Heresy (17 page)

“Well, I hope you will not be punished for what is not your fault,” I said.

“Thank you, sir, you are kind.”

“Tell me, Goodman Cobbett,” I said casually, turning to go, “if a man ever wanted to go into the town and return after you lock the main gates, might that be possible?”

The porter’s face creased into a broad, gummy smile.

“All things are possible, Doctor Bruno,” he said, with a wink. “Perhaps you have heard I sometimes come to certain agreements with the undergraduates regarding the locking of the gates. But you should not need any such arrangements—Fellows and guests may have a key to the main gate.”

“Really?” I asked, surprised. “So the Fellows may leave the college by the main gate and enter at whatever hour they please?”

“It is not exactly encouraged,” Cobbett said, warily, “but yes, they may. Not many of ’em do, mind—they are all too serious-minded for gadding about the town. It’s the students who want to get out and are denied the liberty. But I was a young man once, and I say it does more harm than good to deny young men their pleasures. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, sir.”

I bent slightly and peered through the little window that opened onto the tower archway. Two students in black gowns passed, leather satchels clutched to their chests.

“Can you see from here everyone who comes in and out at night, then?” I asked.

“As long as I’m awake,” said Cobbett, with a husky laugh that quickly turned into another round of coughing.

There was more I wanted to ask, but I sensed my questions were making him suspicious, so I turned to the door.

“Thank you for your help, Cobbett—I must be getting along.”

“Doctor Bruno,” he called, as I opened the door. I turned back. “Please do not repeat what I said about the grove, will you? As much as it pains me, I must do as the rector instructs and say the blame was mine.”

I assured him that I would not mention our conversation. His face slumped with relief.

“I will gladly tell you more of locks and keys another time if you care to know,” he added, casually twirling Mercer’s keys in his stubby fingers. Then he reached beneath the table and pulled out an earthenware flagon, waving it meaningfully in my direction. “But it is thirsty work, all this jawing. Conversation flows all the better for a bit of refreshment, if you catch my meaning.”

I smiled. “I will see what refreshment I can find for when we next converse, Cobbett,” I said. “I shall look forward to it.”

“And I, Doctor Bruno, and I. Leave the door open, if you’d be so kind.”

He reached down and ruffled the dog’s fur between its ears. I could hear him chuckling to himself as I left the lodge and stood in front of the high main gate, wondering.

I
RETURNED
to my chamber, glad to rid myself of the shirt and breeches, now stiff with Roger Mercer’s blood, and to take the book out of my breeches, where its corners were digging uncomfortably into my stomach. Clad only in my underhose, oblivious to the chill of the room, I took a tinderbox from the mantelpiece and lit one of the cheap tallow candles with which the room had been provided; the room quickly filled with its acrid smoke as I took Mercer’s almanac and opened it, this time at the back. There were several blank pages bound into the covers, and one of these was oddly stiff, the paper slightly warped as if it had got wet and then dried out. I sniffed it closely; here the smell of oranges was most insistent. Carefully, so as not to scorch it, I held the page up close to the candle’s flame and watched
as, slowly, a series of marks in dark brown began to grow visible. Moving the paper up and down past the flame, it gradually revealed its secret writing: a sequence of letters and symbols, with no logical pattern I could discern. Below this was a shorter series of the same symbols, though in a different order: grouped in two lots of three different symbols, then a group of five. It was evidently some kind of cipher, though I knew little of cryptography and had no idea how to begin decoding it. I wondered if Sidney might have a better idea, given that he had had more contact than I with such work, so I took a piece of paper and a quill and made a copy of the symbols exactly as they appeared on the page, thinking I would give this to him to work on. But as I copied the first three lines, it became clear that the symbols were arranged in a sequence of twenty-four, and that this sequence was repeated three times.

I paused. There were twenty-four letters in the English alphabet, but surely no cipher could be that obvious? Nonetheless, I thought it worth a try, and on my copy I wrote out the alphabet underneath the first sequence of twenty-four symbols. If this was a basic substitution cipher, then according to this system the groups of letters underneath might mean something. I copied out the first group of three symbols according to the alphabetical substitution, and as I saw the result, O-R-A, I felt my pulse quicken. Hurriedly I translated the remaining letters of the short phrase, and drew my breath in sharply. I had written the words
Ora pro nobis
.

Folding the copy carefully and hiding it under my pillow, I laid my head down gratefully, trying to imagine why Roger Mercer had written those words—the refrain from the Catholic Litany of the Saints—invisibly in the back of his almanac. But I had to put the puzzle from my mind; there were more pressing matters for my attention. I had intended only to close my eyes for a few moments before gathering my thoughts and setting them to concentrate on the evening’s disputation, which was supposed to be the crowning glory of my first visit to Oxford, but I was awakened all of a sudden by a furious hammering on the door and sat upright, confused and bleary.

“Open up, for Christ’s sake!” a man’s voice bellowed, and for a moment my bowels clenched: Had there been another violent death? The door handle rattled urgently as I struggled out of my sheets and into a clean shirt, and when finally I wrenched the door open, there stood Sidney, quiffed and impatient, dressed head to foot in green velvet, with a neck ruff that made his head look as if it were perched on a platter.

“Christ alive, Bruno, I came as soon as I heard!” He strode past me into the room, stripping off his gloves with a businesslike air. “I had barely breakfasted this morning when what should I hear from the servants but that all of Christ Church cloister is aflame with the news that a savage beast stalks Lincoln College, dragging innocent men to their doom.” He looked me up and down, eyes wide in mock terror. “Well—at least you still have all your limbs, God be praised.”

“Philip—a man died in front of me this morning,” I said, wearily.

