An Unholy Alliance (20 page)

and Nicholas joined guilds that denounced sin so vehemently, if they thought they would end up like some of the characters in the paintings. But equally, why would others risk that to become members of covens?

‘I am going to Ely tomorrow,’ said Michael, i want that spare set of keys, and I must report what we have discovered to my Lord the Bishop.’

‘Ask him about witchcraft,’ said Bartholomew.

Michael looked amused. ‘Now why do you think a

Benedictine bishop would know such things?’ he said, humour twinkling in his green eyes.

‘Because any Bishop that did not make himself familiar with potential threats to his peace would be a fool,’ said Bartholomew. ‘I am sure your Bishop will have clerks who will be able to furnish you with a good deal of information if you were to ask.’

Michael stood and cracked his knuckles. ‘Time for something to eat before bed,’ he said. ‘I may be in Ely for several days, so be careful. I will warn de Wetherset of Tulyet’s threat to you. You can talk to Froissart’s family, or Janetta of Lincoln, if they deign to appear.

Otherwise, do nothing until I return with orders from the Bishop.’

Bartholomew watched him amble across the courtyard to the kitchen. He heard an angry screech as

he was evidently caught raiding by Agatha, and then the College was silent. Only the richest fellows and students of Michaelhouse could afford to buy candles in the summer, and so once the sun had set and the light became too poor for reading, most scholars usually slept or talked. Here and there groups of students sat or stood chatting in the dark, and the sound of raised voices from the conclave indicated that the Franciscans were engaged in one of their endless debates about the nature of heresy.

One of the groups outside comprised Cray, Bulbeck, and Deynman, and Bartholomew smiled as he heard

Bulbeck, in exasperated tones, repeating the essence of Bartholomew’s lecture on Dioscorides. Deynman mumbled outrageous answers to Bulbeck’s testing questions, which made Cray laugh. The light was fading fast, and Bartholomew turned to go to his own room before it became too dark to see what he was doing. He undressed and lay on the hard bed, kicking off the rough woollen blanket because the night was humid.

He closed his eyes and then opened them again as he heard a sound outside the open shutters of his window.

A lamp was shining through it, but it was the monstrous shape on the far wall that made him start from the bed with a cry of horror. A great horned head was silhouetted there: the head of a goat. He swallowed hard and crept to the window, trying not to look at the foul shadow on the wall as it swayed back and forth.

He stared in disbelief at the sight of Michael and Cynric kneeling on the ground shaking with suppressed mirth.

Michael held a lamp, while Cynric made figures on the wall with his hands. They saw Bartholomew and stood up, roaring with laughter.

‘Agatha showed us how to do it,’ Michael said, gasping for breath. ‘Oh, Matt! You should see your face!’

‘Agatha told you to do that to me?’ said Bartholomew incredulously.

‘Oh, lord, no!’ said Michael. ‘She would rip our heads off if she thought we had dared to play a practical joke on her favourite Fellow. She has a fire lit to cook the potage for tomorrow’s breakfast, and she was showing Cynric how to make the shapes of different animals with his hands. She showed him a goat, and I could not resist the temptation to try it on you,’ he said.

Cynric grinned. ‘It worked wonderfully, eh lad?’ he said, beginning to laugh again.

Bartholomew leaned his elbows on the window-sill, and shook his head at them, beginning to see the humour of it, despite his still-pounding heart. ‘That was a rotten thing to do,’ he said, but without rancour. ‘Now I will never get to sleep.’

Still chuckling, Cynric took the lamp back to the kitchen, watched curiously by Bartholomew’s students still talking in the courtyard. Michael reached through the window and punched Bartholomew playfully before returning to his own room on the floor above.

Bartholomew could hear his heavy footsteps moving about, and his voice as he related his prank to his two Benedictine room-mates. He heard them laugh

and smiled despite himself. He would think of some way to pay Michael back, and Cynric too. He went to lie back down on his bed, and after a moment got up and closed the shutters, disregarding the stuffiness. Satisfied, he felt himself sliding off into sleep. At the fringes of his mind, he was aware that the meeting of the coven at St John Zachary was planned for that night and that he had intended to ask Stanmore about it. But it was late, Bartholomew’s day had been a long and trying one, and he was already falling into a deep sleep.

