'I am old enough to remember him quite vividly, actually,' said Bartholomew. He smiled apologetically at Thorpe. 'He was of average height — and certainly not short. These bones cannot be his.'
'We have found more of him!' came a breathless exclamation from Bartholomew's elbow. The physician glanced down, and saw a scruffy college servant standing there, his clothes and hands deeply grimed with mud from the Ditch. He smelt like the Ditch too, thought Bartholomew, moving away. The servant's beady eyes glittered fanatically, and Bartholomew saw that Master Thorpe was not the only person at Valence Marie desperate to provide it with a relic.
Tell us, Will,' said Thorpe, hope lighting up his face before he mastered himself and made his expression impassive. 'What have you found this time?'
They followed Will across the swathe of poorly kept pasture to the Ditch beyond. A swarm of flies hovered around its mud-encrusted sides, and even Bartholomew, used to unpleasant smells, was forced to cover his mouth and nose with the sleeve of his gown. The servant slithered down the bank to the trickle of water at the bottom, and prodded about.
'Here!' he called out triumphantly.
'Bring it out, Will,' commanded Thorpe, putting a huge pomander over his lower face.
Will hauled at something, which yielded itself reluctantly from the mud with a slurping plop. Holding it carefully in his arms, he carried it back up the bank and laid it at Thorpe's feet. His somewhat unpleasant, fawning manner reminded Bartholomew of a dog he had once owned, which had persisted in presenting him with partially eaten rats as a means to ingratiate itself.
Holding his sleeve over his nose, Bartholomew knelt and peered closely at Will's bundle.
'Still too small?' asked Michael hopefully.
'Too small to belong to a man,' said Bartholomew, stretching out a hand to turn the bones over. He glanced up at Thorpe and Michael, squinting up into the bright sun. 'But it is human.'
Bartholomew and Michael sat side by side on the ancient trunk of an apple tree that had fallen against the orchard wall behind Michaelhouse. The intense heat of the day had faded, and the evening shade, away from the failing sunlight, was almost chilly. Bats flitted silently through the gnarled branches of the fruit trees, feasting on the vast number of insects that always inhabited Cambridge in the summer, attracted by the dank and smelly waters of the river. That night, however, the sulphurous odours of the river were masked by the sweeter smell of rotting apples, many of which lay in the long, damp grass to be plundered by wasps.
Bartholomew rubbed tiredly at his eyes, feeling them gritty and sore under his fingers. Michael watched him.
'Have you not been sleeping well?' he asked, noting the dark smudges under the physician's eyes.
'My room is hot at night,' Bartholomew answered.
'Even with the shutters open, it is like an oven.'
'Then you should try sleeping on the upper floor,' said Michael unsympathetically. 'The heat is stifling, and my room-mates sincerely believe that night air will give them summer ague. Our shutters remain firmly closed, regardless of how hot it is outside. At least you have a flagstone floor on which to lie. We have a wooden floor, which is no use for cooling us down at all.'
He stretched his long, fat legs out in front of him, and settled more comfortably on the tree trunk. 'It will soon be too cold to sit here,' he added hastily, seeing Bartholomew's interest quicken at the prospect of a discussion about the relationship between summer ague and night air. Fresh air and cleanliness were subjects dear to his friend's heart, and Michael did not want to spend the remainder of the evening listening to his latest theories on contagion. 'The nights are drawing in now that the leaves are beginning to turn.'
Bartholomew flapped at an insistent insect that buzzed around his head. 'We could try an experiment with your room-mates' notion about night air,' he said, oblivious to Michael's uninterest. 'You keep your shutters closed, and I will keep mine open-'
'Strange business today,' Michael interrupted. He laughed softly. 'I felt almost sorry for that greedy dog Thorpe when you told him his precious bones could not belong to that martyr he seems so intent on finding. He looked like a child who had been cheated of a visit to the fair: disappointed, angry, bitter and resentful, all at the same time.'
Bartholomew sighed, regretful, but not surprised, that Michael was declining the opportunity to engage in what promised to be an intriguing medical debate. 'I suppose Thorpe wants to make money from d'Ambrey's bones as saintly relics,' he said.
Michael nodded. 'There is money aplenty to be made from pilgrims these days. People are so afraid that the Death will return and claim everyone who escaped the first time, that they cling to anything that offers hope of deliverance. The pardoners' and relic-sellers' businesses are blossoming, and shrines and holy places all over Europe have never been so busy.'
Bartholomew made an impatient sound. 'People are fools! Relics and shrines did not save them the last time.
Why should they save them in the future?'
Michael eyed his friend in monkish disapproval. 'No wonder you are said to be a heretic, Matt!' he admonished, half-joking, half-serious. 'You should be careful to whom you make such wild assertions. Our beloved colleague Father William, for example, would have you hauled away to be burned as a warlock in an instant if he thought you harboured such irreligious notions.'
Bartholomew rubbed a hand through his hair, stood abruptly, and began to pace. 'I have reviewed my notes again and again,' he said, experiencing the familiar feeling of frustration each time he thought of the plague.
'Until the pestilence, I believed there were patterns to when and whom a disease struck. But now I am uncertain. The plague took rich and poor, priests and criminals, good and bad. Sometimes it killed the young and healthy, but left the weak and old. Some people say it burst from ancient graves during an earthquake in the Orient, and was carried westwards on the wind. But even if that is true, it does not explain why some were taken and some were spared. The more I think about it, the less it makes sense.'
'Then do not think about it, Matt,' said Michael complacently, squinting to where the last rays of the sun glinted red and gold through the trees. 'There are some things to which we will never know the answers.
Perhaps this is one of them.'
Bartholomew raised his eyebrows. 'It is encouraging to see that Michaelhouse supports a tradition of enquiring minds,' he remarked dryly. 'Just because an answer is not immediately obvious does not mean to say that we should not look for it.'
'And sometimes, looking too hard hides the very truth that you seek,' said Michael, equally firmly. 'I can even cite you an example. My Junior Proctor, Guy Heppel, lost the keys to our prison cells yesterday.
I spent the entire period between prime and terce helping him search for them — a task rendered somewhat more urgent by the fact that Heppel, rather rashly, had arrested the Master of Maud's Hostel for being drunk and disorderly.'
'You mean Thomas Bigod?' asked Bartholomew, between shock and amusement. 'I am not surprised you were so keen to find the keys! I cannot see that a man like Bigod would take kindly to being locked up with a crowd of recalcitrant students.'
'You are right — he was almost beside himself with fury once he awoke and discovered where he was. But we digress. I searched high and low for these wretched keys, and even went down on my hands and knees to look for them in the rushes — no mean feat for a man of my girth — and do you know where they were?'
'Round his neck, I should imagine,' said Bartholomew.
'That is where he usually keeps them, tied on a thong of catgut or some such thing.'
Michael gazed at him in surprise. 'How did you know that?'
Bartholomew smiled. 'He had me going through the same process last week when he came to see me about his cough.'
'Is it genuine, then, this cough of his? I thought he was malingering. The man seems to have a different ache or pain almost every day — some of them in places I would have imagined impossible.'
'The cough is real enough, although the other ailments he lists — and, as you say, it is quite a list — are more imagined than real. Anyway, when I told him he must have lost his keys in the High Street, and not in my room, he almost fainted away from shock. He had to lie down to calm himself, and when I loosened his clothes, there were the keys around his neck. I was surprised when he was appointed your junior. He is not the kind of man
