Bartholomew 06 - A Masterly Murder

by Susanna GREGORY

  ‘Right,’ said Bartholomew carefully, trying not to wince at what was one of the firmest grips he had ever encountered, and recalling that the last time he had shaken her hand, he had almost ended up accepting it in marriage, too.

  The following day, life at Michaelhouse seemed almost back to normal. It was Sunday, so there were no workmen hammering and crashing, although a number of them had disobeyed the rule that no work was to be done on the Sabbath, and were surreptitiously performing small, unobtrusive tasks to ensure that they did not fall behind schedule.

  On the way back from the church Bartholomew saw Mayor Horwoode, dressed in his finery as he walked to morning mass. The Mayor declined to acknowledge Bartholomew, although the youngest of his three step-daughters gave the physician a friendly wave. He hoped the chubby ten-year-old was not someone Edith had approached as a prospective wife.

  In the High Street, a pedlar risked a heavy fine by selling his wares on the Sabbath. Bartholomew risked the same by purchasing a piece of green ribbon and arranging to have it delivered to Matilde’s home that morning.

  Almost as soon as breakfast was over, he received a summons from the itinerants who lived in skin tents near the Castle, and was delighted to be presented with an opportunity to use his new birthing forceps. While the patient’s man looked on with a white face, Bartholomew successfully extracted a healthy baby before its mother laboured so long that she bled to death. Nevertheless, he spent the rest of the day in the chilly camp, to ensure that there were no complications. By the time he returned to Michaelhouse it was dark, and cooking fires were lit all over the town, so that the air was thick with a haze of smoke and smelled of burning wood and food. He coughed as the particles suspended in the night mist tickled the back of his throat, and wondered how the damp, foggy evenings affected those of his patients with lung diseases. He was certain the thick atmosphere at this time of night was not good for them.

  He knocked at Michaelhouse’s gate, and waited for some moments before he remembered that Runham had dismissed the porters and that no one would answer his hammering. Assuming that someone would have locked the gate as dusk fell, he was wondering whether he might have to scale the walls, when it occurred to him to try the handle before attempting anything so energetic. He was surprised and not very impressed to discover that not only was the wicket gate unlocked, but that the great wooden door was not barred either. Cambridge was an uneasy town, and leaving the gates open after dark was tantamount to inviting an attack. Disgusted, he made a mental note to remind Kenyngham that students would have to act as guards until more porters could be hired.

  He picked up one of the heavy bars and was manoeuvring it into place when he saw two scholars walking towards him, their hoods pulled over their heads to combat the evening chill. The hoods rendered them unrecognisable, and he assumed they were students intending to spend the night on the town. Well, they could give up that notion, he decided. While Runham might have been content to allow Michaelhouse students to frequent taverns – where they would inevitably fight with the townsfolk – by not employing porters to keep them in, Bartholomew was not prepared to risk it. As one of them reached out to open the wicket gate, Bartholomew grabbed his arm.

  ‘You can help me bar the gate, and then you will return to your rooms,’ he said curtly. ‘You know you are not supposed to leave the College at night.’

  The pair exchanged a glance, and then one of them bent to pick up one end of the heavy wooden bar, indicating that Bartholomew should lift the other.

  ‘Who are you?’ asked Bartholomew, struggling with the timber. ‘I cannot see you in the dark. You had better not be Gray and Deynman.’

  The bar went crashing to the ground so abruptly that Bartholomew lost his balance. Then the wicket gate was wrenched open, and the pair were away. With sudden clarity, the physician recalled another time when two scholars had emerged from Michaelhouse and disappeared into the darkness – when they had shoved him into the mud the night Runham became Master. Determined that they should not elude him a second time, he dived full length and managed to grab the cloak of the second of them. The scholar was jerked to a dead stop in his tracks as the garment tightened around his throat, and then began frantically tugging to try to free it.

  Bartholomew yelled at the top of his voice, aiming to attract the attention of the other Michaelhouse Fellows. Distantly, he heard his colleagues, irritably demanding to know why someone was making such an ungodly row in the courtyard. Among them was Michael’s voice, although that stopped the instant the monk became aware that some kind of tussle was in progress, and Bartholomew could hear his footsteps thundering down the wooden stairs that led from his room.

