Mistress of the Art of Death

Seven

Over the year, the watch kept on Cambridge Castle by the townspeople to make sure the Jews inside did not escape from it had dwindled to Agnes, the eel seller’s wife and mother to Harold, whose remains still awaited burial.

The small hut she’d built for herself out of withies looked like a beehive against the great gates. By day she sat at its entrance, knitting, with one of her husband’s eel glaives planted spike end down on one side of her, and on the other a large handbell. By night she slept in the hut.

On the occasion during the winter when the sheriff had tried to smuggle the Jews out through the dark, thinking she was asleep, she had used both weapons. The glaive had near skewered one of the accompanying sheriff’s men; the bell had raised the town. The Jews had been hurried back inside.

The castle postern was also guarded, this time by geese kept there for the purpose of declaring the emergence of anyone trying to get out, much as the geese of the Capitoline had warned Rome that the Gauls were trying to get in. An attempt by the sheriff’s men to shoot them from the castle walls had caused such honking that, again, the alarm was raised.

Climbing the steep, winding, fortified road up to the castle, Adelia expressed surprise that commoners were allowed to flout authority for so long. In Sicily a troop of the king’s soldiers would have solved the problem in minutes.

“And result in massacre?” Simon said. “Where could it escort the Jews that would not give rise to the same situation? The whole country believes the Jews of Cambridge to be child-crucifiers.”

He was downcast today and, Adelia suspected, very angry.

“I suppose so.” She reflected on the restraint with which the king of England was dealing with the matter. She could have expected a man like him, a man of blood, to wreak awful revenge on the people of Cambridge for killing one of his most profitable Jews. Henry had been responsible for the death of Becket; he was a tyrant, after all, like any other. But so far he had held his hand.

When asked what she thought might happen, Gyltha had said the town did not look forward to the fine that would be imposed on it for Chaim’s death, but she wasn’t anticipating wholesale hangings. This king was a tolerant king as long as you didn’t poach his deer. Or cross him beyond endurance, as Archbishop Thomas had.

“Ain’t like the old days when his ma and uncle Stephen were warring with each other,” she’d said. “Hangings? A baron’d come galloping up-didn’t matter which side he was on, didn’t matter which side you was on, he’d hang you just for scratching your arse.”

“Quite right, too,” Adelia had said. “A nasty habit.” The two of them were beginning to get on well.

The civil war between Matilda and Stephen, Gyltha said, had even penetrated the fens. The Isle of Ely with its cathedral had changed hands so many times, you never knew who was abbot and who wasn’t. “Like we poor folk was a carcass and wolves was ripping us apart. And when Geoffrey de Mandeville came through…” At that point, Gyltha had shaken her head and fallen silent. Then she said, “Thirteen years of it. Thirteen years with God and saints sleeping and taking no bloody notice.”

“Thirteen years when God and his saints slept.” Since her arrival in England, Adelia had heard that phrase used about the civil war a score of times. People still blanched at the memory. Yet on the accession of Henry II, it had stopped. In twenty years it had never restarted. England had become a peaceful country.

The Plantagenet was a more subtle man than she’d classified him; perhaps he should be reconsidered.

They turned the last corner of the approach and emerged onto the apron before the castle.

The simple motte and bailey the Conqueror had built to guard the river crossing had gone, its wooden palisade replaced by curtain walls, its keep grown into the accommodation, church, stables, mews, barracks, women’s quarters, kitchens, laundry, vegetable and herb gardens, dairy, tiltyards, and gallows and lockup necessary for a sheriff administering a sizable, prosperous town. At one end, scaffolding and platforms clad the growing tower that would replace the one that had burned down.

Outside the gates, two sentries leaned on their spears and talked to Agnes where she sat, knitting, on a stool outside her beehive. Somebody else was sitting on the ground, resting his head against the castle wall.

Adelia groaned. “Is the man ubiquitous?”

