Mistress of the Art of Death

Twelve

Am I dead?” asked Sir Rowley of nobody in particular.

“No,” Adelia told him.

A weak, pale hand searched beneath the bedclothes. There was a cry of raw agony. “Oh, Jesus God, where’s my prick?”

“If you mean your penis, it is still there. Under the pads.”

“Oh.” The sunken eyes opened again. “Will it work?”

“I am sure,” Adelia said clearly, “that it will function satisfactorily in every respect.”

“Oh.”

He’d gone again, comforted by the brief exchange while unaware that it had taken place.

Adelia leaned over and pulled the blanket straight. “But it was a damned near thing,” she told him softly. Not just the loss of his membrum virilis but his life. The cleaver had struck the artery, and she’d had to keep her fist in the wound while he was carried indoors to stop him bleeding to death before she could use Lady Baldwin’s needle and embroidery thread-and even then to be so hampered by pumping blood that she knew, if none of those gathered anxiously about her did, it was a matter of blind luck whether or not the sutures were in the right place.

That had been only half the battle. She’d managed to extract the pieces of tunic that the cleaver had pushed into the wound, but how much detritus remained from the blade itself had been anyone’s throw of the dice. Foreign matter could, and usually did, lead to poisoning, which led to death. She’d recalled dismembering resultant gangrenous corpses-recalled, too, the remote curiosity with which she’d looked for the site that had spread its fatality.

This time she had not been remote. When Rowley’s wound inflamed and he went into delirium from fever she had never prayed so hard in her life as she bathed him in cold water and dripped cooling draughts between lips that were flaccid and ghastly as a dead man’s.

And to what had she prayed? Something, anything. Pleading, begging, demanding that it should help her pull him back to life.

Damn it. What had she vowed to all the gods she’d called on? Belief? Then she was now a follower of Jehovah, Allah, and the Trinity, with Hippocrates thrown in, and had wept with gratitude to all of them as the sweat broke out on the patient’s face and his breathing returned from stertor to a soft and natural snore.

The next time he woke up, she watched his hand make its instinctive exploration. Such primitive beings, men.

“Still there.” The eyes closed with relief.

“Yes,” she said. Even facing death’s portals, they retained consciousness of their sexuality. Prick, indeed-such an aggressive euphemism.

The eyes opened. “You still here?”

“Yes.”

“How long?”

“Five nights and…” She looked toward the window, where the afternoon sun was sending stripes of light through its mullions onto the floorboards. “Approximately seven hours.”

“So long? Blind me.” He tried lifting his head. “Where is this?”

“The top of the tower.” Shortly after the operation, which had been performed on the sheriff’s kitchen table, Mansur had carried the patient to the Jews’ upper room-an amazing feat of strength-so that doctor and patient should have privacy and quiet while she engaged in the battle for his life.

The room had no garderobe; on the other hand, Adelia had been blessed with people willing-nay, eager-to go up and down the stair carrying chamber pots, most of them Jewish women grateful to Sir Rowley for his defense of a Jewish grave. Indeed, saving Sir Rowley had been a cooperative effort, and if Adelia had refused most of the help on offer, it was in order not to offend Mansur and Gyltha, who made the cause their own.

A breeze came through the room’s unglazed windows, free of the bad airs circulating at the lower level of the castle and its open cesspits, sullied only by a whiff of Safeguard that entered through the gap under the door to the stairs, to which he had been banished. Even after a bath, the dog’s pelt almost immediately acquired a stink that attacked the nose. It was the only thing about him that did attack; he had been notably absent from the melee in the sheriff’s garden, in which, by rights, he should have involved himself on his mistress’s behalf.

The voice from the bed asked now, “Did I kill the bastard?”

“Roger of Acton? No, he is well, though incarcerated in the donjon. You managed to lame Quincy the butcher and hack Colin of Saint Giles in the neck, and there’s a blacksmith whose prospects of fatherhood are not as sanguine as your own, but Master Acton escaped unharmed.”

“Merde.”

Even this much conversation had tired him; he drifted off.

Copulation as the first priority, she thought. Battle as the second. And although you are now considerably thinner, gluttony has been in evidence, so has arrogance. That represents most of the cardinal sins. So why, out of all humanity, are you the one for me?

Gyltha had guessed. At the height of Rowley’s fever, when Adelia had refused to let the housekeeper replace her at the bedside, Gyltha had said, “Love un you may, woman, but that’ll not help un iffen you drop.”

“Love him?” It was a screech. “I am caring for a patient; he’s not…oh, Gyltha, what am I to do? He’s not my sort of man.”

