A Deadly Brew

by Susanna GREGORY

  Michael scratched his chin. ‘I was forced to remove Dame Pelagia from Denny for her own safety. She knew too much for her own good about these smugglers.’

  ‘That was prudent of you,’ said Harling approvingly. ‘It would be unfortunate for the University if enquiries by one of its Proctors brought about the death of a nun. Do you have her in a safe place? If not, Physwick owns a small house in Trumpington that is seldom used. I can arrange for you to have it for a few days without the knowledge of my colleagues, should you need it.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Michael with a grateful grin. ‘That may become necessary and I appreciate your kindness.’

  ‘However,’ continued Harling, ‘I am concerned about your close association with the Sheriff. If a dispute between canon and secular law arises – with the Chancellor on one side and the Sheriff on the other – your relationship with Tulyet might put you in a difficult position.’

  Michael considered. ‘You are right,’ he said after a moment. ‘Thank you for your concern. Let us hope such a rift will not occur until this smuggling business is solved.’

  Harling nodded. ‘I must not detain you.’ He paused uncertainly but then plunged on. ‘I appreciate what you have sacrificed in order to continue your duties as Senior Proctor, Brother. I would like you to know that I am not the only one to admire your loyalty and good service to the University, the town and the Bishop.’

  Michael smiled, showing his small, yellow teeth. ‘Be assured, Master Harling, that Matt and I will do all in our power to bring this business to an acceptable end – acceptable for the University, and for us.’

  Such declarations of loyalty and gratitude were too much for Bartholomew. Michael, he knew very well, would not hesitate to double-cross Harling if he felt he might gain something from it, while Harling probably had very good reasons for soliciting Michael’s allegiance and support. Perhaps Harling was planning to discredit the Chancellor – who was, by anyone’s standards, taking an inordinately long time enjoying the luxuries of the Bishop’s Palace at Ely – and was going to force another election. Bartholomew was also bothered by Michael’s promise to bring about an ‘acceptable end’ to the poisoned wine affair: it bespoke of corruption and secrecy.

  Smiling politely, he made his farewells to Harling and Michael, and went to see Bulbeck, who was slowly mending. He found the student sitting up in bed and pestering Gray to fetch him something to eat. Bartholomew sent Gray for some watered oatmeal and, satisfied that his patient was on the way to recovery, relinquished him to the rough, but sincere attentions of his friends. Even before he left the room, Bartholomew’s mind began to mull over the symptoms of Bulbeck’s sickness. If Bulbeck had taken only a sip of water from the well, and had become ill so quickly, then the well must be tainted more heavily than he had imagined. He decided to postpone his teaching and to go to inspect it himself, thinking that he might be able to persuade the Mayor to have it boarded over until the river level began to fall again.

  The well stood in Water Lane, a seedy alley of deeply rutted mud that ran between Milne Street and the wharves. Unstable looking houses clustered closely along both sides, and Bartholomew was certain that if one fell they would all collapse, like a group of drunks clinging to each other for support. The ground underfoot was soft with human and animal dung that had been deposited there over many years, and the sharp stench of urine, rotting vegetables and offal made his eyes water.

  The lane opened out into a small square around the well. A group of children played there, thin legs and arms poking from brown rags, as they scampered after a mangy dog with a filthy red ribbon tied around its neck. When Bartholomew crossed the square, they abandoned their game and besieged him, tugging at his tabard with grimy fingers and chanting their demands for pennies in high-pitched monotones. He flung them a handful of coins and approached the well.

  Above ground, it was a simple wooden structure with a stone wall that stood to waist height, and a thatched roof, so that people winching up the water could stand out of the rain; below ground it was a narrow stone tube that dropped into deep darkness. Bartholomew leaned his elbows on the wall and peered down into the blackness. He could see the silvery glint of water at its foot, but jolted his head back sharply as an unpleasant odour drifted up.

  ‘That is disgusting!’ he muttered.

  ‘Talking to yourself?’ came Tulyet’s voice at his elbow. The Sheriff perched on the wall’s rim and grinned at Bartholomew. The children closed in again, and Tulyet tossed a few half-pennies towards them, more to be rid of their clamouring than as an act of charity. ‘I had hopes you were a smuggler hiding his ill-gotten gains when I saw you here,’ he said to the physician.

