A Wicked Deed mb-5

by Susanna GREGORY

  Michael nodded approvingly. ‘That is a good plan. It puts no one at risk and, if Tuddenham is behind all this, we will know when he fails to set his seal to the deed that will make the living ours. But at least we now have the answers to some of our questions: we know for certain that Alcote was murdered, and we know that his death relates to the advowson.’

  ‘Do you think Alcote destroyed the tavern in an attempt to fake his own death?’ asked Cynric.

  ‘Deynman thinks so,’ said Bartholomew. ‘He cannot believe that we will never see him again. I know how he feels. Roger Alcote has been a part of Michaelhouse for so long that I cannot imagine the place without him.’

  Michael sighed. ‘Alcote is…was…a clever man, and all we have to prove that the corpse in the Half Moon was his is a melted cross. It would not surprise me in the slightest if he later appeared unharmed, having left us to deal with this dangerous business without him.’ He was about to add more when there was a stricken cry from the church. It was Hamon’s voice. Moments later, Siric raced out, looking for Bartholomew.

  ‘Sir Thomas is took sick,’ he gasped. ‘Go to him, and I will fetch Master Stoate.’

  Sir Thomas was indeed ‘took sick’. He sat doubled over on one of the benches in the chancel, and clutched at his stomach, while Hamon knelt next to him anxiously and Isilia patted one of his hands. Dame Eva stood behind him, murmuring soothing words in his ear, although Wauncy was chanting the words of the mass for the dying, and was probably already calculating how many fourpences he would be able to claim from the bereaved family over the next few years.

  ‘That will not be necessary,’ said Bartholomew sharply, to the priest’s clear disappointment. ‘Sir Thomas is not going to die quite yet.’

  ‘Leave us,’ groaned Tuddenham to his family. ‘All of you. Arrange for a litter to take me home. You go, too, Brother. I want only Bartholomew with me.’

  When the door had thumped shut behind them, Tuddenham looked up at the physician with pain-filled eyes. ‘Were you lying to my family as Stoate would have done?’ he asked in a feeble voice. ‘Am I to die now?’

  ‘No,’ said Bartholomew. ‘I told you to rest, and this is what happens when you ignore good advice. You are not fit enough to pore over desecrated graves in the middle of the night.’

  Tuddenham gave a wan smile. ‘I would just as soon be in my bed. But did you keep your word? Have you told my household about my weakness?’

  ‘Of course not,’ said Bartholomew, offended that he should ask. ‘But if you are taken ill like this again, your family will guess you are not as healthy as you would have them believe.’

  ‘I will keep it from them a little longer,’ said Tuddenham weakly. ‘What excuse will you make for my sickness tonight? Stoate said he would claim I had an excess of bile in the innards if I was ill before I made the state of my health known — unpleasant, painful, frightening, but not fatal.’

  Lying was not something Bartholomew did well, and he was sure he would be unable to convince a horde of anxious relatives that there was nothing wrong with Tuddenham, while knowing he would soon die — especially the astute Dame Eva. She would home in on his falsehood like an owl on a mouse, and she would know instantly that there was something he was not telling her.

  ‘Stoate can tell them, then,’ said Bartholomew. ‘He is here now.’

  Stoate raced up the nave. Dawn was still some way off, and the church was in total darkness except for the candles that stood around Alcote’s coffin. In his haste to be at his patient’s side, Stoate tripped up the chancel steps, and went sprawling. Bartholomew went to help him up.

  ‘How clumsy,’ said Stoate, embarrassed as he nodded his thanks to Bartholomew. He had dropped his medicine bag, and phials and charts rolled across the floor. Bartholomew collected them, replaced them in the bag, and handed it back to Stoate, who gave him a brief smile.

  Wincing at a bruised knee, Stoate knelt next to Tuddenham, who had watched the physician’s dramatic arrival with a weary expression. Bartholomew appreciated how he must feel: it was not a comforting thought that the man who was to nurse you through your final illness was unable to run through a church without falling over.

  ‘The litter is coming,’ said Stoate. He glanced at Bartholomew. ‘Excess bile in the innards?’

  ‘Apparently,’ said Bartholomew, preparing a strong painkiller. ‘He should be taken back to bed, so he can rest. It is not advisable to allow him to be disturbed in the middle of the night.’