“What sort’s got bugger-all to do with it,” Gyltha had said, sighing.

And, indeed, Adelia was compelled to confess that it hadn’t.

True, there was much to be said for him. As he had demonstrated for the Jews, he was an incipient defender of the defenseless. He was funny, he made her laugh. And in his fever, he had visited again and again the dune where a child’s torn body lay-to suffer once more the same guilt and grief. His mind had pursued the killer through a delirium as hot and terrible as desert sands until Adelia had fed him an opiate for fear that it would wear out the weakened body.

But there was as much to be said against him. In the same fever he had babbled with carnal appreciation of the women he had known, often confusing their attributes with food he’d also enjoyed in the East. Small, slender Sagheerah, tender as an asparagus spear; Samina, sufficiently fleshed for a full-course meal; Abda, black and beautiful as caviar. It had been not so much a list as a menu. As for Zabidah…Adelia’s narrow knowledge of what men and women got up to in bed had been stretched to shocked amazement by the antics of that acrobatic and communally minded female.

More chilling was the revelation of a driving ambition. At first Adelia, listening to the fantastical conversations he was holding with an unseen person, had mistaken his frequent use of “my lord” as being directed at his heavenly king-until it turned out he was referring to Henry II. The compelling need to find and punish Rakshasa had allied itself to serving the King of England at the same time. If he should rid Henry of a nuisance that was depriving the Exchequer of its income from Cambridge ’s Jews, Rowley expected royal gratitude and advancement.

Very considerable advancement, too. “Baron or bishop?” he would ask in his dementia, clutching at Adelia’s hand as it tried to soothe him, as if it were her decision. “Bishopric or barony?”

The golden prospect of either would add to his agitation-“It won’t move, I can’t move it”-as if the wagon he had attached to the royal star was proving too heavy to stir.

Such, then, was the man. Undoubtedly brave and compassionate but a gourmandizing, womanizing, cunning, and greedy seeker after status. Imperfect, licentious. Not a man Adelia had expected, or wanted, to love.

But did.

When that suffering head had turned on the pillow, exposing the line of the throat, and he had pleaded for her-“Doctor, are you there? Adelia?”-his sins, like her heart, had melted away.

As Gyltha said, the sort of man he was had bugger-all to do with it.

Yet it must matter. Vesuvia Adelia Rachel Ortese Aguilar had her own fixity of purpose. It did not aspire to preferment or riches but to serving the particular gift she had been given. For a gift it was, and with it had come the obligation not to give birth to life as other women did but to discover more about life’s nature and thereby save it.

She had always known, and still knew it, that romantic love was not for her; in that respect, she was as bound to chastity as any nun married to God. As long as that chastity had been cloistered in the Medical School of Salerno, she had envisaged its untroubled continuance into a quiet, useful, and respected old age, contemptuous-she admitted it-of women who surrendered to flailing passion.

Sitting in this tower room, she accused that former self of plain damned ignorance. You didn’t know. Didn’t know of this rampage that makes the mind lose its reason against all better judgment.

But you must reason, woman, reason.

The hours during which she had labored to save the man had been a privilege; saving anybody’s life was a privilege; his, her joy. She had begrudged being called away from his side to treat the patients whom the Matildas redirected to the castle so that she and Mansur could heal them, though she had done it.

Now it was time for common sense.

Marriage was out of the question, even supposing he offered it, which was unlikely. Adelia had a strong estimation of her own worth, but she doubted it if he could recognize it. For one thing, to judge from the color of the pubic hair he had described during his more lubricious ravings, his preference was for brunettes. For another, she could not-would not-enter the lists against the likes of Zabidah.

No, a reserved, plain-faced woman doctor was unlikely to attract him; such yearning as he had shown for her in his fever had been a request for relief.

In any case, he thought of her as sexless or his account of his crusade would not have been so frank and so full of swear words. A man talked to a friendly priest in those terms, to a Prior Geoffrey perhaps, not to the lady of his fancy.

In any case, with a bishopric in his sights, he could not offer marriage to anybody. And a bishop’s mistress? There were plenty of them, some being ostentatious, shameless strumpets, others a rumor, a thing of gossip and sniggers, hidden away in a secret bower, dependent on the whim of their particular diocesan lover.

Welcome to the Gates of Heaven, Adelia, and what did you do with your life? My lord, I was a bishop’s whore.

