Bartholomew 06 - A Masterly Murder

by Susanna GREGORY

  ‘Does he?’ asked Jonas, handing Bartholomew the jar.

  ‘I thought the last cask I bought from him tasted weaker than usual. Crafty old dog!’

  ‘She is a dreadful woman,’ said Edith, her eye still fastened to the crack. ‘She came bustling up to me in the Market Square yesterday, when I was in the middle of a conversation with the Prioress of St Radegund’s, and, without any kind of preamble, demanded to know which pardoner sells absolutions for the sin of lust.’

  Bartholomew started to laugh, amused by Adela’s question, the fact that she had chosen Edith as someone who might be able to answer it, and Edith’s indignation that Adela had asked such a thing in the august presence of the Prioress of St Radegund’s Convent.

  Edith regarded him coolly. ‘It is not funny, Matt. It left me completely speechless. She has all the social graces of a carthorse, and she looks like one, too!’

  ‘Well, she has gone now, and we should leave poor Jonas in peace,’ said Stanmore, opening the door and stepping outside. He glanced back and gave a longsuffering sigh. ‘Are you sure you have enough money to pay for that salve, Matt?’

  Bartholomew had emptied the contents of his purse on to one of Jonas’s workbenches, and the apothecary was helping him to count out the mass of small change.

  ‘Penny and a half short,’ said Jonas eventually, looking hopefully at Stanmore.

  ‘I do not carry pennies,’ said Stanmore loftily. ‘I am not a peasant. Here is a shilling. Give Matt back his farthings, Jonas. From what I hear, he needs a regular supply of base coins to pay fines every time he is late for church.’

  ‘Who told you that?’ asked Bartholomew.

  Stanmore tapped his nose and assumed a smug expression. ‘I have a very good network of informants in Cambridge, Matt.’

  ‘Did Runham tell you?’ asked Bartholomew. ‘When did you meet him?’

  ‘He paid me a visit,’ said Stanmore vaguely. He made a moue of disapproval. ‘I do not like that man, and I certainly do not want to be seen having scholars calling on me. What would my neighbours say?’

  ‘I take it that does not apply to me,’ said Bartholomew.

  Stanmore clicked his tongue impatiently. ‘You are different – family. But I do not appreciate scholars like Runham visiting me in broad daylight, when anyone might see him.’

  ‘What did he want?’

  ‘Five marks for his new buildings,’ said Stanmore. ‘But here we are, at Horwoode’s house.’

  Mayor Horwoode answered his door to Stanmore’s knock before Bartholomew could ask why his brother-in-law had parted with his money to a man like Runham. Five marks was a fortune – more than a year’s salary for Bartholomew.

  The Mayor did not look pleased to see Bartholomew. He gazed coolly at the physician’s muddy cloak and patched tabard, and then glanced quickly up and down the street to see whether anyone had observed that a man as important as the Mayor of Cambridge should be visited by such a low fellow.

  ‘Have you resolved that matter of Wymundham’s death?’ he asked frostily, having apparently decided that no one was looking and that he could afford to indulge his curiosity. He did not, however, invite Bartholomew inside his home.

  ‘Not yet,’ said Bartholomew. ‘But Brother Michael’s investigation is continuing.’

  ‘He will discover nothing amiss,’ said Horwoode with great conviction. ‘Whatever you may have thought when you poked at the corpse the other night. I am certain the poor man flung himself to his death in despair after witnessing Raysoun’s fall.’

  ‘I am on my way to look at his body again,’ said Bartholomew.

  ‘Then you might like to know that St Bene’t’s Church lies in the south of the town, and you seem to be walking north. Is Michaelhouse still in its cups, celebrating the election of Runham as Master?’

  ‘It certainly is not,’ said Bartholomew, with more feeling than he intended to show.

  ‘Then I shall not detain you,’ said Horwoode. ‘Go and inspect your corpses. You will find that I am right, and that Wymundham committed suicide.’

  ‘I will bear it in mind,’ said Bartholomew noncommittally, wondering why so many people were determined to have poor Wymundham condemned to a suicide’s grave. Could Horwoode be involved in his murder? Bartholomew could not see how, although the Mayor’s insistence that his findings were wrong had the effect of making Bartholomew more determined than ever to uncover the truth behind the Bene’t man’s death.

