Susanna Gregory: A Wicked Deed

‘God sent a terrible plague to warn us against the deadly sin of greed,’ William ranted on, ‘yet every monk in the country still hankers after power and wealth. Michaelhouse’s interests would not be secure with only monks to watch over them.’

Monks and friars were invariably at loggerheads — friars denounced the contemplative lives of monks as selfish and cosseted, and monks objected to friars working in the community and involving themselves in human affairs. William despised the avaricious Alcote, and did not approve of Michael’s growing influence in the University; in turn, Alcote was repelled by William’s grimy, unkempt appearance, and Michael had no time at all for the friar’s bigotry.

‘God did not send the plague,’ said Bartholomew, to avert a row. ‘It just happened.’

There was a shocked silence, during which Bartholomew received a sharp kick from Michael. With a sinking heart, the physician realised that, far from preventing an argument, he had just managed to precipitate one. William drew himself up to his full height, almost losing the donkey from underneath him as he did so.

‘Are you suggesting that God is not all-powerful?’ he demanded hotly. ‘Do you propose that other agents are equally able to cause such devastation in the world?’

‘It seems to me that is exactly what he is suggesting,’ said Alcote, as keen to promote dissent as Bartholomew was to stop it. ‘He is a heretic!’

‘He is nothing of the kind,’ said Michael before Bartholomew could say anything in his own defence and make matters worse. ‘And now is not the time for theological debate: we have arrived.’

So engrossed had they been in bickering that they had entered the village before realising they had done so. It was tiny, comprising no more than two parallel rows of shacks bordering the path. Behind the houses was the village church, a small, low building that squatted on its rise almost malevolently. Its glassless windows were dark slits in grey walls, and there was ivy growing up the tower. The village was as silent and as unsettling as the grave.

‘This must be Barchester, not Grundisburgh,’ said Bartholomew, looking around at the lonely houses and overgrown gardens. ‘The taverner told me about Barchester this morning. Apparently, only one of its inhabitants survived the plague, but she drowned herself in the river last winter. It has been abandoned ever since.’

‘Is that her?’ asked Deynman in an unsteady voice. Bartholomew looked to the house where the student was pointing and saw an expanse of skirt with a shoe at the end of it, just visible under the cracked piece of leather that served as a door. The physician dismounted and took a step forward.

‘No!’ cried Michael suddenly, his voice shockingly loud in the silent village. He grabbed Bartholomew’s shoulder. ‘The Death may still lurk in this place, Matt. Leave her! If she drowned herself last winter, you can do nothing to help her now.’

‘It cannot be the woman who drowned,’ said Bartholomew reasonably. ‘How could she have moved here from the river, if she were dead?’

His colleagues, to a man, crossed themselves vigorously.

‘I have heard of these places,’ said Cynric, looking around him uneasily. ‘The spirits of those not granted absolution haunt them, and their screams of torment ring out each midnight.’

‘That is superstitious nonsense, Cynric,’ said Bartholomew firmly, refusing to allow his book-bearer’s vivid imagination to unnerve him.

‘It is truth, boy,’ said Cynric with conviction. ‘If you were to come here at the witching hour, you would hear them.’

‘Well, that is no tormented spirit,’ said Bartholomew, nodding at the bundle of clothing in the doorway. ‘But it may be someone needing help.’

‘I do not like this at all,’ said Alcote, looking around him as though he expected to see the plague-dead rising up and rushing out of their houses to lay ghostly hands on him. ‘It is sinister!’

Bartholomew handed the reins of his horse to Cynric, and walked through the nettles and weeds to the house where the skirt and shoe lay.

Aware that Michael was right, and that the house might still contain the decomposing bodies of unburied plague victims, Bartholomew picked up a stick, and used it to ease back the piece of leather that hung in the doorway. He gave a sigh of relief when he saw the skirt and shoe were nothing more than that — discarded clothes that had fallen in such a way as to appear as though someone was inside them.

As the daylight filtered into the house’s single room, Bartholomew noticed it was surprisingly intact for a place that had been abandoned four years before. But, he thought, as he looked around, perhaps it had belonged to the woman who had killed herself, and had therefore only been left to decay for a few months. There was a table in the centre of the room with some carrots on it, black and shrivelled and with a knife lying next to them, as if their owner had been preparing a meal before she left, never to return. Cold, dead ashes lay in the hearth, stirring slightly in the draught from the doorway, and a rusting metal pot nestled among them.

Something glittered on the ground near the threshold, and Bartholomew crouched to look at it. It was a shiny new penny, still copper-bright from the mint, and not the dull brown of most of the coins of the realm. He turned it over in his fingers, and saw the date was that of the current year — 1353.

Bartholomew was puzzled. Coins did not remain clean for long, and he could only suppose that someone had dropped it recently. He turned his attention to the skirt and shoe. Both were free of dust and leaves, and the skirt was relatively clean. Neither could have been there for more than a few days at the most. He stood up. Doubtless some passer-by had dumped the old clothes there, and dropped the penny at the same time. Regardless, it was nothing to warrant him wasting any more of his time, and certainly no one needed his medical skills.

He made his way back to where his colleagues waited for him. Alcote moved away as he approached, holding a large pomander to his nose. It was not the first time the pomander had made its appearance on the journey: Alcote was terrified of the plague returning, and he invariably had the thing clasped to his face the moment they entered a village or a town. It was stuffed with cloves, bayleaves, wormwood and — if the students were to be believed — a little gold dust mixed with dried grasshoppers. Alcote had used it during the pestilence, and attributed his survival to its efficacy, although Bartholomew suspected that him locking himself away in his room had more to do with his escaping the sickness than the mysterious assortment of ingredients in the now-filthy pomander.

‘There was nothing there,’ he said in answer to his colleagues’ anxious looks.

‘Was the hovel full of skeletons?’ whispered Deynman fearfully. ‘Victims of the plague?’

Bartholomew shook his head. ‘No, just some old clothes.’

Michael looked at the skirt and shuddered, memories of the plague in Cambridge surging back to him. There were villages all over England like Barchester, where the plague had struck particularly hard, either killing every inhabitant or driving the few survivors away to seek homes elsewhere. To Michael, the deserted settlements were eerie, haunted places where, as Cynric had suggested, he imagined he might hear the cries of the dead echoing from their hastily dug graves if he listened long enough.

‘What was that?’ Unwin exclaimed suddenly.

‘What?’ asked Deynman, twisting in his saddle to look around. ‘I saw nothing.’

‘Something white,’ said Unwin, pointing off into the trees. ‘A massive white dog.’

‘Probably a stray,’ said Bartholomew, mounting his horse with an inelegance that made Michael wince. ‘There have been lots of strays since the plague.’