Mistress of the Art of Death (33 page)

Find the killer,
she thought as she went down the hill.
Find the killer, Adelia. No matter that Simon of Naples is dead and Rowley Picot is out of action, leaving only me and Mansur. Mansur doesn't speak the language and I am a doctor, not a bloodhound. And that's on top of the fact that we're the only people who think there is a killer yet to be found.

The ease with which Roger of Acton had enlisted recruits for his attack on the castle garden showed that Cambridge still believed the Jews to be responsible for ritual murder, despite the fact that they were incarcerated when three of the killings had been committed. Logic played no part in it; the Jews were feared because they were different and, for the townspeople, that fear and difference endowed supernatural ability. The Jews had killed Little Saint Peter, ergo they had killed the others.

Despite this, despite the rabbi and Jeremiah, despite grief for Simon, her decision to renounce carnal love and pursue science in chastity, the day persisted in presenting itself as beautiful to her.

What is this? I am extended, stretched thin, vulnerable to death and other people's pain but also to life in its infinite width.

The town and its people swam in pale gold effervescence like the wine from Champagne. A bunch of students touched their caps to her. She was forgiven the toll for the bridge when, fumbling in her pocket for a halfpenny, it was found that she didn't have one. "Oh, get on, then, and good day to you," the tollman said. On the bridge itself, carters raised their whips in salute to her, pedestrians smiled.

Taking the longer way along the riverbank to Old Benjamin's house, willow fronds brushed her in good fellowship and fish came to the surface of the river in bubbles that responded to those in her veins.

There was a man on Old Benjamin's roof. He waved at her. Adelia waved back.

"Who is that?"

"Gil the thatcher," Matilda B. told her. "Reckons his foot's better and reckons there's a tile or two on that roof as needs fixing."

"He's doing it for nothing?"

"A'course for nothing," Matilda said, winking. "Doctor mended his foot for un, didn't he?'

Adelia had put down as bad manners the lack of gratitude shown by Cambridge patients who rarely, if ever, said they were obliged for the treatment they received from Dr. Mansur and his assistant. Usually, they left the room looking as surly as when they'd arrived, in sharp contrast to Salernitan patients who would spend five minutes in her praise.

But as well as the mending of the tiles, there was to be duck for dinner, provided by the woman, whose growing blindness was at least made less miserable by eyes that no longer suppurated. A pot of honey, a clutch of eggs, a pat of butter, and a crock of a repellent-looking something that turned out to be samphire, all left wordlessly at the kitchen door, suggested that Cambridge folk had more concrete ways of saying thank you.

Something important was lacking. "Where's Ulf?"

Matilda B. pointed toward the river where, under an alder, the top of a dirty brown cap was just apparent above the reeds. "Catching trout for supper, but tell Gyltha as we're keeping an eye on un. We told un he's not to shift from that spot. Not for jujubes, not for nobody."

Matilda W. said, "He's missed you."

"I missed him." And it was true; even in the fury to save Rowley Picot, she had regretted her absence from the boy and sent him messages. She had almost wept over the bunch of primroses tied with a bit of string that he had sent her via Gyltha, "to say he was sorry for your loss." This new love she felt radiated outward in its incandescence; with the death of Simon, its glow fell on those whom, she realized now, had become necessary to her well-being, not least the small boy sitting and scowling on an upturned bucket among the reeds of the Cam with a homemade fishing line in his grubby hands.

"Move over," she told him. "Let a lady sit down."

Grudgingly, he shifted and she took his place. To judge from the number of trout thrashing in the creel, Ulf had picked the spot well; not actually on the Cam proper, he was fishing a stream that welled in the reeds and cut through the silt, forming a decent-sized channel before reaching the river.

Compared with the King's Ditch on the other side of town, a stinking and mostly stagnant dike that had once served to repel invading Danes, the Cam itself was clean, but the fastidious Adelia, though perforce she ate them on Fridays, entertained a suspicion of fish from a river that received effluent from humans and cattle as it meandered through the county's southern villages.

She appreciated Ulf's choice of springwater into which to make his casts. She sat in silence for a while, watching the fish move, sliding through the water, as clear as if they swam in air. Dragonflies flashed, gemlike, among the reeds.

