‘I might try some on my students then,’ drawled Michael, while Bartholomew wished she had offered him some pine oil instead, as it was useful for skin diseases.
‘This is not the best place for a distillery,’ he said, pocketing the phial before following her back down the stairs. ‘It is poorly ventilated and the fumes may be toxic. Moreover, you work with naked flames and there is firewood nearby. It is asking for trouble.’
Amphelisa waved a hand in a gesture that was unmistakably Gallic. ‘The wood is still damp – it will smoke, but will take an age to ignite. But you are not here to discuss oil with me – you want to see the dead. They are in the chancel. Follow me.’
‘And then you can leave,’ said Tangmer, although with more hope than conviction.
The bodies had been placed in front of the altar. Two men knelt beside them. One was the dark-featured ‘lunatic’ who had said his name was Delacroix. The other was an elderly man with a shock of white hair, who was praying aloud in Latin – Latin that had the distinctive inflection of northern France. Both men leapt up when they realised they were not alone.
‘Go, go!’ cried Tangmer in English, flapping his hands at them. ‘This is no place for madmen. Amphelisa – take them out. They cannot be in here unsupervised.’
‘No, wait,’ countered Michael in French. The two men stopped dead in their tracks, causing Tangmer and Amphelisa to exchange an agitated glance. ‘Are you priests?’
Tangmer frantically shook his head, warning them against engaging in conversation. The pair edged towards the door, clearly aiming to bolt, but Tulyet barred their way. The two inmates regarded each other uncertainly.
‘I am Father Julien,’ replied the old one eventually. He had a sallow, lined face, although wary grey eyes suggested that his mind was sharp. ‘I am ill. I came here to recover.’
‘We aim to find out what happened to your friends,’ said Michael, aware that the clipped English sentences were designed to give nothing of the speaker’s origins away. ‘So Matt will look at their bodies, to see how they died.’
‘Why bother?’ snarled Delacroix in French. He was in shirtsleeves that day, which revealed his neck; a scar around it that suggested someone had once tried to hang him. ‘No one wants us here, and now you have five less to worry about. But we are not–’
‘Hush, Delacroix!’ barked Tangmer, while Amphelisa and Julien paled in horror. ‘Do not use that heathen language in this holy place. You know what we agreed.’
‘Enough of this charade,’ said Tulyet, tiring of the game they were playing. ‘We are not fools. We know there are no lunatics here – just Frenchmen in hiding.’
There was a brief, appalled silence. Then Amphelisa opened her mouth to deny it, but Tangmer forestalled her by slumping on a bench with a groan of defeat.
‘How did you guess?’ he asked in a strangled whisper.
Amphelisa stood next to him, one hand on his shoulder and her face as white as snow. Julien’s expression was resigned, but Delacroix scowled in a way that suggested he was more angry than dismayed at being found out.
‘Tell us your story,’ ordered Tulyet. ‘If your presence here is innocent, you will come to no harm.’
‘No harm?’ sneered Delacroix. ‘I walked through your town yesterday, and I heard what was being said about France on the streets. You hate us all, regardless of whether or not we support the Dauphin and his army.’
‘Yes,’ acknowledged Michael, ‘there is much anti-French sentiment, and had you been caught there, you might well have been lynched. But we are not all ignorant bigots. We will hear what you have to say before passing judgement.’
‘I had to do it,’ whispered Tangmer, head in his hands. ‘They came to me – a host of bewildered, frightened people, including children. How could I turn them away?’
‘We paid you,’ spat Delacroix. ‘That is what convinced you to hide us, not compassion.’
‘The money was a consideration,’ conceded Tangmer stiffly, ‘but our chief motive was pity. These people are not soldiers, but families driven from their homes by war. We call them our peregrini, which is Latin for strangers.’
‘Why choose here?’ asked Tulyet, before Michael could say that he did not need Tangmer to teach him a language he used on a daily basis. ‘Cambridge is hardly on the beaten track.’
‘Because Julien is my uncle,’ explained Amphelisa. Her French was perfect, and was the language used for the rest of the conversation.
‘So he is your uncle and every member of the Spital’s staff is a Tangmer,’ said Tulyet drily. ‘You are fortunate to boast such a large family.’
‘My husband has a large family,’ said Amphelisa with quiet dignity. ‘I only have Julien, as all the rest were killed in France two years ago. After their deaths, Julien brought the surviving villagers to England, where they lived peacefully until the raid on Winchelsea …’
‘Winchelsea was where we settled, you see,’ explained Julien. ‘But it was attacked twice, and each time, the Mayor accused us of instigating the carnage – that we told the Dauphin when best to come.’
‘Why would the Mayor do that?’ asked Tulyet sceptically.
‘Because he should have defended his town,’ replied Julien, ‘but instead, he hid until it was safe to come out. He needed a way to deflect attention from his cowardice, so he found some scapegoats – us.’
‘We fought for Winchelsea,’ said Delacroix bitterly. ‘My brothers and I tried to repel the raiders at the pier, and both of them died doing it. The town should have been grateful, but instead, they turned on us.’
‘We had to abandon the lives we had built among folk we believed to be friends,’ said Julien. ‘Our situation looked hopeless, but then I remembered Amphelisa’s new Spital …’
‘But why stay in England?’ pressed Tulyet. ‘Why not go home?’
Bartholomew knew the answer to that, because the marks on Delacroix’s neck were indicative of a failed lynching, plus there was the fact that these peregrini had fled France two years ago …
‘You are Jacques,’ he surmised. ‘Men who rebelled against their aristocratic overlords, and who were outlawed when that rebellion failed.’
This particular revolt, known as the Jacquerie, had been watched with alarm in England, as there had been fears that it might spread – French peasants were not the only ones tired of being oppressed by a wealthy elite. The Jacques had voiced a number of grievances, but first and foremost was the fact that they were taxed so that nobles could repair their war-damaged castles, on the understanding that the nobles would then protect the peasants from marauding Englishmen. The nobles did not keep their end of the bargain, and village after village was looted and burned. Crops were destroyed, too, and the people starved.
The Jacquerie foundered when its leader was executed, after which the nobles retaliated with sickening brutality. Thousands of peasants were slaughtered, many of whom had had nothing to do with the uprising. Those who could run away had done so, although most of them had nowhere else to go.
‘Only six men from our village dabbled in rebellion,’ said Julien quietly. ‘The remaining two hundred souls did not, but they were murdered anyway. Thirty of us escaped, mostly old men, women and children. I led them, along with the six Jacques, to Winchelsea, thinking it would be safe.’
‘Were the Girards among the six?’ asked Bartholomew.
‘Only the two men,’ replied Julien, then nodded at Delacroix. ‘He is another, along with three of his friends.’
Delacroix went pale with fury. ‘You damned fool! Now we will have to leave. We cannot stay here if the truth is out.’