A Wicked Deed mb-5

by Susanna GREGORY

  ‘Did you manage to tell Tuddenham about Stoate?’ asked Bartholomew, to take his mind off a situation that was growing more alarming by the moment.

  ‘I met William by the church, and sent him to tell Tuddenham, because I was anxious about you. Then I ran into a couple of those loutish brutes who are always hunched over their ale at the Half Moon, and they brought me here.’

  Bartholomew sat on one of the cold, damp steps. ‘Eltisley is threatening to kill William. But he will not get the students — I sent them away yesterday morning.’

  ‘Thank God!’ said Michael. ‘I wish you had sent William away, too. I suspect Eltisley will kill him, whether we comply with his wishes or not.’

  ‘So there is no hope of rescue, then?’ asked Cynric, stricken. ‘You sent William to Tuddenham with a message to chase Stoate, but no one knows we are here?’

  ‘I thought Stoate was all we needed to worry about,’ protested Michael. ‘He confessed to killing Unwin, and I was not anticipating being abducted by another murderer this morning.’

  ‘Do you have your candle?’ Bartholomew asked Cynric, trying to think of something he could do, other than wait for the mad landlord to kill the rest of the deputation from Michaelhouse. ‘There may be another way out of here.’

  Michael chuckled humourlessly in the dark. ‘Church-builders always put an alternative exit in vaults,’ he said. ‘The dead do not like to feel trapped.’

  Cynric produced his stub, and fiddled about with a tinder until the wick was alight. Hot wax spilled on to Bartholomew’s fingers as he eased his way down the steps. The ground moved, and Bartholomew saw with horror that there were dozens of rats there, large brown ones with scaly tails and glittering eyes. He hesitated.

  ‘Go on,’ encouraged Michael. ‘They will not bite you as long as you keep moving.’

  ‘You go, then,’ said Bartholomew, thrusting the candle at him and climbing back up the steps.

  Michael gave a long-suffering sigh and walked down to the floor. The rats inched away, and he began to pick his way to the back of the chamber. It comprised an elongated room with three shelves along each side and a tiny altar at the far end. Four bodies were placed end to end along each shelf, so that there were twelve on the left and twelve on the right. With the rats scurrying about his bare ankles, Michael moved forward, peering at the shrouded figures in their niches.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said, returning a few moments later. ‘The whole thing is made of solid stone.’

  ‘What about the altar?’ asked Bartholomew. ‘Perhaps there is something behind that.’

  ‘Be my guest,’ said Michael, handing him the stub. ‘Those vermin are beginning to lose their nervousness, and it will not be long before they want to try sinking those sharp yellow teeth into something a little fresher than their usual fare.’

  Before he could think too much about what he was doing, Bartholomew strode briskly to the back of the vault, sending furry bodies scattering in alarm. The altar was a simple wooden table, covered with an ancient cloth that was thick with dust. He pulled it off and peered underneath. The floor was solidly paved with slabs of stone sealed with mortar, while the wall behind the altar was made of unevenly hewn lumps of rock. He pushed at a few of them, but they were the foundation stones for the church, and the builders had intended them to last. When the building collapsed, as Bartholomew sensed it would do soon, the vault would remain intact.

  He began to walk back toward the steps, breaking into a run when he trod on one of the rats and made it scream. He felt its sharp teeth dig into his boot, and was grateful he was not wearing sandals like Michael. When he reached the stairs again, his hand was shaking. He dropped the light, and the chamber was plunged into darkness.

  ‘I do not have another candle,’ said Cynric in the dark vault. Michael simply sighed. After a moment, their eyes grew used to the gloom again.

  ‘We will have to try to overpower Eltisley when he comes,’ said Bartholomew, trying to think positively.

  ‘With what?’ asked Cynric. ‘We have no weapons, and you do not even have your bag with you to take a swing at them with.’

  ‘We have that crossbow quarrel,’ said Bartholomew. ‘During our last struggle, one of the men fired a crossbow bolt at us, and I saw it fall down here.’

  ‘Go and fetch it, then,’ said Michael. ‘And retrieve the candle while you are at it.’

  That idea did not much appeal to Bartholomew while rats milled about on the floor. He tried to think of a better idea, but failed. ‘All right, then. But if we all go, you two can drive them off while I feel around on the floor.’

