Mistress of the Art of Death

Eight

I had to make sure,” Adelia said. “The boy could have died at the hands of someone other than our killer, or even accidentally-the injuries might have been sustained after death.”

“They do that,” Simon said. “When they’re accidentally dead, they leap up on the nearest Jewish lawn.”

“It was necessary to make sure he died as the others did. It had to be proved.” Adelia was as tired as Simon, though she didn’t regard the Jews’ treatment of the body on their lawn with the disgust that he did; she was sorry for them. “We can now be certain the Jews didn’t kill him.”

“And who will believe it?” Simon was determinedly depressed.

They were at supper. The last of the sun coming almost directly through the ridiculous windows was warming the room and touching Simon’s pewter flagon with gold. To save the wine, he’d reverted to English beer. Mansur was drinking the barley water that Gyltha made for him.

It was Mansur who asked now, “Why does the dog cut off their eyelids?”

“I don’t know.” Adelia didn’t want to consider the reason.

“Would you know what I think?” Simon said.

She would not. In Salerno, she was presented with bodies, some of which had died in suspicious circumstances; she examined them; she gave her results to her foster father, who, in turn, told the authorities; the bodies were taken away. Sometimes, always later, she learned what happened to the perpetrator-if he or she had been found. This was the first time she had been involved in physically hunting down a killer, and she was not enjoying it.

“I think they die too quickly for him,” Simon said. “I think he wants their attention even after they are dead.”

Adelia turned her head away and watched midges dancing in a shaft of sun.

“I know what parts I’ll cut off when we catch him, inshallah,” Mansur said.

“I shall assist you,” Simon agreed.

Two men so different. The Arab, looming in his chair, dark face almost featureless against the white folds of his headdress; the Jew, the sun catching the line of his cheek, leaning forward, his fingers turning and turning his flagon. Both in accord.

Why did men think that was the worst thing? Perhaps, for them, it was. But it was trivial, like castrating a rogue animal. The harm done by this particular creature was too vast for human reprisal, the pain it had caused spread too far. Adelia thought of Agnes, mother of Harold, and her vigil. She thought of the parents who’d gathered round the little catafalques in Saint Augustine ’s church. Of two men in Chaim’s cellar, praying as they did violence to their nature by ridding themselves of a fearful burden. She thought of Dina and the shadow fallen over her that could never be lifted.

It accounted for the wish for eternal damnation, she thought, that there could be no reparation made to such dead, nor for the living they’d left behind. Not in this life.

“Do you agree with me, Doctor?”

“What?”

“My theory on the mutilations.”

“It is not in my brief. I am not here to understand why a murderer does what he does, merely to prove that he did it.”

They stared at her.

“I apologize,” she said more quietly, “but I will not enter his mind.”

Simon said, “We may have to do that very thing before this business is finished, Doctor. Think as he thinks.”

“Then you do it,” she said. “You’re the subtle one.”

He took in a sad breath; they were all gloomy this evening. “Let us consider what we know of him so far. Mansur?”

“No killings here before the saint boy. Maybe he came new to this place a year ago.”

“Ah, then you think he’s done this before, somewhere else?”

“A jackal is always a jackal.”

“True,” Simon said. “Or he could be a new recruit to the armies of Beelzebub, just starting to slake his desires.”

Adelia frowned; that the killer should be a very young man did not accord with her sense of him.

Simon’s head came up. “You don’t think so, Doctor?”

She sighed; she was to be drawn in despite herself. “Are we supposing?”

“We can do little else.”

Reluctantly, because the apprehension came from less than a shadow glimpsed in a fog, she said, “The attacks are frenzied, which argues youth, but they are planned, which argues maturity. He lures them to a special and isolated place, like the hill; I think that must be so because nobody hears their torture. Possibly, he takes his time, not in the case of Little Peter-he was more hurried there-but with the subsequent children.”