  ‘This water must be foul indeed to emit such a stench,’ said Bartholomew, his mind on the well and not on the Sheriff’s banter. ‘No wonder people become sick when they drink it.’

  The bucket for drawing water was usually secured on a hook to one side, but the last person to use it had left it down inside the well. Bartholomew began to pull it up, so that he could inspect the water more closely. It was stuck, and Tulyet helped him to heave it free, before sitting down again and relating a tale of how he had found an outlaw camp so recently abandoned that the fire still smouldered. Bartholomew’s mind was half on his task and half on Tulyet’s story.

  ‘God’s teeth!’ exclaimed Bartholomew, so violently that Tulyet jumped and almost toppled into the well himself. The Sheriff recovered his balance and twisted round to see the cause of Bartholomew’s shock, gasping in horror when he saw what had snagged on the metal handle of the bucket.

  ‘Is that what I think it is?’ he asked in a whisper, tearing his gaze from the grisly object to look at Bartholomew.

  Bartholomew met his eyes. ‘It is a human ear,’ he said.

  ‘I think that is all,’ yelled Bartholomew from the depths of the well. His voice echoed eerily around the stone walls, muffled by the scarf he wore wound tightly round his mouth and nose. He glanced up, seeing the sky as a circle of bright white high above, broken by dark shapes as Tulyet and Michael peered down. He coughed, beginning to feel nauseated by the sulphurous stench of foul water and the still air that sat at the bottom of the shaft.

  He poked around for the last time with the pole he held, and then felt the bucket in which he stood precariously begin to rise. His balance went and he all but fell into the fetid water. The bucket stopped moving.

  ‘Are you all right?’ came Tulyet’s voice.

  Bartholomew tried to shout back, but he was becoming overwhelmed from inhaling the rank odour of bad water, and he was not certain that the sound he made had carried to Tulyet above. The bucket began to move again, more quickly this time, swinging to and fro, and bumping him against the sides of the well. He felt his cold hands begin to slip on the rope and forced himself to hold on tighter. He glanced upwards. The circle of white was still a long way off.

  He closed his eyes tightly, and tried to concentrate on remaining upright in the swaying bucket. He should have tied himself in, he thought, wincing as the wooden container slammed against the stone shaft, sending booming echoes all around. The pole slipped from under his arm and clattered down to the black depths beneath him, entering the water with a dull splash. He opened his eyes and saw with relief that he was almost at the top. As his head drew level with the rim of the well wall, he gulped in mouthfuls of fresh air.

  ‘Take my arm,’ said Michael, leaning in.

  Bartholomew released the rope with one hand and reached towards Michael, but his other hand was simply too cold and numb to support his weight on its own. With horror, Bartholomew felt it slide off the rope and the bucket tip sideways to pitch him back down the well. But his fall was jolted to a stop almost before it had begun, and he felt Michael grip his wrist, all but dislocating his shoulder as he hung suspended by one hand. Others reached down to grab him and he was hauled out of the well, to kneel gasping and choking for breath on the ground nearby.

  ‘That was close,’ said
Michael shakily, wiping his forehead with a mucky rag. ‘You almost had me down there with you.’

  Bartholomew tugged the scarf from his face and gratefully accepted a cup of wine someone pushed into his hand.

  ‘Matilde!’ he exclaimed in pleasure. ‘Why are you here?’

  ‘Half the town is here,’ she said, gesturing to where a crowd had gathered. ‘It would look suspicious if I remained at home. It is not every day that a corpse is discovered in one of our wells.’

  Bartholomew coughed again and Matilde thumped him on his back.

  ‘You are getting too old for this kind of thing,’ she teased. ‘You should let your students do it. Rob Deynman offered to go.’

  Bartholomew looked to where his student was warding off those people who would have come to ask Bartholomew questions before he had recovered his breath – including Harling, which was risky, and Edith, which was downright rash – and smiled.

  ‘How is Dame Pelagia?’ he asked softly, even though no one else was near.

  Matilde smiled. ‘In better health than you at the moment, and splendid company. She had told me stories beyond my wildest imaginings.’

