A Deadly Brew mb-4

by Susanna GREGORY

  ‘Rob is seventeen years old!’ said Edith hotly. ‘How can you accuse a young lad of so vile a crime? First, he was here all night and nowhere near Valence Marie. Second, he has alibis to prove it. Third, how would he come by poisoned wine with which to kill anyway? Fourth, Oswald and I would have seen him had he been at the installation — which he was not. And, fifth, since you seem to believe that wicked Father Philius rather than Oswald, you imply that our household is involved in something sinister.’

  ‘No!’ exclaimed Bartholomew, shocked. ‘I only-’

  Edith cut across his words. ‘I think it would be best if you left us now, Matthew. Go and catch your poisoner. But you will not be welcome in our house again if you come only to make horrible accusations. And if I see you anywhere near Rob Thorpe, I will tell Tulyet to arrest you for assaulting a child!’

  She turned on her heel and stalked across the yard to the kitchen. After a moment, Stanmore followed. The door slammed, and Bartholomew and Michael were left standing alone in the yard.

  ‘You handled that well,’ remarked Michael, beginning to walk away.

  Bartholomew was rooted to the spot. ‘She believes I am trying to implicate Oswald in all this,’ he whispered, appalled.

  Michael took his sleeve and steered him out of the yard. ‘She spoke in anger,’ he said soothingly. ‘She will come to her senses in a day or two. And anyway, you did imply you did not believe her or Oswald when they told you Rob Thorpe was not at the installation.’

  ‘I have never seen her so fierce,’ said Bartholomew, still shocked.

  ‘I have,’ said Michael, with a wry smile. ‘And so have you if you allow yourself to admit it — only last week, in fact, when she caught that water-seller using the well near the river after you had told people not to drink from it. She had the man terrified out of his meagre wits. What you have not seen, Matt, is her ire directed towards you. Now you know how the rest of us feel when your beloved sister goes on the rampage.’

  ‘You make her sound like a tyrant,’ said Bartholomew resentfully. ‘She is not.’

  ‘She has a quick temper,’ said Michael. ‘And you rashly attacked one of her charges. But her wrath is always short-lived, and all will be well again tomorrow. Now, we both have duties to perform that we have been neglecting while we have been here — you should ascertain what caused Gray to put on such a disgraceful performance at his disputation, and give Bulbeck his medicine. Then, at noon you should come to dine with me in the Brazen George. It is time we treated ourselves to a little decent refreshment, and we need to talk undisturbed. Cynric?’

  The small Welshman appeared behind him.

  ‘Watch Master Stanmore’s gates and tell us when Rob Thorpe emerges. If we are not teaching in College, we will be in the chapel. You know which one I mean.’ He winked meaningfully.

  Cynric gave him a knowing grin and trotted away, leaving Bartholomew bewildered. He tried to make Michael tell him what was happening, but the fat monk would say nothing.

  Several hours later, they were comfortably settled in a pleasant chamber at the rear of the Brazen George, with a plateful of lamb and boiled onions. The room was one of Michael’s favourite haunts when inclement weather rendered the garden impractical. The taverner kept it free for the exclusive use of ranking scholars who should not have been there, and there was a small door that led directly out into an alley that ran perpendicular to the High Street, thus allowing discreet exits to be made should an occasion arise when it became necessary. It was a comfortable place — small and cosy, with a fire burning cheerfully in a brazier and colourful tapestries hanging on the walls. The beaten-earth floor was liberally scattered with reeds collected daily from the river bank, while bowls of herbs on the window sill made the chamber smell clean and fragrant.

  ‘I call this the chapel,’ said Michael, gesturing around him with a grin. ‘It is an excellent place for uninterrupted contemplation, where the troubled spirit can be restored with a good meal and a goblet or two of fine wine.’

  Bartholomew was about to speak, when the landlord entered, bringing a dish of dried figs, which he presented with a flourish.

  ‘Try these, Brother,’ he said ingratiatingly to Michael. ‘They are quite delicious.’

  ‘What are they?’ asked Michael suspiciously, poking at the wizened brown objects with the handle of his spoon, as if he imagined they might leap up and devour him.

