A Wicked Deed

by Susanna GREGORY

  ‘Rotates? You mean spins round?’ asked the man with the pig.

  ‘Precisely,’ said Michael. ‘On the one hand, we can consider that the Earth is at the centre of the universe and is immobile; on the other, we can assume that it rotates on a daily basis, which accounts for the rising and setting of the celestial bodies. Father William will argue that the Earth is motionless; Doctor Bartholomew will argue that it is not.’

  ‘He is wrong, then,’ said Dame Eva with conviction. ‘I have never heard such rubbish.’

  ‘Which is wrong, madam?’ asked Michael. ‘That the Earth rotates or that it is motionless?’

  ‘She means that it rotates,’ said Tuddenham. ‘Of course it does not rotate. It is not a maypole!’

  ‘I am quite capable of answering for myself,’ said Dame Eva. She turned a bright, somewhat hostile, eye on Bartholomew. ‘Well, go on, then. Explain yourself. Explain how you have dreamt up such a gross flight of fancy.’

  ‘Not so gross,’ said Eltisley thoughtfully. ‘A rotation of the Earth would explain why we have winter and summer.’

  ‘It would?’ asked Bartholomew uncertainly.

  Eltisley nodded, scratching his chin. ‘The Earth rotates toward the sun in summer, making the weather warm, but rotates away from it in the winter, bringing snow and cold winds.’

  ‘The notion is that the Earth rotates on a daily basis,’ said Bartholomew, ‘not on a yearly one. A daily rotation explains why the sun rises and sets, and why the stars move, but not why the seasons change.’

  ‘Well, what does explain the advent of winter and summer, then?’ demanded Eltisley. ‘I defy you to come up with a better explanation than the one I have suggested.’

  Expectant eyes turned towards Bartholomew.

  ‘And then you can tell us how to control it,’ said the man with the pig, looking around him for the support of his friends. ‘Summer was too late in coming this year. And it would be better if we could miss winter altogether, and just go from autumn to spring each year.’

  There was not a person in the room who was not nodding enthusiastically. Bartholomew glanced at Michael, struggling to keep a straight face.

  ‘It is outside the topic of our discussion today,’ said Michael quickly, before William could start accusing people of heresy because they wanted to take control of the seasons out of the hands of God. ‘Perhaps we could debate that question on another occasion. But Father William, perhaps you would begin, and state the arguments against the rotation of the Earth?’

  William opened his mouth to speak, but Isilia was there before him, shaking her head admonishingly. ‘Of course it does not spin. We would all feel dizzy if it did.’

  ‘And sick,’ added Mother Goodman. ‘And there would be no end to the potions I would need to make for queasy stomachs.’ She shook her scarfed head firmly. ‘No. The Earth does not spin. The Franciscan is right.’

  ‘One point to you,’ said Michael, glancing up at William and trying not to smile. ‘Do you have anything else to add, before you rest your case?’

  ‘Aristotle, Ptolemy and the Bible all state that the Earth lies immobile at the centre of the universe,’ said William drawing himself up to his full height, and looking around at the assembled audience. ‘I cannot see the need to cite any more potent authorities to prove my argument.’

  Michael sighed under his breath. ‘Come on, Father. These people want more than flat assertions. This will be a very short debate, or a very tedious one, unless you make more effort.’

  ‘Aristarchus of Samos said the Earth rotates on its axis,’ said Bartholomew, trying to enter the spirit of the occasion, ‘and it is this daily rotation that makes it seem as though the celestial bodies move, when they are actually still.’

  ‘No one believes him any more,’ said William dismissively. He folded his arms, and exchanged a victorious smile with the man who held the pig.

  ‘But Buridan, in his commentary on Aristotle’s De Caelo, states that the problem with understanding the rotation of the Earth lies in relative motion,’ said Bartholomew. ‘So, if you are at sea in a ship, and you see another ship passing you, it is not possible to determine from observation alone whether it is the other ship moving or your own.’

  ‘Only if you are drunk,’ shouted Hamon, drawing a murmur of agreement and vigorously nodded heads from his friends. ‘I always know whether I am moving or not when I sail down the river to Woodbridge.’

