Quenhyth shot Gray a triumphant sneer when he saw that Michael had correctly identified the author of his troubles. Una blew Michael a salacious kiss before flouncing away on Gray’s arm, accompanied by whistles and cat-calls from the psalter-reading students.
‘I went to bed after compline – as Master Langelee said we should – and when I awoke she was there,’ explained Quenhyth unpleasantly as Una left. ‘She told me she had been there all night, and that we had had all manner of fun. She is lying, of course: I would remember doing the things she described.’ He gave a fastidious shudder, and Bartholomew struggled not to laugh.
‘I caught him trying to usher her out through the back gate,’ said Meadowman disapprovingly. ‘He spun me this tale about finding her when he awoke, but that does not sound very likely to me. A red-blooded man does not sleep when there is a handsome whore in his bed, especially a fine, strong lass like Una. Do you not agree, Brother?’
Wisely, Michael declined to enter that sort of debate while there were students listening with unconcealed delight. He fixed the hapless Quenhyth with a glare. ‘You shall spend the day in the proctors’ prison, while we shall give this matter some thought. Take him away, Meadowman.’
Quenhyth’s indignant wails could be heard all across the yard as he protested his innocence to anyone who would listen, and a good many others besides.
‘I do not know how you tolerate that self-righteous youngster in your classes without boxing his ears,’ said Michael to Bartholomew as he resumed his walk to the hall. ‘And I do not blame Gray and Deynman for trying to cut him down to size.’
Bartholomew wholly agreed with him.
The bell had finished chiming by the time the scholars had ascended the spiral staircase to the hall. A huge fire roared in the hearth, so that the room felt airless and stuffy after the chill of the morning. Fresh rushes were scattered across the floor in readiness for Christmas, and the sweet scent of them mingled pleasantly with the aroma of burning wood and the baked oatmeal that was being readied behind the servants’ screen. Bartholomew and Michael walked to the dais and took their places at the high table, facing the ranks of assembled students in the body of the hall.
Presiding over the meal was the Master, Ralph de Langelee. He was a powerfully built man, who looked more like a mercenary than a scholar, and many who knew him believed he should have remained a soldier and left the business of education to those capable of independent thought. But despite his intellectual failings, Langelee was proving to be a fair and capable Master, which surprised many people. The College had been infamous for its mediocre food and chilly, fireless rooms before Langelee had arranged for himself to be elected. Two years on, Michaelhouse had wood and peat aplenty for the common rooms, and the quality of the food had improved. This was due at least in part to the fact that he had delegated the College finances to Michaelhouse’s newest Fellow, John Wynewyk, who was good at driving hard bargains with the town’s tradesmen.
To Langelee’s left was Thomas Kenyngham, an elderly Gilbertine friar with fluffy white hair, a dreamy smile and a mistaken belief that all men were as good and kindly as him. The cadaverous theologian Thomas Suttone perched on Kenyngham’s left, turning his unsmiling face towards the students, like Death selecting a victim. At the end of the table sat the Dominican music and astronomy master, John Clippesby. It was common knowledge that Clippesby was insane, although Langelee maintained there was no reason why this minor inconvenience should interfere with his teaching duties.
Bartholomew and Michael sat on Langelee’s right, with Father William, who was also Michael’s Junior Proctor. William was a stern, uncompromising Franciscan, whose inflexible beliefs and bigoted interpretation of the rules he was paid to enforce were swelling the University’s coffers to the point of embarrassment. Michael confided to Bartholomew that William had fined more students in his first month of office than most other junior proctors caught in a year. However, Bartholomew also noticed that neither Michael nor the Chancellor had made any serious attempts to curtail the Franciscan’s fiscal enthusiasm.
On Bartholomew’s right was the last of the Fellows, Wynewyk. Wynewyk had been elected at the beginning of the Michaelmas Term, and was still clearly bewildered by some of the customs and practices of his new College. That day, he seemed puzzled by the fact that Clippesby had a fish under his arm. The other Fellows were used to Clippesby’s idiosyncrasies, and Bartholomew found that he only noticed them if someone else pointed them out.
‘Put it away, Clippesby, there’s a good fellow,’ said Langelee, following Wynewyk’s gaze to where glazed eyes and a gaping mouth leered from beneath the music master’s tabard. ‘You know we do not allow animals to join us for meals.’
‘This is not an animal,’ said Clippesby, placing the thing carefully on the table. Bartholomew saw Wynewyk glance uneasily towards the door, as if wondering whether he would be able to reach it unimpeded, should it become necessary. The other scholars were merely impatient, giving the impression they wanted Clippesby to have done with his antics so they could get on with their meal.
‘Is is an animal,’ argued Father William immediately. He detested Clippesby, partly because William was not a man to waste his meagre supplies of compassion on lunatics, but mostly because Clippesby was a Dominican, and William did not like Dominicans. ‘It is a fish, so of course it is an animal. It is not a stone or a vegetable, is it?’ He leaned back and folded his arms, pleased with this incisive piece of logic.
Clippesby did not concur. ‘This is an interesting philosophical question,’ he said, turning his mad-eyed stare from the fish to the friar. ‘Is a dead fish an animal? Or, since it no longer possesses life, is it something else?’
‘Just because it is dead does not mean that it has changed,’ argued William, determined not to be bested.
‘But it has changed,’ pressed Clippesby, waving the fish in the air, oblivious to the rotten scales that fell from it. ‘A dead fish cannot be the same as a live one.’
‘I agree with Clippesby,’ said Bartholomew, earning himself a hostile glare from Michael for prolonging the debate, and an equally irate one from William for supporting his opponent. ‘If you accept Aristotle’s philosophy, you would argue that the fish has undergone what he termed “substantial change”. This can occur in all substances that are composed of matter and form in the terrestrial region and, of course, all these forms and qualities are potentially replaceable by the other forms and qualities that are their contraries. That is what has occurred in Clippesby’s fish.’
‘It is?’ asked Langelee doubtfully, clearly having forgotten his Aristotelian natural philosophy.
Bartholomew was surprised by the question. ‘Of course! While one form is actualised in matter, its contrary is said to be in privation but is capable of replacing it. Obviously, each potential form or quality must become whatever it is capable of becoming, otherwise it would remain unactualised and that would be a contradiction.’
‘Well, that shut everyone up,’ said Michael gleefully, in the bemused silence that followed. ‘Well done, Matt. Now let us say grace and eat.’
‘Oremus,’ began Langelee hastily, before someone could ask his opinion of the physician’s postulations. He professed to be a philosopher, but was invariably confounded even by that discipline’s most basic theoretical tenets. ‘Spiritum nobis Domine, tuae caritatis infunde: ut, quos sacramentis paschalibus satiasti, tua facias pietate concordes. And so on. Dominus vobiscum.’
‘About time,’ grumbled Michael, as he sat. ‘I am starving, and I am tired of all this Advent fasting and abstaining from meat. It is not natural.’