At the sight of the newcomers, Roger of Acton leaped to his feet, picked up a wooden board on a stick that had been lying beside him, and began shouting. The chalked message read: “Pray for Littel Saint Peter, who was crucafid by the Jews.”

Yesterday he’d favored the pilgrims to Saint Radegund’s; today, it appeared, the bishop was coming to visit the sheriff and Acton was ready to waylay him.

Again, there was no recognition of Adelia, nor, despite Mansur’s singularity, of the two men with her. He doesn’t see people, she thought, only fodder for hell. She noticed that the man’s dirty soutane was of worsted.

If he was disappointed that he didn’t yet have the bishop to hector, he made do. “They did scourge the poor child till the blood flowed,” he yelled at them. “They kept gnashing their teeth and calling him Jesus the false prophet. They tormented him in divers ways and then crucified him…”

Simon went up to the soldiers and asked to see the sheriff. They were from Salerno, he said. He had to raise his voice to be heard.

The elder of the guards was unimpressed. “Where’s that when it’s at home?” He turned to the yelling clerk. “Shut up, will you?”

“Prior Geoffrey has asked us to attend on the sheriff.”

“What? I can’t hear you over that crazy bastard.”

The younger sentry pricked up. “Here, is this the darky doctor as cured the prior?”

“The same.”

Roger of Acton had spotted Mansur now and come up close; his breath was rank. “Saracen, do you acknowledge our Lord Jesus Christ?”

The older sentry cuffed him round the ear. “Shut up.” He turned back to Simon. “And that?”

“Milady’s dog.”

Ulf had, with difficulty, been left behind, but Gyltha had insisted that the Safeguard must go with Adelia everywhere. “He is no protection,” Adelia had protested. “When I was facing those damned crusaders, he skulked behind me. He’s a skulker.”

“Protection ain’t his job,” Gyltha had said. “He’s a safeguard.”

“Reckon as they can go in, eh, Rob?” The sentry winked at the woman in the entrance to her withy hut. “All right by you, Agnes?”

Even so, the guard captain was fetched, and was satisfied that the three were not concealing weapons before they were allowed through the wicket. Acton had to be restrained from going in with them. “Kill the Jews,” he was shouting, “kill the crucifiers.”

The reason for precaution became apparent as they were ushered into the bailey; fifty or so Jews were taking exercise in it, enjoying the sun. The men were mainly walking and talking; women were gossiping in one corner or playing games with their children. As with all Jews in a Christian country, they were dressed like anyone else, though one or two of the men wore the conelike Judenhut on their heads.

But what distinguished this particular group as the Jews was their shabbiness. Adelia was startled by it. In Salerno there were poor Jews, just as there were poor Sicilians, Greeks, Moslems, but their poverty was disguised by the alms flowing from their richer brethren. In fact, it was held, somewhat sniffily, by the Christians of Salerno that “the Jews have no beggars.” Charity was a precept of all the great religions; in Judaism, “Give unto Him of what is His, seeing that thou and what thou hast are

His” was law. Grace was bestowed on the giver rather than the receiver.

Adelia remembered one old man who’d driven her foster mother’s sister to distraction by his refusal to say thank you for the meals he’d taken in her kitchen. “Do I eat what is yours?” he used to ask. “I eat what is God’s.”

The sheriff’s charity to his unwanted guests, it appeared, was not so munificent. They were thin. The castle kitchen, Adelia thought, was unlikely to accord with the dietary laws, and therefore its meals would in many cases remain uneaten. The clothes in which these people had to hurry from their homes the year before were beginning to tatter.

Some of the women looked up expectantly as she and the others crossed the bailey. Their men were too deep in discussion to notice.

With the younger soldier from the gate leading the way, the three passed over the moat bridge, under the portcullis, and across another court.

The hall was cool, vast, and busy. Trestle tables stretched down its length, covered with documents, rolls, and tallies. Clerks poring over them occasionally broke off to run to the dais, where a large man sat in a large chair at another table on which other documents, rolls, and tallies were growing at a rate threatening to topple them.

