The Lost Abbot (42 page)

It was now or never. While everyone’s attention was on the falling treasure, Bartholomew plunged the knife into his captor’s hip. While the fellow screamed in pain, the physician swung a wild punch at Nonton and knocked him cold.

Michael had not been slow to react either, and had dealt Appletre an almighty blow to the chin with the spade. Bartholomew started to run, but the
defensores
were after him in a trice and there were too many to outrun. While three held him down, the one he had wounded hobbled forward, dagger at the ready.

‘Look!’ yelled Michael, brandishing a fistful of treasure at them. ‘Rings, bracelets, brooches! But this is as close as
you
will ever come to it.’

‘What do you mean?’ demanded the injured
defensor
, swivelling around to look at him just as Bartholomew felt the cold touch of steel against his neck.

‘It will be used to rebuild the abbey, and every penny will be needed, because the stables are alight now, too.’

The
defensores
exchanged looks, but the wounded one shook his head. ‘You are wrong. Robert will pay us.’

‘Yes, but this is more than
pay
,’ coaxed Michael. ‘This is an opportunity. Take some and leave. You can live lives of luxury with all the women, wine and—’

He flinched back as two soldiers jumped into the grave with him and began stuffing gold into their tunics. Eager not to miss out, their cronies hastened to join them. The wounded man opened his mouth to order them back, but Bartholomew aimed a kick at the damaged hip that sent him sprawling, his face contorted in agony.

Bartholomew scrambled to his feet and tried to haul Michael out of the grave, but the monk was too heavy. Then Clippesby and Cynric appeared. The Dominican was pale and wild-eyed, and Bartholomew suspected he had been watching for some time, helpless to intervene. Cynric was breathing hard, though, indicating that he had only just arrived.

‘A
defensor
laid hold of me,’ he muttered. ‘It took a while to escape the bastard – and I never reached the hospital.’

‘Help me!’ Bartholomew was tugging with all his might on Michael’s arm.

Cynric and Clippesby obliged, and the monk began to rise. The process dislodged the excavated earth, which began to slide back into the tomb, showering down on soldiers and treasure alike. Appletre lay motionless, but the others cursed, although none thought to abandon the hoard in order to escape the avalanche. When Michael reached the top, his scrabbling feet sent more of it cascading downwards.

‘Leave them!’ shouted Clippesby, when Cynric grabbed a spade and began shovelling for all he was worth, determined to avenge himself on the men who had tried to burn him alive. ‘We must save the people in the hospital.’

Bartholomew glanced at the flames that now danced over the roof, and recalled what it had been like in the granary as it had ignited and smoke had seared his lungs. He started towards the chapel, but Michael caught his arm.

‘Wait! We need a plan. Robert will order you shot if you just race up to—’

‘William is in there,’ Bartholomew shouted, trying to shrug him off.

‘You will be killed before you are halfway to the door,’ gasped Cynric. He was still frantically shovelling soil, drawing furious yells from the
defensores
below.

In an agony of despair, Bartholomew gazed around wildly, looking for anything he might turn to his advantage. His eye lit on the treasure that Appletre had tossed up in his moment of jubilation. Michael had used it to prevent the
defensores
by the grave from killing him, so would the same ploy work on the others? He snatched up the biggest, gaudiest items and ran.

‘We found it!’ he yelled, waving the jewellery in the air as he tore towards the hospital.

Robert whipped around and barked an order to the
defensores
, but the glitter of gold had caught their attention and they did not shoot. Bartholomew shouted louder: his survival and that of William, the monks, the bedesfolk and the servants depended on him being understood.

‘Hurry if you want a share,’ he hollered. ‘Four of your friends have already left, loaded down with as much as they can carry.’

‘They would not dare steal from me,’ said Robert coldly. He turned to his men. ‘Kill him.’

Bartholomew brandished what he had taken. ‘Do you think they would let me take this if they were still here? They knew Robert would not share it. He plans to spend it all on rebuilding his abbey. Why else would he let it burn?’

He felt like screaming when the
defensores
still hesitated. At the end of his tether, he shoved the baubles at the nearest guard. ‘Here. There is plenty more in the grave. Help yourself, because Robert will not—’

‘
Kill
him,’ snarled Robert, exasperated. ‘Can you not see that he is lying?’