And if he became a baron? He would look for an heiress to increase his estates, as they all did. Poor heiress, a life devoted to store cupboard, children, entertaining, and setting one’s husband’s bloody deeds to song when he came back from whatever battlefield his king had dragged him off to. Where, undoubtedly, said husband had taken other women-brunettes, in this case-and fathered bastards on them with the concupiscence of a rutting rabbit.

Deliberately, exhausted, she worked herself into such a fury at the hypothetically adulterous Sir Rowley Picot with his hypothetical and illegitimate brats that, Gyltha now coming into the room with a bowl of gruel for him, Adelia told her, “You and Mansur look after the swine tonight. I’m going home.”

Yehuda waylaid her at the bottom of the steps to inquire after Rowley and to drag her off to see his new son. The baby nuzzling at Dina’s breast was tiny but seemed to have all its requisites, though its parents were concerned that it was not gaining sufficient weight.

“We’ve agreed with Rabbi Gotsce that Brit Mila should be delayed beyond the eight days. Do it when he is stronger,” Yehuda said, anxiously. “What do you think, mistress?”

Adelia said that it was probably wise not to subject the child to circumcision until it was a better size.

“Is it my milk, do you think?” Dina said. “I don’t have enough?”

Midwifery was not Adelia’s field; she knew the principles, but Gordinus had always taught his students that the practice was better left to wise women of whatever denomination unless there were complications in the case. His belief, based on observation, was that more babies survived when delivered by experienced women than by male doctors. It was not a teaching that made him popular with either the general medical profession or the Church, both of which found it profitable to condemn most midwives as witches, but the death toll in Salerno not only among babies but their mothers whose accouchement had been attended by male physicians suggested that Gordinus was right.

However, the baby was very small and seemed to be sucking without profit, so Adelia ventured, “Have you considered a wet nurse?”

“And where do we find one of those?” Yehuda demanded with an Iberian sneer. “Did the mob that drove us in here make sure we had lactating mothers among our number? They overlooked it, I don’t know why.”

Adelia hesitated before saying, “I could ask Lady Baldwin if there is one in the castle.”

She waited for condemnation. Margaret had originally been her wet nurse, and Adelia knew of other Christian women employed in that capacity by Jewish households, but whether this stiff-necked little enclave would contemplate its newest recruit being put to a goy’s breast…

Dina surprised her. “Milk’s milk, my husband. I would trust Lady Baldwin to find a clean woman.”

Yehuda put his hand gently on his wife’s head. “As long as she understands that it is not your fault. With all you have suffered, we are lucky to have a son at all.”

Oh ho, Adelia thought, fatherhood is improving you, young man. And Dina, though anxious, looked happier than the last time she’d seen her; this had the makings of a better marriage than its beginning had promised.

As she left them, Yehuda followed her out. “Doctor…”

Adelia turned on him fast. “You must not call me that. The doctor is Master Mansur Khayoun of Al ‘Amarah. I am but his helper.”

Obviously, the tale of the operation in the sheriff’s kitchen had circulated, and she had enough troubles without the inevitable opposition she would encounter from Cambridge ’s physicians, let alone the Church, if her profession became generally recognized.

Perhaps she could put down the presence of Mansur-he had stood by during the procedure-to that of a master overseeing the work. Claim it had been a Moslem holy day and that Allah wouldn’t allow him to touch blood during its hours. Something like that.

Yehuda bowed. “Mistress, I only wish to say that we are naming the baby Simon.”

She took his hand. “Thank you.”

Though still tired, the day altered for her; life itself had altered with a swing. She felt, quite literally, uplifted by the naming of the child-she experienced a curious feeling of bobbing.

It was being in love, she realized. Love, however doomed, had the capacity to attach buoys to the soul. Never had seagulls circled with such purity against the eggshell-blue sky, never had their cries been so thrilling.

Visiting the other Simon was a priority, and on her way to the sheriff’s garden, Adelia toured the bailey, looking for flowers to take to his grave. This part of the castle was strictly utilitarian, and its roaming hens and pigs had stripped it of most vegetation, but some Jack-by-the-hedge had colonized the top of an old wall and a blackthorn was flowering on the Saxon mound where the original wooden keep had stood.

Children were sliding down the slope on a plank of wood, and while she painfully snapped off some twigs, a small boy and girl came up to chat.

“What’s that?”

“It’s my dog,” Adelia told them.

They considered the statement and animal for a moment. Then, “That blackie you come with, lady, is he a wizard?”

“A doctor,” she told them.

“Is he mending Sir Rowley, lady?”

“He’s funny, Sir Rowley,” the little girl said. “He says it’s a mouse in his hand but it’s a farthing really, what he gives us. I like him.”

