A Poisonous Plot (8 page)

‘Can we leave you to finish here, Master?’ asked the monk wearily. ‘Matt needs to examine Letia Shirwynk, whom we believe might have died in suspicious circumstances.’

‘We cannot visit the brewery, Brother,’ said Bartholomew. ‘Shirwynk was among the onlookers just now, so he will not be at home to give us his permission.’

Michael smiled sweetly. ‘Then we shall just have to get it from Peyn instead – which I anticipate will be a lot easier than dealing with his sire.’

Once again, they hurried through the dark streets, Michael more fleet-footed than usual as he aimed to be home in time for the feast. They trotted down Water Lane, grimacing at the rank smell that seeped from the dyeworks even though they were closed, and were about to approach the brewery when Peyn emerged with some friends. He was so intent on bragging about his imminent move to Westminster that he did not notice the door pop open again after he had closed it.

‘His father will not be impressed by that cavalier attitude towards security,’ remarked Michael, watching him swagger away. ‘But it suits our purposes. Come on.’

Bartholomew baulked. ‘If I am caught examining someone’s dead wife without permission, the town will rise against the University for certain.’

‘Then we must ensure that you are
not
caught. I will guard the door, while you go in. Be ready to make a run for it if you hear me hoot like an owl.’

‘
Can
you hoot like an owl?’

Michael flapped an impatient hand. ‘Hurry up. You are wasting time.’

Heart hammering, Bartholomew stepped inside. A lamp had been left burning by one of the vats, so he grabbed it and made his way to the living quarters at the back of the house, expecting at any moment to bump into Shirwynk, back early from the festivities. But he met no one, and it was almost an anticlimax when he found Letia’s body on a pallet in the parlour.

He examined her quickly, ears pricked for anything that sounded remotely like a bird. However, it was a cacophony of cheers from the High Street that eventually drove him outside again.

‘That was the procession ending,’ whispered Michael. ‘Shirwynk will be home soon, so let us be off before anyone spots us. Well? How did she die? And please do not say dizziness.’

‘I could not tell. There are no marks of violence, and certainly nothing to suggest she swallowed the kind of poison that killed Frenge. To all intents and purposes, she appears to have died of natural causes. Yet there are compounds that kill without leaving any trace …’

‘So was she murdered or not?’ hissed Michael impatiently.

‘I have already told you,’ said Bartholomew, equally testy. ‘I could not tell.’

‘But you must! You were gone an age – you must have seen something to help us find out why Shirwynk’s fellow brewer and wife died on the same day.’

‘It is suspicious,’ agreed Bartholomew. ‘But I am afraid poor Letia provided no answers.’

‘Lord, I feel sick,’ muttered Michael, as the Fellows took their places at the high table the following morning. Meals in College were meant to be taken in silence, so that everyone could listen to the Bible Scholar chanting the scriptures, but it was a rule they rarely followed, and the hapless reader invariably struggled to make himself heard over the buzz of conversation. ‘I think I ate something that was past its best last night.’

The Benedictine was not the only one to be fragile. The feast had been glorious, reminiscent of the splendid affairs they had enjoyed a decade earlier, when the College had been flush with funds. There had been mountains of meat and fish, wine in abundance, bread made with white flour rather than the usual barley-and-sawdust combination, and enough cakes to feed an army. Bartholomew had stayed sober, lest he was called out on a medical emergency, but no one else had demonstrated such restraint, and now there were sore heads aplenty.

Langelee was pale, and kept both hands pressed to his temples as he mumbled a grace that comprised a string of half-remembered Latin quotations, including part of a recipe for horse-liniment. No one but Bartholomew seemed to notice. Wauter had dark circles under his eyes and winced when Langelee raised his voice for a final amen, while William’s habit was not only splattered with a quantity of grease and custard that was remarkable even for that foul garment, but it was rumpled, suggesting he had slept in it.

The remaining Fellows were Suttone and Clippesby, both swaying in a way that suggested they might still be drunk. Clippesby was a Dominican who talked to animals and claimed they spoke back, so was generally deemed to be insane. He had no beasts about his person that day, however, and when the College cat rubbed around his ankles, it was ignored. Suttone was a portly Carmelite famous for his conviction that the plague was poised to return at any moment.

