‘I feel like a virgin in a brothel,’ said Welfry unhappily, while Bartholomew watched the Chestre lads grow angry over something Michael had said. ‘But Drax was generous to both our priories, so it is our duty to be here. Of course, we did not expect the occasion to be quite so … so spirited.’
‘I heard about your trick with the eggs,’ said Bartholomew. Kendale’s expression had turned taunting, and the physician could see Michael struggling to keep his temper. ‘How did you do it?’
Welfry was delighted to be asked. ‘Well, eggs have a certain internal strength, despite their outward fragility, so it is just a case of placing them so that they—’
‘My throat hurts from shouting to make myself heard,’ interrupted Horneby. Neyll was clenching his fists, and Bartholomew braced himself, ready to run to Michael’s rescue if one of them flew. ‘And I do not think this occasion is any place for priests. Your description of virgins in brothels is truer than you thought, Welfry, because I know for a fact that Helia over there is a whore. We had better leave.’
‘Have you made any more loud bangs?’
Both friars and Bartholomew turned to see Dickon standing behind them, grinning.
‘What is this?’ asked Horneby, startled. ‘Loud bangs?’
‘An accident while trying to create a lamp with a clean and steady glow,’ explained Bartholomew, turning his attention back to the Chestre men. ‘I had the idea from Kendale’s trick at St Mary the Great.’
Welfry nodded keenly. ‘You asked me about the formula, and I have been thinking about it. He would have required a sticky substance to rub on his “fuses”, but the solution in his buckets must have been much more fluid. Have you tried mixing different kinds of oil with the pitch?’
‘The stuff you made was very sticky, Doctor,’ supplied Dickon. ‘I climbed over Meryfeld’s wall later, and had a look at it. I tried to blow it up again, but my tinderbox would not work.’
‘Dickon, you must never tamper with such things,’ said Welfry, alarmed. ‘They can be extremely dangerous, and you may hurt someone.’
‘So what?’ asked Dickon airily. ‘Life is full of dangers, and everyone must take his chances.’
‘Heavens!’ breathed Welfry, when the child had gone. ‘That was an eerily sinister philosophy coming from the mouth of someone so young. I doubt he learned that from his parents.’
‘He might, if his father is the Devil,’ muttered Horneby. ‘But this house is definitely no place for friars if he is here. I am going home.’
‘That was a waste of time,’ said Michael angrily, arriving a few moments later. The Chestre men were already back with their ladies, carousing noisily. ‘We exchanged yet more threats and ultimatums, and I learned nothing. What about you? Did you see any nervous or guilty glances?’
Bartholomew shook his head. ‘But the prostitute called Helia is over there. Neyll claimed Gib was with her the night he died, so I am going to ask her whether it is true.’
‘Yes, I service Chestre,’ said Helia. She was a small, pretty woman with a pert figure and dyed red hair. ‘Mostly Neyll and Gib, although Kendale comes, too, on occasion.’
‘Do they ever quarrel about the arrangement?’
‘Almost certainly, I would think – they are a feisty crowd. However, I can tell you one thing: I am not entertaining that Neyll again. The University should send him home – he is a pig.’
‘Why is that?’
‘He is a killer. Do you remember that student who drowned a month ago – Jolye? Well, it was Neyll who pushed him in the river, and would not let him out again. And I doubt Jolye was his first victim, either. You should be careful around him – the Frail Sisters do not want to lose you.’
‘Can you prove Neyll killed Jolye?’
Helia wrinkled her nose. ‘Well, no one saw it happen, but Gib told Belle, who told the University’s stationer, who told his cousin, who told me. So it is absolutely true.’
‘When did you last see Gib?’ asked Bartholomew, suspecting there was unlikely to be much accuracy in a tale that had been passed along by quite so many gossiping tongues.
Helia was thoughtful. ‘Well, we had a bit of a spat, so I did not see him this week. The last time we met would have been more than seven days ago. He visited me from late on Sunday night, until he left for lectures at prime on Monday.’
‘Are you sure?’ asked Bartholomew urgently. If Helia was right, then Gib could not have been the yellow-headed man he himself had chased from Emma’s house.
‘Absolutely sure. On Monday mornings, I look after Yolande’s children while she visits the Mayor. It is a longstanding arrangement, and I went there the moment Gib left me. I saw him go inside his hostel, ready for his morning lessons.’
