Mistress of the Art of Death (46 page)

It was Prioress Joan's turn. The king pulled her head up from the table by her veil, dislodging the wimple to show wiry, gray hair. "And you...If you'd controlled your sisterhood with half the discipline you apply to your hounds...She goes, do you understand? She
goes
or I tear down your convent stone by stone with you in it. Now leave this place and take that stinking maggot with you."

I
T WAS A RAGGED DEPARTURE
. Prior Geoffrey stood at the door, looking old and unwell. Rain had stopped, but the chilly, moist dawn air raised a ground mist and the hooded, cloaked figures mounting their horses or getting into palanquins were difficult to distinguish. Quiet, though, except for the strike of hooves on cobbles and the huff from horses' nostrils and the singing of an early thrush and the crow of a cockerel from a hen run. Nobody spoke. Sleepwalkers, all of them, souls in limbo.

Only the king's departure had been noisy, a rush of boar hounds and riders galloping toward the gates and open country.

Adelia thought she saw two veiled figures being escorted away by men-at-arms. Perhaps the hatted, bowed shape plodding on a solitary course toward the castle was the rabbi. Only Mansur was here beside her, God bless him.

She went and put her arm around Walburga, who had been forgotten. Then she waited for Rowley Picot. And waited.

Either he wasn't coming or he had already gone.
Ah, well...

"It seems we must walk," she said. "Are you well enough?" She was concerned for Walburga; the girl's pulse had been alarming after she'd seen what she should never have seen in the kitchen.

The nun nodded.

Together they ambled through the mist, Mansur striding beside them. Twice Adelia turned to look for the Safeguard; twice she remembered. When she turned for a third time..."Oh no, dear God,
no
."

"What is it?" Mansur asked.

It was Rakshasa walking behind them, his feet hidden in the mist.

Mansur drew his dagger, then half-replaced it. "It's the other. Stay here."

Still gasping with shock, Adelia watched him go forward to speak to Gervase of Coton, whose figure so much resembled that of a dead man, a Gervase who now seemed reduced and oddly diffident. He and the Arab strolled farther along the track and were lost to view. Their voices were a mumble. Mansur's English had improved these last weeks.

He came back alone. The three of them walked on together. "We send him a pot of snakeweed," Mansur said.

"Why?" Then, because everything normal had been cast adrift, Adelia grinned. "He's...Mansur, has he got the pox?"

"Other doctors have been of no help to him. The poor man has attempted these many days to consult me. He says he has watched the Jew's house for my return."

"I saw him. He scared the wits from me. I'll give him bloody snakeweed, I'll put pepper in it, I'll teach him to lurk on riverbanks. Him and his pox."

"You will be a doctor," Mansur reproved her. "He is a worried man, frightened of what his wife will say, Allah pity him."

"Then he should have been faithful to her," Adelia said. "Oh, tut, it'll go in time if it's gonorrhea." She was still grinning. "But don't tell him that."

It was lighter when they gained the gates toward the town, and they could see the Great Bridge. A flock of sheep was trotting over it, making for the shambles. Some students were stumbling home after a hard night out.

Puffing, Walburga said suddenly in disbelief, "But she were the best of us, the holiest. I admired her, she were so good."

"She had a madness," Adelia said. "There's no accounting for that."

"Where'd it come from?"

"I don't know." Always there, perhaps. Stifled. Doomed to chastity and obedience at the age of three. A chance meeting with a man who overpowered--Rowley had talked of Rakshasa's attraction for women.
"The Lord only knows why; he doesn't treat them well."
Had that coition of frenzy released the nun's derangement? Maybe, maybe. "I don't know," Adelia said again. "Take shallow breaths. Slowly, now."

A horseman cantered up as they arrived at the foot of the bridge. Sir Rowley Picot looked down at Adelia. "Am I to be given an explanation, mistress?"

"I explained to Prior Geoffrey. I am grateful and honored by your proposal...."
Oh, this was no good.
"Rowley, I would have married you, nobody else, ever,
ever.
But..."

"Did I not fuck you nicely this morning?"

He was deliberately speaking English, and Adelia felt the nun beside her flinch at his use of the old Anglo-Saxon word. "You did," she said.

"I rescued you. I saved you from that monster."

"You did that, too."

But it had been the jumble of powers she and Simon of Naples possessed between them that had led to the discovery on Wandlebury Hill, despite her own misjudgment in going there alone.

