A Bone of Contention

by Susanna GREGORY

  Instead of turning right to return to the street, they turned left to the kitchens in an unspoken agreement to take some time to think. All was deserted. Bartholomew opened a shutter and surveyed the yard. Against the wall lay a pile of wood — the remains of the shed that had been made to look as though Werbergh had died under it. And it had been Huw and Saul Potter — proven rioters and attackers of Bartholomew in the High Street — who had insisted that they had seen him enter it.

  'Why did you let Cecily go?' asked Bartholomew. 'She might have been able to tell us where Dominica is.'

  'I do not think so,' said Michael. 'It seems to me that while Dominica is central to this grand plan, Cecily is wholly unimportant. I think she knows nothing that she has not already told us, and I am not inclined to want to speak any further to someone who is so twisted with bitterness and hatred; such people see the truth through warped eyes. Anyway, Matt, the woman is not quick-witted like your Tyler daughters — she will probably head straight back for her bottle-dungeon at Chesterton, imagining that we will not guess where she is hiding.'

  He looked around for a place to sit, but every stool and bench that could be carried away had gone. All that remained was a large table littered with broken pots and jars. He settled for elbowing Bartholomew to one side and perching on the window-sill. Bartholomew opened another shutter and followed suit, gazing gloomily at the looted kitchen.

  'You know, we have allowed Lydgate's suspicions to mislead us, Matt,' said Michael, after a moment. 'It is not Norbert we are seeking, but Simon d'Ambrey himself.'

  'And how have you reasoned that out?' asked Bartholomew, startled.

  'I think he did not die in the barn, as Lydgate said, and that he escaped. He has bided his time, and he has returned to Cambridge to wreak revenge on the town that was so quick to believe ill of him after all his charity. It is he who is behind the riots; it is he who has brought about the death of Lydgate and the destruction of Godwinsson Hostel; and it is he who put the ring — Cecily's ring — on the hand of the skeleton that the town believes is his! That explains why the attacks against the University resulted in little destruction, except at David's and Godwinsson. The attacks appear to be aimed at the University, but they will ultimately damage the town far more.'

  'That cannot be right,' said Bartholomew, wearily. 'We have one too many corpses belonging to the d'Ambreys as it is-We have the man who was shot with an arrow on the King's Ditch, the corpse in the burning barn, and the body brought back with the rest of d'Ambrey's household from Dover that I saw displayed in the Market Square years ago. Three corpses for two d'Ambreys — Simon and his brother.'

  'No one ever saw this corpse reputedly burned in the barn,' persisted Michael. 'And regardless of what Lydgate said, I am sure he searched for it in the wreckage. I certainly would have done. And Lydgate's suspicions and unfounded conclusions are not the only ones to have misled us. Yours have, too.'

  'Mine?' asked Bartholomew cautiously.

  'Yes, yours!' said Michael, pursing his lips. 'Tell me again what you saw the day the tithe barn burned all those years ago.'

  Bartholomew sighed. 'I saw Lydgate enter the barn while Norbert and I were swimming nearby. A brief while later, I saw smoke issuing from the barn, and Lydgate came tearing out. We followed him through the trees and saw him watch the barn burn for a few moments before he left to raise the alarm.'

  'But that is not what you told me a few days ago,' said Michael. 'You said you saw someone run from the barn, you followed him, and then you saw Lydgate. What if the person you saw running from the barn was not Lydgate at all? Just because you came upon Lydgate moments later does not mean that he was the man you saw running.

  You have made the same assumption that misled Lydgate, Cecily and Edred over Dominica — you saw what you expected to see and not what was actually there.'

  Bartholomew stared at him. 'But Lydgate's clothes were singed and he had been running hard.'

  'Of course,' said Michael. 'He had just fled a fire. What would you expect? But Lydgate told us he left almost as soon as the lamp was knocked over and the straw caught fire. You saw a man running away after smoke had started seeping from the building. It would have been a couple of minutes at least before the fire had caught hold sufficiently for smoke to start pouring out.

  And by then, Lydgate was well away. The man you saw was Simon d'Ambrey.'

  'But surely Lydgate would have seen him, too,' said Bartholomew, bewildered by the sudden turn in Michael's deductions.

