Mistress of the Art of Death (24 page)

She was joined on her right by the huntsman, Hugh, his face as impassive as ever, though he bowed to her courteously enough. So did an elderly little man she did not know who took his place on her left.

She was unhappy to see that Brother Gilbert had been placed directly across from her. So was he.

Trenchers were brought round, and there was covert slapping by parents of their young people's hands as they reached to break off a piece, for there was much to happen before the bread could have food put upon it. Sir Joscelin must declare his fealty for his liege, Prioress Joan, which he did on one knee and with a presentation of his rent, six milk-white doves in a gilt cage.

Prior Geoffrey must say grace. Wine cups must be filled for the dedicatory toast to Thomas of Canterbury and his new recruit to martyred glory, Little Peter of Trumpington, the raisons d'etre of the feast.
A curious custom,
Adelia thought, as she stood to drink to the health of the dead.

A discordant shriek cut across the respectful murmurs. "The infidel insults our holy saints." Roger of Acton was pointing in triumphant outrage at Mansur. "He drinks to them in water."

Adelia closed her eyes.
God, don't let him stab the swine.

But Mansur stayed calm, sipping his water. It was Sir Joscelin who administered a rebuke clear to the entire hall: "By his faith, this gentleman forswears liquor, Master Roger. If you cannot hold yours, may I suggest you follow his example."

Nicely done.
Acton collapsed onto his bench. Adelia's opinion of her host rose.

Do not be charmed, though,
she told herself.
Memento mori.
Literally, remember death. He may be the killer; he is a crusader. So is the tax collector.

And so was another man on the top table; Sir Gervase had watched every step of her progress into the hall.

Is it you
?

Adelia was assured now that the man who had murdered the children had been on crusade. It was not merely identification of the sweetmeat as an Arab jujube, but that the hiatus between the attack on the sheep and the one on the children coincided exactly with a period when Cambridge had responded to the call of Outremer and sent some of its men to answer it.

The trouble was that there had been the absence of so many....

"Who left town in the Great Storm year?" Gyltha had said when applied to. "Well, there was Ma Mill's daughter as got herself in the family way by the peddler...."

"Men, Gyltha, men."

"Oh, there was a mort of young men went. See, the Abbot of Ely called for the country to take the Cross." By "country" Gyltha meant "county." "Must of been hundreds went off with Lord Fitzgilbert to the Holy Places."

It had been a bad year, Gyltha said. The Great Storm had flattened crops, flood swept away people and buildings, the fens were inundated, even the gentle Cam rose in fury. God had shown His anger at Cambridgeshire's sins. Only a crusade against His enemies could placate Him.

Lord Fitzgilbert, looking for lands in Syria to replace his drowned estates, had planted Christ's banner in Cambridge's marketplace. Young men with livelihoods destroyed by the storm came to it, and so did the ambitious, the adventurous, rejected suitors, and husbands with nagging wives. Courts gave criminals the option of going to prison or taking the Cross. Sins whispered to priests in confession were absolved--as long as the perpetrator joined the crusade.

A small army marched away.

Lord Fitzgilbert had returned pickled in a coffin and now lay in his own chapel under a marble effigy of himself, its mailed legs crossed in the sign of a crusader. Some arrived home and died of the diseases they carried with them, to lie in less exalted graves with a plain sword carved into the stone above. Some were merely a name on a mortuary list carried by survivors. Some had found a richer, drier life in Syria and opted to stay there.

Others came back to take up their former occupation so that, according to Gyltha, Adelia and Simon must now take a keen look at two shopkeepers, several villeins, a blacksmith, and the very apothecary who supplied Dr. Mansur's medicines, not to mention Brother Gilbert and the silent canon who had accompanied Prior Geoffrey on the road.

"Brother Gilbert went on crusade?"

"That he did. Nor it ain't no good suspecting only them as came back rich like sirs Joscelin and Gervase," Gyltha had said relentlessly. "There's lots borrow from Jews, small amounts maybe but big enough to them as can't pay the interest. Nor it ain't certain a fellow yelling for the Jew to swing was the same devil killed the little uns. There's plenty like to see a Jew's neck stretch
and
they call theyselves Christians."

