A Plague on Both Your Houses (28 page)

to hear. ‘No,’ he said. ‘He will die before the night is over.’

Michael looked over at Wilson’s still figure. ‘Why

did he burn the College accounts?’ he asked.

‘Evidence of payments to people he wished kept

secret?’ mused Bartholomew, without really considering the implications.

‘Such payments would not be written down,’

Michael said scathingly. ‘They would come out of a

separate account, the records of which any sensible

master would keep only in his head. These accounts,’

he continued, waving a fistful of charred parchment in the air, scattering tiny cinders, ‘are nothing. They are only records of the College’s finances. There is nothing here to warrant burning!’

Bartholomew shrugged, and turned his attention

to his patient. He guessed Michael had expected to find some documents relating to this miserable University

business. Wilson lay quietly, and Bartholomew moistened his lips with the few drops of water remaining at the

bottom of the pitcher. He placed a clean piece of linen over Wilson’s burned legs, but saw no point in putting him through painful treatment when he was going

to die in a few hours. If he regained consciousness,

Bartholomew could give him medicine that would dull

his senses.

Since Gray was still busy dispersing the curious

scholars, Bartholomew went to his storeroom to fetch

the medicine himself. Recently, he had rarely needed to use such powerful potions - he did not use it for victims of the plague because it tended to make them vomit.

He kept all such medicines in a small, locked chest at the back of the room and usually carried the key on

his belt. He took it now, and leaned down impatiently

when it would not fit. He turned the small chest to the light and looked in horror.

The lock on the chest was broken. Someone had

prised it off completely. With a feeling of sick dread, Bartholomew opened the box and looked inside. He

kept a very careful written record of these medicines, with dates, times, and amounts used. Most of the

potions were still there, with one glaring exception.

Bartholomew looked in shock at the near-empty bottle

where the concentrated opiate had been. Was this what

had been used to kill Aelfrith? There was certainly

enough missing to kill.

Bartholomew leaned over the chest, feeling sick. Was all this never going to end? Had Wilson sneaked down to Bartholomew’s room in the depths of some

night to steal poison with which to kill Aelfrith? If

Wilson were the murderer, he did not have long to

wait before he was judged for it. Feeling appalled at

the pointlessness of it all, he put a few grains of the remaining white powder in a spare bottle, marked it

down in his record book, and returned to Wilson.

He told Gray to find another chest in which to

lock the poisons and sat next to Wilson. Michael went

to fetch the accoutrements he needed to give Wilson

last rites.

Bartholomew dipped a corner of a cloth into some

water, and wiped Wilson’s face with it. He noted that

even on his deathbed, Wilson still managed to look

pompous. Bartholomew tried to stop himself thinking

such uncharitable thoughts, and wiped Wilson’s face

again; to his shock, Wilson opened his eyes.

‘Rest now, Master Wilson,’ he said, trying not to

think about whether the man had murdered Aelfrith.

‘Try to sleep.’

‘Soon, I will sleep all too much,’ came the whispered

reply. ‘Do not try to fool me, Physician. I know I have only a short while left.’

Bartholomew did not argue. He rubbed the soaking

end of the cloth over Wilson’s parched lips, and reached for the medicine that might give him some relief. Wilson’s white hand flapped about pathetically.

‘No! I want none of your medicines!’ he grated. “I

have things I must say.’

‘Brother Michael will be here soon,’ Bartholomew

said, putting the stopper back on the bottle. ‘You can make your confession to him.’

“I do not want to talk to him,’ said Wilson, his voice growing stronger as he spoke. “I have things I want to say to you alone.’

Bartholomew felt the hair on the back of his

neck rise, and he wondered whether Wilson was

about to confess to murder. Wilson’s hand flapped

again, and enveloped one of Bartholomew’s. The

Physician felt revulsion, but did not pull his hand

away.