  ‘Fortunately, we do not usually have guests in the village who dig up corpses at the witching hour,’ said Stoate, not entirely pleasantly. ‘I doubt this kind of thing will happen once you leave.’

  ‘I hope not, for Sir Thomas’s sake,’ said Bartholomew, crouching to help Tuddenham sip the potion he had made.

  ‘Will you bleed him?’ asked Stoate. ‘The evil humours in his body should be released.’

  ‘They should not,’ said Bartholomew. ‘He should drink this, then rest.’

  ‘He must be bled,’ insisted Stoate. ‘You dabble in surgery; you must bleed him.’

  ‘I do not practise phlebotomy,’ said Bartholomew firmly. ‘And I think that in Sir Thomas’s case, bleeding will simply cause him unnecessary discomfort.’

  ‘But you must! The bad humours will build up in his body, and he will never be well.’

  ‘You do it, then, if you deem it so vital,’ said Bartholomew, watching Tuddenham drain the last few drops of the potion. ‘I will not.’

  Stoate shook his head. ‘I do not let blood, either.’

  ‘You do,’ said Bartholomew, surprised at this assertion. ‘Several people have told me that you prescribe blood-letting three times a year. Including yourself.’

  ‘You must have misunderstood,’ said Stoate. ‘I do recommend blood-letting thrice yearly, but I do not offer to provide the service myself.’

  ‘And which one of you am I supposed to believe?’ asked Tuddenham, in a low voice heavy with irony. ‘One says I should be bled, the other says I should not.’

  ‘You should,’ insisted Stoate.

  ‘It is your decision,’ said Bartholomew, refusing to argue any further. ‘It will not kill you, but it will not make you better.’

  ‘Well,’ said Tuddenham with a faint smile, ‘if it makes no difference, I think I will forgo the pleasure. But I am sure you bled my wife, Stoate, when she was first with child? She said you did.’

  ‘I recommended that she be bled,’ corrected Stoate. ‘I did not do it myself. Mother Goodman probably did it. She has some skill in those matters.’

  Bartholomew went to summon the litter-bearers, and saw Sir Thomas carried out of the church and back to Wergen Hall. The knight was already beginning to drowse from the strong potion Bartholomew had given him, and his face had regained some of its colour. Stoate went with him, holding Tuddenham’s wrist as he made a show of testing the strength of his life-beat, although how he could do it with the litter bouncing up and down, Bartholomew could not begin to imagine.

  ‘This has been quite a night,’ said Michael, walking slowly into the church. ‘We have been attacked by men wielding swords, found the body of a murder suspect, been searched most intimately for the advowson, and seen Tuddenham taken ill in his church. What was wrong with him? Guilty conscience for ordering the death of Alcote?’

  ‘The night is not over yet, Brother,’ said Bartholomew, crouching down to retrieve something from under the trestle table on which Norys lay. ‘Here is Unwin’s stolen relic.’

  The morning was well advanced, with bright sunshine streaming in through the windows, when Bartholomew awoke in the church. He rubbed his eyes and stretched, realising that he had fallen asleep over his prayers. Michael had not, and was kneeling at the altar, although his preoccupied frown suggested that his mind was not on masses for Alcote’s soul, but on the confusion of facts and theories they had amassed the previous night. There was a clank as the door was opened, and Bartholomew hastened to join him, so that William would
not guess he had spent much of what remained of the night in an exhausted slumber rather than praying for the charcoaled mess that graced the parish coffin.

  The Franciscan flopped on to his knees and glowered. ‘May the Lord have mercy on the iniquitous soul of Robert Deynman and his evil ways,’ he thundered.

  ‘Why?’ asked Bartholomew. Even half asleep, he realised the prayer was intended for his ears, and not the Almighty’s.

  ‘He refused to recite prime with me. He said he would rather go for a walk, and he insisted Horsey went with him. That boy will come to a bad end one day.’

  But not, Bartholomew was relieved to hear, in Grundisburgh. William continued to grumble about how the two students had slunk down the Ipswich road, and that he strongly suspected they were up to no good. Hoping their journey would be uneventful, and that he would collect them safe and sound later that day, Bartholomew accompanied Michael to Wergen Hall, where the monk planned to correct one or two details on the deed before leaving Grundisburgh and its superstitions and secrets, never to return.

