Mistress of the Art of Death (11 page)

The woman listened. Though neither tall nor fat, in her eelskin boots, her muscled arms folded over her apron, gray hair escaping from the sweat-stained roll round her head, she had the massive, feminine barbarity of a sheela-na-gig that turned the prior's comfortable, book-lined room into a cave.

"Thus I have need of you, Gyltha," Prior Geoffrey said, finishing. "
They
have need of you."

There was a pause.

"Summer's a-coming in," Gyltha said in her deep voice. "Summer I'm busy with eels."

In late spring, Gyltha and her grandson emerged from the fens wheeling tanks full of squirming, silver eels and settled into their reed-thatched summer residence by the Cam. There, out of a wonderful steam, emerged eels pickled, eels salted, eels smoked, and eels jellied, all of them, thanks to recipes known only to Gyltha, superior to any other and bought up immediately by waiting and appreciative customers.

"I know you are," Prior Geoffrey said patiently. He sat back in his great chair and reverted to broad East Anglian. "But that's dang hard work, girl, and you're getting on."

"So're you, bor."

They knew each other well. Better than most. When a young Norman priest had arrived in Cambridge to take over its parish of Saint Mary's twenty-five years before, his house had been kept for him by a well-set-up young fenland woman. That they might have been more to each other than employer and employee had not raised an eyebrow, for England's attitude toward clerical celibacy was tolerant--or slack, depending on which way you looked at it--and Rome had not then begun to shake its fist at "priests' wives," as it did now.

Though young Father Geoffrey's waist had swelled on Gyltha's cooking, and young Gyltha's waist had swelled also, though whether from her cooking or something else, nobody knew the truth of it except those two. When Father Geoffrey was called by God to the canonry of Saint Augustine, Gyltha had disappeared into the fenland from which she had come, refusing the allowance offered to her.

"What iffen I throw in a skivvy or two," the prior said now, winningly. "Bit of cooking, bit of organizing, that's all."

"Foreigners," said Gyltha. "I don't hold with foreigners."

Looking at her, the prior was reminded of Guthlac's description of the fen folk in whom that worthy saint had tried to instill Christianity:
"Great heads, long necks, pale faces, and teeth like horses. Save us, from them, O Lord."
But they'd had the means and the independence to resist William the Conqueror longer and more strongly than the rest of the English.

Nor was intelligence lacking among them. Gyltha had it; she was the beau ideal as housekeeper for the menage Prior Geoffrey had in mind--outre enough, yet sufficiently well known and trusted by the townsfolk of Cambridge to provide a bridge between it and them. If she would agree...

"Weren't I a foreigner?" he said. "You took me on."

Gyltha smiled, and for a moment the surprising charm reminded Prior Geoffrey of their years in the priest's little house next to Saint Mary's church.

He pressed home his advantage. "Be good for young Ulf."

"That's doing well enough at school."

"When that do bother to come." Young Ulf's acceptance at the priory school had been less to do with his cleverness, which was considerable if idiosyncratic, than to Prior Geoffrey's unconfirmed suspicion that the boy, being Gyltha's grandson, was also his own. "Sore need of a bit of gentrifying, though, girl."

Gyltha leaned forward and put a scarred finger on the prior's writing desk. "What they doing here, bor? You going to tell me?"

"Took ill, didn't I? Saved my old life, she did."

"Her? I heard it was the blackie."

"Her. And not witchery, neither. Proper doctor she is, only best nobody don't know it."

There was no point in concealing it from Gyltha, who, if she took on the Salernitans, would find out. In any case, this woman was as close as the seaweeded oysters that she made him a present of every year, of which a fine selection was at this moment in the priory's ice-house.

"I don't be sure who sent they three," he went on, "but they do mean to find out who's killing the children."

"Harold." Gyltha's face showed no emotion, but her voice was soft; she did business with Harold's father.

"Harold."

She nodded. "Weren't Jews, then?"

"No."

"Didn't reckon it was."

From across the cloisters connecting the prior's house with the church came the bell calling the brotherhood to vespers.

