Falconer's Trial (7 page)

‘Never you mind about that, man. Just show me to my room, and keep your mouth shut.’

Halegod had a mind to turn the discourteous knight away, such was his rudeness, but business was business and it had truly been poor of late. Muttering about the wheel of fate’s downward turn and having to put up with ungrateful wretches, Peter Halegod led Segrim to his best room. He would have his revenge by making him pay through the nose for his night’s stay.

SIX

O
n the Sunday of that week, the bells of Oxford’s many churches called the good citizens to prayer as normal. The Franciscans and the Dominicans both had their own friaries in the town, and the friars had been long up and about their devotions when Falconer rose bleary-eyed from his bed. For those in holy orders proper, the day began at midnight with Matins and Lauds, though the monks and friars were then allowed back to bed until daybreak. That was the first Mass of the day for them, followed by breakfast. Falconer’s day was altogether more congenial, even though Regent Masters and students of the university were also nominally in holy orders themselves. Falconer yawned and splashed some cold water in his face from the bowl one of his students had left outside his door. His black robe, when he pulled it on, felt damp and his boots chilly, and he hurried down the creaky stairs to the communal hall where he hoped someone had managed to stir the fire into a semblance of life.

Unfortunately, all he found was a pile of cold ashes. He ventured to the back of the hall, where a ramshackle arrangement of wood and cheap cloth divided off the sleeping areas. In there were small cubicles with bedsteads provided by the abbey landlord. The rest of the bedding was the students’ responsibility to provide. Falconer poked his head in Peter Mithian’s cell. It was he whose duty it was that week to arise first. He must have done so as the regent master’s water had been outside his door. But clearly tiredness had overtaken the clerk again as soon as he had performed that early duty. He lay on a bare plank bed innocent of any mattress. On the floor around him were scattered two books, a candlestick bearing the nub of a candle, a gimlet, a hornpipe and a wooden spoon. Amongst all these, his worldly possessions, Mithian was fast asleep. Falconer stirred him with his boot.

‘Get up and pay your way, boy,’ he grumbled. The few shillings Falconer earned annually in fees for teaching were supplemented by the commons paid for ten or a dozen students lodging in Aristotle’s Hall. But even after he had paid his landlord, Oseney Abbey, its rent, the money didn’t stretch very far. Especially as Falconer took a few poor students on who had a begging licence from the university. Their passage through the university was made possible by working for the richer students and living off their scraps. Peter Mithian was one of those beggar clerks, and though Falconer hated it, he needed to keep the boy up to the mark. He would find no other way out of his poverty and needed his qualifications.

Peter Mithian yawned, stretched, then realized who had roused him and why. Blushing deeply across his chubby, boyish features, he scrambled off his bed.

‘I am sorry, master. I was conning my texts until the early hours with a candle Tom gave me.’

Tom Youlden was one of the rich students in Falconer’s hall. His generosity, however, seemed not to run to providing a mattress for Peter. Falconer was mortified that he had not noticed before that one of his charges was sleeping on bare boards.

‘Where is your mattress, Peter? Did you not have one when you came?’

Mithian cast his eyes to the ground and mumbled some words Falconer did not understand.

‘What, boy? Speak up.’

‘I sold it to buy these books.’ He snatched the two precious books up from the floor where they had fallen when he had finally lost his battle with staying awake the night before. Falconer gently took them from his grasp and examined them. One was the
Topics
of Boethius and the other Priscian’s
De constructione
– both basic texts for the clerks at university. He carefully gave them back to Peter.

‘You should have come to me. I can lend you any books you may want. And as for the mattress, I believe there is an old one in the shed in the yard. It will need mending and airing by the fire, mind. And talking of the fire, you had better get last night’s embers going before we all freeze to death.’

Peter Mithian responded to Falconer’s final peremptory tones and scuttled from his cubicle to attend to his duties. Meanwhile, the regent master foraged for himself and found some dry bread that he moistened with ale from the barrel in the hall. With the fire downstairs not yet providing any heat, he retreated to his own solar, wrapping himself in the still-warm blanket from his bed until such time as the sun struck through the window and warmed the room. Behind him, high on his perch, his owl, Balthazar, ruffled its feathers and stared impassively down. Night-time was its time for activity, and the day was for sleeping.

