The Lost Abbot (5 page)

Bartholomew winced. Such cases were never easy, and he wished Michael had been with him instead: the monk never questioned his medical judgement. He was about to explain further when there was a sudden clatter at the back of the chapel. It was Botilbrig, come to find out why his charges were taking so long.

‘Cow!’ he screeched, making the scholars jump. ‘Thieving whore! These visitors are
mine
, and if they give any donations for the shrines, then they are mine, too!’

The Michaelhouse scholars gaped their astonishment at such remarks bawled in a holy place, while Botilbrig stared with undisguised loathing at Joan. The expression was returned in kind, and her meaty fists clenched at her sides.

‘You are not welcome here,’ she said coldly. ‘Leave, before the saint takes umbrage at your evil presence and sends a bolt of lightning to dispatch you.’

‘I shall go when it pleases me,’ bellowed Botilbrig. ‘It is not for a harlot to direct my movements. Besides, St Thomas does not go around striking down innocents.’

‘No, but Oxforde might,’ flashed Joan. ‘Especially after all the rude remarks you have made about him in the past. He is certainly offended.’

‘He was no more holy than you are,’ snapped Botilbrig. ‘How can you take money from desperate pilgrims, pretending that he will answer their prayers? You are a wicked—’

‘Please,’ interrupted Clippesby quietly. ‘It is inappropriate to bandy words here. The spiders do not like it – they have just said so.’

‘Spiders?’ echoed Botilbrig, startled.

‘The friar is right,’ said Joan. ‘So go away, you horrible little man.’ She turned her back on Botilbrig, deliberately provocative.

‘You two are not married, are you?’ asked William. ‘Because you sound like my parents.’

‘No, we are not,’ spluttered Botilbrig, outraged. ‘I might have set my sights on her once, but that was before she grew fat and shrewish. Now I would not look twice at her.’

‘He is jealous, because we have Thomas Becket’s relics
and
Oxforde’s grave,’ said Joan, scowling at him. ‘Whereas St Leonard’s has nothing but a smelly well and an old man who should have died years ago.’

‘Our spring does not smell,’ objected Botilbrig. ‘And Kirwell
is
holy with his great age – a saint in the making. When he dies, he will do much better miracles than Oxforde.’

‘We should go,’ said Michael to his colleagues, as the quarrel escalated. ‘The sooner we complete our business here, the sooner we can leave. And I
must
be home by Saturday week, or Winwick Hall’s charter will be drawn up without me, and there will be a riot.’

They left the chapel, blinking as they emerged into the sunlight. Immediately, the ousted pilgrims surged forward, demanding to know when they could resume their petitions. They jerked back when Joan propelled Botilbrig out with an unnecessary degree of force; he would have fallen if Bartholomew had not caught him. She raised a large hand for silence, before announcing haughtily that the shrines would reopen after she had counted the day’s takings. She was clearly anticipating a generous donation from the Bishop’s Commissioners, although she was going to be disappointed – Bartholomew’s had had been modest because he never had much money; Michael considered himself exempt from such obligations; and Clippesby had forgotten. The pilgrims cried their dismay, but Joan’s only response was to close the door with a firmly final thump.

‘Look,’ said William, pointing. ‘A fellow Grey Friar browsing among the market stalls. Yet my Order has no convent here.’

His curiosity piqued, he hurried off to interrogate the priest about his business. Disinclined to abandon him in a strange place, Michael sat on a low wall to wait for him, tilting his plump face towards the sun. Bartholomew and Clippesby perched by his side, both grateful for the opportunity to relax before presenting themselves at the abbey.

‘I hope finding out what happened to Abbot Robert will not take long,’ remarked the monk worriedly. ‘Gynewell is unfair to expect me to investigate so long after it happened. And he did not furnish me with much in the way of details, either.’

‘What did he tell you exactly?’ asked Bartholomew. ‘You were so angry at being forced to leave Cambridge that you barely spoke a word all the way here.’

‘I would have done, but it was impossible,’ said Michael irritably. ‘Either we were listening out for robbers, or I was worried that distracting you might make you fall off your horse again. But to answer your question, Gynewell told me virtually nothing – just that the Abbot set out to visit a goldsmith one day and no one has heard from him since. He did not even say whether the case has been investigated by the monks.’