  'Not necessarily, not if he were concentrating on his own escape and was in a state of shock over what he had done. And we know Lydgate has never had good eyesight — he told us that himself in St Andrew's Church.'

  'And Father Andrew, of course, is about the same age as Simon d'Ambrey would be,' said Bartholomew, rubbing his temples tiredly. 'There is our killer.'

  CHAPTER 12

  Michael claimed the stench of burning in the hostel had made him thirsty and, reluctantly, Bartholomew went with him to the secluded garden at the Brazen George. The landlord obligingly told three indignant bakers that they had to leave so that Michael and Bartholomew could talk in private, then brought them a large platter of roast lamb smothered in a greenish, oily gravy. Michael scraped the sauce away with Bartholomew's surgical knife, muttering in disgust when he discovered a piece of cabbage lurking in it.

  'People who eat things that grow in the dirt will die young, Matt,' he pronounced firmly. 'And there is always the danger that there might be a worm or a slug served up with them.'

  'Time is running short. We need to try to sort out some of this mess before it is too late.'

  'Very well,' said Michael, his mouth full. 'We had just deduced that the kindly Father Andrew is none other than the villainous martyr Simon d'Ambrey himself. Sit down and eat something, Matt. You will wear yourself out with all that pacing.'

  Bartholomew sat next to him and toyed with his food, trying to make some sense out of the mass of fact and theories. Michael carefully trimmed the fat from a piece of meat and ate it, pushing the lean part to one side.

  'All right, then. Let me start. Father Andrew is too old to be your Norbert, but Father William has exposed him as a fraud, and there is clearly something untoward about the man: John of Stirling told us that Father Andrew had some kind of hold over the rioters last night, and there were all your suspicions that he was not all he seemed the way he splattered ink when he wrote, the fact that you think you heard him while you were sneaking around: the Chesterton tower-house, and so on. He is clearly up to, no good. Meanwhile, we learn from Lydgate that he once i roasted a martyr in the barn but, conveniently, no body is ever recovered. With one of those leaps of logic of which you are so fond, it is clear that Simon d'Ambrey escaped ' the fire in Trumpington, was never shot at the King's Ditch, and now he has returned to take his revenge on the town that so wronged him.'

  He leaned back against the wall, pleased with what he had reasoned. Bartholomew rubbed a hand through his '' hair as his mind still grappled with the complexities of the evidence they had acquired.

  'Who can blame him?' Michael added, gnawing on a bone. 'You all behaved abominably. I told you days ago that I thought the town had abused him.'

  Bartholomew watched him. 'If all this is true, then d'Ambrey has succeeded in his revenge. The King, whose spy Heppel is probably here because of the growing unrest, will see the town as a hotbed of insurrection and he will clamp down on it hard. He will raise taxes, send more soldiers and shorten trading hours, so that ‹ Cambridge will be unable to compete with other market ' towns. Gradually, her wealth and influence will decline. j Perhaps the University might even flounder, and take away another source of income, resented by the town though it may be. And as Cambridge sinks further into poverty — the poverty that d'Ambrey once fought so hard to reduce — he will have had his vengeance on the town.'

  'Now this is beginning to come together,' said Michael with satisfaction, scrubbing the grease from his face with
the sleeve of his habit. 'Although I cannot yet see where Norbert fits into all this — unless he and d'Ambrey are in it together.'

  'They may be,' said Bartholomew thoughtfully. 'But something else became clear to me when the charming Lydgates were baring their souls. I think I now know what the two acts were that Matilde's client told her about.'

  'From something the Lydgates said?' asked Michael, frowning. 'I cannot see what.'

  'The riots were instigated to mask two acts,' said Bartholomew slowly. 'We thought at first that these acts might be burglaries, such as the one at the house next to Oswald, or perhaps the destruction of the Market Square.

  But now I think these were just coincidental. The two acts were matters much closer to d'Ambrey's heart: the first was his daughter Dominica's supposed death, and the second involved Will finding a suitable hand to use as a relic.'

  'You reasoned this from something the Lydgates said?' asked Michael, unconvinced.

