Mistress of the Art of Death (10 page)

As his horse began to labor up the steep road to the castle, the prior's mind's eye pictured the scene that had been played out on this very hill a year ago. Sheriff's men trying to hold off a maddened crowd from frightened Jews, himself and the sheriff bellowing uselessly for order.

Panic and loathing, ignorance and violence...the devil had been in Cambridge that day.

And so had the tax collector.
A face glimpsed in the crowd and forgotten until now. Contorted like all the others as its owner struggled...struggled with whom? Against the sheriff's men? Or for them? In that hideous conglomeration of noise and limbs, it had been impossible to tell.

The prior clicked his horse to go on.

The man's presence on that day in this place was not necessarily sinister; sheriffs and taxmen went together. The sheriff collected the king's revenue; the king's collector ensured that the sheriff didn't keep too much of it.

The prior reined in.
But I saw him at Saint Radegund's fair much later. The man was applauding a stilt-walker. And that was when little Mary went missing. God save us.

The prior dug his heels into the horse's side. Quickly now. More urgent than ever to talk to the sheriff.

"M
MM.
The pelvis is chipped from below, possibly accidental damage postmortem but, since the slashes seem to have been inflicted with considerable force and the other bones show no damage, more probably caused by a instrument piercing upward in an attack on the vagina...."

Rowley hated her, hated her equable, measured voice. She did violence to the feminine even by enunciating the words. It was not for her to open her woman's lips and give them shape, loosing foulness into the air. She had become spokesman for the deed and thereby complicit in its doing. A perpetrator, a hag. Her eyes should not look on what she saw without expelling blood.

Adelia was forcing herself to see a pig. Pigs were what she'd learned on. Pigs--the nearest approximation in the animal world to human flesh and bone. Up in the hills, behind a high wall, Gordinus had kept dead pigs for his students, some buried, some exposed to the air, some in a wooden hut, others in a stone byre.

Most of the students introduced to his death farm had been revolted by the flies and stench and had fallen away; only Adelia saw the wonder of the process that reduced a cadaver to nothing. "For even a skeleton is impermanent and, left to itself, will eventually crumble to dust," Gordinus had said. "What marvelous design it is, my dear, that we are not overwhelmed by a thousand years' worth of accumulated corpses."

It
was
marvelous, a mechanism that went into action as breath departed the body, releasing it to its own device. Decomposition fascinated her because--and she still didn't understand how--it would occur even without the help of the flesh flies and blowflies, which, if the corpse were accessible to them, came in next.

So, having achieved qualification as a doctor, she'd learned her new trade on pigs. On pigs in spring, pigs in summer, pigs in autumn and winter, each season with its own rate of decay. How they died. When. Pigs set up, pigs with heads down, pigs lying, pigs slaughtered, pigs dead from disease, pigs buried, pigs unburied, pigs kept in water, old pigs, sows that had littered, boars, piglets.

The
piglet. The moment of divide. Recently dead, only a few days old. She'd carried it to Gordinus's house. "Something new," she'd said. "This matter in its anus, I can't place it."

"Something old," he'd told her, "old as sin. It is human semen."

He'd guided her to his balcony overlooking the turquoise sea and sat her down and fortified her with a glass of his best red wine and asked her if she wanted to proceed or return to ordinary doctoring. "Will you see the truth or avoid it?"

He'd read her Virgil, one of the Georgics, she couldn't remember which, that took her into roadless, sun-soaked Tuscan hills, where lambs, full of winey milk, leaped for the joy of leaping, tended by shepherds swaying to the pipes of Pan.

"Any one of which may take a sheep, shove its back legs into his boots and his organ into its back passage," Gordinus had said.

"No," she'd said.

"Or into a child."

"No."

"Or a baby."

"No."

"Oh, yes," he'd said, "I have seen it. Does that spoil the Georgics for you?"

"It spoils everything." Then she'd said, "I cannot continue."

