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  A Wicked Deed

  ( Matthew Bartholomew - 5 )

  Susanna Gregory

  Susanna Gregory

  A Wicked Deed

  Prologue

  Suffolk, April 1353

  Twigs slashed at alice quy’s face and arms as she raced through the undergrowth, certain that the dog that chased her would bring her down at any moment. She tripped over a tree root, tumbling head over heels down a leaf-strewn slope, until coming up hard against the trunk of an old beech. She could not see the dog, with its small glittering eyes and its shaggy white coat rippling as it moved, but she knew it was behind her. She scrambled to her feet, sobbing in terror, and ran towards the river.

  She knew she should never have come to the woods that night. It was true that she had been well paid, and that the money would help to buy the new cow her family needed, but money would be no use to her if the huge dog that snapped and slathered at the top of the slope were to catch her: she could not spend the gold coins that jangled in the purse at her waist if she were dead. She glanced behind, aware that the animal was beginning to gain on her, loping through the woods in a deceptively unhurried gait that was faster than anything two legs could achieve.

  She had heard stories in the village about the massive white dog that haunted the abandoned plague village of Barchester. It was known to be a ferocious beast, given to tearing out the throats of its victims, and it was said that even to catch sight of the thing was sufficient to set a person on the road to doom and disaster. Alice Quy tried not to think about it, forcing herself to concentrate on where she stepped as she reached the River Lark, and waded across it, falling headlong as the cold water that surged around her legs slowed her down. Gasping for breath and dashing the droplets from her eyes, she splashed through the shallows on the other side, and began to force her way through the trees on the opposite bank.

  Suddenly she was out of the woods that surrounded Barchester, and was at the edge of the neat strip-fields that belonged to Roland Deblunville, the lord of the manor whose land abutted on to that of her own village of Grundisburgh. She knew what would happen if he caught her trespassing on his land and trampling his ripening barley, but she did not care. Her only concern was to escape the white dog, the hot breath of which she could almost feel on the back of her neck, as she left the trees and began sprinting across the ploughed earth.

  It was a dark night, and the moon was obscured by a thick covering of cloud. She stumbled over one particularly deep furrow and fell, grazing her elbows and knees on the stony soil. Terrified, she clambered upright and plunged on, too frightened to look behind to see if the dog were still in pursuit. The ground was becoming more uneven, and she fell again almost immediately. This time, she did not rise, but lay on the ground, weeping with fear and exhaustion.

  Gradually, as she lay motionless on the cold earth, her breathing began to return to normal, the thudding of her heart subsided, and the blind terror began to recede. She had escaped! Scarcely daring to believe her good luck, she slowly relaxed her tensed muscles, and sat up to peer around her in the blackness. She could see nothing in the dark, but it seemed as though her prayers had been answered, and that the dog had abandoned the chase and allowed her to live another day. Almost dizzy with relief, she climbed unsteadily to her feet, and started to stumble away from Master Deblunville’s land before he or his men caught her.

  She had not taken more than a few faltering steps when she heard a noise behind her. Heart pounding again, she looked around her wildly, trying to penetrate the velvety blackness to see what it was. She could see nothing, but the sound was there sure enough — soft, slithering footfalls as someone or something inched its way toward her, slowly and carefully, like a wolf stalking its prey.

  Was it the dog that approached her so stealthily? Or was it one of Deblunville’s guards, slinking up behind a trespasser on his lord’s lands? Alice Quy was almost at the point where she did not care. She started to run, but her legs were too weak to carry her, and she fell on to her knees. The slithering sound was closer now. Desperately, she tried to crawl, oblivious to the sharp stones that cut into her hands and legs.

  It was hopeless. She could hear breathing now, slow and even. She was almost paralysed with terror, and collapsed in a heap on the ground’, shuddering uncontrollably and aware that the footsteps were coming closer and closer. And then something reached out and touched her shoulder.

