A Deadly Brew

by Susanna GREGORY

  Tulyet climbed to his feet and took Katherine by the arm. ‘It seems you have some explaining to do, madam. Your husband is not the only one who wants to know what you have been plotting.’

  Katherine met his eyes coolly, but said nothing.

  ‘For God’s sake, Katherine!’ yelled Mortimer in sudden fury. ‘What is happening?’

  ‘Nothing!’ she said to Tulyet. ‘Edward and I have done nothing. The wine is Constantine’s.’

  ‘It is over, Katherine,’ said Tulyet quietly. ‘It is clear Master Mortimer knows nothing about this wine. But it is equally clear that you and Edward do.’

  ‘Not so,’ said Katherine in the same calm voice. ‘Edward is a timid boy, and he has always been frightened of his father. It was from Constantine he fled, not from you as a sign of guilt.’

  ‘Who was the third person?’ demanded Michael. ‘It was you and Edward who went to Gonville to reclaim the poisoned wine from Isaac once you realised it was there. You knocked me over as you came racing out. But who else was with you? Who helped you kill Isaac?’

  ‘We have killed no one,’ said Katherine. ‘I do not know what you are talking about.’

  ‘What are you saying?’ said Mortimer, bewildered as he looked from Michael to Katherine. ‘Of what are you accusing my wife?’

  ‘Of murder,’ said Michael. He pointed a soft white finger at the remaining bottles. ‘Crates of wine from this part of France tend to contain a dozen bottles. So, we can assume that originally there were twelve, but that a little over a month ago six were stolen by an opportunistic thief named Sacks.’

  ‘Sacks?’ queried one of Tulyet’s sergeants, as he lounged against the wall watching the exchange with interest. ‘Has he been busy again?’

  ‘Sacks sold the wine he stole from you in the Brazen George – two bottles to Rob Thorpe and three bottles to Brother Armel. One of Thorpe’s bottles killed Will Harper, the boy we pulled from the well, and the other killed James Grene.’ Michael’s eyes never left Katherine’s face. ‘Harper died more than a month ago, but it was not until last Saturday that Sacks tried to sell the remaining bottles.’

  ‘Sacks has been in the castle prison,’ said Tulyet’s sergeant, eager to join in. ‘We kept him for three weeks for selling stolen goods. It was a petty matter and we did not think to bother you with it, Master Tulyet, knowing how all your time was taken up with hunting down the outlaws. He was released last Saturday – the morning of the installation.’

  ‘I see,’ said Michael. He turned his attention back to Katherine. ‘You must have thought you were off the hook when no tales of violent death were rumoured around the town. Then last Saturday Grene died horribly and publicly at the installation. Edward was there and must have seen it – although you were absent because of your husband’s illness. It was followed by rumours about the death of Armel, and you knew the wine was finally beginning to surface.’

  Katherine shook her head and smiled. ‘I really have no idea what you are talking about. I know nothing of stolen wine. I have already told you we drank the six bottles you see missing from the crate.’

  Michael continued relentlessly. ‘In desperation, knowing that it might be traced back to you via Sacks, you took steps to remove the evidence – you stole four of the bottles from Michaelhouse, first terrifying poor Walter, our porter, out of his wits, and then went to Gonville to see whether Matt had been called to physic another case of poisoning. Cynric saw you – three of you – in the shadows in St Michael’s Lane, waiting to slip unnoticed into Michaelhouse as soon as the coast was clear. After you searched his room and found what you wanted, you went to Gonville, where you had heard the messenger tell Walter that Philius had been struck down with a strange illness. You followed Isaac from Philius’s room when he went to fetch the wine he had used in the purge, and you stunned him with a savage blow to the head in the ensuing struggle. You could not risk leaving him alive to identify you, so you hanged him to make certain he would die.’

  Katherine gave a short laugh of bemusement. ‘How can you think such a thing of me? How could I hang a man from the rafters? I am only a woman, not a great brawny ox, like you.’

