Mistress of the Art of Death

Thirteen

You will not go without me,” Sir Rowley said, struggling out of bed and falling. “Ow, ow, God rot Roger of Acton. Give me a cleaver and I’ll chop his privates for him, I’ll use them for fish bait, I’ll…”

Trying not to laugh, Adelia and Mansur raised her patient from the floor and put him back to bed. Ulf retrieved his nightcap and replaced it on his head.

“It will be safe enough with Mansur and Ulf-and we are going in daylight,” she said. “You, on the other hand, will indulge in light exercise. A gentle walk round the room to strengthen the muscles, that is all you are capable of at the moment, as you see.”

The tax collector let out a snarl of frustration and hammered his bedclothes, an action that caused another moan, this time of pain.

“Stop that nonsense,” Adelia told him. “Anyway, it wasn’t Acton who wielded the cleaver. I’m not sure who it was, there was such a confusion.”

“I don’t care. I want him hanged before the assize judges look at his bloody tonsure and let him go.”

“He should be punished,” she said. Acton was certainly responsible for whipping into a frenzy the group that had forced their way in to desecrate Simon’s grave. “But I hope he is not hanged.”

“He attacked a royal castle, woman, he damn near neutered me, he needs basting over a slow fire with a spit up his arse.” Sir Rowley shifted his position and looked at her sideways. “Have you at all dwelt on the fact that you and I were the only ones to receive injury in the melee? Apart from the likely lads I put out of action, I mean.”

She had not. “In my case, a broken nose hardly merits the title of injury.”

“It could have been a great deal worse.”

It could, but it had been accidental; in a sense, her own fault for running into battle.

“Moreover,” Rowley said, still cunning, “the rabbi remained unhurt.”

She was becoming confused. “Are you implicating the Jews?”

“Of course not. I am merely pointing out that the good rabbi was not set upon. What I’m saying is that only two people remain inquiring into the death of the children now that Simon is dead. You and I. And we were hurt.”

“And Mansur,” she said absently. “He wasn’t hurt.”

“They didn’t see Mansur until he came into the fight. Besides, he hasn’t been asking questions, his English isn’t good enough.”

Adelia pondered it. “I don’t follow your argument,” she said. “Are you saying that Roger of Acton is the children’s killer? Acton ?”

“I’m saying, damn it”-physical weakness was making Rowley testy-“I’m saying that he was put up to it. The suggestion was made to him or to one of his gang that you and I were Jew lovers better off dead.”

“All Jew lovers are better off dead in his view.”

“Somebody,” the tax collector said between gritted teeth, “somebody is after us. Us, you and me.”

You, oh, dear God, she thought. Not us; you. You’ve been asking questions, Simon and you. At the feast, Simon was addressing you: “We have him, Sir Rowley.”

She groped for the edge of the bed and sat down on it.

“Ah ha,” Rowley said, “Now it’s dawning. Adelia, I want you away from Old Benjamin’s. You can move in here with the Jews for a while.”

Adelia thought of last night’s figure among the trees. She had not told Rowley what she and Matilda B. had seen; he could do nothing about it, and there was no point in adding to his frustration because he could not.

It was Ulf the thing had menaced; it was after another child, had specified this particular one for itself. She’d known it then and she knew it now; it was why the boy must spend his nights in the castle and his days always with Mansur nearby.

But, dear God, if the creature considered Rowley a threat to itself-it was so clever; it had resources-two people she loved were in danger.

Then she thought: Damn it, Rakshasa is achieving what he likes at our expense and locking us all in this damned castle. We shall never find him like this. I, at least, must have the freedom to move.

She said, “Ulf, tell Sir Rowley your theory about the river.”

“No. He’ll say that’s squit.”

Adelia sighed at the incipient jealousy between these two males in her life. “Tell him.”

The boy did so sullenly and without conviction.

Rowley pooh-poohed it. “Everybody’s near the river in this town.” He was equally dismissive of Brother Gilbert as an object of suspicion. “You think he’s Rakshasa? A weedy monk like him couldn’t cross Cambridge Heath, let alone the desert.”

The argument swayed back and forth. Gyltha entered carrying Rowley’s breakfast tray and joined in.

While it lasted, though they spoke of horror and suspicion, some of the sting was drawn for Adelia. They were dear to her, these people. To banter with them, even about life and death, was so pleasurable to her who had never bantered that for this moment she knew a piercing happiness. Hic habitat felicitas.

As for the big, flawed, magical man in the bed, cramming ham into his mouth, he had been hers, his life hers, gained not only by her expertise but by the strength that had flowed out of her into him, a grace sought and granted.

Though marvelous to her, it was a sadly one-sided love affair, and she would have to live on it for the rest of her life. Every moment spent in his company confirmed that to show her vulnerability to him would be ruinous; he would use it either to reject or, even worse, to manipulate. His and her intents were mutually destructive.

Already, it was ending. With the wound scabbing nicely, he refused to let her dress it, depending instead on the ministrations of Gyltha or Lady Baldwin. “It’s indecent for a maiden female to be finicking about in that man’s part,” he’d said crossly.

She had forborne asking him where he would be if she hadn’t finicked in the first place; she was no longer his necessity; she must withdraw.

“At any rate,” she said now, “we must explore the river.”

“In the name of God, don’t be so bloody stupid,” Rowley said.

Adelia got up; she was prepared to die for the swine but not to be insulted. As she tucked the bedclothes more firmly around him, he was enveloped in the smell of her, a mixture of the bogbean tincture that she administered to him three times a day and the chamomile in which she washed her hair-a scent quickly obliterated by the stink of the dog as it passed the bed to follow her out of the room.

Rowley looked around in the silence she left. “Am I not right?” he said in Arabic to Mansur, and then fractiously, because he was exhausted, “I won’t have her exploring that scum-sucking river.”

“Where would you have her, effendi?”

“Flat on her back where she belongs.” If he hadn’t been weak and pettish, he wouldn’t have said it-at least, not out loud. He looked nervously at the Arab, who was advancing; he was in no state to fight the bastard. “I didn’t mean it,” he said hastily.

“That is as well, effendi,” Mansur said, “or I should be forced to reopen your wound and extend it.”