  Alice Quy found she was unable to do so much as flinch: fright had finally paralysed her, like a deer caught in the light of a hunter’s flaring torch. She felt herself rolled on to her back. She did not look at her captor, but gazed up at the black sky with eyes that were fixed and dilated with fear.

  Two weeks later

  It had been a busy day for James Freeman, the butcher. Lady Isilia from Wergen Hall had sent him two pigs to be slaughtered, and the landlord of the Half Moon had bought a sheep that needed gutting in order to feed the rough group of men who had been hired to weed the village’s ripening crops. And in a couple of weeks’ time there would be the Pentecost Fair with its feasts — the butcher was always inundated with work for that. The Pentecost Fair was the highlight of the village’s year, a much-loved occasion that was eagerly awaited by everyone after Easter. The villagers were not expected to work from Saturday to Monday — an almost unheard-of luxury in a time when labour was scarce and landlords demanding — and there would be music, dancing and feasting. But James Freeman was not interested in the Fair this year, because he knew he would not live the two weeks to enjoy it.

  Lethargically, he hacked at a sheep leg bone with his meat cleaver, muscles bunching under his bloodstained shirt. He saw his wife watching him with an odd mixture of pity and wariness. He had tried hard to pretend that he was not afraid of what might happen, but they had known each other since childhood, and he sensed she had not been deceived by his blustering attempts to shrug off the inner fear that gnawed at him day and night. How would he die? he wondered, as he raised the cleaver again. Would his hand slip as he butchered an animal, severing some great vein so that his life blood would drain away? Would he choke over his food one night for no apparent reason? Would he stumble as he walked along the road, and be crushed under the wheels of a passing cart? He shuddered, and pushed such thoughts from his mind, aware that his wife was coming toward him.

  ‘Do not think about it, James,’ she said, seeing in his face what was going through his mind. ‘If you do not think about it, it might not happen.’

  They regarded each other sombrely, both knowing her words were meaningless: James Freeman would be dead within a few days just as surely as would the pig that blithely awaited execution in the yard outside.

  He summoned a wintry smile and looked away. ‘Alice Quy tried not to think about it, but look what happened to her. We all thought she had escaped when she returned from Barchester that night, but she died — just as I will.’

  ‘No, James,’ protested his wife, although he could not but help notice that her voice lacked conviction. He knew that, as far as she was concerned, he was already dead. He also knew that she had started to look to her future without him, and he had seen her flirting with Will Norys, the pardoner.

  Still, Freeman thought, if she married Norys at least he could go to his grave knowing that she would be properly looked after. Being a widow was not easy in rural Suffolk, and the pardoner’s trade had been booming since the plague — everyone wanted forgiveness for sins when no one knew when the pestilence might strike again. Norys would provide her with all she could want, and she would not be forced to eke out the rest of her life in miserable poverty, stewing animal skins and nettles to eat, like some widows.

  ‘I am hungry,’ he said, not comfortable with the way
she looked at him — like she might the lepers from the nearby hospital, who still breathed and walked even though a requiem mass had already been said over their rotting, living bodies. ‘Is the meal ready?’

  She shook her head. ‘But it will be by the time you have finished with this sheep.’

  She started to leave the butchering shed, to make her way to the house at the top of the garden, but then hesitated, her eyes fixed on the sharp cleaver that dangled from his hand. As if she thought it might be the last time she would see him alive.

  ‘Be careful, James.’

  He watched her walk away, before turning his attention back to the carcass that lay on the bench in front of him. He was about to raise the chopper to continue his work, when he became aware of a shadow in the doorway. Thinking it was only his wife, checking to make sure he did not do something foolish, he did not look up, but started to chop through the sheep’s thigh bone with rhythmic, precise blows.

  By the time he realised that the shadow was not his wife, it was too late. He felt a hot, burning sensation somewhere in his head, and then blackness claimed him.