  ‘Good,’ said Horwoode flatly. ‘In that case, I will bid you good afternoon.’

  ‘He came with—’ began Edith, indignant that the Mayor should dismiss her brother so rudely.

  ‘There is Matilde,’ said Bartholomew quickly, not wanting Edith to inveigle an invitation from a man who clearly did not want to extend his hospitality to scholars. ‘I must pay my respects.’

  ‘A whore?’ asked Horwoode disapprovingly. ‘Is the University in league with harlots these days?’

  ‘Not on Fridays,’ retorted Bartholomew, recalling Matilde’s friend telling him about her weekly visits to the Mayor’s house. ‘The prostitutes have civic engagements on Friday nights.’

  Leaving Horwoode scarlet with mortification and outrage, Bartholomew bowed to Edith and Stanmore and took his leave.

  Matilde was inspecting some brightly coloured ribbons on a pedlar’s cart, stretching long, elegant fingers to touch each one and assess its quality. Bartholomew remembered Langelee telling him that he should buy her some ribbons, although he could not imagine that the loutish philosopher had any advice about women that was worth following; after all, he had just extricated himself from a disastrous marriage.

  ‘Matthew,’ said Matilde, turning to smile at him as he approached. ‘What are you doing here? Surely Mayor Horwoode would not admit a mere scholar into his home? Or is someone ill?’

  ‘I did not know there was such a strong dislike of scholars among the great and the good of the town,’ said Bartholomew, still bemused.

  ‘Then you must be blind,’ said Matilde bluntly. ‘Important men like the Mayor, the burgesses and the merchants no more want poor scholars in their homes than they do the sisters. To both of us, their doors are only open when they think no one else will see.’

  ‘I am sure it never used to be this bad. Sheriff Tulyet is important, but he is never hostile to me or Michael.’

  ‘Dick Tulyet is a good man, and your role as physician and your family connections make you less objectionable than most. But you are right – relations between town and University are less friendly since Michaelhouse disbanded the choir. It was an ill-considered act on Runham’s part.’

  ‘I know.’

  Matilde smiled at him. ‘But let us not talk about such things. Which of these ribbons do you prefer? The green or the blue?’

  ‘Green,’ he said, barely glancing at them. Even in the dull light of a grey November afternoon, Matilde was lovely. Her hair shone with health, and her skin was clean and unblemished. In her cloak of dark blue wool she looked as respectable and affluent as any of the wealthy merchants.

  ‘Green it is, then,’ she said, holding the ribbon out to the pedlar to fold. She smiled when Bartholomew paid the threepence. ‘Thank you. I seldom carry pennies – they are always so dirty, not to mention heavy. Where are you going now? Home to Michaelhouse?’

  ‘To Bene’t College, to ask the Master if he will allow me to inspect the bodies of those two scholars again.’

  ‘I know Raysoun fell from the scaffolding,’ said Matilde, ‘and the word is that Wymundham flung himself from the bank of the King’s Ditch in sorrow at losing his only friend.’

  ‘That is what Mayor Horwoode thinks, certainly.’

  ‘Mayor Horwoode,’ mused Matilde. ‘You said it was his garden in which the body was found, so I suppose he would want a verdict of suicide.’

  ‘Would he?’ asked Bartholomew. ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, no one wants their home to be the scene of a gruesome crime,’ said Matil
de. ‘And no one wants their home to be open to the interested scrutiny of the Senior Proctor, whose task it is to investigate the murders of scholars. Also, if it were proven that a scholar was killed on his property, Horwoode might have enraged students storming his house, seeking revenge.’

  ‘That is true,’ said Bartholomew. ‘But all this suggests that Horwoode suspected that Wymundham was murdered – or even that he had a hand in it – and that he deliberately set out to make Michael believe the death was not suspicious.’

  ‘It does indeed,’ said Matilde. ‘Although I think you will find that Horwoode is more likely to be guilty of concealing a crime than of committing one. If he had killed Wymundham himself, he would have removed the body from his own property. But what did you think when you examined the corpse that night? Did it look as though Wymundham had killed himself in a fit of grief?’

  ‘No,’ said Bartholomew. ‘I was a little drunk at the time …’

  Matilde laughed. ‘A little? You were reeling like an apprentice with his first wine!’

