Discovery of Berengar's Body

The discovery of Berengar of Arundel's body on the morning of the third day marks a decisive turn in the investigation, transforming a series of isolated deaths into a pattern of murder by poison and forcing William of Baskerville to abandon his earlier hypothesis of suicide. The corpse is found not at the foot of a cliff or in a jar of blood, but in the balneary, submerged in a full bath, and the circumstances of its discovery reveal both the murderer's method and the limits of William's deductive confidence.

Discovery and Immediate Context

After the office of matins, Berengar is absent from choir, and the abbot informs William that the assistant librarian has not been seen since compline the previous night. A search of the abbey grounds yields nothing until William, prompted by Alinardo of Grottaferrata's cryptic allusion to the third trumpet of the Apocalypse—which foretells death by water—suggests examining the balneary. There, behind a drawn curtain, they find a full tub and, at the bottom, the naked body of Berengar. The water is undisturbed, the garment lies in a heap beside the bath, and the fireplace holds fresh ashes with an overturned cauldron, indicating that Berengar heated the water himself. Severinus of Sankt Wendel confirms that Berengar suffered from convulsions and had often been advised to take warm baths to calm his agitation, making it plausible that he sought the balneary of his own accord after some emotional crisis.

Forensic Evidence and the Poison Trail

Severinus and William examine the corpse with the detachment of physicians. The face is swollen, the belly taut—unmistakable signs of drowning—and there are no external wounds or signs of violence. William notes that the scene is neat and clean, with no evidence of a struggle, suggesting that Berengar entered the water voluntarily. But the critical clue emerges when Severinus examines the dead man's hands: the tips of two fingers on the right hand are dark, as if blackened by some substance, and fainter traces appear on the thumb and index of the left hand. Severinus recalls that Venantius of Salvemec's fingers bore identical marks, a detail he had dismissed as ink stains at the time. When William asks him to open the corpse's mouth, Severinus discovers that the tongue is black. This combination of blackened fingers and a black tongue eliminates the possibility of simple drowning and points to a poison that was ingested—grasped with the fingers and put into the mouth. The poison, William reasons, must have been smeared on something that Berengar handled and then brought to his lips, a mechanism that would explain both Venantius's death and Berengar's.

The Missing Poison and the Theft of the Book

The discovery of the blackened tongue prompts Severinus to recall a long-forgotten incident: years earlier, a brother returning from distant lands had given him a highly potent, yellowish substance that could kill within half an hour if it touched the lips. Severinus kept the ampoule hidden, but after a great storm that devastated his laboratory, it disappeared. He had assumed it was broken and swept away, but now he realizes it could have been stolen—perhaps by the novice Augustine, who died the following year, or by someone else who took advantage of the confusion. The poison, William now understands, was the weapon used against both Venantius and Berengar. The connection between the two victims is further strengthened when Severinus reveals that he found Berengar's lenses—William's stolen glasses—inside the dead man's habit, confirming that Berengar was the mysterious figure who had ambushed them in the scriptorium two nights earlier and snatched the lenses from the desk. Berengar had taken the forbidden book from Venantius's desk, read it, and been poisoned by its pages; he then fled to the balneary, seeking relief from the burning in his mouth and throat, and drowned when the poison overcame him.

Narrative Role and Thematic Significance

Berengar's death is the third in a sequence that William initially tries to read through the lens of the Apocalypse—hail, blood, water—but the forensic evidence of the blackened fingers and tongue forces him to abandon that pattern and focus instead on the material object at the center of the mystery: the book. The discovery that both Venantius and Berengar touched and ingested the same lethal substance establishes that the murders are not random acts of violence but a calculated defense of a forbidden text. The scene also deepens the portrait of Berengar as a figure driven by lust, jealousy, and fear—a man who traded sexual favors for access to the library's secrets, who stole the book in a desperate bid to possess its knowledge, and who died because he could not resist reading what he had stolen. His death, like Venantius's, is a direct consequence of the poison that Jorge of Burgos prepared years earlier and that now, through a chain of human weakness and ambition, has claimed its second victim.