Read A Wicked Deed for Free Online

heard of these places,’ said Cynric, looking around him uneasily. ‘The spirits of those not granted absolution haunt them, and their screams of torment ring out each midnight.’
    ‘That is superstitious nonsense, Cynric,’ said Bartholomew firmly, refusing to allow his book-bearer’s vivid imagination to unnerve him.
    ‘It is truth, boy,’ said Cynric with conviction. ‘If you were to come here at the witching hour, you would hear them.’
    ‘Well, that is no tormented spirit,’ said Bartholomew, nodding at the bundle of clothing in the doorway. ‘But it may be someone needing help.’ ‘I do not like this at all,’ said Alcote, looking around him as though he expected to see the plague-dead rising up and rushing out of their houses to lay ghostly hands on him. ‘It is sinister!’
    Bartholomew handed the reins of his horse to Cynric, and walked through the nettles and weeds to the house where the skirt and shoe lay.
    Aware that Michael was right, and that the house might still contain the decomposing bodies of unburied plague victims, Bartholomew picked up a stick, and used it to ease back the piece of leather that hung in the doorway. He gave a sigh of relief when he saw the skirt and shoe were nothing more than that – discarded clothes that had fallen in such a way as to appear as though someone was inside them.
    As the daylight filtered into the house’s single room, Bartholomew noticed it was surprisingly intact for a place that had been abandoned four years before. But, he thought, as he looked around, perhaps it had belonged to the woman who had killed herself, and had therefore only been left to decay for a few months. There was a table in the centre of the room with some carrots on it, black and shrivelled and with a knife lying next to them, as if their owner had been preparing a meal before she left, never to return. Cold, dead ashes lay in the hearth, stirring slightly in the draught from the doorway, and a rusting metal pot nestled among them.
    Something glittered on the ground near the threshold, and Bartholomew crouched to look at it. It was a shiny new penny, still copper-bright from the mint, and not the dull brown of most of the coins of the realm. He turned it over in his fingers, and saw the date was that of the current year – 1353.
    Bartholomew was puzzled. Coins did not remain clean for long, and he could only suppose that someone had dropped it recently. He turned his attention to the skirt and shoe. Both were free of dust and leaves, and the skirt was relatively clean. Neither could have been there for more than a few days at the most. He stood up. Doubtless some passer-by had dumped the old clothes there, and dropped the penny at the same time. Regardless, it was nothing to warrant him wasting any more of his time, and certainly no one needed his medical skills.
He made his way back to where his colleagues waited for him. Alcote moved away as he approached, holding a large pomander to his nose. It was not the first time the pomander had made its appearance on the journey: Alcote was terrified of the plague returning, and he invariably had the thing clasped to his face the moment they entered a village or a town. It was stuffed with cloves, bayleaves, wormwood and – if the students were to be believed – a little gold dust mixed with dried grasshoppers. Alcote had used it during the pestilence, and attributed his survival to its efficacy, although Bartholomew suspected that him locking himself away in his room had more to do with his escaping the sickness than the mysterious assortment of ingredients in the now-filthy pomander.
    ‘There was nothing there,’ he said in answer to his colleagues’ anxious looks.
    ‘Was the hovel full of skeletons?’ whispered Deynman fearfully. ‘Victims of the plague?’
    Bartholomew shook his head. ‘No, just some old clothes.’
    Michael looked at the skirt and shuddered, memories of the plague in Cambridge surging back to him. There