The Mark of a Murderer (19 page)

‘Perfectly,’ replied Weasenham. He swallowed hard. ‘If I mention what I just overheard between you and Bartholomew, you will
drive me out of business.’

‘Then can I assume we have reached an understanding?’ asked Michael, not bothering to deny the charge of blackmail, or even
attempting to couch what he was doing in more pleasant terms.

‘Yes,’ said Weasenham shortly. His face was dark with resentment as he stalked back to his house, and Bartholomew saw the
monk had just made himself a new enemy. Alyce lingered, however.

‘If our business fails because Tynkell takes his custom elsewhere, we will have nothing to lose,’ she said coldly. ‘Extortion
works both ways, you know.’

‘You are right,’ said Michael softly. ‘Your husband will have no reason to keep quiet about Matt if he loses all his customers.
But
you
will. You do not want me to inform Weasenham that you and Langelee discuss far more intimate matters than Michaelhouse’s
fictitious expansion, do you?’

She glowered at him. ‘But that would damage your College, too. Michaelhouse will not want its Master exposed as a man who
possesses a lover.’

‘True,’ agreed Michael amicably. ‘So I suggest we both keep still tongues in our heads. Then no one will be harmed and we
will all be happy.’

She thought for a moment, then gave Michael a curt nod before following her husband. Bartholomew watched her open the door
and bustle inside the shop, where scholars were waiting to be served with orders of pens, parchment, ink and the cheap copies
of selected texts known as
exemplar pecia
. She did not look back, but Bartholomew could tell she was livid. He wondered whether she would inform Langelee about Michael’s
threats, and plunge the College into a bitter dispute between its Master and its most influential member.

‘Thank you,’ he said sincerely. ‘But you should not have intervened, Brother. I do not want you involved in this mess.’

‘In what mess?’ The physician’s odd choice of words to describe his romance did not escape the astute Michael. He looked searchingly
at his friend’s face, and spoke kindly. ‘What are you not telling me, Matt?’

‘Nothing,’ mumbled Bartholomew, acutely uncomfortable. ‘But thank you for taking care of Weasenham. I will tell Matilde what
you did, and will ask her about whatever it is that Eudo and Boltone are supposed to have stolen when I visit this evening.’

‘There
is
something amiss,’ said Michael, catching his arm and preventing him from walking on. ‘You never normally pass up an opportunity
to see Matilde.’

Bartholomew searched desperately for a way to change the subject, knowing it would not be long before the monk smoked out
his most intimate secrets if the discussion were to run its course. He was simply too tired for convincing prevarication,
and Michael was too skilled an interrogator. He was transparently relieved to see John Wormynghalle and Dodenho coming towards
them, deep in the throes of a debate. He did not know them well, but they served his purpose.

‘Good afternoon!’ he called, hailing them with considerable enthusiasm. ‘How are you?’

Wormynghalle was startled to be so buoyantly addressed, but Dodenho considered it only natural that someone should be interested
in the state of his health.

‘I am in need of a physic,’ he announced. ‘Paxtone says I should take a purge but I detest those. I am sure there is a less
dramatic way to remedy this burning in my innards.’

‘Yes,’ said Bartholomew, feeling on safer ground now he was talking about medicine. ‘A chalk solution might help, or perhaps
some charcoal mixed with poppy juice and wine.’

‘Yes,’ agreed Dodenho, nodding keenly. ‘The latter remedy sounds acceptable. But omit the charcoal, if you please. Come to
King’s Hall and write the recipe for this concoction now, so I can send it to the apothecary.’

It was difficult to refuse, having initiated the conversation in the first place, but Michael did not object as
Dodenho led them into his College. The chance encounter presented a good opportunity for the monk to ask Dodenho whether Eudo
and Boltone had stolen something from him, not to mention probing further into his relationship with the dead Chesterfelde.
However, the boastful scholar was not Michael’s main concern at that moment: he was more troubled by what he now thought of
as Bartholomew’s ‘predicament’ with Matilde, and resolved to add it to his list of problems to solve.

Dodenho led Bartholomew to his chamber, Michael and Wormynghalle trailing behind them, but then realised he had run out of
ink. He claimed it was because he used so much for scribing his erudite masterpieces, but Bartholomew looked around the room
and knew he was lying. It was arranged in such a way that writing would be difficult: its two desks were shoved in a corner
where the light was poor, and the area near the window – where the tables should have been – held a pair of comfortable chairs
that were obviously used for dozing in the sun.

