But it had been the Cluniacs who had best satisfied Alcote’s requirements: they were an Order strong enough to promote him in University circles, but one that would leave him to his own devices as long as regular donations to the Mother House continued to swell its coffers.

‘What will Tuddenham think when he sees the shambolic deputation the Master of Michaelhouse has dispatched?’ Alcote went on. ‘A fat Benedictine, an eccentric physician, a huge Franciscan on a tiny mule, a servant who is more soldier than book-bearer, and three disreputable students, one of whom is destined to be his parish priest, but who would rather be doing something else. What was the Master thinking of?’

‘I suspect he was thinking of the peace he would have, once rid of a few troublemakers,’ shot back Michael. ‘He is weary of your constant criticism. Meanwhile, William is becoming so obsessed with being the University’s next Junior Proctor that he is beginning to make a serious nuisance of himself with the Chancellor; young John de Horsey is here to ensure his friend Unwin does not flee his duties; Rob Deynman is still in disgrace over that nasty business regarding Agatha the laundress’s teeth; and Matt’s dalliance with the town’s most beautiful prostitute means that the Master had a very good reason for wanting
him
out of Cambridge!’

Just a minute,’ began Bartholomew, horrified. ‘I have never—’

‘I heard about that,’ said Father William smugly, his timely entry into the conversation indicating that he had been listening all along. ‘Disgraceful! If I were Master, I would insist you took major orders, and become a friar or a monk, like the rest of us, Matthew. That would put an end to unseemly lechery with harlots. And I am not obsessed with becoming Junior Proctor, by the way. I have just made it clear in certain quarters that I would accept such a post if it were offered to me.’

‘And you are here to keep us all in order, I suppose,’ said Alcote, sneering at Michael. ‘You can spy for the Master, just as you spy for the Chancellor and the Bishop.’

‘The Master wanted
me
here to make sure the College was not cheated,’ said William, before Michael could reply to Alcote’s accusation, which was just as well, given that there was more than a grain of truth in it. Michael was not only the University’s Senior Proctor and a valued member of the Chancellor’s staff, he was also a trusted agent of the Bishop of Ely.

Monks and friars were invariably at loggerheads – friars denounced the contemplative lives of monks as selfish and cosseted, and monks objected to friars working in the community and involving themselves in human affairs. William despised the avaricious Alcote, and did not approve of Michael’s growing influence in the University; in turn, Alcote was repelled by William’s grimy, unkempt appearance, and Michael had no time at all for the friar’s bigotry.

‘God did not send the plague,’ said Bartholomew, to avert a row. ‘It just happened.’

There was a shocked silence, during which Bartholomew received a sharp kick from Michael. With a sinking heart, the physician realised that, far from preventing an argument, he had just managed to precipitate one. William drew himself up to his full height, almost losing the donkey from underneath him as he did so.

‘Are you suggesting that God is not all-powerful?’ he demanded hotly. ‘Do you propose that other agents are equally able to cause such devastation in the world?’

‘It seems to me that is exactly what he is suggesting,’ said Alcote, as keen to promote dissent as Bartholomew was to stop it. ‘He is a heretic!’

‘He is nothing of the kind,’ said Michael before Bartholomew could say anything in his own defence and make matters worse. ‘And now is not the time for theological debate: we have arrived.’

‘This must be Barchester, not Grundisburgh,’ said Bartholomew, looking around at the lonely houses and overgrown gardens. ‘The taverner told me about Barchester this morning. Apparently, only one of its inhabitants survived the plague, but she drowned herself in the river last winter. It has been abandoned ever since.’

‘Is that her?’ asked Deynman in an unsteady voice. Bartholomew looked to the house where
the
student was pointing and saw an expanse of skirt with a shoe at the end of it, just visible under the cracked piece of leather that served as a door. The physician dismounted and took a step forward.

‘No!’ cried Michael suddenly, his voice shockingly loud in the silent village. He grabbed Bartholomew’s shoulder. ‘The Death may still lurk in this place, Matt. Leave her! If she drowned herself last winter, you can do nothing to help her now.’

‘It cannot be the woman who drowned,’ said Bartholomew reasonably. ‘How could she have moved here from the river, if she were dead?’

His colleagues, to a man, crossed themselves vigorously.

‘I have heard of these places,’ said Cynric, looking around him uneasily. ‘The spirits of those not granted absolution haunt them, and their screams of torment ring out each midnight.’

‘That is superstitious nonsense, Cynric,’ said Bartholomew firmly, refusing to allow his book-bearer’s vivid imagination to unnerve him.

‘It is truth, boy,’ said Cynric with conviction. ‘If you were to come here at the witching hour, you would hear them.’

‘Well, that is no tormented spirit,’ said Bartholomew, nodding at the bundle of clothing in the doorway. ‘But it may be someone needing help.’

‘I do not like this at all,’ said Alcote, looking around him as though he expected to see the plague-dead rising up and rushing out of their houses to lay ghostly hands on him. ‘It is sinister!’

Bartholomew handed the reins of his horse to Cynric, and walked through the nettles and weeds to the house where the skirt and shoe lay.

Aware that Michael was right, and that the house might still contain the decomposing bodies of unburied plague victims, Bartholomew picked up a stick, and used it to ease back the piece of leather that hung in the doorway. He gave a sigh of relief when he saw the skirt and shoe were nothing more than that – discarded clothes that had fallen in such a way as to appear as though someone was inside them.

As the daylight filtered into the house’s single room, Bartholomew noticed it was surprisingly intact for a place that had been abandoned four years before. But, he thought, as he looked around, perhaps it had belonged to the woman who had killed herself, and had therefore only been left to decay for a few months. There was a table in the centre of the room with some carrots on it, black and shrivelled and with a knife lying next to them, as if their owner had been preparing a meal before she left, never to return. Cold, dead ashes lay in the hearth, stirring slightly in the draught from the doorway, and a rusting metal pot nestled among them.

Something glittered on the ground near the threshold, and Bartholomew crouched to look at it. It was a shiny new penny, still copper-bright from the mint, and not the dull brown of most of the coins of the realm. He turned it over in his fingers, and saw the date was that of the current year – 1353.