A Bone of Contention

by Susanna GREGORY

  'Poor Norbert!' said Bartholomew, coming up silently behind them, making them all jump. 'Still blamed for burning the tithe barn, even though he had nothing to do with it.'

  'So you insisted at the time. But he fled the scene of the crime, and that was tantamount to admitting his guilt,' said Stanmore, recovering his composure quickly.

  'He fled because he knew that no one would believe his innocence,' said Bartholomew. 'And because I let him go.'

  There was a short silence as his words sank in. Michael smothered a grin, and folded his arms to watch what promised to be an entertaining scene.

  'Matt!' exclaimed Edith, shocked. 'What dreadful secrets have you been harbouring all this time?'

  Bartholomew did not reply immediately, frowning slightly as he tried to recall events from years before.

  'I had all but forgotten Norbert's alleged crime.'

  'Alleged?' spluttered Stanmore. 'The boy was as guilty as sin!'

  'That was what everyone was quick to assume,' said Bartholomew. 'No one bothered to ask his side of the story and then make a balanced judgement. That was why I helped him to escape.'

  'But we locked the priest with him in the solar!' said Stanmore, regarding Bartholomew with patent disbelief.

  He turned to Michael, who quickly assumed an air of gravity to hide his amusement. 'Norbert was only a child, and even though he had committed a grave crime, we did not want to frighten him out of his wits. We also thought the priest might wring a confession from him.'

  He swung back to Bartholomew, still uncertain whether to believe his brother-in-law's claim. 'How could you let him out without the priest seeing you?'

  'The priest was drunk,' said Bartholomew, smiling. 'So much so, that the cracked bells of Trumpington Church and their unholy din could not have roused him. I waited until everyone was asleep, took the solar key from the shelf outside, and let Norbert out. After, I relocked the door, and Norbert disappeared into the night to go to his sister, who was a kitchen maid at Dover Castle.'

  'But this is outrageous!' said Stanmore, aghast. 'How could you do such a thing? You abused my trust in you!

  And those bells are not cracked, I can assure you. They just need tuning.'

  Edith suddenly roared with laughter, and some of the outrage went out of her husband. 'All these years and you kept your secret!' she said. She reached up and ruffled her brother's hair as she had done when he was young. 'Whatever possessed you to risk making my husband look foolish in front of his neighbours?'

  Bartholomew looked at Stanmore thoughtfully for a moment before answering. 'I am not the only one who knows Norbert was innocent. I suppose I still should not tell, but it was such a long time ago that it cannot matter any more. It was not Norbert who fired the tithe barn: it was Thomas Lydgate.'

  'Thomas Lydgate? The Principal of Godwinsson Hostel?' said Michael, halfway between merriment and horror.

  Bartholomew nodded, smiling at the monk's reaction.

  'I suspect he did not set the building alight deliberately, but you know how fast dry wood burns. I suppose he had no wish to own up to a crime that might make him a marked man for the rest of his life, and Norbert was an ideal candidate to take the blame, since he was an outsider, and had no one to speak for him.'

  'But how do you know this?' asked Stanmore, still indignant about the wrong that had been perpetrated against him in his own house. 'Why are you so certain that Norbert did not commit the crime and Lydgate did?'

  'Because Norbert and I saw Lydgate enter the barn when we were swimming nearby; we saw smoke billowing from it a few moments later and someone came tearing out. Naturally curious, we crept through the trees to see who it was. We came across Lydgate, complete with singed shirt, breathing heavily after his run, and looking as though he had seen the Devil himself. If you recall, it was Lydgate who raised the alarm, and Lydgate who first blamed Norbert.'

  'But what if Lydgate followed Norbert and killed him to ensure he would never tell what he had seen?' mused Michael, suddenly serious. 'It is perfectly possible that the bones in the Ditch belong to your Norbert. From what you say, he was the right age, and all this appears to have happened about twenty-five years ago.'

  'Impossible!' said Bartholomew. 'I received letters from Norbert in Dover a few weeks later to tell me that he had joined his sister, and he wrote to me several times after that, until I went to study in Paris. He has made a success of his life, which is more than could be said had the Trumpington witch-hunters laid their vindictive hands on him.'