The students were also unusually subdued, and as breakfast comprised a bizarre and unsuitable combination of leftovers, it seemed that the servants had also availed themselves of the opportunity to enjoy the festivities the previous night.

‘Is it my imagination, or do our pupils get younger every year?’ asked Langelee, as food worked its magic on roiling stomachs and the students began to chat amongst themselves, throwing off their malaise with the enviable resilience of youth.

‘They must lie about their age,’ said Michael sourly. ‘That puny boy in Matt’s class – Bell, is it? He cannot be more than nine.’

‘Eighteen,’ said Bartholomew. ‘They seem younger because you are growing old.’

‘That is a wicked thing to say!’ cried Michael. ‘I am in my prime. However, there are a few grey hairs on
your
head that were not present a decade ago.’

‘Those came because he let women make him unhappy,’ stated William, referring to Matilde, who had left Cambridge because Bartholomew had been too slow to ask her to marry him; and Julitta, who had transpired to be a rather different lady from the one they all thought they knew. ‘Painful affairs of the heart always age a man, which is why he should give up his various amours and become a Franciscan. Like me.’

‘Or better yet, find a few more,’ said Langelee. Relations with women were forbidden by the University, but many scholars – he and Bartholomew among them – opted to ignore this particular stricture. ‘What about that widow you were seeing earlier this year? Is she still available?’

Bartholomew was aware that the students were listening, no doubt delighted to learn that the Fellows strayed from the straight and narrow – and his colleagues’ remarks, taken out of context, made him sound like an incurable philanderer. Moreover, he did not want to be reminded of the confusion and hurt he had suffered that summer. He changed the subject with an abruptness that made everyone automatically conclude that he had intriguing secrets to hide.

‘The mural is looking nice,’ he declared. ‘The Austins are talented artists.’

‘They are,’ agreed Wauter, prodding suspiciously at the plate of marchpanes and cabbage that had been set in front of him. ‘It is why I suggested we hire them. You should see their chapel – it is a delight.’

They were silent for a while, studying the painting. It ran the full length of one wall, and was nearing completion. There had been some debate as to what it should depict, but in the end they had settled for Aristotle, Galen, Aquinas and Plato teaching rows of enrapt scholars. The faces of many College members were among them: Bartholomew sitting near Plato but straining to hear Galen; Clippesby with the College cat; Wauter raising a finger as he prepared to tackle Aristotle; and William scowling at Aquinas’s Dominican habit – he hated his rival Order with a passion that verged on the fanatical.

‘I do hope our plan works,’ said Suttone worriedly, lowering his voice so that the students would not hear. ‘We have spent such a lot of money on it, and if we fail to win benefactors …’

‘I know it is a risk,’ whispered Langelee. ‘But we have no choice. We will not survive another year if we do not replenish our endowment, and drastic situations call for drastic solutions.’

‘Then we
must
remain aloof from this burgeoning spat between town and University,’ said Wauter. ‘No secular will give us money if we support King’s Hall against Frenge.’

‘Hopefully, we will not have to be diplomatic for long,’ said Langelee. ‘We shall put on such a grand display at the
disceptatio
tomorrow that donors will race to be associated with us.’

‘They will race even faster if we win,’ said William, treating Bartholomew and Wauter to a pointed look. ‘Which may not happen unless our representatives on the
consilium
agree to be reasonable and tell us which question they have chosen.’

‘We cannot,’ said Wauter shortly. ‘We have not yet made our final decision.’

‘Then you had better hurry up,’ said the Franciscan disagreeably. ‘Or do you expect us to stand around in St Mary the Great tomorrow, waiting while you debate the matter?’

‘Perhaps we should listen to them instead of the students,’ sniggered Suttone. ‘It will almost certainly be more entertaining.’

‘Regardless of what happens in the debate,’ said Michael, tactfully changing the subject, ‘when they see the lavish style in which we honour the memory of our founder, every wealthy family in the town will want us to do the same for them.’

‘But if not, there is always Wauter’s
Martilogium
,’ said Suttone. ‘He confided last night that all the monies from its publication will come to Michaelhouse.’

‘You mean that list of martyrs that you have been compiling for the last twenty years?’ asked Langelee eagerly. ‘That is generous, man!’