  Tuddenham was sleeping, his face drawn and pale and his breathing shallow. He was beginning to look like a man with one foot in the grave, and Bartholomew knew that the astute Dame Eva sensed all was not as it should be. He was sorry for her, understanding that parents are seldom braced for the death of a child who has reached adulthood. She sat next to her son and held his hand, and it was not easy to persuade her to leave him to rest. Isilia was as bad, and it took some effort to dissuade her from delivering a large and carefully prepared breakfast to her ailing husband.

  Eventually, Bartholomew prised them from the sickroom. They went slowly, as though they imagined Tuddenham might take a turn for the worse even as they walked to the door. Bartholomew instructed Siric to allow no one to disturb him, and then went to look for Michael.

  Michael waved him away as he approached, working hard to complete what needed to be done before someone from Tuddenham’s household guessed what he was doing. Bored and unsettled, Bartholomew went to wander aimlessly in the gardens, poking around in the stables, and looking with uninterest at the great destriers that were tethered there. Cynric had managed to obtain some bread and nuts, although Bartholomew hoped the episode with the beef had not given him a taste for the theft of food, and they ate them in Isilia’s pretty herbal arbour.

  Bartholomew was considering taking Michael something to eat, when he glimpsed Hamon slinking out of Wergen Hall in a manner that could only be described as furtive. With nothing better to do, and with Cynric back to normal and ready to engage in a little daytime stalking, they followed him along the path that wound down the hill, and then along a trackway that cut off to the east. Bartholomew was curious. Hamon was not a man who walked — knights rode, even short distances — and Bartholomew could not imagine what could be sufficiently important to make him resort to using his feet.

  Every so often, Hamon would stop and look around to see whether he was being followed, but he was no match for Cynric; the Welshman knew exactly how close he could come without being seen and when to melt back into the shadows to avoid detection. At last they reached the river at a point where it flowed deep and swift before widening into a shallow pool fringed by willows. A set of irregular stepping stones stretched across it, and Hamon leapt inelegantly from one to another — falling in water to his knees when he misjudged one — and clambered up the bank on the other side. Cynric and Bartholomew followed a good deal more gracefully.

  They were now on land that had been Deblunville’s, and Bartholomew began to feel anxious, afraid that some nasty plot was in progress. Eventually, in a pretty, secluded grove well away from any houses or fields, Hamon stopped and paced impatiently, apparently waiting for someone to arrive. Bartholomew tried to imagine who. Someone from Burgh, who was helping Hamon plot against Tuddenham and the advowson? An accomplice, who had helped him kill Deblunville with a stone in the woods near Barchester? Or was it Bardolf, who seemed intelligent enough to persuade others to do what he did not want to do himself?

  Before he had time to speculate further, Cynric tensed, and pointed to someone walking through the trees. Hamon, who had been gazing in that direction for a while, also stiffened.

  ‘Janelle!’ breathed Bartholomew, as the pretty woman stepped into the glade.

  She regarded Hamon uncertainly, as if not quite sure what to do. He hesitated for a moment, then held out his hands, and with dainty steps she walked towards him and took them in hers. Bartholomew was confused. Surely Janelle could not be the mastermind behind all this evil, using Hamon as her instrument? He watched uncomfortably as Hamon kissed her gently on the lips.

  ‘Come on,’ he whispered to Cynric. ‘We have seen enough.’

  He turned to leave, but as he did so his bag caught on a twig that snapped sharply. Hamon moved faster than Bartholomew would have thought possible, and had the tip of his sword at the physician’s throat before Bartholomew was able to take more than a few steps. Cynric had melted into the shadows, but Bartholomew knew one of the Welshman’s daggers would be embedded in Hamon’s body the instant Cynric considered his friend to be seriously at risk. Nevertheless, he did not much like the sensation of cold steel so near his neck, and hoped Cynric knew what he was doing. Hamon, however, seemed more dismayed than threatening when he recognised his uncle’s guest.

  ‘So, now you know,’ he said, lowering his sword slightly.

  ‘Know what?’ asked Bartholomew in confusion, feeling he knew nothing at all.