  'And how could you receive letters without my knowledge?' demanded Stanmore imperiously. 'This is nonsense! How could you have paid whoever brought these messages, and how is it that my steward never mentioned mysterious missives from Dover? Not much slips past his eagle eyes!'

  Edith shuffled her feet, and looked uncomfortable.

  'Letters from Dover, you say?' she asked. 'From someone called Celinia?'

  Stanmore rounded on her. 'Edith! Do not tell me you were a party to all this trickery, too!'

  'Not exactly,' said Edith guiltily, looking from her husband to her brother.

  'Not at all,' said Bartholomew firmly. 'Norbert's sister was called Celinia. I imagine she wrote the letters, since Norbert was illiterate, and she signed her own name so that no one would know the letters were from him.

  Celinia is an unusual name, and Norbert knew I would guess that the letters were from him if she signed them.

  Edith simply assumed I had found myself a young lady.

  She did not ask me about it, so I did not tell her.'

  'Extraordinary!' said Michael gleefully. 'All this subterfuge in such a respectable household!'

  'Really!' said Stanmore, still annoyed. 'And in my own house! The villagers were not pleased that Norbert had evaded justice while in my safekeeping, and neither was the Sheriff when he found he had made the journey for nothing. Thank God Norbert was not caught later to reveal your part in his escape, Matt! '

  'Well I never!' drawled Michael facetiously, nudging Bartholomew in the ribs. 'You interfering with the course of justice, and Lydgate an arsonist! Did you confront him with what you had seen?'

  'Are you serious?' queried Bartholomew. 'Since Lydgate was not above allowing a child to take the blame for his crime — for which Norbert might well have been hanged — it would have been extremely foolish for me to have let him know that I had witnessed his guilty act. No, Brother. I have carried Lydgate's secret for twenty-five years and none have known it until now except Norbert.'

  'I still cannot believe you took the law into your own hands in my house in such a way,' said Stanmore, eyeing his brother-in-law dubiously. 'What else have you done that will shock me?'

  Bartholomew laughed. 'Nothing, Oswald. It was the only serious misdemeanour I committed while under your roof… that I can remember.'

  Stanmore regarded Bartholomew with such rank suspicion that the physician laughed again. He was about to tease Stanmore further, when he saw the Junior Proctor, Guy Heppel, hurrying along the street towards them, his weasel-like face creased with concern.

  When Heppel reached them, he was breathless, and there was an unhealthy sheen of sweat on his face.

  He rubbed his hands down the sides of his gown nervously.

  'There is another,' he gasped. 'Another body has been found in the King's Ditch next to Valence Marie!'

  CHAPTER 2

  Bartholomew and Michael hurried towards Valence Marie, while Guy Heppel panted along behind them. Bartholomew glanced round at the Junior Proctor, noting his white face and unsteady steps.

  'Another skeleton?' he asked.

  Heppel shook his head, but was unable to answer, and clutched at his heaving chest pathetically. Bartholomew wondered anew why the Chancellor had chosen such an unhealthy specimen to serve as a proctor, especially since he might be required to control some of the more unruly elements in the University with physical force.

  Bartholomew doubted if Heppel could control a child, let alone som
e of the aggressive, self-confident young scholars who roamed around the town looking for trouble.

  Not only was Heppel's appointment a poor choice for the University and the town, it was a poor choice for Heppel himself. Bartholomew studied him hard.

  Heppel was a small man, with a peculiarly oblong head. His face was dominated by a long, thin nose that always appeared to be on the verge of dripping, and underneath it rested a pair of unnaturally red lips. He had no chin at all, and his upper teeth pointed backwards in his mouth in a way that reminded Bartholomew of a rodent. Bartholomew supposed Heppel's hair was dark, but the Junior Proctor always wore a woollen cap or a hood, even in church, so that his head was never exposed to the elements.

  'Does that physic I gave you help your cough?'

  Bartholomew asked, concerned by Heppel's pallor.

  'This is no time for a medical consultation,' said Michael briskly, pulling on his friend's arm. 'You can do that when no more bodies claim your attention.'