The rest of Dodenho’s quarters was equally a shrine to easy living. Feathers clinging to the rugs on the floor suggested that
he and his room-mate pampered themselves with down mattresses, rather than the more usual straw ones. A table held several
jugs of wine, and on a tray stood a large plum cake, some cheese and a bowl of nuts.

‘How do you write with the desk so far from the light?’ asked Michael guilelessly.

‘He does not scribe as much as he would have you believe,’ whispered Wormynghalle, amused by the question. ‘But he reads by
the window – learns theories that he then claims as his own.’

‘I work better in the gloom,’ pronounced Dodenho with considerable authority. ‘Now, where is my ink? Damn that Wolf! He must
have made off with it.’

‘Wolf left on Ascension Day – almost two weeks ago,’ pounced Michael wickedly. ‘Does this mean you have only just noticed
you have none left?’

‘Perhaps it was not Wolf,’ blustered Dodenho, caught out. ‘I must have used the last of it committing my mean speed theorem
to parchment yesterday.’

‘You mean the one devised by Bradwardine?’ asked Bartholomew, who loved the complex physics entailed in the Mertonian’s theories
about distance and motion.

‘I mean the superior one devised by
me
,’ snapped Dodenho, striding to what appeared to be a private garderobe and inspecting the shelves. Bartholomew thought it
an unlikely place to find ink, and, judging from the grins of Michael and Wormynghalle, so did they. Wormynghalle began to
whisper again, taking the opportunity to speak while Dodenho was out of earshot.

‘His plagiarism may deceive uneducated men like Norton, but I do not appreciate him trying to mislead me, too. I am no knuckle-brained
courtier, but a man who takes his studies seriously. I find it extremely irritating, and expected a better quality of scholarship
from a Cambridge College.’

‘There are plenty of men like Dodenho at Oxford, too,’ objected Michael, conveniently forgetting the fact that he had never
been there.

Wormynghalle inclined his head apologetically, aware he had trodden on sensitive toes. ‘I know; I have met them. They are
partly why I came here – to be away from boasters and theory-thieves.’

‘You will never escape those,’ said Bartholomew, thinking him naïve to suppose he could.

Wormynghalle smiled. ‘But I have met many brilliant men since I arrived here. I particularly enjoyed your lecture on Grosseteste’s
notion that lines, angles and figures of geometry are a useful tool for understanding natural
philosophy. Perhaps we could debate that some time?’

‘When?’ asked Bartholomew eagerly. His fatigue miraculously evaporated. ‘Now?’

Wormynghalle indicated Michael with a nod of his head. ‘It had better be later if we do not want to make an enemy of the Senior
Proctor. I will set our students an exercise that will keep them occupied, and we can use the time for informal disputation.
But you will be here all day if you wait for Dodenho to find his non-existent ink. Come upstairs and I will give you some
of mine.
I
write all the time, and have a plentiful supply.’ He gave Dodenho a disparaging glance and led the way to the floor above.

‘It is much nicer here without Wolf and Hamecotes,’ declared Dodenho, following. ‘I am glad they have gone away on business
of their own. I like having a room to myself.’

‘Ah, yes,’ said Michael. ‘Your truant Fellows. Have you heard from them?’

‘I had a letter from Hamecotes today,’ said Wormynghalle, pulling a crumpled missive from the pouch on his belt. ‘He arrived
safely in Oxford, and has already bought Gilbertus Angelicus’
Compendium medicinae
and William of Pagula’s
Oculus sacerdotis
for our library.’

He seemed delighted, and Bartholomew supposed that, to an earnest scholar like Wormynghalle, securing books was far more important
than staying in College to teach.

‘
I
have heard nothing from Wolf, however,’ offered Dodenho. ‘I doubt
he
is buying books, given how much money he owes the College. I do not miss him or his nasty habit of dropping nutshells all
over the floor, where they hurt my bare feet. And Hamecotes has a habit of waking me far too early in the day with his damned
pacing. He makes the floorboards creak, right above my head.’

‘He is thinking,’ said Wormynghalle defensively, pausing at the top of the stairs to open a window. The stairwell had
the musty, sour odour often associated with places inhabited exclusively by men, even relatively wealthy ones like the scholars
of King’s Hall, and Wormynghalle wrinkled his nose fastidiously. ‘He is especially sharp-witted in the mornings, and we always
rise early and pass the time in scholarly discourse – and when he thinks, he walks back and forth. All you and Wolf talk about
is the quality of College ale.’

