A Wicked Deed (53 page)

‘Eltisley thinks he is beyond the law,’ said Michael. ‘Sit down, Cynric! You keep kicking these things into my lap. Why Isilia should consider forming an alliance with Eltisley is beyond me. He is likely to kill her, to see if she can be resurrected.’

‘I do not see how they are connected, though,’ said Cynric. ‘Isilia and Eltisley. She is sweet and kind, and he is a maniac.’

‘Do not let appearances deceive you, Cynric,’ said Michael sagely. ‘Behind that lovely face lies a mind as strong and cunning as a rat trap – which I would give a good deal to have one of right now. She must have paid him to destroy his tavern with Alcote in it, and snatched the copy of the will from me in the churchyard.’

‘What if—?’ began Bartholomew. He stopped as a screech from above heralded the opening of the trap-door. There was a flood of light, and the rats slunk away into the shadows.

Bartholomew saw Cynric braced to pounce and tensed himself, waiting for an opportunity to launch a bid for escape. It never came. More wary this time, one of the surly men immediately kicked out at Cynric’s hands, and the crossbow quarrel went skittering down the steps to the floor below. Michael let out a cry of dismay, while Cynric only gazed at it in horror.

‘All is ready,’ said Eltisley pleasantly. ‘I would like you to come out, Brother. I have an elixir I would like you to taste. And that Welshman, too. The monk might prove too fat for what I have in mind, but the servant should do nicely. I will save Bartholomew to help me later – I might be forced to call upon his expertise, if this does not work.’

‘What would you say if I told you to try your elixir on yourself?’ asked Michael, as he stepped out of the vault. The landlord seemed surprised by Michael’s hostility.

‘I would say that your students and the friar will test it in your stead. At the moment, I am still prepared to let them return to Michaelhouse.’

‘You do not have them,’ shouted Bartholomew desperately. ‘They have gone away.’

‘To the leper hospital,’ said Eltisley. He beamed at Bartholomew’s shock. ‘I overheard that slow-witted student of yours telling the handsome one where they were headed, as they fled along the Ipswich road yesterday. It was clever of you to try to spirit them away.’

Bartholomew’s heart sank.

‘Well, where are they, then?’ asked Michael.

Eltisley hesitated. ‘They have not arrived at the leper hospital yet.’ He shrugged absently. ‘Perhaps they have been waylaid. Or lost. That stupid student is capable of getting lost on a straight road, I am sure.’

Bartholomew was uncertain whether to be relieved they had escaped Eltisley’s clutches, or concerned that they might have fallen into someone else’s. He could only hope that Horsey had realised the danger they were in, and had come up with an alternative plan.

‘And we will catch that friar, too,’ said Eltisley. ‘He will not be able to hide from me for long.’

Eltisley’s attention was on Michael. ‘I have been working on a rather clever idea that you will test for me. You see, not everyone likes the time in which they live, so I have invented a potion that kills temporarily. Then, at a later date, my other elixir – the one that raises people from the dead – can be taken, and the person can be restored to life at a time of his choosing.’

‘But that is monstrous!’ exclaimed Michael. ‘The time in which we live is the one granted to us by God, and it is not natural to decide you do not like it, and exchange it for another.’

‘People will pay handsomely to do it, monstrous or not,’ said Eltisley, oblivious to Michael’s revulsion. ‘You would be surprised how many men would like to lie low for a few years.’

‘Murderers, thieves, rapists, arsonists and a whole host of other felons, I should imagine,’ said Michael scathingly. ‘You have invented an elixir to allow criminals to evade justice.’

Eltisley’s face hardened. ‘You will take my potion, and you are not a criminal.’

The slab was slammed shut, almost landing on Bartholomew’s head. On reflection, as the physician crouched in the darkness listening to the rustles as the rats began to move again, he decided that having his brains dashed out might be a better way to die than being eaten alive by rodents, or downing one of Eltisley’s hideous concoctions. Michael’s voice echoed down to him, and he strained to hear what was being said.

‘My colleague believes that you killed James Freeman,’ came Michael’s voice conversationally. ‘He thinks you hanged him, so that you could test your potion, and that he was wearing clothes from a bundle you found near the Grundisburgh parish boundary.’

‘He is right,’ said Eltisley. ‘Someone had abandoned those clothes – I found them when I was walking and thinking up new theories as we philosophers are wont to do. Since I needed some for James Freeman – to replace the ones I had bloodied to convince people of his death – I gave them to him, and he wore them when I hanged him at Bond’s Corner. Unfortunately, you chose that moment to cut him down.’

‘My apologies,’ said Michael.

Eltisley made an irritable sound. ‘You have no idea how frustrating it was to watch Bartholomew’s attempts to revive him, when I knew a few drops of my potion would work! But I thought that if I made my appearance from the bushes, you would assume I had hanged him.’

‘You had,’ Michael pointed out.

Bartholomew kicked away a rat that was clawing its way up his leg. It landed with a soggy thump on the floor below.

‘But not with any intention to kill,’ protested Eltisley. ‘He would have been alive today, had you not come by and interfered. Then I was left with a body to dispose of.’

‘Why did you not test your elixir on him after we had gone?’ asked Michael.

Eltisley sighed.’ I did, but that particular elixir was designed to raise people who had only just died, and the delay caused by your meddling meant it did not work.’

Bartholomew knew students who always had an excuse as to why they had not completed some task he had set them, or why an experiment he had asked them to undertake was unsuccessful. It was never their fault; someone else was always to blame. Eltisley was just like them.

‘Then what did you do?’ asked Michael.

‘I could not have James Freeman’s body discovered, or people would be asking me who I had buried in his specially constructed coffin. It was quite a problem for me. Have you ever tried to dispose of a corpse?’