  'I am a physician, not an undertaker,' said Bartholomew, pulling his arm away irritably. 'My first duties are to my patients.'

  'Nonsense, Matt,' said Michael. 'Your first duties are to your University and to me as Senior Proctor. Your second duties are to your patients — one of whom may well be waiting for you to unravel the mystery of his death.'

  Bartholomew stopped dead in his tracks and gazed at Michael. 'I can assure you, Brother, that the University, with all its treachery and plotting, is not more important than my patients. If I thought that were ever the case, I would resign my Fellowship and abandon teaching completely.'

  'No, you would not,' said Michael with total assurance.

  'You like teaching, and you believe you play a vital role in training new physicians to replace those that died during the plague. You will never leave the University — unless you decide to marry, of course. Then you will have no choice. We cannot have married masters in the University. Although, I suspect there is no danger of that: you have been betrothed to Philippa for more than three years now, and you have done virtually nothing about it. Of course, there is always that whore of yours.'

  'What?' asked Bartholomew, bewildered by the sudden turn in the conversation. 'What are you talking about?'

  Michael poked him playfully in the ribs with his elbow.

  'Do not play the innocent with me, Matt! I have seen the way you look at that Matilde, the prostitute. You should watch yourself. If Father William sees you ogling like a moonstruck calf, you will not need to worry about where your loyalties lie, because you will be dismissed from your Fellowship faster than you can lance a boil.'

  'But I have not… he cannot Michael laughed. 'If being tongue-tied is not a sign of your guilt, I do not know what is! Come on, Guy.

  We cannot be standing around all day listening to Dr Bartholomew describe his secret lust for the town's most attractive harlot.'

  Bartholomew grabbed Heppel's sleeve as he made to follow Michael. 'Ignore him,' he ordered, scowling after the monk's retreating back. 'Did you take that physic I gave you?'

  Heppel nodded vehemently, coughing into a strip of linen. 'Every drop. I was going to ask you for more because it was beginning to have an effect. Of course, when the pains in my chest had eased, the ones in my stomach and head started.'

  'In your stomach and head,' echoed Bartholomew thoughtfully, wondering which of the herbs in his medicine had adversely affected his patient.

  'And then there are my legs,' continued Heppel, lifting his gown to reveal a skinny limb swathed in thick black hose. 'They burn and ache and give me no rest.' He rubbed his hands vigorously down the side of his gown in a peculiar nervous habit Bartholomew had noticed before. 'And my ears ached last night. I think Saturn must have been ascendant. And I have an ulcer on my tongue, and my little finger is swollen.'

  'Anything else?' asked Bartholomew dryly, now certain his medicine could not be to blame for Heppel's impressive list of maladies.

  Heppel gave the matter some serious thought. 'No, I think that is all.'

  'Right,' said Bartholomew, thinking that patients like Heppel were exactly the reason why he had no desire to treat the wealthy. The cure, he was sure, would be for Michael to allocate the Junior Proctor extra duties, so that he would not have time to dwell on every twinge in his body and imagine it to be something serious.

  Perhaps exercise and fresh air might help, too, although Bartholomew's attempts to suggest that bizarre remedy to patients in the past had met with a gamut of reactions ranging from patent disbelief to accusations that he was in league with the Devil.

  'As I said, I think Saturn was ascendant last night,' said Heppel helpfully. 'I was born when Jupiter was dominant, you see, and there was a full moon.'

  'Good,' said Bartholomew, unimpressed. 'I shall tell Jonas the Poisoner… I mean the Apothecary, to make you an infusion of angelica mixed with some wine and heartsease. I think when your cough eases, these other symptoms will disappear, too.'

  'But angelica is a herb of the sun,' protested Heppel.

  'I need a herb of the moon to match the time when I was born. And I must have something to counteract the evil effects of Saturn.'

  Like most physicians, Bartholomew did not particularly like patients who claimed a knowledge greater than his own — especially when that knowledge was flawed. He bit back his impatience, recalling his Arab master's insistence on listening to every patient with sympathy and tolerance, regardless of how much nonsense they spoke.