But the
defensor
who held the treasure was impressed by its weight and quality, and wanted more. He dropped his bow and began to hurry towards the cemetery. Unwilling to miss out, his cronies followed.

‘No!’ screeched Robert. ‘Come back!’

Bartholomew shoved past him and hauled open the hospital door. Immediately, people spilled out, coughing and gagging.

‘You locked us in!’ gasped William, pointing furiously at Robert. ‘And you must have known the roof was smouldering.’

‘I did not,’ stated Robert. ‘I was just coming to—’

‘Liar!’ shouted Inges. ‘We heard you order the
defensores
not to open the door on any account.’

‘Lay hold of him, ladies,’ ordered Hagar, and her bedeswomen surged forward. ‘We shall see what the Bishop says about abbots who leave their flock to roast.’

Robert went down in a flailing melee of arms and legs, still protesting his innocence.

The lesser obedientiaries, quick to understand what was happening, hastened to organise their bewildered brethren. Some were instructed to secure Nonton and the cemetery, while others were directed to fight the fires. Their calm but firm commands soon restored order, and it was not long before the blazes were either doused or under control.

‘It is over, Matt,’ said Michael, coming to stand next to the physician, who was trying to summon the energy to walk to where Ramseye was dispensing ale to the exhausted but victorious monks, servants and bedesfolk. ‘Nonton was stabbed by a
defensor
during the scrabble for the treasure, Appletre suffocated before he could be pulled out of Oxforde’s grave, and Robert is under Hagar’s watchful eye.’

‘I cannot begin to imagine how we will explain all this to the Bishop,’ said Clippesby. He had several horses and a goat in his wake, along with Henry.

‘I am sure Michael will find a way,’ said Henry. ‘And if not, I shall do it. I am not afraid to tell the truth about these wicked men.’

‘None of this would have happened if you had not buried a felon in your grounds,’ said Michael, rather accusingly.

‘In that case,’ said Henry with a seraphic smile, ‘we had better make sure we do not do it again.’

The journey south was uneventful, and with no robbers to repel, Bartholomew did not fall off his horse once. He breathed a sigh of relief when he saw the familiar jumble of towers and spires on the horizon, and was delighted to ride back through Michaelhouse’s sturdy gates, despite the immediate accusatory clamour from patients and students who thought he had been gone too long.

When he had seen to the more urgent cases, and the sun was setting in a blaze of orange, he went to the conclave, the room adjoining the hall that was the exclusive domain of the Fellows. They were all there: those who had stayed were keen to hear about their colleagues’ adventures, while the travellers were eager to oblige them. Cynric was there, too, serving cakes. Bartholomew took one. It was overcooked, needed salt and tasted vaguely of cabbage, but it was fare he was used to, and there was something comfortingly reassuring about it after the fine tables of Peterborough.

Michael came to slump next to him. ‘I should never have gone,’ he said bitterly. ‘My Junior Proctor not only wrote
and
published Winwick Hall’s charter, he gave its founder permission to start building. The place is half finished already, and will open next term.’

‘Next term?’ asked Bartholomew, startled. ‘That
is
fast.’

‘Yes, considering these things usually take years – decades, even. It has caused a lot of ill feeling: the other Colleges object to this cuckoo in their midst, the hostels resent its brazen affluence, and the town is angry that they were not consulted.’

‘What will you do? Order it demolished?’

‘I wish I could, but the founder is a favourite of the King, so Winwick Hall is here to stay. There have already been riots over it, including one last night in which a student was killed. I shall need you to inspect his body tomorrow, then help me find the culprit.’

‘It is good to be home,’ declared William, just as Bartholomew was wondering whether he might have been wiser to stay away. ‘Heresy and wickedness have flourished in my absence, and I shall have to work hard to suppress them again.’

‘Do not forget the reason you were sent away in the first place,’ warned Michael. ‘So watch what you say – unless you want to be dispatched on another journey.’

William closed his mouth abruptly.

‘Cambridge may have its drawbacks,’ said Clippesby quietly. ‘But I would rather live here than anywhere else. At least no one labours under the misapprehension that I am a saint.’

‘No,’ agreed William sullenly.