Adelia was unacquainted with the role of sheriff, but Simon had said that as far as each shire was concerned, this was the man of greatest importance next to the king, the royal agent of the county who, with the diocesan bishop, wielded most of its justice and alone was responsible for the collection of its taxes, the keeping of its peace, pursuing its villains, ensuring there was no Sunday trading, seeing to it that everybody paid church tithes and the Church paid its dues to the Crown, arranging executions, appropriating the hanged one’s chattels for the king, as well as that of waifs, fugitives, outlaws, ensuring that treasure trove went into the royal coffers-and twice a year delivering the resultant money and its accounting to the king’s Exchequer at Winchester, where, Simon said, a penny’s discrepancy could lose him his place.

“With all that, why does anyone want the job in the first place?” Adelia inquired.

“He takes a percentage,” Simon said.

To judge from the quality of the clothes the Sheriff of Hertfordshire was wearing and the amount of gold and jewels adorning his fingers, the percentage was a big one, but at the moment, it was doubtful whether Sheriff Baldwin thought it enough. “Harassed” hardly described him; “distracted” did.

He stared with manic vacancy at the soldier who announced his visitors. “Can’t they see I’m busy? Don’t they know the justices in eyre are coming?”

A tall and bulky man, who’d been bending over some papers at the sheriff’s side, straightened up. “I think, my lord, these people may be helpful in the matter of the Jews,” Sir Rowley said.

He winked at Adelia. She looked back at him without favor. Another as ubiquitous as Roger of Acton. And perhaps more sinister.

Yesterday a note had arrived for Simon from Prior Geoffrey, warning him against the king’s tax collector: “The man was in the town on two occasions at least when a child disappeared. May the good Lord forgive me if I cast doubt where none is deserved, but it behooves us to be circumspect until we are sure of our ground.”

Simon accepted that the prior had cause for suspicion, “but no more than for anyone else.” He’d liked what he had seen of the tax collector, he said. Adelia, made privy to what lay beyond the amiable exterior when Sir Rowley had forced his presence on her examination of the dead children, did not. She found him disturbing.

It appeared he had the castle in thrall. The sheriff was staring up at him for help, incapable of dealing with any but his own immediate troubles. “Don’t they know there’s an eyre coming?”

Rowley turned to Simon. “My lord wishes to know your business here.”

Simon said, “With the lord’s permission, we would speak to Yehuda Gabirol.”

“No harm in that, eh, my lord? Shall I show them the way?” He was already moving.

The sheriff grabbed at him. “Don’t leave me, Picot.”

“Not for long, my lord, I promise.”

He ushered the trio down the hall, talking all the way. “The sheriff’s just been informed that the justices in eyre are intending to hold an assize in Cambridge. Coming on top of the presentment he must make to the Exchequer, that means considerable extra work, and he finds himself somewhat, shall we say, overwhelmed. So do I, of course.”

He smiled chubbily down at them; a less overwhelmed man would have been difficult to find. “One is trying to discover what debts are owed to the Jews and, therefore, to the king. Chaim was the chief moneylender in this county, and all his tallies went up in the tower fire. The difficulty of recovering what is not there to speak for itself is considerable. However…”

He gave an odd little sideways bow to Adelia. “I hear Madam Doctor has been dabbling in the Cam. Not a doctorly thing to do, one would have thought, considering what pours into it. Perhaps you had your reasons, ma’am?”

Adelia said, “What is an assize?”

They had gone through an arch and were following Sir Rowley up the winding staircase of a tower, the Safeguard pattering behind them.

Over his shoulder, the tax collector said, “Ah, an assize. A judgment really, by the king’s traveling justices. A Day of Judgment-and nearly as terrible as God’s for those in its scales. Judgment of ale and punishment for the watering down of. Judgment of bread, ditto for the underweight of. Gaol delivery, guilt or innocence of prisoners therein. Presentments of land, ownership of, presentment of quarrels, justification for…the list goes on. Juries to be provided. Doesn’t happen every year, but when it does…Mother of God help us, these steps are steep.”

