‘St Botolph’s,’ said Michael, looking at the church. ‘The Abbot of St Edmundsbury told me about this church. It was named for the saint whose bones once rested nearby.’
‘Yes,’ said Bartholomew. ‘I read that the relics of St Botolph used to be in a chapel near here, until the monks of St Edmundsbury came one night and stole them for their abbey.’
‘The monks did not steal them,’ said Michael defensively. ‘They merely removed them from a place where they were all but forgotten, and placed them in a fine chapel where they would be freely available to the populace as a whole. Hundreds of people come to pay homage to those bones each year. Would you deny them that privilege?’
‘You Benedictines certainly stick together,’ said Bartholomew, laughing. ‘Why not let a little village keep its relics? Why do they all have to be in great abbeys and monasteries?’
‘The monks had the permission of King Canute to remove them from here to St Edmundsbury,’ protested Michael. ‘It was all perfectly legal.’
‘Then why, according to the historical documents I read, did they choose a dark night to do their “removing”? Why not come in the daytime and ask nicely?’
‘Asking nicely gets you nowhere in this life,’ said Michael, regarding Bartholomew as though he were insane. ‘If you want something, you just have to take it.’
‘And this is the philosophy expounded by the Benedictine Order, is it? No wonder all your monasteries are so rich!’
‘The relics of one of England’s most venerated saints should not be left to rot in some godforsaken settlement on a road that leads to nowhere,’ said Michael testily. ‘St Botolph deserves to be somewhere splendid.’
‘Did the Abbot tell you about the golden calf, too?’ asked Bartholomew, seeing he would not be able to make the monk see his point of view, and disinclined to waste his energies in pointless debate.
‘No,’ said Michael curiously. ‘What was it? Some sort of pagan idol the villagers made to replace their lost bones?’
‘A statue of a cow was also in the chapel, but the monks missed it when they “removed” St Botolph’s bones. This statue was said to have been made of solid gold, and was thought to have been of great value. The villagers were afraid the monks would come back and “remove” that, too, so they buried it for safekeeping. And there it remains to this day.’
‘You mean there is a lump of solid gold buried here somewhere?’ asked Michael, looking around him as though he imagined he might see a glittering hoof protruding from the ground.
Bartholomew nodded. ‘So the legend says. It is supposed to be near the chapel.’
‘And where is the chapel?’ demanded Michael keenly. ‘I might set Cynric to a little digging if we have time.’
‘You will do no such thing,’ said Bartholomew, surprised that Michael, who was usually scornful of such tales, believed this one. ‘If you want to root about for gold, you can do it yourself; you are not to use Cynric. Anyway, with no relics to house, the chapel gradually fell into disrepair and collapsed. No one knows exactly where it stood. It was all a very long time ago.’
‘Before the Conqueror came, according to the Abbot,’ agreed Michael. ‘But how do you know all this? You said you had never been here before.’
‘I read it in the Abbey while you were checking up on Tuddenham. Did you visit the monks’ library? It has all of Galen’s works, plus two copies of Honeien ben Ishak’s Isagoge in Artem Parven Galeni. And there were treatises by Theophilus, Nicholas and even Trotula.’
‘How fascinating,’ said Michael dryly. ‘Now, about this calf…’
‘And there were texts by great Arab philosophers, like Averroes and Avicenna, including little-known commentaries on Galen that I have never read before,’ continued Bartholomew enthusiastically, not to be deterred by Michael’s apathy. ‘One of them suggested a cure for Anthony’s Fire that I intend to try on my next patient who is afflicted with that disease, and a–’
‘There are flowers around the door of the church,’ interrupted Michael. ‘How very quaint. I thought this was just another one of those depressing decommissioned places that does not have enough of a congregation to keep it going. Look, Matt! Blue and yellow things.’
‘Violets and oxlips,’ said Bartholomew, glancing at them absently. ‘And in one of the Greek translations of the Arab surgeon Albucasis, there was a technique for incising fistulae that–’
‘You will end up in trouble with the Guild of Barbers again if you persist in practising surgery,’ warned Michael. ‘You are a physician, not a surgeon, and you are not supposed to chop and slice people about.’
‘And you are a monk, not a lawyer, but you still study deeds and writs and haggle over legal details,’ Bartholomew retorted.
Michael inclined his head. ‘Point taken. But let’s not talk about such things as incising fistulae. Most men would be discussing horseflesh, or how the beautiful Isilia rates against the exquisite Matilde, not stolen bones and lancing boils. There must be something wrong with us, Matt.’
Close up, Deblunville’s encampment was better fortified than Grosnold had led them to believe. There were parallel ditches surrounding a rectangular outer bailey, while a second set of ramparts and a neat palisade of sharpened stakes defended an inner bailey. At the heart of the complex was a row of huts and a low motte topped by a timber building.
They had not taken many steps towards it, when Bartholomew heard the unmistakable clicks of crossbows being wound. He stopped dead in his tracks and looked around him wildly, hoping that Deblunville’s men were not trained to shoot first and discuss visiting hours later. Tuddenham dismounted, and raised his hands in the air to indicate that he held no weapon. He did, however, have a hefty broadsword strapped to his waist, as well as at least two daggers that Bartholomew could see, not to mention Grosnold, six alert archers and Hamon, who breathed heavily in anticipation of violence like a trapped boar.
‘We come in peace,’ Tuddenham declared in a loud, confident voice. He gestured to Michael and Bartholomew. ‘These are scholars visiting from Michaelhouse at the University of Cambridge. They claim to have seen a man hanged at Bond’s Corner yesterday, and, since all our villagers are accounted for, I felt obliged to ensure that Burgh’s people were similarly safe.’
No one answered.
‘If it was Deblunville we saw dead on the gibbet, he is unlikely to come out to greet us now,’ Michael whispered to Bartholomew. ‘And his people will be leaderless.’
Receiving no response, Tuddenham started to move forward again. He stopped short when an arrow thudded into the ground at his feet. He looked at it quivering, and took several steps back. He was prevented from taking several more only by the fact that Grosnold was in his way.
‘I have already told you that we have not come with any hostile intention,’ he said, his voice tight with anger. ‘I demand to speak to Deblunville immediately!’
More silence greeted him, and he turned to Michael and Bartholomew in exasperation. ‘You see what the man is like? He will not even speak in a civilised manner. I have had enough of this nonsense. If he is dead, then all I can say is good riddance! Hamon, lead the way home.’
‘Wait!’
It was a woman’s voice that came from the outer ramparts. There was a pause, and then a figure appeared, climbing lithely on to the top of the bank. A hand grasped firmly around one of her ankles suggested that someone in the ditch behind did not share her confidence in her balancing skills and was trying to ensure she did not fall. For the second time in two days, Bartholomew found himself gazing in admiration at a woman. This one was small and delicate, with corn-fair hair knotted into a thick plait that reached almost to her knees. Even from a distance, he could see her eyes were a startling blue and that her cheeks were pink and downy, not brown and weathered from too much sun. She wore a dress of fine peach-coloured material that shone in the sun as she moved.