An Order for Death (8 page)

‘The lateness of the meal would not have anything to do with that misguided group of Carmelites who were lingering outside
your walls, would it?’ asked Walcote with raised eyebrows. ‘Were you preparing to do battle with them?’

‘What Carmelites?’ asked Morden with an air of assumed innocence that was patently false. ‘Were there Carmelites outside our
walls this morning? I did not notice.’

‘It is just as well we moved them on,’ said Michael to Bartholomew, not fooled for an instant by Morden. ‘The last thing we
want is a revenge killing. But let us go to see these students, eating their breakfast in the middle of the day.’

Bartholomew, Michael and Walcote followed Prior Morden down the stairs and across the yard to the largest of the buildings
in the Dominican Friary. The door to the refectory was closed, but even so, Bartholomew could hear that the sounds emanating
from within had nothing to do with the Bible Scholar. Morden gave an irritable frown before throwing open the door and stepping
inside. Bartholomew ducked instinctively as a piece of bread whistled past his ear, although Michael was slower and received
a boiled leek in the chest.

Morden gaped in horror for a few moments, before striding to the nearest table, snatching up a pewter cup and banging it against
the wall. The din gradually faded to silence, and the student-friars, who had been standing to hurl their edible missiles,
quickly took their places on the benches that ran the length of the room. Some had the grace to appear shamefaced as their
Prior ran admonishing eyes over their ranks, but many made no secret of their amusement at having been caught.

‘Where is Kyrkeby?’ Morden demanded. ‘He is supposed to be overseeing your meals today.’

‘He is not here,’ replied one of the student-friars, a smooth-faced, arrogant youth who Bartholomew immediately recognised
as one of the mob that had been near Faricius.

Morden sighed. ‘I can see that, Bulmer. But where is he?’

‘We do not know,’ answered another student. A green smear on the front of his habit and crumbs in his hair indicated that
he had been in the thick of the mischief. ‘Probably working on his lecture. He does little else these days.’

Bulmer walked to the door and then turned, pointing across the courtyard to a room on the far side. The distinctive bristle-head
of Kyrkeby could be seen in the window, bent over a book. ‘Yes, there he is. Working on his lecture, as usual.’

Morden glowered at the assembled students. ‘I would have hoped that you would not require a nursemaid, and that you could
be trusted to behave yourselves in a manner suited to men who have chosen to become friars. But I can see my faith in you
was misplaced.’

‘It certainly was,’ mumbled Michael to Bartholomew, gazing around him in disdain. ‘I have never seen such a deplorable spectacle
among men of the cloth.’

Although a food fight was not something usually associated with friaries, the physician was aware that most of the religious
community in Cambridge comprised young men – some only fifteen or sixteen – who had been sent to acquire
an education of sorts before they were dispatched to parishes all across the country. Young men in large groups, even clerics,
would inevitably display some degree of high spirits, and the scene in the refectory had been exactly that. Still, he thought,
hardening his heart, six of the faces that were turned towards their Prior had been responsible for more than a bit of horseplay
involving a few vegetables.

‘The proctors want to speak to those of you who were present when the Carmelite was killed yesterday,’ announced Morden in
his childish voice. ‘I have been telling them that you are law-abiding men, but now I wonder whether I was wrong.’

‘You are not wrong, Father,’ said Bulmer. ‘I was there, although I swear before God that we did not harm him.’

He met Michael’s eyes steadily, and Bartholomew could not decide whether the young man’s confidence was convincing bluster
or genuine truthfulness.

‘Thank you, Bulmer,’ said Morden. ‘And who was with you?’

Five others stood. Bartholomew recognised them all.

‘What Bulmer says is true,’ said a pink-faced boy with tightly curled fair hair. ‘We admit we went to the Carmelite Friary
after Horneby and Simon Lynne taunted us about the fact that Lincolne had written that proclamation and pinned it on the church
door for all to see, but all the White Friars had fled inside their walls long before we could reach them.’

‘And what about Faricius?’ asked Michael coolly. ‘He had not fled inside.’

Bulmer and his cronies exchanged a nervous glance. ‘We were on our way home, when we saw a Carmelite lying in a doorway, so
we went to see what he was doing. We saw he had blood on the front of his habit.’