He was puffing as he led them up. Shafts of sun coming in through arrow slits deep in the stone lit tiny landings, each with its arched door.

“Try losing weight,” Adelia told him, her eyes presented with his backside as it ascended.

“I am a man of muscle, madam.”

“Fat,” she said. She slowed so that he rounded the next twist ahead of her and she could hiss at Simon at her rear, “He is going to listen in to what we have to say.”

Simon took his hands off the rail that had been aiding him upward and spread them. “He must know our business here already. He knows-Lord, he’s right about these stairs-who you are. Where’s the difference?”

The difference was that the man would draw conclusions from what was to be said to the Jews. Adelia distrusted conclusions until she had all the evidence. Also, she distrusted Sir Rowley. “But if he should be the killer?”

“Then he knows already.” Simon closed his eyes and groped for the rail.

Sir Rowley was waiting for her at the top of the stairs, much put out. “You think me fat, mistress? I’d have you know that when he heard I was on the march, Nur-ad-Din would pack up his tents and steal away into the desert.”

“You went on crusade?”

“The Holy Places couldn’t have done without me.”

He left them in a small circular room, of which the only amenities were some stools, a table, and two unglazed windows with spreading views, promising that Master Gabirol would attend them in minutes and that he’d send up his squire with refreshments.

While Simon paced and Mansur stood, a statue as usual, Adelia went to the windows, one facing west, the other east, to study the panorama afforded by each.

To the west, among the low hills, she could see battlemented roofs from which flew a standard. Even miniaturized by distance, the manor that Sir Gervase held from the priory was larger than Adelia would have expected of a knight’s fee. If Sir Joscelin’s, held from the nuns, to the southeast and beyond either window’s view, was as big, both gentlemen appeared to have done well from their tenancies and crusading.

Two men came in. Yehuda Gabirol was young, his black earlocks cork-screwed against cheeks that were hollow and tinged with an Iberian pallor.

The uninvited guest was old and had found the climb hard. He clung to the doorpost, introducing himself to Simon in a wheeze. “Benjamin ben Rav Moshe. And if you’re Simon of Naples, I knew your father. Old Eli still alive, is he?”

Simon’s bow was uncharacteristically curt, as was his introduction of Adelia and Mansur, merely giving their names without explaining their presence.

The old man nodded to them, still wheezing. “Is it you occupying my house?”

Since Simon showed no sign of replying, Adelia said, “We are. I hope you don’t mind.”

“I should mind?” Old Benjamin said sadly. “In good shape is it?”

“Yes. Better for being occupied, I think.”

“You like the hall windows?”

“Very nice. Most unusual.”

Simon addressed the younger man. “Yehuda Gabirol, just before Passover a year ago, you married the daughter of Chaim ben Eliezer here in Cambridge.”

“The cause of all my troubles,” Yehuda said gloomily.

“The boy came all the way from Spain to do it,” Benjamin said. “I arranged it. A good marriage, though, I say it myself. If it turned out unfortunate, is that the fault of the shadchan?”

Simon continued to ignore him, his eyes on Yehuda. “A child of this town disappeared on that day. Perhaps Master Gabirol could cast light on what happened to him.”

Adelia had never seen this side of Simon; he was angry.

There was an outburst of Yiddish from both men. The young one’s thin voice rose over Benjamin’s deeper one: “Should I know? Am I the keeper of English children?”

Simon slapped him across the face.

A sparrow hawk landed on the west windowsill and took off again, disturbed by the vibration inside the room as the sound of Simon’s slap reverberated round the walls. Fingermarks rose on Yehuda’s cheek.

Mansur stepped forward in case of retaliation, but the young man had covered his face and was cowering. “What else could we do? What else?”