‘And you did not see him after that?’
Helia shook her head. ‘But he sent me a message saying he intended to honour me with his presence on Saturday night. He never arrived.’
Probably because he had been murdered en route, thought Bartholomew, watching as Helia left to dance with Isnard. How the bargeman managed his wild skipping with only one leg was beyond Bartholomew, and seemed to defy the laws of physics.
As Michael was with Yffi’s apprentices, he went to sit with his fellow physicians until the monk had finished, surprised that the staid Rougham had deigned to attend such a riotous event. The man was a killjoy, and disliked seeing people having fun.
Rougham grinned, and raised his goblet in a happy salute. He was not usually friendly, and it did not take Bartholomew long to realise the man was drunk. So was Meryfeld, while Gyseburne was well on the way to joining them: Meryfeld’s hand-rubbing was approaching frenzied proportions, while Gyseburne was on the brink of cracking a genuine smile. Gyseburne offered Bartholomew a sip of wine from the goblet he was holding. It was remarkably good, and Bartholomew thought it a pity that it was being wasted on people who were too inebriated to appreciate it.
‘I am glad you are here,’ slurred Rougham. ‘Now we are all four physicians together, and that does not happen often. We are all too busy.’
‘We should talk about medicine, then,’ declared Gyseburne. ‘Because we are medici.’
The others agreed with the kind of exaggerated gravity often affected by the intoxicated. Bartholomew glanced at Michael, and hoped he would not be long – he did not like discussing medicine with Rougham when he was sober, and it would be worse when the man was drunk.
‘What did you give to Emma, to soothe her inflamed gums?’ Gyseburne asked Meryfeld.
Meryfeld tapped the side of his nose. ‘That is a secret.’
‘We should not have secrets from each other,’ said Rougham admonishingly. ‘We should share our knowledge, for the greater good of the profession. Except sorcery. I am not interested in learning diabolical cures, Bartholomew, so you can keep those to yourself.’
‘I do not know any,’ said Bartholomew indignantly. ‘My medicines are based on herbs that—’
‘I am not telling you my cure for sore gums,’ hiccuped Meryfeld. ‘My poultice of lettuce and rosemary is— Damn! Now look what you made me do! It was a secret!’
‘Her condition warrants a more potent remedy than that,’ warned Bartholomew, concerned. ‘It will not heal her, and the delay in extracting the tooth may cost her life.’
‘He is right,’ said Gyseburne. ‘It should have come out days ago. Personally, I am surprised she is still alive, because I have seen how quickly these things can poison the blood.’
‘Medicine is too contentious a subject for an occasion like this,’ said Meryfeld sulkily. ‘So let us debate something else instead. I have been thinking about our lamp, and I have devised a way to refine it. I think we used too much charcoal and not enough pitch. The reason for this is that pitch burns at a lower temperature than brimstone, and so will be more steady.’
‘Does it?’ asked Bartholomew, intrigued. ‘How do you know that?’
‘He does not know,’ said Gyseburne. ‘He is guessing. But it is worth a try. Shall
we do it now?’
‘No!’ exclaimed Bartholomew, thinking they were likely to blow themselves up.
‘Yes,’ countered Meryfeld, struggling to stand. ‘We shall go while the notion is fresh in our heads, and I do not live far away. Next door, in fact. Which is quite close, I believe.’
‘Excellent!’ slurred Rougham. ‘Then let us grab the pig by the horns, and begin.’
With mounting alarm, Bartholomew saw he would have to go with them, because it would be too dangerous to leave them unsupervised. He shrugged apologetically at Michael as he left, muttering that protecting three-quarters of Cambridge’s medical fraternity was just as valuable a way to spend their precious time as demanding answers from uncooperative suspects.
Rougham, Meryfeld and Gyseburne linked arms as they left Celia’s house. They tried to include Bartholomew, but he did not like the notion of four physicians in a line, weaving their way along a public highway, even if only for a short distance, and lagged behind. When they reached Meryfeld’s home, no one was able to fit the key in the lock. They dropped it so many times that it became a joke, and even the sour Rougham was convulsed in paroxysms of laughter.
‘It is not a good idea to play with dangerous materials when you are drunk,’ said Bartholomew, snatching the key and opening the door himself. ‘You might do yourselves some serious harm.’