  It was not a plan that filled anyone with much enthusiasm, but in the absence of an alternative, they inched down the stairs and stepped gingerly on the floor. Feeling that caution was the wrong approach, Michael suddenly began stamping his feet and spinning around like some crazed Oriental dancer. While Cynric did likewise, Bartholomew dropped to his hands and knees and began groping around for the quarrel, trying to ignore the cold, wet patches and mysterious lumps that his fingers encountered.

  Michael’s breath came in laboured gasps from the vigour of his exercise, and Cynric was already edging toward the steps. Bartholomew knew they would not maintain their rat-scaring act for much longer, and his search became more erratic. Just when he thought he would have to think of something else, he found the bolt. He snatched it up with a triumphant yell, and vied with the others to be first up the stairs.

  ‘Give it to me,’ said Cynric, feeling for it in the darkness. He nodded. ‘It will do. Did you find the candle?’

  There was a disappointed silence when Bartholomew did not reply.

  ‘We should try to think out answers to all this,’ said Michael, after a moment. ‘It might give us some kind of bargaining power, if Cynric’s attempt to free us fails.’

  ‘Eltisley said we have all the facts,’ said Bartholomew. ‘So we should be able to work out at least part of it. I have been thinking hard, and I think I know the identity of the hanged man.’

  ‘Then who is it?’ asked Michael.

  ‘James Freeman.’

  ‘You mean the husband of the poor woman Stoate poisoned with his neighbourly dish of mussels? The man who died of a slit throat two weeks before we arrived in the village? How in God’s name did you come up with that?’

  ‘Mother Goodman told me that one of the first people at the scene of James Freeman’s death was Eltisley, and Eltisley later bragged about that fact himself — he went into some detail about the box he had designed to carry Freeman to his grave. But no one saw the body except Eltisley, not even Mother Goodman, who usually lays out the dead. All anyone saw were bloodstained clothes.’

  ‘But Dame Eva found the body. Obviously she saw it.’

  ‘I doubt she stayed long and studied it,’ said Bartholomew. ‘Anyway, she is old and frail. She probably glimpsed someone lying there all covered in blood — probably one of Eltisley’s henchmen playing dead — and made the assumption that it was Freeman, because he was in Freeman’s home.’

  Michael scratched his chin thoughtfully. ‘Eltisley did make a good deal of fuss about the coffin he produced — telling us how he designed it specially for the occasion.’

  ‘Quite,’ said Bartholomew. ‘And he designed it so that it would leak blood, and that would be what everyone would remember. No one would ask to look inside the coffin with that stuff dribbling out all over the place. And there is another thing: corpses do not bleed. So, Freeman’s body should not have been bleeding at all, gaping throat wound or no.’

  ‘But why should Freeman be the hanged man, as opposed to some lone traveller who stumbled on Eltisley’s evil empire by mistake?’

  ‘Eltisley believes he can raise the dead. By faking Freeman’s death, I imagine he saw an opportunity to avail himself of a living human subject. Then, he could add credence to the legend that anyone who sees Padfoot will die a violent death — thus keeping people away from Barchester where he conducts his experiments — and
procure someone to kill at his own convenience and then try to bring back to life.’

  ‘So, you are saying that there was never a body with a slit throat, and that the blood dripping from Eltisley’s box had nothing to do with a corpse?’ asked Michael. Bartholomew nodded, but the monk was not convinced. ‘But why was the hanged man — Freeman — wearing Deblunville’s clothes?’ He kicked out at a rat, braver than the rest, that was edging upwards.

  ‘Oh, that is easy. Janelle said she stole them from Deblunville for her father. She left them near the Grundisburgh parish boundary, but someone else found them before they could be collected. Since Freeman’s clothes had been soaked in blood to convince everyone he had died a gruesome death, Eltisley would have needed another set. Doubtless he or one of his henchmen found Janelle’s bundle, and gave them to Freeman to wear while they kept him prisoner.’

  ‘But Norys told us that whoever ran from the church was wearing Deblunville’s clothes,’ Michael pointed out. ‘How do you explain that?’