Adelia stood unnoticed by the window as the three Jews recovered themselves enough to drag three stools into the center of the room and sit down on them. A ceremony even for this, she thought.

Benjamin did most of the talking while young Yehuda cried and rocked.

A good wedding it had been, Old Benjamin said, an alliance between cash and culture, between a rich man’s daughter and this young Spanish scholar of excellent pedigree whom Chaim intended to keep as an eidem af kest, a resident son-in-law to whom he would give a dowry of ten marks…

“Get on,” Simon said.

A fine early spring day it was; the chuppah in the synagogue was decorated with cowslips. “I myself shattered the glass…”

“Get on.”

So back to Chaim’s house for the wedding banquet, which, such was Chaim’s wealth, had been expected to go on for a week. Fife, drums, fiddle, cymbals, tables weighed with dishes, wine cups filled and refilled, enthronement of the bride under white samite, speeches-all this on the riverside lawn because the house was scarcely big enough to entertain all the guests, some of whom had traveled more than a thousand miles to get there.

“Maybe, maybe a little bit, Chaim was showing off to the town,” Benjamin admitted.

Inevitably, he was, Adelia thought. To burghers who would not invite him to their houses yet were quick enough to borrow from him? Of course he was.

“Get on.” Simon was remorseless, but at that moment Mansur raised a hand and began tiptoeing to the door.

Him. Adelia tensed. The tax collector was listening.

Mansur opened the door with a pull that took half of it off its hinges. It was not Sir Rowley who knelt on the threshold, ear at keyhole level, it was his squire. A tray with a flagon and cups was on the floor beside him.

In one flowing movement, Mansur scooped up the tray and kicked the eavesdropper down the stairs. The man-he was very young-tumbled to the turn of the stairwell which caught him so that he was doubled with his legs higher than his head. “Ow. Ow.” But when Mansur shifted as if to follow him down and kick him again, the boy writhed to his feet and pattered away down the steps, holding his back.

The odd thing was, Adelia thought, that the three Jews sitting on the stools paid the incident little attention, as if it was of no more moment than another bird landing on the windowsill.

Is that plump Sir Rowley the killer? What exercises him about these murdered children?

There were people-she knew because she’d encountered them-who became excited by death, who tried to bribe their way into the school’s stone chamber when she was working on a corpse. Gordinus had been obliged to put a guard on his death field to shoo away men, even women, wanting to gaze on the festering carcasses of the pigs.

She hadn’t detected that particular salacity in Sir Rowley during the examination she’d carried out in Saint Werbertha’s cell; he’d seemed appalled.

But he’d sent his creature-Pipin, that was the squire’s name-to listen at the keyhole, which suggested that Sir Rowley wished to keep himself abreast of her and Simon’s investigation, either through interest-in which case, why doesn’t he ask us directly?-or through fear that it would lead to him.

What are you?

Not what he seemed was the only answer. Adelia returned her attention to the three men in their circle.

Simon had not yet allowed Mansur to offer round the contents of the tray; he was forcing the two Jews on, through the events of Chaim’s daughter’s wedding.

To the evening. A chilly dusk descending, the guests had retired back into the house to dance, but the lamps across the garden were left burning. “And maybe, a little bit, the men were getting drunk,” Benjamin said.

“Will you tell us?” Never had Simon shown anger like this.

“I’m telling you, I’m telling. So the bride and her mother-two women closer than those two ain’t been seen-they wander outside for air, talking…” Benjamin was slowing up, reluctant to get to whatever it was.

“There was a body.” Everybody turned to Yehuda; he’d been forgotten. “In the middle of the lawn, like someone throw it from the river, from a boat. The women saw it. A lamp shone on it.”

“A little boy?”

“Perhaps.” Yehuda, if he’d seen it at all, had glimpsed it through a haze of wine. “Chaim saw it. The women screamed.”

“Did you see it, Benjamin?” Adelia made her first interjection.