“So do I,” Adelia said helplessly, finding it sweet to make the confession.

The boy said, pointing, “That’s Sam and Bracey. Shouldn’t have let ’em in, should they? Not even to kill Jews, my pa says.”

He was indicating to a spot near the new gallows on which stood a double pillory with two heads protruding from it, presumably those of the guards on the gate when Roger of Acton and the townspeople had gained entrance to the castle.

“Sam says he didn’t mean to let them in,” the girl said. “Sam says the buggers rushed him.”

“Oh, dear,” Adelia said. “How long have they been there?”

“Shouldn’t have let ’em in, should they?” the boy said.

The little girl was more forgiving. “They free ’em of nights.”

So bad for the back, the pillory. Adelia hurried over to it. A wooden sign had been hung about each man’s neck. It read: “Failed in Duty.”

Carefully avoiding the ordure that was collecting round the feet of the pillory’s victims, Adelia placed her posy on the ground and lifted one of the signs. She settled the guard’s jerkin so that it formed a buffer between his skin and the string that had been cutting into his neck. She did the same for the other man. “I hope that’s more comfortable.”

“Thank you, mistress.” Both stared straight ahead with military directness.

“How much longer must you remain here?”

“Two more days.”

“Oh, dear,” Adelia said. “I know it cannot be easy, but if you let your wrists take the weight from time to time and incline your legs backwards, it will reduce the strain on the spine.”

One of the men said flatly, “We’ll bear it in mind, mistress.”

“Do.”

In the sheriff’s garden, the sheriff’s wife, who was at one end overseeing the division of tansy roots, was holding a shouted conversation with Rabbi Gotsce at the other, where he bent over the grave.

“You should wear it in your shoes, Rabbi. I do. Tansy is a specific against the ague.” Lady Baldwin’s voice carried effortlessly to the ramparts.

“Better than garlic?”

“Infinitely better.”

Charmed and unseen, Adelia lingered in the gateway until Lady Baldwin caught sight of her. “There you are, Adelia. And how is Sir Rowley today?”

“Improving. I thank you, ma’am.”

“Good, good. We cannot spare such a brave fighter. And what of your poor nose?”

Adelia smiled. “Mended and forgotten.” The race to halt Rowley’s hemorrhage had obliterated everything else. She’d only become aware of the fracture to her nose two days later, when Gyltha commented on the fact that it had become humped and blue. Once the swelling went down, she’d clicked the bone into place without trouble.

Lady Baldwin nodded. “What a pretty posy, very green and white. The rabbi is seeing to the grave. Go down, go down. Yes, the dog too-if that’s what it is.”

Adelia went down the path to the cherry tree. A simple wooden board had been laid over the grave. Carved into it was the Hebrew for “Here lies buried” followed by Simon’s name. On the bottom were the five letters for “May his soul be bound up in the bond of life eternal.”

“It will do for now,” Rabbi Gotsce said. “Lady Baldwin is finding us a stone to replace it, one that’s too heavy to lift, she says, so Simon cannot be desecrated.” He stood up and dusted his hands. “Adelia, that is a fine woman.”

“Yes, she is.” Much more than the sheriff’s, this was his wife’s garden; it was where her children played and from which she took the herbs to flavor her food and scent her rooms. It had been no mean sacrifice to surrender part of it to the corpse of a man despised by her religion. Admittedly, since this was ultimately royal ground, it had been imposed on her force majeure, but whatever she felt in private, Lady Baldwin had acceded with grace.

Better still, the principle that giving imposes obligation on the giver as well as the recipient had come into play, and Lady Baldwin was showing concern for the welfare of the strange community in her castle. The newest little Baldwin ’s baby clouts had been passed on to Dina and the suggestion made that the community should have a share in the castle’s great bread oven instead of baking for themselves.

“They’re really human beings just like us, you know,” Lady Baldwin had lectured Adelia when visiting the sickroom bearing calf’s-foot jelly for the patient. “And their rabbi is quite knowledgeable on the subject of herbs, really quite knowledgeable. Apparently they eat a lot of them at Easter, though they seem to choose the bitter ones, horseradish and such. Why not a little angelica, I asked him. To sweeten it up?”

Smiling, Adelia had said, “I think they’re supposed to be bitter.”

“Yes, so he told me.”

Now, asked if she knew of a wet nurse for Baby Simon, Lady Baldwin promised to supply one. “And not one of the castle trollops, either,” she said. “That baby needs respectable Christian milk.”

