Finally, feeling he could delay no longer, he took the reins of his horse and led it up the hill toward the crossroads. Tuddenham and Wauncy stood together, while Michael poked about near the foot of the gibbet in the dying light. From the stony expressions of the knight and the priest, Bartholomew sensed that something was amiss.
‘Are you sure about this?’ asked Wauncy in a tone that was not entirely friendly. ‘I have heard that the scholars of Cambridge have a reputation for savouring fine wines.’
‘Are you implying we were drunk?’ asked Michael coldly, pausing in his prodding to favour the priest with the expression normally reserved for students who tried to lie to him.
Wauncy clearly was, but he folded his hands together and forced a smile. ‘All I can say is that you must have been mistaken in what you thought you saw. Look around you, Brother. There is no hanged man here now. And from what I can see, there never was.’
Chapter 3
‘I can assure you, Sir Thomas, that there was a man hanging at Bond’s Corner yesterday morning,’ said Michael firmly. ‘Someone must have returned after we left, and taken the body away.’
Tuddenham was clearly sceptical. He gestured to Siric to refill the scholars’ goblets, but Bartholomew noticed that the steward was being more cautious with the portions than he had been the previous day. Michael noticed, too, and was not amused.
It was the day after the mysterious disappearance of the corpse on the gibbet, and the scholars and Tuddenham’s household were sitting at a large table in the knight’s handsome two-storey manor house of Wergen Hall, which stood about a mile to the south of the main village. Outside, a moat and two sets of earthen banks provided basic protection against attack, although these had apparently been added when Roland Deblunville moved to the neighbouring village of Burgh, and had nothing to do with the continuing wars with the French.
Wergen Hall’s main chamber was a pleasant room with brightly painted window shutters that had been thrown open to the golden morning sunlight. Hand-woven tapestries adorned the walls, depicting hunting scenes and a rather alarming vision of Judgement Day in scarlet and emerald, which Isilia told them had been sewn by Dame Eva while her husband was on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land many years before. The rafters above it were stained black with decades of smoke from fires burning in the central hearth, while the wooden floor had been liberally sprinkled with dried grass and fragrant herbs.
Bartholomew considered the oddly empty scaffold of the day before, as Michael continued to try to convince a disbelieving audience that he had not been drunk. With Tuddenham and his priest Wauncy looking on, Bartholomew had knelt in the grass below the gibbet and inspected it closely. Some of the blades were flattened where the body had lain, although with four horses trampling about it was flimsy evidence at best. He had presented Tuddenham with the rope Cynric had cut, but the knight claimed it had been left from the previous hanging. Bartholomew had discovered only one other thing: in the fading light, something had glinted dully, and he saw it was one of the silver studs from the belt the dead man had worn. Tuddenham shrugged, unimpressed, and pointed out that it might have been there for weeks, and provided no incontrovertible evidence that Deblunville had been hanged there earlier that day.
It had been an uncomfortable ride back to Grundisburgh. Tuddenham was clearly relieved that the scholars had been mistaken, but was not pleased that he had been dragged away from the Pentecost Fair on a wasted errand. His priest, meanwhile, hinted darkly about the widely known penchant of Cambridge scholars for strong wines. As far as Bartholomew was concerned, the timely disappearance of the corpse added credence to his initial claim that the hanged man had been murdered, while Michael fretted about whether the incident would make Tuddenham rethink his intention to grant the advowson to Michaelhouse.
Michael need not have been concerned. As soon as they entered the grassy courtyard of Wergen Hall, the knight had asked yet again whether they were inclined to begin sifting through the pile of deeds that needed to be read before the advowson could be drafted. Michael pounced on the opportunity – uncharacteristically declining an invitation to attend the villagers’ feast on the green – and summoned Alcote so that they could begin immediately. The rest of the evening was spent painstakingly sorting through the mass of scrolls and deeds that proved Tuddenham’s legal ownership of various plots of land and buildings.
Michael and Alcote, with William and Bartholomew helping, toiled well into the night, working in the unsteady light of smoking tallow candles. Eventually, eyes stinging from the fumes and from the strain of reading poor handwriting in the gloom, they were obliged to sleep where they sat, hunched over a trestle table piled high with documents, because all the best places by the fire had been taken by Tuddenham’s servants hours before. The scholars were woken, stiff and unrested, before dawn the following morning by Tuddenham himself, eager to know how much progress had been made.
Later, over a breakfast of hard bread and salted fish, during which the usual topics were aired – it was indeed mild for the time of year, the scholars had heard that the Pope had died the previous December, and food prices had risen alarmingly since the plague – Dame Eva turned the conversation to the mysteriously absent hanged man. Tuddenham pursed his lips, reluctant to resurrect a subject he considered closed, but the old lady persisted, claiming she was concerned that the outlaws on the Old Road might have dipped south on to Tuddenham land.
As she spoke, Bartholomew wondered how old she was. Although she possessed almost all her long yellow teeth and her eyes were bright and alert, she seemed so small and frail that he thought a gust of wind might blow her away. But elderly though she might be, she was astute and far too wary of her neighbours to make light of the odd disappearance of a corpse on her son’s manor. Given the seemingly precarious state of his relationship with Deblunville, Bartholomew thought her concerns were probably justified, and that Tuddenham would do well to pay heed to her.
‘The hanged man was about thirty years of age,’ said Alcote, looking up from where he was prising the bones from his herrings with a delicate silver knife, ‘with brown hair and a red face.’
‘He had a red face because he had been suffocated,’ Bartholomew pointed out. ‘I cannot imagine it was that colour in life.’
Tuddenham raised silvery eyebrows. ‘It is not much of a description, gentlemen. Can you recall nothing else about him? Did he have any marks or scars?’
‘Not that I saw,’ said William. ‘He was just an ordinary sinner.’
‘And you are certain he was dead,’ said Walter Wauncy, chewing slowly and deliberately on a piece of bread, as if he imagined his teeth might drop out if he were too vigorous. ‘Because dead men do not cut themselves down from gibbets and walk away.’
‘How can you be sure of that?’ asked Isilia, her green eyes round and sombre as she regarded the cadaverous priest. ‘Strange things have been happening here since the Death.’
‘Not that strange!’ said Tuddenham, with a bemused smile. He shook his head at his mother. ‘Have you been telling her silly tales again?’
‘Do not mock things you do not understand, Thomas,’ said the old lady sharply. ‘Isilia is right: strange things have happened here since the Death.’
She exchanged a glance with Isilia, and they instinctively moved closer together as if for protection. Bartholomew noticed that the old lady’s gaudy brooch had been exchanged for a heavy gold cross, which she clutched at with bird-like fingers.