A Masterly Murder (25 page)

‘This is a bad business,’ said Michael gloomily. ‘I have all my beadles on the alert for information regarding the deaths
of Patrick, Raysoun and Wymundham, but they have heard nothing. It is unusual, because there is nearly always some rumour
or accusation passed on over a jug of ale that I can act upon, but in these deaths, there is nothing.’

‘You are essentially better, so why do you not leave your room and take control over these investigations?’ suggested Bartholomew.
‘Meadowman will do his best, but he is not you.’

‘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.’

‘Who is Henry de Walton?’ Before she could answer, Bartholomew recalled that Robin of Grantchester had mentioned a Henry de
Walton who had an inappropriate fondness for the Mayor’s wife. Simeon had described him as a sickly soul with a list of ailments.

‘One of the Fellows,’ replied Adela. ‘A snivelling little man who is always complaining about the state of his digestion –
not an attractive subject, you must admit.’

Adela was not the person to be criticising others about their choice of suitable conversational gambits, since her own included
ending unwanted pregnancies in horses and equine breeding habits.

‘Do you know the Bene’t Fellows well?’ asked Bartholomew, intrigued by the contrast between the picture Adela presented and
the one Simeon would have them believe.

‘I most certainly do not,’ said Adela, offended. ‘Scholars are an unsavoury brood, to be avoided at all costs – present company
excepted, of course. Caumpes of Bene’t is nice, but he is a Fenman, and so is better than all these foreigners from Hertfordshire,
Yorkshire and other distant lands. My father and I would never willingly socialise with the Bene’t scholars, although we are
forced to deal with them when we discuss their College’s finances.’

Mayor Horwoode had also been offended by the notion that he hobnobbed with scholars, Bartholomew recalled. He had claimed
that he would never invite one to his house.

‘That pathetic de Walton is not fit to be called a man,’
Adela continued. ‘Raysoun and Wymundham murdered indeed! What arrant nonsense!’

‘Why do you say that?’ asked Bartholomew curiously.

Adela regarded him with a puzzlement that equalled his own. ‘You would
not ask that if you knew the man. All he thinks about is his health, and he sees danger at every turn. Would you believe that
he refuses to mount a horse in case he falls off and bruises himself?’

Bartholomew, who detested riding, did not consider de Walton’s refusal to clamber on to a snorting, prancing animal that was
much bigger than himself to be the final word in cowardice. He thought Adela was being overly harsh.

‘I cannot imagine how de Walton came to the conclusion that his colleagues were murdered,’ Adela went on. ‘The workmen at
Bene’t say that Raysoun fell while he was drunk, while Wymundham is said to have thrown himself from the King’s Ditch – remorse
for having made Raysoun’s last few months on Earth so miserable with his sharp tongue.’

Bartholomew supposed he could tell her what Wymundham had claimed to have heard Raysoun declare with his dying breath, but
his gossiping with her would only serve to fan the flames of rumour and untruth. Anyway, it seemed she had already made up
her own mind about what she thought had happened, and he did not see why he should convince her otherwise. It would do no
one any good, and might even cause harm.

‘I should go,’ she said. ‘If I leave my father for too long, there is always a danger that he will have found me a husband
by the time I return. I expect your sister is the same. I know she would like to see you married.’

Bartholomew smiled. ‘She is determined to see me with a wife,’ he admitted. ‘But then I would have to give up my teaching,
and I do not want to do that yet.’

‘Quite right,’ said Adela. ‘The country needs as many trained physicians as you can give it. Master Lynton is so overwhelmed
by summonses from his human patients these days that he can seldom spare the time to see my horses when I need him. He was
never too busy before the Death.’

‘Lynton physicks your horses?’ asked Bartholomew, startled. ‘But that is what blacksmiths do.’

‘Physicians are better,’ said Adela. ‘They are more careful, and they consult the stars before suggesting a course of treatment.’

Bartholomew laughed in disbelief. ‘So, all these years that Lynton has been berating me for dabbling in surgery, he has been
poaching the blacksmiths’ trade?’

‘Horses are sensitive animals, Matthew,’ protested Adela. ‘Not to mention expensive. I do not want any grubby old tradesman
tampering with them. But, as I just said, Lynton is invariably too busy for me these days.’ She regarded Bartholomew speculatively.
‘I do not suppose you would be interested in helping on occasion, would you? I pay well.’

‘No,’ said Bartholomew firmly. ‘I know nothing about horses.’

‘Pity,’ said Adela with genuine regret. ‘That will reduce your value as a potential husband.’

‘Will it?’ asked Bartholomew, bewildered by the peculiar twists and turns the conversation took with the eccentric Adela Tangmer.
‘No one has mentioned this before.’

‘No woman wants a man who does not look good in his saddle,’ declared Adela with conviction. ‘It would be like having a mate
who does not know how to hunt.’

As a boy, Bartholomew had been given a basic training in such manly skills by his brother-in-law, but suspected that if he
ever needed to catch his own food he would quickly starve. He supposed that to Adela,
he would be about as poor a catch as she could imagine.

Adela grimaced and continued. ‘My father has become quite tedious about the subject of marriage. I do not want a husband chasing
me morning, noon and night to demand his conjugal rights. I have better things to do with my time.’

Adela’s age and appearance made it unlikely that she would be the object of such desperately amorous attentions, although
Bartholomew was too polite to say so.

He shrugged. ‘Your father probably wants an heir for his business.’

‘He does, but I am not some old nag to be bred to suit
his
needs. When I decide to couple with a man, it will be on
my
terms and in my own time. Do not let your sister grind you down over this, Matthew. You and I should draw strength from each
other to fight these match-makers, or you will end up with some empty-headed imbecile and I will be provided with some man
who knows nothing about horses and who has skinny legs into the bargain.’