“I know—I want to hear all about it,” he said. “Come on, dress yourself, man—I have come to take you out to dinner.”

“What time is it?” I said, suddenly panicked; clearly I had slept much longer than I intended and my stomach was crying out with hunger, but I had not yet even begun my preparation for the disputation at five.

“Just past one.” Sidney sauntered around the room, picking up books and considering them idly while I rummaged for clean hose and a plain doublet. “One lad at Christ Church said a wolf had got into the college—I thought that seemed unlikely. Did you see what happened?”

“By tomorrow they’ll be saying it was a lion,” I said. “These students seem starved of incident here, they will make legends out of any matter. But I will be glad to tell you all, for there is much that troubles me, and I have something to show you. Let us find some food first, though.” I took the almanac from under my pillow and tucked it inside my doublet before fastening the buttons, Sidney watching me curiously as I did so.

The air was still damp though the sky was lighter as we passed under the tower gate into St. Mildred’s Lane, then south past the tall spire of All Hallows
Church. At the High Street we paused to let two riders on horseback pass, then crossed between piles of dung and straw that littered the muddy thoroughfare, churned up after all the rain. I was glad I had put on my riding boots. Young men in short black gowns hurried past us in groups, chattering over one another. At the corner of a narrow lane edged by low timber-framed houses, Sidney turned and led me to a two-storey building with gabled roofs which bore a painted sign creaking above its door:
PECK-WATER INN
.

The cobbled yard was busy as we passed under the gate; men led horses toward a stable block at the back as others unloaded heavy-looking barrels from a high cart. The building occupied three sides of a quadrangle, with two levels of balconies on each side overlooking the yard.

Inside, the taproom was dim and a fire burned in a stone hearth at one end. Long, rough-hewn tables and benches were set around the edges of the room, many of them already occupied by busy diners talking and eating at once; a serving hatch was built into the wall opposite the fireplace, and a red-faced woman in an apron scuttled between it and the tables ferrying wooden platters and pewter tankards, pausing occasionally to brush a strand of damp hair from her face with the back of her hand. When she noticed us, her harried expression changed to one of delight and she rushed over, wiping her hands on her apron.

“Sir Philip! What a pleasure—we heard you were back in town,” she said, with a wink. “They said there was a great procession in your honour.”

“It was a very wet procession, and the honour was not mine, Lizzy,” Sidney said, removing his hat and making a solemn bow. “May I present my dear friend from Italy, Doctor Giordano Bruno?”

“Buongiorno, signorina,”
I said, playing up to Sidney’s exaggerated courtliness.

“Pleasure, I’m sure,” the tavern mistress giggled, her considerable bosom quivering.

“Now then, Lizzy—we’d like a quiet table, a jug of beer when you have a moment, your best game pie, and some fresh bread, if you please.”

She beamed up at him.

“You best take the corner table, you won’t be disturbed there,” she said, and bustled off to the kitchen.

“I used to come here all the time,” Sidney explained. “The inn is hard by Christ Church and there was more varied company to be had here than inside the college when I was a student, if you know what I mean. We will be well treated in any case, they know I tip generously. Now then, Bruno—tell your tale.”

He sat back and folded his hands with the air of one who expects to be entertained. I could not help feeling he was taking a man’s death rather lightly, treating it as material for an exciting anecdote; in that he reminded me of Gabriel Norris. Perhaps it is a trait of rich boys, I thought: craving adventure in a life made dull by the absence of daily cares. I was about to launch into my account when Lizzy arrived with a jug of beer, two tankards, and a loaf of bread that Sidney ripped into immediately, handing me the first piece.

With my mouth half full, I told him of all that had happened since I was first awakened by the dog’s fearsome noise at dawn. When I came to the part about the locked gates, his complacent expression vanished and he leaned forward eagerly, his eyes alert.

“You suspect foul play?” he asked, as the tavern mistress arrived again with a platter of thick game pie.

When she had gone, I told him of my visit to Roger Mercer’s room, the interruption by Slythurst, and my subsequent conversation with the old porter. When I had finished, Sidney whistled through his teeth.

“Extraordinary business,” he said, shaking his head in disbelief. “So you surmise someone set that dog on him on purpose, then ransacked his room looking for something valuable?”

“That is the mystery,” I said. “It can’t be valuable in the usual sense, because whoever did it had no interest in the ten pounds he was carrying, or
the chest of gold in his room. But that is what I can’t fathom—someone lured him to the garden on the pretext of a meeting, clearly someone to whom he owed money. So why didn’t they take the money and then kill him?”

“Not necessarily a debt,” Sidney said, his mouth full. “Might it not have been someone who had something to sell?”

I frowned.

“But what would he be buying at that hour, in the grove? Something contraband, you think?”

Sidney was regarding me with amusement, a knowing smile playing about his lips. “Think, Bruno—what might a man want to buy under cover of darkness?”

I looked back at him blankly, then caught his meaning.

“Whores, you mean? But in that case, how much simpler—and warmer—just to find a whorehouse in town.” I shook my head. “Even if he
was
whoring—someone else knew to find him there at that time, someone who had a key to the grove. And it still doesn’t explain who went through his room, or why. Whatever they were looking for must have been of value to the person who wanted it—the place was torn to shreds, as if they sought it with utmost urgency.”

“But you say at least two people wanted whatever it might have been—the bursar and the other fellow who got there before you.” Sidney’s brow creased for a moment and he took a long draught of beer. “One thing is strange, though. It’s such a cowardly way to kill a man, and so imprecise, too. If you want a man dead, why not just run him through with a sword, especially if you know where to find him alone and unarmed. But a dog is so unpredictable.”