  Just when Bartholomew was confident he could maintain his precarious hold on the student’s cloak long enough to allow the others to reach him, there was a deep groan that seemed to shudder through the very ground on which he lay. The voices of his colleagues faltered and then fell silent. The scholar Bartholomew held hauled at his cloak with increasing desperation.

  And then there was an almighty crash, louder than anything Bartholomew had ever heard before, and the ground shivered and shook. A great cloud of dust billowed over him the same instant that the cloaked scholar finally freed the hem of his cloak. The physician glimpsed the soles of his shoes as the student fled, and the wicket door slammed closed behind him as he made good his escape. Meanwhile, small pieces of timber and plaster began pattering down like rain, and Bartholomew instinctively covered his head with his arms.

  He clambered to his feet, coughing and staggering in the swirling dust. For several moments he was completely disorientated, but then the dust began to clear and he could see that the entire mass of scaffolding which had been erected over the north wing had collapsed, tearing with it part of the roof and all the gutters.

  Had it been chance that two mysterious strangers were in Michaelhouse just as the scaffolding had fallen? Were they the same pair that he had encountered the night that Runham had been elected Master? Bartholomew felt certain that they were.

  ‘Where is Michael?’ came Kenyngham’s worried voice from the crowd of scholars who milled about excitedly in the yard. ‘He was in his room when I last saw him.’

  With growing horror, Bartholomew saw that the eastern end of the north wing – where Michael’s room was located – had been seriously damaged by the collapsing timber. And Bartholomew had quite clearly heard Michael’s distinctive footsteps on the stairs moments before the whole thing had fallen!

  Bartholomew gazed aghast at the rubble of Michael’s room, his stomach churning as his disbelieving mind tried to make sense out of what had happened. Dust still swirled in hazy clouds, and somewhere there was a second crash as yet more staves and supports tumbled to the ground. Scholars raced from their chambers, the hall and the conclave and stood in the yard in shock. A few workmen, still illicitly working as the Sabbath light faded, joined them, and stood next to the scholars, white-faced at the damage and the delay it would cause.

  ‘What has happened?’ cried Clippesby, as he dashed into the College from the lane. ‘I heard that terrible noise all the way from the High Street! I have been visiting Master Raysoun at Bene’t.’

  Suttone shot him an anxious glance. ‘Raysoun is dead,’ he said warily.

  ‘Yes,’ replied Clippesby, as if it were obvious. ‘But the dead like to be visited, and to be asked their opinions about this and that. It helps pass the time of Eternity for them, and I often stop at Raysoun’s tomb to hear what he has to say.’

  ‘Perhaps you should go and lie down,’ began Suttone nervously, evidently deciding that the College could do without a madman on the loose at that precise moment.

  Clippesby waved a dismissive hand. ‘Later. What happened here? Has the whole north wing collapsed?’

  ‘Michael!’ whispered Bartholomew, who was still staring at the crushed shell that had been the monk’s chamber. ‘He was in the building. I heard him on the stairs.’

  ‘Then we n
eed to fetch him out,’ shouted Langelee, darting forward and beginning to scramble through the wreckage.

  The carpenter Robert de Blaston tried to haul him back. ‘No, not yet! It is not safe. Wait until it has settled.’

  Langelee shook him off, and, oblivious to the danger to himself, continued to clamber across the dusty rubble to where the door to Michael’s staircase had been located. Finally recovering his wits, Bartholomew followed his example, grazing hands and knees in his desperation to reach the monk.

  ‘No!’ cried Blaston, advancing a few steps to snatch at Bartholomew’s tabard. ‘Your weight might bring more of it down. Wait until we are able to assess it properly.’

  He watched helplessly as Bartholomew tugged himself free, and he and Langelee picked their way through broken spars, smashed tiles and endless tangles of rope.

  ‘I said you were working too fast,’ yelled Langelee furiously, casting an accusing glower over his shoulder at the carpenter. ‘And now look what has happened.’

  Bartholomew stepped on a timber that was poorly balanced and it collapsed, sending him sliding down in another explosion of dust. Choking and gagging, Langelee proffered a meaty hand to haul him up.

