‘I wish it were that easy, Matt. But my talents lie in dealing with scholars, and I suspect our victims were killed by townsfolk. The kind of mean, vicious fellows who would stab a friar in the back, shove an ageing academic from a roof, or smother a man with a cushion and leave his body in the Mayor’s garden are unlikely to open their hearts to the Senior Proctor – whether the ale is flowing or not. But they might tell my beadles, who are townsfolk themselves. I may do more harm than good if I interfere.’
Bartholomew left him and went to his own room, where he threw open the window shutters and sat at the table to begin work on his treatise. The section on infection reminded him of the riverman with the rat bite, and from there he thought about the conversation he had had with Dunstan and Aethelbald. Although the old rivermen were a pair of shameless gossips, their stories often carried an element of truth, and he was concerned by their assertion that the town was resentful that Michaelhouse had left the book-bearer’s body unattended and forgotten in St Michael’s Church for a week.
He considered mentioning the matter to Runham again, but suspected it would be a waste of time. With some reluctance, he laid down his pen, swung his cloak around his shoulders, and left the College to walk to St Michael’s Church. Justus’s body was still there, shut into the porch and draped carelessly with a dirty sheet. Bartholomew lifted the corner and peered underneath. Justus’s face had darkened, and the corpse released an unpleasant, sickly odour: it was not as bad as the stench from the butchers’ stalls because the cold weather had slowed putrefaction, but it would not be long before it was providing some impressive competition.
He returned to Michaelhouse, asked Agatha for a sheet to use as a shroud, and then set off with it across the yard. On the way back to the church he met Suttone, and the Lincoln-born friar immediately agreed to conduct a funeral for a man who had hailed from the same city. Together, they wrapped the body in the sheet and then prepared it for burial, lighting candles, anointing it with chrism, and sprinkling scented oil over it to mask the smell as it was brought from the porch to the chancel.
Because Justus was a suicide, the verger would not allow him to be buried in the churchyard, so Bartholomew hired a cart to take the body to the desolate spot near the Barnwell Causeway that had been set aside for people who had taken their own lives. As Suttone said his prayers, Bartholomew stood at the side of the shallow grave and shivered, his cloak billowing around him in the wind. The scrubby bushes that shielded the burial ground from the yellow stone buildings of the nearby Austin priory whispered and hissed when the breeze cut through them, and small, stinging dashes of rain spat at Bartholomew and Suttone as they completed their mournful task.
The grave-diggers, who had decided it was too cold to wait for the Carmelite to finish his benedictions, were nowhere to be found after he and Bartholomew had rolled Justus’s floppy remains into the wet hole in the ground. Not liking to leave the grave open, Bartholomew took a spade and filled in the gaping maw himself, while Suttone continued to pray. When they had finished, they stood in silence for a few moments, gazing down at the soggy pile of earth until wind and rain forced them to hurry back along the Causeway and into the town. Suttone returned to St Michael’s Church for more prayers, while Bartholomew walked back to the College, feeling cold and dirty. As he went, he grew increasingly angry with Runham, despising the man for having so little concern for others that he had consigned Justus to the paltry ceremony Suttone had just conducted.
He was so engrossed in his thoughts that he almost collided with a horse being ridden down the High Street at a healthy clip, and was only saved from injury by some very skilled horsemanship on the part of its rider. He backed up against a wall in alarm, and watched Adela Tangmer, the vintner’s daughter, control her panicky mount.
‘You should watch where you are going, Matthew,’ she called when the horse had been calmed. He was relieved that she did not seem cross at his carelessness; the tone of her words bore more sisterly concern than censure. She grinned down at him, and he was amused to note that she still wore her comfortable brown dress, set off by a pair of rather manly riding boots and a belt from which hung a no-nonsense dagger.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I was thinking about something else.’
‘You should be more careful. You would have been trampled had I not been such an accomplished horsewoman. Worse yet, you might have done Horwoode an injury.’
‘Horwoode?’ asked Bartholomew in confusion. ‘The town Mayor?’
Adela gave a guffaw. ‘I call this horse Horwoode, because he is skittish, weak, rather stupid and has overly thin legs.’
‘I see,’ said Bartholomew, startled by such a bald, if astute, summary of the Mayor’s most prominent attributes. ‘I have never noticed Mayor Horwoode’s legs, personally.’
‘Well, you are not a woman, are you?’ Adela pointed out. ‘But I do not like that man.’
Neither did Bartholomew, but he was not so imprudent as to be bawling his opinions in one of the town’s main thoroughfares.
‘Horwoode is Master of the Guild of St Mary, you know,’ Adela went on. ‘His advice to my father’s guild, Corpus Christi, to invest in Bene’t College was bad. That horrible College is turning out to be a lot more expensive than my father was given leave to expect. And a couple of their scholars have been put down in the last few days, which does not reflect well on my father’s guild.’
‘Put down?’ asked Bartholomew, not sure what she meant.
She waved an impatient hand. ‘Killed. Put out of their misery. Or rather, put out of ours. That drunken Raysoun and his friend Wymundham have already gone to meet their maker, and the rest of the rabble are bickering about who was responsible.’
‘What are you talking about?’ asked Bartholomew, confused by her diatribe.
‘Bene’t College is a nasty place, Matthew. Its porters are a gang of uncontrollable louts, its students are worse than some of the town’s apprentices for wild behaviour, and the Fellows are always fighting and squabbling.’
‘It sounds just like any other University institution to me,’ said Bartholomew. ‘What is it that singles Bene’t out as particularly disreputable – other than the fact that you do not approve of your father’s money being spent on it?’
She gave him a hard stare, and then broke into one of her toothy smiles. ‘You are an astute man, Matthew. I do resent the money my father is always ploughing into the place. But Bene’t is more than just a waste of gold: it seethes with secrets and plots. One of its patrons is the Duke of Lancaster, and he is so worried about what might happen in the College with which he is associated, that he has made one of his squires a Fellow there, just to keep an eye on it.’
‘You mean Simekyn Simeon?’ he asked. ‘He told us he was the Duke’s squire.’
‘Well, he is, and his task is to watch the place and report its nasty secrets to the Duke.’
To Bartholomew, her assertions sounded the kind of rumours that the townsfolk loved to circulate about the University, and they contrasted sharply with what Simeon had claimed about Bene’t being a harmonious College where Fellows enjoyed each other’s company. Yet Michael had also detected something strained about the atmosphere at Bene’t, and only that morning, Robin of Grantchester had told Bartholomew that the porter Osmun had been making the peculiar claim that Wymundham had stabbed Raysoun himself.
‘What kind of thing is the Duke afraid will happen?’ he asked.
She shrugged carelessly. ‘I have no idea. That feeble Henry de Walton is bleating about foul play, but no one takes any notice of him.’