  ‘From the rafters, was it?’ pounced Michael. ‘But you have not been listening. I said there were three of you, so you did not murder Isaac alone. When you could not find the bottle – which had been smashed by the College cat and lay in pieces under the work-bench – one of you stayed to look again, while the other two went to see if it was still in Philius’s room. It was while you were looking there that Matt disturbed you, and the three of you fled, knocking me over on the way out. But, fortunately for one of you, Matt had found the broken bottle under the bench, and it was an easy matter to scrape up the pieces before you left.’

  ‘This is all wild nonsense,’ said Katherine in disbelief. She turned to Bartholomew. ‘Has the good Brother been drinking? Is he wholly in his right mind?’

  ‘Wholly, Mistress,’ said Bartholomew coldly. ‘And you also killed Philius in his bed and chopped Egil’s head from his neck.’

  ‘Who is Egil?’ asked Katherine with an expression of profound confusion. ‘And why would I do such a foul thing? I am no warlock!’

  ‘Because he was the smuggler who brought you this wine across the Fens,’ said Bartholomew.

  ‘But this is outrageous!’ protested Katherine, laughing. ‘This Egil’s head was probably stolen by wild animals.’

  ‘So that is what we were meant to believe, was it?’ said Michael.

  Katherine shook her head in exasperation and went to her husband. ‘Constantine! Why do you stand there and allow them to insult me? Call for the Chancellor and tell him to order these University men away, because I will sue them for slander if they continue in this vein. They are trying to provoke a riot by accusing a townsperson of vile crimes!’

  Mortimer looked from her to Bartholomew, bewildered. ‘I do not understand how you arrived at all these conclusions. You have no evidence with which to accuse my wife, only wild guesses.’

  In his heart, Bartholomew knew the baker was right. No court of law would find Katherine guilty on the evidence they had. Bartholomew was certain their reasoning was accurate, but the only clue that Katherine was involved came from her apparent attempt to implicate her bullying husband by claiming the wine was his. It was true that she had prevented Edward from drinking it, and provided him with the opportunity to flee, but it was hardly solid proof. He glanced at Michael, seeing his own frustration mirrored in the fat monk’s face.

  They all turned at the sound of a violent altercation between John Cheney and another of Tulyet’s men, who was attempting to inspect a large barrel.

  ‘I will not broach it,’ the spice-merchant was shouting. ‘That is finest quality sea salt and the rain will spoil the contents. I have shown you all the legal documentation for it and you have no right to press me further!’

  ‘It will take only a moment!’ yelled the soldier in his turn. ‘Your records show it is almost empty anyway. I just want to ensure nothing has been hidden with its legal contents.’

  ‘But water will ruin the salt,’ shouted Cheney, putting his hand palm up to emphasise his point. Rain fell steadily in fine, misty droplets.

  ‘We could move it inside,’ suggested the soldier, more quietly.

  Cheney considered. ‘Very well, then,’ he conceded in a more reasonable tone of voice. ‘As long as you put it back where you found it.’

  The barrel in dispute stood just inside the gates to Cheney’s yard. An idea suddenly formed in Bartholomew’s mind. Katherine and her pugilistic husband forgotten, he walked over to the barrel and tapped on it. It sounded hollow.

  ‘And what do you think you are doing?’ Cheney snapped, angry again. ‘Get off my property!’

  Bartholomew turned to Tulyet and Michael. ‘I wonder if we might … ?’

  He stopped as he saw Katherine clutch her throat and sway dizzily. Next to her, Mortimer watched his wife in disbelief as a smoky bottle slipped from he
r nerveless fingers and smashed on the ground. Tulyet darted forward and caught her as she swooned, but as Bartholomew ran towards them, he could see there was nothing that could be done to save her. Her eyes rolled back in her head and she began to convulse in Tulyet’s arms. Bartholomew called for water to wash the poison from her mouth, but even as he did so, he knew it would do no good. After a few moments, her desperate attempts to breathe eased and she went limp.

  ‘My God!’ breathed Tulyet in horror. He eased the body onto the ground and looked up at Bartholomew. ‘She is dead already. What is this poison?’

  Even a sudden death in one of the town’s busiest thoroughfares did little to slow the frantic activity there. One or two people stopped to look at Katherine Mortimer’s body as it lay in the rain, but most ignored the scene outside the baker’s house, too anxious to ensure their own businesses were in order to risk interfering with someone else’s. Mortimer knelt next to his wife, holding her limp hand in his with an expression of total mystification, as though he imagined she might leap to her feet at any moment and tell him it had been some kind of macabre joke. Tulyet, Michael and Bartholomew stood over him, while the sergeant shouted to one of his men to help carry the body into the house.

