Susanna Gregory - A Wicked Deed

‘What if-?’ began Bartholomew. He stopped as a screech from above heralded the opening of the trap-door. There was a flood of light, and the rats slunk away into the shadows.

Bartholomew saw Cynric braced to pounce and tensed himself, waiting for an opportunity to launch a bid for escape. It never came. More wary this time, one of the surly men immediately kicked out at Cynric’s hands, and the crossbow quarrel went skittering down the steps to the floor below. Michael let out a cry of dismay, while Cynric only gazed at it in horror.

‘All is ready,’ said Eltisley pleasantly. ‘I would like you to come out, Brother. I have an elixir I would like you to taste. And that Welshman, too. The monk might prove too fat for what I have in mind, but the servant should do nicely. I will save Bartholomew to help me later — I might be forced to call upon his expertise, if this does not work.’

‘What would you say if I told you to try your elixir on yourself?’ asked Michael, as he stepped out of the vault. The landlord seemed surprised by Michael’s hostility.

‘I would say that your students and the friar will test it in your stead. At the moment, I am still prepared to let them return to Michaelhouse.’

‘You do not have them,’ shouted Bartholomew desperately. ‘They have gone away.’

‘To the leper hospital,’ said Eltisley. He beamed at Bartholomew’s shock. ‘I overheard that slow-witted student of yours telling the handsome one where they were headed, as they fled along the Ipswich road yesterday. It was clever of you to try to spirit them away.’

Bartholomew’s heart sank.

‘Well, where are they, then?’ asked Michael.

Eltisley hesitated. ‘They have not arrived at the leper hospital yet.’ He shrugged absently. ‘Perhaps they have been waylaid. Or lost. That stupid student is capable of getting lost on a straight road, I am sure.’

Bartholomew was uncertain whether to be relieved they had escaped Eltisley’s clutches, or concerned that they might have fallen into someone else’s. He could only hope that Horsey had realised the danger they were in, and had come up with an alternative plan.

‘And we will catch that friar, too,’ said Eltisley. ‘He will not be able to hide from me for long.’

Bartholomew was confused. Was William hiding from Eltisley? He did not know that he should, and would be under the impression that Stoate, hastily riding towards Ipswich, was the villain of the piece. So where was William, and what was he doing so that Eltisley could not find him? Bartholomew’s heart sank further when he realised that William, headstrong and keen to prove himself, might have decided to tackle Stoate alone. Perhaps he was even now pursuing the killer physician on horseback, or had confronted him and was lying in some roadside bush with a crossbow quarrel in him.

Eltisley’s attention was on Michael. ‘I have been working on a rather clever idea that you will test for me. You see, not everyone likes the time in which they live, so I have invented a potion that kills temporarily. Then, at a later date, my other elixir — the one that raises people from the dead — can be taken, and the person can be restored to life at a time of his choosing.’

‘But that is monstrous!’ exclaimed Michael. ‘The time in which we live is the one granted to us by God, and it is not natural to decide you do not like it, and exchange it for another.’

‘People will pay handsomely to do it, monstrous or not,’ said Eltisley, oblivious to Michael’s revulsion. ‘You would be surprised how many men would like to lie low for a few years.’

‘Murderers, thieves, rapists, arsonists and a whole host of other felons, I should imagine,’ said Michael scathingly. ‘You have invented an elixir to allow criminals to evade justice.’

Eltisley’s face hardened. ‘You will take my potion, and you are not a criminal.’

The slab was slammed shut, almost landing on Bartholomew’s head. On reflection, as the physician crouched in the darkness listening to the rustles as the rats began to move again, he decided that having his brains dashed out might be a better way to die than being eaten alive by rodents, or downing one of Eltisley’s hideous concoctions. Michael’s voice echoed down to him, and he strained to hear what was being said.

‘My colleague believes that you killed James Freeman,’ came Michael’s voice conversationally. ‘He thinks you hanged him, so that you could test your potion, and that he was wearing clothes from a bundle you found near the Grundisburgh parish boundary.’

‘He is right,’ said Eltisley. ‘Someone had abandoned those clothes — I found them when I was walking and thinking up new theories as we philosophers are wont to do. Since I needed some for James Freeman — to replace the ones I had bloodied to convince people of his death — I gave them to him, and he wore them when I hanged him at Bond’s Corner. Unfortunately, you chose that moment to cut him down.’

‘My apologies,’ said Michael.

Eltisley made an irritable sound. ‘You have no idea how frustrating it was to watch Bartholomew’s attempts to revive him, when I knew a few drops of my potion would work! But I thought that if I made my appearance from the bushes, you would assume I had hanged him.’

‘You had,’ Michael pointed out.

Bartholomew kicked away a rat that was clawing its way up his leg. It landed with a soggy thump on the floor below.

‘But not with any intention to kill,’ protested Eltisley. ‘He would have been alive today, had you not come by and interfered. Then I was left with a body to dispose of.’

‘Why did you not test your elixir on him after we had gone?’ asked Michael.

Eltisley sighed.’ I did, but that particular elixir was designed to raise people who had only just died, and the delay caused by your meddling meant it did not work.’

Bartholomew knew students who always had an excuse as to why they had not completed some task he had set them, or why an experiment he had asked them to undertake was unsuccessful. It was never their fault; someone else was always to blame. Eltisley was just like them.

‘Then what did you do?’ asked Michael.

‘I could not have James Freeman’s body discovered, or people would be asking me who I had buried in his specially constructed coffin. It was quite a problem for me. Have you ever tried to dispose of a corpse?’

‘Not lately,’ replied Michael.

‘It is no mean task, I can assure you. I tried to burn it, but it smouldered for days and I was still left with a sizeable chunk. I had to chop it into small pieces, and leave it out for Padfoot — although he did not seem to be very interested.’

‘Probably prefers his human corpses raw,’ suggested Michael.

Eltisley continued. ‘Anyway, after he died, I took the clothes off Freeman, donned them along with some potions to disguise my face and went into Grundisburgh church, intending to have a conversation with Walter Wauncy. My ingenious plan was that Wauncy would say he had seen the hanged man alive and well, and your story would be dismissed as fantasy — drunken scholars reeling from a night in the taverns, claiming to find a dead man who was later seen in a church by our priest. Who would question the word of a priest?’

‘But instead of Wauncy, you found Unwin, who was dead,’ said Michael, ‘so you ran away.’

‘I tried to give him some of my potion, but in my excitement at finding a subject so unexpectedly, I spilled it. Vapours wafted into my eyes, and I could barely see what I was doing. I decided to abandon the experiment before someone accused me of a murder I did not commit. I ran away across the fields behind the church, although the shoes were too small: they slopped, and made haste difficult.’