‘Because you had stabbed him,’ said Michael flatly.

‘No!’ objected Bulmer. ‘He was already bleeding when we found him. We were edging closer, to see what had happened, when your
colleague arrived and took him away.
I am surprised you say he is dead – I did not know he was so seriously wounded.’

‘Someone had driven a knife into his stomach,’ said Bartholomew. ‘He died from loss of blood about an hour later.’

‘Well, it was nothing to do with us,’ said Bulmer firmly. ‘I admit that the sight of a white habit lying in front of us was
a tempting target, but you drove us off with those horrible birthing forceps before we could even touch him.’

‘If we had known he was badly hurt, we would have summoned help,’ claimed the fair-haired student. ‘But we only saw a White
Friar lying in the doorway with blood on him. For all we knew, the blood might not even have been his.’

‘Do not lie!’ exclaimed Bartholomew in disbelief. ‘The poor man was trying to hold his innards in. It was patently obvious
the blood was his. And you can say what you like, but you were going to finish him off. You said as much when you tried to
prevent me from carrying him away.’

‘Those were words spoken in the heat of the moment,’ said Bulmer defensively. ‘We let you go, did we not? There were six of
us, and had we really meant trouble, then you would not have left with him.’

Bartholomew wondered if that were true. He was not one of Cambridge’s most skilled fighters, birthing forceps or no, and suspected
that the six Dominicans had carried weapons that would have been much more efficient than a heavy lump of metal.

‘It seems you must look elsewhere for your killer, Brother,’ said Morden smugly. ‘You heard these students: Faricius was already
wounded when they found him. Perhaps they did mean to harm him when they saw his white habit, but they still allowed Bartholomew
to carry him away. The Dominicans are not responsible for this crime.’

‘Lord!’ muttered Michael as he looked from the gloating features of the diminutive Prior to the calm gazes of the six student-friars
who were protesting their innocence. ‘What a mess! I do not know whom to believe.’

‘Well, I do not believe any of them,’ said Bartholomew firmly. ‘I know what I saw.’

‘You are right,’ agreed Michael. ‘So we will arrest the whole lot of them and talk about this in the proctors’ cells – that
should make them reconsider their stories and their lies and the threats they made to you.’

‘You should take a horse, Matt,’ said Michael, watching critically as Bartholomew prepared to visit his sister in her husband’s
country manor the following evening.

Bartholomew grabbed his warmest winter cloak and swung it around his shoulders. The pale spring sun that had cheered the town
at dawn had long since slipped behind a bank of dense clouds, and a bitter wind had picked up. Now, as evening fell, it promised
to be a miserable night, with wind and rain in the offing. Bartholomew did not feel like going out, but he had promised his
sister he would be there. He would have gone earlier, but had been obliged to spend most of the afternoon tending the Dominican
Precentor, Kyrkeby, whose frail heart and imminent lecture were making him breathless and feverish. Normally, Kyrkeby was
a compliant and grateful patient, but that day he was agitated and moody, oscillating between angry defiance of the Carmelites
and frightened tearfulness when he talked about the lecture that loomed on his horizon.

‘I am pleased you plan to sleep at Trumpington tonight and not return here,’ Michael continued, when the physician did not
reply. ‘But you should not walk there alone at this time of the day. You would be wise to take someone with you.’

‘Cynric has promised to escort his wife to the vigil in St Mary’s Church tonight,’ said Bartholomew, referring to his faithful
book-bearer. ‘I cannot ask him to come with me.’

‘Ask me, then,’ offered Michael generously. ‘Years of wrestling with recalcitrant undergraduates have honed my fighting skills,
so that I am more than a match for most would-be robbers. I can protect you almost as well as Cynric.’

‘But you have a murder to investigate,’ Bartholomew pointed out. ‘And anyway, I imagine you are also expected to take part
in a vigil tonight. You are a monk after all, and Easter Week is an important time for clerics.’

‘The Benedictines at Ely Hall plan to keep vigil in St Botolph’s Church,’ replied Michael, slightly disapproving. ‘But so
do the Carmelites, and I do not want to spend an entire night yelling at the top of my lungs in a futile attempt to make the
prayers of a few Benedictines heard over four dozen bawling White Friars.’

