'He was dead then,' snapped Bartholomew, trying to control the shaking of his hands. 'And he is very dead now.'
Bartholomew led Gray back inside the stables again, noticing how the student's eyes kept edging fearfully over to the bundle that was Augustus. 'You must not tell anyone of this,' Bartholomew said. "I do not understand what is happening, why his body has been put here now after all this time. But I think he was murdered, and his murderer must still be alive or Augustus's body would still be hidden. We must be very careful.'
Gray nodded, his usually cheerful face sombre.
'Just sew him back up again, and let us pretend to anyone who is watching that we have not noticed the extra one,' he said, going to the door and trying to peer out through the gaps in the wood.
It was possibly already too late for that, Bartholomew thought, if the murderer had seen them take Gilbert's body back inside again once they had realised that something was amiss. He collected his thoughts. Bartholomew could see why Augustus's body had reappeared. It had been no secret that Wilson had spent some time talking alone to Bartholomew before he died. The murderer had assumed, correctly, that Wilson would tell him about the trap-door to the attic — where Augustus had probably lain since his body had been taken. That would explain the unpleasant smell that Bartholomew had noticed there.
If, as Bartholomew supposed, the body had been hidden in the passageway, Wilson would have been unlikely to have found it because he would have no reason to search a passageway he knew was blocked off. Unless, he thought, Wilson had known, and had deliberately told Bartholomew about the trap-door, knowing that he would find Augustus. What had Wilson said? Discover who in the College knew about the trap-door and he would find the murderer?
Bartholomew rubbed a hand over his face. He realised that once the murderer became aware that Bartholomew knew of the trap-door and would be likely to search the attic, he would have to dispose of the corpse that had lain there for several months. In many ways, it was an ideal time. When better to dispose of a body than when there were bodies of so many others to be taken away?
Had William not complained, then Bartholomew might well have left the bodies to be collected by the dead-cart the following day, and no one would have known that one of them had not died of the plague at all.
So the person who had brought Augustus's body to the stables must also have been the person who had killed him. It could not have been Aelfrith, since he was long dead. It could not have been Wilson, because Augustus's body had been placed in the stable after he had died — and Bartholomew was certain Gray was not lying to him about removing the previous corpses. Was it Abigny? Had he come back from wherever he was hiding when he had heard that Bartholomew knew about the trap-door? Could it have been Swynford, back from his plague-free haven? Was it Michael, who had reacted so oddly at Augustus's death? Was it William, who had prompted him to look at the bodies in the first place, or Alcote, skulking in his room?
Gray was handing him the needle and thread so he could sew up Augustus's shroud again. But Bartholomew had one more task he needed to do.
'Start taking the others out to the cart,' he said. "I need to take a closer look.'
Gray's eyes widened in horror, but he began to drag the bodies outside to the cart as Bartholomew had instructed. Bartholomew knelt down by Augustus, and slit the shroud down the side, pulling it back to reveal the grey, desiccated body. Augustus was still dressed in the nightshirt he had been wearing when Bartholomew had last seen his body, but it was torn down the middle to reveal the terrible mutilations underneath. Bartholomew felt anger boil inside him. Whoever had taken the body had slashed it open, pulling out entrails, and slicing deeply into the neck and throat.
All Bartholomew could assume was that Augustus had led the murderer to believe he had swallowed that wretched ring of Sir John's, and the murderer had desecrated his body to find it. Bartholomew was beginning to feel sick. Augustus's blackened and dried entrails had been stuffed crudely back into his body with a total disregard for his dignity. The horrific mess made Bartholomew wonder whether the murderer would ever have found the ring anyway.
He had seen enough. Hastily, he began to resew the bundle, hiding the terribly mangled body from his sight — and from Gray, who was becoming bolder and inching forward. Bartholomew looked at Augustus's face. The warmth of the attic in the top of the house in late summer must have sucked the moisture from the body, for the face was dry and wizened rather than rotten. The skin had peeled back from the lips, leaving the teeth exposed, and the eyes were sunken, but it was unmistakably Augustus.
As Bartholomew covered up the face, he whispered a farewell. His mind flashed back to Augustus's funeral back in September, when a coffin filled with bags of earth had been reverently laid to rest in the churchyard. He sat back on his heels, staring down at the shapeless bundle in front of him, and wondered if the requiem mass said for him by Aelfrith had truly laid his soul to rest.
Bartholomew had often looked at the simple wooden cross in the churchyard, and wondered about the body that should have lain beneath it. At least in the plague pit the old man would rest in hallowed ground and no one would come again to desecrate his body.
9
February 1349
January ended in a succession of blizzards that coated everything in white. With February came wetter, warmer weather that turned the snow into icy brown muck that seeped into shoes and chilled the feet. Bartholomew still trudged around the houses of plague victims, incising buboes where he could, but mostly doing little more than watching people die. He and Gray had visited the last of Abigny's known haunts, and then revisited his favourite ones, but had learned nothing. Philippa and Abigny seemed to have vanished into thin air.
Bartholomew heard that Stanmore's older sister, her husband, and all seven of their children were dead, while at Michaelhouse he buried Roger Alyngton, two more students, and four of the servants. Colet still sat in St Botolph's Church and drooled his days away.
Bartholomew had lain in wait for him one day, and dragged him along when he went to visit his patients hoping to shock him back to rationality — but his patients had been disconcerted, and Colet had become so distressed that Bartholomew was forced to take him home.
It was mid-afternoon, but already growing dark because of the overcast skies, when Bartholomew and Gray were met on the way home by Master Burwell, who asked them to attend a student who was dying.
Bartholomew did all he could, but the student died without regaining consciousness. Three other Bene't Hostel students were ill, and Bartholomew helped Burwell set up a separate room in which they could be cared for. It was a large room compared to the others, and Jacob Yaxley, Master of Law, who had had it to himself since the death of his room-mates, clearly resented being moved. He muttered and grumbled as his students helped him carry his books and papers to another chamber.
As they walked back to the College, Bartholomew thought he saw one body, all wrapped in its shroud, move, and went to investigate. He took his knife and slit open the crude sheet. The woman inside was still alive, although barely. Her neighbour shouted that the woman had sewn herself into the winding sheet when she knew she had the plague, because there was no one left to do it for her.
'What about you?' Bartholomew shouted.
The neighbour crossed himself quickly, and slammed the window shut. The woman muttered incoherently as Bartholomew carried her back inside.
He had heard from Michael that some people, the last surviving members of their families, were preparing themselves for burial with their dying strength but he had dismissed it as yet another plague story intended to horrify. He sat back on his heels, patting the woman's hand abstractedly, unable to stop his mind running through the dreadful outcomes of such actions: supposing the cart had come while she was still alive, and she had been smothered in earth or burned by the quicklime? He wondered if others had not already suffered that fate. The woman slipped away quietly while he was thinking, and he and Gray resewed the shroud and left her on her doorstep again.