She paused because the theory was hideous and founded on such little proof. “It may be that they are kept alive for some time after their abduction. That would argue a perverted patience and a love of prolonged agony. I would have expected the corpse of the most recent victim, considering the day he was taken, to have displayed more advanced decomposition than it did.”

She glared at them. “But that could be due to so many causes that, as a proposition, it bears no weight at all.”

“Ach.” Simon pushed his cup away as if it offended him. “We are no further. We shall, after all, have to inquire into the movements of forty-seven people, whether they wear black worsted or not. I shall have to write to my wife and tell her I will not be home yet.”

“There is one thing,” Adelia said. “It occurred to me today when I talked with Mistress Dina. That poor lady believes all the killings are the result of a conspiracy to blame her people…”

“They are not.” Simon said. “Yes, he tries to implicate the Jews with his Stars of David, but that is not why he kills.”

“I agree. Whatever the prime motive for these murders, it is not racial; there is too much sexual ferocity involved.”

She paused. Having sworn not to enter the mind of the killer, she could feel it reaching out to enmesh her. “Nevertheless, he may see no reason why he should not gain from it. Why did he cast Little Peter’s body on Chaim’s lawn?”

Simon’s eyebrows went up; the question didn’t need asking. “Chaim was a Jew, the eternal scapegoat.”

“It worked damn well, too,” Mansur said. “No suspicion on the killer. And”-he dragged a finger across his throat-“good-bye, Jews.”

“Exactly,” said Adelia. “Good-bye, Jews. Again, I agree it is probable that the man wanted to implicate the Jews while he was about it. But why choose that particular Jew? Why not put the body near one of the other houses? They were deserted and dark that night because all Jewry was attending Dina’s wedding. If he were in a boat-and presumably he was-the killer could have lain the corpse here; this house, Old Benjamin’s, is near the river. Instead, he took unnecessary risk and chose Chaim’s lawn, which was well lighted, to throw the body onto.”

Simon leaned even further forward until his nose almost touched one of the table’s candlesticks. “Continue.”

Adelia shrugged. “I merely look at the end result. The Jews are blamed; a mob is fired into madness; Chaim, the biggest moneylender in Cambridge, is hanged. The tower holding the records of all those owing money to the usurers goes up in flames, Chaim’s with it.”

“He owed money to Chaim? Our killer having satisfied his perversion also wants his debt canceled?” Simon considered it. “But could he have reckoned on the mob burning the tower down? Or that it would turn on Chaim and hang him, for that matter?”

“He is in the crowd,” Mansur said, and his boy’s voice went into a shriek: “Kill the Jews. Kill Chaim. No more filthy usury. To the castle, people. Bring torches.”

Startled by the sound, the head of Ulf peeped over the rail of the gallery, a white and unruly dandelion clock in the growing darkness. Adelia shook a finger at it. “Go to bed.”

“Why you talking that foreign gobble?”

“So you can’t eavesdrop. Go to bed.”

More of Ulf appeared over the rail. “You reckon the Judes didn’t do for Peter and them after all, then?”

“No,” Adelia told him and added, because, after all, it was Ulf who had discovered and shown her the drain, “Peter was dead when they found him on the lawn. They were frightened and put him into the drain to take suspicion off themselves.”

“Mighty clever of ’em, weren’t it?” The boy gave a grunt of disgust. “Who did do for him, then?”

“We don’t know. Somebody who wanted to see Chaim blamed, perhaps someone who owed him money. Go to bed.”

Simon held up his hand to detain the boy. “We do not know who, my son. We try to find out.” To Adelia he said in Salernitan, “The child is intelligent; he has already been of use. Perhaps he can scout for us.”

“No.” She was surprised by her own vehemence.

“I can help.” Ulf left the balustrade to come pattering down the stairs in a rush. “I’m a tracker. I got my hoof all over this town.”

Gyltha came in to light the candles. “Ulf, you get to bed afore I feed you to the cats.”