Daunted by the size of the problem, Adelia had grimaced at the housekeeper for her logic even as she'd acknowledged it as inescapable.

So now, looking around, she must attach no sinister significance to Sir Joscelin's obvious wealth. It could have been gained in Syria, rather than from Chaim the Jew. It had certainly transformed a Saxon holding into a flint-built manor of considerable beauty. The enormous hall in which they ate possessed a newly carved roof as fine as any she'd seen in England. From the gallery above the dais issued music played with professional skill on recorder, vielle, and flute. The personal eating irons that a guest usually took to a meal had been made redundant by a knife and spoon laid at each place. Saucers, finger bowls waiting on the table were of exquisite silverwork, the napkins of damask.

She expressed her admiration to her companions. Hugh the huntsman merely nodded. The little man on her left said, "But you ought to've seen that in old days, wonderful wormy barn of a place near to falling down that was when Sir Tibault had un, him as was Joscelin's father. Nasty old brute he was, God rest him, as drank hisself to death in the end. Ain't I right, Hugh?"

Hugh grunted. "Son's different."

"That he is. Different as chalk and cheese. Brought the place back to life, Joscelin has. Used un's gold well."

"Gold?" Adelia asked.

The little man warmed to her interest. "So he told me. 'There's gold in Outremer, Master Herbert,' he said to me. 'Hatfuls of it, Master Herbert.' See, I'm by way of being his bootmaker; a man don't fib to his bootmaker."

"Did Sir Gervase come back with gold as well?"

"A ton or more, so they say, only he ain't so free with his money."

"Did they acquire this gold together?"

"Can't answer for that. Probable they did. They ain't hardly apart. David and Jonathan, them."

Adelia glanced toward the high table at David and Jonathan, good-looking, confident, so easy together, talking over the prioress's head.

If there were
two
killers, both in accord...It hadn't crossed her mind, but it should have. "Do they have wives?"

"Gervase do, a poor, dribblin' little piece as stays home." The bootmaker was happy to display his knowledge of great men. "Sir Joscelin now, he's atrading for the Baron of Peterborough's daughter. Good match that'd be."

A shrill horn blasted away all talk. The guests sat up. Food was coming.

A
T THE HIGH TABLE
, Rowley Picot allowed his knee to rub against that of the sheriff's wife, keeping her happy. He also winked at the young nun seated at the trestle below to make her blush, but found that his eyes were more often directed toward little Madam Doctor down among the toilers and hewers. Washed up nicely, he'd give her that. Creamy, velvety skin disappeared into that saffron bodice, inviting touch. Made his fingertips twitch. Not the only thing to twitch, either; that gleaming hair suggested she was blonde all over....

Damn the trollop--Sir Rowley shook off a lubricious reverie--she was finding out too much, and Master Simon with her, relying on their bloody great Arab for protection, a eunuch, for God's sake.

T
O HELL
, thought Adelia,
there's more.

For the second time, a blast on the horn had announced another course from the kitchen, led by the marshal. More and even larger platters, piled like petty mountains, each needing two men to carry them, were greeted with cheers from the merry diners, who were getting merrier.

The wreckage from the first course was removed. Gravy-stained trenchers were put into a wheelbarrow and taken outside to where ragged men, women, and children waited to fall on them. Fresh ones took their place.

"Et maintenant, milords, mesdames..."
It was the head cook again.
"Venyson en furmety gely. Porcelle farce enforce. Pokokkye. Crans. Venyson roste. Conyn. Byttere truffee. Pulle endore. Braun freyes avec graunt tartez. Leche Lumbarde. A soltelle."

Norman French for Norman food.

"That's France talk," explained Master Herbert, the bootmaker, to Adelia kindly, as if he hadn't said so the first time, "as Sir Joscelin brought that cook from France."

And I wish he might go back there. Enough, enough.

She was feeling strange.

To begin with, she had refused wine and asked for boiled water, a request that had surprised the servant with the wine pitcher and had not been fulfilled. Persuaded by Master Herbert that the mead being offered as an alternative to wine and ale was an innocuous drink made from honey, and being thirsty, she had emptied several cups.

And was still thirsty. She waved frantically at Ulf to bring her some of the water from Mansur's ewer. He didn't see her.