"Man hovers between Paradise and the Pit," Gordinus told her cheerfully. "Sometimes rising to one, sometimes swooping to the other. To ignore his capacity for evil is as obtuse as blinding oneself to the heights to which he can soar. It may be that it is all one to the sweep of the planets. You have seen Man's depths for yourself. I have just read you some lines of his upward flight. Go home, then, Doctor, and put on the blindfold, I do not blame you. But at the same time, plug your ears to the cries of the dead. The truth is not for you."

She
had
gone home, to the schools and hospitals to receive the plaudits of those she taught and to whom she administered, but her eyes were unbound now, and her ears unplugged, and she had become pestered by the cries of the dead, so she'd returned to the study of pigs and, when she was ready, to human corpses.

However, in cases like the one on the table before her now, she resumed a metaphorical blindfold so that she could still function, donning self-imposed blinkers to halt a descent into uselessness through despair, a necessary obscurity that permitted sight but allowed her to see not the torn, once immaculate body of a child but instead the familiar corpse of a pig.

The stabbing around the pelvis had left distinctive marks; she had seen knife wounds before, but none like these. The blade of the instrument that had caused them appeared to be much faceted. She would have liked to remove the pelvis for leisurely examination in better light, but she had promised Prior Geoffrey to do no dissection. She clicked her fingers for the man to pass her the slate and chalk.

He studied her while she drew. Slants of sunlight from between the bars of Saint Werbertha's tiny window fell on her as on a monstrous blowfly hovering over the thing on the table. The gauze smoothed the features of her face into something lepidopteral, pressing strands of hair against her head like flattened antennae. And
hmmm,
the thing buzzed with the insistence of the feeding, winging, clustering cloud that hovered with her.

She finished the diagram and held out the slate and chalk so that the man could receive them back. "Take them," she snapped. She was missing Mansur. When Sir Rowley didn't move, she turned and saw his look. She'd seen it on others. Wearily, she said, almost to herself, "Why do they always want to shoot the messenger?"

He stared back at her. Was that what his anger was?

She came outside, brushing away flies. "This child is telling me what happened to her. With luck, she may even tell me where. From that, with even more luck, we may be able to deduce who. If you do not wish to learn these things, then get to hell. But first, fetch me someone who does."

She lifted the helmet from her head, clawing her fingers through her hair, a glimpse of dark blond, turning her face to the sun.

It was the eyes, he thought. With her eyes closed, she reverted to her years, which, he saw, numbered a few less than his own, and to something approximating the feminine. Not for him; he preferred them sweeter. And plumper. The eyes, when open, aged her. Cold and dark like pebbles--and with as much emotion. Not surprising, when you considered what they looked on.

But if in truth she could work the oracle...

The eyes turned on him. "Well?"

He snatched the slate and chalk from her hand. "Your servant, mistress."

"There's more gauze in there," she said. "Cover your face, then come in and make yourself useful."

And manners, he thought, he liked them with manners. But as she retied her mask over her head, squared her skinny shoulders, and marched back into the charnel house, he recognized the gallantry of a tired soldier reentering battle.

The second bundle contained Harold, redheaded son of the eel seller, pupil at the priory school.

"The flesh is better preserved than Mary's, to the point of mummification. The eyelids have been cut away. Also the genitals."

Rowley put down the whisk to cross himself.

The slate became covered with unutterable words, except that she uttered them: binding cord. A sharp instrument. Anal insertion.

And, again, chalk.

That interested her. He could tell from the humming. "Chalkland."

"The Icknield Way is near here," he told her helpfully. "The Gog Magog hills, where we stopped for the prior, are of chalk."

"Both children have chalk in their hair. In Harold's case, some has been embedded in his heels."

"What does that say?"

"He was dragged through chalk."

The third bundle contained the remains of Ulric, eight years old, gone missing on Saint Edward's of this year and which, because his disappearance had taken place more recently than the others', brought forth frequent
hmm
s from the examiner--an alert to Rowley, who'd begun to recognize the signs that she had more and better material to investigate.