‘I am not drunk,’ declared Gyseburne indignantly, toppling inside. ‘Really, Bartholomew! What a horrid thing to say! I am as sober as the Queen of Sheba.’
‘And I am not drunk, either,’ added Meryfeld, making for his pantry and grabbing a selection of bowls and phials. Rougham helped, making seemingly random choices from the compounds on offer. ‘A tad tipsy, perhaps. But a long way from being drunk. Now, where is the oil?’
‘You should do this in the garden,’ said Bartholomew, rescuing the oil when Meryfeld whipped it around vigorously, threatening to slop some in the hearth, where a fire was burning.
‘I will bring a lamp – it is dark outside,’ said Gyseburne, tripping as he took one from a shelf. ‘Lord! You must get your flagstones levelled, Meryfeld. They are a hazard.’
Bartholomew followed them to the garden, stopping to collect two pails of water en route, then selected a spot where they would not be seen by prying eyes from next door. He fetched the wooden table they had used the last time, and his colleagues began to toss their ingredients down on it. He read the labels with growing alarm.
‘This is not sensible,’ he said, when Rougham contributed a large pot of lye, some wool fat and a bottle of distilled rock oil. ‘These are volatile substances, and—’
‘Nonsense,’ declared Meryfeld. ‘We are educated men and know exactly what we are doing.’
‘Actually, I have no idea what we are doing,’ said Rougham with an uncharacteristic giggle. He picked up a pot of saltpetre. ‘But intuition tells me a dose of this might produce some interesting results.’
‘That is far too big a bowl,’ objected Bartholomew, when he saw the size of the receptacle Gyseburne had brought for mixing. It was large enough to accommodate a fully grown sheep. ‘I thought we had decided to experiment with smaller—’
‘Do not be tedious,’ said Meryfeld, elbowing him out of the way and emptying something red into the cauldron. ‘If we use piffling amounts, the reactions will be too minute to assess.’
Bartholomew watched uneasily as the others began to add their own favourites to the concoction. They were all speaking much too loudly, embarking on a lively debate about the efficacy of tying dead pigeons around a patient’s feet to combat fevers.
‘I never use them myself,’ declared Rougham. ‘Pigeons belong in a pie, not wrapped around the soles, in my humble opinion.’ He sounded anything but humble.
‘They may have fleas,’ added Gyseburne with a shudder. ‘And I have enough of my own.’
‘Well, I enjoy great success with pigeons,’ declared Meryfeld. ‘And with surgeons, too. I tie their eyes around a patient’s neck as a remedy against sore throats.’
‘No wonder surgeons are loath to ply their trade in Cambridge,’ mused Gyseburne gravely.
‘He means sturgeons,’ said Bartholomew, heartily wishing he had stayed at Celia’s house. Gyseburne shot him a blank look. ‘Fish.’
‘I dislike eels,’ said Rougham, off on a tangent of his own. ‘My Gonville Hall colleagues assure me they are more akin to worms than fish, but I am not so sure. They are all slippery and vile.’
‘Are they?’ asked Gyseburne. ‘I have always found your Gonville colleagues quite pleasant.’
‘Now there is a question,’ said Meryfeld, ladling pitch into the bowl. He missed, and some oozed down the outside. ‘Are eels fish or worms? We should debate that some time.’
‘We are debating it now,’ Gyseburne pointed out.
‘Stop!’ cried Bartholomew, horrified when he saw the quantity of saltpetre Rougham planned to use. ‘That is far too much, and it will—’
‘Take as much as you want, Rougham,’ countered Meryfeld. ‘We are all rich, and can afford expensive ingredients in the name of science. Well, you are not wealthy, Bartholomew, but you could be, if you were to dispense with your poor patients.’
‘Yes, but then they would come to us,’ Rougham pointed out. ‘And I do not want them. I like things the way they are, with him taking the dross and me compiling horoscopes for the affluent.’
‘Well, that is honest,’ said Bartholomew, taken aback by the baldness of the remark. ‘But the poor often have more interesting ailments. Just last week, one had a sickness that looked like leprosy, but I managed to cure it with a decoction of—’
‘You have a remedy for leprosy?’ asked Meryfeld eagerly. ‘Now we shall be rich.’