  ‘I have no idea,’ admitted the taverner. ‘My wife bought them yesterday, but she says they are quite the fashion at the King’s table.’

  ‘The King can keep them!’ muttered Michael ungraciously. ‘I would rather have some tart, if you have it. And not one made of these things! Apple. Or sugared pears. Something normal.’

  The landlord left, crestfallen, while Michael regarded the figs with a shudder.

  ‘They look as though someone has eaten them already,’ he said, pushing them away.

  Bartholomew frowned. ‘Lemons at the feast at Valence Marie; pomegranates at Michaelhouse; sugared almonds at Deschalers’s house; oranges at Denny Abbey. The whole town seems flooded with unusual foods. Deschalers must be making a fortune. Winter is usually a time when only apples left over from the summer are available. Now every house in Cambridge is attempting to dine like the King. Even Agatha was persuaded to buy a pomegranate and she did not even know what to do with it!’

  ‘You will be having problems with people’s digestions if they go round eating this kind of thing,’ said Michael, pushing the figs further away from him.

  Bartholomew stared at him, a notion beginning to unfold in his mind.

  But Michael was speaking. ‘You were right about that snivelling apprentice Rob Thorpe, Matt,’ he said. ‘He was at the installation. I saw him too.’

  Chapter 9

  ‘But why did you not say you saw Rob Thorpe at the installation ceremony?’ cried Bartholomew angrily, leaping to his feet and sending the figs scattering over the table in the little room at the back of the Brazen George. ‘You might have saved me that ugly scene with Edith!’

  ‘Your family is in fine form today,’ said Michael with irritating calm. ‘This morning Oswald and Edith holler at you and now you yell at me. Sit down and drink some ale. I will explain if you let me.’

  ‘I do not want any ale!’ snapped Bartholomew. ‘Just tell me what game you are playing now.’

  ‘No game,’ said Michael, suddenly serious. ‘Lives are at stake here, Matt: Bingham’s for one. As soon as you had collared that young rat Thorpe, I knew you were right: it was him at the installation behind Grene, and he did indeed help you carry Grene’s body to the chapel. Yet he was different — his hair was black, not light brown, and his eyebrows were darker and heavier. He had disguised himself. And Edith was wrong when she said she would have noticed him at the installation — she was not expecting him to be there and so she had no reason to look. The hall at Valence Marie is huge and with all those people crushed into it, it is not surprising that she failed to notice a single servant at a table a long way from her own.’

  ‘Could you not have pointed this out to her?’ asked Bartholomew bitterly. ‘It might have gone some way to making her believe I am not an ogre blaming a murder on an innocent child.’

  Michael took a hearty mouthful of meat and swallowed it with the most superficial of chews. Bartholomew watched in distaste as the monk wiped the grease from his mouth on his sleeve and turned his attentions to the onions bobbing around in the thick gravy.

  ‘I tried to stop you from continuing with your accusations, Matt,’ he said, in the same maddeningly tranquil voice. ‘I knew Edith and Oswald would never believe ill of one of their apprentices: they treat them like their own children. But you insisted in blundering on.’

  Bartholomew wanted to grab him by the front of his habit and yell at him to stop being so infuriatingly smug. He chewed at his lip and wondered about the number of times he had recently felt moved to violence — towards Julianna for her attitude to Egil; towards Langelee
for goading him about Matilde; towards Rob Thorpe for his gloating smile; and now even towards Michael.

  ‘It was better that I said nothing,’ Michael continued placidly. ‘Rob Thorpe would simply have continued to deny the accusations, and had I told Edith that I, too, had seen him at the installation, she would have assumed I was lying to support you. Nothing I could have said would have made any difference.’

  ‘So what do we do now?’ demanded Bartholomew. He sat down with an exhausted sigh. ‘What a mess!’

  ‘We wait,’ said Michael, taking another mouthful of boiled onions and smiling at his friend.

  ‘Wait for what?’ asked Bartholomew, putting his elbows on the table and resting his chin in his hands. ‘For Thorpe to deliver us a bottle of poisoned wine? I might be tempted to drink it: I have had my fill of all this subterfuge.’

