He closed his eyes and then opened them again as he heard a sound outside the open shutters of his window.
A lamp was shining through it, but it was the monstrous shape on the far wall that made him start from the bed with a cry of horror. A great horned head was silhouetted there: the head of a goat. He swallowed hard and crept to the window, trying not to look at the foul shadow on the wall as it swayed back and forth.
He stared in disbelief at the sight of Michael and Cynric kneeling on the ground shaking with suppressed mirth.
Michael held a lamp, while Cynric made figures on the wall with his hands. They saw Bartholomew and stood up, roaring with laughter.
'Agatha showed us how to do it,' Michael said, gasping for breath. 'Oh, Matt! You should see your face!'
'Agatha told you to do that to me?' said Bartholomew incredulously.
'Oh, lord, no!' said Michael. 'She would rip our heads off if she thought we had dared to play a practical joke on her favourite Fellow. She has a fire lit to cook the potage for tomorrow's breakfast, and she was showing Cynric how to make the shapes of different animals with his hands. She showed him a goat, and I could not resist the temptation to try it on you,' he said.
Cynric grinned. 'It worked wonderfully, eh lad?' he said, beginning to laugh again.
Bartholomew leaned his elbows on the window-sill, and shook his head at them, beginning to see the humour of it, despite his still-pounding heart. 'That was a rotten thing to do,' he said, but without rancour. 'Now I will never get to sleep.'
Still chuckling, Cynric took the lamp back to the kitchen, watched curiously by Bartholomew's students still talking in the courtyard. Michael reached through the window and punched Bartholomew playfully before returning to his own room on the floor above.
Bartholomew could hear his heavy footsteps moving about, and his voice as he related his prank to his two Benedictine room-mates. He heard them laugh and smiled despite himself. He would think of some way to pay Michael back, and Cynric too. He went to lie back down on his bed, and after a moment got up and closed the shutters, disregarding the stuffiness. Satisfied, he felt himself sliding off into sleep. At the fringes of his mind, he was aware that the meeting of the coven at St John Zachary was planned for that night and that he had intended to ask Stanmore about it. But it was late, Bartholomew's day had been a long and trying one, and he was already falling into a deep sleep.
7
After the frenzied events of the last three days, Bartholomew was grateful for a respite while Michael went to Ely. He drilled his students relentlessly, and when at noon on Friday the College bell chimed to indicate the end of lectures for the day, his students heaved a corporate sigh of relief and prepared to spend the rest of the day recuperating from the shock of being made to work so hard.
The porter had a message asking him to visit the miller at Newnham village half a mile away. He had a hasty meal of thin barley soup flavoured with bacon rinds and some unripe pears, and set off. He walked upstream along the river path, muddy and slippery from the rain of the day before. The river itself ran fast and grey-brown, and Bartholomew saw a drowned sheep that had obviously strayed too close to the edge and fallen in.
He crossed the river at Small Bridges Street, paying a fee of one penny to use the two wooden bridges that spanned different branches of the meandering river. Once out of the town, peace prevailed. Larks twittered in the huge sky above him, and fields, neatly divided into ribbons, were rich with oats and barley. A man emerged from where he had been tending one field, and wielded a hoe at Bartholomew. Such was the shortage of crops that any farmer would need to guard his property well if he wished to feed his family or grow rich on the proceeds.
The miller and his family sat outside the mill sharing some baked fish. The three children — of ten — who had survived the plague looked thin and hungry, while their father's mill stood silent. There were three mills in Cambridge, and the one at Newnham was by far the smallest and the most isolated. Business was poor for all of them, for the lack of crops meant that there was little for mills to grind. Bartholomew had seen the miller at the Fair offering ridiculously low prices for his labour.
The family saw him coming and waved him over. The miller's wife held a child on her lap. Bartholomew, careful not to waken him, saw painfully thin limbs and a distended stomach that was full of nothing. The miller's wife said her milk had dried up, and the baby was unable to eat fish. She wanted him to bleed the baby, thinking that an excess of black bile might be making him sick from the fish, and offered him her last three pennies to do so.
Why people believed bleeding would cure so much was beyond Bartholomew^ understanding. He sent one of the older children to buy bread and milk from a nearby farmer with the three pennies, and showed the mother how to feed the baby milk sops in small amounts so as not to make him sick. But what would happen when the bread and milk ran out next time? And what about the rest of the family, looking at the milk sops with envious eyes? Bartholomew vowed he would never complain about College bread again.
Since it was a pleasant evening for a walk, and he was not expected back at Michaelhouse, he decided to visit his sister in Trumpington. He walked slowly, enjoying the warmth of the sun and the fresh, clean air of the countryside. Birds flitted from tree to tree, and at one point a deer trotted from the undergrowth across the path. Bartholomew stood still and watched as it nibbled delicately at a patch of grass. It suddenly became aware of him and stared intently until, unconcerned, it took a final mouthful of grass and disappeared unhurriedly into the dark scrub to the side of the path.
As Bartholomew strolled through the gates to Edith's house, she came running to meet him, delighted at his unexpected visit. He followed her into the kitchen and sat at the great oak table while she fetched him cool ale and freshly baked pastries, which made him think guiltily of the miller's child. Oswald Stanmore heard his wife's greetings from where he had been working in the solar, and came to join them. The kitchen was full of delicious smells, as meats roasted on spits in the fireplace. Edith had been picking rhubarb, and great mounds of it sat at one end of the kitchen table ready to be bottled.
Edith, with many interludes for helpless laughter, told him about how the ploughman's geese had escaped and trapped the rector in his church for an entire afternoon.
He told her about Michael's prank the night before, and she laughed until the tears rolled down her face.
'Oh, Matt! To think you were frightened by such a trick! I used to make those shadows for you when you were a boy. Do you not remember?'
Bartholomew had not told her about finding the goat mask in the coffin with the murdered woman, and was sure that she would not have been so dismissive of his gullibility had she known. She ruffled his hair as she had done when he was young and went to tend to her rhubarb, still smiling.
He played a game of chess with Stanmore, which Stanmore won easily because Bartholomew became impatient and failed to concentrate, and then he strummed Edith's lute in the solar until the daylight began to fade. Stanmore offered to walk part of the way back with him, and they set off as the shadows lay long and dark across the Cambridge road, and the last red glow of the sun disappeared beyond the horizon.
'Any news of who killed Will?' asked Bartholomew.
Stan more shook his head angrily. 'Nothing! And Tulyet is worse than useless. I discovered that the attack was being discussed by men in the King's Head and, like a good citizen, I passed my information to Tulyet, who has refused to investigate.'