  He was not the only one coughing. From somewhere deep inside the wreckage, Bartholomew could hear Michael.

  ‘Brother? Where are you?’ he yelled.

  ‘Sitting on the stairs in the hallway,’ the monk shouted back. ‘Has the scaffolding fallen? It is pitch black in here and I cannot see a thing.’

  ‘Thank God!’ breathed Suttone, coming to join them. ‘For a moment, I feared the worst.’

  ‘Are you hurt?’ called Bartholomew.

  ‘No,’ said Michael. ‘I was just coming to help you with that pair of ruffians when there was a crash and everything went dark. The exit is blocked, so I will wait in my room for you to excavate it.’

  ‘You do not have a room, Brother,’ said Langelee. ‘The roof was smashed when the scaffolding fell. Stay where you are and wait for us to reach you.’

  ‘Well, just how long will that be?’ came Michael’s peeved tones. ‘I have better things to do than to sit around on dark staircases, you know.’

  Bartholomew exchanged a grin of relief with Langelee and Suttone. There was nothing wrong with the monk if he was able to complain. The physician yielded to Blaston’s persistent tugs and moved away from the wreckage, allowing him and his workmate Adam de Newenham to decide the best way to untangle the mess and free Michael. While the two carpenters stood together arguing and planning in loud, important voices, Bartholomew sat on the steps to the hall and rested his arms on his knees. Across the courtyard, he could hear Kenyngham taking a roll-call, ensuring that no one but Michael was unfortunate enough to have been caught in the collapse.

  He looked around the College, as if seeing it for the first time, gazing up at the black silhouettes against the sky, and at the faint golden gleams of candles and firelight that filtered through badly fitting window shutters. Langelee came to sit next to him, regarding the wreckage with a shake of his head.

  ‘I think your room and medical store survived, but anything you left on the windowsill will be destroyed, and there will be dust everywhere – although I see you left the shutters closed, which will help. Poor Michael’s chamber is a lost cause, though. Did he own anything valuable?’

  ‘Probably,’ said Bartholomew tiredly. ‘I do not know. We did not discuss that kind of thing.’

  ‘You sound like Father William,’ said Langelee disapprovingly. ‘There is nothing wrong with possessing a few worldly goods to render life a little more tolerable, you know.’

  ‘It was good of you to risk yourself to help Michael,’ said Bartholomew, recalling the philosopher’s wild scramble through the wreckage. He wondered whether Michael would have done the same for Langelee, and quickly concluded that the answer was definitely no.

  ‘Guilt,’ said Langelee.

  Bartholomew stared at him uncomprehendingly.

  Langelee sighed. ‘You were right: I should not have mentioned the Oxford business to prevent Michael from standing as Master. Unsavoury though it is to have dealings with that place, it was unfair of me to have used it against him.’

  ‘I studied at Oxford,’ said Bartholomew. ‘I do not understand why everyone has taken against it so. It is bigger than Cambridge, so there are more fights, but it has an undeniable atmosphere of learning and scholarship. Some of the best minds in Christendom are there.’

  It was Langelee’s turn to gaze. ‘You are an Oxford man? Well, that explains a lot about you,’ he said rudely. ‘I thought you learned your leeching in Paris.’

  ‘That was later. You realise that Michael will not readily forgive you for destroying his chance of becoming Master? He cannot stand even now that Runham is dead, because your accusations still hang over him.’

  ‘But I just saved his life,’ Langelee pointed out. ‘We are even again.’

  Bartholomew was certain Michael would not agree, and was equally certain that at some point in the future, Langelee would pay dearly for his error of judgement in thwarting Michael’s ambitions.

  ‘So, what were you yelling about just before this happened?’ asked Langelee, changing the subject. ‘Did you see the scaffolding about to fall? I heard you howling at the top of your voice when the whole lot crumbled.’

  ‘There were two men in the College whom I did not recognise,’ said Bartholomew, not sure what else he could say about the mysterious cloaked figures who had fled when he challenged them.