The only one who had failed Simon, Adelia thought as she placed her posy, was herself. His name on the simple board should shriek of murder instead of portraying a supposed victim of his own negligence.

“Help me, Rabbi,” she said. “I must write to Simon’s family and tell his wife and children he is dead.”

“So write,” Rabbi Gotsce said. “We shall see to sending the letter; we have people in London who correspond with Naples.”

“Thank you, I would be grateful. It’s not that, it’s…what shall I write? That he was murdered but his death has been recorded as an accident?”

The rabbi grunted. “If you were his wife, what would you want to know?”

She said immediately, “The truth.” Then she considered. “Oh, I don’t know.” Better for Simon’s Rebecca to grieve over a drowning accident than to envisage again and again Simon’s last minutes as she did, to have her mourning polluted by horror, as was Adelia’s, to desire justice on his killer so much that she could not take ease in anything else.

“I suppose I shall not tell them,” she said, defeated. “Not while he is unavenged. When the killer is found and punished, perhaps then we can give them the truth.”

“The truth, Adelia? So simple?”

“Isn’t it?”

Rabbi Gotsce sighed. “To you, maybe. But as the Talmud tells us, the name of Mount Sinai comes from our Hebrew word for hatred, sinah, because truth produces hate for those who speak it. Now, Jeremiah…”

Oh, dear, she thought. Jeremiah, the weeping prophet. None of the slow, worldly-wise, clever Jewish voices lecturing in the sunlit atrium of her foster parents’ villa had ever mentioned Jeremiah without prophesying evil. And it was such a nice day, and there was beautiful detail in the flowers of the cherry blossom.

“…we should remember the old Jewish proverb that truth is the safest lie.”

“I’ve never understood it,” she said, coming to.

“No more have I,” the rabbi said. “But by extension it tells us that the rest of the world never wholly believes a Jewish truth. Adelia, do you think that sooner or later the real killer will be revealed and condemned?”

“Sooner or later,” she said. “God send it be sooner.”

“Amen to that. And on that happy day, the good people of Cambridge will line up outside this castle, weeping and sorry, so sorry, for killing two Jews and keeping the rest imprisoned? That also you believe? The news will speed through Christendom that Jews do not crucify children for their pleasure? You believe that, too?”

“Why not? It is the truth.”

Rabbi Gotsce shrugged. “It’s your truth, it’s mine, it was truth for the man who lies here. Maybe even the townsfolk of Cambridge will believe it. But truth travels slowly and gets weaker as it goes. Suitable lies are strong and run faster. And this was a suitable lie; Jews put the Lamb of God to the cross, therefore they crucify children-it fits. A nice, agreeable lie like that, it scampers through all Christendom. Will the villages in Spain believe the truth if it limps so far? Will the peasants of France? Russia?”

“Don’t, Rabbi. Oh, don’t.” It was as if this man had lived a thousand years; perhaps he had.

He bent to remove a piece of blossom from the grave and stood up again, taking her arm and walking her to the gate. “Find the killer, Adelia. Deliver us from this English Egypt. But in the end, it will still be the Jews who crucified that child.”

Find the killer, she thought as she went down the hill. Find the killer, Adelia. No matter that Simon of Naples is dead and Rowley Picot is out of action, leaving only me and Mansur. Mansur doesn’t speak the language and I am a doctor, not a bloodhound. And that’s on top of the fact that we’re the only people who think there is a killer yet to be found.

The ease with which Roger of Acton had enlisted recruits for his attack on the castle garden showed that Cambridge still believed the Jews to be responsible for ritual murder, despite the fact that they were incarcerated when three of the killings had been committed. Logic played no part in it; the Jews were feared because they were different and, for the townspeople, that fear and difference endowed supernatural ability. The Jews had killed Little Saint Peter, ergo they had killed the others.

Despite this, despite the rabbi and Jeremiah, despite grief for Simon, her decision to renounce carnal love and pursue science in chastity, the day persisted in presenting itself as beautiful to her.

What is this? I am extended, stretched thin, vulnerable to death and other people’s pain but also to life in its infinite width.

The town and its people swam in pale gold effervescence like the wine from Champagne. A bunch of students touched their caps to her. She was forgiven the toll for the bridge when, fumbling in her pocket for a halfpenny, it was found that she didn’t have one. “Oh, get on, then, and good day to you,” the tollman said. On the bridge itself, carters raised their whips in salute to her, pedestrians smiled.

Taking the longer way along the riverbank to Old Benjamin’s house, willow fronds brushed her in good fellowship and fish came to the surface of the river in bubbles that responded to those in her veins.

