[William Falconer 06] - Falconer and the Ritual of Death (3 page)

Humphrey’s favourite passage was advice on how a husband should treat his wife.

‘A man may chastise his wife and beat her for correction, for she is of the household and therefore the lord may chastise his own.’

It had not taken Ann long to realize that showing herself to be cleverer than her husband gave him perfect cause for chastisement. She might have fought him over the matter, but had wits enough to know that there were more ways than one to skin a cat. And though after fifteen years of marriage she was still vexed by having to feign obedience, still she complied, knowing she had found a way to make her life tolerable. No children had been born of the liaison, a situation that tore her heart two ways But their ongoing domestic war had at least settled into an amicable stalemate, even if peace had not been declared.

Then this fragile equilibrium had been unbalanced by William Falconer. She had been at first intrigued by his enquiring mind, then drawn by his physical presence. Of course, Ann Segrim was the dutiful wife, and their liaison was more a meeting of minds than bodies. Though she and William met and conversed on many occasions over the years, little untoward had occurred. Which made it all the more ridiculous when recently they had bickered like an old married couple." Ann had rebuffed him in a way she could not her husband, and that had been that. Or so she thought, until she had seen him today. She was avoiding him, but part of her wished he would seek her out. Lingering in the spice shop had been the compromise she had negotiated with her finer feelings. But Falconer had not come in search of her, and now Margery was becoming impatient, sighing and swinging her arms like a windmill round her body. She was in imminent danger of tipping over precious supplies on the spice stall. So Ann Segrim gave up, and exited the shop. In the street, Falconer was nowhere to be seen.

In Little Jewry Lane, the demolition work was reaching a conclusion for the day. Three frontages had been pulled down, and the fourth, with upper floors of just a timber and wattle construction, would offer little resistance. When the building work began in earnest, as it would soon, there would be much to do. Therefore, Richard Thorpe had just decided to take on the two journeymen who had appeared by chance on site that very day. One of them he knew very well. John Trewoon was a giant of a man, who would never make a mason. His brain was too addled to take on board the mysteries and rituals of the craft. But he was a hard worker whom Thorpe had come across on and off since he himself was an apprentice. And Trewoon had seemed very anxious to work for him again, though it was Thorpe who had finally spotted him lurking opposite the building site as though reluctant to put himself forward. But he had called the man over, and the other one who stood beside him, and added them to the rolls. The second worker was a wiry little man called Pawlyn with whom Trewoon seemed to have struck up a friendship. Thorpe hoped he too was as good a worker. So with both men set on immediately, Thorpe emerged from his lodge to supervise progress. Firstly, he checked that no one was hanging around the lane. His foreman, Wilfrid, saw the anxious look.

‘It’s safe to proceed, Master Thorpe. The kids are gone, and there’s no one to get buried under the falling rubble.’ Thorpe grimaced as if not welcoming the prospect.

‘Maybe we should leave it until tomorrow, Wilfrid.’ The foreman was surprised by Thorpe’s hesitation. Normally the master mason squeezed the last drop of effort out of his workers. With the roof already off, they could strip the house down to the stone ground floor with ease. After that, the rest of the demolition could wait until the morrow. So he made his point.

‘We’ll just take it down to the ground-floor stone walls, master.’

Without waiting for agreement from Thorpe, he gave the nod to start. Two of his workmen brought their hammers to the task with a will, and soon the upper walls were falling.

The remaining framework disappeared for a while under a cloud of powdery dust. From the midst of it came an unearthly wail. Wilfrid sprang forward into the chaos to find out what had gone wrong. If one of their men had been hurt, or worse still killed, it would hold work up interminably. Thorpe stood back, desirous of avoiding the settling dust. As the cloud dispersed, Wilfrid and the two workmen were revealed standing atop the stone wall that formed the lower level of the house.

Thorpe breathed a sigh of relief that no one was injured. Then he shivered as he saw the three men crossing themselves hastily, and invoking the salvation of Heaven. Wilfrid called out to him.