  ‘I said on the sea,’ said Bartholomew, trying to be patient. It was like having a debate with a room full of Deynmans. ‘On a river you would have points of reference to tell you whether you are moving or still. On the sea there is no point of reference, except the other boat – hence you cannot tell whether it is your vessel or the other that is moving.’

  ‘I need none of these “points of reference” to tell me whether I am still or not,’ said Hamon firmly. ‘I just know.’

  A chorus of cheers rose around the room, drowning out Bartholomew’s attempt to explain further what he had meant.

  ‘Two points to William,’ muttered Michael, amused. ‘This is far more entertaining than a debate at the University.’

  Bartholomew sighed, wishing he had never agreed to comply with Tuddenham’s request in the first place. William, in the rare position of winning a debate against Bartholomew, was beginning to enjoy himself. His booming voice cut through the hum of conversation that had erupted.

  ‘Buridan says that if the Earth rotates, and if I threw a stone straight up into the sky, it would not land at the place from where I had thrown it – the Earth would have moved, and it would land somewhere else.’ He looked around at the audience, and spread his hands in an expansive shrug. ‘And we all know that is not the case. A stone thrown directly upwards, lands directly underneath where it was thrown from.’

  ‘Like this?’ asked Eltisley, grabbing a heavy pewter goblet from one of his surly customers and hurling it, contents and all, up at the ceiling. Ale splattered over the audience, and the cup clanged deafeningly against a rafter before clattering down at Michael’s feet.

  ‘It did not come down under the place from which it was thrown,’ said Hamon, regarding it in awe. ‘It came down to one side. Perhaps the Earth does rotate after all.’ There was a rumble of agreement, and some sagely exchanged nods. Hamon looked at Bartholomew for confirmation.

  ‘That was not a straight throw,’ said Bartholomew. ‘It did not come down on Master Eltisley’s head because he hurled it at an angle.’

  ‘You have just scored a point in favour of rotation, Matt,’ said Michael, his green eyes glittering with mischief. ‘Do not dismiss it so lightly. You are unlikely to win another if you persist with all this theoretical nonsense.’

  ‘No, no, no,’ said Tuddenham, shaking his head. ‘The Earth cannot be rotating: if it were, we would feel the wind of it on our faces.’

  ‘But we do,’ said Hamon fervently. ‘There is nearly always a wind at Peche Hall, whispering in the trees and rippling the water on the moat.’

  ‘But the wind does not always comes from the same direction,’ Bartholomew pointed out. ‘If the Earth was moving from west to east, then the wind would always come from the east – and we all know it does not.’

  ‘Perhaps that is because the Earth does not always rotate in the same direction,’ reasoned Hamon. Several of his friends voiced their agreement.

  ‘But it must always rotate in the same direction,’ said Bartholomew, regarding him askance. ‘Otherwise the moon would not always rise after the sun sets.’

  ‘But it does not,’ said Eltisley. ‘We have all seen the moon in the sky while the sun is still up, and sometimes we cannot see whether it has risen at all because of clouds.’

  ‘But it is still there,’ said Bartholomew, startled. ‘Even if we cannot see it.’

  ‘Prove it,’ challenged Eltisley. Several villagers began to shout encouragement, some to Bartholomew, others to Eltisley. ‘You do not know what is above the clouds.’

  ‘O
nly God knows that,’ put in William loudly.

  ‘But this rotation of the Earth would explain the wind,’ said Hamon thoughtfully, once the racket had died down. ‘And when it is very windy, it means the Earth is rotating faster than usual.’

  ‘No, it does not,’ said Bartholomew, feeling as though the points raised were becoming steadily more outrageous. ‘The wind is independent of rotation. As the Earth moves, everything – the earth, the air and all sublunar matter – moves with it in a circular motion, the wind included.’

  ‘Rubbish!’ said Dame Eva in a surprisingly strong voice for a woman of her years. ‘And, despite Eltisley’s experiment, I have tossed things in the air that have returned directly to me, not landed half a league down the road.’

  ‘There are two types of motion associated with an object thrown into the air,’ said Bartholomew, remembering a lecture he had heard by the young scholar Nicole Oresme. ‘The first is an upward motion, and the second is west to east, following the circular motion of the Earth. Therefore, an object thrown into the air that returns to the place where it originated, does not prove or disprove that the Earth rotates.’

  ‘But we can only see one motion,’ argued William. ‘The vertical one.’