  Bartholomew scratched his head. ‘I do not know, but the dagger we saw on the hanged man was the same as the one under the smouldering corpse in the shepherd’s hut.’

  ‘God’s blood, Matt!’ said Michael. ‘These rats are climbing the stairs.’

  Bartholomew swallowed. ‘They will become bolder the longer we stay here. Kick them away.’

  Michael gripped Bartholomew’s arm and flailed about with his legs. ‘There,’ he said with satisfaction. ‘That should make them think twice about tangling with me.’

  ‘They will be back,’ said Cynric.

  ‘Think of something else,’ said Bartholomew. ‘James Freeman had to die because he claimed he had seen Padfoot — no one lives who has set eyes on Padfoot. It was the same with Alice Quy, dead of childbirth fever six months after having her last child. I will wager you anything you like that both had been out on one of Hamon’s nocturnal expeditions, looking for the golden calf. Either by design or by chance, they ended up at Barchester and encountered Mad Megin and her dog, who were guarding the village for Eltisley.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Michael. ‘You are right. And we were foolish, you know. We allowed ourselves to be misled by Deblunville’s false assumptions — that it was Tuddenham who was promoting the Padfoot legend to provide an excuse for his people trespassing on his neighbours’ land while searching for buried treasure.’

  Bartholomew nodded slowly. ‘But, of course, had we really drought about that, we would have seen it made no sense: the only two people to have availed themselves of this excuse — James Freeman and Alice Quy — were killed almost immediately. Why go to all the trouble of inventing an excuse if you plan to kill anyone who uses it? Eltisley, not Tuddenham, killed the two villagers.’

  ‘Mother Goodman told you that Eltisley had sent Alice Quy a harmless potion because she could not pay Master Stoate’s inflated prices for medicine.’ Michael tried to ease higher up the stairs.

  ‘It was supposed to contain feverfew and honeyed wine,’ said Bartholomew, ‘an appropriate remedy for such disorders. But, of course, all that was wrong with her was fear, because she had set eyes on this so-called phantom. By the time she had taken a few draughts of Eltisley’s potion, her fate was sealed. Her death proved to the villagers that no one sets eyes on Padfoot and lives.’

  ‘And then there was Deblunville,’ said Michael. ‘He, too, was supposed to have seen Padfoot — although he claimed it was a wolf. Eltisley must have bashed him over the head in the woods. We know he was experimenting with how he was going to kill us that night — you saw flames shooting out of his workshop — and then he went to Barchester to continue because he had been unsuccessful at home. He must have come across Deblunville, conveniently separated from his archers, and decided it was too good an opportunity to miss.’

  ‘Grosnold’s man told me that Padfoot had been heard sniffing around Wergen Hall, but that people were too afraid to open the window to look. It was probably a fox, but you can see how Eltisley has the whole village terrified over this Padfoot nonsense.’

  ‘And it has worked brilliantly. You said that even Grosnold took the path that leads around the edge of the village, not through the middle, and he is a knight.’

  ‘We walked through it the first time,’ said Cynric. ‘Nothing happened to us then — except for Unwin seeing the white dog.’

  ‘Eltisley must have been delighted with the story that Unwin saw that thing,’ said Michael bitterly. ‘Stoate unwittingly gave credence to the lie that all who see Padfoot die.’

  ‘And to the same end, Eltisley made a flagrant attack on Cynric when he felt he was under the same curse,’ said Bartholomew. ‘He tried to give him dog mercury.’

  Cynric said nothing, but made a stabbing motion with the crossbow quarrel, and there was a sharp squeal. He shook it in disgust, and they heard the soft thump of a body as it landed somewhere on the floor. There was an immediate and ominous scurry.

  ‘Occasional travellers through Barchester present no problem because they leave,’ continued Bartholomew, trying not to imagine the rats chasing after the corpse of one of their own. ‘What Eltisley does not want is people from the village seeing him here, and wanting to know what he is doing. He needs privacy. There is no one in Barchester except Mad Megin, who serves to keep visitors away with her white dog. It was no ghost you saw, Cynric: it is a gigantic hoax, perpetrated by Eltisley to keep people so frightened that they will not interfere with him.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Cynric cautiously, in such a way that Bartholomew was sure the Welshman remained convinced that Padfoot was real.