Now Rowley was enveloped in a smell that took him back to the souqs, a mixture of sweat, burnt frankincense, and sandalwood.

The Arab bent over him and placed the tips of his left fingers and thumb together in front of Rowley’s face, then touched them with his right forefinger, a delicate movement that nevertheless cast doubt on Sir Rowley’s parentage by indicating that he had five fathers.

Then he stood back, bowed, and left the room, followed by the dwarfish child whose own gesture was simpler, cruder, but just as explicit.

Gyltha gathered up the tray and its wreckage before going after them. “Don’t know what you said, bor, but there’s better ways of putting it.”

Oh, Lord, he thought, sinking back, I am become childish. Lord, deliver me, though, it is true. That’s where I want her, in bed, under me.

And he wanted her so much that he’d had to stop her dressing his wound with that green muck-What was it? Comfrey?-because his adjacent part had gotten its strength back and tended to rise every time she touched him.

He berated his god and himself for putting him in such a fix; she was not at all his type of woman. Remarkable? Never a woman more so; he owed her his life. On top of that, he could talk to her as he could to no other, male or female. He had revealed more of himself while telling her about his hunt for Rakshasa than he had when he’d related it to the king-and, he was afraid, had revealed a damn sight more in his delirium. He could swear in her company-though not at her, as her departure from the room had just proved-making her an easy as well as desirable companion.

Could she be seduced? Quite probably; she might be conversant with all the functions of the body, but she was undoubtedly naïve about what made its heart beat faster-and Rowley had learned to have faith in his considerable, though little understood, attraction for women.

Seduce her, however, and at one stroke you removed not only her clothing but her honor and, of course, her remarkableness, thus rendering her just another woman in another bed.

And he wanted her as she was; her hmms as she concentrated, her appalling dress sense-though she had looked very nice indeed at the Grantchester feast-the importance she ascribed to all humanity, even its dregs, especially its dregs, the gravity which could dissolve into an astonishing laugh, the way she squared her shoulders when she felt daunted, the way she mixed his dreadful medicines and the kindness of her hands as she held the cup to his mouth, the way she walked, the way she did everything. She had a quality he had never known; she was quality.

“Oh to hell,” said Sir Rowley to the empty room. “I’ll have to marry the woman.”

THE VENTURE UPRIVER, while beautiful, proved fruitless. Considering its purpose, Adelia was ashamed of enjoying so much a day spent in drifting through tunnels formed by overbranching trees from which they emerged into sunlight where women momentarily ceased laundering to wave and call, where an otter swam craftily by the side of the punt while men and hounds on the far side hunted for it, where fowlers spread their nets, where children tickled for trout, where mile-long stretches of bank were empty except for warblers balancing perilously on the reeds as they sang.

The Safeguard loped dolefully along the bank, having rolled in something that made his presence in the punt untenable, while Mansur and Ulf took turns poling, competing with each other in a skill seeming so easy that Adelia asked if she might try, eventually clinging to the pole like a monkey as the punt proceeded without her and having to be rescued by Mansur because Ulf was laughing too hard to move.

Shacks, huts, fowlers’ hides aplenty lined the river-each one likely to be deserted by night and each desolate enough for any scream issuing from it to be heard only by the wildlife-so many that it would have taken a month to investigate them all and a year to follow the little beaten paths and bridges through the reeds that led to others.

Tributaries flowed into the Cam, some of them mere streams, some of considerable size and navigable. These great flatlands, Adelia realized, were veined with waterways; causeways, bridges, roads were ill-kept and often impassable, but anybody could go anywhere with a boat.

While Safeguard chased birds, the other three explorers ate some of the bread and cheese and drank half the cider that Gyltha had provided, sitting on a bank by the boathouse at Grantchester where Sir Joscelin stored his punts.

Water sent quiet, wobbling reflections onto walls that held oars, poles, and fishing tackle; nothing spoke of death. In any case, a look toward the great house in the distance showed that, like all manors, Sir Joscelin’s was too occupied for horror to take place unnoticed. Unless dairymaids, cowherds, stablers, fieldhands, and the house servants were all complicit in the children’s abduction, the crusader was not a murderer in his own home.

Going back down the river toward town, Ulf spat into the water. “Waste of bloody time that was.”

“Not entirely,” Adelia told him. The excursion had brought home something she should have recognized before. Whether they went willingly with their abductor or not, the children would have been seen. Every boat on these stretches below the Great Bridge had a shallow draft and low gunwales, making it impossible to conceal the presence of anyone bigger than a baby-unless he or she were lying flat under the thwarts. Therefore, either the children had hidden themselves or they had been rendered unconscious and a coat, a piece of sacking, something, had been thrown over them for the journey that had taken them to the place of their death.

She pointed this out in Arabic and English.

“He does not use a boat, then,” Mansur said. “The devil throws them across his saddle. Takes a route across country unseen.”

It was possible; most habitation in this part of Cambridgeshire was on a waterway, its interior virtually deserted apart from grazing cloven-hoofed beasts, but Adelia didn’t think so; the predominance of the river in each child’s disappearance argued against it.

“Then it is the thebaicum,” Mansur suggested.

“Opium?” That was more likely. Adelia had been gratified by how extensively the Eastern poppy was grown in this unlikely area of England and by the availability of its properties, but also alarmed. The apothecary, he who visited his mistress by night, distilled it in alcohol, calling it Saint Gregory’s Cordial, and sold it to anybody, though keeping it below his counter out of sight from clerics who condemned the mixture as godless for its ability to relieve pain, an attribute that should be left exclusively to the Lord.

“That’s it,” Ulf said. “He gives ’em a drop of the Gregory’s.” He crinkled up his eyes and exposed his teeth. “Take a sip of this, my pretty, and come along of me to paradise.”

It was a caricature of wheedling malevolence that chilled the warmth of spring.

ADELIA WAS CHILLED AGAIN when, next morning, she sat in the sanctum of a leaded-windowed countinghouse on Castle Hill. The room was stacked with documents and chests bound by chains with locks, a hard-cornered, masculine room built to intimidate would-be borrowers and to accommodate women not at all. Master De Barque, of De Barque Brothers, received her into it with reluctance and met her request with a negative.