  Bartholomew shot her a curious glance and wondered what kind of life Dame Pelagia had led to enable her to tell tales to astonish the worldly-wise Matilde. The uncharitable thought flashed through his mind that they might have been in the same business before Pelagia undertook her monastic vocation. Or was he being unfair?

  Matilde helped Bartholomew to his feet and Edith came rushing towards him.

  ‘What were you thinking of, volunteering to go down there?’ she demanded angrily, hands on hips. ‘It was a dangerous thing to do!’

  ‘Someone had to do it,’ he said, fending her off. ‘And I am less sensitive about this kind of thing than most.’

  Edith sighed and exchanged a look of resignation with Matilde. ‘You do not deserve good women to worry over you,’ she said. She hesitated and looked away towards the river. ‘My words were over-hasty yesterday. I know you meant no offence to Oswald and I am sorry we quarrelled with each other.’

  Bartholomew rubbed his eyes and smiled wanly. ‘I should have thought before I made such an accusation. But Thorpe–’

  Edith raised her finger to stop him from speaking. ‘We will only argue again if we pursue that subject. It is enough that we are friends again.’ She embraced him in a sudden fierce hug. ‘There. Now Master Harling wants you, and the Sheriff is waiting.’

  Bartholomew left her, and went to where Michael and Tulyet stood over the body that he had recovered from the well. Harling bustled up, smoothing down his immaculate tabard where Deynman had dared to lay his hands on it.

  ‘That boy is a menace,’ he said to Bartholomew, glowering at Deynman over his shoulder. ‘I am tempted to pass him through his disputations simply to remove him from the town.’

  ‘I might hold you to that,’ said Michael opportunistically. ‘I have been wondering how Michaelhouse might raise sufficient funds to buy him a degree.’

  Tulyet bent down to lift the cover from the face of the dead man, so that Bartholomew could see it. He was not familiar, but had been in the water for at least a month and his features were all but unrecognisable. Harling glanced down and shuddered, looking away quickly.

  ‘His own mother would not know him,’ said Tulyet, regarding the Vice-Chancellor sympathetically. ‘But his red tunic suggested to me that he might be one of Thomas Deschalers’s lads. I just asked Deschalers if any are missing, and he informed me that one of his apprentices left Cambridge about a month ago, rather abruptly, leaving a note that said he was going to become a monk. Apparently the lad was given to unpredictable behaviour, and Deschalers did not give it another thought. I suspect this is him, and that he found God in a way he did not anticipate. His death cannot be natural.’

  ‘He must be the apprentice Father Philius was called to attend at Oswald’s house,’ said Bartholomew, kneeling next to the body. ‘There are still blisters just visible on his lips and if I look in his mouth–’

  ‘Not here, Matthew,’ said Harling, touching him on the shoulder and glancing nervously at the crowd that watched them.

  ‘Why not?’ muttered Michael. ‘You realise, Master Harling, that you are depriving Matt of a God-sent opportunity to revolt at least thirty people all at once – Edith and Matilde among them.’

  Bartholomew glanced up at the crowd, many looking with horrified eyes at the bloated features of the apprentice. He pulled the cover over the dead man’s face to hide it from sight and stood up, brushing mud from his knees.

  ‘I would say, from the blisters and the time he has been in the water, that he is almost certainly the apprentice Philius saw dead,’ said Bartholomew. ‘What was his name?’

  ‘Will Harper,’ said Tulyet.

  ‘So that solves one mystery,’ said Michael to Bartholomew. ‘Philius was summoned in a belated attempt to help an apprentice who died after drinking poisoned wine. After Philius left, the body must have been bundled down the well to hide it.’

  ‘And the cases of fever started about three weeks ago,’ said Bartholomew. ‘Which would be about sufficient time for the body to begin festering in the water. No wonder people became ill! I was wrong about the river after all.’

  ‘But correct in your theory that the fever was caused by poisoned water from this well,’ said Michael. ‘That a corpse was responsible is not an explanation that springs readily to mind. You cannot be blamed for not guessing that.’

  Bartholomew shook his head, disgusted with himself. ‘I should have checked the well earlier. I even told you about the similar case I had seen in Greece, where the cause was a dead goat in a stream. I should have known.’

