The Killer of Pilgrims (34 page)

‘I am not telling you my cure for sore gums,’ hiccuped Meryfeld. ‘My poultice of lettuce and rosemary is— Damn! Now look what
you made me do! It was a secret!’

‘Her condition warrants a more potent remedy than that,’ warned Bartholomew, concerned. ‘It will not heal her, and the delay
in extracting the tooth may cost her life.’

‘He is right,’ said Gyseburne. ‘It should have come out days ago. Personally, I am surprised she is still alive, because I
have seen how quickly these things can poison the blood.’

‘Medicine is too contentious a subject for an occasion like this,’ said Meryfeld sulkily. ‘So let us debate something else
instead. I have been thinking about our lamp, and I have devised a way to refine it. I think we used too much charcoal and
not enough pitch. The reason for this is that pitch burns at a lower temperature than brimstone, and so will be more steady.’

‘Does it?’ asked Bartholomew, intrigued. ‘How do you know that?’

‘He does not know,’ said Gyseburne. ‘He is guessing. But it is worth a try. Shall we do it now?’

‘No!’ exclaimed Bartholomew, thinking they were likely to blow themselves up.

‘Yes,’ countered Meryfeld, struggling to stand. ‘We shall go while the notion is fresh in our heads, and I do not live far
away. Next door, in fact. Which is quite close, I believe.’

‘Excellent!’ slurred Rougham. ‘Then let us grab the pig by the horns, and begin.’

With mounting alarm, Bartholomew saw he would have to go with them, because it would be too dangerous to leave them unsupervised.
He shrugged apologetically at Michael as he left, muttering that protecting three-quarters of Cambridge’s medical fraternity
was just as valuable a way to spend their precious time as demanding answers from uncooperative suspects.

Rougham, Meryfeld and Gyseburne linked arms as they left Celia’s house. They tried to include Bartholomew, but he did not
like the notion of four physicians in a line, weaving their way along a public highway, even if only for a short distance,
and lagged behind. When they reached Meryfeld’s home, no one was able to fit the key in the lock. They dropped it so many
times that it became a joke, and even the sour Rougham was convulsed in paroxysms of laughter.

‘It is not a good idea to play with dangerous materials when you are drunk,’ said Bartholomew, snatching the key and opening
the door himself. ‘You might do yourselves some serious harm.’

‘
I
am not drunk,’ declared Gyseburne indignantly, toppling inside. ‘Really, Bartholomew! What a horrid thing to say! I am as
sober as the Queen of Sheba.’

‘And I am not drunk, either,’ added Meryfeld, making for his pantry and grabbing a selection of bowls and phials. Rougham
helped, making seemingly random choices from the compounds on offer. ‘A tad tipsy, perhaps. But a long way from being drunk.
Now, where is the oil?’

‘You should do this in the garden,’ said Bartholomew, rescuing the oil when Meryfeld whipped it around vigorously, threatening
to slop some in the hearth, where a fire was burning.

‘I will bring a lamp – it is dark outside,’ said Gyseburne, tripping as he took one from a shelf. ‘Lord! You must get your
flagstones levelled, Meryfeld. They are a hazard.’

Bartholomew followed them to the garden, stopping to collect two pails of water
en route
, then selected a spot where they would not be seen by prying eyes from next door. He fetched the wooden table they had used
the last time, and his colleagues began to toss their ingredients down on it. He read the labels with growing alarm.

‘This is not sensible,’ he said, when Rougham contributed a large pot of lye, some wool fat and a bottle of distilled rock
oil. ‘These are volatile substances, and—’

‘Nonsense,’ declared Meryfeld. ‘We are educated men and know exactly what we are doing.’

‘Actually, I have no idea what we are doing,’ said Rougham with an uncharacteristic giggle. He picked up a pot of saltpetre.
‘But intuition tells me a dose of
this
might produce some interesting results.’

‘That is far too big a bowl,’ objected Bartholomew, when he saw the size of the receptacle Gyseburne had brought for mixing.
It was large enough to accommodate a fully grown sheep. ‘I thought we had decided to experiment with smaller—’

‘Do not be tedious,’ said Meryfeld, elbowing him out of the way and emptying something red into the cauldron.
‘If we use piffling amounts, the reactions will be too minute to assess.’

Bartholomew watched uneasily as the others began to add their own favourites to the concoction. They were all speaking much
too loudly, embarking on a lively debate about the efficacy of tying dead pigeons around a patient’s feet to combat fevers.