“But the letter of credit was in the name both Simon of Naples and myself,” Adelia protested and heard her voice being absorbed into the walls.

De Barque extended a finger and pushed a roll of vellum with a seal on it across the table to her. “Read it for yourself, mistress, if you are capable of understanding Latin.”

She read it. Among the “heretofores” and “wherebys” and “compliance therewith” the Luccan bankers in Salerno, the issuers, promised to pay on behalf of the applicant, the King of Sicily, to the Brothers De Barque of Cambridge such sums as Simon of Naples, the beneficiary, should require. No other name was mentioned.

She looked up into the fat, impatient, disinterested face. How vulnerable to insult you were if you lacked money. “But it was understood,” she said. “I was Master Simon’s equal in the enterprise. I was chosen for it.”

“I am sure you were, mistress,” Master De Barque said.

He thinks I came along as Simon’s strumpet. Adelia sat up, squaring her shoulders. “An application to the Salerno bank or to King William in Sicily will verify me.”

“Then make it, mistress. In the meantime…” Master De Barque picked up a bell on the table and rang it to summon his clerk. He was a busy man.

Adelia sat where she was. “It will take months.” She didn’t have enough money to pay even what it would cost to send the letter. There had been only a few clipped pennies in Simon’s room when she’d gone to look; either he had been preparing to apply to these bankers for more or he had kept what he had in the wallet his killer had taken. “May I borrow until-”

“We do not lend to women.”

She resisted the clerk taking her by the arm to lead her out. “Then what am I to do?” There was the apothecary’s bill to pay, Simon’s headstone to be inscribed by a stonemason, Mansur needed new boots, she needed new boots…

“Mistress, we are a Christian organization. I suggest you apply to the Jews. They are the king’s chosen usurers, and I understand you are close to them.”

There it was, in his eye. She was a woman and a Jew lover.

“You know the Jews’ situation,” she said desperately. “At present they have no access to their money.”

For a moment the flesh on Master De Barque’s face creased into warmth. “Have they not?” he said.

AS THEY WENT UP THE HILL, Adelia and Safeguard were passed by a prison cart containing beggars; the castle beadle was rounding them up ready for sentence at the coming assize. A woman was shaking its bars with skeletal hands.

Adelia stared after her. How powerless we are when we’re destitute.

Never in her life had she been without money. I must go home. But I cannot, not until the killer is found, and even then, how can I leave? She turned her mind from the name; she would have to leave him sooner or later… In any case, I cannot travel. I have no money.

What to do? She was a Ruth amid alien corn. Ruth had solved her situation by marrying, which was not an option in this case.

Could she even exist? Patients had been redirected to the castle while she’d been there, and, in between looking after Rowley, she and Mansur had attended to them. But nearly all were too poor to pay cash.

Her anxiety was not placated when, on entering the castle’s tower room with Safeguard, she found Sir Rowley up and dressed, sitting on the bed, and chatting with Sir Joscelin of Grantchester and Sir Gervase of Coton. As she bustled toward him, she said irritably to Gyltha, who stood sentinel-like in a corner, “He’s supposed to be resting.” She ignored the two knights who had risen at her entrance-Gervase reluctantly and only at a signal from his companion. She took the patient’s pulse. It was steadier than her own.

“Don’t be angry with us, mistress,” Sir Joscelin said. “We came to sympathize with Sir Rowley. It was God’s mercy you and the doctor were by. The wretch Acton…we can only hope the assize will not allow him to escape the rope. We are all agreed hanging’s too good for him.”

“Are you, indeed?” she snapped.

“The lady Adelia does not countenance hanging; she has crueler methods,” Rowley said. “She’d treat all criminals with a hearty dose of hyssop.”

Sir Joscelin smiled. “Now that is cruel.”

“And your methods are effective, are they?” Adelia asked. “Blinding and hanging and cutting off hands makes us all safer in our beds, does it? Kill Roger of Acton and there will be no more crime?”

“And the killer of the children, mistress,” Sir Joscelin asked gently. “What would you have done to him?”

Adelia was slow to answer.

“She hesitates,” Sir Gervase said with disgust. “What sort of woman is she?”

She was a woman who regarded legislated death as an effrontery by those imposing it-so easily and sometimes for so little cause-because life, to her, who wished to save it, was the only true miracle. She was a woman who never sat with the judge or stood with the executioner but always clung to the bar with the accused. Would I have come to this place in his or her circumstances? Had I been born to what he or she was born to, would I have done differently? If someone other than two doctors from Salerno had picked up the baby on Vesuvius, would it cower where this man or woman cowers?

For her, the law should be the point at which savagery ended because civilization stood in its path. We do not kill because we stand for betterment. She supposed the killer had to die and most certainly would, the putting down of a rabid animal, but the doctor in her would always wonder why it had turned rabid and grieve for not knowing.

She turned away from them to go to the medicine table and noticed for the first time how rigidly Gyltha was standing. “What’s the matter?”

The housekeeper looked worn, suddenly aged. Her hands were flat and supporting a small reed casket in much the same manner as the faithful received consecrated bread from the priest before putting it into the mouth.

Rowley called from his bed, “Sir Joscelin has brought me some sweetmeats, Adelia, but Gyltha won’t let me have them.”

“Not I,” Joscelin said. “I am merely their porter. Lady Baldwin asked me to carry them up the stairs.”

Gyltha’s eyes held Adelia’s, then looked down at the casket. Letting it rest on one hand, she raised its lid slightly with the other.

Inside, lying on pretty leaves, like eggs in a nest, was an assortment of colored, scented, lozenge-shaped jujubes.

The two women stared at each other. Adelia felt ill. With her back to the men, she silently shaped the word: “Poison?”

Gyltha shrugged.

“Where’s Ulf?”

“Mansur,” Gyltha mouthed back. “Safe.”

Adelia said slowly, “The doctor has forbidden Sir Rowley confits.”

“Hand them round to our visitors, then,” Rowley called from his bed.

We can’t hide from Rakshasa, Adelia thought. We are targets; wherever we are, we stand exposed like straw men for him to shoot at.

She nodded her head toward the door and turned to the men, while behind her, Gyltha left the room, carrying the casket with her.