‘You are lucky, bird. You can sleep the day away wrapped in your own down blanket while others have to toil for a living.’

Falconer’s grumble was interrupted by a tentative knock at his door. He called out for whoever it was to come in. Peter Mithian poked his head round the door, a scared look in his eyes. He didn’t like inflicting his presence on the regent master, preferring to remain unnoticed. By doing so, he was less likely to be picked on when it came to awkward questions about logic and grammar. But this morning had put him in the full light of day, so he had decided to take advantage of Falconer’s offer.

‘Master, I need also to read the new logic of Aristotle…’

Falconer sighed, seeing he was to get no peace today.

‘Come in, boy. You need to read
Sophistici elenchi
. Look, it is over there beside the chimney breast.’

He pointed out a toppling stack of his most cherished books and papers. At the bottom of the heap, less used because they were the approved texts, were to be found books such as the rather dull
Historia Scholastica
. Falconer’s more esoteric and well-thumbed works lay on the top, amongst them works by the Arab mathematician Al-Khowarizmi, medical works of Galen and a geography text called
De Sphaera Mundi
. The boy tiptoed across the cluttered room, marvelling at the strange collection of objects on the large central table that dominated the space. Animal bones jostled with dried plants and stones which had weird shapes inscribed on their surfaces. Two scrolls lay open, their edges held down with pebbles and a rusty dagger. He could not decipher the writing on them.

‘Hebrew. The texts are both Hebrew translations of Arabic works by Averroes. I am trying to discover the true original text from examining the errors in both translations.’

Falconer’s explanation of the scratchings on the scrolls was bewildering to Mithian. He was afraid he would never understand the simplest of texts expounded in ordinary lectures at the university. Let alone be able to put into Latin or English a Jewish version of an Arabic work. He sighed deeply.

‘Yes, master. I think I had better learn my Aristotle first.’

He turned to the heap of books, not sure where to begin even now. How was he to identify which text was which amidst this pile of paper and parchment? Perhaps he had better first move the pots and vials that lay atop them. He picked up a stone jar and sniffed its contents. Recoiling in horror, he nudged the pile of books, and had to grab at a couple of other pots that began to slide off the top.

‘Here, here. Let me do that.’ Falconer shrugged off his blanket and leaped nimbly across the room. Though he was a large, rangy man, his footwork was still neat and sure, due to long years spent dodging swords and daggers in his youth. He had been a mercenary in many of the skirmishes that played out across Europe and along the trade routes that he had chosen to explore before settling to a scholastic life. He grabbed the foul-smelling pot from his student and steadied the others. Gingerly, Peter Mithian took one in each hand and transferred them to the cluttered table.

‘You need to take care with some of these pots. What they contain could be quite deadly if swallowed.’

Mithian shuddered, stepping away from the pots and vials as Falconer transferred them from the pile by the chimney breast. Then the regent master slipped out a roughly bound sheaf of papers from the middle of the heap.

‘There it is. The Aristotle you so wish to consult, Peter. Learn it well, for I shall test you on it when next you are in my school.’

Mithian groaned. What he had feared had come to pass. Master Falconer would now single him out for special attention and he would no longer be able to hide in the shadows.

‘Thank you, master. For this, and for the mattress. I have already brought it in from the shed and set it to dry out by the fire.’

‘Which I am sure you now have burning well and warmly.’

Falconer’s parting shot gave the boy good reason to hurry from his master’s presence. He rushed down to check on the fire that he had roused from the embers of the night before. Falconer, meanwhile, picked up one of the pots and peered at the label he had bound around it. The ink had smeared and the label was illegible. Truth to tell, he could not remember what the contents were and why they stunk so much. Perhaps he would take it round to Saphira and see if her new knowledge of poisons would serve to identify it. Insatiably curious though, he poked his finger in, wiggled it around and withdrew it. Tentatively, he touched his finger to his tongue.