  'Angelica is gathered in the hour of Jupiter,' he said reluctantly, not particularly wanting to engage in what might be a lengthy discussion of herb-lore with Heppel when Michael was waiting. 'You say you were born when Jupiter was dominant, and angelica is very effective against the diseases of Saturn. Heartsease, of course, is a saturnine herb.'

  Considering the conversation over, he made to walk on. Heppel scurried after him, and tugged at his tabard to make him stop.

  'I think I shall require a complete astrological consultation,' said the Junior Proctor. 'Herbs of Saturn and Jupiter will not help my ears.'

  Bartholomew sighed. In his experience, the planet that governed a particular herb made little difference to whether it healed a patient or not, and, over the years, he had gradually abandoned astrological consultations as a tool to determine the causes of a person's malaise.

  It was a decision that made him unpopular with his fellow physicians, and often resulted in accusations of heresy.

  But there was no denying that he lost fewer patients than his colleagues, a remarkable achievement given that most of his clients were less well-nourished and more prone to infections than the wealthier citizens the other physicians doctored.

  'Just take the medicine,' he said to Heppel impatiently.

  'And Saturn most certainly does control diseases of the ears, so the heartsease will work.' He did not add that if, as he believed, Heppel's ears ached only in his imagination, then Saturn could quite happily explode with no ill-effects to the organs under discussion.

  'All right, then,' said Heppel dubiously. 'But I will have my astrological consultation next week if your concoction does not work.'

  Not from me, thought Bartholomew. Complete astrological consultations were time-consuming affairs, and while Bartholomew conducted the occasional one to ensure he still remembered how, he was certainly not prepared to do one at the beginning of term with corpses appearing in the King's Ditch every few hours. Thoughts of the King's Ditch made him look away from Heppel for Michael. The fat monk was puffing towards him.

  'What happened to you?' Michael demanded. 'There I was, regaling you with a list of the prostitute Matilde's physical virtues, when I saw Father William staring at me. Then I saw that you were nowhere to be seen, and I had been strolling up the High Street talking loudly to myself about a whore! Really, Matt! You might have more regard for my vocation. I am a monk, chaste and celibate!'

  'You might have more regard for it yourself,' said Bartholomew, smiling at the image of
Michael being caught in the act of airing some of his less monkish thoughts by the austere Father William. 'You should not be filling your chaste and celibate mind with thoughts of prostitutes — especially on a Sunday.'

  'I was trying to help you,' retorted Michael pompously, eyeing him with his baggy green eyes. He smoothed down the lank brown hair that grew around his perfectly circular tonsure. 'Now, Matthew, if you can spare a few moments away from your unseemly, lustful imaginings, a dead man awaits us at Valence Marie — assuming the poor fellow has not turned into the dust from whence he came in the interim.'

  He turned abruptly, and stalked away, glancing around to ensure that Bartholomew and Heppel followed him.

  The dark grey stone of St Botolph's Church came into view, and Valence Marie stood a few steps away, on the far side of the King's Ditch. They walked quickly along the small path that ran between the College and the Ditch to where Robert Thorpe stood, wringing thin hands.

  This way, gentlemen,' he said, clearly relieved at their eventual arrival. Without further ado, he ushered them over to the patch of scrubby grass near where the small skeleton had been retrieved the day before.

  'More bones?' asked Bartholomew, curious at the man's obvious agitation.

  Thorpe flung him a desperate glance and gestured that he should look over the raised rim of the Ditch and into the water that trickled along the bottom. Puzzled, Bartholomew scrambled up the bank, while Michael followed more warily. Heppel declined to climb, and went to stand in the shade of one of the old oak trees, scrubbing his hands against his tabard. Bartholomew watched him, intrigued. The garment was shiny where the material had been rubbed so often, and Bartholomew wondered whether Heppel might have some itchy skin complaint that caused him to move them so.

  Turning his attention back to the Ditch, he was greeted by the sight of a body floating face down in the shallow water, its arms raised above its head, almost as if it were swimming. Blood from a wound in its head stained the water in a pink halo around it.