Michael looked sceptical. 'Just when term is beginning?
It is an odd time for students to be leaving the University to say the least. Did you tell Eligius why you wanted them? Did you mention the relic and offend him by your rejection of it?'
Bartholomew skidded in something slippery. 'He would not have noticed if I had. He was too absorbed in his own devotion to the thing. It was difficult to persuade him to discuss anything else.'
Michael was silent, concentrating on steering himself and Bartholomew clear of the more obvious obstacles that turned the High Street into a dangerous gauntlet of ankle-wrenching holes, treacherously slick mud, and repellent mounds of substances the monk did not care to think about.
'But what about Master Bigod?' he said eventually.
'I cannot imagine why he would be out in the rain ambushing his colleagues.'
Bartholomew frowned, trying to concentrate. 'I may be mistaken — I did not see his face because it was hidden by a hood. But I am sure I recognised his voice. He is from Norwich, and his accent is distinctive, not to mention the fact that his voice is unusually deep.'
'Well, what do you think he wanted?' asked Michael, still dubious.
Bartholomew shrugged. 'I have no idea.' He stopped abruptly, turning to face Michael. 'Unless it could be that broken ring I found.'
Michael scratched his chin, the rain plastering his thin brown hair to his scalp, making his head seem very small atop his large body. 'It may have been, I suppose.'
'I think I may have broken the arm of one of our attackers: I was holding it when I fell and I heard it crack. He was wielding a knife, trying to stab me, and Bigod called for him to stop. I struggled and he missed, striking the ground instead — I heard it scrape the ground next to my ear. I suppose the sight of the blood on my shirt led Bigod to assume it was mine. I decided to play into their belief that I was dead so they would leave, but one of them, that Saul Potter I think, kicked my head.' He rubbed it ruefully. 'A tactical error on my part.'
'I do not think so, Matt,' said Michael soberly. 'They were certainly going to slit my throat. They only desisted at the last moment because they realised I really was a monk and not just Oswald Stanmore.'
Bartholomew tried to work out what the servants of Godwinsson and Valence Marie could possibly want from him. Or Master Bigod from Maud's. It proved their institutions were connected in some way. But how? To the murder of the child and James Kenzie? To the rape and murder of Joanna? To the mysterious movements of Kenzie's ring? Or to the 'two acts' that Matilde said the riot was instigated to hide?
Thinking was making him feel light-headed and he felt his legs begin to give way. They had reached St Michael's Church. He lurched towards one of the tombstones in the churchyard and held on to it to prevent himself from falling.
'I think I am going to be sick,' he said in a whisper, dropping to his hands and knees in the wet grass.
Feeling better, he was helped to his feet by Michael.
'May the Lord forgive you, Matthew,' the monk said with amusement. 'You have just thrown up on poor Master Wilson's grave.'
When Bartholomew woke, he sensed someone else was in the room with him. He opened his eyes and blinked hard.
Above him the curious face of Rob Deynman hovered.
'At last!' the student said, his voice loud and unendearingly cheerful. 'I was beginning to think you would sleep for ever.'
'So I might, had I known I would wake to you,'
Bartholomew muttered unkindly, sitting up carefully.
'What was that?' Deynman said, putting his ear close to Bartholomew in a grotesque parody of the bedside manner that Bartholomew had been trying to instil into him. Not receiving a reply, he pushed Bartholomew back down on the bed and slapped something icy and wet on his head with considerable force.
'God's teeth!' gasped Bartholomew, his eyes stinging from the violence of Deynman's cold-compress application.
'You just lie there quietly,' Deynman yelled, hauling the blanket up around Bartholomew's chin with such vigour that it all but strangled him. Bartholomew wondered why Deynman was shouting. He was not usually loud- voiced.
'Where is Michael?' he asked.
Deynman favoured him with an admonishing look.
'Brother Michael is asleep, as are all Michaelhouse scholars.
Tom Bulbeck, Sam Gray, and I — we three are your best students — are the only ones awake.'
'Not for long if you keep shouting,' said Bartholomew, feeling cautiously at his head. Someone had bandaged it, expertly, and only a little too tight.
Deynman laughed. 'You are back to normal,' he said.
'Crabby!'
Bartholomew stared at him in disbelief. Cheeky young rascal! 'Where is Sam?' he demanded coldly.
'Gone for water,' said Deynman, still in the stentorian tones that made Bartholomew's head buzz. 'Here he is.'
'Oh, you are awake!' exclaimed Gray in delight, enter ing Bartholomew's room and setting a pitcher of water carefully on the table. He knelt next to Bartholomew and peered at him. I 'What is Deynman doing in my room?' Bartholomew demanded. 'What time is it?'
Gray sent Deynman to the kitchen for watered ale, and arranged the blanket in a more reasonable fashion.
'You should rest,' Gray said softly. 'It is probably somewhere near midnight and you have been ill for almost two days. We wondered whether you might have a cracked skull but now you seem back to normal, I think not. But your stars are sadly misaligned.'
'Two days?' echoed Bartholomew in disbelief. 'That cannot be right!'
But even as he said it, vague recollections of moving in and out of sleep, of his students, Michael and Cynric, hovering around him began to flicker dimly through his mind.
'Easy,' said Gray gently. 'The kick Brother Michael said you took in that fight must have been harder than you realised. And, as I said, your stars are not good. You were born when Saturn was in its ascendancy and the conjunction of Mars and Jupiter on Wednesday-'
'Oh really, Sam!' exclaimed Bartholomew irritably.
'You do not have the slightest idea when I was born.
And if you had been to Master Kenyngham's lecture last week, you would know there was no conjunction of Mars and Jupiter on Wednesday.'
Gray was not easily deterred. 'Details are unimportant,' he said airily. 'But you were attacked on Wednesday night and it is late on Friday.'
'Two days wasted,' said Bartholomew, his mind leaping from his neglected teaching to the inquiries he had been pursuing with Michael.
'We have not been idle,' said Gray, not without pride.
'While Deynman stayed with you, I read the beginning of Theophilus's De urinis to the first-and second-year students, while Tom Bulbeck read Nicholas's Antidotarium to the third, fourth and fifth years.'
Bartholomew regarded him appraisingly. 'It seems I am no longer needed,' he said, complimenting Gray's organisational skills.
Gray looked at him sharply to see if he were being facetious, but then gave a shy grin. 'I would claim it was all down to my talent for teaching but the students were only malleable because you were ill,' he said in an rare moment of honesty. 'Had you left me in charge and went drinking in the taverns all day, it would have been a different matter. We were all concerned for you. After all, since the plague, there is just you, Father Philius and Master Lynton who teach medicine. What would happen to us if you were to die?'
'Nicely put,' said Bartholomew.
'We have had to turn away hoards of anxious women who came to enquire after you,' announced Deynman, loud enough to be heard in every college in Cambridge as he returned with the watered ale. Tom Bulbeck slipped in behind him and came to squat next to Gray, inspecting his teacher anxiously. Deynman, choosing to ignore Gray's gesture to keep his voice down, continued with his oration.