Saphira was sure she had seen the weirdly dressed talisman seller before. But the large conical hat hid his features well. She had been crossing Fish Street on her way to Jewry Lane and Aristotle’s Hall, when the apparition that had so startled Peter Pady the previous night appeared at the top of the street. The seller had obviously attracted a lot of attention in Carfax because a small crowd of people were following in his wake. Despite the insistent clamour of the church bells calling them, Christians as much as Jews were attracted by magical gewgaws. Everyone believed strongly in the curative powers of talismans and amulets. There were many suffering from all sorts of ailments who would buy from this man. Personally, Saphira would rather depend on the powers of the plants and herbs that Samson was revealing to her. Though, even those held some mystery for her. After all, why should lungwort, whose leaves were supposed to resemble a human lung, ease congested lungs? But it did. Perhaps buying a talisman – a stone or similar with some marks on it – was no less efficacious in the end. Who was to say otherwise? The strangely dressed vendor stopped in the middle of Fish Street and opened the large satchel that hung around his shoulders. From it he pulled out a handful of items dangling on chains and leather strips. Polished stones and silvery boxes glittered in the light. He held the trinkets high in the air and called out.

‘Amulets and talismans to ward off all ills.’

The people that had been following him soon gathered around and began examining his wares. Curious, Saphira delayed her visit to Falconer and walked over to the edge of the crowd. At the front of the assembled throng, a boy with sightless eyes was being pushed forward. He held a silver coin in his trembling hand, uncertain where to proffer it. The talisman seller expressed a reluctance to take his money, but then a sceptic in the crowd snorted his derision.

‘I might have known. Just another Jew trick.’

Saphira looked closer at the seller. It was true that though his eyes were obscured by the hat, and he had his back to her, his long dark beard and hair locks suggested he was a fellow religionist. He stiffened at the jibe, and held out a bright stone with a peculiar mark across its surface that swung on the end of a cord. He dropped it in the boy’s open fist, refusing to accept the coin in his other hand. The boy held the stone to his forehead and slowly his eyeballs, that had been white as an egg’s albumen, rotated. He closed his eyelids, and when he opened them, a pair of dark-brown eyes stared out incredulously. The crowd gasped as one, and the boy darted away, crying out he was cured. Suddenly, hands reached out to touch the Jew’s wares. A young woman with an ugly boil on her neck fingered one of the small silver boxes nervously. She engaged in earnest conversation with the stranger, who clearly reassured her that the amulet could rid her of her existing affliction, as well as it could ward off future ills and ailments. The woman turned to her companion, who groaned and put his hand into the purse at his waist. Another coin was exchanged and the box was hung by its leather strap around the woman’s neck.

As the trader sold more wares, he turned towards Saphira’s part of the crowd. When his conical hat tilted back, she recognized him immediately. It was a man called Covele. Several months ago, he had crossed her path when he had come to Oxford offering to carry out rituals that the majority of Jews deemed forbidden. Rituals that could only be carried out in the Temple of Solomon, which had long ago been destroyed. He had scuttled out of town when his actions had seemed to be mixed up with the death of a child. His deeds had caused untold problems for the Jews who tried to live their life alongside the Christians of England. Saphira recalled he had then had his son with him.

‘You trickster. The blind boy was your son and the last time I saw him his sight was perfect.’

She only spoke under her breath, so he couldn’t have heard. But Covele must have recognized her all the same. He suddenly stuffed the rest of his wares in his satchel and shook his head at his other customers.

‘I am sorry but I cannot sell any more today. The time is not propitious.’

Despite the loud protests, he pushed through the crowd and hurried back up Fish Street in the opposite direction to Saphira. She made to follow him, lifting her skirts to keep pace. At first, she kept him in sight because of the strange hat with the spike on the top. But then he looked back at her and realized what was giving him away. He pulled his hat off his head and was soon lost amidst the rest of the people who thronged the street.

Ann woke up that Sunday with a vague feeling of nausea in the pit of her stomach. Was it a genuine illness creeping over her? Or were the events of the last few days preying on her mind? There had been the unpleasant encounter with the red-haired Jew in Oxford, and the subsequent skirmish with Humphrey’s half-brother, Alexander. Both had left her with a nasty taste in her mouth, but neither had seemed so extreme as to make her ill.