“Tell ’em, Gran,” Ulf said desperately. “Tell how I’m a fine tracker. And I hear things, don’t I, Gran? I hear things nobody else don’t acause nobody don’t notice me, I can go places… I got a right, Gran, Harold and Peter was my friends.”

Gyltha’s eyes met Adelia’s and the momentary terror in them told Adelia that Gyltha knew what she knew: The killer would kill again.

A jackal is always a jackal.

Simon said, “Ulf could come with us tomorrow and show us where the three children were found.”

“That’s at the foot of the ring,” Gyltha objected. “I don’t want the boy near it.”

“We have Mansur with us. The killer is not on the hill, Gyltha, he is in town; from the town, the children were abducted.”

Gyltha looked toward Adelia, who nodded. Safer that Ulf should be in their company than wandering Cambridge following a trail of his own.

Gyltha considered. “What about the sick?”

“Surgery will be closed for the day,” Simon said firmly.

Equally firmly, Adelia said, “On his way to the hill, the doctor will call on yesterday’s worst cases. I want to make sure of the child with the cough. And the amputation needs his dressing changed.”

Simon sighed. “We should have set up as astrologers. Or lawyers. Something useless. I fear the spirit of Hippocrates has lain a yoke of duty across our shoulders.”

“It has.” In Adelia’s limited pantheon, Hippocrates ruled supreme.

Ulf was persuaded to the undercroft where he and the servants slept, Gyltha retired to the kitchen, and the three others resumed their discussion.

Simon drummed his fingers on the table, thinking. He stopped. “Mansur, my good, wise friend, I believe you are right, our killer was in the crowd a year ago, urging the death of Chaim. Doctor, you agree?”

“It could be so,” Adelia said cautiously. “Certainly Mistress Dina believes the mob was being set on with intent.”

Kill the Jews, she thought, the demand beloved of Roger of Acton. How fitting if that creature proved as horrid in action as in person.

She said so out loud, then doubted it. The children’s murderer was surely persuasive. She could not imagine the timorous Mary being tempted by Acton, however many sweetmeats he offered her. The man lacked guile; he was a ranting buffoon, ugly. Nor, despising the race as he did, was he likely to have borrowed from a Jew.

“Not necessarily so,” Simon told her. “I have seen men leave my father’s counting house, condemning his usury while their purses bulged with his gold. Nevertheless, the fellow wears worsted, and we must see if he was in Cambridge on the requisite dates.”

His spirits had risen; he would not be long returning to his family after all. “Au loup!” Beaming at their puzzlement, he said, “We are on the scent, my friends. We are Nimrods. Lord, if I had known the thrill of the chase, I would have neglected my studies for the hunting field. Tyer-hillaut! Is that not the call?”

Adelia said kindly, “I believe the English cry halloo and tallyho.”

“Do they? How quickly language corrupts. Ah, well. However, our quarry is in sight. Tomorrow I shall return to the castle and use this excellent organ”-he tapped his nose, which was twitching like a questing shrew’s-“to sniff out which man it is in this town that owed Chaim money he was reluctant to repay.”

“Not tomorrow,” Adelia said. “Tomorrow we go to Wandlebury Hill.” To search, it would need all three of them. And Ulf.

“The day after, then.” Simon was not to be put off. He raised his flagon first to Adelia, then Mansur. “We are on his track, my masters. A man of maturity in age, on Wandlebury Hill three nights ago, in Cambridge on such and such a day, a man in heavy debt to Chaim and leading the crowd as it bays for the moneylender’s blood. With access to black worsted.” He drank deep and wiped his mouth. “Almost we know the size of his boots.”

“Who may be someone entirely different,” Adelia said.

To that list she would have added a cloak of geniality, for surely if, like Peter, the children had gone willingly to meet their killer, they had been persuaded by charm, even humor.

She thought of the big tax collector.

Gyltha didn’t hold with her employers staying up too late and came in to clear the table while they were yet sitting at it.

