dulling his wits. He bent to look at the woman.
Assuming that the coffin had not been changed after Nicholas's funeral, she had been dead for a month. The state of decay confirmed this to Bartholomew, taking into account the fact that she had died during warm weather and that the earth had been baked dry for several weeks.
The grave was only flooded now because of the sudden downpour. He looked at her feet, but they were wet, and even if the rain-water had not washed her feet clean, he would not have been able to identify a circle painted in blood on her rotting skin. The lamp above him fluttered in the wind and went out. Cynric swore and cursed in Welsh as he tried to re-light it, but the rain was coming down harder than ever and the wick was sodden.
Bartholomew waited in the dark, the water lapping about his ankles. The smell was overpowering, and it was becoming more and more difficult to resist the urge to turn around and scramble out.
I cannot light it,' said Cynric from above him, his voice unsteady.
'What shall we do, Father?' asked Bartholomew. 'There is no point in examining this woman when she is not Nicholas. Shall we re bury her and leave her in peace?'
'We must bring the body out,' said Cuthbert. 'If not, the Chancellor will order that you bring her out another night so that she can be identified and the whole matter investigated.'
'She cannot be identified now,' said Bartholomew.
'She has been underground too long. And I can tell you now that she died because she was stabbed in the throat. It does not take a physician to see that.'
'Bring her out, Matt,' said Michael. 'Father Cuthbert is right in that the Chancellor will demand an investigation, and I for one do not want to go through all this again tomorrow.'
Cynric handed Bartholomew a chisel. 'Make a hole in the bottom of the coffin to let the water drain,' he said. 'Then it will be easier to lift.'
Michael fetched the rope, and Bartholomew fumbled about trying to tie the knots in the darkness while Jonstan attempted to light a second lamp under the shelter of the porch. Eventually, Bartholomew thought the knots were secure, and Michael and Cynric began to pull.
With a slurp of mud, the coffin came free, sending water everywhere. Bartholomew steadied it until the others were able to heave it up and onto the ground.
Bartholomew found that his arms were too tired to allow him to climb out again, and he had a moment's panic until Michael offered his hand and hauled so hard that Bartholomew shot from the grave like a cork from a bottle. Cynric had put the lid back over the coffin and was enlarging the hole in the bottom to allow any water still remaining to drain away. Jonstan watched.
'It was that mask,' he said with a shudder. 'If it had just been the woman, it would not have been so bad. But that thing looks like something from hell.' He crossed himself yet again and backed away.
'I will unlock the church and we can put the body in the crypt out of sight,' said Cuthbert, clearly the more practical of the two. 'The goat mask can go in the charnel house until the Chancellor has seen it. Who would do such a thing to a corpse?'
But more to the point, who was she? Bartholomew thought. And where was Nicholas? Was he alive or dead?
He wanted to rub his eyes, but glimpsed his filthy hands and thought better of it. He and Michael had gained nothing from this grisly business. They had answered no questions, but had raised many more.
The sky was brightening noticeably by the time they had removed the woman's body and filled in the grave. Michael, white-faced, went with Jonstan to give a complete report to the Chancellor, while Cuthbert remained in the church to say prayers for the dead woman. Bartholomew looked down at his wet and muddy clothes despondently. The rain was easing off with the onset of dawn, but the day seemed cold and gloomy.
He and Cynric walked home, where they hauled buckets of water from the well to wash, and Bartholomew threw the gloves and his old clothes onto the ever-smouldering fires behind the kitchen. Bartholomew was down to his last shirt, and he hoped he would have an uneventful day in order to give Agatha time to do the laundry. Shivering, they went to the kitchen, where Cynric warmed some potage left over from the day before. When the bell chimed for Prime, Bartholomew was fast asleep in Agatha's chair next to the fireplace, and she did not waken him.
Michael returned later, having spoken to de Wetherset, and said he planned to continue his reading of Nicholas's book. Bartholomew spent the rest of the morning teaching, and was pleased with the way some of his students were learning, although he was finding Brother Boniface difficult. The friar seemed to have been talking to the fanatic Father William, for he was obsessed with the notion of heresy. Boniface proclaimed that Bartholomew teaching them surgery was heretical, and sparked a bitter argument, with Bulbeck and Cray defending Bartholomew's position, and Boniface and his fellow Franciscans opposing it. It was not an argument based on logic and reason, but on ignorance and bigotry on both sides. Bartholomew did not take part, and listened with a growing sense of weariness.
Ibn Ibrahim had warned him that some of the techniques and cures he had been taught would meet with hostility and suspicion, but he was unprepared for such reactions from his own students. He thought about the difference between Arab and Christian medicine, and wondered whether he had made the right decision in choosing the former. Naively, he had assumed that his greater success with diseases and wounds than his more traditional colleagues would speak for itself, and that in time people would come to accept his methods.
But Boniface claimed that Bartholomew's success was because he used methods devised by the Devil, while Gray and Bulbeck claimed he was blessed by God with a gift of healing, as though his painstakingly acquired skills were nothing.
As he listened to Boniface's raving, Bartholomew considered telling Kenyngham that he was impossible to teach. But all hostels and Colleges were finding it difficult to recruit students after the plague, with the exception of lawyers, and Michaelhouse could not afford to lose the Franciscans.
After the main meal of the day, eaten in silence, he went to St Man's in search of Michael. The clerks told him they had been unable to find Janetta or Froissart's kinsmen.
Bartholomew was relieved: he and Michael could not proceed until they had spoken to them, and the fact that they were unavailable would slow everything down and allow him to concentrate on his teaching duties.
He was about to return to Michaelhouse when he was hailed by de Wetherset, who wanted to know what could be discovered from the dead woman. Grimacing to register his reluctance, Bartholomew followed de Wetherset down into the small cellar under the altar.
The door leading to the stairs was locked, and the Chancellor motioned the ever-solicitous Gilbert forward to open it and precede them down damp steps into the musty crypt. Gilbert held back, his eyes huge with fear.
De Wetherset looked as though he would order Gilbert into the crypt, but he relented, and patted him on the shoulder.
'I have no taste for this either,' he said. 'Father Cuthbert!'
The priest waddled from where he had been scraping candle wax from the altar, took the keys from Gilbert, and puffed down the steps to the vault below. The crypt was little more than a passageway that ran under the altar from one side of the choir to the other. To the left was a small chamber protected by a stout door, where the church silver was kept. In the chamber, two coffins lay side by side on the ground: Froissart's and the woman's.
Several large bowls of incense were dotted about, adding to the general overpowering odour.
'I am surprised you need to lock this,' said Bartholomew hoarsely, his eyes watering. 'I would think the smell alone would be deterrent enough.'
De Wetherset ignored him and pulled the sheet off the coffin in which the woman lay. Bartholomew was again filled with compassion for her. He made a cursory examination of the wound on her throat he had seen that morning, and looked again in vain for a circle on the sole of her foot. Lifting the simple gown of pale blue, he inspected her body for other wounds, but found nothing. Her dress, home-made and like a hundred others in the town, would not help to identify her, and her face meant nothing to Bartholomew. He suggested giving a description of her to Richard Tulyet to see whether he had been told of some person missing over the last month.
'This makes five,' said de Wetherset, dismissing his suggestion with a contemptuous wave of his hand. 'Five prostitutes dead.'
'We do not know she was a prostitute,' said Bartholomew. 'And Frances de Belem was not a prostitute either.'