It was Simon of Naples who waved back. He'd just entered and bowed a deep apology to Prioress Joan and Sir Joscelin for his late arrival.

He's learned something,
Adelia thought, sitting up. She could tell from his very walk that his time with the Jews had yielded fruit. She watched him talking excitedly to the tax collector at the end of the high table before he disappeared from her view to take his seat farther up the trestle and on the same side of it as herself.

Week-dead peacocks still displaying their tail were on the board; litters of crispy baby pigs sucked sadly on the apple between their jaws. The eye of a roasted bittern, which would have looked better un-roasted among the fenland reeds where it belonged, stared accusingly into Adelia's.

Silently, she apologized to it.
I'm sorry. I'm sorry they stuffed truffles up your arse.

Again, she glimpsed Gyltha's face peering round the kitchen door. Adelia sat up straight again.
I
am
doing you credit, I am, I am.

Venison in a stew of corn appeared on her clean trencher. It was joined by "gely" from a saucer. Red currant, probably. "I want salads," she said hopelessly.

The prioress's rent had escaped from their cage and joined the sparrows in the rafters to plop droppings on the tables below.

Brother Gilbert, who'd been ignoring the nuns on either side of him and was staring at Adelia instead, leaned across the table. "I should think you ashamed to show your hair, mistress."

She glared back. "Why?"

"You would better hide your locks beneath a veil, better dress in mourning garments, neglect your exterior. O Daughter of Eve, don the penitential garb that women must derive from Eve's ignominy, the odium of it being the cause of the fall of the human race."

"Wasn't her fault," said the nun on his left. "Fall of the human race wasn't her fault. Wasn't mine, neither."

She was a skinny, middle-aged woman who had been drinking heavily, as had Brother Gilbert. Adelia liked the cut of her jib.

The monk turned on her. "Silence, woman. Would you argue with the great Saint Tertullian? You, from your house of loose living?"

"Yah," the nun said, crowing, "we got a better saint than you got. We got Little Saint Peter. Best you've got is Saint Etheldreda's big toe."

"We have a piece of the True Cross," Brother Gilbert shouted.

"Who ain't?" said the nun on his other side.

Brother Gilbert descended from his high horse into the blood and dust of the battleground. "A muck of good Little Saint Peter'll do you when the archdeacon investigates your convent, you slut. And he will. Oh, I know what goes on at Saint Radegund's--slackness, holy office neglected, men in your cells, hunting parties, sliding upriver to provision your anchorites. I
don't
think. Oh, I know."

"So we do provision 'em." This was the nun on Brother Gilbert's right, as plump as her sister in God was thin. "If I visit my aunty after, where's the harm?"

Ulf's voice repeated itself in Adelia's head.
Sister Fatty for to supply the hermits, look a her puff.
She squinted at the nun. "I saw you," she said happily. "I saw you poling a punt upriver."

"I'll wager you didn't see her poling back." Brother Gilbert was spitting in his fury. "They stay out all night. They comport themselves in licentiousness and lust. In a decent house, they'd be whipped until their arses bled, but where's their prioress? Out hunting."

A man who hates,
Adelia thought,
a hateful man.
And a crusader. She leaned across the table. "Do you like jujubes, Brother Gilbert?"

"What?
What?
No, I loathe confits." He turned from her to resume his denunciation of Saint Radegund's.

A quiet, sad voice on Adelia's right said, "Our Mary liked confits." Appallingly, tears were running down the sinewy cheeks of Hugh the huntsman and plopping into his stew.

"Don't cry," she said, "don't cry."

A whisper came from the bootmaker on her left: "She was his niece. Little Mary as was murdered. His sister's child."

"I'm sorry." Adelia touched the huntsman's hand. "I'm so sorry."

Bleary, infinitely sad, his blue eyes looked into hers. "I'll get him. I'll tear his liver out."

"We'll both get him," she said and became irritated that Brother Gilbert's harangue should be intruding on such a moment. She stretched across the board to poke the monk in his chest. "Not
Saint
Tertullian."

"What?"

"Tertullian. Fellow you quoted on Eve. He wasn't a saint. Did you think he was a saint? He wasn't. He left the Church. He was"--she said it carefully--"heterodoxal. That's what
he
was. Joined the Montanists, Subsequently never declared a saint."