[William Falconer 06] - Falconer and the Ritual of Death

Further Titles by Ian Morson

The Falconer Mysteries

FALCONER’S CRUSADE

FALCONER’S JUDGEMENT

FALCONER AND THE FACE OF GOD

A PSALM FOR FALCONER

FALCONER AND THE GREAT BEAST

FALCONER AND THE RITUAL OF DEATH *

The Mediaeval Murderers

THE TAINTED RELIC

SWORD OF SHAME

HOUSE OF SHADOWS

The Niccolo Zuliani Mysteries

CITY OF THE DEAD *

* available from Severn House

FALCONER AND THE RITUAL OF DEATH

A Master William Falconer Mystery

Ian Morson

This first world edition published 2008

in Great Britain and in 2009 in the USA by SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of 9-15 High Street, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM1 1DF.

Trade paperback edition published

in Great Britain and the USA 2009 by

SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD

Copyright © 2008 by Ian Morson.

All rights reserved.

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Morson, Ian

Falconer and the ritual of death

1. University of Oxford - Fiction 2. Falconer, William (Fictitious character) - Fiction 3. Great Britain - History - Henry HI, 1216-1272 - Fiction 4. Detective and mystery stories

I. Title

823.9’14[F]

ISBN-13:978-0-7278-6702-5 (cased) ISBN-13:978-1-84751-097-6 (trade paper)

Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

All Severn House titles are printed on acid-free paper.

Typeset by Palimpsest Book Production Ltd., Grangemouth, Stidingshire, Scotland.

Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd., Bodmin, Cornwall.

And first came out the thick, thick blood,
 

And next came out the thin,
 

And next came out the bonny heart’s blood;
 

There was no more within.’

The Ballad of Hugh of Lincoln

One

Feast of the Beheading of John the Baptist, August 1271

The girl’s body lay on the scrubbed oak surface of the battered table. Soon the table would need another great effort to clean it. It was steeped in blood that trailed across it, and pooled in the gouges and gulleys that marred the surface. The source of all this blood was the flayed chest of the unfortunate girl. Someone had carved open her torso from neck to crotch and peeled the flesh back. Revealed was a mass of soft greyish matter and bone, soaked in red ichor.

The sight was at once nauseating and bewildering to William Falconer. A regent master of Oxford University he might be, but the inner parts of a human being, and their functions, were as much a mystery to him as God’s purpose for the world.

He teased his eyeglasses out of the pouch at his waist, and put them on. He had recently fitted side arms to the original armature, which was a V-shaped piece of metal with a lens at each extremity. Previously, he had to hold the lenses to his eyes, making them ungainly and tiring to use. Now, the new adaptation at either side, which hooked over his ear, permitted him to wear them and keep his hands flee. The problem was they were now awkward to carry around, unless he could devise some sort of hinge with which to fold the arms over.

He peered more closely at the array of internal organs that the lenses brought into sharp focus.

‘God’s design is a thing of beauty, don’t you agree?’ The quiet voice came from over his left shoulder, and Falconer, who had not heard anyone approaching, turned sharply.

The short, bald-headed little man standing behind him would normally have looked the most inoffensive of souls in any other ctrcumstance. But with the wild gleam of excitement in his eyes, and the presence of a bloody blade in his right hand, he would have scared the boldest of warriors in battle. It was a good job that Falconer knew Richard Bonham well, and was aware of his intentions.

In fact it was Falconer who had asked the little grey man to carry out the horrific act that had been perpetrated on poor Sarah Blakiston, the servant girl who now lay on the butcher’s slab. Of course, Bonham was not a butcher in the normal sense. He was a regent master like Falconer, and a man of science whose keen sense of the practical was only partially hindered by his deeply religious nature. Very few at the University of Oxford even knew that the self-effacing and quite humourless teacher of rhetoric had another side to his character. Successive popes had strictly forbidden the anatomizing of the human body for many years. And few people felt the need to contravene the proscription. But Bonham’s thirst for an understanding of the workings of man, in both a spiritual and a physical sense, had led him down a deeply secret avenue. So secret that even the normally perspicacious Falconer had only found it out by accident.

Bonham’s gruesome hobby had once made him the suspect in one of Falconer’s murder enquiries.

Now, Falconer pointed vaguely at the sticky morass before them.

‘Where is the gift’s heart?’

Bonham smirked at the request.

‘And you once a soldier, Master William. Surely, of all the parts of the body, you would know where the heart resides.’ Falconer remained patient with his colleague. The man was without a sense of humour other than the gallows sort, but remained a friend. He pointed at the bloody torso.