  ‘We saw a light the night we were attacked,’ Bartholomew went on. ‘I thought it was a traveller seeking shelter, but no traveller would ever stay — be allowed to stay — in Barchester. That was Eltisley working over his potions.’

  Michael sighed. ‘Eltisley might believe he is a veritable genius, and that he has intellectual powers to rival the likes of Roger Bacon, but he is sadly mistaken. Someone else is involved in all this — someone who has enough money to buy Eltisley all he needs for his experiments, and someone who does not want us to have our advowson.’

  ‘Somehow, the deed seems to pale into insignificance when all this is considered,’ said Bartholomew, jerking backward as something nosed at his hand.

  ‘But someone stole it from me in the churchyard. It is important. It must be something to do with the fact that someone in Tuddenham’s family does not want a representative from Michaelhouse to be the executor of his will.’

  ‘I forgot about the will,’ said Bartholomew, not very interested, but wanting to keep Michael talking so that they would not be sitting in silence in the tomb with only the rustle of rats for company. ‘That was one of the terms Alcote agreed with Tuddenham, was it not?’

  ‘It was the one Tuddenham was most insistent upon,’ said Michael. ‘It is a good decision: he will have an executor who is completely independent, should there be any unpleasantness, and his heirs will save a good deal on legal fees.’

  ‘Why should there be unpleasantness?’ asked Bartholomew. ‘The line of inheritance is clear: if Isilia’s child is a boy, he will inherit; if it is a girl, Hamon will inherit.’

  ‘There will only be difficulties if Tuddenham dies before the child is born,’ said Michael, ‘because his will stipulates that no child born after his death can inherit. But this is all irrelevant since Tuddenham is in good health.’

  Bartholomew gazed at him in the darkness. He considered keeping his silence, but the promise had been to keep the knight’s illness from his family, not from Michael. ‘But Tuddenham has a mortal illness, and will not live to see himself a father again.’

  Michael let out his breath in a long sigh. ‘Why did you not mention this before? Now it begins to make sense. Now I understand why Tuddenham is so desperate to have the advowson signed and sealed before we go. He wants Hamon to inherit, not his unborn child.’

  ‘But he could stipulate that in his will anyway,’ said B
artholomew. ‘He does not need Michaelhouse’s help to do that.’

  ‘But Michaelhouse will see his wishes fulfilled in a way that few other executors will be able to do. We have no vested interest in who inherits and who does not — the living of the church is ours whatever happens — and we have the power of the Church behind us, not to mention some of the best legal minds in the country. The real issue is that there are ancient laws that might override Tuddenham’s choice of heirs — a son is a son. Even Henry the Second was obliged to leave his kingdom to his hated oldest son, and not his favourite younger child. Hamon will need our expertise if he is to inherit Tuddenham’s estates.’

  ‘But what does Tuddenham have against his unborn child?’ asked Bartholomew, kicking out and feeling something soft fly away from his foot. ‘He seems happy with Isilia. Unless … ‘He trailed off, thinking.

  ‘Unless what, Matt?’ asked Michael. ‘I beg you, if you have any more information, please do not keep it to yourself. Small things that seem unimportant to you might make a great deal of difference to the law.’

  Bartholomew took a deep breath. ‘It is probably not his child that Isilia is carrying.’

  Bartholomew could imagine the expression on the monk’s sardonic face. ‘And how are you party to that intimate little detail?’

  ‘The disease he has tends to take away the ability to father children. I was surprised by the fact that Isilia was pregnant when I first learned of his illness, but he probably knows Isilia’s child is not his. Do you think that would give him cause enough to insist so vehemently that we finish our business here, and leave with the documents that will allow Hamon to inherit?’

  ‘I do indeed,’ said Michael. ‘And it would give Hamon good reason for wanting the advowson signed quickly, too. But who would oppose it?’

  ‘Isilia, for one,’ said Bartholomew. He drew his hand up with a sharp intake of breath, when something grazed it with what felt like teeth. He continued, somewhat unsteadily, rubbing his wrist. ‘Also, Dame Eva does not seem to like Hamon very much, while Wauncy might not approve of Hamon inheriting over Isilia’s offspring.’