  Chapter 1

  Suffolk, May 1353

  Matthew Bartholomew, doctor of medicine and fellow of Michaelhouse at the University of Cambridge, lay on his stomach in the long grass at the side of the road, and waited. The only sounds were the twittering of a lark from high up in the clouds and the muffled voices of the men who lurked in the deep ditch opposite. One of them gave a low laugh, and Bartholomew thought he heard the faint metallic clink of a sword or a dagger that tapped against a stone. Next to him, his book-bearer, Cynric, tensed suddenly and pointed down the trackway to their left. A small cart was creaking towards them, a ramshackle affair on wheels of different sizes, drawn by a listless horse with bony withers.

  The men in the ditch had seen it, too, and fell silent as it rumbled closer. With mounting horror, Bartholomew realised what was about to happen. Dried leaves rustled as he eased himself up on to his elbows, preparing to shout a warning to the man who drove the cart. Cynric grabbed a handful of his tabard and jerked him down again, shooting the physician a look of disgust, appalled that he would compromise their own safety to help a stranger who was probably doomed anyway.

  The cart was almost on them, wooden wheels protesting in irregular squeaks and groans as they jolted across ruts that had been baked hard by the early summer sun. The driver, a skinny, undersized man wearing a bell-shaped hat of straw and a rough homespun tunic, was taking fruit to be sold at the market in Ipswich, and a sorry offering of wizened apples, carefully hoarded from the previous year’s crop, rolled around in the back with hollow thumps.

  With ear-splitting yells, the men exploded from the ditch, and had surrounded the cart before the driver guessed what was happening. The horse pranced in terror at the sudden noise, and the cart tipped, sending its cargo bouncing across the road. The petrified driver did not wait to hear the robbers’ demands, but scrambled off the cart, and began to race back the way he had come. He tore his purse from his belt as he fled, and hurled it behind him, an astute move that distracted the robbers just long enough to allow him to be out of arrow range when they saw he was escaping.

  While the thieves argued over the meagre contents of the purse and unharnessed the frightened horse from the cart, Bartholomew and Cynric eased further back into the scrubby undergrowth and watched them. There were five in all, a rough-looking group of men, who wore shabby clothes and whose faces were masked by bandages. Had they not looked so well-fed and healthy, Bartholomew might have supposed they were lepers, hiding their ravaged features from the world with only their eyes showing through the swaths of dirty grey-brown linen. Three sported hose and jerkins that had probably once been of fine quality, suggesting to Bartholomew that the attack on the would-be apple-seller was not their first ambush of travellers along the Old Road that linked the prosperous city of Ipswich to the Suffolk coast

  Since the black days of the plague, which had carried away a third of the country’s population, roadside robbers were becoming increasingly common. Some were simply desperate people who had learned that preying on travellers was an easier and quicker way of earning a loaf of bread than toiling in the fields for pitifully low wages. Others, like the five who argued over the apple-seller’s pennies, were more professional, perhaps veterans from King Edward’s army, who believed England owed them more than a life of labouring on the land after their great victory over the French at the Battle of Crécy in 1346.

  ‘They will have to attack someone else tonight,’ whispered Cynric to Bartholomew, as he watched the squabble become more acrimonious. ‘There will not be enough in the apple-seller’s purse to satisfy them, and that pathetic nag will not fetch much at the market.’

  ‘Then what shall we do?’ asked Bartholomew in a low voice. ‘We need to use the road, but it will be dark soon, and if they do not hesitate to attack travellers in daylight, I dread to think what they might be like at night.’

  Cynric shrugged. ‘They will not stay here in case the apple-seller fetches the Sheriffs men — they will move further down the road. Therefore, we cannot go on or we will walk right into them, and it is too late to return to the last village we passed.’ He grimaced and glanced at the road, an ancient trackway that ran as straight as the path of an arrow for almost as far as the eye could see. ‘The highways of England are no place for honest men after dusk these days.’