‘It must have been, Brother. You do not lose your Abbot and wait for someone else to look into the matter. I wonder why the Bishop did not come in person. The disappearance of Peterborough’s most senior monk is a serious matter.’

‘His Lincoln Mint has been producing counterfeit coins, and the King is incandescent with rage – no monarch wants his currency debased, as it could destabilise the entire economy. Gynewell has been charged to catch the forger as a matter of urgency.’

‘Money,’ said Clippesby, shaking his head disapprovingly. ‘It seems to take precedence over everything.’

‘It certainly seems important here,’ said Michael wryly. ‘Joan is taking an age to count her takings, and it seems that the two bedeshouses compete as to which can raise the most.’

They sat in companionable silence for a while, until William returned to say that his fellow Grey Friar had come to find out why Robert had failed to reply to his convent’s letters.

‘The Abbot did not leave anyone with the authority to answer them, apparently,’ he said, all smug disdain. ‘It is unprofessional, and would never happen in a Franciscan foundation.’

Michael grimaced at the claim, but it was pleasant in the sunshine and he didn’t want to quarrel. Absently, he watched a gaggle of bedeswomen enter the chapel; the pilgrims had ignored Joan’s injunction to wait, and must have either sneaked in or gone away, because there were far fewer of them than there had been. Botilbrig, loitering by the door, had been joined by several men whose robes identified them as cronies from the same foundation. They called challenging remarks after the women, then hooted derisively when there was no response.

‘Lord!’ muttered William. ‘They are old enough to know better.’

The others nodded agreement, but then a man walked past with a pig on a lead, and the animal, scenting something it did not like about the place where it was being taken, made a sudden bid for freedom. An abrupt right-angled turn saw the rope whipped from its master’s hand, and it was off. Pandemonium reigned as it raced among the market stalls, leaving chaos in its wake. It was still running amok when there was a shriek from the chapel. It was followed by a lot of shouting, and one of the bedeswomen hobbled out, wailing in distress. The scholars were torn between watching folk cluster around her and the pig’s efforts to lay hold of an apple while simultaneously eluding the hands that endeavoured to grab it.

‘Marion says that Joan is dead,’ reported Botilbrig, evidently deciding that someone should inform the Bishop’s Commissioners what the bedeswoman was howling about. ‘In front of the altar.’

The four scholars exchanged bemused glances, and went to join the growing throng outside the chapel door. Marion’s sobbing jabber was difficult to understand, so Botilbrig took it upon himself to interpret.

‘Stone dead and lying on her face. It must be because Joan argued with me in a holy place.’

‘Lies!’ howled Marion, launching herself at him. Bartholomew stepped between them, catching her flailing hands before she could do herself or her target any harm. ‘
He
killed her! He slipped up behind her and brained her with the broken bit of St Thomas’s flagstone!’

‘What?’ breathed William, shocked. ‘He did
what
?’

‘I never did!’ cried Botilbrig. ‘I was out here with you. If Joan has been brained, and Oxforde is not responsible, then St Thomas must have done it.’

‘That is blasphemy!’ shouted William, incensed. ‘And while I saw Joan toss you out, I was not watching you the whole time afterwards. You could easily have slipped back inside again without me noticing.’

Botilbrig turned white. ‘I did not kill Joan! I admit that I did not like her, but I do not want her dead.’

‘Yes, you do,’ wept Marion. ‘You have hated her ever since she refused to marry you years ago. You are a spiteful, wicked villain who—’

Bartholomew did not wait to hear more. He strode inside the chapel, Michael, Clippesby and William at his heels. Joan was lying near the altar, the remaining bedeswomen in a sobbing cluster around her, and it did not take him a moment to see that someone had indeed battered out her brains with the broken fragment of stone from the altar.

‘Is she really dead?’ whispered William, crossing himself.

Bartholomew nodded.

‘Then we had better pray for her soul,’ said Michael softly.

Everyone was eager to see the body of a woman who had been killed by one of St Thomas’s relics, and pilgrims, bedesmen and passers-by had flowed into the chapel on the scholars’ heels. There was a collective sigh of disappointment when Bartholomew covered Joan with his cloak, followed by much resentful muttering. Michael sent the fittest-looking bedesman to fetch someone in authority from the abbey, but the fellow kept stopping to share the news with people he knew, and it was clear that it would be some time before help arrived.