‘I meant, which part of this mess of offal is the girl’s heart?’ Bonham patted Falconer’s arm condescendingly, and indicated the flaccid object just below where he had broken away the left side of the ribcage. Falconer peered more closely.

‘Hmm. No indication in its nature then of the state of her feelings.’

‘Master Falconer, surely you are aware that a person’s humours reside in the head. If she was melancholic, then it would be her head we should examine.’ He paused, a bloodied finger tapping his lips. ‘Do you wish me to open her skull?’

Falconer shuddered at the thought, and hastily declined the offer. Her face and long dark hair were, even in death, too sweet to desecrate in such a cruel way.

‘No, no, Richard. I just thought that her heart might reveal to me something about her mood. Was she in love? Had she been so cruelly rejected that she would take her own life?’

This was the crux of why Bonham had been so easily able to obtain the girl’s body for his own nefarious deed. Not only was Sarah Blakiston a servant girl and an orphan to boot, she had also committed the felony of self-murder. If she had owned property, her rash action would have resulted in the confiscation of her goods and chattels. As it was, she had been merely a lowly servant in the house of Sir Gilbert de Bois.

And he had been only too happy to have her inconvenient body hastily removed from his sight after the legal niceties had been observed.

Bonham shook his head, and sucked absently on his finger.

‘I don’t think you should be looking at her heart to answer that question. You should be seeking a reason for her suicide elsewhere.’

‘And where would you suggest, Master Richard?’ Falconer was a little puzzled by Bonham’s cryptic remark.

Current opinion dictated that the humours were located in the head and blood in the chest, whereas the abdomen was the seat of raw bile. Where else than in the head or the heart would Bonham suggest looking for the cause of melancholia? Falconer was soon to understand the man’s words, however.

Bonham crossed to the other side of the body, and indicated for Falconer to come closer and stand opposite him. When he had so positioned himself, Bonham pointed to the girl’s lower regions. Nakedness was not a cause of embarrassment to Falconer, who saw in it the naturalness of God’s creation. But he was not used to examining the sexual parts of a young Woman, and bridled at the task.

‘No, no. Higher up, Master Falconer.’

Bonham jabbed a finger at the greyish mass below the girl’s coils of stomach pipes.

‘Look closely’.

Falconer obligingly bent over, and peered through the lenses of the contraption on the end of his nose. The heavy rig slipped slightly, and he was obliged to push the lenses back on to the bridge of his nose. But he had seen enough. Curled neatly in the egg-shaped womb that Bonham had carefully incised open was a perfectly formed child.

Two

Master Mason Richard Thorpe had a problem. The streets of Oxford were narrow and winding, and he was being asked to work in Little Jewry Lane, the narrowest of the lot.

Moreover, only two streets away was an alley suggestively called Grope Lane. He had a good idea what went on there.

And doubtless most of his workers would be sloping off before the end of the day to sniff around the whorehouses. But he could cope with all that. No, his main problem was his employer, Dame Elia Bassett.

It would not have been so bad if the widow had been fair of face. He could have dealt with her condescendingly. But she was a harridan, and insistent on getting her own way in all things. No wonder her husband had fled this life in the fullness of his years, and with a heavy purse to boot. Now the widow proposed to squander the largest portion of his money on a new building in the university town, ostensibly in memory of her dear departed husband. Not that Thorpe was carping about that. He was earning a good income from the transaction. But Dame Elia was proposing to construct an edifice to house a whole gang of students of the university all together.

Personally, Thorpe couldn’t see why the old method of lodging the indolent youths in a variety of ramshackle tenements at high rents couldn’t continue. The layabouts deserved nothing better. From what he knew even before he took on the project, most of the students spent their evenings roaming the streets accosting honest, hard-working citizens, and getting drunk. Now he had moved to Oxford for the duration of the task at hand, he had seen that the tales were all truth. And that was another thing. His workers would no doubt also be led astray by the antics of those who should be their betters, if not their elders.

But when it came down to it, it was still the shrill voice of the dame that he could not cope with. Every interview with her was the same. The longer he tried to take explaining the practical problems, the louder she screeched. She could not see th~ difficulties that faced Thorpe in even preparing the site for building whatever the thing was to be called. He looked again at the orders that lay on the table before him, recalling when ‘th~ dame had described the edifice, and had explained its purpose. It was to be a community - she called it a collegium of students. His Latin wasn’t all that good, so he didn’t understand fully what she was saying. But she had rendered it in God’s English, and there it was - the name she had inscribed on his instructions.

‘Bassett College.’

Thorpe rubbed his dusty hands through his tousled black hair, adding to the streaks of white that were already showing through above his ears. He had no doubt the greyness would be much increased by the end of his present task. And the irony was that he had fought hard to get this commission.