  'Only the first one — Dominica's supposed death,'

  Bartholomew admitted. 'We need to review what we know and it involves Joanna.' Michael raised his eyes heavenwards. 'No, listen to me, Michael! It will make sense if you listen! A short while ago, Joanna, a prostitute from Ely and Agnes Tyler's niece, came to Cambridge.

  Mistress Tyler was not happy with her guest, because Joanna started some unofficial business from her home, putting her good name at risk — we had that from Jonas the Poisoner's wife and from the old river men. Obviously, Mistress Tyler would not want Joanna's clients calling at her house with three daughters to protect. Meanwhile, Dominica wanted to escape from the Lydgates, and what better way than to pretend she was dead? And Joanna had long, fair hair, like Dominica.'

  'Now, just a moment,' said Michael, sufficiently startled to pause in his repast. 'Are you saying that Mistress Tyler plotted to have Joanna's body mistaken for Dominica's?'

  'Yes,' said Bartholomew earnestly. 'Either she plotted with Dominica herself, or with d'Ambrey, who might well want his daughter back from the man who almost killed him in the tithe barn fire.'

  'Why?' demanded Michael. 'Why should a perfectly law-abiding, honest woman like Mistress Tyler plot with a fallen martyr and his murderous daughter to have her niece killed and her body given the identity of another?'

  'I have no idea what her motive might be,' said Bartholomew.

  'But we know that the Tyler family are involved in something sufficiently sinister to force Eleanor to try to stop me from asking too many questions — and I am sure that something involves Joanna. Eleanor has virtually ordered me to stop investigating Joanna's death twice once in the High Street and once at the Feast — and even the apothecary's wife suspects their sudden flight had something to do with Joanna.'

  'All right,' said Michael grudgingly. 'We will ignore the motive for now — for your convenience — and concentrate on what we know. Continue.' He picked up Bartholomew's knife and began to prod the bones to see if there was any more meat to be salvaged.

  'This plan would allow Dominica to be free of the Lydgates and her life at Godwinsson. She could help d'Ambrey in the last stages of his revenge against the town, along with his other faithful friends — Master Bigod, Saul Potter, Huw, Ivo, and so on, the ones whose names were recorded in the hidden documents in the Galen.

  And afterwards, she could go wherever d'Ambrey might take her.'

  'I see,' said Michael. 'So, the plan was to kill Joanna and leave her for Lydgate to find. You told me that her face was battered, which would make her difficult to recognise. Dominica knew her father's eyesight was failing and he would be easy to fool. He was not a man given to reason anyway, particularly when enraged. He would storm off into the night searching for Dominica, see a blur of golden hair and assume his daughter was dead.' He shook his head. 'Unpleasant though it may seem, I suppose it is a just revenge on a man who had tried to kill d'Ambrey twenty-five years ago, and deprived him of seeing his daughter grow up.'

  Bartholomew took up the tale. 'Edred must have been in on the deception — he tried to steal the Galen with Norbert's documents in it, so we can assume he was in their pay. Edred was the one who told Lydgate that he had seen Dominica in the streets of Cambridge. Naturally, Lydgate raced out to bring her back, while Edred and Cecily followed. Dominica knew the places Lydgate was most likely to look, so Joanna was killed at one of them by Godwinsson's Frenchmen, who first raped her.'

  'No,' said Michael, stopping him. 'She was killed in Mistress Tyler's house — we saw the bloodstains — and then dumped at a place Lydgate would be likely to look.

  That was why Mistress Tyler would not allow you to try to oust the looters from her house, and why she — a woman who knows how to look after herself and her property chose to abandon her house and spend the night with Jonas and his wife.'

  Bartholomew nodded. It was beginning to make sense.

  'Meanwhile, Cecily took the opportunity to run away from her husband, while Edred, after he had helped her, sneaked back and ransacked her room. Lydgate told us he had stolen a crucifix.'

  'So, we have reasoned out Matilde's "first act",' said Michael. 'Ah, here comes the landlord with a pie. Apple!

  Excellent! Carry on, Matt. What of the second act — this relic business?'

  'The answers to that have been staring us in the face all the time. Think about where the first riot started at Master Burney's tannery. Everyone knows that the Austin Canons own the room underneath, and that they use it as a mortuary, thinking the smell of the tannery will eliminate any dangerous miasmas that might come from the corpses.'