"No eyelids, no genitals. This one wasn't buried at all. What was the weather this March in this area?"

"I believe it to have been dry all over East Anglia, ma'am. There was general complaint that newly planted crops were withering. Cold but dry."

Cold but dry. Her memory, renowned in Salerno, searched the death farm and fell on early-spring pig number 78. About the same weight. That, too, had been dead just over a month in the cold and dry, and was of more advanced decomposition. She would have expected this one to be in an approximately similar state. "Were you kept alive after you went missing?" she asked the body, forgetting that a stranger, and not Mansur, was listening.

"Jesus God, why do you say that?"

She quoted Ecclesiastes as she did to her students: "
To everything there is a season...a time to be born and a time to die; a time to plant, a time to pluck up that which is planted.
Also a time to putrefy."

"So the devil kept him alive? How long?"

"I don't
know.
"

There were a thousand variations that could cause the difference between this corpse and pig 78. She was irritable because she was tired and distressed. Mansur wouldn't have asked, knowing better than to treat her observations as conversation. "I won't be drawn on it."

Ulric also had chalk embedded in his heels.

The sun was beginning to go down by the time each body had been wrapped up again, ready for encoffining. The woman went outside to take off her apron and helmet while Sir Rowley took down the lamps and put them out, leaving the cell and its contents in blessed darkness.

At the door, he knelt as he once had in front of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. That tiny chamber had been barely larger than the one now before him. The table on which the Cambridge children lay was about the same size as Christ's tomb. It had been dark there, too. Beyond and about had been the conglomeration of altars and chapels that made up the great basilica that the first crusaders had built over the holy places, echoing with the whispers of pilgrims and the chant of Greek Orthodox monks singing their unending hymns at the site of Golgotha.

Here there was only the buzz of flies.

He'd prayed for the souls of the departed then, and for help and forgiveness for himself.

He prayed for them now.

When he came out, the woman was washing herself, laving her face and hands from the bowl. After she had finished, he did the same--she'd lathered the water with soapwort. Crushing the stems, he washed his hands. He was tired; oh, Jesus, he was tired.

"Where are you staying, Doctor?" he asked her.

She looked at him as if she hadn't seen him before. "What did you say your name was?"

He tried not to be irritated; from the look of her, she was even more weary than he was. "Sir Roland Picot, ma'am. Rowley to my friends."

Of which, he saw, she was not likely to be one. She nodded. "Thank you for your assistance." She packed her bag, picked it up, and set off.

He hurried after her. "May I ask what conclusions you draw from your investigation?"

She didn't answer.

Damn the woman.
He supposed that, since he'd written down her notes, she was leaving him to draw his own conclusions, but Rowley, who was not a humble man, was aware that he had encountered someone with knowledge he could not hope to attain. He tried again: "To whom will you report your findings, Doctor?"

No answer.

They were walking through the long shadows of the oaks that fell over the wall of the priory deer park. From the priory chapel came the clap of a bell sounding vespers, and ahead, where the bakery and brew house stood outlined against the dying sun, figures in violet rochets were spilling out of the buildings into the walkways like petals being blown in one direction.

"Shall we attend vespers?" If ever he'd needed the balm of the evening litany, Sir Rowley felt he needed it now.

She shook her head.

Angrily, he said, "Will you not pray for those children?"

She turned and he saw a face ghastly with fatigue and an anger that outmatched his. "I am not here to pray for them," she said. "I have come to speak for them."

Five

R
eturning from the castle that afternoon to the not inconsiderable house that had accommodated the succession of Saint Augustine's priors, Prior Geoffrey had yet more arrangements to make.

"She's waiting for you in your library," Brother Gilbert said curtly. He didn't approve of a tete-a-tete between his superior and a woman.

Prior Geoffrey went in and sat himself in the great chair behind his table desk. He didn't ask the woman to sit down because he knew she wouldn't; he didn't greet her, either--there was no need. He merely explained his responsibility for the Salernitans, his problem, and his proposed solution.