"How's Rowley-Powley?" It was a sneer.

"Better, and don't be rude."

He grunted and got on with his fishing.

"What worms are you using?" she asked politely. "They work well."

"These?" He spat. "Wait til the hangings when the 'sizes start, then you'll see proper worms, take any fish they will."

Unwisely, she asked, "What have hangings to do with it?"

"Best worms is them under a gallows with a rotting corpse on it. I thought ev'body knew that. Take any fish, gallows' worms will. Di'n't you know that?"

She hadn't and wished she didn't. He was punishing her.

"You're going to have to talk to me," she said. "Master Simon is dead, Sir Rowley's laid up. I need someone who thinks to help me find the killer--and you're a thinker, Ulf, you know you are."

"Yes, I bloody am."

"And don't swear."

More silence.

He was using a float, a curious contraption of his own invention that ran his line through a large bird's quill so that the bait and tiny iron hooks were kept to the surface of the water.

"I missed you," she said.

"Huh." If she thought that was going to placate him...but after a while he said, "Do we reckon as he drowned Master Simon?"

"Yes. I know he did."

Another trout rose to a worm, was unhooked, and thrown into the creel. "It's the river," he said.

"What do you mean?" Adelia sat up.

For the first time, he looked at her. The small face was screwed up in concentration. "It's the river. That's what takes 'em. I been asking about..."

"No."
She almost screamed it. "Ulf, whatever...you mustn't, you must not. Simon was asking questions. Promise me,
promise
me."

He looked at her with contempt. "All I done was talk to the kin. No harm in that, is there? Was
he
a-listening when I done it? Turns hisself into cra and perches on trees, does he?"

A crow. Adelia shivered. "I wouldn't put it past him."

"That's dizzy talk. You want to know or not?"

"I want to know."

He pulled in his line and detached it from rod and float, arranged both carefully in the wicker box that East Anglians called a frail, then sat cross-legged facing Adelia, like a small Buddha about to deliver enlightenment.

"Peter, Harold, Mary, Ulric," he said. "I talked with their kin, the which nobody else seems to have listened to. Each of un,
each of un,
was seen last at the Cam here or heading for un."

Ulf lifted a finger. "Peter? By the river." He lifted another. "Mary? She was Jimmer the wildfowler's young un--Hugh Hunter's niece--and what was she about, last seen? Deliverin' a pail o' fourses to her pa in the sedge up along Trumpington way."

Ulf paused. "Jimmer was one of them rushed the castle gates. Still blames the Jews for Mary, Jimmer does."

So Mary's father had been among that terrible group of men with Roger of Acton. Adelia remembered that the man was a bully and, quite probably, easing his own guilt for the treatment of his daughter by attacking the Jews.

Ulf continued with his list. He jerked a thumb upriver. "Harold?" A frown of pain. "Eel seller's boy, Harold'd gone for water as to put the elvers in. Disappeared..." Ulf leaned forward.
"Making for the Cam."

Her eyes were on his. "And Ulric?"

"Ulric," said Ulf, "lived with his ma and sisters on Sheep's Green. Taken Saint Edward's Day. And what day was Saint Edward's last?"

Adelia shook her head.

"Monday." He sat back.

"Monday?"

He shook his head at her ignorance. "You frimmocking me? Washday, woman. Mondays is washday. I talked to his sister. Run out of rainwater to boil, they had, so Ulric was sent with a yoke o' pails..."

"Down to the river," she finished for him in a whisper.

They stared at each other and then, together, turned their heads to look toward the Cam.

It was full; there had been heavy rain during the week; Adelia had shuttered the window of the tower room to stop it coming in. Now, innocent, polished by the sun, it fitted the top edge of its banks like sinuous marquetry.

Had others noticed it as a common factor in the children's deaths?
They must have,
Adelia thought; even the sheriff's coroner wasn't entirely stupid. The significance, however, could have escaped them. The Cam was the town's larder, waterway, and washpot; its banks provided fuel, roofing, and furniture; everybody used it. That all the children had disappeared while in its vicinity was hardly less surprising than if they had not.