  ‘That is because we are part of the Earth’s circular motion, too,’ said Bartholomew.

  ‘We cannot see the circular motion because we are part of it?’ asked Tuddenham, eyeing Bartholomew doubtfully. ‘I cannot imagine where you scholars find the time to concoct all these peculiar ideas.’

  ‘Let us conclude,’ said Michael, sensing the whole affair might become acrimonious if allowed to drag on. He rubbed at a flabby chin. ‘It has been argued that the Earth does not rotate, because we would feel dizzy and we would all be after Mother Goodman for remedies for sick stomachs. It has also been argued that we do not need points of reference to know whether we are moving or not, because we just know.’

  ‘Right.’ Hamon nodded vigorously. ‘That makes sound sense. We just know.’

  ‘On the other hand, Master Eltisley demonstrated that an object thrown in the air does not fall to the Earth at the point from which it originated, thus proving that the Earth is spinning in a west-to-east direction.’

  ‘And it explains the seasons,’ added Eltisley, reluctant to let that one pass.

  ‘And the wind we feel is because the Earth is spinning,’ added Hamon. ‘Any changes in wind direction means that the Earth is spinning a different way.’

  Bartholomew sighed in exasperation.

  ‘Quite,’ said Michael. ‘Argued most intelligently, Sir Hamon.’ Hamon exchanged a smile of pride with his uncle, and Michael continued. ‘And so, weighing up both sides of the argument, as is my duty as presiding master, I can only conclude that the evidence is insufficient on either side to answer the question satisfactorily.’

  There was silence in the room, and a number of mystified looks exchanged.

  ‘Now, just a minute,’ said Tuddenham indignantly. ‘There was plenty of evidence presented here for you to make up your mind. You are just trying to please everyone by calling it a draw.’

  ‘The point of a debate, Sir Thomas,’ said Michael, ‘is not to discover the definitive answer to a question, but to present the evidence, such as it is, and examine it logically, demonstrating the human ability to think and process information.’

  ‘You what?’ demanded the man with the pig. ‘Does the Earth spin or not? That is what we all want to know, not whether you can examine evidence loquaciously.’

  There was a cheer from the audience at his eloquence, and he enjoyed the adulation of the people who stood around him.

  ‘Did I say “loquaciously” instead of “logically”?’ asked Michael of Bartholomew, as the audience clapped and banged their feet on the floor. ‘I may have done, you know. I have seldom been less in control at a disputation than at this one. At least scholars generally keep to the rules.’

  When the racket showed no sign of abating, he stood and raised his hands to quieten the excited villagers. ‘We will decide this democratically, by asking the audience which theory it thinks is correct,’ he yelled.

  ‘No!’ said Hamon, leaping to his feet and looking around at the assembled villagers. ‘We will not decide democratically. We will have a vote!’

  ‘I should have let you be presiding master, after all,’ muttered Michael to William, his words barely audible over the thunder of applause that met Hamon’s suggestion, while Bartholomew sat in Michael’s chair and laughed. ‘This is all quite beyond me.’

  ‘All those who think the Earth rotates, raise one hand,’ bellowed William, the only one with a voice that could be projected over the babble. Immediately, nearly all the hands in the room were waved at him. ‘I said raise one hand!’ thundered William. He made a sound of exasperation as most of them went back down again. ‘I meant one hand each, not one hand between all of you!’

  ‘Come on!’ cried Hamon, prowling around the room and grabbing the arms of those who were not voting. ‘What is wrong with you? All of you have felt the wind on your faces as the Earth moves. Think about that storm we had last autumn – that was the Earth speeding up.’

  ‘Now, all those who believe that the Earth is motionless, raise one hand,’ said William, once he had made a quick count. Bartholomew started to laugh again when he saw an equal number of hands raised, most of them from the people who had already voted the other way. Hamon leapt around the room slapping them down until he was certain his side had the majority, and grinned at Dame Eva triumphantly.

  ‘The Earth does spin,’ he announced. ‘You are wrong in thinking that it does not.’

  She gave him a weary look, and hobbled from the room. Hamon led his supporters in a chorus of loud cheers, which quickly petered out when Tuddenham fixed them with an admonishing glare. As people began to disperse, Tuddenham sought out Michael.