“Here,” she said, “let’s have a look at that confit of yourn. I got Matilda B.’s uncle in the kitchen; he’s in the confectionary trade. Might be as he’s seen the like.”

It wouldn’t do in Salerno, Adelia thought, as she trudged upstairs. In her parents’ villa, her aunt made sure that servants not only knew their place but kept to it, speaking-and with respect-when spoken to.

On the other hand, she thought, which is preferable? Deference? Or collaboration?

She brought down the sweetmeat that had been entangled in Mary’s hair and put it with its square of linen on the table. Simon shrank from it. Matilda B.’s uncle poked at it with a finger like pasty and shook his head.

“Are you sure?” Adelia tipped a candle to give better light.

“It’s a jujube,” Mansur said.

“Made with sugar, I reckon,” the uncle said. “Too dear for my trade, we do sweeten with honey.”

“What did you say?” Adelia asked of Mansur.

“It’s a jujube. My mother made them, may Allah be pleased with her.”

“A jujube.” Adelia said. “Of course. They make them in the Arab quarter in Salerno. Oh, God…” She sank into a chair.

“What is it?” Simon was on his feet. “What?”

“It wasn’t Jew-Jews, it was jujubes.” She squeezed her eyes shut, hardly able to bear a renewal of the picture in which a little boy looked back before disappearing into the darkness of trees.

By the time she opened them, Gyltha had ushered Matilda B. and her uncle out of the room and then come back to it. Uncomprehending faces stared into hers.

Adelia said in English, “That’s what Little Saint Peter meant. Ulf told us. He said Peter called across the river to his friend Will that he was going for the Jew-Jews. But he didn’t. He said that he was going for the jujubes. It’s a word Will can’t have heard before; he translated it as ‘Jew-Jews.’”

Nobody spoke. Gyltha had taken a chair and sat with them, elbows on the table, her hands to her forehead.

Simon broke the silence: “You are right, of course.”

Gyltha looked up. “That’s what they was tempted with, sure enough. But I never heard of un.”

“An Arab trader may bring them,” Simon pointed out. “They are a sweetmeat of the East. We look for someone with Arab connections.”

“Crusader with a sweet tooth, maybe,” Mansur said. “Crusaders bring them back to Salerno, maybe one brings them to here.”

“That’s right.” Simon was becoming excited again. “That’s right. Our killer has been to the Holy Land.”

Once again, Adelia thought not of Sir Gervase nor Sir Joscelin, but of the tax collector, another crusader.

SHEEP, LIKE HORSES, will not willingly tread on the fallen. The shepherd called Old Walt, following his flock to its day’s grazing on Wandlebury Hill, had seen a gap appear in its woolly flow as if an unseen prophet had called on it to divide. By the time he’d reached the obstruction it had avoided, the ongoing sea of sheep had become seamless once more.

But his dog had set to howling.

The sight of the children’s bodies, a strange weaving laid on the chest of each one, had broken the tenor of a life into which the only enemy was bad weather, or came on four legs and could be chased away.

Now Old Walt was mending it. His dry, creased hands were folded on his crook, a sack over his bent head and shoulders, eyes like beads set deep, contemplating the grass where the corpses had lain, muttering to himself.

Ulf, who sat close by, said he was praying to The Lady. “To heal the place, like.”

Adelia had moved some yards away, had chosen a tussock, and was sitting on it, Safeguard by her side. She’d tried questioning the shepherd, but, though his glance had swept over her, he had not seen her. She’d seen him not seeing her, as if a foreign woman was so far outside his experience as to be invisible to him.

This must be left to Ulf, who, like the shepherd, was a fenlander and therefore claimed a solid position in the landscape.

Such a weird landscape. To her left the land descended to the flatness of the fens and the ocean of alder and willow that kept its secrets. Away to her right, in the distance, was the bare hilltop with its wooded sides where she, Simon, Mansur, and Ulf had spent the last three hours examining the strange depressions in its ground, bending to peer under bushes, looking for a lair where murder had been done-and not finding it.