  Tulyet’s men loaded the body onto a cart and took it away, leaving an ominous trail of water behind it. Realising there was nothing more to be seen, the crowd began to break up, talking about the incident in hushed voices as they went. Bartholomew looked around for Matilde, but she had already gone, and Edith was busily ushering her husband’s apprentices homewards.

  ‘So,’ said Michael, to distract Bartholomew from looking too obviously for Matilde as they began to walk back to Michaelhouse. ‘We can now be certain that Philius spoke the truth. He claimed to have seen a dead apprentice and here is the body. Philius assumed the lad was Stanmore’s because he had been called to Stanmore’s premises, and thus misled us. And the blisters around this apprentice’s mouth suggest that he met his death in the same way as did Armel.’

  ‘Oswald does not approve of his apprentices drinking,’ said Bartholomew, ‘although they have developed a number of ingenious plans to deceive him. I suspect that this was one such plan that went terribly wrong.’

  ‘Let us recap what we know. One of Oswald’s lads – Thorpe, no doubt – bought the wine in the Brazen George, as seen by Gray and his cronies, but it was Will Harper who drank it. When he became ill, they called Philius – not you, because they knew you would have told Stanmore – but when Philius declared him dead, they decided to hide the body and send Deschalers a note purporting to be from Harper saying he was bound for the cloister.’

  Bartholomew nodded. ‘The whole plan is the kind of ill-conceived venture frightened teenagers might dream up, not anticipating that the corpse would poison the well or that Father Philius might mention the incident to someone else. Poor Isaac probably felt perfectly justified in confiscating the wine from them when he went with Philius to Oswald’s house that night.’

  ‘But he died for it,’ said Michael soberly. ‘And so did Philius. Did these apprentices, emboldened by their success in ridding themselves of Will Harper’s corpse, kill Isaac for stealing their wine?’

  ‘No,’ said Bartholomew, frowning in concentration. ‘The people who killed Isaac also stole the bottles from Michaelhouse and terrified Walter out of his wits. And, anyway, you saw the killers as they knocked you over – you did not mention that they were the size of Oswald’s apprentices.’

  ‘They were not,�
�� said Michael as they stepped through the wicket-gate into Michaelhouse. ‘Two at least were bigger than Thorpe. But I cannot think on an empty stomach. I am off to the kitchen to see if Agatha has left anything edible lying around. Are you coming?’

  Bartholomew walked with him. ‘It is beginning to make sense. At least we know Philius was telling the truth. And Oswald, too,’ he added.

  ‘I suppose so,’ said Michael. ‘But things would be much clearer if your sister would allow us to talk to Thorpe. And I would certainly feel easier if I knew what had happened to Sacks’s last bottle of wine.’

  ‘I would feel easier if Thorpe were under lock and key,’ said Bartholomew vehemently. He paused, his hand on the kitchen door. ‘Do you think Edith and Oswald are safe? What if he tries to give the wine to them?’

  ‘They are protecting him, Matt,’ said Michael. ‘He is unlikely to harm them as long as they offer sanctuary from the unwanted attentions of the big, bad Senior Proctor and his henchmen.’

  He opened the door to the kitchen, and Bartholomew headed gratefully towards the fire that roared in the hearth. The room was cosy and warm, and smelled of baking bread, stale grease and the sharper odour of burning logs. It was familiar, comfortable and went some way to dispelling the memory of being down the narrow stone chimney with the rotting corpse of Deschalers’s apprentice.

  Michael was in the act of stretching fat white fingers towards a plate of freshly baked cakes, that Agatha had rashly left unattended, when Cynric burst in.

  ‘That Rob Thorpe was watching as the body was pulled from the well,’ he said breathlessly. ‘So I followed him after your sister took him and the others home. He was definitely anxious and left Master Stanmore’s house a few moments later.’

  ‘Oh? And where did he go this time?’ asked Michael, spraying the front of his habit with cake crumbs as he spoke. ‘St Mary’s Church for the mystery plays? To St Botolph’s Church to pray?’

  Cynric shot him a mystified look. ‘To the Hall of Valence Marie.’