But Adelia and Ulf knew something else; Simon had been deliberately drowned in that same water--a coincidence stretched too far.

"Yes, "she said, "it's the river."

As evening drew on, the Cam became busy, boats and people outlined against the setting sun so that features were indistinguishable. Those going home after a day's work in town hailed workers coming back from the field to the south, or cursed as their craft caused a jam. Ducks scattered, swans made a fuss as they took flight. A rowing boat carried a new calf that was to be fed by hand at the fireside.

"Reckon as it took Harold and the others to Wandlebury?" Ulf asked.

"No. There's nothing there."

She had begun to discount the hill as the site where the children were murdered; it was too open. The extended suffering they had been subjected to would have required their killer to have more privacy than a hilltop could offer, a chamber, a cellar, somewhere to contain them and their screams. Wandlebury might be lonely, but agony was noisy. Rakshasa would have been fearful of it being heard, unable to take his time.

"No," she said again. "He may take the bodies to it, but there's somewhere else...." She was going to say "where they're put to death," then stopped; Ulf was only a little boy, after all. "And you're right," she told him. "It's on or near the river."

They continued to watch the moving frieze of figures and boats.

Here came three fowlers, their punt low in the water from its piles of geese and duck destined for the sheriff's table. There went the apothecary in his coracle--Ulf said he had a lady friend near Seven Acres. A performing bear sat in a stern while his master rowed it to their hovel near Hauxton. Market women went by with their empty crates, poling easily. An eight-oared barge towed another behind it bearing chalk and marl, heading for the castle.

"Why d'you go, Hal?" Ulf was muttering. "Who was it?"

Adelia was thinking the same thing. Why had any of the children gone? Who was it on that river had whistled them to the lure? Who had said, "Come with me?" and they'd gone. It couldn't have been merely the temptation of jujubes; there must have been authority, trust, familiarity.

Adelia sat up as a cowled figure punted past. "Who's that?"

Ulf peered through the fading light. "Him? That's old Brother Gil."

Brother Gilbert, eh?
"Where's he going?"

"Taking the host to the hermits. Barnwell's got hermits, same as the nuns, and near all of 'em live along the banks upriver in the forests." Ulf spat. "Gran don't hold with them. Dirty old scarecrows, she reckon, cuttin' theyselves off from everybody else. Ain't Christian, Gran says."

So Barnwell's monks used the river to supply the recluses just as the nuns did.

"But it's evening," Adelia said. "Why do they go so late? Brother Gilbert won't be back in time for Compline."

The religious lived by the tolling of holy hours. For Cambridge generally, the bells acted as a daytime clock; appointments were made by them, sandglasses turned, business begun and closed; they rang laborers to their fields at Lauds, sent them home at vespers. But their clanging by night allowed sleeping laity the schadenfreude of staying in bed while nuns and monks were having to issue from their cells and dorters to sing vigils.

An appalling knowingness spread over Ulf's unlovely little features. "That's why," he said. "Gives 'em a night off. Good night's sleep under the stars, bit of hunting or fishing next day, visit a pal, maybe, they all do it. 'Course the nuns take advantage, Gran says, nobody don't know
what
they get up to in them forests. But..."

Suddenly, he was squinting at her.
"Brother Gilbert?"

She squinted back, nodding. "He could be."
How vulnerable children were,
she thought. If Ulf with all his mother-wit and knowledge of the circumstances was slow to suspect someone of standing that he knew, the others had been easy prey.

"He's grumpy, old Gil, I grant," the child said, reluctant, "but he speaks fair to young 'uns and he's a cru--" Ulf clapped his hands over his mouth and for the first time Adelia saw him discomposed. "Oh my arse, he went on crusade."

The sun was down now and there were fewer boats on the Cam; those that were had lanterns at the prow so that the river became an untidy necklace of lights.

Still the two of them sat where they were, reluctant to leave, attracted and repelled by the river, so close to the souls of the children it had taken that the rustle of its reeds seemed to carry their whispers.

Ulf growled at it. "Why don't you run backwards, you bugger?"

Adelia put her arm round his shoulders; she could have wept for him. Yes, reverse nature and time. Bring them home.