Light rain came and went as clouds obscured the sun and then let it shine again.

Knowing that a Golgotha was nearby had affected natural sound: the song of warblers, leaves trembling in the rain, the breeze creaking an ancient apple tree, the puffing of Simon the townsman as he stumbled. The crisp sound of sheep tearing mouthfuls of grass had, for her, been overlaid by a heavy silence still vibrating with unheard screams.

She’d been glad of an excuse when, far off, she saw the shepherd, the priory’s shepherd-for these were Saint Augustine sheep-and had gone with Ulf to talk to him, leaving the two men still searching.

For the tenth time, she went over the reasoning that had brought them all to this place. The children had died in chalk, no doubt of it.

They had been found on silt-down there, on a muddy sheepwalk that led eventually to the hill. And, what’s more, found on the very morning after the hill had been disturbed by an ingress of strangers.

Ergo, the corpses had been moved in the night. From their chalk graves. And the nearest chalk, the only possible chalk outcrop from which they could have been carried in the time, was Wandlebury Ring.

She looked toward it, blinking away rain from the latest shower, and saw that Simon and Mansur had disappeared.

They would be scrambling among the deep, dark avenues, made darker by overhanging trees, that had once been the hill’s encircling ditches.

What ancient people had fortified the place with those ditches and for what purpose? She found herself wondering if the children’s was the only blood that had been shed there. Could a place be intrinsically evil and attract to itself the blackness in men’s souls as it had attracted the killer’s?

Or was Vesuvia Adelia Rachel Ortese Aguilar as prey to superstition as an old man muttering spells over a stretch of grass?

“Is he going to talk to us or not?” she hissed at Ulf. “He must know if there’s a cave up there. Something.”

“He don’t go up there no more,” Ulf hissed back. “Says Old Nick dances on that of nights. Them hollows is his footprints.”

“He allows his sheep up there.”

“Best grazing for miles this time of year. His dog’s with ’em. Dog allus tells un if aught’s amiss.”

An intelligent dog, and a mere lift of its lip had sent Safeguard cowering.

She wondered which lady the shepherd was praying to. Mary, mother of Jesus? Or a more ancient mother?

The Church had not managed to banish all the earth gods; for this old man, the depressions on the hilltop would be the hoofprints of a horror that predated Christianity’s Satan by thousands of years.

Into her mind’s eye came the picture of a giant horned beast trampling on the children. She grew cross with herself in consequence-what was the matter with her?

She was also becoming wet and cold. “Ask him if he’s actually seen Old Nick up there, blast him.”

Ulf put the question in a low-voiced singsong that she couldn’t catch. The old man replied in the same tone.

“He don’t go near, he says. And I won’t blame un. He seen the fire o’ nights, though.”

“What fire?”

“Lights. Old Nick’s fire, Walt reckons. The which he dances round.”

“What sort of fire? When? Where?”

But the staccato of questions had disturbed the peace the shepherd was making with the spirit of the place. Ulf gestured for quiet and Adelia returned to her contemplation of the spiritual, good and bad.

Today on the hill, she had been glad that beneath her tunic was the little wooden crucifix that Margaret had given to her, though it was for Margaret’s sake that she always wore it.

It wasn’t that she had anything against the faith of the New Testament; left alone, it would be a tender and compassionate religion; indeed, on her knees beside her dying nurse, it had been Margaret’s Jesus she had beseeched to save her. He hadn’t, but Adelia forgave him that; Margaret’s loving old heart had grown too tired to go on-and at least the end had been peaceful.

No, what Adelia objected to was the Church’s interpretation of God as a petty, stupid, moneygrubbing, retrograde, antediluvian tyrant who, having created a stupendously varied world, had forbidden any inquiry into its complexity, leaving His people flailing in ignorance.