There was a man on Old Benjamin’s roof. He waved at her. Adelia waved back.

“Who is that?”

“Gil the thatcher,” Matilda B. told her. “Reckons his foot’s better and reckons there’s a tile or two on that roof as needs fixing.”

“He’s doing it for nothing?”

“A’course for nothing,” Matilda said, winking. “Doctor mended his foot for un, didn’t he?’

Adelia had put down as bad manners the lack of gratitude shown by Cambridge patients who rarely, if ever, said they were obliged for the treatment they received from Dr. Mansur and his assistant. Usually, they left the room looking as surly as when they’d arrived, in sharp contrast to Salernitan patients who would spend five minutes in her praise.

But as well as the mending of the tiles, there was to be duck for dinner, provided by the woman, whose growing blindness was at least made less miserable by eyes that no longer suppurated. A pot of honey, a clutch of eggs, a pat of butter, and a crock of a repellent-looking something that turned out to be samphire, all left wordlessly at the kitchen door, suggested that Cambridge folk had more concrete ways of saying thank you.

Something important was lacking. “Where’s Ulf?”

Matilda B. pointed toward the river where, under an alder, the top of a dirty brown cap was just apparent above the reeds. “Catching trout for supper, but tell Gyltha as we’re keeping an eye on un. We told un he’s not to shift from that spot. Not for jujubes, not for nobody.”

Matilda W. said, “He’s missed you.”

“I missed him.” And it was true; even in the fury to save Rowley Picot, she had regretted her absence from the boy and sent him messages. She had almost wept over the bunch of primroses tied with a bit of string that he had sent her via Gyltha, “to say he was sorry for your loss.” This new love she felt radiated outward in its incandescence; with the death of Simon, its glow fell on those whom, she realized now, had become necessary to her well-being, not least the small boy sitting and scowling on an upturned bucket among the reeds of the Cam with a homemade fishing line in his grubby hands.

“Move over,” she told him. “Let a lady sit down.”

Grudgingly, he shifted and she took his place. To judge from the number of trout thrashing in the creel, Ulf had picked the spot well; not actually on the Cam proper, he was fishing a stream that welled in the reeds and cut through the silt, forming a decent-sized channel before reaching the river.

Compared with the King’s Ditch on the other side of town, a stinking and mostly stagnant dike that had once served to repel invading Danes, the Cam itself was clean, but the fastidious Adelia, though perforce she ate them on Fridays, entertained a suspicion of fish from a river that received effluent from humans and cattle as it meandered through the county’s southern villages.

She appreciated Ulf’s choice of springwater into which to make his casts. She sat in silence for a while, watching the fish move, sliding through the water, as clear as if they swam in air. Dragonflies flashed, gemlike, among the reeds.

“How’s Rowley-Powley?” It was a sneer.

“Better, and don’t be rude.”

He grunted and got on with his fishing.

“What worms are you using?” she asked politely. “They work well.”

“These?” He spat. “Wait til the hangings when the ’sizes start, then you’ll see proper worms, take any fish they will.”

Unwisely, she asked, “What have hangings to do with it?”

“Best worms is them under a gallows with a rotting corpse on it. I thought ev’body knew that. Take any fish, gallows’ worms will. Di’n’t you know that?”

She hadn’t and wished she didn’t. He was punishing her.

“You’re going to have to talk to me,” she said. “Master Simon is dead, Sir Rowley’s laid up. I need someone who thinks to help me find the killer-and you’re a thinker, Ulf, you know you are.”

“Yes, I bloody am.”

“And don’t swear.”

More silence.

He was using a float, a curious contraption of his own invention that ran his line through a large bird’s quill so that the bait and tiny iron hooks were kept to the surface of the water.

“I missed you,” she said.

“Huh.” If she thought that was going to placate him…but after a while he said, “Do we reckon as he drowned Master Simon?”

“Yes. I know he did.”

Another trout rose to a worm, was unhooked, and thrown into the creel. “It’s the river,” he said.

“What do you mean?” Adelia sat up.

For the first time, he looked at her. The small face was screwed up in concentration. “It’s the river. That’s what takes ’em. I been asking about…”

“No.” She almost screamed it. “Ulf, whatever…you mustn’t, you must not. Simon was asking questions. Promise me, promise me.”

He looked at her with contempt. “All I done was talk to the kin. No harm in that, is there? Was he a-listening when I done it? Turns hisself into cra and perches on trees, does he?”

A crow. Adelia shivered. “I wouldn’t put it past him.”

