Susanna GREGORY - The Mark of a Murderer

The rest of Dodenho’s quarters was equally a shrine to easy living. Feathers clinging to the rugs on the floor suggested that he and his room-mate pampered themselves with down mattresses, rather than the more usual straw ones. A table held several jugs of wine, and on a tray stood a large plum cake, some cheese and a bowl of nuts.

‘How do you write with the desk so far from the light?’ asked Michael guilelessly.

‘He does not scribe as much as he would have you believe,’ whispered Wormynghalle, amused by the question. ‘But he reads by the window – learns theories that he then claims as his own.’

‘I work better in the gloom,’ pronounced Dodenho with considerable authority. ‘Now, where is my ink? Damn that Wolf! He must have made off with it.’

‘Wolf left on Ascension Day – almost two weeks ago,’ pounced Michael wickedly. ‘Does this mean you have only just noticed you have none left?’

‘Perhaps it was not Wolf,’ blustered Dodenho, caught out. ‘I must have used the last of it committing my mean speed theorem to parchment yesterday.’

‘You mean the one devised by Bradwardine?’ asked Bartholomew, who loved the complex physics entailed in the Mertonian’s theories about distance and motion.

‘I mean the superior one devised by me ,’ snapped Dodenho, striding to what appeared to be a private garderobe and inspecting the shelves. Bartholomew thought it an unlikely place to find ink, and, judging from the grins of Michael and Wormynghalle, so did they. Wormynghalle began to whisper again, taking the opportunity to speak while Dodenho was out of earshot.

‘His plagiarism may deceive uneducated men like Norton, but I do not appreciate him trying to mislead me, too. I am no knuckle-brained courtier, but a man who takes his studies seriously. I find it extremely irritating, and expected a better quality of scholarship from a Cambridge College.’

‘There are plenty of men like Dodenho at Oxford, too,’ objected Michael, conveniently forgetting the fact that he had never been there.

Wormynghalle inclined his head apologetically, aware he had trodden on sensitive toes. ‘I know; I have met them. They are partly why I came here – to be away from boasters and theory-thieves.’

‘You will never escape those,’ said Bartholomew, thinking him naïve to suppose he could.

Wormynghalle smiled. ‘But I have met many brilliant men since I arrived here. I particularly enjoyed your lecture on Grosseteste’s notion that lines, angles and figures of geometry are a useful tool for understanding natural philosophy. Perhaps we could debate that some time?’

‘When?’ asked Bartholomew eagerly. His fatigue miraculously evaporated. ‘Now?’

Wormynghalle indicated Michael with a nod of his head. ‘It had better be later if we do not want to make an enemy of the Senior Proctor. I will set our students an exercise that will keep them occupied, and we can use the time for informal disputation. But you will be here all day if you wait for Dodenho to find his non-existent ink. Come upstairs and I will give you some of mine. I write all the time, and have a plentiful supply.’ He gave Dodenho a disparaging glance and led the way to the floor above.

‘It is much nicer here without Wolf and Hamecotes,’ declared Dodenho, following. ‘I am glad they have gone away on business of their own. I like having a room to myself.’

‘Ah, yes,’ said Michael. ‘Your truant Fellows. Have you heard from them?’

‘I had a letter from Hamecotes today,’ said Wormynghalle, pulling a crumpled missive from the pouch on his belt. ‘He arrived safely in Oxford, and has already bought Gilbertus Angelicus’ Compendium medicinae and William of Pagula’s Oculus sacerdotis for our library.’

He seemed delighted, and Bartholomew supposed that, to an earnest scholar like Wormynghalle, securing books was far more important than staying in College to teach.

‘ I have heard nothing from Wolf, however,’ offered Dodenho. ‘I doubt he is buying books, given how much money he owes the College. I do not miss him or his nasty habit of dropping nutshells all over the floor, where they hurt my bare feet. And Hamecotes has a habit of waking me far too early in the day with his damned pacing. He makes the floorboards creak, right above my head.’

‘He is thinking,’ said Wormynghalle defensively, pausing at the top of the stairs to open a window. The stairwell had the musty, sour odour often associated with places inhabited exclusively by men, even relatively wealthy ones like the scholars of King’s Hall, and Wormynghalle wrinkled his nose fastidiously. ‘He is especially sharp-witted in the mornings, and we always rise early and pass the time in scholarly discourse – and when he thinks, he walks back and forth. All you and Wolf talk about is the quality of College ale.’

‘That is important, too,’ argued Dodenho, watching him struggle with the latch before shoving him out of the way and opening it with brute force. He regarded his young colleague with dislike. ‘At least we can discuss something other than work. You cannot, and it is tedious in the extreme.’

‘I heard you were the victim of a crime recently,’ said Michael to Dodenho, seeing Wormynghalle’s angry look. He did not want to be caught in the middle of a petty row between two men who should have better manners than to bicker in company.

‘What crime?’ demanded Dodenho. ‘Do you mean the time when Hamecotes defamed me, by publicly accusing me of stealing his ideas on the meaning of time?’

‘No,’ said Michael. ‘I mean a theft. Something was stolen from you.’

‘Nothing was stolen,’ said Dodenho, and his face flushed red. ‘I found it again.’

Wormynghalle regarded him in disbelief. ‘You found it? But you stormed around the College for days, accusing people of making off with your astrolabe, and now you say it was not taken after all? Why did you not say so sooner? We have been thinking there was a thief under our roof all this time.’

‘An astrolabe?’ asked Bartholomew, recalling that he had seen such an object in the hands of the tanner at Merton Hall. ‘It was not silver, was it?’

‘Show it to me,’ ordered Michael.

‘I sold it,’ said Dodenho uneasily. ‘It was silver, and therefore too valuable to keep in a place like this, where impecunious students are in and out of our rooms all the time.’

‘A student stole it?’ asked Michael, confused. ‘And then you got it back and sold it?’

‘Yes,’ replied Dodenho. ‘No.’

Michael raised his eyebrows. ‘Well, it must be one or the other. However, I was under the impression that Bailiff Boltone or Eudo might have laid sticky fingers on the thing.’

Dodenho appeared to be bemused. ‘What makes you mention them in particular?’

‘No reason,’ hedged Michael. ‘Why? Do you know them?’

Dodenho seemed to consider his options. ‘A little,’ he replied eventually. ‘I met them once or twice through my friend… through my slight acquaintance , Chesterfelde. But they did not steal my astrolabe. That was students.’ His face took on a grim, stubborn look.

‘Misleading the Senior Proctor is a serious matter,’ said Michael sternly. ‘You would not be lying, would you, Dodenho?’

‘Of course not,’ bleated Dodenho. ‘Why would I do such a thing?’ He gave one of the falsest smiles Michael had ever seen and changed the subject. ‘Now, where is this ink, Wormynghalle?’

He pushed past the younger man and opened the door to an airy chamber where two desks were placed in the windows, to make best use of the light. Bartholomew looked around and saw a neat, functional room, obviously occupied by two people dedicated to academic pursuits. Shelves contained books and scrolls, all carefully stacked, while ink and pens were kept on a windowsill, to avoid accidental spillage that might damage the precious tomes. It was a clean place; Bartholomew could not see so much as a speck of dust anywhere.