Wauter shot Suttone a weary glance. ‘Yes, I
confided
my intentions to you. That means you were meant to keep them secret until I was ready to make a general announcement.’

‘Oh,’ mumbled Suttone guiltily. Then his expression became pained. ‘Lord! I remember why you told me now! To cheer me up after what Stephen the lawyer said – that he plans to leave his collection of tomes on architecture to Gonville Hall instead of us.’

‘Does he?’ cried Langelee, dismayed. ‘I thought I had persuaded him that they would be more appreciated here.’

‘You did,’ said Suttone. ‘But he changed his mind. Personally, I suspect it was Zachary’s doing – to disconcert us before the
disceptatio
.’

‘It will have been Kellawe,’ said William viciously. ‘I cannot abide him – he is a fanatic.’

‘But he is a Franciscan,’ Suttone pointed out, while the others supposed that the Zachary man must be zealous indeed to have drawn such condemnation from William, who was no moderate himself. ‘A member of your own Order.’

‘He should never have been allowed to join,’ declared William hotly. ‘He should have gone to the Dominicans instead. They are the ones who love heretics.’

There followed a lengthy diatribe, during which William listed all Kellawe’s failings. His colleagues were wryly amused to note that every one of them was echoed in himself – arrogance, inflexibility, dogmatism and stupidity.

‘What will the Saturday Sermon be about today, Suttone?’ asked Langelee, eventually tiring of the tirade and so changing the subject. ‘It is your turn to preach.’

Suttone’s regarded him in horror. ‘Is it? Lord, I forgot, and I have nothing prepared! Perhaps we all can listen to the mock disputation that Matthew has organised instead. I know it will be about medicine, but that cannot be helped.’

‘Very well,’ said Langelee. ‘What is the subject, Bartholomew? And do not worry about what Nigellus and Rougham will think when informed that their audience will be ten times the size of the one they are expecting – they will be delighted, as both love being the centre of attention.’

Bartholomew hoped he was right. ‘Whether scrofulous sores in the throat can—’

‘Oh, no,’ gulped Langelee with a shudder. ‘I do not want to listen to that sort of thing today, thank you very much. We shall change it to something less grisly.’

‘What about one of Aristotle’s medical questions?’ suggested Suttone. ‘Such as my personal favourite: why do women have softer bodies than men?’

‘I hardly think our theologians will want to hear the answer to that, Father,’ said Wauter primly. ‘Moreover, our seculars will become inflamed with lust, and we shall have trouble.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Langelee briskly. ‘Medical debates necessarily involve mention of human parts, and I am sure we can trust Rougham and Nigellus to be genteel. Besides, our clerics can always stuff their fingers in their ears if anything too shocking is aired.’

He rubbed his hands together gleefully, although Bartholomew thought that if he was expecting anything enjoyably lewd from those particular
medici
, then he was going to be sorely disappointed.

When the meal was over, the servants began to remove dirty dishes and fold away tables, turning the hall from refectory to auditorium. Bartholomew went to wait by the gate, aiming to warn Rougham and Nigellus about the revised itinerary, so they could escape if they wanted. The rest of Michaelhouse might not care about offending their sensibilities, but Bartholomew was obliged to work with them, and did not want them irked.

‘I have not attended a good debate in ages,’ came a cheerful voice. It was Rob Deynman, who had been a medical student himself before Langelee had ‘promoted’ him to the post of Librarian. He had been accepted to study because his father was rich, but the unfortunate truth was that he had no academic talent whatsoever and everyone had heaved a sigh of relief when he had agreed to care for books rather than people. ‘Now we shall have two in as many days.’

‘Do you plan to take part tomorrow?’ asked Bartholomew, a little uneasily. Michaelhouse would be unlikely to impress potential donors if he did.

‘No, because Brother Michael says it would be beneath a Librarian’s dignity,’ replied Deynman. ‘So I shall just listen, and nod sagely in all the right places.’

‘Oh,’ said Bartholomew, supposing he would have to be placed where no one could see him.

‘I am sorry that Stephen is giving his architecture books to Gonville,’ Deynman went on, his amiable face creasing into a scowl. ‘He promised them to us, and I built special shelves to house them. I imagine Rougham did something sly to make him change his mind.’