  ‘Do you have any idea at all where this foul stuff came from?’ asked Tulyet, poking one of the bottles in the crate on his cart with his dagger. ‘Or how much of it is currently loose in the town?’

  Michael shook his head. ‘I made the erroneous assumption that there were only six bottles in total. Now we find there was a full case of twelve. I have no idea whether this is all of it, or whether another crate is lurking somewhere.’

  Bartholomew looked down at the lifeless form of Mistress Mortimer. ‘I have never seen any poison work as quickly as this before. Neither had Philius.’

  ‘Philius was good with poisons,’ said Tulyet, moving away from the crate with a shudder. ‘He used to help Jonas the Apothecary prepare potions to kill lice and fleas, while his reputation for producing effective concoctions to rid granaries of rats stretched as far afield as Thetford. All the Franciscans in the Friary on Bridge Street are good with herbs and powders.’

  ‘Well, that’s Franciscans for you!’ muttered Michael. ‘While we Benedictines live our lives in serene contemplation and prayer, the Franciscans find themselves one of the best houses in Bridge Street and find new ways to kill things.’

  Something horrible occurred to Bartholomew as he stared down at the lifeless features of Katherine Mortimer. Had he, by encouraging Philius to investigate the nature of the poison that had made him so ill and killed Will Harper, Grene and Armel, inadvertently brought about Philius’s death? He spoke his thoughts aloud.

  ‘Master Colton of Gonville Hall said he went with Philius to visit the Franciscan Friary – where Philius told me he would ask about this poison among his colleagues. It must have been the fact that he was asking questions that aroused the suspicions of Katherine and her associates, and Philius must have been killed before he could come too close to the truth.’

  Michael tapped him smartly on the arm. ‘You could not have prevented Philius’s death, Matt. How were you – or any of us – to know that his asking questions about a kind of poison in his own Friary would make someone want to kill him?’

  ‘We misjudged Colton, too,’ said Bartholomew, facts coming together in his mind. ‘I was certain his determination to suppress knowledge of Philius’s murder was a sign of guilty involvement. Now I see his suspicious behaviour was nothing more than a desire to keep the Sheriff well away from his College and its activities while he was indulging himself in a little smuggling.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Michael, nodding. ‘That explains why he was so nervous, and why he tried to claim his College could not be connected to the poisoned wine and the deaths of Grene and Armel – he did not want me or the Sheriff to start digging too deeply into Gonville’s affairs given that the cellars are probably well stocked with all sorts of contraband.’

  ‘But why would someone kill Philius for asking about the poison?’ asked Tulyet. ‘Its nature is no secret – half the town saw Grene die.’

  ‘It seems a curious substance to me,’ said Bartholomew, kneeling to look more closely at Katherine’s body. ‘It killed Grene, Will Harper, Armel and now Katherine almost instantly, but it only made Philius ill. And it killed the rat, but the cat which I saw drinking it escaped unscathed.’

  ‘You and that wretched cat!’ exclaimed Michael, exasperated. ‘You must have been mistaken about it. The wine has certainly killed Katherine stone dead.’

  Bartholomew continued to inspect the corpse. Her husband still held one of her hands and gaped at her in stunned disbelief, while the sergeant muttered meaningless and trite words of comfort in his ear and attempted to make him stand up. On Katherine’s other hand was a burn where the wine had attacked her skin as she had opened the bottle, like the ones on Isaac and the porter at Valence Marie.

  The sergeant finally succeeded in prising the baker from his wife’s side and led him into the house, leaving two of his men to cover Katherine with a cloak and carry her inside. The soldiers treated the body with an exaggerated care that had nothing to do with respect for the dead and a good deal to do with their respect for the poison. Bartholomew helped them, protecting his own hands with the gloves Katherine herself had given him just a few days before.

  ‘I suppose we can assume he is innocent in all this?’ asked Tulyet, watching Mortimer stumbling through the door to his house with the sergeant behind him.