The medicines. Hurriedly, Adelia checked them. All stoppers were in place, the boxes piled neatly as she and Gyltha always left them.

You are being absurd, she thought; he is somewhere outside; he cannot have tampered with anything. But last night’s horror of a Rakshasa with wings was on her and she knew she would change every herb, every syrup on the table before administering them.

Is he outside? Has he been here? Is he here now?

Behind her, the conversation had turned to horses as it always did among knights.

She was aware of Gervase lolling in his chair because she felt his awareness of her. His sentences were grunted and abstracted. When she glanced at him, his look turned to a deliberate sneer.

Killer or not, she thought, you’re a brute and your presence is an insult. She marched to the door and held it open. “The patient is tired, gentlemen.”

Sir Joscelin rose. “We are sorry not to have seen Dr. Mansur, aren’t we, Gervase? Pass on our compliments to him, if you would.”

“Where is he?” Sir Gervase demanded.

“Improving Rabbi Gotsce’s Arabic,” Rowley told him.

As he passed her on his way out, Gervase muttered, as if to his companion, “That’s rich, a Jew and a Saracen in a royal castle. Why to hell did we go on crusade?”

Adelia slammed the door behind him.

Rowley said crossly, “Damn it, woman, I was edging the talk round to Outremer to find out who was where and when; one might let something slip about the other.”

“Did they?” she demanded.

“You ushered them out too fast, damn it.” Adelia recognized the irritability of recuperation. “Oddly enough, though, Brother Gilbert admitted to being in Cyprus at about the right time.”

“Brother Gilbert was here?”

And Prior Geoffrey and Sheriff Baldwin and the apothecary-with a concoction he’d sworn would heal a wound within minutes-and Rabbi Gotsce. “I’m a popular man. What’s the matter?” For Adelia had slammed a box of powdered burdock so hard on the table that its lid came off, emitting a cloud of green dust.

“You are not popular,” she said, teeth gritted. “You are a corpse. Rakshasa would poison you.”

She went back to the door, calling for Gyltha, but the housekeeper was already coming up the stairs, still holding the casket. Adelia snatched it from her, opened it, and shoved it under Rowley’s nose. “What are those?”

“Dear Christ,” he said. “Jujubes.”

“I been asking round,” Gyltha said. “Little girl handed ’em to one of the sentries, saying as they was from her mistress for the poorly gentleman in the tower. Lady Baldwin was going to carry ’em up, but Sir Joscelin said he’d save her legs. Always the polite gentleman, he is, not like t’other.”

Gyltha didn’t hold with Sir Gervase.

“And the little girl?”

“Sentry’s one of them sent from London by the king to help guard the Jews. Barney, his name is. Didn’t know her, he says.”

Mansur and Ulf were summoned so that the matter could be gone over in conference.

“They could be merely jujubes, as they seem,” said Rowley.

“Suck one an’ see,” Ulf told him sharply. “What you think, missus?”

Adelia had picked one up in her tweezers and was smelling it. “I can’t tell.”

“Let’s test them,” Rowley said. “Let’s send them down to the cells for Roger of Acton, with our compliments.”

It was tempting, but instead Mansur took them down to the courtyard to throw the casket on the smithy fire.

“There will be no more visitors to this room,” Adelia instructed. “And none of you, especially Ulf, is to leave the castle or wander in it alone.”

“Goddammit, woman, we’ll never find him like that.”

Rowley, it appeared, had been carrying on his own investigation from his bed, using his role as tax inspector to question his visitors.

From the Jews he had learned that Chaim, according to his code, had never talked about his clients nor mentioned the size of their debts. His only records were those that had burned or been stolen from Simon’s body.

“Unless the Exchequer in Winchester has a list of tallies, which it may well do-I’ve sent my squire there to find out-the king will not be best pleased; the Jews provide a large part of this nation’s income. And when Henry isn’t pleased…”

Brother Gilbert had announced that he would rather burn than approach Jews for money. The crusading apothecary as well as Sir Joscelin and Sir Gervase had said the same, though less forcefully. “They’re not likely to tell me if they did, of course, but all three seem finely set up from their own efforts.”

Gyltha nodded. “They done well out of the Holy Land. John was able to start his ’pothecary shop when he got back. Gervase, nasty little turd he was as a boy and he ain’t any pleasanter now, but he’s getting hisself more land. And young Joscelin as didn’t have a rag to his arse thanks to his pa, he’s made a palace out of Grantchester. Brother Gilbert? He’s allus Brother Gilbert.”

They heard labored breathing on the stairs and Lady Baldwin came in, holding her side with one hand and a letter in the other. “Sickness. At the convent. Lord help us. If it be the plague…”

Matilda W. followed her in.

The letter was for Adelia and had been delivered first to Old Benjamin’s house whence Matilda W. had brought it. It was a scrap of parchment torn from some manuscript, showing its terrible urgency, but the writing on it was strong and clear.

“Prioress Joan presents her compliments to Mistress Adelia, assistant to Dr. Mansur, of whom she has heard good reports. Pestilence has broken out amongst us and I ask in the name of Jesus and his dear Mother for said Mistress Adelia to visit this convent of the blessed Saint Radegund that she may then report to the good doctor and solicit his advice on what may alleviate the sisters’ suffering, it being very severe and some near to death.”

A postscript read: “To be no haggling over fees. All this to be done with discretion so as to avoid the spread of alarm.”

A groom and horse were awaiting Adelia in the courtyard below.

“I shall send you with some of my beef tea,” Lady Baldwin told Adelia. “Joan is not usually alarmed. It must be dire.”

It must be, Adelia thought, for a Christian prioress to beg the aid of a Saracen doctor.

“The infirmaress have gone down with it,” Matilda W. said-she’d heard the groom’s report. “Spewing and shitting fit to bust, the lot of ’em. God help us if it be the plague. Ain’t this town suffered enough? What’s Little Saint Peter at that the holy sisters ain’t spared?”

“You will not go, Adelia,” Rowley said.

“I must.”

“I fear she should,” said Lady Baldwin. “The prioress does not allow a man in the nuns’ inner sanctum, despite those wicked rumors, except a priest to hear their confession, of course. With the infirmaress hors de combat, Mistress Adelia is the next best thing, an excellent thing. If she keeps a clove of garlic up each nostril, she cannot succumb.” She hurried away to prepare her beef tea.