  ‘So, that is how debates are held at the universities,’ he said. ‘Most intriguing, although I am a little surprised at its brutality of reason. I expected something a little more probing and subtle, not all this yelling and hurling of objects up to the ceiling.’

  ‘They vary,’ said Michael vaguely. ‘It really depends on the participants. Come to visit us in Michaelhouse, and I will take you to a real one.’

  ‘Perhaps I will,’ said Tuddenham, a little wistfully. ‘But thank you, Brother. I have not enjoyed an event as much since last year’s muck-spreading competition.’

  ‘I am glad to hear it,’ said Michael.

  Bartholomew awoke the following morning to a dawn that gleamed dully with a silver mist that lay in uneven strips across the fields and along the river. Gradually, as the sun rose above the tree-ridged hill, it bathed the mist in red and then gold, before burning it away altogether. He stood with his arms resting on the windowsill, listening to Eltisley’s cockerel crowing in thee yard below, and watching two of the surly men heave barrels of ale from a cart into the cellar. Eltisley saw him, and waved cheerfully. Absently, Bartholomew waved back, thinking of the colleague whose funeral was that day.

  He walked down the stairs, and found Eltisley laying out bread and ale for breakfast. The innkeeper smiled at Bartholomew and indicated that he should sit, but Bartholomew was not hungry and did not feel much like eating when he was about to bury Unwin. Alcote was already there, pale faced and heavy eyed from a night rendered restless by too many raisins.

  ‘That potion you gave me did not work,’ he complained to Bartholomew. ‘I still feel dreadful.’

  Bartholomew felt Alcote’s forehead. It was cold and clammy, but Alcote was a cold and clammy person, and Bartholomew was not overly concerned. He imagined that the chief cause of Alcote’s continued ill health was because he was anxious about the advowson, and was working too hard to ingratiate himself with Tuddenham.

  ‘We have had more than our share of funerals this month,’ said Eltisley conversationally, as they waited for the others to arrive. The physician did not feel the landlord’s jovial tone
was appropriate for such a discussion, particularly bearing in mind they were about to attend another.

  ‘So I understand,’ he said shortly, wishing Eltisley would go away.

  ‘First there was poor Alice Quy and then there was James Freeman,’ Eltisley continued happily, clattering about with his pewter plates. ‘I had to invent a special box for him, because otherwise all that blood would have damaged the parish coffin, and leaked over the church.’

  ‘Mother Goodman said yours leaked, too,’ said Bartholomew unkindly.

  Eltisley looked crestfallen. ‘Well, I did my best. I was sent inferior wood, and even though I sealed all the joints, the blood simply seeped out. It took me a whole day to make that box – even with some of my customers helping me.’ He nodded at the surly men who were labouring with the barrels in the yard. ‘They are casual labourers, hired by Hamon to help with the crop weeding.’

  ‘What happened to Alice Quy?’ asked Bartholomew. ‘Mother Goodman says you gave her a potion for her childbirth fever. What was in it?’

  ‘Ah,’ said Eltisley, regarding Bartholomew with a hurt expression. ‘You think my potion hastened her end. I can assure you, Doctor, I gave her nothing that would cause her harm. It was a mild mixture of feverfew mixed with honeyed wine. Surely there can be nothing noxious in that?’

  ‘I suppose not,’ said Bartholomew.

  ‘And what was in that one you gave me on Monday night?’ demanded Alcote, holding his stomach for dramatic effect. ‘I am still suffering.’

  ‘I have already told you,’ said Eltisley, offended. ‘It was not my potion that made you ill – Tuddenham’s cook told me that you ate raisins all day, and too many of those are very bad for you. Anyway, my wife and I take a dose of my black potion nightly, and we are both well.’

  Bartholomew could not imagine how.

  ‘James Freeman’s death was a shock to us all so soon after Alice Quy,’ continued Eltisley, shaking his head. ‘Poor Dame Eva found him when she went to collect Wergen Hall’s pork, and I heard her cries of shock. She is a sensible lady, but even she was shaken by what she saw – the butcher’s neck hacked with one of those great knives he used for chopping up animal carcasses. It was her suggestion that I build a special coffin because of all the blood. Next time, I will line the thing with pitch. Pitch is used to render boats watertight, you know.’