Death of a Scholar: The Twentieth Chronicle of Matthew Bartholomew (Chronicles of Matthew Bartholomew) Read online

  Although by far the richest pickings were in Cambridge, Potmoor did not operate there – he was no fool, and knew better than to take on the combined strength of Sheriff and Senior Proctor. Then an opportunity arose. Sheriff Tulyet was summoned to London to account for an anomaly in the shire’s taxes, and Brother Michael went to Peterborough. Potmoor was delighted: their deputies were members of the Guild of Saints, as was Potmoor himself, and guildsmen always looked after each other. He moved quickly to establish himself in fresh pastures, and they turned a blind eye to his activities, just as he expected.

  Not every guildsman was happy with his expansion, though: Oswald Stanmore had objected vociferously to Potmoor’s men loitering around the quays where his barges unloaded. Then Stanmore died suddenly, and those who supported him were quick to fall silent. By the time Brother Michael returned, Potmoor’s hold on the town was too strong to break, and the felon was assailed with a sense of savage invincibility. But he had woken that morning feeling distinctly unwell.

  At first, he thought nothing of it – it was an ague caused by the changing seasons and he would soon shake it off. But he grew worse as the day progressed, and by evening he was forced to concede that he needed a physician. He sent for John Meryfeld, and was alarmed by the grave expression on the man’s normally jovial face. A murmured ‘oh, dear’ was not something anyone liked to hear from his medicus either.

  At Meryfeld’s insistence, Surgeon Holm was called to bleed the patient, but the sawbones’ expression was bleak by the time the procedure was finished. Unnerved, Potmoor summoned the town’s other medical practitioners – Rougham of Gonville, Lawrence of Winwick Hall and Eyer the apothecary. The physicians asked a number of embarrassingly personal questions, then retreated to consult their astrological tables. When their calculations were complete, more grim looks were exchanged, and the apothecary began to mix ingredients in a bowl, although with such a want of zeal that it was clear he thought he was wasting his time.

  A desperate fear gripped Potmoor at that point, and he ordered his son Hugo to fetch Matthew Bartholomew. Although the most talented of the town’s medici, Potmoor had resisted asking him sooner because he was Stanmore’s brother-in-law. Potmoor did not know the physician well enough to say whether he had taken his kinsman’s side in the quarrel over the wharves, but he had been unwilling to take the chance. Now, thoroughly frightened, he would have accepted help from the Devil himself had it been offered.

  Hugo rode to Cambridge as fast as his stallion would carry him, but heavy rain rendered the roads slick with mud on the way back, and Bartholomew was an abysmal horseman. Hugo was forced to curtail his speed – the physician would be of no use to anyone if he fell off and brained himself – so the return journey took far longer than it should have done.

  They arrived at Chesterton eventually, and the pair hurried into the sickroom. It was eerily quiet. The other medici stood in a silent semicircle by the window, while Potmoor’s henchmen clustered together in mute consternation.

  ‘You are too late,’ said Surgeon Holm spitefully. He did not like Bartholomew, and was maliciously gratified that his colleague had braved the storm for nothing. ‘We did all we could.’

  Hugo’s jaw dropped. ‘My father is dead? No!’

  ‘It is God’s will,’ said Meryfeld gently. ‘We shall help you to lay him out.’

  ‘Or better yet, recommend a suitable woman,’ said Rougham. It was very late, and he wanted to go home.

  ‘But he was perfectly well yesterday,’ wailed Hugo. ‘How can he have died so quickly?’

  ‘People do,’ said Lawrence, an elderly gentleman with white hair and a kindly smile. ‘It happens all the time.’

  ‘How do you know he is dead?’ demanded Hugo. ‘He might just be asleep.’

  ‘He is not breathing,’ explained Meryfeld patiently. ‘His eyes are glazed, he is cold and he is stiff. All these are sure signs that the life has left him.’

  ‘Declare him dead so we can go,’ whispered Rougham to Bartholomew. ‘I know it is wrong to speak ill of the departed, but Potmoor was a vicious brute who terrorised an entire county. There are few who will mourn his passing – other than his equally vile helpmeets and Hugo.’