Benjamin glanced at her, dismissed her, and said to Simon, as if it was an answer, “I was the shadchan.” The arranger of this great wedding, feted with wine on all sides? He should be capable of seeing anything?

“What did Chaim do?”

Yehuda said, “He put out all the lamps.”

Adelia saw Simon nod, as if it was reasonable; the first thing you did when you discovered a corpse on your lawn, you put out the lamps so that neighbors or passersby should not see it.

It shocked her. But then, she thought, she was not a Jew. The libel that at Passover time Jews sacrificed Christian children was attached to them like an extra shadow sewn on their heels to follow them everywhere. “The legend is a tool,” her foster father had told her, “used against every feared and hated religion by those who fear and hate it. In the first century, under Rome, the ones accused of taking the blood and flesh of children for ritual purposes were the early Christians.”

Now, and for many ages, the child-eaters had been the Jews. So deeply entrenched in Christian mythology was the belief, and so often had Jews suffered for it, that the automatic response to finding the body of a Christian child on a Jewish lawn was to hide it.

“What could we do?” Benjamin shouted. “You tell me what we should have done. Every important Jew in England was with us that night. Rabbi David had come from Paris, Rabbi Meir from Germany, great biblical commentators, Sholem of Chester had brought his family. Did we want lords like these torn to pieces? We needed time for them to get away.”

So while his important guests took horse and scattered into the night, Chaim wrapped the body in a tablecloth and carried it to his cellar.

How and why the little corpse had appeared on the lawn, who had done whatever it was that had been done to it, these things hardly entered the discussion among the remaining Cambridge Jews. The concern was how to get rid of it.

They didn’t lack humanity, Adelia assured herself, but each Jew had now felt so close to being murdered himself, and his family with him, that any other preoccupation was beyond him.

And they’d botched it.

“Dawn was breaking,” Benjamin said. “We’d come to no conclusion-how could we think? The wine, the fear. Chaim it was who decided for us, his neighbors, God rest his soul. ‘Go home,’ he said to us. ‘Go home and be about your business as if nothing has happened. I will deal with it, me and my son-in-law.’” Benjamin raised his cap and clawed his fingers over his scalp as if it still had hair on it. “Yahweh forgive us, that’s what we did.”

“And how did Chaim and his son-in-law deal with it?” Simon was leaning forward toward Yehuda, whose face was again hidden by his hands. “It was daytime now-you couldn’t smuggle it out of the house without someone seeing you.”

There was silence.

“Maybe,” Simon went on, “maybe at this point perhaps Chaim remembers the conduit in his cellar.”

Yehuda looked up.

“What is it?” Simon asked, almost without interest. “A shit hole? An escape route?”

“A drain,” Yehuda said sullenly. “There’s a stream through the cellar.”

Simon nodded. “So there’s a drain in the cellar? A large drain? Leading into the river?” For a second his gaze shifted to Adelia, who nodded back at him. “The mouth comes out under the pier where Chaim’s barges tie up?”

“How did you know?”

“So,” Simon said, still mild, “you pushed the body down it.”

Yehuda rocked, crying again. “We said prayers over it. We stood in the dark of the cellar and recited the prayers for the dead.”

“You recited the prayers for the dead? Good, that’s good. That will please the Lord. But you didn’t go to see if the body floated free when it got to the river.”

Yehuda stopped crying in surprise. “It didn’t?”

Simon was on his feet, raising his arms in supplication to the Lord, who allowed fools like these.

“The river was searched,” Adelia interposed in Salernitan patois for Simon’s and Mansur’s ears only. “The whole town was out. Even if the body had been caught by a stanchion under the pier, a search such as that would have found it.”

Simon shook his head at her. “They had been talking,” he said, wearily, in the same tongue. “We are Jews, Doctor. We talk. We consider the outcome, the ramifications; we wonder if it is acceptable to the Lord and if we should do it anyway. I tell you, by the time they finished gabbing and made their decision, the searchers had been and gone.” He sighed. “They are donkeys and worse than donkeys, but they didn’t kill the boy.”