And the lies. At seven years old, learning her letters at Saint Giorgio’s convent, Adelia had been prepared to believe what the nuns and the Bible told her-until Mother Ambrose had mentioned the ribs…

The shepherd had finished his prayers and was telling Ulf something.

“What does he say?”

“He’s saying about the bodies, what the devil done to them.”

It was noticeable that Old Walt addressed Ulf as an equal. Perhaps, Adelia thought, the fact that the boy could read raised him to a level in the shepherd’s eyes that obviated the difference in their ages.

“What’s he saying now?”

“He’s saying the which he never saw the like of it, not since Old Nick was here last time and did similar to some of the sheep.”

“Oh.” A wolf or something.

“Says he’d hoped he’d seen the last of the bugger then, but he’s come back.”

What Old Nick did to the sheep. Sharply, Adelia asked, “What did he do?” And then she asked, “What sheep? When?”

Ulf put out the question and received the answer. “Year of the great storm, that was.”

“For God’s sake. Oh, never mind. Where did he put the carcasses?”

AT FIRST ADELIA AND ULF used tree branches as spades, but the chalk was too friable to be raised in chunks, and they were reduced to digging with their hands. “What we looking for?” Ulf had asked, not unreasonably.

“Bones, boy, bones. Somebody, not a fox, not a wolf, not a dog…somebody attacked those sheep, he said so.”

“Old Nick, he said.”

“There isn’t any Old Nick. The wounds were similar, didn’t he say?”

Ulf’s face went dull, a sign-she was beginning to know him-that he hadn’t enjoyed hearing the shepherd’s description of the wounds.

And perhaps he should not have heard it, she thought, but it was too late now. “Keep digging. In what year was the great storm?”

“Year Saint Ethel’s bell tower fell down.”

Adelia sighed. Seasons went by uncounted in Ulf’s world, birthdays passed without recognition, only unusual events recorded the passage of time. “How long ago was that?” She added, helpfully, “In yuletides?”

“Weren’t yuletide, were prim-e-rose time.” But the look on Adelia’s chalk-streaked face urged Ulf to put his mind to it. “Six, seven Christmases gone.”

“Keep digging.”

Six, seven years ago.

That, then, was when there had been a sheep stall on Wandlebury Ring. Old Walt said he used to shut the flock in it overnight. Not anymore, not since the morning he’d found its door torn open and carnage in the grass around it.

Prior Geoffrey, on being told, had discounted his shepherd’s tale of the devil. A wolf, Prior Geoffrey had said, and set the hunt to find it.

But Walt knew it wasn’t a wolf; wolves didn’t do that, not that. He had dug a pit at the bottom of the hill, away from the grazing, and carried the carcasses down one by one to bury them in it, “laying them out reverent,” as he told Ulf.

What human soul was so tormented that it would knife and knife a sheep?

Only one. Pray God, only one.

“Here we go.” Ulf had uncovered an elongated skull.

“Well done.” On her side of the pit they’d made, Adelia’s fingers also encountered bone. “It’s the hindquarters we want.”

Old Walt had made it easy for them; in his attempt to give peace to the spirits of his sheep, he had arranged the corpses neatly in rows, like dead soldiers on a battlefield.

Adelia dragged out one of the skeletons and, sitting back, laid its tail end across her knees, brushing away chalk. She had to wait for another shower to pass before the light was bright enough to examine it. At last it was.

She said, quietly, “Ulf, fetch Master Simon and Mansur.”

The bones were clean, the wool no longer clinging to them, consistent with them having lain here for a long time. There was terrible damage to what, in a pig-the only animal skeleton with which she was familiar-would have been the pelvis and pubes. Old Walt had been right; no toothmarks, these. Here were stab wounds.

When the boy had gone, she felt for her purse, loosened the drawstring, brought out the small traveling slate that went everywhere with her, opened it, and began to draw.

The gouges in these bones corresponded to those inflicted on the children; not caused by the same blade, perhaps, but by one very similar, crudely faceted like the end of a flattish piece of wood that had been whittled to a point.