  Bartholomew stepped towards the bed, but immediately sensed something odd about the body. He examined it briefly, then groped for his smelling salts in the bag he always wore looped over his shoulder.

  ‘Sal ammoniac?’ asked Eyer in surprise, when he saw the little pot of minerals and herbs that he himself had prepared. ‘That will not work, Matt. Not on a corpse.’

  Bartholomew ignored him and waved it under Potmoor’s nose. For a moment, nothing happened. Then Potmoor sneezed, his eyes flew open and he sat bolt upright.

  ‘I have just been in Heaven!’ the felon exclaimed. ‘I saw it quite clearly – angels with harps, bright light, and the face of God himself! Why did you drag me back from such a paradise?’

  ‘That is a good question, Bartholomew,’ muttered Rougham sourly. ‘Why could you not have left him dead?’

  CHAPTER 1

  Cambridge, early October 1358

  It was an inauspicious start for a new College. Geoffrey de Elvesmere of Winwick Hall lay dead in the latrine, sprawled inelegantly with his clothes in disarray around him. Matthew Bartholomew was sorry. Elvesmere had been a fastidious, private man, who would have hated the indignity of the spectacle he was providing – three of his colleagues had come to gawp while his body was being inspected. Establishing why he had died was a task that fell to Bartholomew, who was not only a physician and a Doctor of Medicine at Michaelhouse, but also the University’s Corpse Examiner – the man responsible for providing official cause of death for any scholar who shed the mortal coil.

  ‘Our first fatality,’ sighed Provost William Illesy. He was tall, suave, sly-eyed and wore more rings than was practical for a mere eight fingers and two thumbs. ‘I knew we would lose members eventually, but I was not expecting it to be quite so soon.’

  ‘It will look bad in our records,’ agreed a small, sharp-faced Fellow named Ratclyf. His expression turned thoughtful. ‘So perhaps we should pretend he never enrolled. Officially, we are not part of the University until term starts next week, so there is no reason why—’

  ‘You do not mean that,’ interrupted the last of the trio sharply. Master Lawrence was unusual in that he was not only a medicus, but a lawyer as well. His long white hair and matching beard made him distinctive, and although he had not been in Cambridge long, he was already noted for his compassion and sweetness of manner. ‘It is shock speaking. Elvesmere was a lovely man, and we should be proud to count him as a colleague.’

  Bartholomew kept his eyes on the corpse, lest Lawrence should read the disbelief in his face. He had only met Elvesmere twice, but had considered him rude, officious and haughty. A long way from being ‘lovely’ in any respect.

  ‘I suppose he suffered a seizure,’ mused Illesy. ‘He was very excited about the beginning of term ceremony, and I said only last night that he should calm himself.’

  Bartholomew blinked. ‘What ceremony? There is nothing to mark the occasion except a long queue to sign the register and a short service in St Mary the Great.’

  ‘This year will be different, because of us,’ explained Ratclyf smugly. ‘We are to be formally incorporated into the University, so there will be a grand procession.’

  But Bartholomew’s attention had returned to the body, and he was no longer listening. Elvesmere was in an odd position, one he was sure the man could not have managed by himself. ‘Has he been moved?’

  ‘No,’ replied Illesy, pursing his lips in disapproval. ‘Although he should have been. It is disrespectful for an outsider like you to see him in such an embarrassing situation.’

  ‘But Lawrence would not let us,’ added Ratclyf, treating his colleague to a cool glance. ‘Even though we are not quite members of the University, he said its Corpse Examiner would still need to inspect Elvesmere in situ.’

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p; There was a distinct sneer in Ratclyf’s voice as he spoke Bartholomew’s title, but the physician chose to ignore it. The post had been created by the Senior Proctor as a way to secure help with the many suspicious deaths that occurred in the town – when Brother Michael had first started calling on his expertise, Bartholomew had vehemently objected, feeling his duty lay with the living. Now he earned three pennies for every case, he was happy to oblige, as he needed the money to supply medicine for his enormous practice of paupers.

  There was another reason why his objections had diminished, too: familiarity with cadavers had taught him that there was much to be learned from them. He felt this knowledge made him a better physician, and he was sorry the study of anatomy was frowned upon in England. He had watched several dissections at the University in Salerno, and it was obvious to him that they should form part of every medicus’s training.