  ‘… but it looked to me as though he had been suffocated in some way. There was no injury to his head and I do not think his neck was broken, but the blueness of the face and the damaged fingers suggested that he was prevented from breathing.’

  Matilde shuddered, her amusement fading. ‘What nasty business this is, Matt. You should be careful. If Horwoode did try to make Wymundham’s murder appear suicide – perhaps even by calling you in the depths of the night, so that it would be too dark for you to see properly – then he will not take kindly to you investigating it too closely.’

  ‘I know,’ said Bartholomew. ‘And the Mayor is a powerful man in Cambridge. If ever I need to apply for a licence to practise medicine in the town, I would need his good favour.’

  ‘Are you thinking of leaving Michaelhouse, then?’ asked Matilde in astonishment. ‘But you cannot, Matthew! You love your teaching too much! You would be unhappy!’

  Would he? Bartholomew wondered. If he were no longer affiliated with Michaelhouse, then there would be nothing to stop him from pursuing Matilde in any way he pleased. And, he thought, spending long winter evenings in the presence of so lively and intelligent a mind, not to mention a lovely body, was infinitely more appealing than shivering over candle stubs in the rising damp of his Michaelhouse cell.

  ‘What about Ovyng Hostel’s Brother Patrick?’ asked Matilde, changing the subject quickly, as if embarrassed by her outburst. ‘Did you learn anything about him? I told you one of the sisters had denounced him as an inveterate gossip. Did you check that? Was she right?’

  ‘His Principal certainly thought so,’ said Bartholomew. ‘But he also said that Patrick was not privy to the kind of secrets that would warrant someone killing him.’

  ‘It is quite astonishing what some people object to, and the trouble they take to conceal things,’ said Matilde. ‘You should not dismiss Patrick’s gossiping too lightly as a motive for his murder. But I have a present for you. It has been ready for some days now, but you have not visited me, and so I have been unable to give it to you.’

  Bartholomew experienced a resurgence of the guilt he had felt when Edith had accused him of being lax in his brotherly attentions. ‘You should not give—’ he began.

  Matilde brushed his objections aside. ‘Actually, it is not really for you, and it is not really from me. But it is waiting to be collected from the blacksmith’s forge.’

  ‘The blacksmith?’ asked Bartholomew nervously, sincerely hoping it was not a horse.

  Matilde smiled mysteriously and slipped her arm through his. They walked briskly to the smelly, filthy, fiery hole in which the blacksmith and his two soot-blackened assistants laboured in the hiss and roar of flames and the deafening clang of metal against metal. The smith glanced up as Matilde entered, then went to fetch something.

  Rifling through an assortment of weapons, horse shoes, and pieces of armour, he found what he was looking for and presented Matilde with a bundle of greasy black sacking. She declined to sully her hands with it, and indicated that it was for Bartholomew.

  Curiously, the physician peeled away the material to reveal a pair of shiny forceps, equipped with a pair of jaws that opened to the size of a small head. Bewildered, he gazed at them and then at her.

  ‘They are the tool that midwives use for drawing forth babies from their mothers,’ she explained.

  ‘I know what they are,’ said Bartholomew, as he turned them over in his hands. They were beautifully crafted, with wide ends that would allow the pressure to be spread across a wider area of the skull and so lessen the chance of damage to the baby’s brain, and the metal had been polished smooth, so that rough edges would not harm the mother. ‘But why are you giving them to me?’

  ‘Rosa Layne,’ said Matilde in a soft voice. ‘Do you remember her?’

  ‘Yes, of course. She died in childbirth last week. Her family had hired a charlatan midwife, who killed the poor woman. A real midwife, armed with a pair of these forceps, would have saved her.’

  ‘She was a sister,’ said Matilde quietly. ‘A prostitute. In fact, she was the sister who told me that your murdered Brother Patrick was such a gossip.’

  ‘A friend of yours, then,’ said Bartholomew sympathetically. ‘I am sorry, Matilde. I was called too late, and there was nothing I could do to save her.’

  ‘I know that,’ said Matilde. ‘But a group of us were discussing the problem penniless women now face in securing qualified midwives for difficult births. We know you occasionally attend such women, so we decided you should be properly equipped for the task. The gift is to be used to honour the memory of Rosa Layne.’