  ‘Now, now,’ said Michael, gently chiding. ‘What would Matilde do without you?’ He favoured Bartholomew with one of his leering winks and coaxed the ghost of a smile from his morose friend. ‘But, meanwhile, we will wait for Rob Thorpe to go running off to the person who led him into all this murder and mayhem in the first place — his accomplice!’

  Bartholomew lifted his head. ‘And what makes you so sure there is such a person?’

  ‘As your sister pointed out, Thorpe is seventeen years old. He would hardly be able to get himself into Valence Marie for the night without help.’

  ‘So you do think he killed Grene?’

  ‘Without a doubt,’ said Michael, waving a greasy hand in the air. ‘Although I cannot believe he did so alone. Gray and his cronies claim they saw an apprentice buying wine from Sacks on a Saturday night about a month ago. Philius was summoned to Stanmore’s house later that night because someone there was stricken by an ailment — which you and he later discovered had the same symptoms of the poisonings of Grene and Armel. I suspect that the apprentice was Thorpe and that he probably bought the wine in total innocence. Then, another lad drank the wine Thorpe bought and died most horribly. It was his death that gave Thorpe the idea of killing Grene.’

  ‘But wait a moment!’ said Bartholomew. ‘This is all very well. But what of the motive? Why should Thorpe want Grene dead? Why not Bingham who, after all, was the man elected into the position left vacant by his father’s dismissal?’

  Michael rubbed hard at the whiskers that stubbled his jowls, making a rasping sound. ‘By killing Grene, Thorpe has struck a blow at both rivals for his father’s position, not just one,’ he said. ‘Grene is dead and it is Bingham who is accused of his murder.’

  Bartholomew considered. ‘But if Isaac took the poisoned wine from Thorpe — and we know he did because Philius saw him — how did Thorpe acquire another bottle with which to kill Grene?’

  ‘We can surmise he bought two bottles from Sacks,’ said Michael. ‘Gray said Sacks had six bottles initially. A few weeks later, Sacks was still trying to sell four of them. Four, Matt, not five.’

  ‘I see,’ said Bartholomew. ‘So Thorpe bought two bottles — Isaac stole one and the other came briefly into our possession after it had killed Grene at the feast. Armel bought three — stolen from us at Michaelhouse. Which leaves one. Whoever has that will be in for an unpleasant shock.’

  ‘We must to talk to Sacks,’ said Michael. ‘If we can discover to whom he sold the sixth bottle, we may yet save a life. I have had two beadles looking for him since this business began, but he seems to have fled the town. And who can blame him, given what he has done?’

  ‘This accomplice of Thorpe’s,’ said Bartholomew, unable to banish the vision of the apprentice’s gloating face from his mind, ‘do you think it may be Father Eligius at Valence Marie?’

  Michael puffed out his cheeks, and nodded. ‘I must confess, it has crossed my mind. We have already discussed the possibility that Eligius had a hand in Grene’s death.’

  ‘We know Eligius is a firm believer that Bingham is responsible for Grene’s murder,’ said Bartholomew thoughtfully. ‘He even arranged to have Bingham arrested — and he wanted it done with such haste that he could not even wait until you had finished looking into that burglary at St Clement’s Hostel, and asked the Sheriff to do it instead.’

  ‘True,’ said Michael. ‘And what better way to hide his own guilt than to blame someone else? And, if you remember, Eligius was also the first Fellow to claim that Grene had confided that he was in fear of his life from Bingham.’

  ‘But what of the other two Fellows who claimed Grene had made a similar confession to them?’ asked Bartholomew uncertainly. ‘Do you think they are lying, too?’

  ‘“Claimed” is the pertinent word,’ said Michael. ‘Once Eligius stated that Grene had confessed himself in fear of his life, the other two might have thought back to conversations they had with Grene and read a significance into his words that was never there. Eligius is a brilliant logician, skilled at wrapping the arguments of others around their ears with his word-play. I imagine it would be easy for him to plant doubts in the minds of the others about supposed hidden meanings in Grene’s statements.’

  ‘All very well,’ said Bartholomew. ‘But I still cannot see why a renowned scholar like Eligius should risk all to help some apprentice commit murder.’