“I know.” Though there was no court of law that would believe it. Rightly terrified for their own lives, Yehuda and his father-in-law had done a desperate thing and done it badly, gaining themselves only a few days’ respite, during which the body, snagged below the waterline under the pier, swelled to the point where it unsnagged itself and floated to the surface.

She turned to Yehuda, unable to wait any longer. “Before it went into the drain, did you examine the body? What condition was it in? Was it mutilated? Was it clothed?”

Yehuda and Benjamin regarded her with disgust. “You bring a female ghoul into our company?” Benjamin demanded of Simon.

“Ghoul? Ghoul?” Simon was in danger of hitting somebody again, and Mansur put out a hand to stop him. “You shove a poor little boy down a drain and you talk to me of ghouls?”

Adelia left the room, leaving Simon in full tirade. There was one person still in the castle who could tell her what she wanted to know.

As she crossed the hall on her way to the bailey, the tax collector noted her departure. He left the sheriff’s side for a moment to instruct his squire.

“That Saracen’s not with her, is he?” Pipin was nervous; he was still favoring his back.

“Just see whom she talks to.”

Adelia walked across the sunlit bailey toward the corner where the Jewish women were gathered. She was able to pick out the one she sought by her youth and the fact that, of all the women, she had been given a chair to sit on. And by her distended belly. At least eight months gone, Adelia judged.

She bowed to Chaim’s daughter. “Mistress Dina?”

Dark eyes, huge and defensive, turned to look at her. “Yes?”

The girl was too thin for the good of her condition; the rounded stomach might have been an invasive protuberance that had attached itself to a slender plant. Hollowed sockets and cheeks were darkened in a skin like vellum.

The doctor in Adelia thought, You need some of Gyltha’s cooking, lady; I shall see to it.

She introduced herself as Adelia, daughter of Gershom of Salerno. Her foster father might be a lapsed Jew, but this was not the time to bring up either his or her own apostasy. “May we talk together?” She looked around at the other women, who were gathering close. “Alone?”

Dina sat motionless for a moment. She was veiled to keep off the sun in near-transparent gossamer; her ornate headdress was not everyday wear. Silk encrusted with pearls peeped out from under the old shawl wrapped around her shoulders. Adelia thought with pity, She’s in the clothes she was married in.

At last, a flap of the hand sent the other women scattering; fugitive as she was, orphaned as she was, Dina still held rank among her sex as daughter of the man who had been the richest Jew in Cambridgeshire. And she was bored; having been cooped up with them for a year, she would have heard everything her companions had to say-and heard it several times.

“Yes?” The girl lifted her veil. She was sixteen, perhaps, no more, and lovely, but her face was setting into bitterness. When she heard what Adelia wanted, she turned it away. “I will not talk about it.”

“The real murderer must be caught.”

“They are all murderers.” She cocked her head to one side in the attitude of listening, raising a finger so that Adelia should listen with her.

Faintly, from beyond the curtain wall, came shouts indicating that Roger of Acton was responding to the arrival of the bishop at the castle gates. “Kill the Jews” was distinguishable among the gabble.

Dina said, “Do you know what they did to my father? What they did to my mother?” The young face crumpled, becoming even younger. “I miss my mother. I miss her.”

Adelia knelt beside her, taking the girl’s hand and putting it to her cheek. “She would want you to be brave.”

“I can’t be.” Dina put back her head and let the tears gush.

Adelia glanced to where the other women were teetering anxiously and shook her head to stop them coming forward. “Yes, you can,” she said. She laid Dina’s hand and her own on the swell of the girl’s stomach. “Your mother would want you to be brave for her grandchild.”

But Dina’s grief, having burst out, was mixed with terror. “They’ll kill the baby, too.” She opened her eyes wide. “Can’t you hear them? They’re going to break in. They’re going to break in.”