‘I never use them myself,’ declared Rougham. ‘Pigeons belong in a pie, not wrapped around the soles, in my humble opinion.’
He sounded anything but humble.

‘They may have fleas,’ added Gyseburne with a shudder. ‘And I have enough of my own.’

‘Well, I enjoy great success with pigeons,’ declared Meryfeld. ‘And with surgeons, too. I tie their eyes around a patient’s
neck as a remedy against sore throats.’

‘No wonder surgeons are loath to ply their trade in Cambridge,’ mused Gyseburne gravely.

‘He means sturgeons,’ said Bartholomew, heartily wishing he had stayed at Celia’s house. Gyseburne shot him a blank look.
‘Fish.’

‘I dislike eels,’ said Rougham, off on a tangent of his own. ‘My Gonville Hall colleagues assure me they are more akin to
worms than fish, but I am not so sure. They are all slippery and vile.’

‘Are they?’ asked Gyseburne. ‘I have always found your Gonville colleagues quite pleasant.’

‘Now there is a question,’ said Meryfeld, ladling pitch into the bowl. He missed, and some oozed down the outside. ‘Are eels
fish or worms? We should debate that some time.’

‘We are debating it now,’ Gyseburne pointed out.

‘Stop!’ cried Bartholomew, horrified when he saw the quantity of saltpetre Rougham planned to use. ‘That is far too much,
and it will—’

‘Take as much as you want, Rougham,’ countered
Meryfeld. ‘We are all rich, and can afford expensive ingredients in the name of science. Well,
you
are not wealthy, Bartholomew, but you could be, if you were to dispense with your poor patients.’

‘Yes, but then they would come to us,’ Rougham pointed out. ‘And I do not want them. I like things the way they are, with
him taking the dross and me compiling horoscopes for the affluent.’

‘Well, that is honest,’ said Bartholomew, taken aback by the baldness of the remark. ‘But the poor often have more interesting
ailments. Just last week, one had a sickness that looked like leprosy, but I managed to cure it with a decoction of—’

‘You have a remedy for leprosy?’ asked Meryfeld eagerly. ‘Now we
shall
be rich.’

‘He said it
looked
like leprosy,’ corrected Gyseburne. He staggered, and the rock oil in the bottle he was holding glugged into the bowl. ‘That
means it was actually something else. Perhaps we should name it after him. It will bring him the fame he will never have from
being affluent.’

‘What a dreadful notion,’ said Rougham, shuddering in distaste. ‘Who wants to be remembered for a disease? I would rather
have a stained-glass window in my College chapel. Then people will see my handsome face for centuries to come.’

‘Not if it is smashed by rioting students,’ said Gyseburne. ‘The glass, I mean. What is in this jug, Rougham? I cannot read
the label. Oh, well. In it goes. Stir it around a bit, Meryfeld.’

‘I would not mind this light being named after me,’ said Meryfeld, giving the concoction a prod.

‘The Meryfeld Lamp,’ mused Rougham. Then he shook his head. ‘No – it sounds like a tavern.’

‘The ingredients are mixed now,’ said Gyseburne,
peering into the cauldron. ‘What shall we do next? Shove some in a lantern and see what happens?’

‘Good idea,’ said Meryfeld, making a lunge for the torch.

Bartholomew reached it first. ‘We will take a small amount of your potion, and touch a flame to it. But we are wasting our
time, because even if it works, you did not keep a record of the ingredients you used so we will never be able to replicate
the result.’

‘You are too cautious,’ said Meryfeld disdainfully. ‘And timidity in science is not a virtue. We shall set the lot alight,
and see what happens.’

He snatched the lamp from Bartholomew and tossed it into the bowl.

Bartholomew hurled himself backwards, and managed to pull Gyseburne with him, while Rougham had been bending over to retrieve
a bottle he had dropped. There was muffled boom, and for a moment the dusky garden was lit up as bright as a summer day. Meryfeld
shrieked as flames shot towards him, so Bartholomew scrambled to his feet and dashed a bucket of water over him before he
could ignite, leaving him coughing and spluttering.

‘That was dazzling,’ said Gyseburne, in something of an understatement as he picked himself up. ‘And it was steady, too, but
it did not last very long. Perhaps there was too much pitch.’

‘Are you all right?’ asked Bartholomew, peering at Meryfeld in concern. Flames licked across the table, and their light showed
Meryfeld’s round face to be bright pink, like a bad case of sunburn.

‘The smell!’ exclaimed Rougham, waving a hand in front of his face. ‘It is awful!’