Adelia was giving explanations and instruction to Mansur. “O friend of the ages, look after this man and this woman and this boy while I am absent. Let them go nowhere alone. The devil is abroad. Guard over them in the name of Allah.”

“And who shall guard over you, little one? The holy women will not object to the presence of a eunuch.”

Adelia smiled. “It is not a harem, the women safeguard their temple from all men. I shall be safe enough.”

Ulf was tugging at her arm. “I can come. I ain’t growed yet, they know me at Saint Raggy’s. And I don’t never catch nothing.”

“You’re not going to catch this, either,” she said.

“You will not go,” Rowley said. Wincing, he dragged Adelia to the window away from the others. “It’s a bloody plot to get you unprotected. Rakshasa’s in it somewhere.”

Back on his feet, Adelia was reminded of how big he was and what it was for a powerful man to be kept powerless. Nor had she realized that, for him, Simon’s murder had seemed a preliminary to her own. Just as she was frightened for him, so was he for her. She was touched, gratified, but there were things to attend to-Gyltha must be told to change the medicines on the table; she had to collect others from Old Benjamin’s…she didn’t have time for him now.

“You’re the one who’s been asking questions,” she said gently. “I beg you to take care of yourself and my people. You merely need nursing at this stage, not a doctor. Gyltha will look after you.” She tried to disengage herself from him. “You must see that I have to go to them.”

“For God’s sake,” he shouted. “You can stop playing the doctor for once, can’t you?”

Playing the doctor. Playing the doctor?

Though his hand was still on her, it was as if the ground had fallen between them, and looking up into his eyes, she saw herself across the chasm-a pleasant little creature enough but a deluded one, merely busying itself, a spinster filling in time until she should be claimed by what was basic for a woman.

But if so, what was the line of suffering that waited for her every day? What was Gil the thatcher who was able to climb up ladders?

And what are you, she thought, amazed, looking into his eyes, who should have bled to death and didn’t?

She knew in absolute certainty now that she should never marry him. She was Vesuvia Adelia Rachel Ortese Aguilar, who would be very, very lonely but always a doctor.

She shook herself free. “The patient can resume solid food, Gyltha, but change all those medicaments for fresh,” she said and went out.

Anyway, she thought, I need that fee the prioress promised.

SAINT RADEGUND’S CHURCH and its outhouses near the river were deceptive, having been built after the Danes stopped invading and before the foundation ran out of money. The main body of the convent, its chapel and residences, was larger and lonelier and had known the reign of Edward the Confessor.

It stood away from the river hidden among trees so that Viking longboats snaking through the shallow waters of the Cam tributaries might not find it. When the monks, who’d inhabited it originally, died out, the place had been granted to religious women.

All this Adelia learned over the shoulder of Edric as, with Safeguard following, his horse carried them both into the convent estate via a side gate in its wall, the main gates having been barred against visitors.

Like Matilda W., the groom was aggrieved by Little Saint Peter’s failure to do his job. “It do look bad shutting up, with the pilgrim season just starting proper,” he said. “Mother Joan’s right put out.”

He set Adelia down by a stable block and kennels, the only well-kept convent buildings she had seen so far, and pointed to a path skirting a paddock. “God go with you, missis.” Obviously, he would not.

Adelia, however, was not prepared to be cut off from the outside world. She ordered the man to go to the castle each morning, taking any message she might need to send and asking how her people did, and to bring back the answer.

She set off with Safeguard. The clatter of the town across the river faded. Larks rose around her, their song like bursting bubbles. Behind her the prioress’s hounds sent up a belling and a roe deer barked somewhere in the forest ahead.

The same forest, she remembered, that contained the manor of Sir Gervase, and into which Little Saint Peter had disappeared.

“CAN THIS BE MANAGED?” Prioress Joan demanded. She was more haggard than when Adelia had last seen her.

“Well, it isn’t the plague,” Adelia told her, “nor typhus, Lord be thanked; none of the sisters has the rash. I believe it to be cholera.”

She added, because the prioress went pale, “A milder form than the one found in the East, though bad enough. I am concerned for your infirmaress and Sister Veronica.” The oldest and the youngest. Sister Veronica was the nun who, praying over Little Saint Peter’s reliquary, had presented Adelia with an image of imperishable grace.

“Veronica.” The prioress appeared distraught-and Adelia liked her better for it. “The sweetest-natured of them all, may God attend her. What is to be done?”

What indeed? Adelia glanced in dismay across to the other side of the cloister, where, beyond the pillars of its walk, rose what looked like an outsize pigeon-loft, two rows of ten doorless arches, each giving to a cell less than five feet wide, inside which lay a prostrate nun.

There was no infirmary-the title “infirmaress” seemed to be an honorary designation settled on the elderly Sister Odilia merely because she was skilled in herbs. No dorter, either-nowhere, in fact, for the nuns to be cared for collectively.

“The original monks were ascetics who preferred the privacy of individual cells,” the prioress said, catching Adelia’s look. “We keep to them because as yet we have had no money to build. Can you manage?”

“I shall need assistance.” Caring single-handedly for twenty women severely afflicted with diarrhea and vomiting would be hard enough in a ward, but to fetch and carry from cell to cell, up and down the wickedly narrow and railless flight of steps that led to the upper cells, would cut down the carer herself.

“I fear our servants fled at the mention of plague.”

“We don’t want them back in any case,” Adelia said firmly. A glimpse of the convent house suggested that those who should have kept it ordered had allowed slovenliness to reign long before disease overtook it, a slackness that might have caused the disease itself.

She said, “May I ask if you eat with your nuns?”

“And what has that to do with the price of fish, mistress?” The prioress was offended, as if Adelia was accusing her of dereliction.

So Adelia was, in a way. She remembered Mother Ambrose’s care for the physical and spiritual nourishment of her nuns while presiding over meals in Saint Giorgio’s immaculate refectory, where wholesome food was accompanied by a reading from the Bible, where a nun’s lack of appetite for either could be noted and acted on. But she did not want confrontation so early and said, “It may have something to do with the poisoning.”

