Susanna GREGORY - An Order for Death

‘Lord!’ muttered Michael as he looked from the gloating features of the diminutive Prior to the calm gazes of the six student-friars who were protesting their innocence. ‘What a mess! I do not know whom to believe.’

‘Well, I do not believe any of them,’ said Bartholomew firmly. ‘I know what I saw.’

‘You are right,’ agreed Michael. ‘So we will arrest the whole lot of them and talk about this in the proctors’ cells – that should make them reconsider their stories and their lies and the threats they made to you.’

‘You should take a horse, Matt,’ said Michael, watching critically as Bartholomew prepared to visit his sister in her husband’s country manor the following evening.

Bartholomew grabbed his warmest winter cloak and swung it around his shoulders. The pale spring sun that had cheered the town at dawn had long since slipped behind a bank of dense clouds, and a bitter wind had picked up. Now, as evening fell, it promised to be a miserable night, with wind and rain in the offing. Bartholomew did not feel like going out, but he had promised his sister he would be there. He would have gone earlier, but had been obliged to spend most of the afternoon tending the Dominican Precentor, Kyrkeby, whose frail heart and imminent lecture were making him breathless and feverish. Normally, Kyrkeby was a compliant and grateful patient, but that day he was agitated and moody, oscillating between angry defiance of the Carmelites and frightened tearfulness when he talked about the lecture that loomed on his horizon.

‘I am pleased you plan to sleep at Trumpington tonight and not return here,’ Michael continued, when the physician did not reply. ‘But you should not walk there alone at this time of the day. You would be wise to take someone with you.’

‘Cynric has promised to escort his wife to the vigil in St Mary’s Church tonight,’ said Bartholomew, referring to his faithful book-bearer. ‘I cannot ask him to come with me.’

‘Ask me, then,’ offered Michael generously. ‘Years of wrestling with recalcitrant undergraduates have honed my fighting skills, so that I am more than a match for most would-be robbers. I can protect you almost as well as Cynric.’

‘But you have a murder to investigate,’ Bartholomew pointed out. ‘And anyway, I imagine you are also expected to take part in a vigil tonight. You are a monk after all, and Easter Week is an important time for clerics.’

‘The Benedictines at Ely Hall plan to keep vigil in St Botolph’s Church,’ replied Michael, slightly disapproving. ‘But so do the Carmelites, and I do not want to spend an entire night yelling at the top of my lungs in a futile attempt to make the prayers of a few Benedictines heard over four dozen bawling White Friars.’

‘If the Orders confined their rivalries to who can shout the loudest prayers, Cambridge would be a nicer place in which to live,’ said Bartholomew fervently. ‘Then I would have been treating Faricius for a sore throat, rather than a fatal stab wound.’

‘And I would not be thinking about how to solve the mystery surrounding his death: a man whose Prior swears he did not leave the friary and whose apparent killers claim he was already stabbed when they found him.’

‘I suppose the Dominicans could be telling the truth,’ said Bartholomew uncertainly. ‘I did not actually see them stab him. But they certainly intended mischief when I caught them: they were advancing on him with undisguised menace as he lay helpless, and I am sure they planned to make a quick end of him.’

Michael agreed. ‘Those student-friars we met yesterday – Horneby, Lynne and Bulmer – are the kind of men who turn small disputes between the Orders into violence. They are the younger sons of minor noblemen, who have been dispatched to the religious Orders to make their own fortunes in the world because they cannot expect an inheritance.’

‘Like you?’ asked Bartholomew, aware of Michael’s own noble connections.

Michael regarded him coolly. ‘In a sense, although I would hardly describe my family as minor. They are a powerful force in Norfolk. But lads like Horneby, Lynne and Bulmer are sent to Cambridge to form alliances with other men destined for high posts in the Church–’

‘Not to study and receive an education?’ interrupted Bartholomew. ‘This is a University, Brother. It is a place of learning, not somewhere to develop business connections.’

‘Do not be ridiculous, Matt,’ said Michael dismissively. ‘Many of these friars only stay for a term or two. How much learning do you imagine they absorb in that time?’

Bartholomew sighed heavily. ‘Not all scholars are ambitious power-mongers, here only to further their careers.’

‘No,’ admitted Michael, after a moment of thought. ‘There are exceptions, and you are one of them. The Benedictines at Ely Hall are also a sober group of men.’

‘And there are others,’ persisted Bartholomew. ‘In our own College, Master Kenyngham is devoted to his teaching, and even Father William never misses a lecture.’

‘But things are different in the friaries, Matt. The Orders are legally obliged to send one in ten of their number to Oxford or Cambridge, and the men who come are not necessarily endowed with a desire to learn. They see their time here as an opportunity to escape the rigours of living as priests, and to engage in the kind of fighting that most young men love. And that is what they are – young men – for all their habits and their cowls.’

‘They certainly behaved like undisciplined louts two days ago,’ said Bartholomew, thinking of the six Dominicans clustered around the injured Faricius, and of their sneering threats when he had driven them off.

Michael seemed to read his thoughts. ‘I mean no disrespect, Matt, but had Bulmer and his cronies genuinely intended to kill Faricius, you would not have been able to stop them. If Cynric had been there, it would have been a different matter, but you were alone. And there is another thing that worries me, too.’

‘What?’

‘They all readily identified themselves. Murder is a serious offence: would they have leapt to their feet so willingly if they really had killed Faricius?’

‘They knew I would identify them anyway,’ said Bartholomew doubtfully. ‘It would have done them no good to deny it.’

‘They did not know that for certain. And if all had denied encountering you, it would have been the word of six friars against a lone physician, who had half his attention on a patient who was bleeding to death.’

‘Then do you think they are telling the truth: that they saw a wounded enemy and did not know he was so seriously injured?’

Michael shook his head slowly. ‘I do not know. Perhaps one of the six struck the fatal blow, and the others merely saw a wounded Carmelite. Then, when you came along, they decided that it was not worth a battering from your forceps and they let you both go.’

‘So, how will you discover which of them was responsible?’ asked Bartholomew. ‘Will you interview them all separately?’

‘Already done,’ replied Michael. ‘Walcote and I had them in the proctors’ cells yesterday and today. They all said the same thing: they admitted that they were out looking for trouble, but maintained that when they found Faricius he was already bleeding. You did not actually see them stab him, and so there is insufficient evidence to charge them with his murder. I was forced to release them.’

‘Then what do you think happened? Do you think one of Faricius’s own Order harmed him?’ asked Bartholomew, thinking about the peculiar story spun by Lincolne and his students that Faricius could not have left the friary.

Michael scratched his chin, fingernails rasping on two days’ growth of bristles. ‘It is odd. On the one hand, we have Prior and friends certain that an exit from the friary was impossible and that Faricius was inside; on the other we have the very real evidence of his corpse outside it. I cannot decide what the truth is.’