‘That is important, too,’ argued Dodenho, watching him struggle with the latch before shoving him out of the way and opening
it with brute force. He regarded his young colleague with dislike. ‘At least we
can
discuss something other than work. You cannot, and it is tedious in the extreme.’

‘I heard you were the victim of a crime recently,’ said Michael to Dodenho, seeing Wormynghalle’s angry look. He did not want
to be caught in the middle of a petty row between two men who should have better manners than to bicker in company.

‘What crime?’ demanded Dodenho. ‘Do you mean the time when Hamecotes defamed me, by publicly accusing me of stealing his ideas
on the meaning of time?’

‘No,’ said Michael. ‘I mean a theft. Something was stolen from you.’

‘Nothing was stolen,’ said Dodenho, and his face flushed red. ‘I found it again.’

Wormynghalle regarded him in disbelief. ‘You
found
it? But you stormed around the College for days, accusing people of making off with your astrolabe, and now you say it was
not taken after all? Why did you not say so sooner? We have been thinking there was a thief under our roof all this time.’

‘An astrolabe?’ asked Bartholomew, recalling that he had seen such an object in the hands of the tanner at Merton Hall. ‘It
was not silver, was it?’

‘Show it to me,’ ordered Michael.

‘I sold it,’ said Dodenho uneasily. ‘It
was
silver, and therefore too valuable to keep in a place like this, where impecunious students are in and out of our rooms all
the time.’

‘A student stole it?’ asked Michael, confused. ‘And then you got it back and sold it?’

‘Yes,’ replied Dodenho. ‘No.’

Michael raised his eyebrows. ‘Well, it must be one or the other. However, I was under the impression that Bailiff Boltone
or Eudo might have laid sticky fingers on the thing.’

Dodenho appeared to be bemused. ‘What makes you mention them in particular?’

‘No reason,’ hedged Michael. ‘Why? Do you know them?’

Dodenho seemed to consider his options. ‘A little,’ he replied eventually. ‘I met them once or twice through my friend . .
. through my
slight acquaintance
, Chesterfelde. But they did not steal my astrolabe. That was students.’ His face took on a grim, stubborn look.

‘Misleading the Senior Proctor is a serious matter,’ said Michael sternly. ‘You would not be lying, would you, Dodenho?’

‘Of course not,’ bleated Dodenho. ‘Why would I do such a thing?’ He gave one of the falsest smiles Michael had ever seen and
changed the subject. ‘Now, where is this ink, Wormynghalle?’

He pushed past the younger man and opened the door to an airy chamber where two desks were placed in the windows, to make
best use of the light. Bartholomew looked around and saw a neat, functional room, obviously occupied by two people dedicated
to academic pursuits. Shelves contained books and scrolls, all carefully stacked, while ink and pens were kept on a windowsill,
to avoid accidental spillage that might damage the precious tomes.
It was a clean place; Bartholomew could not see so much as a speck of dust anywhere.

Wormynghalle placed a tray on one of the tables and fetched a scrap of parchment. Bartholomew dipped his pen in the inkwell,
and was amused when the first word he wrote came out bright green.

‘Sorry,’ said Wormynghalle, hurriedly supplying another pot. ‘That is Hamecotes’s. He has a liking for this particular colour,
because he says it does not fade as readily as black.’

‘He is a verdant kind of man,’ said Dodenho, not entirely pleasantly. ‘He wears a green hood on Sundays, and dons emerald
hose under his tabard. And he likes vegetables, especially cabbage.’

‘And folk think Clippesby is insane,’ muttered Michael.

Bartholomew wrote out the prescription, ignoring Dodenho’s insistence that wine and poppy juice would work better without
the unnecessary addition of charcoal. Michael followed Dodenho when he went to find a servant to carry the recipe to the apothecary,
to see if he could shake loose any more details about the mysterious movements of the astrolabe, while Bartholomew remained
with Wormynghalle, who showed him a scroll containing quotations from the Arabic scholar al-Razi. The physician was pleasantly
surprised when Wormynghalle listened attentively to his explanation about why Western medicine could benefit from the wisdom
of the East, and even more pleased when he offered a number of intelligent comments. Wormynghalle was single-minded, perhaps
a little fanatical, about learning, but Bartholomew preferred him to the shallow Dodenho.