What in hell’s weaponry was it? Certainly not wood. Not a steel blade, not necessarily iron, too roughly shaped. Sharp, though, hideously sharp-the animal’s spine had been severed.

Was this where the killer’s shocking sexual rage had first shown itself? On defenseless animals? Always the defenseless with him.

But why the hiatus between six, seven years ago and this last year? Compulsions like his could surely not be held in for so long. Presumably, they hadn’t been; other animals had been killed elsewhere and their death put down to a wolf. When had animals ceased to satisfy him? When had he graduated to children? Was Little Saint Peter his first?

He moved away, she thought. A jackal is always a jackal. There have been other deaths in other places, but that hill up there is his favored killing place. It is the ground where he dances. He’s been away, and now he’s come back.

Carefully, Adelia closed the slate against the rain, put the skeleton aside, and lay down on her front so that she could reach into the pit for more bones.

Somebody bade her good morning.

He’s come back.

For a moment she was very still, then she rolled over, awkward and exposed, her hands on the skeletons in the pit behind her in order to support her upper body from collapsing on top of them.

“Talking to bones again?” the tax inspector asked with interest. “What will these say? Baa?”

Adelia became aware that her skirt had ridden up to show a considerable amount of bare leg, and she was in no position to pull it down.

Sir Rowley leaned down to put his hands under her armpits and raise her like a doll. “A lady Lazarus from the tomb,” he said, “complete with gravedust.” He began patting at her person, releasing clouds of sour-smelling chalk.

She pushed his hand away, no longer frightened but angry, very angry. “What do you do here?”

“Walking for my health, Doctor. You should approve.”

He gleamed with health and good humor; he was the most defined thing in the gray landscape, ruddy cheeks and cloak; he looked like an oversized robin. He swept off his cap to bow to her and in the same movement picked up her slate. With apparent clumsiness, he knocked it open, exposing the drawings for him to look at.

Geniality went. He bent down to peer at the skeleton. Slowly, he straightened. “When was this done?”

“Six or seven years ago,” she said.

She thought, Was it you? Is there madness behind those jaunty blue eyes?

“So he began with sheep,” he said.

“Yes.” A swift intelligence? Or the cunning to assume it, knowing what she had surmised already?

His jaw had tightened. It was a different, much less good-natured man, who stood in front of her now. He seemed to have gotten thinner.

The rain was increasing. No sign of Simon or Mansur.

Suddenly he had her by the arm and was pulling her along. Safeguard, having given no warning of the man’s approach, scampered happily behind them. Adelia knew she should be afraid, but all she felt was outrage.

They stopped under a sheltering beech tree, where Picot shook her. “Why are you ahead of me each time? Who are you, woman?”

She was Vesuvia Adelia Rachel Ortese Aguilar, and she was being manhandled. “I am a doctor of Salerno. You will show me respect.”

He looked at his big hands that were clutching her arms and released her. “I beg your pardon, Doctor.” He tried smiling. “This won’t do, will it?” He took off his cloak, laid it carefully at the foot of the tree, and invited her to sit on it. She was glad to do so; her legs were still shaking.

He sat down beside her, talking reasonably. “But do you see, I have a particular interest in discovering this killer, yet each time I follow a thread that might take me into the depth of his labyrinth, I find not the Minotaur but Ariadne.”

And Ariadne finds you, she thought. She said, “May I ask what thread it was led you here today?”

Safeguard lifted a leg against the tree trunk, then settled itself on an unoccupied corner of the cloak.

“Oh, that,” Sir Rowley said. “Easily explained. You were good enough to employ me in writing down the story those poor bones told you in the hermit’s hut, their removal from chalk to silt. A moment’s reflection even suggested when that removal took place.” He looked at her. “I assume your menfolk are searching the hill?”

She nodded.

