Susanna GREGORY - The Lost Abbot

The Sheriff nodded his understanding, then gave a wry smile. ‘And there is a certain satisfaction in putting him in that particular hole.’

Two months before, a silversmith had been interred in St Thomas’s cemetery, amid rumours that he had bought the plot next to it for bits of his favourite jewellery. Oxforde had been digging for them when he had been caught.

So Oxforde was lowered into the pit he himself had made, and the hangman and his lads began to shovel soil on top of him: it landed with a muffled thud. Then there was a different kind of thump, one that caused everyone to start back in alarm. Had it come from inside the coffin?

‘Continue,’ ordered the Sheriff urgently. ‘Quickly now!’

Several onlookers hurried forward to help, flinging great spadefuls of earth down so fast and furiously that even if another sound had emerged, it would not have been heard. They finished by stamping down the mound as hard as they could, and some folk brought heavy stones to pile over the top.

When it was done, the Sheriff breathed a sigh of relief. ‘There! That should hold him.’

The next morning was even more grey and dismal, with clouds so thick that it felt like dusk. Kirwell returned to the grave to petition the saints for the dead man’s soul, although he suspected he was wasting his time: Oxforde’s sins were too great and his victims too many. The prayer was on the table in his house, and he had already been offered a shilling for it. He was inclined to accept, because he did not believe for a moment that selling it would shorten his life.

He dropped to his knees, but his thoughts soon went from his devotions to Oxforde’s scribbles. Perhaps someone might be interested in buying them for a higher price. The notion had no sooner crossed his mind when a shaft of sunlight blazed through the clouds and bathed the grave so intensely that it hurt his eyes. He fell backwards with a cry. And then, just as suddenly, the light vanished, leaving the little cemetery as dark and gloomy as before.

‘Did Oxforde do that?’ asked Botilbrig, running over to help Kirwell to his feet. The youth looked frightened. ‘Because you were nice to him?’

‘I do not know,’ replied Kirwell unsteadily, crossing himself. But one thing was certain. He would not sell the prayer now. Not ever.

Suffolk, Summer 1358

Cambridge and Clare were less than two days’ ride apart, but they could not have been more different. Cambridge was flat, busy, dirty and noisy, while Clare nestled amid gently rolling hills and was a tranquil, orderly village. Both possessed castles and priories, although Clare’s lacked the bustling urgency of Cambridge’s, and were smaller and quieter. But the biggest difference was that Clare had no University – no argumentative, arrogant, opinionated throng that antagonised the locals and was thoroughly resented for it.

Matilde was not sure which of the two she preferred. Clare was her home now, but there were times when she missed Cambridge’s vibrancy. She had fled the University town three years before, certain in the belief that the physician she adored there would never ask her to marry him. Since then, she had found a modicum of peace in Clare. She later learned that she had been mistaken about Matt Bartholomew, and that he had actually intended to put the question to her on the very day that she had left. But by then, of course, it was too late.

Or was it?

Her heart had clamoured at her to dash back and hurl herself into his arms, but that would have been selfish, for it would have deprived him of the two things he loved most: his teaching and his impoverished patients. If he married her, he would have to resign his University post, as scholars were not permitted to wed; and providing for a wife would necessitate exchanging needy clients for ones who could pay.

Staying away after she had discovered that he loved her as much as she loved him was not easy, but it had been the right decision – for him, at least, because the occasional report she received suggested that he was content. But then she heard that another woman had entered his life: Julitta Holm, trapped in a barren marriage to the town’s new surgeon.

The news that he was ready to look elsewhere came as a shock to Matilde, and gradually she began to view her noble sacrifice as rather silly. This was reinforced when she met a wise-woman named Mother Udela, who informed her bluntly that she was a fool to sit back and watch while the only man she had ever really loved gave his heart to someone else. So Matilde started to consider ways in which she and Matt could be together.

The main stumbling block was money. If they had some, he could continue to physick the poor, which would go some way to consoling him for losing his students. As he was unlikely to acquire any on his own – he invariably forgot to collect fees that were owing, and was less interested in wealth than any man Matilde had ever met – she saw it was up to her to secure the necessary fortune. She did not know if it was possible, but she was a resolute woman and the prize was her future happiness, so she was determined to try.

She rode north that very day.

Peterborough, August 1358

Everyone was relieved when the towers and pinnacles of the great Benedictine abbey finally came into view. It had not been an easy journey, and misfortune had dogged them every step of the way – lame horses, flooded roads, accidents and a series of raids by robbers. And as none of the party had wanted to leave Cambridge in the first place, the litany of mishaps had done nothing to soothe ragged tempers.

‘At last!’ breathed Ralph de Langelee. ‘I thought we would never arrive.’

‘I told you we should not have come,’ said Father William, an unsavoury Franciscan who wore a filthy habit and whose thick hair sprouted in oily clumps around an untidy tonsure. ‘It is hundreds of miles across dangerous country, and we are lucky to be alive.’

‘It is not hundreds of miles,’ countered Matthew Bartholomew, gripping the reins of his horse with fierce concentration. He was not a good rider, and had fallen off twice since the journey began; he was determined it would not happen again. ‘It is less than forty.’

William only sniffed, declining to acknowledge that he might be wrong. Bartholomew did not blame him for thinking the distance greater than it was, when a journey that should have taken no more than two or three days had extended to almost a fortnight. He glanced at his companions.

Langelee was in charge, not only because he was Master of Michaelhouse, the Cambridge College to which they all belonged, but because he had been a soldier before embarking on an academic career, and so knew what to do in the kinds of crises that had plagued them. Most of the University thought he should have stuck to warfare, because he was patently unsuited to scholarship, and his classes had a tendency to slide off into discussions about camp-ball, his favourite sport. But he was a just and fair leader, and his Fellows were content with his rule. Or they had been before he had decided that some of them should visit Peterborough.

There were seven Fellows in his College, and he had picked three of them to travel with him, while a fourth had been ordered to go by no less a person than the Bishop of Lincoln. As all had hoped to spend the summer recovering from the rigours of an unusually frantic Easter Term, not to mention preparing work for the next academic year, the decision to drag them away had been unpopular, to say the least.

‘I do not see why I had to come to this godforsaken place,’ grumbled William, glaring at the monastery with dislike. ‘I will be unwelcome here – the Black Monks will mock me and make me feel uncomfortable. And they have no right, because everyone knows that the Franciscan Order is the only one God really likes.’