“Poisoning? Do you suggest that someone is trying to murder us?”

“Deliberately, no. Accidentally, yes. Cholera is a form of poisoning. Since you yourself seem to have escaped it…”

The prioress’s expression suggested that she was beginning to regret calling Adelia in. “As it happens, I have my own quarters, and I am usually too occupied by convent business to eat with the sisters. I have been at Ely this last week, consulting with the abbot on…on religious matters.”

Buying one of the abbot’s horses, so Edric the groom had said.

Prioress Joan went on: “I suggest you confine your interest to the matter in hand. Inform your doctor that there are no poisoners here and, in the name of God, ask him what is to be done.”

What had to be done was to solicit help. Satisfied that it was not the convent’s air causing the nuns’ sickness-though the place was dank and smelled of rot-Adelia walked back to the kennels and sent Edric the groom for the Matildas.

They arrived, and Gyltha with them. “The boy’s safe in the castle with Sir Rowley and Mansur,” she said when Adelia reproved her. “Reckon you need me more than he do.”

That was undoubted, but it was dangerous for them all.

“I shall be glad of you by day,” Adelia told the three women. “You shall not stay by night because, while the pestilence lasts, you will not eat any of the convent’s food nor drink its water. I insist on this. Also, buckets of brandy will stand in the cloister, and after touching the nuns, or their chamber pots, or anything that is theirs, you must lave your hands in them.”

“Brandy?”

“Brandy.”

Adelia had her own theory concerning diseases such as the one ravaging the nuns. Like so many of her theories, it did not accord with that of Galen or any other medical influences in vogue. She believed that the flux in cases like this was the body’s attempt to rid itself of a substance it could not tolerate. Poison in one form or another had gone in and, ergo, poison was coming out. Water itself was so often contaminated-as in the poorer districts of Salerno, where disease was ever-present-it must be treated as a source of the original poison until proved otherwise. Since anything distilled, in this case brandy, frequently stopped wounds from putrefying, it might also act on any ejected poison that touched the hands of a nurse and prevent her from ingesting it herself.

So Adelia reasoned and acted on.

“My brandy?” The prioress expressed dissatisfaction at seeing the cask from her cellar poured into two buckets.

“The doctor insists on it,” Adelia told her, as if the messages Edric brought from the castle had contained instructions from Mansur.

“I would have you know that is best Spanish,” Joan said.

“An even stronger specific.”

Since they were all in the kitchen at that moment, Adelia had the prioress at a disadvantage; she suspected the woman of never having entered it. The place was dark and verminous; several rats had fled at their entrance-Safeguard yelping after them with the most animation Adelia had ever seen in him. The stone walls were encrusted with grease. Such grooves of the pine table block that could be seen beneath litter were filled with grime. There was a smell of rotting sweetness. Pots hanging from hooks retained furred remnants of meals, flour bins were uncovered, and there was a suggestion of movement in their contents, the same applied to the open vats of cooking water-Adelia wondered if it was in one of these that the nuns had boiled Little Saint Peter’s corpse and whether it had been cleaned afterward. Shreds clinging to the blade of a meat cleaver stank like pus.

Adelia looked up from sniffing them. “No poisoner here, you say? Your cooks should be arrested.”

“Nonsense,” the prioress said. “A bit of dirt never hurt anybody.” But she pulled at the collar of her pet gazehound to stop him from licking an unidentified mess sticking to a platter on the floor. Rallying, she said, “I am paying Dr. Mansur that my nuns be made well, not for his subordinate to spy on the premises.”

“Dr. Mansur says that to treat the premises is to treat the patient.”

Adelia would not give way on this. She had fed a pill of opium to the worst cases in the cells in order to relieve their cramps, and now, apart from washing the rest and giving them sips of boiled water-which Gyltha and Matilda W. were already about-little could be done for the invalids until the kitchen was fit to use on their behalf.

Adelia turned to Matilda B., whose Herculean task this was to be. “Can you do it, little one? Cleanse these Augean stables?”

“Kept horses in here as well, did they?” Rolling up her sleeves, Matilda B. looked around her.

“Quite probably.”

Followed resentfully by the prioress, Adelia went on a tour of inspection. An aumbry in the refectory contained labeled jars that spoke well of Sister Odilia’s knowledge of herbology, though it also held a plentiful supply of opium-too plentiful, in the opinion of Adelia, who, knowing the drug’s power, kept her own cache to a minimum in case of theft.

The convent’s water proved healthy. A peat-colored but pure ground spring had been enclosed in a conduit that ran through the buildings, first to serve the kitchen before supplying the fish in the convent’s stew outside, then on to the nuns’ laundry, lavatorium, and, finally, to course along a helpful slope under the long, many-holed bench in the outhouse that was the privy. The bench was clean enough, though nobody had brushed out the runnel beneath it for many a long month-a job that Adelia reserved for the prioress, seeing no reason why Gyltha or the Matildas should have to do it.

But that was for later. Having done her best to ensure that the condition of her patients was not made worse, Adelia turned her energy to saving their lives.

PRIOR GEOFFREY CAME to save their souls. It was generous of him, considering the feud between him and the prioress. It was also brave; the priest who usually heard the sisters’ confession had refused to risk the plague and instead sent a letter containing a generalized absolution for any sins that might come up.

It was raining. Gargoyles spouted water from the roof of the cloister walk into the unkempt garden at its center. Prioress Joan received the prior, thanking him with stiff politeness. Adelia took his wet cloak to the kitchen to dry.

By the time she returned, Prior Geoffrey was alone. “Bless the woman,” he said. “I believe her to suspect me of trying to steal Little Saint Peter’s bones while she is yet at this disadvantage.”

Adelia was happy to see him. “Are you well, Prior?”

“Well enough.” He winked at her. “Functioning nicely so far.”

He was leaner than he had been and looked fitter. She was relieved for that, and also by his mission. “Their sins seem so little, except to them,” she said of the nuns. In their more terrible moments, when they thought themselves near death, she had heard most of her patients’ reasons for dreading hellfire. “Sister Walburga ate some of the sausage she was taking upriver for the anchorites, but you’d think from her distress that she was a Horseman of the Apocalypse and the Whore of Babylon rolled into one.”