‘Not lately,’ replied Michael.

‘It is no mean task, I can assure you. I tried to burn it, but it smouldered for days and I was still left with a sizeable chunk. I had to chop it into small pieces, and leave it out for Padfoot – although he did not seem to be very interested.’

‘Probably prefers his human corpses raw,’ suggested Michael.

Eltisley continued. ‘Anyway, after he died, I took the clothes off Freeman, donned them along with some potions to disguise my face and went into Grundisburgh church, intending to have a conversation with Walter Wauncy. My ingenious plan was that Wauncy would say he had seen the hanged man alive and well, and your story would be dismissed as fantasy – drunken scholars reeling from a night in the taverns, claiming to find a dead man who was later seen in a church by our priest. Who would question the word of a priest?’

‘But instead of Wauncy, you found Unwin, who was dead,’ said Michael, ‘so you ran away.’

‘I tried to give him some of my potion, but in my excitement at finding a subject so unexpectedly, I spilled it. Vapours wafted into my eyes, and I could barely see what I was doing. I decided to abandon the experiment before someone accused me of a murder I did not commit. I ran away across the fields behind the church, although the shoes were too small: they slopped, and made haste difficult.’

So, Stoate had been telling the truth, thought Bartholomew. He
had
seen a man running from the church rubbing his eyes. And Norys had seen him wearing Freeman’s shoes and belt – recently stolen from Deblunville by Janelle. Deblunville’s shoes had not fitted Eltisley, and they had slopped, something peculiar enough to lodge in Norys’s mind.

‘Norys saw you,’ said Michael. ‘He described the belt and shoes – but not the dagger, because you left that with James Freeman’s body.’

‘I was impressed by Norys’s observing powers,’ said Eltisley. ‘Although I was relieved that he did not recognise anything else. For a dreadful moment, I thought he was going to come to help disentangle my cloak from the tree it snagged on. I ripped it pulling myself free.’

‘And how did you manage to take the afternoon away from your tavern to conduct your experiments during the Fair?’ asked Michael. ‘Did people not demand to know where you were?’

‘I have a wife,’ said Eltisley loftily. ‘I have better things to do with my time than selling ale to peasants. But later I was arrested for the priest’s murder anyway, because of that bloody knife.’

‘I suppose the knife was the one you used to kill an animal – to provide the blood you needed to make Freeman’s “death” appear convincing.’

‘Exactly,’ said Eltisley. ‘Ironic, do you not think? But you were kind enough to come to my rescue, and provide evidence that Norys was the culprit, not me, so I was free to continue my work.’

Bartholomew rested his head against the cool stone and felt sick. He did not stay still for long. Something furry bumped up against his leg, forcing him to push it away. How much longer could he repel the things? Would they get him first, or would Eltisley?

‘And who is it who is financing these great experiments of yours?’ asked Michael. ‘Isilia?’

Bartholomew heard Eltisley clap his hands in delight. ‘At last you have reasoned it out! Mistress Isilia does not want that loutish Hamon to inherit Tuddenham’s estates over her brat, as is likely to be stipulated in Tuddenham’s will. She asked me to relieve her of your presence so that the will cannot be written, and since I was running a little low on funds, I agreed.’

‘Many people are interested in my work,’ said Eltisley blithely. ‘Everyone has a loved one they would like to see again. I have even been paid by priests, who want me to raise a saint for them.’

‘There is not much left of most saints to raise,’ said Michael. ‘Bones, hair, teeth, nails, fingers and beard have been scattered all over the country as relics.’

‘That will be dealt with when the time comes,’ said Eltisley grandly.

Their voices faded away into silence. In a brief moment of hope, Bartholomew thought they had forgotten to replace the chest that held down the slab, but there was a rumble and a thump, and that was that. He sat with his head resting on his knees, wondering how he had ever become embroiled in the whole mess, and fervently wishing that he had never left Cambridge in the first place. He thought of Unwin, dead because he had been foolish enough to let Stoate bleed him, and Alcote, dead because Isilia did not want Hamon to inherit Tuddenham’s estates. And then he thought about Michael, Cynric, Horsey, Deynman and William – who would go the same way. He was angry enough to beat his fists uselessly on the stone slab to vent his frustration.

It was not long before the rats intruded into his thoughts. One of them started to scramble up his back, while a scaly tail slid across his arm. He stood and shook them off, hearing them tumble down the stairs. Then it occurred to him that the rats could not possibly have squeezed themselves through the tiny gap around the edges of the trap-door, and that he must have been right in his original assumption, scoffed at by Michael, that there was another way in – and out.

But he was in almost complete darkness and surrounded by rats. How was he to find it? He groped around on the step, and found Cynric’s tinder. Now all he needed to do was to locate the stub of candle he had dropped when he had stepped on his first rat – assuming they had not already eaten it. It took all his courage and self-control to make his way down the steps in the gloom and feel about among the milling rats on the floor.

Immediately, he found the crossbow quarrel that Eltisley’s henchman had kicked from Cynric’s hand, and used it to stab randomly while he searched with his other hand for the stub. Expecting to be bitten at any moment, he forced himself to feel around until his cold fingers finally encountered it. It had been chewed, but was still functional. With unsteady hands, he scraped the tinder until it caught, and watched leaping shadows fill the vault. Some of the rats slunk away. But not all of them.

Hoping that the stub would not sputter into nothing as it burned down, he began his search, watching the rats to see if he could tell whether they were coming or going in any particular direction. The rats, however, seemed as interested in him as he was in them, and their beady eyes were fixed unswervingly on his feet. His first exploration of the vault told him nothing, other than it was solidly built – something he already knew. He poked at every stone near the altar, then paced the floor to see if there were rings in the paving slabs that might lead to another chamber. There was nothing.