A Wicked Deed (30 page)

Bartholomew spun round to see where Cynric was pointing. From the fields around them, men had materialised, some of them carrying bows with arrows already nocked, and others with swords that glittered dully in the darkness.

‘Who are you?’ one of them called. ‘Why are you trespassing here?’

‘They are the dead souls of Barchester, protecting their fields,’ groaned Cynric, clutching at Bartholomew’s arm. ‘They have come for us!’

‘For God’s sake, Cynric!’ snapped Bartholomew, the shock of his experience with the dog making him unusually irritable with his book-bearer. ‘Pull yourself together! We are probably on Bardolf s or Deblunville’s land, and these are their men wondering why we were racing across their crops in the middle of the night all covered in mud.’

An arrow thumped into the ground nearby. Cynric closed his eyes and began to mutter incantations against the Devil.

‘I asked who you were!’ shouted the voice.

‘We are from Cambridge,’ Bartholomew called back. ‘We were returning to Grundisburgh from Grosnold’s manor, but we are lost.’

‘You
are
lost,’ agreed the man. ‘This is not the way from Otley to Grundisburgh. I suppose you were sent here to spy. Who paid you? Grosnold or Tuddenham? Or has that weakling Hamon finally become a man, and come out from behind his uncle’s skirts?’

‘Someone tried to rob us,’ said Bartholomew, lowering his voice as the man with the bow came closer. ‘Our horses ran away.’

The archer gave a sneering laugh. ‘Is that so? Next you will be trying to tell us that these robbers had a big white dog.’

‘They did, actually,’ said Bartholomew, puzzled. ‘How did you know?’

The archer refused to listen to anything more. He nodded to his friends, and Cynric and Bartholomew were searched roughly: Bartholomew lost his medicine bag, and Cynric was relieved of enough metal to start his own forge. Bartholomew was astonished: he knew the Welshman never went unarmed, but the number of knives, blades and even sharp nails that were removed from every available place in Cynric’s clothing was staggering.

The archer jabbed Bartholomew with one of Cynric’s weapons, to indicate that they were to start walking. It was a miserable journey. Bartholomew’s body ached from his encounter with the dog, and he was wet and cold. Cynric seemed to have given up altogether, and trailed listlessly at Bartholomew’s side, more morose and apathetic than the physician had ever seen him. It seemed that, as far as Cynric was concerned, he was already a dead man.

At last the bumps and ridges of Deblunville’s enclosure could be seen against the night sky, and Bartholomew and Cynric were prodded inside. They were directed through both sets of embankments and led into the inner bailey, where they were ordered to wait while someone went to fetch Deblunville. The wooden keep was in darkness, suggesting that Deblunville and his household had already retired to bed. It was some time before the door opened and Deblunville appeared; his wife, Janelle, and her father, John Bardolf, were behind him. Janelle walked slowly and her eyes were red-rimmed and sad, a far cry from the confident defiance she had displayed a few days before, when she had announced her marriage to Tuddenham and his cronies.

‘I am sorry we trespassed on your land,’ said Bartholomew. ‘We were attacked as we were riding through Barchester from Otley, and we ran the wrong way when we escaped.’

‘That is
my
land,’ interposed Bardolf coldly. ‘Barchester lies on my land – despite what Grosnold and Tuddenham might claim.’

‘Attacked?’ asked Deblunville, ignoring his father-in-law. He looked Bartholomew up and down. ‘What was stolen? Not my cramp ring, I hope.’

‘Nothing was stolen,’ said Bartholomew, although he would not have been dismayed to lose the funeral jewellery Deblunville had given him. ‘Cynric drove the robbers away with an arrow.’

‘He claims Padfoot ambushed him,’ said the archer with a grin. ‘It is strange how Padfoot always seems to chase people from Grundisburgh on to
our
land.’

Deblunville nodded thougtfully and addressed Bartholomew. ‘Two people claim to have been chased on to my land by Padfoot within the last month: both are now dead, although I assure you that it had nothing to do with me. I personally believe that they were spies in the employ of one of my neighbours, who then executed them for getting caught – a cut throat and a childbirth fever were
the
official causes of death, I understand.’

‘We are telling you the truth,’ insisted Bartholomew. ‘Why should I want to spy on you?’

‘Look.’ The archer held up the gold coin Grosnold had given Bartholomew, discovered when he had searched Bartholomew’s bag. ‘If they were robbed, why did the outlaws leave them this?’

‘Who paid you to spy?’ demanded Bardolf of Bartholomew, pushing forward to stand next to his son-in-law.

‘Grosnold paid me for—’

‘There!’ exclaimed Bardolf triumphantly, interrupting Bartholomew and turning to Deblunville. ‘A confession! I knew these scholars would soon start to meddle in our affairs. Tuddenham summoned them from Cambridge, so that he could set their cunning minds to undermining our rightful claims to this land. You know how lawyers are with words, twisting and turning them, so that they can be made to mean the opposite of what was intended.’

Janelle stepped forward and laid a hand on his arm. ‘All these accusations will get us nowhere, father,’ she said in a low voice. ‘The scholars are not unreasonable men, and if we explain to them why we do not want spies on our manors they will understand.’

‘You are ill,’ said Bartholomew, noting the tremble in her voice and the unhealthy pallor of her skin. ‘Is it the child?’

She nodded, and then shook her head. Tears sprouted from her eyes, and Deblunville thrust the torch into Bardolf s hands, so that he could put his arm around her.

‘There is no child,’ he said bitterly. ‘Not any more. Master Stoate has killed it.’

Bartholomew was bewildered. ‘Killed it how?’