‘What happened to her, Matt?’ Michael asked in a low voice. ‘Was she murdered?’

As well as being a physician and teacher of medicine, Bartholomew was the University’s Corpse Examiner, the man who gave an official cause of death for any scholar who died. As violence was distressingly frequent in a community that included a lot of feisty young men, he had gained considerable experience in identifying murder victims. However, while Cambridge was used to his grisly work, Peterborough was not, and conducting the necessary examination on Joan was unlikely to be well received. He said so.

‘There is nothing to see here,’ Michael announced, hoping to get rid of the crowd so the physician could work unobserved. ‘You can all go home.’

‘You have no authority to make us leave,’ declared a burly fellow in fine clothes and expensive jewellery. There were several well-armed henchmen at his back. ‘I am Ralph Aurifabro, goldsmith of this town, and
I
decide where I go and when.’

‘I also determine my own movements,’ added a man with broken teeth and a straggly beard whose clothes were of good quality but food-stained and rumpled. There was an unhealthy redness in his face that made Bartholomew suspect his humours were awry. ‘I am Reginald the cutler, and it is not every day that St Thomas kills sinners with his relics, so I demand to see his handiwork.’

Reginald had tried to imitate the goldsmith’s haughty arrogance, but his slovenly mien worked against him, along with the fact that he did not possess the required gravitas. Bartholomew had heard the cutler mentioned before, but it took a moment to remember where: Botilbrig had described him as the ‘foul villain’ who had a shop under the chapel.

‘You will not
demand
anything, Reginald.’ A powerful voice made everyone look around. It was another bedeswoman, smaller than Joan, but her bristly chin and fierce eyes indicated that she would be just as redoubtable. ‘None of you will. So go away.’

‘That is Hagar Balfowre,’ murmured Botilbrig to the scholars. ‘Joan’s henchwoman. Not that Joan needed one very often, being an old dragon in her own right.’

‘I most certainly shall not,’ Reginald was declaring angrily. ‘Not until I—’

‘Do as you are told,’ snapped Hagar. She turned to the goldsmith. ‘Put your louts to some use, Aurifabro, and get rid of these oglers. It is not seemly for them to be here.’

Neither Aurifabro nor his men moved to comply, but the threat of forcible eviction by them was enough to cause a concerted surge towards the door. The bedeswomen lingered, careful to stay in the shadows, while Botilbrig took refuge behind a pillar. Aurifabro watched them go, then turned back to the scholars.

‘I suppose you are the Bishop’s Commissioners, come to investigate what happened to that greedy scoundrel Robert. Well, I had nothing to do with his disappearance, and if you claim otherwise, you will be sorry.
I
am not afraid of corrupt Benedictines.’

Michael inclined his head, unperturbed by the man’s hostility. ‘Your remarks are noted. However, if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. I am not easily misled, and I always uncover the truth.’

‘Good,’ said Aurifabro, although his eyes were wary and Bartholomew wished Michael had held his tongue. If something untoward had befallen the Abbot, the culprit would not appreciate a Commissioner who promised to expose him. And the boast would be common knowledge by the end of the day in a small place like Peterborough.

‘The Bishop told me that Robert was visiting a goldsmith when he disappeared,’ Michael went on, all polite affability. ‘Am I to assume it was you?’

Aurifabro’s expression became closed and sullen. ‘Yes, but he never arrived. And I have better things to do than be interrogated by monks. Good day to you.’

He spun on his heel and stalked out. Only when he and his henchmen had gone did Botilbrig and the bedeswomen emerge from their hiding places.

‘Now that Joan is dead, I am head of St Thomas’s Hospital,’ Hagar announced to the other ladies. ‘Because I am next in seniority. You may call me Sister Hagar. Or better yet,
Prioress
Hagar.’ She grinned. ‘Yes! I like the sound of that.’

Bartholomew exchanged a glance with Michael; both wondered whether she liked the sound of it well enough to dispatch her predecessor.

‘You might wait until Joan is cold before stepping into her shoes,’ said Botilbrig, his voice full of distaste. ‘I had no love for her, but what you are doing is not right.’

‘Of course it is right,’ snapped Hagar. ‘Would you have our hospital without a leader? But of course you would! It would make us weak, and St Leonard’s could take advantage of it. You and your cronies would do anything to see us—’