  ‘So, we cannot go on and we cannot go back,’ concluded Bartholomew. ‘What do you suggest we do? Stay here?’ He looked around with a distinct lack of enthusiasm. While he did not mind sleeping under the stars, particularly when the weather was dry and warm, he did not relish the idea of doing so while there was a ruthless band of outlaws prowling nearby.

  ‘We will take that path that leads north,’ whispered Cynric promptly, pointing to a gap in the trees to the left. ‘The village of Otley should be a mile or two that way, if my memory serves me right.’

  Bartholomew climbed to his feet, anxious to be away from the road before darkness fell. The sun had already set, disappearing in a blaze of gold-red, and the first stars were pinpricking the sky. His travelling companions — three other Michaelhouse Fellows and three students — had been left with the horses a short distance away, bundled to safety when Cynric first became uneasy about the deep ditch to one side of the road, and the low mutter of voices that only he had heard.

  But Bartholomew’s haste made him careless, and there was a sharp snap as a twig broke under his foot. Cynric cast him a withering look, and quickly tugged him down again as the robbers immediately fell silent. With horror, Bartholomew saw them draw short swords and move toward the undergrowth in which he and Cynric hid. One gestured to the others and they began to fan out, creeping like shadows through the bushes and trees. Cynric poked Bartholomew in the ribs and indicated that he was to move to his right, away from where the other scholars were waiting to be told whether it was safe to continue their journey. When Bartholomew glanced around, the Welshman was nowhere to be seen, having melted away into the foliage as though he had never been there at all.

  Trying to tread lightly, Bartholomew threaded his way through the woods, wincing as leaves crackled under his feet. Then, a triumphant yell told him that he had been spotted. He risked a quick glance backward, and saw one of the men racing toward him, sword held high above his head. Abandoning stealth, Bartholomew turned and ran, crashing through twigs and brambles that scratched his face and tangled themselves around his feet as he went. The medicine bag, which he always wore looped over his shoulder, snagged on branches, slowing him down. He did not need to look behind again to know that the robbers were gaining on him.

  He ran faster, breath coming in ragged gasps, stumbling as his foot caught on the root of a tree. The undergrowth was becoming more dense, so that it was harder to move in a straight line, and he knew it was only a matter of time before the robbers drew close enough to hack at him with their swords. With a strength born of
desperation, he raced on, trying to force a final spurt of speed in the vain hope that his pursuers might give up the chase if he were able to increase, even slightly, the distance between them.

  He saw a silvery glint as something dropped into the ferns ahead of him. One of the robbers had thrown a dagger, aiming to bring him down before they wasted more energy in tearing through the scrub. A distant part of Bartholomew’s mind supposed it was the sight of his heavy bag that made them so determined: they were not to know it contained only salves, potions and a few surgical instruments, none of which would be of much value, even to the most destitute of thieves. He plunged into the ferns where the knife had fallen, but they were tangled and thick, and he tripped almost immediately, sprawling forward on to his hands and knees.

  He saw the dagger on the ground, and snatched it up as he struggled to his feet to face his pursuers. There were three of them. They slowed when they saw he was run to ground, and began to spread out, making it difficult for him to watch them all at the same time. One of them feinted to his left, while another darted behind him. Even through their bandaged faces, Bartholomew could sense they were grinning, confident that they would make short work of him and make off with the contents of the intriguing leather bag that bulged at his side.

  Suddenly, one of them dropped to his knees, clutching his upper arm. An arrow protruded from it, and for an instant all three robbers and Bartholomew did nothing but stare at it in surprise. Then the stricken outlaw gave a tremendous shriek of pain and fear that almost, but not quite, drowned out the hiss of a second quiver that thudded into the ground at the feet of one of his companions. Leaving the injured man to fend for himself, the other two promptly fled, smashing through the scrubby vegetation every bit as blindly as Bartholomew had done. The wounded man staggered to his feet and followed, leaving Bartholomew alone.