'Eight,' said Bartholomew. 'Who died just before Wilson?'
Gray named the others, nineteen in all. He thought he saw which way the conversation was leading, assumed he was being criticised, and began to object. 'You told me to take them to the plague pit, and I did. Ask Cynric. He helped. We took all of them!'
Bartholomew held up his hand to quell Gray's indignant objections. 'I believe you,' he said. 'But we seem to have an extra body here now.'
Gray looked at the one Bartholomew still held by the feet. 'One of the townspeople probably slipped it in here so that we would take it to the pits with the others,' he suggested.
'Unlikely,' said Bartholomew, 'unless they stole one of our blankets as well.'
Gray and Bartholomew looked at each other for a moment, and then back to the stables. Bartholomew began to drag the body back inside again.
'This had best be done out of sight,' he said over his shoulder to Gray. 'I do not want anyone to see what I am going to do. Will you bring a lamp?'
Gray was gone only briefly, returning with a lamp and a needle and thread. He lit the lamp and closed the door against prying eyes. 'You cut the shrouds open, and I will sew them up,' he said, swallowing hard as he steeled himself for the grisly task.
Bartholomew clapped him on the shoulder, and made a small cut along the seam of the first body. It was Gilbert. He sat for a moment, looking at his face, more peaceful than most of his patients, but blackened with the plague nevertheless. Gray, kneeling next to him, nudged him with his elbow.
'Hurry up,' he urged, 'or someone will come and ask what we are doing.'
He began stitching the blanket back together while Bartholomew moved to the next one. It was one of the law students who had been studying under Wilson. He resisted the urge to think about the scholars as their faces appeared under the coarse blanket-shrouds, and tried to concentrate on the task in hand. The third was another student, and the fourth one of the old commoners. As he came to the fifth, he paused. The blanket was exactly the same as the others, but there was an odd quality about the body inside that he could not define. Instinctively, he knew it was the one that did not belong to Michaelhouse.
Carefully he slit the stitches down one side of the blanket, noting that they were less neat than the others he had cut. He peeled it back and cried out in horror, leaping backwards and almost knocking the lamp over.
'What? What is it?' Gray gasped, unnerved by Bartholomew's white face. He went to look at the body, but Bartholomew pulled him back so he should not see.
They went to the door for some fresh air, away from the stench of the bodies. After a few moments, Bartholomew began to lose the unreal feeling he had had when he looked into the decomposed face of Augustus, and rubbed his hands on his robe to get rid of their clamminess. Gray waited anxiously.
Taking a last deep breath of clean air, Bartholomew turned to Gray. 'It is Augustus,' he said. Gray looked puzzled for a moment, and then his face cleared.
'Ah! The commoner who disappeared after you had declared him dead!' He looked at the stables. 'He is dead now, is he?'
'He was dead then,' snapped Bartholomew, trying to control the shaking of his hands. 'And he is very dead now.'
Bartholomew led Gray back inside the stables again, noticing how the student's eyes kept edging fearfully over to the bundle that was Augustus. 'You must not tell anyone of this,' Bartholomew said. 'I do not understand what is happening, why his body has been put here now after all this time. But I think he was murdered, and his murderer must still be alive or Augustus's body would still be hidden. We must be very careful.'
Gray nodded, his usually cheerful face sombre.
'Just sew him back up again, and let us pretend to anyone who is watching that we have not noticed the extra one,' he said, going to the door and trying to peer out through the gaps in the wood.
It was possibly already too late for that, Bartholomew thought, if the murderer had seen them take Gilbert's body back inside again once they had realised that something was amiss. He collected his thoughts. Bartholomew could see why Augustus's body had reappeared. It had been no secret that Wilson had spent some time talking alone to Bartholomew before he died. The murderer had assumed, correctly, that Wilson would tell him about the trap-door to the attic — where Augustus had probably lain since his body had been taken. That would explain the unpleasant smell that Bartholomew had noticed there.
If, as Bartholomew supposed, the body had been hidden in the passageway, Wilson would have been unlikely to have found it because he would have no reason to search a passageway he knew was blocked off. Unless, he thought, Wilson had known, and had deliberately told Bartholomew about the trap-door, knowing that he would find Augustus. What had Wilson said? Discover who in the College knew about the trap-door and he would find the murderer?
Bartholomew rubbed a hand over his face. He realised that once the murderer became aware that Bartholomew knew of the trap-door and would be likely to search the attic, he would have to dispose of the corpse that had lain there for several months. In many ways, it was an ideal time. When better to dispose of a body than when there were bodies of so many others to be taken away?
Had William not complained, then Bartholomew might well have left the bodies to be collected by the dead- cart the following day, and no one would have known that one of them had not died of the plague at all.
So the person who had brought Augustus's body to the stables must also have been the person who had killed him. It could not have been Aelfrith, since he was long dead. It could not have been Wilson, because Augustus's body had been placed in the stable after he had died — and Bartholomew was certain Gray was not lying to him about removing the previous corpses. Was it Abigny? Had he come back from wherever he was hiding when he had heard that Bartholomew knew about the trap-door? Could it have been Swynford, back from his plague-free haven? Was it Michael, who had reacted so oddly at Augustus's death? Was it William, who had prompted him to look at the bodies in the first place, or Alcote, skulking in his room?
Gray was handing him the needle and thread so he could sew up Augustus's shroud again. But Bartholomew had one more task he needed to do.
'Start taking the others out to the cart,' he said. 'I need to take a closer look.'
Gray's eyes widened in horror, but he began to drag the bodies outside to the cart as Bartholomew had instructed. Bartholomew knelt down by Augustus, and slit the shroud down the side, pulling it back to reveal the grey, desiccated body. Augustus was still dressed in the nightshirt he had been wearing when Bartholomew had last seen his body, but it was torn down the middle to reveal the terrible mutilations underneath. Bartholomew felt anger boil inside him. Whoever had taken the body had slashed it open, pulling out entrails, and slicing deeply into the neck and throat.
All Bartholomew could assume was that Augustus had led the murderer to believe he had swallowed that wretched ring of Sir John's, and the murderer had desecrated his body to find it. Bartholomew was beginning to feel sick. Augustus's blackened and dried entrails had been stuffed crudely back into his body with a total disregard for his dignity. The horrific mess made Bartholomew wonder whether the murderer would ever have found the ring anyway.
He had seen enough. Hastily, he began to resew the bundle, hiding the terribly mangled body from his sight — and from Gray, who was becoming bolder and inching forward. Bartholomew looked at Augustus's face. The warmth of the attic in the top of the house in late summer must have sucked the moisture from the body, for the face was dry and wizened rather than rotten. The skin had peeled back from the lips, leaving the teeth exposed, and the eyes were sunken, but it was unmistakably Augustus.
As Bartholomew covered up the face, he whispered a farewell. His mind flashed back to Augustus's funeral back in September, when a coffin filled with bags of earth had been reverently laid to rest in the churchyard. He sat back on his heels, staring down at the shapeless bundle in front of him, and wondered if the requiem mass said for him by Aelfrith had truly laid his soul to rest.
Bartholomew had often looked at the simple wooden cross in the churchyard, and wondered about the body that should have lain beneath it. At least in the plague pit the old man would rest in hallowed ground and no one would come again to desecrate his body.