Deblunville sighed. ‘I sent a man to Ipswich for the cumin you said Janelle should have, but he has not yet returned. When Janelle was sick again this morning, we used Stoate’s old remedy, since there was nothing else. Then she had griping pains and a flux of bleeding. The child has gone.’

‘I am sorry,’ said Bartholomew gently. ‘But she should not be out here; she should be resting.’

‘Will you give her something to help her sleep?’ asked Deblunville. ‘I do not want to ask Stoate to come. I might feel obliged to wring his neck.’

‘What would he gain from hurting Janelle?’ said Deblunville, pulling away angrily. ‘And anyway, I believe him when he says he was attacked by Padfoot.’

‘What?’ Bardolf was almost screaming in disbelief.’ Padfoot is a story invented by Tuddenham to allow his spies to come and go at will.’

‘But Tuddenham does not believe in Padfoot,’ protested Bartholomew. ‘He told us it was superstitious nonsense.’

Deblunville ignored him, but snatched the torch to thrust it so close that the physician winced, certain that he would have caught fire had his clothes not been so wet. ‘Look at his cloak, Bardolf. It is covered in white hairs!’

Bartholomew sat on the edge of the bed in Janelle’s chamber, and replaced the covers carefully. She smiled up at him, her face so lovely in the candlelight that it made him feel suddenly lonely. He wondered what Matilde was doing back in Cambridge, and whether he, like Michael, was destined to spend the rest of his life without the joy of a female companion.

‘Are you really sure?’ she asked yet again.

Bartholomew nodded. ‘I am certain. There was no child in the flux of blood, and everything suggests to me that you are still carrying it. The potions I have given you will help, but you must rest for the next few days – weeks, even – and no more betony and pennyroyal, no matter what Stoate tells you.’

‘About the murder of Unwin?’ he asked hopefully.

She shook her head. ‘I am sorry, but no one seems to know anything about that. Usually, if a crime is committed, someone knows the culprit, and it does not take long for the truth to come out. But whoever killed Unwin has been very clever in hiding his tracks. I think you should not look to the common villagers for your killer; you should look higher.’

‘That has been suggested before,’ said Bartholomew, thinking about what Norys had told him. And then there was Eltisley’s claim to have seen Grosnold with Unwin in the churchyard shortly before the friar’s death, plus her father’s belief that Unwin might have been killed because of the strife among the lords of the manor and their priests, ‘Is that what you wanted to tell me?’

‘No, something else. About my husband’s clothes – the ones that you saw on the hanged man at Bond’s Corner.’ She paused again, and looked at the fire, its lights flickering in her eyes.

‘You know who took them?’ asked Bartholomew, gently prompting.

‘Yes.’ She looked up at him, and there was some of the grim determination in her face that he had seen when they first met. ‘But you must not reveal that I told you this, or use the information against my father.’

‘Your father?’ said Bartholomew, puzzled. ‘How is he involved?’

‘I gave him those clothes,’ said Janelle reluctantly. She shrugged at him. ‘I am the thief. I stole from the man who was going to be my husband.’

‘I see,’ said Bartholomew, not seeing at all.

That meant he was poor indeed, for there were few who escaped the greedy hands of the King and his tax collectors. Before an exemption was granted, all accounts were inspected rigorously by men who were neither generous nor sympathetic to hardship. Janelle continued.

‘So, a week or so ago, I took the clothes and the dagger, and I left them for him in a bundle near the Clopton – Grundisburgh parish boundary. Roland would not have been keen for me to give them to my father had I asked, but he would not have demanded them back once they had gone. I wanted my father to wear them at our wedding, you see, so that he would not look shabby and old.’

‘And did your father ever receive these clothes?’ asked Bartholomew.

She shook her head. ‘I had instructed one of his men to meet me there, but he was late. I did not want to waste the whole day waiting for a servant, so I left the bundle under a tree and went about my own business. By the time the servant arrived, the clothes had gone.’

‘So, someone else found them?’

She nodded. ‘It could not have been a villager from Clopton, because the finder would have announced his luck, and then someone would have told him that the bundle was intended for my father. It must have been someone from Grundisburgh.’

‘So, someone from Grundisburgh found a bundle containing some clothes and a dagger, donned them and ended up hanged,’ said Bartholomew, trying to make sense of it.

‘But that makes no sense, either,’ said Bartholomew. ‘The man to judge that sort of crime would be Tuddenham, and he seemed to know nothing about anyone being hanged for theft.’

‘Perhaps he did not want to cast a pall of gloom over the Pentecost Fair, and so kept it quiet,’ she said with a shrug. ‘You should not believe everything he tells you.’

‘I will bear it in mind,’ he said with a smile. He was not surprised that she had kept the business of the stolen clothes to herself; the most obvious people who would avenge an act of finders-keepers would be either her father – an impecunious man who needed his daughter to steal him new clothes for her wedding – or her husband, perhaps startled to meet a man parading around in the finery he thought was safely packed away in a chest at home. Bartholomew frowned. Or was the real killer Tuddenham, the man whom Deblunville and Bardolf thought had been spreading tales of the mysterious white dog? ‘Padfoot’ was, after all, the word uttered by the dying man.

He left Janelle in the care of her maidservant. Deblunville was waiting for him in the lower chamber, huddled near the fire, while Bardolf paced back and forth angrily. Cynric was folded into a corner with an untouched cup of ale at his side, staring morosely into the rushes.

‘Thank you,’ said Deblunville, standing to greet him. ‘This child means a great deal to her. She was afraid she might be too old to have children.’

‘You should find her a midwife in Ipswich,’ said Bartholomew. ‘Or better still, try to persuade Mother Goodman to come. She seems a competent woman.’

‘She is,’ said Deblunville. ‘But she is also loyal to Tuddenham. She will never attend Janelle.’