  ‘He saw only a brotherly kiss,’ said Janelle quickly. ‘What harm is there in that?’

  ‘It was not brotherly!’ proclaimed Hamon hotly. ‘You know it was not.’

  Janelle sighed in exasperation. ‘Where are your wits, Hamon? We might have convinced him you were simply here to offer me your condolences for the tragic demise of my husband. Now, after your outburst, he would have to be an imbecile not to see that there is more to our relationship.’

  ‘I have never hidden the fact that I adore you,’ claimed Hamon vehemently. ‘It would be like…like denying that the Earth rotates!’

  Janelle’s irritation gave way to wry humour. ‘I was always taught that it did not. Walter Wauncy argues most convincingly against such a mad notion.’

  ‘Then he is wrong,’ said Hamon loftily. ‘I attended the debate at Wergen Hall, where it was proved, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that the Earth spins most of the time.’ He licked a finger and held it up. ‘It is still now, of course, because there is no wind.’

  Janelle looked from Hamon to Bartholomew in amused disbelief. ‘Is that so? But academic disputes, however fascinating, will not help us decide what to do about Doctor Bartholomew, who, thanks to your indiscretion, now knows that we are… close.’

  ‘I will marry you,’ declared Hamon, his attention fully on Janelle, as he let the sword drop to his side. ‘No man will steal you from me a second time.’

  ‘No man stole me the first time,’ said Janelle practically. ‘It was my decision to marry Roland Deblunville, and mine alone. I know now that I made a terrible mistake — one that might have proved fatal for me — but up until our wedding day I thought he was the innocent victim of a hateful plan initiated by Tuddenham to spread lies about him. Foolishly, I believed that monster when he said there was nothing sinister about Pernel’s death, but he was lying. He had smashed her head against the stone windowsill, and killed her.’

  ‘It may have been an accident,’ said Bartholomew cautiously.

  ‘It was not,’ said Janelle, with utter conviction. ‘She was old enough to be his grandmother, and he pushed her, knowing she would fall. He married her for her land, and when Burgh was his, he killed her so he could marry me and have Clopton, too. I have no doubt that in time I would also have had an “accident” — he was already flirting with Lady Ann from Hasketon: he ogled her all through our wedding feast, although I am sure it was her dairy farm that he really wanted.’

  ‘I told you that Deblunville killed old Pe
rnel,’ said Hamon, sheathing his sword. ‘But you did not listen to me.’

  ‘Deblunville was more persuasive than you, Hamon,’ said Janelle, rather bitterly. She turned to Bartholomew for support. ‘Who did you believe — the dashing and personable Deblunville, or the oafish, inarticulate man who hates him because his uncle tells him to?’

  Bartholomew did not like to answer. He felt he did not know Hamon or Deblunville well enough to tell who was the more truthful of the pair, and was not inclined to come down on the side of Deblunville anyway, with Hamon glowering at having been described as oafish.

  ‘And Deblunville was obsessed with the search for the golden calf,’ Janelle continued, when no reply was forthcoming. ‘He was out every night, despite my attempts to keep him with me. He believed Hamon was close to discovering it, and wanted to get to it first.’

  ‘I am close to finding it,’ protested Hamon.

  ‘How?’ asked Bartholomew curiously. ‘Have you discovered a clue, such as the foundations of the old chapel near which the calf is said to be buried?’

  ‘Well, no,’ admitted Hamon. ‘Not yet. But I will.’ He looked fondly at Janelle. ‘And then I will be richer than Deblunville. I will have my uncle’s estates, and you will have Clopton and Burgh. Together, we will be a powerful force in the county.’

  ‘But Isilia’s child will inherit your uncle’s manors,’ said Bartholomew, unable to stop himself.

  Hamon regarded him coldly. ‘We will see about that.’ He turned back to Janelle. ‘Marry me! Wait a week or two, until it is seemly, and then marry me. Our alliance will make us rich and powerful, and I think we are a couple who could get along nicely together.’

  ‘That is true,’ she said, considering. ‘My brains and your strength will make us a formidable force. We could rule the whole of the Lark Valley.’

  Hamon’s eyes glittered with excitement, and he took her into his arms. Disconcerted by the display of naked ambition and craving for wealth, Bartholomew backed away.