‘If the Orders confined their rivalries to who can shout the loudest prayers, Cambridge would be a nicer place in which to
live,’ said Bartholomew fervently. ‘Then I would have been treating Faricius for a sore throat, rather than a fatal stab wound.’

‘And I would not be thinking about how to solve the mystery surrounding his death: a man whose Prior swears he did not leave
the friary and whose apparent killers claim he was already stabbed when they found him.’

‘I suppose the Dominicans could be telling the truth,’ said Bartholomew uncertainly. ‘I did not actually
see
them stab him. But they certainly intended mischief when I caught them: they were advancing on him with undisguised menace
as he lay helpless, and I am sure they planned to make a quick end of him.’

Michael agreed. ‘Those student-friars we met yesterday – Horneby, Lynne and Bulmer – are the kind of men who turn small disputes
between the Orders into violence. They are the younger sons of minor noblemen, who have been dispatched to the religious Orders
to make their own fortunes in the world because they cannot expect an inheritance.’

‘Like you?’ asked Bartholomew, aware of Michael’s own noble connections.

Michael regarded him coolly. ‘In a sense, although I would hardly describe my family as minor. They are a powerful
force in Norfolk. But lads like Horneby, Lynne and Bulmer are sent to Cambridge to form alliances with other men destined
for high posts in the Church—’

‘Not to study and receive an education?’ interrupted Bartholomew. ‘This is a University, Brother. It is a place of learning,
not somewhere to develop business connections.’

‘Do not be ridiculous, Matt,’ said Michael dismissively. ‘Many of these friars only stay for a term or two. How much learning
do you imagine they absorb in that time?’

Bartholomew sighed heavily. ‘Not all scholars are ambitious power-mongers, here only to further their careers.’

‘No,’ admitted Michael, after a moment of thought. ‘There are exceptions, and you are one of them. The Benedictines at Ely
Hall are also a sober group of men.’

‘And there are others,’ persisted Bartholomew. ‘In our own College, Master Kenyngham is devoted to his teaching, and even
Father William never misses a lecture.’

‘But things are different in the friaries, Matt. The Orders are legally obliged to send one in ten of their number to Oxford
or Cambridge, and the men who come are not necessarily endowed with a desire to learn. They see their time here as an opportunity
to escape the rigours of living as priests, and to engage in the kind of fighting that most young men love. And that is what
they are – young men – for all their habits and their cowls.’

‘They certainly behaved like undisciplined louts two days ago,’ said Bartholomew, thinking of the six Dominicans clustered
around the injured Faricius, and of their sneering threats when he had driven them off.

Michael seemed to read his thoughts. ‘I mean no disrespect, Matt, but had Bulmer and his cronies genuinely intended to kill
Faricius, you would not have been able to stop them. If Cynric had been there, it would have been a different matter, but
you were alone. And there is another thing that worries me, too.’

‘What?’

‘They all readily identified themselves. Murder is a serious offence: would they have leapt to their feet so willingly if
they really had killed Faricius?’

‘They knew I would identify them anyway,’ said Bartholomew doubtfully. ‘It would have done them no good to deny it.’

‘They did not know that for certain. And if all had denied encountering you, it would have been the word of six friars against
a lone physician, who had half his attention on a patient who was bleeding to death.’

‘Then do you think they are telling the truth: that they saw a wounded enemy and did not know he was so seriously injured?’

Michael shook his head slowly. ‘I do not know. Perhaps one of the six struck the fatal blow, and the others merely saw a wounded
Carmelite. Then, when you came along, they decided that it was not worth a battering from your forceps and they let you both
go.’

‘So, how will you discover which of them was responsible?’ asked Bartholomew. ‘Will you interview them all separately?’

‘Already done,’ replied Michael. ‘Walcote and I had them in the proctors’ cells yesterday and today. They all said the same
thing: they admitted that they were out looking for trouble, but maintained that when they found Faricius he was already bleeding.
You did not actually see them stab him, and so there is insufficient evidence to charge them with his murder. I was forced
to release them.’

‘Then what do you think happened? Do you think one of Faricius’s own Order harmed him?’ asked Bartholomew, thinking about
the peculiar story spun by Lincolne and his students that Faricius could not have left the friary.