“They won’t find anything. I know damn well they won’t, because I’ve been prowling it myself for the last two evenings and believe me, lady, it is no place to be when night comes down.”

He slammed his fist down on the stretch of cloak between them, making Adelia jump and Safeguard look up. “But it’s there, goddammit. The clue to the Minotaur leads there. Those poor youngsters told us it did.” He looked at his hand as if he hadn’t seen it before, uncurling it. “So I made my excuses to the lord sheriff and rode over to have yet another look. And what do I find? Madam Doctor listening to more bones. There, now you know all about it.”

He’d become cheery again.

Rain had been pattering while he talked; now the sun came out. He’s like the weather, Adelia thought. And I don’t know all about it.

She said, “Do you like jujubes?”

“Love ’em, ma’am. Why? Are you offering me one?”

“No.”

“Oh.” He squinted at her as at someone whose mind shouldn’t be disturbed further, then spoke slowly and kindly. “Perhaps you would tell me who sent you and your companions on this investigation?”

“The King of Sicily,” she said.

He nodded cautiously. “The King of Sicily.”

She began to laugh. It might have been the Queen of Sheba or the Grand Inquisitor; he couldn’t recognize the truth because he didn’t use it. He thinks I am mad.

As she laughed the sun sent its light through the young beech leaves to fall on her like a shower of newly minted copper pennies.

His face changed so that she sobered and looked away from him.

“Go home,” he said. “Go back to Salerno.”

Now she could see Ulf leading Simon and Mansur toward them from the direction of the sheep pit.

The tax collector was all reasonableness again. Good day, good day, my masters. Having attended the good doctor while she was performing the postmortem on the poor children…he, like them, had suspected the hill as being the site of…had searched the ground yet found nothing…Should they not, all four, exchange what knowledge they possessed to bring this fiend to justice?

Adelia moved away to join Ulf, who was slapping his cap against his leg to shake off raindrops. He waved it in the direction of the tax collector. “Don’t like that un.”

“I don’t either,” Adelia said, “but the Safeguard seems to.”

Absentmindedly-and she thought he would be sorry for it later-Sir Rowley was caressing the dog’s head where it leaned against his knee.

Ulf growled in disgust. Then he said, “You reckon them sheep were done for by him as did for Harold and the others?”

“Yes,” she said. “It was a similar weapon.”

Ulf mused on it. “Wonder where he’s been killing betwixt times?”

It was an intelligent question; Adelia had asked it of herself immediately. It was also the question the tax collector should have asked. And hadn’t.

Because he knows, she thought.

DRIVING BACK TO TOWN in the cart, like a good medicine vendor after a day picking herbs, Simon of Naples expressed gratification at having joined forces with Sir Rowley Picot. “A quick brain, for all his size, none quicker. He was most interested in the significance we place on the appearance of Little Saint Peter’s body on Chaim’s lawn and, since he has access to the county’s accounts, he has promised to assist me in discovering which men owed Chaim money. Also, he and Mansur are going to investigate the Arab trade ships and see which of them carries jujubes.”

“God’s rib,” Adelia said. “Did you tell him everything?”

“Most everything.” He smiled at her exasperation. “My dear Doctor, if he is the killer, he knows everything already.”

“If he’s the killer, he knows we’re closing him round. He knows enough to wish us away. He told me to go back to Salerno.”

“Yes, indeed. He is concerned for you. ‘This is no matter to involve a woman,’ he told me. ‘Do you want her murdered in her bed?’”

Simon winked at her; he was in a good mood. “Why is it that we are always murdered in our beds, I wonder. We are never murdered at breakfast time. Or in our bath.”

“Oh, stop it. I don’t trust the man.”

“I do, and I have considerable experience of men.”

“He disturbs me.”

Simon winked at Mansur. “Considerable experience of women, too. I believe she likes him.”

Furiously, Adelia said, “Did he tell you he was a crusader?”

“No.” He turned to look at her, grave now. “No, he did not tell me that.”

“He was.”