‘Do not inhale it,’ warned Bartholomew. ‘I imagine it is poisonous.’

‘What in God’s name is going on?’ It was Dick Tulyet, who had scrambled over the wall that divided his home from Meryfeld’s.
Dickon was with him, eyes alight at the prospect of mischief. ‘We heard a lot of drunken revelry, followed by a huge bang
and screams.’

‘I told you they were doing something bad,’ said Dickon smugly. ‘I saw them leave Celia’s—’

‘What have you done to that table?’ demanded Tulyet, watching Bartholomew struggle to smother the flames that still danced
across it. Nothing was working. Water hissed and had no effect, his cloak simply ignited, and the flames even burned through
the handfuls of soil he piled over them. ‘What devilry have you invented?’

‘Not devilry,’ said Bartholomew, uncomfortably aware of how it must look. ‘Simple alchemy. I suspect these flames will burn
as long as there is air to feed them. So we must deprive them of it.’

‘But you
have
deprived them of it,’ Tulyet pointed out. ‘You have heaped a great stack of earth on them, and they are still going strong.
I can see the smoke.’

‘They must be drawing it through the wood. They will burn out eventually.’

‘You cannot leave them,’ cried Tulyet, appalled. ‘They might grow hungry for more fuel, and incinerate the whole town.’

‘We can bury the tabletop,’ suggested Bartholomew. ‘That should make it safe.’

‘I will fetch a spade,’ offered Gyseburne, sheepish in the face of Tulyet’s growing horror. ‘The Sheriff is right: there is
something of Satan in these flames.’

While they waited for him to come back, Tulyet poked the bench with a stick. Some of the substance adhered to it, and it burst
into flames. He hurled it from him in revulsion.

‘Dig,’ he ordered, when Gyseburne returned. ‘And let us make an end of this mischief.’

Gyseburne made an enthusiastic but ineffectual assault on the ground and, unwilling to be there all night, Bartholomew took
the shovel from him. It was hard going, because the soil was clayey.

‘I liked the bit where Doctor Bartholomew threw the pail of water in Meryfeld’s face,’ said Dickon gleefully, watching him
work. ‘Can I have a go? He is still pink.’

‘Put that bucket down,’ ordered Tulyet sharply. He turned back to the table. ‘God preserve us! The flames seem to be getting
fiercer!’

‘Because the pitch is heating up, I imagine,’ said Bartholomew, stopping his labours to watch. ‘We must have precipitated
some sort of chain reaction.’

‘I do not care what it is,’ said Tulyet angrily. ‘Just stop it.’

‘This would make an incredible weapon,’ mused Meryfeld, picking up the stick Tulyet had dropped and inspecting it minutely.
‘Imagine if you were in a castle, being attacked. You could drop this on your enemies, and they would never be able to extinguish
it. And, as an added bonus, its fumes are toxic.’

Bartholomew felt sick, appalled that a physician should suggest such a terrible thing.

‘How did you make it again?’ asked Dickon.

‘Actually, I cannot remember,’ said Meryfeld. ‘And that is a pity, because I am sure the King would pay handsomely for such
a device. It would be devastating in battle.’

‘Quite,’ said Rougham, suddenly sober. ‘And we are physicians. We do not invent methods to kill people, so I recommend we
dispense with the pitch next time.’

‘Pitch?’ asked Dickon keenly.

‘Among other ingredients,’ said Rougham coolly. ‘
Many
other ingredients. You cannot possibly hope to replicate what we did here this evening.’

Dickon pulled a face at him, then turned to his father. ‘If I make some, I could take it to school. That would teach my classmates
for not wanting to sit next to me.’

‘It is not a joke, Dickon,’ said Bartholomew quietly. ‘This compound could subject someone to a very slow and painful death.’

‘Better and better,’ grinned Dickon.

‘I still cannot believe you allowed yourself to be involved in such a wild scheme,’ said Tulyet a short while later. He and
Bartholomew were in his house, sitting in the room he used as an office, and he was pouring wine for his guest. ‘I hope to
God your cronies will not remember the formula tomorrow, especially Meryfeld. He strikes me as rather unscrupulous.’

‘They were hurling substances into the pot willy-nilly,’ said Bartholomew. He was exhausted, partly from his colleagues’ irresponsible
antics, partly from the worry of what might unfold the following day, and partly from too many disturbed nights. ‘Even if
one of them does recall what he added himself, he will never know what the others put in.’

‘
You
probably do, though,’ said Tulyet. ‘And it is a dangerous secret.’