‘Did you ask Pulham about what Master Thorpe told us?’ asked Bartholomew. ‘About the Mortimers promising hefty donations, if Gonville can make the Commission find in their favour?’
‘Not yet,’ replied Michael shortly. ‘The Bishop of Ely summoned most of the Gonville Fellows to see him on Thursday afternoon – something about the deeds to a property Bateman did not properly transfer to them before he died. But I will catch them as soon as they return.’
‘Bottisham deserves to have his name cleared of the unpleasant rumours that are circulating around the town – that he killed Deschalers,’ said Father William, making Michael wince. It sounded like an accusation of incompetence. ‘The townsfolk’s anger against us is palpable when they come to visit the Hand. You should do all you can to prove him innocent, Brother.’
‘He is working as hard as he can,’ said Bartholomew sharply. ‘I have never seen a case where there are so few clues, and he is doing his best. He has barely rested since this started.’
‘I have barely eaten, either,’ added the monk in a plaintive voice, obviously considering this far more serious. ‘Will you come with me to the mill, Matt? Now?’
‘You should not have discredited the Hand with such relish on Thursday, Bartholomew,’ admonished Langelee, as the physician reached for his cloak. ‘It might bring the University a great deal of money, and it does not look good when our own scholars scoff at its powers.’
‘Hear, hear,’ said William, pouring himself a third cup of wine, despite the fact that there was not much left and neither Kenyngham nor Wynewyk had yet had any. ‘And you telling folk it is a fake does nothing for my status as Keeper of the University Chest, either.’
Bartholomew bit back a retort that told the sanctimonious friar exactly what he could do with his reputation. ‘The Hand is not sacred. It came from Peterkin Starre, who drooled over his food, had the mind of a five-year old and was frightened of the dark.’
‘Great wisdom often springs from the mouths of the simple,’ preached Suttone piously. ‘If we had listened to Peterkin, then perhaps the Death would not have visited us in all its terrible glory.’
‘If we had listened to Peterkin, then we would have been making mud pies in the gutters and singing our favourite lullabies when the plague came,’ said Bartholomew caustically.
‘But people say he was a saint – a prophet – who chose to deliver his message in the voice of a child,’ argued Suttone. ‘That is why his Hand can bring about miracles.’
‘Adjusting the story to fit the facts.’ Bartholomew shook his head in disgust. ‘There is no reasoning with fanatics, is there? They fabricate answers to every question, and when something does not sit well with their beliefs they either ignore it or dismiss it. Such attitudes explain why men commit such shameful acts – like the vicious persecutions of the Albigensians and the Templars.’
‘Those were perfectly justified,’ declared William, who had taken part in some vicious persecutions of his own before his Order had placed him in the University, where they felt he was less likely to do any harm. Sometimes Bartholomew thought they were very wrong.
‘I visited Albi once,’ said Wynewyk conversationally. ‘Albi was where the Albigensian persecutions took place – and where the heretical Cathars were finally eliminated. These days, it is a dirty place that smells of rotting olives, although its wine is very good.’ He looked disparagingly at the brew William was imbibing with such relish.
‘I do not accept the rubbish about the Hand’s sanctity, either,’ said Langelee to Bartholomew. ‘But we must be pragmatic. Do not denounce it publicly and make Michaelhouse an enemy of the town. Dame Pelagia recommends that we keep silent on the matter – at least until she has found a way to rid us of Thorpe and Mortimer without too much bloodshed. After that, the Hand will be quietly forgotten.’
‘I do not like the sound of “without too much bloodshed”,’ said the gentle Kenyngham in alarm. ‘Dame Pelagia does not intend to practise her knife-throwing skills on them, does she?’
‘I doubt it,’ said Michael. ‘If she had, she would have done it by now, and none of us would have been any the wiser. But the situation is delicate: that pair have the King’s Pardon, and even she cannot slip daggers into men who have powerful friends. We do not want the King imposing enormous fines on us because we have murdered people under his protection. Do we?’
‘No,’ chorused the Fellows as one. It was a punishment too horrible to contemplate, and might interfere with the purchase of new books or – worse – the contents of the wine cellars.
‘She needs to devise a solution that will see them safely removed – let us hope permanently – without it appearing that we had a hand in it,’ Michael went on. ‘It may take her a while, but she will not let us down, you can be sure of that.’
‘I never doubted it,’ said Langelee, pouring the remains of the wine into his goblet, then indicating with an apologetic shake of his head that Kenyngham was too late. ‘She is Dame Pelagia, after all.’
‘She put Rougham in his place the other day,’ chortled William. ‘We were all dining at the Franciscan Friary – my Prior likes to entertain – and Rougham advised me to take syrup of figs for a sore head on the grounds that it would cleanse my bowels. I informed him there is only one physician I allow near my bowels, and that is my esteemed colleague from Michaelhouse.’
‘You said that?’ asked Bartholomew, startled by the friar’s loyalty.
‘I did. Rougham then informed me that I would die if I took cures offered by you, and that I should listen to his advice if I wanted to get better. But Dame Pelagia informed him that only fools muddled their heads with their bowels, and suggested he had better work out which was which before he dispensed any more of his remedies.’ He guffawed furiously.
‘Really?’ asked Michael. He shook his head in fond admiration. ‘She has a quick tongue. What did Rougham say?’
‘There was little he could say. We all roared with laughter – jokes about bowels are popular in the friary – and no one heard what he mumbled in his defence. It was most gratifying. I do not like that man, especially since he has taken to slandering Matthew to anyone who will listen.’
‘You must have upset him deeply, Matt,’ said Wynewyk. ‘Have you contradicted him, or offended him in some way? Stolen away one of his wealthy patients?’
‘I do not know why he has taken against me so violently of late.’
‘Then you had better find out,’ advised William. ‘His slanderous attacks are growing increasingly vicious, and you will have no patients left if you do not silence him.’
Bartholomew and Michael left the conclave, Bartholomew silently pondering the problem of Rougham, and walked to the King’s Mill. It was working hard, and its great wheel creaked and thumped in a steady, endless rhythm as the strong current forced it round. The water downstream was frothy and brown, where silt and muck had been churned up. Bartholomew glanced upstream, to where Mortimer’s Mill stood silent and still.
Michael knocked at the door of the King’s Mill, but it was a pointless exercise given the thundering groans from the machinery inside. They entered and weaved around apprentices struggling under grain sacks, some being carried to storage bins for later milling and some for immediate grinding. The air was full of chaff and dust, and it caught in Bartholomew’s throat. Michael began to sneeze.
The noise increased as they made their way closer to the wheel. Rye was being poured into a hopper with a tapering ‘shoe’ that allowed its contents to trickle on to the millstones, where it was ground into flour. Bartholomew had heard that the rod – which connected the shoe to the hopper and rattled to shake the grain on to the stones – was called a ‘damsel’, because it was never silent when the mill was working. It was certainly not silent now, and he resisted the urge to place his hands over his ears.