‘God preserve us. It’s a body.’

Four

Falconer might be a master of logic, but he was incapable of working out how to deal with Ann Segrim. When he had seen her near the spicer’s shop, his instinct had been to flee. And he had cravenly followed his instinct. He knew there was a spark between them that glowed hot whenever they met. They had often gone further than the propriety of their respective positions - one a celibate regent master, the other a married woman - would dictate. But their relationship had never been truly consummated. More because of Ann’s sense of rightness than Falconer’s, who was often prepared to risk damnation in his disregard for convention. Witness his collusion with Master Bonham over the dissection of the servant girl. Both men were risking excommunication, and possibly worse, if the truth of their activities came out into the open.

But he also had to admit that his desire for Ann Segrim could not be compared with his passion for scientific curiosity. One only concerned his own risk of perdition, the other that of another soul. And though he fretted over her devotion to a loveless marriage, he respected her feelings. He had resolved to end their fruitless dalliance for good, now that on her side Ann had broken from him.

So it was that he justified his ignominious flight from her presence on the High Street that day. When Ann entered the shop, he strode quickly past, turning down into the dubious charms of Grope Lane, and hurried thence back to his sanctum in Aristotle’s Hall.

Master Mason Richard Thorpe scrambled up the pile of plaster and lath, and mounted the broken street wall of the half-demolished building. He looked Wilfrid in the eye, questioning his revelation.

‘Where?’

The foreman pointed down at his feet, his hand trembling.

His mouth flapped but no words came out. Thorpe looked at where he was indicating. In the rubble infill between the inner and outer stone courses, a skeletal arm clad in a remnant of cloth poked upward. It was as though the body was calling to the Heavens for assistance. Or perhaps more accurately, now the body was stripped down to a skeleton, crying out for Justice. Wilfrid squatted down and slowly sifted the coarse sand and dust away from the bone. He was still hoping that they were mistaken. Maybe it was an animal bone that had been tossed into the infill. As he stroked the sand away, though, he felt a hard surface under his fingers. Slowly, the curves of a ribcage began to emerge. He looked back towards where his lodge sat on the edge of the building site, wondering what to do next. He had a mind to tell his workmen to pull the body out and dispose of it quietly along with all the other rubbish of the demolition. That way his schedule would stay on course, and his payments too. He would have to buy the three men’s silence, of course. But if they truly wanted to be fully-fledged masons themselves, they would have to learn how to keep secrets. It was then he saw the outline of a tall figure standing in the shadow of the buildings opposite. Though the man was a mere few yards away, he could not see his face, but he knew instantly there was another witness to the discovery. The man’s eyes seemed to pierce the gloom in which he stood, and transfix Thorpe. He sighed deeply, and spoke to his foreman.

‘Wilfrid, you had better send a message to the constable.

This man is long dead, but he will want to know we have found a body.’

When he looked across the street again, the shadow had disappeared as if it had never been there. And Thorpe wondered if he could have got away with it after all.

Falconer occupied the largest upper room in Aristotle’s Hall, which was a
domus scholarum
accommodating a dozen or so students who paid him a few pennies a week for their lodgings. However, though large, the room seemed to shrink the further Falconer delved into the natural sciences that obsessed him, and accumulated oddities. A visitor to his solar would first have to squeeze past a precarious stack of books and papers wedged in the recess to the left of the fireplace. Standard Church works such as the
Historia Scholastica
were buried deep and uncared for under the more used and well-thumbed texts that Falconer preferred. Frequent use ensured that works by the Arab mathematician A1-Khowarizmi, medical works and studies of geography such as
De Sphaera Mundi
topped the stacks. To the right of the fireplace under the unglazed window stood an array of jars of various sizes, all of them exuding exotic and sometimes malodorous scents. Proximity to the window did little to alleviate the stench, to which, however, Falconer appeared to be oblivious. Most of his visitors were not so blessed. In the farthest corner stood a narrow cot that was his bed, at the bottom of which was a small chest housing his meagre supply of clothes and personal goods.