Gyltha sighed. "Skivvies as promised, and I only do the bloody cooking."

"Benigne. Deo gratias."
The prior got up and accompanied Gyltha to the door. "Old Tubs still breeding they smelly dogs?"

"Smellier than ever."

"Bring un with you. Attach it to her, like. If her's asking questions, it'll maybe cause trouble. Her needs keeping an eye on. Oh, and they don't none of 'em eat pork. Or shellfish." He slapped Gyltha's rump to send her on her way, folded his arms beneath his apron, and went on his own toward the chapel for vespers.

A
DELIA SAT ON A BENCH
in the priory's paradise breathing in the scent of rosemary from the low hedging that bordered the flower bed at her feet and listened to the psalms of vespers filter out of cloister through the evening air across the walled vegetable garden and thence to the paradise with its darkening trees. She tried to empty her mind and let the masculine voices pour salve on the hurt caused by masculine abomination.
"Let my prayer be counted as incense before you,"
they chanted,
"and the lifting of my hands as an evening sacrifice."

There would be supper at the priory guesthouse, where Prior Geoffrey had lodged her and Simon and Mansur for the night, but it would entail sitting round the table with other travelers, and she was not fit for petty conversation. The straps of her goatskin bag were buckled tight so that, for this little space, the information the dead children had given her was trapped within it, chalk words on a slate. Undo the straps, as she would tomorrow, and their voices would burst out, beseeching, filling her ears. But tonight even they must be muted; she could bear nothing but the stillness of the evening.

Not until it was almost too dark to see did she stand, pick up her bag, and walk along the path leading to the long shafts of candlelight that indicated the windows of the guesthouse.

It was a mistake to go to bed without food; she lay in a narrow cot in a narrow cell off the corridor devoted to women guests, resenting the fact that she was there at all, resenting the King of Sicily, this country, almost the dead children themselves for imposing the burden of their agony on her.

"I cannot possibly go," she'd told Gordinus when he'd first broached the subject. "I have my students, my work."

It was not a matter of choice, however. The command for an expert in death had come down from a king against whom, since he also ruled southern Italy, there was no appeal.

"Why do you choose me?"

"You meet the king's specifications," Gordinus had said. "I know of no one else who does. Master Simon will be fortunate to have you."

Simon had considered himself not so much fortunate as burdened; she'd seen that at once. Despite her credentials, the presence of a woman doctor, an attendant Arab, and a female companion--Margaret,
blessed
Margaret, had been alive then--had piled a Pelion of complication on the Ossa of an already difficult assignment.

But one of Adelia's skills, honed to perfection in the rough-and-tumble of the schools, was to make her femininity near invisible, to demand no concession, to blend in almost unnoticed among the largely male fraternity. Only when her professionalism had been called into question did her fellow students find that there was a very visible Adelia with a rough edge to her tongue--in listening to them, she had learned how to swear--and an even rougher edge to her temper.

There had been no need to display either to Simon; he had been courteous and, as the journey went on, relieved. He found her modest--a description, Adelia had long decided, that was applied to women who gave men no trouble. Apparently, Simon's wife was the acme of Jewish modesty, and he judged all other women by her. Mansur, Adelia's other accessory, proved to be his invaluable self and, until reaching the coast of France, where Margaret had died, they had traveled in sweet accord.

By now, it took the regularity of her periods for her to remember that she was not a neutered being. On reaching England, the trio's transfer to a cart and adoption of their roles as a traveling medicine troop had caused none of them little more than discomfort and amusement.

There remained the mystery of why the King of Sicily should involve Simon of Naples, one of his most capable investigators, let alone herself, in a predicament that the Jews of a wet, cold little island on the edge of the world had gotten themselves into. Simon had not known, nor had she. Their instructions were to see the Jews' name washed of the taint of murder, an aim to be accomplished only by discovering the identity of the true killer.