Indeed, Adelia had already discounted the accusations made by Brother Gilbert against the nuns’ behavior. A doctor learned many secrets from an acutely ill patient, and Adelia found these women to be slapdash perhaps, undisciplined, mostly illiterate-all failings that she put down to the negligence of their prioress-but not immoral.

“She shall be reconciled through Christ for the sausage,” Prior Geoffrey said solemnly.

By the time he had finished confessing the sisters on the ground floor, it was dark. Adelia waited for him outside Sister Veronica’s cell at the end of the row, to light him to the upper cells.

He paused. “I have given Sister Odilia the last rites.”

“Prior, I hope to save her yet.”

He patted her shoulder. “Not even you can perform miracles, my child.” He looked back to the cell he had just left. “I worry for Sister Veronica.”

“So do I.” The young nun was ill beyond what she should be.

“Confession has not eased that child’s sense of sin,” Prior Geoffrey said. “It can be the cross of those who are holy-minded, like her, that they fear God too much. For Veronica, the blood of our Lord is still moist.”

Having seen him, complaining, up steps that were slippery from the rain, Adelia went back down the row to Odilia’s cell. The infirmaress lay as she had for days, her twiggy, soil-engrained hands plucking at her blanket in an effort to throw it off.

Adelia covered her, wiped away some of the unction trickling down her forehead, and tried to feed her Gyltha’s calf’s-foot jelly. The old woman compressed her lips. “It will give you strength,” Adelia pleaded. It was no good; Odilia’s soul wanted free of the empty, exhausted body.

It felt like desertion to leave her, but Gyltha and the Matildas had gone for the night, though reluctantly, and with only the prioress and herself to do it, Adelia had to see the other sisters fed.

Walburga, she who had been Ulf’s “Sister Fatty” and was now much thinner, said, “The Lord has forgiven me; the Lord be praised.”

“I thought he might. Here, open your mouth.”

But after a few spoonfuls, the nun again showed concern. “Who’ll be a-feeding our anchorites now? ’Tis wicked to eat if they be starving.”

“I’ll speak to Prior Geoffrey. Open up. One for the Father. Good girl. One for the Holy Ghost…”

Sister Agatha, next door, had another bout of sickness after taking three spoonfuls. “Don’t you worry,” she said, wiping her mouth, “I’ll be better tomorrow. How’s the others doing? I want the truth now.”

Adelia liked Agatha, the nun who had been brave enough, or drunk enough, to provoke Brother Gilbert at the Grantchester feast. “Most are better,” she said, and then, in response to Agatha’s quizzical look, “but Sister Odilia and Sister Veronica are still not as well as I’d like.”

“Oh, not Odilia.” Agatha said, urgently, “Good old stick, she is. Mary, Mother of God, intercede for her.”

And Veronica? No intercession for her? The omission was strange; it had been evident when other nuns asked after their sisters in Christ; only Walburga, who was about the same age, had inquired for her.

Perhaps the girl’s beauty and youth were resented, as was the fact that she was the prioress’s obvious favorite.

Favorite, indeed, Adelia thought. There had been agony in Joan’s face that spoke of great love when she looked on Veronica’s suffering. Being sensitive to the existence of love in all its forms now, Adelia found herself sincerely pitying the woman and wondered if the energy she put into her hunting was a way of redirecting a passion for which, as a nun, and especially one in authority, she must be clawed by guilt.

Had Sister Veronica been aware of being an object of desire? Probably not. As Prior Geoffrey said, there was an otherworldliness to the girl that spoke of a spiritual life the rest of the convent lacked.

The other nuns must know of it, though. The young nun didn’t complain, but the bruises on her skin suggested she’d been physically bullied.

When he’d finished in the upper cells, Adelia made the prior wash his hands in the brandy. The procedure bemused him. “Usually, I take it internally. However, I no longer question anything you would have me do.”

She lit him to the gate, where a groom waited for him with their two horses. “A heathenish place, this,” he said, lingering. “Perhaps it is the architecture or the barbarous monks who built it, but I am always more conscious of the Horned One than of sanctity when I am in it, and for once I am not referring to Prioress Joan. The arrangement of those cells alone…” He grimaced. “I am reluctant to leave you here-and with so little help.”

“I have Gyltha and the Matildas,” Adelia told him, “and the Safeguard, of course.”

“Gyltha is with you? Why did I not see her? Then there’s no need for worry; that woman can dispel the forces of darkness single handed.”

He gave her his blessing. The groom took the chrismatory box from him, put it in a saddlebag, heaved him up on his horse, and they were gone.

It had stopped raining, but the moon, which should have been full, was heavily clouded. Adelia stood for a minute or two after they had disappeared, listening to the sound of hooves diminishing into the blackness.

She hadn’t told the prior that Gyltha did not stay at night and that it was at night when she became afraid.

“Heathenish,” she said out loud. “Even the prior feels it.” She went back into the cloister but left the gates open; it was nothing outside the convent that frightened her, it was the convent itself; there was no air to it, nothing of God’s light, no windows even in the chapel, just arrow slits set into walls of heavy, unadorned stone that reflected the savagery they had been built to withstand.

But it has gotten in, Adelia thought. The hideously ancient, hogback tomb in the chapel was carved with wolves and dragons biting each other. Scrollwork on the altar circled a figure with arms upheld, Lazarus perhaps, though candlelight gave it a demonic quality. The foliage surrounding the arches of the cells imitated the encroaching forest that tangled buttresses in ivy and creepers.

At night, sitting by a nun’s cot, she, who did not credit the devil, found herself listening for him and being answered by the shriek of an owl. For Adelia, as for Prior Geoffrey, the twenty gaping holes, ten below, ten above, in which the nuns were stacked, reinforced the barbarity. Called to another cell, she had to urge herself to brave the wicked, black steps and narrow ledge that led to it.

By day, when Gyltha and the Matildas returned, bringing with them noise and common sense, she allowed herself an hour or two’s rest in the prioress’s quarters, but even then the two rows of cells infiltrated her exhausted dozes with reproach, as if they were graves of troglodyte dead.