‘He said it looked like leprosy,’ corrected Gyseburne. He staggered, and the rock oil in the bottle he was holding glugged into the bowl. ‘That means it was actually something else. Perhaps we should name it after him. It will bring him the fame he will never have from being affluent.’
‘What a dreadful notion,’ said Rougham, shuddering in distaste. ‘Who wants to be remembered for a disease? I would rather have a stained-glass window in my College chapel. Then people will see my handsome face for centuries to come.’
‘Not if it is smashed by rioting students,’ said Gyseburne. ‘The glass, I mean. What is in this jug, Rougham? I cannot read the label. Oh, well. In it goes. Stir it around a bit, Meryfeld.’
‘I would not mind this light being named after me,’ said Meryfeld, giving the concoction a prod.
‘The Meryfeld Lamp,’ mused Rougham. Then he shook his head. ‘No – it sounds like a tavern.’
‘The ingredients are mixed now,’ said Gyseburne, peering into the cauldron. ‘What shall we do next? Shove some in a lantern and see what happens?’
‘Good idea,’ said Meryfeld, making a lunge for the torch.
Bartholomew reached it first. ‘We will take a small amount of your potion, and touch a flame to it. But we are wasting our time, because even if it works, you did not keep a record of the ingredients you used so we will never be able to replicate the result.’
‘You are too cautious,’ said Meryfeld disdainfully. ‘And timidity in science is not a virtue. We shall set the lot alight, and see what happens.’
He snatched the lamp from Bartholomew and tossed it into the bowl.
Bartholomew hurled himself backwards, and managed to pull Gyseburne with him, while Rougham had been bending over to retrieve a bottle he had dropped. There was muffled boom, and for a moment the dusky garden was lit up as bright as a summer day. Meryfeld shrieked as flames shot towards him, so Bartholomew scrambled to his feet and dashed a bucket of water over him before he could ignite, leaving him coughing and spluttering.
‘That was dazzling,’ said Gyseburne, in something of an understatement as he picked himself up. ‘And it was steady, too, but it did not last very long. Perhaps there was too much pitch.’
‘Are you all right?’ asked Barth
olomew, peering at Meryfeld in concern. Flames licked across the table, and their light showed Meryfeld’s round face to be bright pink, like a bad case of sunburn.
‘The smell!’ exclaimed Rougham, waving a hand in front of his face. ‘It is awful!’
‘Do not inhale it,’ warned Bartholomew. ‘I imagine it is poisonous.’
‘What in God’s name is going on?’ It was Dick Tulyet, who had scrambled over the wall that divided his home from Meryfeld’s. Dickon was with him, eyes alight at the prospect of mischief. ‘We heard a lot of drunken revelry, followed by a huge bang and screams.’
‘I told you they were doing something bad,’ said Dickon smugly. ‘I saw them leave Celia’s—’
‘What have you done to that table?’ demanded Tulyet, watching Bartholomew struggle to smother the flames that still danced across it. Nothing was working. Water hissed and had no effect, his cloak simply ignited, and the flames even burned through the handfuls of soil he piled over them. ‘What devilry have you invented?’
‘Not devilry,’ said Bartholomew, uncomfortably aware of how it must look. ‘Simple alchemy. I suspect these flames will burn as long as there is air to feed them. So we must deprive them of it.’
‘But you have deprived them of it,’ Tulyet pointed out. ‘You have heaped a great stack of earth on them, and they are still going strong. I can see the smoke.’
‘They must be drawing it through the wood. They will burn out eventually.’
‘You cannot leave them,’ cried Tulyet, appalled. ‘They might grow hungry for more fuel, and incinerate the whole town.’
‘We can bury the tabletop,’ suggested Bartholomew. ‘That should make it safe.’
‘I will fetch a spade,’ offered Gyseburne, sheepish in the face of Tulyet’s growing horror. ‘The Sheriff is right: there is something of Satan in these flames.’
While they waited for him to come back, Tulyet poked the bench with a stick. Some of the substance adhered to it, and it burst into flames. He hurled it from him in revulsion.
‘Dig,’ he ordered, when Gyseburne returned. ‘And let us make an end of this mischief.’
The Killer Of Pilgrims: The Sixteenth Chronicle of Matthew Bartholomew (The Chronicles of Matthew Bartholomew) Page 30