What she
had
known was that she would not like England--and she didn't. In Salerno, she was a respected member of a highly regarded medical school where nobody, except newcomers, expressed surprise on meeting a female practitioner. Here, they'd duck her in a pond. The bodies she'd just examined had darkened Cambridge for her; she'd seen the results of murder before but rarely any so terrible as these. Somewhere in this county a butcher of children walked and breathed.

Identifying him would be made harder by her unofficial position and the pretense that she wasn't doing it at all. In Salerno she worked, however unacknowledged, with the authorities; here she had only the prior on her side, and even he dare not declare the fact.

Still resentful, she went to sleep and dreamed dark dreams.

S
HE SLEPT LATE
, a concession not usually granted to other guests. "Prior said as you could forgo matins, you being so tired," Brother Swithin, the chubby little guest-master told her, "but I was to see you ate hearty when you woke."

She breakfasted in the kitchen on ham, a rare luxury for one who traveled with a Jew and a Moslem, cheese from the priory's sheep, bread fresh from the priory's bakery, new-churned butter and preserve of Brother Swithin's own pickling, a slice of eel pie, and milk warm from the cow.

"You was thrawn, maid," Brother Swithin said, ladling her more milk from the churn. "Better now?"

She smiled at him through a white mustache. "Much." She
had
been thrawn, whatever that was, but vigor had returned, resentment and self-pity gone. What did it matter that she must work in a foreign land? Children were universal; they inhabited a state superseding nationality with a right to protection by an eternal law. The savagery inflicted on Mary, Harold, and Ulric offended no less because they were not Salerno-born. They were everybody's children; they were hers.

Adelia felt a determination such as she had never known. The world had to be made cleaner by the removal of the killer.
"Whoso shall offend one of these little ones, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck...."

Now, round the neck of this offender, though he was as yet in ignorance of it, had been hung Adelia, Medica Trotula of Salerno, doctor to the dead, who would strive with all her knowledge and skill to bring him down.

She returned to her cell to transcribe her observations from slate to paper so that, on her return to Salerno, she might deliver a record of her findings--though what the King of Sicily wanted with it, she did not know.

It was terrible work, and slow; more than once she had to throw down her quill in order to cover her ears. The walls of the cell echoed with the children's screams.
Be quiet, oh, be quiet, so that I may track him down.
But they had not wanted to die and could not be hushed.

Simon and Mansur had already departed to take up residence in accommodation the prior had found for them in the town so that the mission might have privacy. It was gone noon before Adelia set off after them.

Believing it to be her business to investigate the murderer's territory and see something of the town, she was surprised, but not displeased, to find that Brother Swithin, busy with a new influx of travelers, was prepared to let her go without an escort and that in Cambridge's teeming streets, women of all castes bustled about their business unaccompanied and with faces unveiled.

This was a different world. Only the students from the School of Pythagoras, red-capped and noisy, were familiar to her; students were the same the world over.

In Salerno, thoroughfares were shadowed by upper walkways and overhangs built to keep out a barbarous sun. This town opened itself wide like a flat flower to catch what light the English sky gave it.

True, there were sinister side alleys with tweedy, reed-thatched houses crammed together like fungi, but Adelia kept to main roads, asking her way without fear for her reputation or purse as she would not have done at home.

Here it was water, not sun, that the town bowed to; it coursed in runnels down both sides of a street so that every dwelling, every shop, had a footbridge to it. Cisterns, troughs, ponds confused the sight into seeing double; a roadside pig was exactly reflected by the puddle it stood in. Swans apparently floated on themselves. Ducks on a pond swam over the arched, chevroned doorway of the church looming above it. Errant streams contained images of roofs and windows, and willow fronds appeared to grow upward from the rivulets that mirrored them.

Adelia was aware that Cambridge piped to her, but she would not dance. To her, the double reflection of everything was symptomatic of a deeper duplicity, two-faced, a Janus town, where a creature that killed children walked on two legs like any other man. Until it was discovered, all of Cambridge wore a mask that she could not look on without wondering if a wolf's muzzle lay beneath.

Inevitably, she lost her way.