“That’s dizzy talk. You want to know or not?”

“I want to know.”

He pulled in his line and detached it from rod and float, arranged both carefully in the wicker box that East Anglians called a frail, then sat cross-legged facing Adelia, like a small Buddha about to deliver enlightenment.

“Peter, Harold, Mary, Ulric,” he said. “I talked with their kin, the which nobody else seems to have listened to. Each of un, each of un, was seen last at the Cam here or heading for un.”

Ulf lifted a finger. “Peter? By the river.” He lifted another. “Mary? She was Jimmer the wildfowler’s young un-Hugh Hunter’s niece-and what was she about, last seen? Deliverin’ a pail o’ fourses to her pa in the sedge up along Trumpington way.”

Ulf paused. “Jimmer was one of them rushed the castle gates. Still blames the Jews for Mary, Jimmer does.”

So Mary’s father had been among that terrible group of men with Roger of Acton. Adelia remembered that the man was a bully and, quite probably, easing his own guilt for the treatment of his daughter by attacking the Jews.

Ulf continued with his list. He jerked a thumb upriver. “Harold?” A frown of pain. “Eel seller’s boy, Harold’d gone for water as to put the elvers in. Disappeared…” Ulf leaned forward. “Making for the Cam.”

Her eyes were on his. “And Ulric?”

“Ulric,” said Ulf, “lived with his ma and sisters on Sheep’s Green. Taken Saint Edward’s Day. And what day was Saint Edward’s last?”

Adelia shook her head.

“Monday.” He sat back.

“Monday?”

He shook his head at her ignorance. “You frimmocking me? Washday, woman. Mondays is washday. I talked to his sister. Run out of rainwater to boil, they had, so Ulric was sent with a yoke o’ pails…”

“Down to the river,” she finished for him in a whisper.

They stared at each other and then, together, turned their heads to look toward the Cam.

It was full; there had been heavy rain during the week; Adelia had shuttered the window of the tower room to stop it coming in. Now, innocent, polished by the sun, it fitted the top edge of its banks like sinuous marquetry.

Had others noticed it as a common factor in the children’s deaths? They must have, Adelia thought; even the sheriff’s coroner wasn’t entirely stupid. The significance, however, could have escaped them. The Cam was the town’s larder, waterway, and washpot; its banks provided fuel, roofing, and furniture; everybody used it. That all the children had disappeared while in its vicinity was hardly less surprising than if they had not.

But Adelia and Ulf knew something else; Simon had been deliberately drowned in that same water-a coincidence stretched too far.

“Yes, “she said, “it’s the river.”

As evening drew on, the Cam became busy, boats and people outlined against the setting sun so that features were indistinguishable. Those going home after a day’s work in town hailed workers coming back from the field to the south, or cursed as their craft caused a jam. Ducks scattered, swans made a fuss as they took flight. A rowing boat carried a new calf that was to be fed by hand at the fireside.

“Reckon as it took Harold and the others to Wandlebury?” Ulf asked.

“No. There’s nothing there.”

She had begun to discount the hill as the site where the children were murdered; it was too open. The extended suffering they had been subjected to would have required their killer to have more privacy than a hilltop could offer, a chamber, a cellar, somewhere to contain them and their screams. Wandlebury might be lonely, but agony was noisy. Rakshasa would have been fearful of it being heard, unable to take his time.

“No,” she said again. “He may take the bodies to it, but there’s somewhere else…” She was going to say “where they’re put to death,” then stopped; Ulf was only a little boy, after all. “And you’re right,” she told him. “It’s on or near the river.”

They continued to watch the moving frieze of figures and boats.

Here came three fowlers, their punt low in the water from its piles of geese and duck destined for the sheriff’s table. There went the apothecary in his coracle-Ulf said he had a lady friend near Seven Acres. A performing bear sat in a stern while his master rowed it to their hovel near Hauxton. Market women went by with their empty crates, poling easily. An eight-oared barge towed another behind it bearing chalk and marl, heading for the castle.

“Why d’you go, Hal?” Ulf was muttering. “Who was it?”

Adelia was thinking the same thing. Why had any of the children gone? Who was it on that river had whistled them to the lure? Who had said, “Come with me?” and they’d gone. It couldn’t have been merely the temptation of jujubes; there must have been authority, trust, familiarity.

Adelia sat up as a cowled figure punted past. “Who’s that?”

Ulf peered through the fading light. “Him? That’s old Brother Gil.”

Brother Gilbert, eh? “Where’s he going?”