AFTER THE FRENZIED EVENTS OF THE last THREE days, Bartholomew was grateful for a respite while Michael went to Ely. He drilled his students relentlessly, and when at noon on Friday the College bell chimed to indicate the end of lectures for the day, his students heaved a corporate sigh of relief and prepared to spend the rest of the day recuperating from the shock of being made to work so hard.

The porter had a message asking him to visit the miller at Newnham village half a mile away. He had a hasty meal of thin barley soup flavoured with bacon rinds and some unripe pears, and set off. He walked upstream along the river path, muddy and slippery from the rain of the day before. The river itself ran fast and grey-brown, and Bartholomew saw a drowned sheep that had obviously strayed too close to the edge and fallen in.

He crossed the river at Small Bridges Street, paying a fee of one penny to use the two wooden bridges that spanned different branches of the meandering river. Once out of the town, peace prevailed. Larks twittered in the huge sky above him, and fields, neatly divided into ribbons, were rich with oats and barley. A man emerged from where he had been tending one field, and wielded a hoe at Bartholomew. Such was the shortage of crops that any farmer would need to guard his property well if he wished to feed his family or grow rich on the proceeds.

The miller and his family sat outside the mill sharing some baked fish. The three children - of ten - who had survived the plague looked thin and hungry, while their father’s mill stood silent. There were three mills in Cambridge, and the one at Newnham was by far the smallest and the most isolated. Business was poor for all of them, for the lack of crops meant that there was little for mills to grind. Bartholomew had seen the miller at the Fair offering ridiculously low prices for his labour.

The family saw him coming and waved him over. The miller’s wife held a child on her lap. Bartholomew, careful not to waken him, saw painfully thin limbs and a distended stomach that was full of nothing. The miller’s wife said her milk had dried up, and the baby was unable to eat fish. She wanted him to bleed the baby, thinking that an excess of black bile might be making him sick from the fish, and offered him her last three pennies to do so.

Why people believed bleeding would cure so much

was beyond Bartholomew^ understanding. He sent one of the older children to buy bread and milk from a nearby farmer with the three pennies, and showed the mother how to feed the baby milk sops in small amounts so as not to make him sick. But what would happen when the bread and milk ran out next time? And what about the rest of the family, looking at the milk sops with envious eyes? Bartholomew vowed he would never complain about College bread again.

Since it was a pleasant evening for a walk, and he was not expected back at Michaelhouse, he decided to visit his sister in Trumpington. He walked slowly, enjoying the warmth of the sun and the fresh, clean air of the countryside. Birds flitted from tree to tree, and at one point a deer trotted from the undergrowth across the path. Bartholomew stood still and watched as it nibbled delicately at a patch of grass. It suddenly became aware of him and stared intently until, unconcerned, it took a final mouthful of grass and disappeared unhurriedly into the dark scrub to the side of the path.

As Bartholomew strolled through the gates to Edith’s house, she came running to meet him, delighted at his unexpected visit. He followed her into the kitchen and sat at the great oak table while she fetched him cool ale and freshly baked pastries, which made him think guiltily of the miller’s child. Oswald Stanmore heard his wife’s greetings from where he had been working in the solar, and came to join them. The kitchen was full of delicious smells, as meats roasted on spits in the fireplace. Edith had been picking rhubarb, and great mounds of it sat at one end of the kitchen table ready to be bottled.

Edith, with many interludes for helpless laughter, told him about how the ploughman’s geese had escaped and trapped the rector in his church for an entire afternoon.

He told her about Michael’s prank the night before, and she laughed until the tears rolled down her face.

‘Oh, Matt! To think you were frightened by such a trick! I used to make those shadows for you when you were a boy. Do you not remember?’

Bartholomew had not told her about finding the goat mask in the coffin with the murdered woman, and was sure that she would not have been so dismissive of his gullibility had she known. She ruffled his hair as she had done when he was young and went to tend to her rhubarb, still smiling.