‘It was me,’ said Wilson. “I fought with you in the

dark on the night of Augustus’s death. It was me who

pushed you down the stairs.’

Bartholomew snatched his hand back. ‘Then it was

also you who murdered Brother Paul!’ he said. ‘Poor

Brother Paul! Murdered while he lay defenceless on his pallet bed!’

Wilson gave an awful grimace that Bartholomew

took to be a smile. ‘No! You have that wrong, Physician.

You always were poor at logic. Listen to me and learn.’

Bartholomew gritted his teeth so that he would not

allow his distaste for the lawyer to show.

Wilson continued wheezily. ‘After I left the feast, I

went back to the room I shared with Alcote. We talked

for a while, and he went to sleep, as we told the Bishop the next day. But I did not sleep. Alcote was almost

senseless with the amount of wine he had drunk. It was a simple thing to slip out of the room once it began to ring with his drunken snores. He woke only when Alexander

came to fetch us when you had raised the alarm, and by then I was back in my bed. There was my alibi!’

He stopped speaking, and lay with his eyes closed,

breathing heavily. After a few moments, Wilson opened

his eyes again, and fixed Bartholomew with an unpleasant stare.

“I allowed quite some time to pass before I went

to Augustus’s room that night,’ he continued, his voice weaker than before. “I was going to send Aelfrith away and offer to pray for Augustus until dawn. I went up the stairs, but saw that Augustus’s room had been ransacked, and that he was gone. Aelfrith was unconscious on the

floor. The shutters were open, and in the light from

outside, I could see that there was an irregularity in the wooden floor. It is doubtful I ever would have noticed it in ordinary light. I closed the shutters and had just prised up the board, when you came. We fought, and

you lost.’

He paused, coughing weakly. Bartholomew wiped

away a thin trail of blood that dribbled from his mouth and thought back to that struggle. Wilson, like Michael, was flabby, and was well-endowed with chins, but that did not mean to say he was also weak. If Wilson had been

desperate and panic-stricken, Bartholomew believed he

could have been overpowered by him.

“I assume your intention in going to Augustus’s

room was not to pray?’ asked Bartholomew.

Wilson sneered. ‘Damn right it was not to pray!

I wanted to find the seal. I am certain that whoever

murdered Sir John did not get it from his body.’

Bartholomew caught his breath. ‘You say Sir John

was murdered?’

Wilson sneered again. ‘Of course he was! He was

killed for the seal he always carried, and without which no further messages would come from his contact in

Oxford. It was imperative I found that seal. I saw it

round his neck as he went for dinner the night of his

death. The way in which his body was dressed indicated that it had not been round his neck when he died, or his murderers would not have bothered taking his clothes

- they would merely have thrown his body into the mill stream. No murderer stays too long at the site of his

crime,’ he said with a superior smile.

‘The only place Sir John went between dinner and

when he left College for the last time was to see Augustus,’

Wilson continued. ‘So, the seal had to be in Augustus’s room. When you told me he had died, I decided to look

for the seal before someone else did.’

‘But you did not find it,’ said Bartholomew. He

thought of Augustus’s senile ramblings the afternoon

before the feast, exhorting John Babington to ‘hide it well’. If Sir John had not hidden the wretched seal as well as he apparently had, Augustus, Paul, and Montfitchet

might still be alive.

“I did not,’ said Wilson. “I had just felt about in the small hole in the floorboards when you came blundering in. But,’ he continued, fastening a cold, but sweaty, hand round Bartholomew’s wrist, “I did not hit Aelfrith, I did not drug the wine, and I did not kill Paul.’ He looked at Bartholomew. “I also do not know what happened to

Augustus, although I do not believe he was responsible for the happenings that night. The poor old fool was far too senile to have effected such a well-considered plan.’

‘Well-considered?’ said Bartholomew in disgust.

‘You call the murder of Paul and Montfitchet well

considered?’

Wilson ignored him and lay silent for a while.