“Taking the host to the hermits. Barnwell’s got hermits, same as the nuns, and near all of ’em live along the banks upriver in the forests.” Ulf spat. “Gran don’t hold with them. Dirty old scarecrows, she reckon, cuttin’ theyselves off from everybody else. Ain’t Christian, Gran says.”

So Barnwell’s monks used the river to supply the recluses just as the nuns did.

“But it’s evening,” Adelia said. “Why do they go so late? Brother Gilbert won’t be back in time for Compline.”

The religious lived by the tolling of holy hours. For Cambridge generally, the bells acted as a daytime clock; appointments were made by them, sandglasses turned, business begun and closed; they rang laborers to their fields at Lauds, sent them home at vespers. But their clanging by night allowed sleeping laity the schadenfreude of staying in bed while nuns and monks were having to issue from their cells and dorters to sing vigils.

An appalling knowingness spread over Ulf’s unlovely little features. “That’s why,” he said. “Gives ’em a night off. Good night’s sleep under the stars, bit of hunting or fishing next day, visit a pal, maybe, they all do it. ’Course the nuns take advantage, Gran says, nobody don’t know what they get up to in them forests. But…”

Suddenly, he was squinting at her. “Brother Gilbert?”

She squinted back, nodding. “He could be.” How vulnerable children were, she thought. If Ulf with all his mother-wit and knowledge of the circumstances was slow to suspect someone of standing that he knew, the others had been easy prey.

“He’s grumpy, old Gil, I grant,” the child said, reluctant, “but he speaks fair to young ’uns and he’s a cru-” Ulf clapped his hands over his mouth and for the first time Adelia saw him discomposed. “Oh my arse, he went on crusade.”

The sun was down now and there were fewer boats on the Cam; those that were had lanterns at the prow so that the river became an untidy necklace of lights.

Still the two of them sat where they were, reluctant to leave, attracted and repelled by the river, so close to the souls of the children it had taken that the rustle of its reeds seemed to carry their whispers.

Ulf growled at it. “Why don’t you run backwards, you bugger?”

Adelia put her arm round his shoulders; she could have wept for him. Yes, reverse nature and time. Bring them home.

Matilda W.’s voice shrieked for them to come in for their supper.

“How’s about tomorrow, then?” Ulf asked as they walked up to the house. “We could take old Blackie. He punts well enough.”

“I wouldn’t dream of going without Mansur,” she said, “and if you don’t show him respect, you will stay behind.”

She knew, as Ulf did, that they must explore the river. Somewhere along its banks there was a building, or a path leading to a building, where such horror had occurred that it must declare itself.

It might not have a sign outside to that effect, but she would know it when she saw it.

THAT NIGHT, there was a figure standing on the far bank of the Cam.

Adelia saw it from her open solar window when she was brushing her hair and was so afraid she could not move. For a moment, she and the shadow under the trees faced each other with the intensity of lovers separated by a chasm.

She backed away, blowing out her candle and feeling behind her for the dagger she kept on her bedside table at night, not daring to take her eyes off the thing on the other bank in case it leaped across the water and in through the window.

Once she had steel in her hand she felt better. Ridiculous. It would need to have wings or a siege ladder to reach Old Benjamin’s windows. It couldn’t see her now; the house was in darkness.

But she knew it watched as she closed the lattice. Felt its eyes piercing the walls as she padded on bare feet downstairs to make sure everywhere was bolted, Safeguard reluctantly following.

Two arms raised a weapon above her head as she reached the hall.

“Gor bugger,” said Matilda B. “You gone and scared the shit out of I.”

“Likewise,” Adelia told her, panting. “There’s somebody across the river.”

The maid lowered the poker she’d been holding. “Been there every night since your lot went to the castle. Watching, always watching. And little Ulf the only man in the place.”

“Where is Ulf?”

Matilda pointed toward the stairs to the undercroft. “Safe asleep.”

“You’re sure?”

“Certain.”

Together the two women peered through a pane in the rose window.

“Gone now.”

That the figure had disappeared was worse than if it were still there.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Adelia wanted to know.

“Reckon as you had enough on your shoulders. Told the watch, though. Shit lot of good they were. Didn’t see nobody nor nothin’, not surprising, the rumpus they made marching over the bridge to get there. Peeping Tom, they reckoned it was.”

Matilda B. went to the middle of the room to replace the poker. For a second, it vibrated against the bars of the fire grate as if the hand that held it was shaking too much to release it. “Ain’t a Peeping Tom, though, is it?”

“No.”

The next day, Adelia moved Ulf into the castle tower to stay with Gyltha and Mansur.