  ‘Lawrence doubtless hopes that you will do for Elvesmere what you did for Potmoor,’ Ratclyf went on. ‘Namely raise him from the dead.’

  ‘Potmoor was not dead,’ said Bartholomew shortly. Reviving such an infamous criminal had earned him almost universal condemnation, and he was tired of people berating him for it. ‘He would have woken on his own eventually.’

  ‘So you say,’ harrumphed Ratclyf. ‘But you should have let him—’

  ‘Enough, Ratclyf,’ interrupted Provost Illesy irritably. ‘Potmoor has been very generous to our new College, and it is ungracious to cast aspersions on the way he earns his living.’

  ‘I am not casting aspersions on him, I am casting them on Bartholomew. If he had not used magic potions, Potmoor would have stayed dead. It was witchcraft that brought him back.’

  ‘Actually, it was smelling salts,’ corrected Lawrence with one of his genial smiles. ‘We call them sal ammoniac. Like me, Matthew buys them from Eyer the apothecary, whose shop is next door.’ He gestured down the High Street with an amiable wave.

  ‘Well, he should have left them in his bag,’ grumbled Ratclyf. ‘Potmoor might give us princely donations, but that does not make him respectable. It was God’s will that he should perish that night, and Bartholomew had no right to interfere.’

  ‘Certain ailments produce corpse-like symptoms,’ began Bartholomew. He knew he was wasting his time by trying to explain, just as he had with the many others who had demanded to know what he thought he had been doing. ‘One is catalepsia, which is rare but fairly well documented. Potmoor was suffering from that.’

  ‘I came across a case once,’ said Lawrence conversationally. ‘In a page of Queen Isabella’s. They were lowering him into his grave, when he started banging on the lid of his coffin.’

  ‘Yes, but he was not a vicious criminal,’ sniffed Ratclyf. ‘Bartholomew should have found a way to keep Potmoor dead.’

  Bartholomew disliked people thinking that physicians had the right to decide their patients’ fates. ‘I swore an oath to—’

  ‘You saved one of the greatest scoundrels who ever lived,’ interrupted Ratclyf. ‘And if that is not bad enough, Potmoor believes that his glimpse of Heaven means he is favoured by God. Now his wickedness will know no bounds.’

  ‘How can you call him wicked when he gave us money to build a buttress when our hall developed that worrying crack last week?’ asked Illesy reproachfully. ‘There is much good in him.’

  ‘You would think so,’ sneered Ratclyf. ‘You were his favourite lawyer, and it was your skill that kept him out of prison for so many years.’

  ‘How dare you!’ flashed Illesy, irritated at last by his Fellow’s bile. ‘You had better watch your tongue if you want to continue being a Fellow here.’

  Bartholomew was embarrassed. Most halls kept their spats private, and he did not like witnessing rifts in Winwick. Lawrence saw it, and hastened to change the subject.

  ‘I was probably the last person to see Elvesmere alive,’ he told his fellow physician. ‘It was late last night. He said he felt unwell, so I made him a tonic. He was not in his room when I visited at dawn, so I assumed he was better and had gone to church, but I found him here a little later.’

  ‘He is cold and stiff,’ remarked Bartholomew. ‘Which means he probably died hours ago. Why was he not discovered sooner? Latrines are seldom empty for long, even at night.’

  ‘Because no one uses this one except him and me,’ explained Lawrence. ‘The seats are not fixed yet, you see, and have a nasty habit of tipping sideways when you least expect it.’

  ‘The rest of us prefer the safety of a bucket behind the kitchen,’ elaborated Ratclyf. He addressed his Provost archly. ‘Do you think Potmoor will pay to remedy that problem, or is it beneath his dignity as a member of the Guild of Saints and an upright citizen?’

  ‘Is something wrong, Bartholomew?’ asked Lawrence quickly, thus preventing the Provost from making a tart reply. ‘You seem puzzled.’

  ‘I am. You say Elvesmere has not been moved, yet I doubt he died in this position.’

  ‘He must have done,’ said Illesy. ‘You heard Lawrence: he and Elvesmere are the only ones who ever come here. And Lawrence is the one who insisted that nothing be touched until you came, so you can be sure that he has not rearranged anything.’

