Grave Goods aka Relics of the Dead

TWO

MY DEAR CHILD, you must leave now,” Prior Geoffrey said. “Please understand. If you and Mansur are summoned to the consistory court, I cannot save you. I doubt if even the bishop could. The summoner will be here today. He’ll have men to take you both by force.”

“This baby was drowned alive,” Adelia said. “Dear God, somebody threw her into the river alive-there’s weed in the bronchus. Look.” She held out a tiny tube that had been slit by her dissecting knife. “Three infants in three years found floating, and Lord knows how many others that haven’t been discovered.”

The prior of Cambridge ’s great canonry looked around for help, avoiding the poor little mess lying on the tarpaulined table. At one time, he’d have been outraged by it and used his power to have this woman put away as an offense against heaven-even now he shook to think how he would explain his connivance when he came to stand before God’s throne. But he’d learned many things since Vesuvia Adelia Rachel Ortese Aguilar, qualified doctor from the School of Medicine in Salerno -the only place in Christendom that suffered, and trained, women students-had come into his life. And saved it.

The fiction they had all maintained-that Mansur, her Arab attendant, was actually the doctor, and she merely his assistant and translator-would not save her; for one thing, it was wearing thin, and for another, her association with a Saracen, and therefore a heretic, would hoist her on the same gallows.

The prior wondered what his own association with this extraordinary and dangerous woman was doing to his own reputation, particularly in God’s eyes. In the Almighty’s presence he would have to seek forgiveness and give explanation for himself, and for her. He would ask the Lord why it was so wrong that a female should heal rather than a man. Are women not natural nurturers? Did not Your holy servant Paul command in his letter to the Corinthians, “Thou shall not muzzle the ox that treadeth out the corn”? Lord, if we have the corn, does it matter if the ox should be feminine?

Well, of course he’d have to admit that she cut up the dead. But, he would say, she has uncovered murder through it and brought the perpetrators to justice. Surely You must approve of that.

The prior sighed. God would send him to hell for his impertinence.

Yes, he was risking his soul for her, but he loved her like a daughter.

Also, Lord, she is humble in her way. You can’t find a much humbler dwelling than this one in Waterbeach.

It was a typical Cambridgeshire fenland cottage, slightly larger than most: walls of lathe and plaster, a reed-thatched roof, a mud floor, a ladder to the sleeping loft, stools made of tussocked rushes. Nothing of stone-there was none in the fens. No animals except the disgusting dog she called Ward. The only steel in the place was in her dissecting knives.

Prior Geoffrey could hear the prattle of Adelia’s daughter, her illegitimate daughter, from the cottage next door, where Gyltha, the child’s nurse, lived in sin with the Arab eunuch, Adelia’s childhood guardian, whom she’d brought with her from Salerno.

Prior Geoffrey tried to draw a veil over his memory of Adelia’s explanation that though a castrated man was unable to have children, he could still sustain an erection.

Forgive her plain speaking, Lord; it is all she knows how to do.

Outside was a view that kings might envy: a soft, sinuous panorama of alder and willow exactly reflected in the waters of the Cam. Far off were the castle turrets of Cambridge itself and, nearer, a tiny landing stage where, at this moment, his barge was moored, with a path leading from it to her ever-open door.

The path, of course, was the trouble. It had been beaten flat and deep by the feet of Cambridge ’s sick and broken coming to be made better.

The town’s doctors-Prior Geoffrey drew another veil across Adelia’s plain speaking as far as those charlatans were concerned-had lost too many patients to “Dr. Mansur” and had complained to the archdeacon of that abomination-no matter that those same patients fared better.

At any moment, the summoner would be coming up that same path and, finding a partially dismembered baby, would have Mansur and Adelia put on trial, where she’d be at once condemned and handed over to the civil authorities to be hanged. Nobody could save her.

Yet Prior Geoffrey knew the woman; she was championing this dead infant that somebody had found and brought to her. Most likely its father had thrown it into the river as unwanted, which, to a poor man with too many children to feed already, it was, but its death, to Adelia, constituted an atrocity that must be brought home.

“A great evil, I grant you,” he said to her, “but we can do nothing about it now.”

Adelia was sewing up the incision. She paused to consider. “We could,” she said. “I’ve often wondered if I could start teaching women how to prevent conception when they need to. There are some sure methods.”

“I don’t want to hear them,” Prior Geoffrey said hurriedly.

That would finish it. The idea that the marital embrace could be for sinful pleasure rather than for the transmission of life would cause the judges to strike this woman down where she stood. Even he, Geoffrey, loving her as he did, was confounded by her temerity. What did they teach them in Salerno?

Picking up the embroidered hem of his gown, he left her and ran next door, the dog cantering interestedly after him.

Young Allie was sitting on the grass, weaving a birdcage under the tutelary eye of Gyltha, both of them wearing rush hats to protect their eyes from the sun.

Mansur was kneeling on his prayer mat, facing east, his torso rising and lowering. Dear Lord, it was noon, of course, time for what the prior had learned to be the Muslim hour for Dhur. How many heresies was he to encounter this day?

Well, Gyltha would do, dear, sensible woman that she was.

He gabbled his explanation. “So the two of them must leave, Gyltha. Now.”

“Where we going to go?”

The immediate reaction of the down-to-earth Gyltha-that she too would go with them-was a comfort. More calmly, the prior said, “Lady Wolvercote is at the priory…”

“Emma? Young Emma’s in Cambridge?”

“By God’s mercy, she happened to arrive last night asking where to find you all. She is touring her estates and desires Adelia’s company. It is at least a temporary expedient until I can arrange… something.”

The prior removed his cap to wipe his forehead and think what the “something” could be, which he couldn’t. “Gyltha, they’re coming for her and Mansur, and she won’t attend to me.”

Gyltha’s mouth set. “She’ll bloody well attend to me.”

By the time the prior had signaled to his boatman to help transfer possessions to the barge, Gyltha had kicked Mansur to his feet, run with Allie to Adelia’s cottage, wrapped the dead baby in a rug, and was now handing it to the Arab. “Here, hide this poor thing and be quick about it.”

Adelia snatched it back. “Not like that. She deserves better.”

So a funeral was held. Mansur dug a small grave in the orchard, under a budding pear tree. While the last of its blossoms fell on him, Prior Geoffrey rushed through the obsequies, again imperiling his soul, for certainly this baby had not been baptized and, according to Saint Augustine, would share in the common misery of the damned in hell for its inheritance of original sin.

Though, he thought, lately there had been a softening of this precept in the teachings of Abelard and others. Yet Abelard… The prior shook his head at his own propensity for fondness for the world’s sinners.

“Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis. Requiescant in pace. Amen. And now let’s go.”

About to step aboard the barge, Adelia turned to look at what had been her English home for four years, as dear to her as that of her youth in the Kingdom of Sicily. “I can’t say good-bye,” she said, “I love this place, I love its people.”

“I know,” the prior said, grabbing her hand. “Come along.”

“And I love you,” she said.

As the boatman poled the barge into a tributary that led to the back of Saint Augustine ’s canonry, they saw a skiff flying the pennant of the consistory court being rowed swiftly up the Cam toward Waterbeach, on its way to fetch two heretics to justice.

By the mercy of God, its occupants didn’t see them.