  Bartholomew did not know what to say. ‘There are good midwives in Cambridge—’

  ‘Two. But they are expensive to hire, and they do not deign to attend whores when they could be hovering at the scented bedsides of merchants’ wives. We need someone who does not condemn us, and who knows what he is doing. We would prefer a woman, of course, but you are the next-best thing.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Bartholomew, supposing it was meant to be a compliment.

  ‘We did quite a bit of investigating before we settled on this design,’ Matilde continued, looking down at the instrument in Bartholomew’s hands. ‘The person who helped us most was Adela Tangmer. She told us all about a pair she had devised for assisting the birth of foals, and so we modelled ours on hers, although smaller, of course.’

  ‘They are perfect,’ he said, performing a few trial grabs with them, and making the blacksmith and his assistants wince. ‘They could well save a woman’s life.’

  ‘Good,’ said Matilde warmly. ‘That is what we hoped. And we are friends again now – I was angry with you but it is impossible to be cross with you for long. But I should go. Poor Yolande de Blaston had just learned that she is to bear her tenth child, and she is all but overwhelmed with the first nine. She is in sore need of a little cheerful company and a lot of practical advice about managing household expenses.’

  ‘You might do better telling her how to avoid unwanted pregnancies in the first place,’ said Bartholomew, before he could stop himself.

  ‘Really, Matthew!’ exclaimed Matilde, and Bartholomew could see that not all her shock at his blunt suggestion was feigned. ‘What a dreadful thing to say to a respectable woman!’

  ‘Sorry,’ muttered Bartholomew, mortified.

  ‘I should think so,’ she said. ‘You should not believe all you hear, you know.’

  And with that enigmatic statement, she was gone, weaving in and out of the late afternoon crowds and clutching a piece of bright green ribbon in her slender fingers.

  When Bartholomew felt he had outstayed his welcome at the forge, brandishing and snapping his new forceps, he carefully wrapped them in some clean cloth and slipped them inside his medicine bag, where they all but doubled its weight. He supposed he should leave them in his storeroom, to be collected whenever he was summoned to a childbirth, but was too pleased to a
bandon them just yet. Somewhat guiltily, he began to make a list in his mind of all the pregnant women he knew, in anticipation of putting his latest acquisition to practical use.

  He realised that he had delayed his visit to St Bene’t’s Church for far too long, and left the forge to set off down the High Street. But he needed the permission of the Master of Bene’t College to examine the bodies: he did not want to be caught tampering with the corpses of another College’s scholars without first obtaining the blessing of their Master. Physicians in Italian universities had a sinister reputation for using dead human bodies to teach anatomy, and Bartholomew did not want to be accused of prospecting for potential subjects.

  When he reached the part of Bene’t College that faced the High Street, he saw that his medical colleague, Master Lynton, must have done as he had threatened and complained to the Sheriff about the unsafe state of the scaffolding. Parts of it had been dismantled, and the incessant clatter that had driven Bartholomew to distraction at Michaelhouse was refreshingly absent.

  Like all the Cambridge Colleges, Bene’t was being built to repel invaders. There was a substantial gatehouse, which comprised a stocky tower with an entrance large enough to allow a cart through it, some chambers on the upper floors, and a dim little hole in which the porters lurked. Since the door was usually kept closed, anyone wanting to enter or leave the College was obliged to pass the porters first.

  Bartholomew tapped on the gate and waited to be admitted. He knew the porters were in their lodge, because he could hear the click of bone against bone as dice were rolled and the muted sniggers of one player as he won a game. He knocked again, a little louder.

  ‘Go away,’ came an irritable voice from within. Bartholomew recognised it as that of Osmun. ‘Bene’t College is closed to visitors.’

  ‘I have come to see Master Heltisle,’ called Bartholomew. ‘I have business with him on behalf of the Senior Proctor.’

  ‘That is too bad,’ came the reply. ‘Shove off.’

  Although Bartholomew knew of the Bene’t College porters’ reputation for rudeness, he had never experienced it first hand. He considered doing as they suggested, unwilling to become embroiled in a physical confrontation. But he was a doctor of the University and one of its most senior Fellows, and he did not see why he should be sent away by a mere porter, especially given that his purpose for entering the College was to try to solve the murders of Bene’t’s own scholars.