  'Mistress Starre's son!' exclaimed Michael in sudden realisation, his pie forgotten. 'That feeble-minded boy who was a giant and whom you put into the Canons' care when he was implicated in all that business with the saffron trade a while ago. We saw his body in the wreckage of Master Burney's tannery!'

  Bartholomew recalled the tangle of limbs in the rubble after the tannery had collapsed, and remembered that he had even told Michael that Starre was one of the dead.

  'There was too much else to be done with caring for the injured for the Canons to have been concerned with a missing hand, although I am sure d'Ambrey and his accomplices ensured that the body was carefully arranged so that the damage looked accidental.'

  Michael shook his head in grudging admiration. 'These people are clever. They selected Starre's hand so that there would be no question that it belonged to a man because he was so big.'

  'And, of course, there were signs that the hand had been boiled and there was a pin to hold two of the bones together. The hand had not simply been discovered in the King's Ditch — it had been carefully prepared. On top of all this, there was the ring it wore. John of Stirling took the ring Dominica gave to Kenzie at Father Andrew's — d'Ambrey's — request.

  D'Ambrey must have had an imitation made, which John then gave back to Kenzie, later to be stolen by Edred, thrown into the shed, and found by me. The real ring d'Ambrey must have given to Will of Valence Marie, with which to adorn the skeleton's hand. Cecily said the pair of lovers' rings were hers perhaps they were a gift from d'Ambrey if he were her paramour.'

  'And d'Ambrey could not simply use the one Cecily still had because it was too small to fit over the big hand they had prepared — she had the woman's ring, and they needed the man's. Dominica's generosity to James Kenzie brought about his death.'

  'But it could not have done, Michael. Kenzie had the false ring, remember? And he clearly was unable to tell the difference and did not know the rings had been exchanged, or he would not have gone to Werbergh and Edred in his desperation to have it back.'

  Michael sighed. 'Regardless, we had better apprehend this Simon d'Ambrey before he does any more damage.

  But what about Werbergh's murder? How does that fit into this foul web of retaliation?'

  'We will have to work that out as we go,' said Bartholomew, reaching out a hand and hauling Michael to his feet. 'We have wasted enough time already. If we are correct in our deductions,
then d'Ambrey's work is almost done here and he will soon be gone.'

  'Where are we going?'

  'To Valence Marie. That is where this relic purporting to be d'Ambrey's hand is, and that, I am certain, is where d'Ambrey will go sooner or later.'

  They left a message with the sergeant to tell Tulyet of their suspicions — neither Bartholomew nor Michael felt there was much point in entrusting the information to the feeble Guy Heppel. Tulyet, Bartholomew knew, would not stop to question their message; he would hasten to Valence Marie and leave explanations until later. f The sun was high as they hurried along the High f Street, but it was already beginning to cloud over with the I promise of rain. As Michael raised his hand to knock on f the great gate, Bartholomew pushed it away. The memory П of Radbeche's murder at David's was clear in his mind. He* and Michael had been incautious to walk so blithely into David's — Radbeche's killer could easily have been lurking still at the scene of his crime. He wished Cynric were with them, since he would know exactly how to proceed.

  Bartholomew pushed open the door and peered round it. There was no porter at the lodge. He drew a surgical knife from his bag, while Michael found a sturdy piece of wood he could use as a cudgel. Bartholomew pushed the door open a little further, and stepped inside. Like the last time they had visited Valence Marie, it was eerily quiet.

  Bartholomew took a deep breath and began to make his way around the edge of the yard, Michael following.

  The hall door was ajar. Standing well back, Bartholomew pushed it open with the tip of his knife and looked inside. It was deserted. Puzzled, he lowered the knife and walked in. It looked as though it had been the scene of a violent struggle. Cups and plates lay scattered on the floor and two of the long tables that ran down the sides of the hall had been overturned. Several tapestries hung askew, wine had pooled on the polished floor. Michael pushed past him, whistling at the mess.

  Without warning, something heavy fell on Bartholomew from above. With a cry, he dropped to his hands and knees, the knife sent skittering across the stone floor.