‘The College cat could scarcely credit such foolery when I told her about it,’ Clippesby went on. The animal in question was purring in his lap. ‘You see? She is still stunned now.’

‘You are not the only one who was perceived as something he was not,’ said Langelee. ‘So was Spalling. He had fiery ideas, but he did not really believe in them.’

‘He was a villain,’ spat Cynric. He did not usually voice his opinions in the hallowed confines of the conclave, where only Fellows ever spoke, but Spalling’s perfidy still rankled, and he could not help himself. ‘Yet there
will
be a great rebellion one day, when everything he promised will come to pass.’

‘I sincerely hope you are wrong,’ said Langelee fervently. ‘But before we leave the subject of Spalling, I should tell you that I did not know him after all. We got together with dates and places one night, and it turned out that it was another Spalling I met in York. Not him. No wonder he did not look familiar.’

Bartholomew blinked. ‘You mean you imposed yourself on a total stranger?’

Langelee shrugged. ‘I knew him by the time we realised the mistake.’

William laughed. ‘I must remember that one, Master, because it saw you housed and fed most sumptuously.’

‘But not as sumptuously as us,’ said Michael. ‘Those monks knew how to cater to their personal comforts. Of course, those days are over now that most of the obedientiaries are in one kind of trouble or another.’

‘Or dead,’ added William, rather gleefully. He began to list them. ‘Welbyrn the treasurer, drowned in St Leonard’s well; Appletre the precentor, smothered in Oxforde’s tomb; and Nonton the cellarer, knifed during an unseemly spat over gold. And their helpmeets Spalling and Lullington killed into the bargain.’

‘And poor Pyk sacrificed on the altar of their greed,’ said Michael. ‘Not to mention Lady Lullington and Reginald.’

‘But none of them poisoned Matt,’ said Clippesby with a guileless smile. ‘That was William’s doing.’

‘It was not deliberate,’ insisted the Franciscan, flushing red with mortification. ‘I was trying to help.’

‘There is a certain irony in the fact that Oxforde’s treasure was in their own abbey,’ said Langelee, more interested in the hoard than the friar’s protestations of innocence – he had listened to them all the way back from Peterborough, because although Bartholomew was prepared to overlook the matter, Michael was not, and had harped on it constantly. ‘Robert wasted an entire month digging up Aurifabro’s land.’

‘Why did Oxforde hide his hoard in St Thomas’s cemetery in the first place?’ asked William, glad to be discussing something else. ‘If he had been pardoned, it would have been very difficult to retrieve.’

‘The graveyard only became busy after his death,’ explained Michael. ‘Before the so-called miracles at his tomb, it was a quiet, secluded place with few visitors. Indeed, it was unfortunate for him that the Sheriff decided to pay his respects to the dead silversmith on the day he was burying his hoard – an encounter that saw him arrested.’

‘The stuff he was hiding comprised jewellery that was distinctive,’ Bartholomew went on. ‘And thus difficult to sell. His plan was to store it for a few years until memories had faded. At least, that is what Kirwell said when I described some of the pieces to him.’

‘He thought Oxforde’s deception was hilarious,’ said William uncompromisingly. ‘And he laughed so hard that he died.’

‘I think he was laughing at himself,’ said Bartholomew, who had been with the old man when he had cackled himself into his grave. ‘For believing a lie all those years.’

‘Oxforde was evil,’ stated William uncompromisingly. ‘He murdered men, women and children in his quest for riches, and I am glad that Henry has promised to bury his bones in a location that only he knows. There will be no more pilgrims praying at his tomb from now on.’

‘He was punished for his crimes, though,’ added Michael soberly. ‘I cannot imagine what it must have been like to be buried alive.’

They sat quietly for a while, contemplating the wages of sin.

‘I had a letter from Gynewell this morning,’ said Michael eventually. ‘He thinks it would be a pity to taint Peterborough by exposing the actions of a few rotten apples.’

‘You mean he wants the matter covered up?’ asked Bartholomew in distaste.

Michael nodded. ‘And he is right. Peterborough is a
good
place, and its monks are decent men. Why should they suffer for what Robert and a few of his obedientiaries did?’

‘But the Bishop bundled Robert off to Avignon, to answer for his crimes to the Pope,’ said Langelee. ‘How can the matter be kept quiet now?’