How hideous it was for them. Adelia had imagined the isolation, even the boredom, but not the day-to-day waiting, like an animal with its leg in a trap, for the wolves to come. There was no forgetting that there was a pack outside; Roger of Acton’s howl was there to remind them.

She made ineffectual pats of comfort. “The king won’t allow them in.” And “Your husband’s here to protect you.”

“Him.” It was said with a contempt that dried tears.

Was it the king so derided? Or the husband? The girl would not have set eyes on the man she’d been told to marry until the day she married him; Adelia had never thought it a good custom. Jewish law did not permit a young woman to be married against her will, but too often that meant only that she could not be forced to wed a man she hated. Adelia herself had escaped marriage through the liberality of a foster father who had complied with her wish to remain celibate. “There are good wives aplenty, thank God,” he’d said, “but few good doctors. And a good woman doctor is above rubies.”

In Dina’s case, a fearful wedding day and the incarceration that followed it had not augured well for marital bliss.

“Listen to me,” Adelia said briskly. “If your baby is not to spend the rest of its life in this castle, if a killer is not to stay free and murder other children, tell me what I want to know.” Out of desperation, she added, “Forgive me but, by extension, he also killed your parents.”

Wet-lashed, beautiful eyes studied her as if she were an innocent. “But that was why they did it. Don’t you know that?”

“Know what?”

“Why they killed the boy. We know that. They killed him only so that we should be blamed. Why else would they put his corpse in our grounds?”

“No,” Adelia said. “No.”

“Of course they did.” Dina’s mouth was ugly with a sneer. “It was planned. Then they set the mob on, kill the Jews, kill Chaim the usurer. That’s what they shouted, and that’s what they did.”

“Kill the Jews.” The echo came parrotlike from the gate.

“Other children have died since,” Adelia said. She was taken aback by a new thought.

“Them too. They were killed so that the mob will have an excuse when they come to hang the rest of us.” Dina was inexorable. Then she wasn’t. “Did you know my mother stepped in front of me? Did you know that? So they tore her apart and not me?”

Suddenly, she covered her face and rocked back and forth as her husband had done minutes before, only Dina was praying for her dead: “Oseh sholom bimromov, hu ya’aseh sholom olaynu, v’al kol yisroel. Omein.”

“Omein.” He who makes peace in his high holy places, may he bring peace upon us and upon all Israel. If you are there, God, Adelia prayed, let it be thus.

Of course these people would see their plight as deliberately engineered, a plot by goyim to murder children if, in so doing, they could murder Jews. Dina did not ask why; history was her answer.

Gently, firmly, Adelia pulled Dina’s hands down so that she could look into the girl’s face. “Listen to me, mistress. One man killed those children, one. I have seen their bodies, and he is inflicting injuries on them so terrible that I will not tell you what they are. He is doing it because he has lusts we do not recognize, because he is not human as we understand it. Now Simon of Naples has come to England to free the Jews of this guilt, but I do not ask you to help him because you are a Jew. I ask you because it is against all the law of God and men that children should suffer as those children suffered.”

The castle’s noise was climbing up its daylong crescendo, diminishing Roger of Acton’s ravings to a bird’s chirrup.

A bull waiting to be baited was adding its bellow to the rasp of a grindstone where squires were sharpening their master’s blades. Soldiers were drilling. Children, newly let out to play in the sheriff’s garden, laughed and shouted.

Away in the tiltyard, a tax collector who had decided to shed some of his weight had joined the knights practicing with wooden swords.

“What do you want to know?” Dina asked.

Adelia patted her cheek. “You are worthy of your brave mother.” She took in her breath. “Dina, you saw that body on the lawn before the lights were put out, before it was covered by the tablecloth, before it was taken away. What condition was it in?”

“The poor child.” This time Dina wept not for herself, nor for her baby, nor for her mother. “The poor little boy. Somebody had cut off his eyelids.”