He played a game of chess with Stanmore, which

Stanmore won easily because Bartholomew became impatient and failed to concentrate, and then he strummed Edith’s lute in the solar until the daylight began to fade. Stanmore offered to walk part of the way back with him, and they set off as the shadows lay long and dark across the Cambridge road, and the last red glow of the sun disappeared beyond the horizon.

‘Any news of who killed Will?’ asked Bartholomew.

Stan more shook his head angrily. ‘Nothing! And Tulyet is worse than useless. I discovered that the attack was being discussed by men in the King’s Head and, like a good citizen, I passed my information to Tulyet, who has refused to investigate.’

‘Refused?’ said Bartholomew. ‘Or merely did not

initiate enquiries.’

Stanmore shrugged. ‘Pedant,’ he said. ‘He said he would consider the information, but my man in the King’s Head said there have been no soldiers asking questions. For Will’s sake, I regret bitterly sending the silk to London for dyeing. Now I have little choice but to use de Belem. Since his wife died of the plague, his work has become shoddy.’

‘I suppose lately Master de Belem has had other things to worn’ about,’ said Bartholomew.

‘Has anything further been discovered about the killer of his daughter?’ asked Stanmore, picking up a stone and tossing it at a tree stump that rose out of a boggy meadow at the side of the road.

Bartholomew told him about the dead woman in the grave of Nicholas of York, and that she had been wearing a mask depicting the head of a goat.

Stanmore looked appalled, and shook his head slowly.

‘Since the Death ravaged the land, men have turned from God,” he said. ‘Who knows what evil stalks the land!’

“I wish I knew why Frances was killed at Michaelhouse,’

said Bartholomew.

‘Did you follow up on that information I gave you about the guilds?’

‘I am not sure I know where to begin,’ said

Bartholomew. He told his brotherin-law what he

had overheard Harling telling de Wetherset. Stanmore frowned and pulled at his neat grey beard thoughtfully.

“I asked one of my men to make enquiries about which two covens were using the decommissionedchurches that Brother Alban told you about. They are the Cuild of Purification, which uses St John Zachary, and the Cuild of the Coming, which uses All Saints’. “Purification”

apparently means purification from God, rather than by Him, while the “Coming” refers to the coming of Lucifer, not the Messiah. The Cuild of Purification met last night at St John Zachary’s Church, as you heard Harling say it would, and my man posted a guard outside. As the guild members came out of the church, he saw each one make the sign of a small circle on the ground with their forefingers.’

‘A circle?’ said Bartholomew, staring at Stanmore and thinking of the feet of the dead girls.

Stanmore nodded. ‘So, it does mean something to

you. My man could not be absolutely certain because he, rather sensibly, had placed himself a good distance away. He also said that people wore black hoods, and did not linger to be recognised. What does the circle mean to you?’

Bartholomew rubbed a hand through his hair. ‘A small circle was drawn on the sole of the foot of three of the dead women I saw. I do not know if Tulyet saw the marks or not.

He reacted oddly when I tried to ask him whether there was a similar mark on the foot of the first victim.’

‘What do you mean, “acted oddly”?’

‘He became angry and then dismissive. It was after I mentioned the possibility of all the victims bearing a similar mark that he threatened to arrest me.’

‘Arrest you?’ said Stanmore, horrified. ‘Be careful, Matt! Even though Richard Tulyet the elder is no longer Mayor, he is still an influential man. If you anger the son, you will also anger the father.’

‘Do you think the older Tulyet is in a guild other than the Guild of the Annunciation?’ asked Bartholomew.

‘Fie is certainly in his trade guild, the Tailors,’ answered Stanmore. ‘I suppose it is possible that he could also be in one of these covens, although he would be hard pushed if ever his loyalty to one were tested over the others.’

“I think there could be some connection between the dead women and the Tulyets,’ said Bartholomew, ‘based on the Sheriffs reaction to me, and the fact that he seems to be doing nothing to investigate their deaths.’

Stanmore frowned. ‘If there were, it would have to be through one of these covens. The Guild of the Coming probably has the edge over the Guild of Purification in terms of power. I suspect that some highly influential person might be a member of the Coming. It is possible that person could be one of the Tulyet clan.’

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SUSANNA GReqoRY