  Langelee regarded him askance. ‘It is not a crime for people to visit us, Bartholomew. I had a couple of guests myself, as it happened. They left just before the scaffolding collapsed, so it was probably them you hollered at.’

  ‘Really?’ asked Bartholomew, his mind whirling. ‘Who were they?’

  ‘Simekyn Simeon from Bene’t and one of his College’s porters – a man called Osmun. Simeon and I have known each other for years; he is in the service of the Duke of Lancaster and I met him often when I worked for the Archbishop of York. It was he who invited me to Bene’t last week, so that I could meet the Duke.’

  Bartholomew stared at him. Could it be possible that the two Bene’t men had done something to make the scaffolding collapse, perhaps to spite Michaelhouse for poaching its labourers? Was it Simeon and Osmun who Bartholomew had grabbed as they tried to leave? It could have been – as far as he could tell in the dark, they were about the right size and shape.

  But surely it would have been somewhat brazen, not to mention risky, for the two Bene’t men to sabotage Michaelhouse while visiting Langelee? Bartholomew rubbed his head. There was Clippesby, too: he had entered the College just after the two intruders had left, claiming to be returning from Raysoun’s grave. Had he merely thrown off his cloaked disguise and re-entered the College as himself, pretending to be as shocked by the incident as everyone else?

  Or was the collapse merely an accident? Langelee was not the first to observe that the scaffolding had been thrown up in too great a hurry, while the carpenters Blaston and Newenham did not seem surprised that the whole thing had come tumbling down around their ears. Embarrassed and annoyed, but not surprised.

  Bartholomew closed his eyes tiredly. At least now that Runham was dead the College should settle back into the routine of its everyday affairs, especially if Kenyngham were to be Master again, to heal with kindness and understanding the rifts and squabbles engendered by Runham.

  ‘Come on!’ shouted Blaston, turning to the watching scholars. ‘We can have that fat monk out in a few moments, if there are willing hands to help.’

  Bartholomew and Langelee moved forward with the others, while the carpenters carefully directed the removal of each timber, so that the whole operation was conducted safely and efficiently and none of the scholars suffered so much as a splinter. Lights flickered like great fireflies as Kenyngham, Clippesby and Suttone held lamps and the only sounds were the detailed orders of the two carpenters. It was not lon
g before the mess of wreckage was sufficiently untangled to allow Michael to climb out. Brushing dust from his habit, he stepped daintily across broken timbers and smashed tiles to the safety of the courtyard beyond.

  ‘I thought you were in your room when that lot came down,’ said Langelee, as he offered the monk a cup of wine to wash the dust from his throat. ‘Kenyngham told me you had gone to rest.’

  ‘I had,’ said Michael, drinking deeply and holding out the cup to be refilled. Langelee grimaced but did as he was bidden. ‘I was fast asleep when Matt woke me with all that yelling. I was on my way down the stairs to see what the fuss was about when the scaffolding fell.’ He gazed up at the ruins of his room and shuddered. ‘I see I would have slept all too well had I been lying in my bed when that happened.’

  ‘I said it was all going ahead too quickly,’ reiterated Langelee, snatching the cup from Michael before he could demand yet more wine. ‘I know about buildings – the Archbishop of York likes to raise them when he can get the money – and I told Runham this was all moving forward far too fast.’

  ‘I need a drink,’ said Michael with a sigh, as though the two cups provided by Langelee had never existed. ‘I cannot bear to watch my lovely College in such a state. Come on, Matt. The Brazen George awaits.’

  ‘We cannot go to a tavern and leave the others to do all the work,’ said Bartholomew, looking across to where students and Fellows alike still laboured over the fallen scaffolding.

  ‘They are stopping,’ said Michael, watching Blaston clap his hands and announce it was too late and too dark to manage anything more that night.

  ‘Good,’ said Langelee. ‘I will arrange some refreshment for everyone in the hall – assuming Michaelhouse has bothered to invest in optional extras, like food and wine, of course. There is still some Widow’s Wine left, but no one but William and I seem to like that.’ He strode away, hailing the cooks as he went.

  ‘Are you sure you are unharmed, Brother?’ asked Suttone anxiously, looking Michael up and down. ‘You are covered in dust.’