The centre of the room was dominated by a great oak table on which was usually piled a bewildering array of objects that gave some indication of the eclectic nature of regent master William Falconer’s mind. There were animal bones, human skulls, small jars of spices, carved wooden figures, bundles of dried herbs, stones that glittered and lumps of rock sheared off to reveal strange shapes inside their depths. All was presided over by the basilisk stare of Balthazar, a white ghost of a barn owl. Some visitors to Falconer’s solar were inclined to think the bird was dead and stuffed. Until they were startled by a stately turn of Balthazar’s head, as his cold eyes followed their progress round the cluttered room. In actual fact, anyone who knew Falconer had good reason to imagine the bird stuffed and somehow animated, for barn owls rarely live longer than eight years. Balthazar had lived with the regent master for twice that length of time, and was a marvel to many. The answer to the miracle was simple. This bird was the third of that name, and like his predecessors, Falconer had hand-reared him from a chick. The conceit of permitting people to think he was the same bird amused him enormously.

Today, a morass of papers covered the table top, half-burying the disconsolate regent master
•
Falconer had begun two years earlier on a task that had gradually proved to be an insurmountable mountain. In his early days in Oxford, twenty years before, study had been dominated by the outpouring of scientific works by Robert Grosseteste. The Bishop of Lincoln had been prevented from calling himself the chancellor of the university, and had modestly called himself
magister scolarum Oxonie
. But for years before Falconer’s arrival his knowledge had been regarded as compendious. Later, Falconer’s old friend Roger Bacon had rivalled him in the spewing out of new ideas.

So much so that he was called an alchemist, and a necromancer, endangering his very existence. William preferred to append the tag to Bacon that one of his admirers had concocted.

Doctor Mirabilis - the Marvellous Doctor.

For Falconer, the problem was to resolve the often conflicting views of his two mentors. Sometimes he felt as if one pillar of the edifice of his understanding was being smashed or undermined by the other. His house would totter until he could square the circle of the conflict. He had set out to summarize his understanding of a myriad issues from optics to astronomy and from philosophy to chemistry. The mountain of papers had built up on his table since then, and he had done little but produce bewilderment. Often his brain ached with the accumulated information, much of the new influx incompatible with what he had previously gathered.

Now he sat surrounded by the evidence of his impossible mission, and could only brood on the image of Ann Segrim’s cornfield of blonde hair sparkling in the afternoon sunlight.

Idly he shifted papers from one pile to the other, uncertain how to proceed, until matters were suddenly taken out of his hands by the hesitant appearance of one of his students at the door to his solar. He always left the door ajar, and emphasized to all his new recruits that he could be disturbed at any time. But in truth, all the students whose welfare he cared for were reluctant to disturb the regent master when they realized he had sat down at his table behind the awesome pile of papers piled thereon. From experience, indeed, they soon saw that it was well-nigh impossible to rouse him from the trance-like state the papers induced. Today, however, Peter Mithian, in his second year of study and a little more confident than most other youths lodging in Aristotle’s Hall, knew he had to try.

And was soon relieved to see that the regent master appeared Unequal to the task before him. For once, Master Falconer looked as though he would welcome a distraction.

‘Master, there is a boy downstairs who says he has an urgent message for you. I would not disturb you at your work normally….’ Falconer beckoned Peter into the room, and he sidled into the only remaining floor space available. ‘However, what he has to say sounds very curious. And knowing that you have an interest...’

‘Spit it out, boy. I am tired, and may well expire before you come to the point otherwise. ‘

Peter Mithian squirmed, and began to profusely apologize for his prolixity. Until he realized he was making matters worse with his jabbering. He came abruptly to the point.

‘Master. A body has been found in Little Jewry Lane.’ Falconer smiled broadly. It was the best news he had had all day.