‘So how did you escape?’ asked Bartholomew after

a while. ‘You did not pass me on the stairs.’

‘You are observant, Master Physician,’ said Wilson

facetiously. ‘Had you looked up instead of down, you

may have noticed where I was, although I doubt it,

for it is very cunningly concealed. The south wing of

Michaelhouse was designed with two trap-doors in the

ceilings of the upper floor. It is a secret passed on from Master to Master should the need ever arise for him to listen to the plottings of his fellows.’

‘Sir John died before you became Master. How did

you find out about this?’

‘The day the Chancellor told me I was to be Master,

he gave me various documents locked in a small chest.

I had to return the box to him immediately after I had read the documents, lest I die without passing certain information to my successor. Reference to these secret doors was included with a stricture that only Masters

should be informed of their presence. I immediately

went to Augustus’s room to look for one of them.

He watched me, but did not understand what I was

doing.’

‘Who else knows about these trap-doors?’

‘When you know that, you will know the murderer.’

Bartholomew’s mind began to mull through this

information. Wilson’s callous dismissal of Augustus

had probably brought about his death. Augustus had

very possibly babbled to someone else, in one of his

senile ramblings, about the trap-door he had watched

Wilson uncover, and had thus endangered himself.

So, who might he have told? Evidently not Aelfrith

or he would have guessed where his attacker might

have hidden himself, and would not have searched

with Bartholomew. Was it Michael? Or another

Fellow?

Wilson watched him trying to reason the muddle

out, his expression smug, as if Bartholomew were one

of his students trying to resolve some legal point for which there was no solution. He continued. ‘All I had

to do once I had pushed you down the stairs was to

stand on the window-sill, and pull myself through the

opening. I could hear you looking for me and knew you

would never be able to spot the trap-door, especially in the poor light. Whoever killed Paul and took Augustus

evidently also knew about the trap-doors.’

Bartholomew sat back and thought. It made sense.

As Aelfrith had prayed over Augustus, the murderer had slipped through the trap-door- or perhaps even dropped something on the friar - and knocked him senseless.

The wine was drugged, and Paul murdered so that the

commoners would know nothing about what was going

on. A search of the room was made, but, not finding the seal, and perhaps hearing Wilson coming, the murderer

took Augustus’s body through the trap-door to hide it.

‘But why steal a body?’ asked Bartholomew, still

thwarted in his attempt to make sense of the new

information.

Wilson sighed. ‘You are intractable, Physician. It

would not take long to search a corpse, and so the

answer is obvious. Augustus was alive, and was taken

so that he would reveal where the seal was hidden to

the murderer!’

Bartholomew shook his head. ‘Augustus was dead,

Master Wilson. He was probably murdered too.’

‘Rubbish,’ said Wilson dismissively. ‘He was alive.

Why would anyone wish to steal a corpse? Think,

man! Your supposition that Augustus was dead is not

a reasonable one.’

He lay back on his pillow, his face red with effort.

Bartholomew sponged it again while he let all Wilson’s claims sink in. Wilson was right. It would make sense

for the murderer to take a living person with him to be questioned later, but not a dead one. But Bartholomew

knew Augustus had been dead! He had touched his eyes,

and made a careful examination of the body. Nevertheless, apart from that, Wilson’s story made matters a little

clearer, and also explained why the Master had been

prepared to put about the Bishop’s lies. The Bishop had probably known exactly what Wilson had been doing in

Augustus’s room, and approved of it.

The door swung open on its broken hinges, and

Michael entered, bringing the things he would need to

give Wilson last rites and to hear his confession.

‘Get out!’ hissed Wilson, lifting his head from the

pillow. ‘Get out until I am ready!’

Michael looked annoyed, but left the room without

arguing. Wilson waited until he heard his footsteps going down the wooden stairs.

‘Why did you want this seal?’ Bartholomew asked.

Wilson’ s eyes remained closed. The effort of sending