  ‘His position looks natural to me,’ said Lawrence, frowning. ‘The fatal seizure caused him to snatch at his clothes in his final agony, which is why they are awry.’

  ‘His final agony was not the result of a seizure,’ said Bartholomew. He eased the body forward to reveal a dark patch of red. ‘It was because he was stabbed.’

  Provost Illesy turned so pale after Bartholomew’s announcement that the physician was afraid he might faint, so he asked Lawrence to take him somewhere to sit down. Then, with Ratclyf watching his every move with discomfiting intensity, he finished his examination. Afterwards, they wrapped the body and carried it to St Mary the Great, where it would lie until it was buried.

  ‘Come to our parlura and tell us what you have deduced,’ instructed Ratclyf, once they were outside. A parlura, or place to talk, was Winwick Hall’s name for the Fellows’ common room; other Colleges used the rather less pretentious term ‘conclave’. ‘It is only right that we should hear your conclusions before you report them to the Senior Proctor.’

  Bartholomew was frantically busy. He had more patients than he could properly manage, and if he did not prepare lectures, reading lists and exercises for his students before the beginning of term, he would sink beneath the demands of a ridiculously heavy teaching load. Moreover, his sister was still in mourning, so any free moments he did have were spent with her. Thus he did not have time to linger in Winwick Hall. Yet he knew he would want details, if one of his colleagues had been murdered, so he nodded assent and followed Ratclyf across the yard.

  He looked around him as he went, studying for the first time the place that would soon become the University’s latest addition. Like all Cambridge Colleges, it was protected by high walls and a stalwart gatehouse. Set in the exact centre of the enclosure was the hall. This was a magnificent building on three floors, perfectly symmetrical, with a large arched doorway in the middle. The ground floor comprised the parlura to the left, and a library to the right. The first floor was a huge room for teaching and dining, with imposing oriel windows and a hearth at either end, while the top floor was a spacious dormitory for students.

  In addition to the hall, Winwick boasted living quarters for the Provost and his Fellows, a kitchen block with accommodation for servants, several stables, and sheds for storage. Most were new, and workmen still swarmed over the parts that were not quite completed. Some of the labourers were Bartholomew’s patients, and nearly all had called on him to tend cuts, bruises and even broken bones as a result of the speed with which the founder had compelled them to work.

  ‘I hear Brother Michael is no further forward with solving the murder of his Junior Proctor,’ said Ratclyf as they walked. ‘Why should we trust him to keep us safe, when he cannot catch his own deputy’s killer? Personally, I think he s
hould resign.’

  ‘It only happened two weeks ago,’ objected Bartholomew. ‘Give him time.’

  ‘Yet I cannot say I was surprised when Felbrigge was shot,’ Ratclyf went on. ‘He antagonised not only half the University with his hubris, but most of the town, too.’

  ‘You exaggerate,’ said Bartholomew curtly. He had not particularly liked Felbrigge, but he detested gossip, especially from someone like Ratclyf, who was hardly a paragon of virtue himself.

  ‘I do not! And had he lived, there would have been trouble. He had a heavy hand with students, and they would have rebelled. Michael is well rid of him.’

  ‘How many pupils have enrolled at Winwick Hall?’ asked Bartholomew, pointedly changing the subject to something less contentious.

  ‘Twelve. But we shall have ten times that number by the beginning of term. Men flock to apply for places, and I anticipate that we shall be bursting at the seams in no time at all.’

  Bartholomew was sure of it, as the town was currently full of men who had come in the hope of being offered a place. It was always a dangerous time of year, because the applicants did not officially become students until they had matriculated – registered with a College or a hostel – and so were outside the University’s jurisdiction. Ergo, there was nothing the Senior Proctor or his beadles could do about their boisterous high spirits, and the town resented them. Affrays were frequent and sometimes serious.

  The discussion ended as Ratclyf led the way into the parlura, a pleasant chamber that smelled of wet plaster and new wood. Its walls were plain, still to be covered with tapestries or murals, and its floorboards had not yet been stained or waxed. When it was finished, it would be a delightful place to sit of an evening.