  ‘If we knew that, we would have the evidence we need to tackle him,’ said Michael. ‘But it would have been simple for him, as a Fellow of Valence Marie, to help Rob Thorpe to slip into the College and to secure him a place near Grene at the high table. Then Thorpe could have given Grene the poisoned wine unobtrusively.’

  They were silent for a while, thinking about what they had reasoned. Bartholomew wondered whether a seventeen-year-old apprentice would be able to conceive and execute such a plan alone and decided it was unlikely. In which case, why should Eligius help Thorpe in his warped desire for vengeance? It seemed a dangerous game to play, especially if Thorpe’s nerve broke and he revealed the identity of his accomplice to the Proctors.

  When Bartholomew and Michael had been examining Grene’s body in St Botolph’s Church, Eligius had made it clear that he believed Bingham to be responsible. Was that to ensure Michael’s investigation concentrated on Bingham, and did not attempt to seek other possible culprits? But the niggling doubt at the back of Bartholomew’s mind was Eligius’s apparent lack of motive. Bartholomew could conceive of no earthly reason why Eligius should want to rid Valence Marie of Grene and Bingham in so dramatic a manner, just because he was unimpressed with their intellectual abilities. He had not wanted the Mastership for himself or he would have taken it when it had been offered to him.

  Bartholomew turned his thoughts to the wine. ‘There are aspects to this poison I do not understand,’ he said aloud. ‘I saw that cat drink from the broken bottle and it did not die; but the rat did, instantly. And Philius became ill from the poison, but he did not die, despite the fact that it was strong enough to cause that burn on Isaac’s hand.’

  ‘Armel seems to have died as quickly as Grene,’ said Michael. ‘And the porter at Valence Marie, who was overly curious about the three bottles we left in his care, also burned his hand on them. Perhaps Philius and the cat had a greater resistance to the poison than had Grene and Armel. You are always telling me that people react differently to the same disease and the same treatments.’

  ‘But not usually to poisons,’ said Bartholomew. ‘At least, not to that extent. A poison strong enough to kill a person from a single sip is hardly likely to have no effect at all on a cat. But we still do not know why Sacks sold this poisoned wine in the first place. Gray says Sacks often sells stolen goods to students, so he would hardly want to deprive himself of their custom by killing them. He must have stolen them from someone else.’

  ‘That is it!’ said Michael, clicking his fingers with sudden insight. ‘Of course! You have it! He stole them. They were never meant to be sold around the town taverns, and that is why someone went to such pains to retrieve them — as you pointed out days ago. Someone wanted the evidence back. This is beginning
to make sense.’

  ‘Not to me,’ said Bartholomew. ‘So, what you are suggesting is that Sacks stole these six bottles of wine and began selling them in the Brazen George. Thorpe and his cronies, perhaps out of fear of Oswald’s anger at their disobedience, covered up the death of the apprentice Oswald denies losing. Thorpe kept the second bottle to use at a later date-’

  ‘And that meant that the people trying to retrieve their wine would have no clue where to look,’ interrupted Michael, nodding. ‘There were no tales of sudden and violent death for four weeks to reveal the bottles’ whereabouts — although Sacks sold the first of the wine four weeks ago, the first public death did not occur until last Saturday.’

  He took a bone from his plate and gnawed it thoughtfully, while Bartholomew watched him, wondering whether all their reasoning was correct. Michael waved the bone in the air and continued.

  ‘At the installation I did not announce the fact that I had taken the bottle from which Grene had been drinking to look for poison, but I did not take it with stealth. Anyone might have seen me remove it. I imagine that, first, these people went to Michaelhouse, where they found not one but four of their bottles. Then they went to Gonville Hall where they retrieved the fifth one and killed Isaac at the same time.’

  ‘But why go to Gonville at all?’ asked Bartholomew. ‘No one knew that Philius had been poisoned until I diagnosed it. And why was Isaac’s death so brutal?’

  Michael shrugged and then stretched his meaty arms. ‘I confess I do not know. But we have made good headway with this mystery. At least we have the answer to some of our questions.’

  ‘But not the identities of the people trying to kill us,’ said Bartholomew glumly. ‘And not why someone chopped Egil’s head and hands from his body. Nor why Eligius should help a misguided adolescent commit murder. And I am still uncomfortable with the roles Colton and Julianna are playing in all this.’