  ‘He certainly acted as though he were,’ said Michael. ‘His unbearable arrogance and temper must have led his wife and son to plot against him. She was quite happy for him to take the blame for owning the poisoned wine.’

  ‘But Mortimer was right – we had no real evidence against her,’ said Bartholomew. ‘I am sure what we have reasoned is correct, but she must have seen we had no proof.’

  ‘I have known Constantine Mortimer for many years,’ said Tulyet with a sigh. ‘I can see he would have given his wife no peace over this – whether your accusations were unproven or not. He kept her on a short rein, and she was never allowed out unless he or Edward were with her. I am sure she knew her chances of running away from him were remote, and so she must have decided to drink the wine when she realised her future was bleak.’

  ‘You mean just saying what we did induced her to take her own life?’ asked Bartholomew, horrified. ‘I sincerely hope you are wrong.’

  ‘She killed herself because she knew we had her measure, and that it would be only a matter of time before we had the proof of it,’ said Michael firmly. ‘We are not responsible for her death.’

  Bartholomew looked at Cheney’s barrel, his scrutiny of which seemed to have tipped her to drinking the poisoned wine in the first place. Was there proof of her guilt concealed within it? ‘Perhaps she has more of this wine stored there. Or perhaps …’

  His voice trailed away as he regarded the barrel. Gradually, as realisation dawned on him, it went from being a simple container to something sinister, and he was certain that whatever it contained, it was not salt. He walked slowly towards it and borrowed a dagger from one of Tulyet’s men to prise off the lid.

  ‘What are you doing?’ demanded Cheney crossly, trying to snatch the weapon away from him. ‘That is finest sea salt from Hunstanton and it will be no good if it gets wet. Sheriff Tulyet! Stop this man at once!’

  ‘Perhaps you should allow one of my soldiers to do this,’ said Tulyet without conviction, leaning against the wall with his arms folded, making no attempt to prevent Bartholomew from levering at the lid, but watching with interest. ‘Master Cheney does not seem to like it.’

  ‘I most certainly do not!’ shouted Cheney. ‘If water spoils that salt, I shall expect you to pay for it. You have no right to force your way on to my property and take liberties with my barrels.’

  The lid came off with a creaking pop and Bartholomew glanced inside. Immediately, he backed away
coughing. Cheney elbowed him out of the way and looked himself. He gave a gasp of horror, hands flying to his mouth as he saw what was in it, the blood draining from his face.

  Crouched in the barrel was the body of a small man wearing rough, homespun clothes, while on his lap lay Egil’s decapitated head. The stench was overpowering, a sickly, sulphurous reek of decay mingled with salt and rotting wood. Cheney regained the use of his legs and backed away hurriedly, colliding with Michael as he did so.

  ‘It is Sacks,’ said Tulyet, looking down at the thief and wrinkling his nose at the smell. ‘Sacks and someone else’s head.’

  ‘Egil’s head,’ said Michael, after a very cursory glance. ‘Hacked from his shoulders after we left his body for Oswald Stanmore to collect from the Fens. We wondered what had happened to it.’

  ‘And we wondered what had happened to Sacks,’ said Tulyet’s sergeant, emerging from Mortimer’s house and peering over Michael’s shoulder into the barrel. He showed no particular emotion at the grisly sight, not even surprise: he had seen a good deal worse as a soldier during the King’s wars in France. ‘When we realised we had not seen him for a few days, we assumed he had decided to move away from Cambridge after his spell in our prison, to try his skills where he was less well known.’

  ‘His hands have red marks,’ said Bartholomew, pointing to blisters on the thief’s fingers. ‘The Bernard’s students said there was something wrong with his skin. He must have been burned by one of the bottles.’

  He leaned in and poked around, digging into the coarse-grained salt in search of more evidence. After a moment he found it.

  ‘Here are Egil’s hands,’ he said, drawing one out and holding it up. Tulyet slapped his arm down, aware that a curious crowd was beginning to gather, and that their mood was uneasy. While Katherine Mortimer dropping stone dead in Milne Street might not be cause for more than a passing glance, dismembered corpses in spice barrels were another matter entirely. Cheney gave another stifled exclamation of horror and swallowed hard.