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calm after dealing with this murder,’ said Michael, as the Benedictines
     walked away. He rearranged his face into a sympathetic smile as the Carmelite Prior reached him. ‘Accept my sincere condolences
     for this dreadful incident, Father.’
    Lincolne did not reply. His eyes lit on the spots of blood that splattered the ground, and he pushed past Michael to enter
     the church. Lincolne was a man of immense proportions. Bartholomew was tall, but Lincolne topped him by at least a head, a
     height further accentuated by a curious triangular turret of grey hair that sprouted from his scalp in front of his tonsure.
     The first time Bartholomew had seen it, when Lincolne had arrived in Cambridge to become Prior after the plague had claimed
     his predecessor, he thought a stray ball of sheep wool had somehow become attached to the man’s head. But closer inspection
     had revealed that it was human hair, and that it was carefully combed upward in a deliberate attempt to grant its owner a
     hand’s length more height. Lincolne was broad, too, especially around the middle, and his ill-fitting habit revealed a pair
     of thin white ankles that looked too fragile to support the weight above them.
    He knelt next to Faricius and began to recite the last rites in a loud, indignant voice that was probably audible back at
     his friary. He produced a flask of holy water from his scripand began to splash it around liberally, so that some of it fell on the floor.
    ‘Do you have any idea what happened?’ asked Michael, watching the proceedings with sombre green eyes.
    ‘What happened is that the Dominicans murdered Faricius,’ Lincolne replied, glaring up at Michael. Holy water dribbled from
     the flask on to Faricius’s habit. ‘Faricius was one of my best scholars and hated violence and fighting. I will have vengeance,
     Brother. I will not stand by while you allow the Black Friars to get away with this.’
    ‘I would never do such a thing,’ objected Michael, offended. ‘I am the University’s Senior Proctor, appointed by the Bishop
     of Ely himself to ensure that justice is done in cases like this.’
    ‘I have been at the Carmelite Friary in Cambridge since I was a child,’ Lincolne went on, as if Michael had not spoken. ‘Yet,
     in all that time, I have never witnessed such an act of evil as this.’
    ‘An act of evil?’ asked Bartholomew, thinking it an odd phrase to use to describe a murder.
    ‘Heresy,’ hissed Lincolne, spraying holy water liberally over himself as well as over the dead student. ‘Nominalism.’
    ‘I beg your pardon?’ asked Michael, startled. ‘What does nominalism have to do with anything?’
    Lincolne pursed his lips in rank disapproval. ‘It is a doctrine that came from the Devil’s own lips. It denies the very existence
     of God.’
    ‘I do not think so,’ said Bartholomew, surprised by the Carmelite’s assertion. ‘Nominalism is a philosophical doctrine that
     …’
    He trailed off as Lincolne fixed him with the gaze of the fanatic. ‘Nominalist thinking will destroy all that is good and
     holy in the world and allow the Devil to rule. It was because people were nominalists that God sent the Great Pestilence five
     years ago.’
    ‘I see,’ said Bartholomew, who had heard many reasons for why the devastating sickness had ravaged the world,taking one in three people, but never one that claimed a philosophical theory was responsible. ‘So, you are saying that the
     plague took only nominalists as its victims? Not realists?’
    ‘I think God sent the Death to warn us all against sinful thoughts – like nominalism,’ declared Lincolne in the tone of voice
     that suggested disagreement was futile. ‘And that wicked man, William of Occam, who was the leading proponent of nominalism
     in Oxford, was one of the first to die.’
    ‘But so were a number of scholars who follow realism,’ Bartholomew pointed out. ‘The plague took scholars from both sides
     of the debate. That