Tonight, when she walked the length of the cloister to look in on Sister Veronica, the light of her lantern flickered the ugly heads of the pillars’ capitals into life. They grimaced at her. She was glad of the dog by her side.

Veronica lay tossing in her cot, apologizing to God for not dying. “Forgive me, Lord, that I am not with you. Suspend Thy wrath at my transgressions, Dear Master, for I would come to You if I could…”

“Nonsense,” Adelia told her. “God is perfectly happy with you and wants you to live. Open your mouth and have some nice calf’s-foot jelly.”

But Veronica, like Odilia, would not eat. Eventually, Adelia gave her half an opium pill and sat with her until it took effect. It was the barest cell of the twenty, its only ornament a cross that, like all the nuns’ wall crucifixes, was woven from withies.

Somewhere out in the marsh, a bittern boomed. Water dripped on the stones outside with a regularity that made Adelia’s nerves twitch. She heard retching from Sister Agatha’s cell farther along the cloister, and went to her.

Emptying the chamber pot meant leaving the cloister. A shift of cloud allowed some moonlight on her return, and Adelia saw the figure of a man by one of the walk’s pillars.

She closed her eyes against it, then opened them and went forward.

It was a trick of shadow and the glistening of rain. There was nobody there. She put her hand on the pillar to lean against it for a moment, breathing hard; the figure had been wearing horns. Safeguard appeared to have noticed nothing, but then he rarely did.

I am very tired, she thought.

Prioress Joan cried out sharply from Odilia’s cell…

WHEN THEY’D SAID THE PRAYERS, Adelia and the prioress wrapped the infirmaress’s body in a sheet and carried it between them to the chapel. They laid it on a makeshift catafalque of two tables covered by a cloth and lit candles to stand at the head and the foot.

The prioress stayed to chant a requiem. Adelia went back to the cells to sit with Agatha. All the nuns were asleep, for which she was thankful; they need not know of the death until the morning, when they would be stronger.

That is, if morning ever comes to this awful place, she thought. “Heathenish,” the prior had said. At this distance, the strong, single contralto echoing from the chapel sounded not so much a Christian requiem as a lament for a fallen warrior. Had it been Odilia’s death or some element in the very stones that conjured the horned figure in the cloister?

Fatigue, Adelia told herself again. You are tired.

But the image persisted, and to rid herself of it, she used her imagination to transpose it with another figure, this one more rotund, more funny, infinitely beloved, until Rowley stood there in the horror’s stead. With that comforting presence on guard outside, she fell asleep.

Sister Agatha died the next night. “Her heart seems to have just stopped beating,” Adelia wrote in a message to Prior Geoffrey. “She was doing well. I did not expect it.” And had cried for it.

With rest and Gyltha’s good food, the remaining nuns recovered swiftly. Veronica and Walburga, being younger than the others, were up and about sooner than Adelia would have liked, though it was difficult to resist their high spirits. However, their insistence that they should go upriver to supply the neglected anchorites was not sensible, especially as, in order to take sufficient food and fuel, one nun would be poling one punt and her sister yet another.

Adelia went to Prioress Joan with an appeal that they be stopped from exhausting themselves.

Being worn out herself, she did so tactlessly: “They are still my patients. I cannot allow it.”

“They are still my nuns. And the anchorites my responsibility. From time to time, Sister Veronica, especially, needs the freedom and solitude to be found among them; she has sought it, and I have always granted it.”

“Prior Geoffrey promised to supply the anchorites.”

“I have no opinion of Prior Geoffrey’s promises.”

It was not the first time, nor the second, nor the third, that Joan and Adelia had locked horns. The prioress, conscious that her many absences had brought both convent and nuns to the brink of ruin, involuntarily tried to retain her authority by opposing Adelia’s.

They had argued over Safeguard, the prioress saying that he stank, which he did-but not more than the living conditions of the nuns. They had argued over the administration of opium, on which the prioress had decided to take the side of the Church. “Pain is God-sent, only God should take it away.”

“Who says so? Where in the Bible does it say that?” Adelia had demanded.

“I am told the plant is addictive. They will form a habit of taking it.”

“They won’t. They don’t know what they are taking. It is a temporary panacea, a soporific to relieve their suffering.”

Perhaps because she had won that argument, she lost this. The two nuns were given their superior’s permission to take supplies to the anchorites-and Adelia, knowing she could do no more for it, left the convent two days later.

Which was the same time the assize arrived in Cambridge.

THE NOISE WAS TREMENDOUS in any case, but for Adelia, whose ears had become accustomed to silence, it was like being battered. Weighted by her heavy medicine case, the walk from the convent house had been a hard one, and now, wanting only to get back to Old Benjamin’s and rest, she stood in a crowd on the wrong side of Bridge Street as the parade passed.

At first she didn’t realize this was the assize; the cavalcade of musicians in livery blowing trumpets and beating tabors took her back to Salerno, to the week before Ash Wednesday when the carnevale came to town despite all the Church could do to prevent it.

Here came more drums-and beadles, such ornate livery, with great gold maces over their shoulders. And heavens, mitered bishops and abbots on caparisoned horses, one or two actually waving. And a comic executioner with hood and ax…

Then she knew the executioner wasn’t comic; there would be no tumblers and dancing bears. The three Plantagenet leopards were blazoned everywhere, and the lovely palanquins now going by on the shoulders of tabarded men contained the judges of the king come to weigh Cambridge in their scales and, if Rowley was correct, find much of it wanting.

Yet the people around her cheered as if starved of entertainment, as if the trials and fines and death sentences to come would provide it.

Bewildered by hubbub, Adelia suddenly saw Gyltha pushing to the front of the crowd across the street, her mouth open as if she, too, were cheering. But she wasn’t cheering.

Dear God of All, don’t let her be saying it. It is unsayable, not to be borne. Don’t look like that.

Gyltha ran into the street so that a rider had to rein in, swearing, his horse jittering to one side to avoid trampling her. She was talking, looking, clutching. She was coming close, and Adelia stood back to avoid her, but the shriek penetrated everything. “Any of you seen my little boy?”

She might have been blind. She caught at Adelia’s sleeve without recognizing her. “You seen my little boy? Name’s Ulf. I can’t find un.”