‘Come on,’ he whispered. ‘It is freezing here, and I am tired.’
‘Wait,’ instructed Michael, narrowing his eyes as he squinted in the darkness. ‘I want to see who it is.’
‘Well, I do not,’ said Bartholomew. ‘You are being unfair, Brother. No scholar in his right mind will want to spend time in Michaelhouse while Runham is still revelling in his new-found power. Those two are only doing what we have done – looking for a way to be elsewhere.’
‘But, Matt–’ whispered Michael urgently.
Bartholomew ignored him and pushed his way out of the bushes, walking openly towards the two figures. When they saw him, they started in alarm, but did not make any attempt to run away. Knowing that they would not be able to recognise him, he pushed back his hood so that they could see his face.
‘I have just returned from seeing Father Paul to the–’ he began.
What happened next was a blur. As soon as he began to speak, one of the figures rushed at him and gave him a hefty shove in the chest that sent him staggering backward, then raced on down the lane before turning towards the river. Startled and indignant that a student should dare to strike a master, Bartholomew grabbed the second man as he made to run past, determined that he should not escape. But the student was stronger than he anticipated, and Bartholomew was uncoordinated. A second shove sent him crashing to the ground. All he could hear were the sounds of running footsteps in the distance.
‘Matt!’ Michael’s anxious face hovered above him. ‘Are you hurt?’
‘Damn!’ said Bartholomew, sitting up and feeling the thick mud – and worse – that clung to his cloak. ‘I only had this cleaned last week. Did you see who they were?’
‘My beadle has gone after them,’ said Michael. ‘But I would not hold out too much hope of an arrest, if I were you. They are young and fast, and he is old and slow.’
‘Did you see their faces?’ asked Bartholomew, clinging to Michael for support as he climbed to his feet. ‘They were not Gray and Deynman, I hope.’
‘Of course they were not,’ said Michael scornfully. ‘Do you think either of that pair would push you over? But I did not see their faces – I do not even know if they were our students.’
‘They were wearing tabards and cloaks,’ said Bartholomew.
‘So do lots of men,’ said Michael. He gave a sigh of exasperation. ‘Why did you not wait, as I told you? I had a feeling that they were not merely a couple of disgruntled students sneaking out for a night on the town. They did not have the demeanour of lads playing truant, and I had the distinct impression that their business was more important than a jug of ale in the King’s Head.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘What I say,’ said Michael. ‘That there was mischief afoot tonight, and you blundered into it before we could see what it was.’
Chapter 4
THE FOLLOWING DAY WAS COLD AND GLOOMY, and a thick pall of mist hung over the town, smothering it in a blanket of dampness that stank of the river and of the filth that lay thick along the High Street. Bartholomew woke with a start when Walter the porter’s cockerel began its croaking call directly outside his window. He threw open the shutters and hurled a glove at it, grumbling under his breath as the animal strutted away. Bartholomew would not have minded if the bird had kept its crows for morning, but it made its unholy racket at any time of the day or night, when the fancy took it.
Bartholomew’s ill temper at being so rudely awoken was not improved when he became aware that he had a thumping headache. His stomach felt empty and acidic, his throat was dry and sore, and his best cloak was clotted with muck from where he had been pushed into the mud by the fleeing scholars.
The beadle had returned with a hang-dog expression to report that he had lost his quarry, and Michael dismissed him to warn other patrols to be on the lookout for the black-cloaked pair. Angry, Michael had woken the surly porter to berate him for sleeping while people wandered in and out of the College. Walter’s sullen self-justification was mixed with a sickening sycophancy that Bartholomew found hard to fathom, until the porter revealed that Runham had already sacked a number of College staff, and Walter was afraid he would be next. With curt instructions that he might have a better chance of keeping his job if he did not sleep every night, Michael had abandoned the porter to his guilty anxiety and stalked across the yard to his room.
The monk was just climbing the stairs to his chamber on the upper floor, when a shadowy figure had emerged from the hallway to demand why it had taken Bartholomew so long to escort Father Paul to the Friary. It was Runham, checking his colleagues’ comings and goings. Bartholomew was too weary to feel indignant, and wanted only to lie down, but Michael was outraged enough for both of them. Bartholomew shoved his way past the new Master, while Michael remained in the hall, telling Runham in ringing tones that must have been audible in the Market Square what he thought of a man who lurked in dark corners in the middle of the night to spy on his Fellows. Bartholomew threw off his damp clothes, dropped on to his bed, and knew no more until his abrupt awakening by Walter’s annoying bird the following day.
It was Sunday, and Bartholomew’s turn to help officiate at the mass that took place just after dawn in the College church. When he saw that the sky had begun to lighten, he hopped across the icy stones in his bare feet to wash and shave in the cold water that Cynric left for him each night. For the first time in years, however, Cynric had forgotten, and the jug was empty. Tugging on his boots, Bartholomew splashed through the courtyard mire to draw water from the well behind the kitchen, shivering in the chill of early morning.
Teeth chattering, he doused himself with the freezing water in the dim light from the open window. He groaned when he heard an ominous tear as the clean shirt he hauled over his head stuck to his wet skin, then ripped it more when he did not take the time to dry himself. He grabbed a green woollen jerkin that his sister had given him, and that was definitely not part of the uniform Michaelhouse scholars were expected to wear, and then covered it with his black tabard. He was late by the time he had finished dressing, so he ran across the yard to the gate, skidding in the slick mud and almost falling.
Still fastening his cloak pin, he was sprinting across the High Street before he realised that Father Paul was supposed to be conducting the mass that morning – and Paul had been unceremoniously expelled from Michaelhouse the previous night. Bartholomew had taken minor orders, which meant that he could take certain services, but he was certainly not qualified to perform a full Sunday mass. He was about to run back to the College to wake Michael, when he saw that candles were already burning inside St Michael’s Church. Surprised, he pushed open the door and went inside.
John Runham knelt at the small altar he had erected near his cousin’s tomb. He was red-faced and breathless, and Bartholomew saw he had the altar pulled a little way from the tomb and was cleaning behind it with a bundle of feathers tied on a short pole. Bartholomew felt the anger rising inside him even looking at the tomb and its pompous creator but he forced down his ire as he closed the door and walked towards the high altar.
St Michael’s Church was a lovely building. It was small and intimate, and had been rebuilt especially for Michaelhouse by the College’s founder. There were fine paintings on the walls, the ceiling was picked out in blue and gold, and the stone tracery in the windows was as intricate as lace. In the midst of all this beauty was the late Master Wilson’s tomb, an edifice that Bartholomew was not alone in considering to be the nastiest creation in Christendom.
When Thomas Wilson had died during the plague four years before, he had given Bartholomew money to pay for a splendid tomb to house his mortal remains. Bartholomew had been tardy in fulfilling his promise, and by the time he had commissioned a mason to carve the grave, Wilson’s bequest had devalued dramatically. Instead of the glorious affair he had envisaged, Wilson had been incarcerated under a plain slab of black marble with a simple cross carved on the top.