Those same powers had led to the saving of Ulf. It had liberated the Jews. Though it had been mentioned by none except the king, their investigation had been a craft of logic and cold reason and...oh, very well, instinct, but instinct based on knowledge; rare skills in this credulous age, too rare to be drowned as Simon's had been drowned, too valuable to be buried, as hers would be buried in marriage.

All this Adelia had reflected on, in anguish, but the result had been inexorable. Though she had fallen in love, nothing in the rest of the world had changed. Corpses would still cry out. She had a duty to hear them.

"I am not free to marry," she said. "I am a doctor to the dead."

"They're welcome to you."

He spurred his horse and set it at the bridge, leaving her bereft and oddly resentful. He might at least have seen her and Walburga home.

"Hey," she yelled after him, "are you sending Rakshasa's head back east to Hakim?"

His reply floated back: "Yes, I bloody well am."

He could always make her laugh, even when she was crying. "Good," she said.

M
UCH HAPPENED IN
C
AMBRIDGE
that day.

The judges of the assize listened to and gave their verdict on cases of theft, of coin-clipping, street brawls, a smothered baby, bigamy, land disputes, ale that was too weak, loaves that were short, disputed wills, deodands, vagabondage, begging, shipmasters' quarrels, fisticuffs among neighbors, arson, runaway heiresses, and naughty apprentices.

At midday, there was a hiatus. Drums rolled and trumpets called the crowds in the castle bailey to attend. A herald stood on the platform before the judges to read from a scroll in a voice that reached to the town: "Let it be known that in the sight of God and to the satisfaction of the judges here present the knight yclept Joscelin of Grantchester has been proved vile murderer of Peter of Trumpington; Harold of Saint Mary Parish; Mary, daughter of Bonning the wildfowler, and Ulric of the parish of Saint John, and that the aforesaid Joscelin of Grantchester died during his capture as befitted his crimes, being eaten by dogs.

"Let it also be known that the Jews of Cambridge have been quitted of these killings and all suspicion thereof, whereby they shall be returned to their lawful homes and business without hindrance. Thus, in the name of Henry, King of England, under God."

There was no mention of a nun. The Church was silent on that matter. But Cambridge was full of whispers and, in the course of the afternoon, Agnes, eel seller's wife and mother to Harold, pulled apart the little beehive hut in which she had sat outside the castle gates since the death of her son, hauled its material down the hill, and rebuilt it outside the gates of Saint Radegund's convent.

All this was seen and heard in the open.

Other things were done in secrecy and darkness, though exactly who did them nobody ever knew. Certainly, men high in the ranks of Holy Church met behind closed doors where one of them begged, "Who will rid us of this shameful woman?" just as Henry II had once cried out to be rid of the turbulent Becket.

What happened next behind those doors is less certain, for no directions were given, though perhaps there were insinuations as light as gnats, so light that it could not be said they had even been made, wishes expressed in a code so byzantine that it could not be translated except by those with the key to it. All this, perhaps, so that the men--and they were not clerics--who went down Castle Hill to Saint Radegund's could not be said to be acting on anyone's command to do what they did.

Nor even that they did it.

Possibly Agnes knew, but she never told anybody.

These things, both transparent and shadowed, passed without Adelia's knowledge. On Gyltha's orders, she slept round the clock. When she woke up, it was to find a line of patients winding down Jesus Lane, waiting for Dr. Mansur's attention. She dealt with the severe cases, then called a halt while she consulted Gyltha.

"I should go to the convent and look to Walburga. I've been remiss."

"You been mending."

"Gyltha, I don't want to go to that place."

"Don't then."

"I must; another attack like that could stop her heart."

"Convent gates is closed and nobody answering. So they say. And that,
that
..." Gyltha still couldn't bring herself to say the name. "She's gone. So they say."

"Gone? Already?"
Nobody dallies when the king commands,
she thought.
Le roi le veut.
"Where did they send her?"

Gyltha shrugged. "Just gone. So they say."

Adelia felt relief spreading down to her ribs and almost mending them. The Plantagenet had cleansed his kingdom's air so that she could breathe it.

Though,
she thought,
in doing so, he has fouled another nation's. What will be done to her there?

Adelia tried to avoid the image of the nun writhing as she had on the floor of the refectory but this time in filth and darkness and chains--and couldn't. Nor could she avoid concern; she was a doctor, and true doctors made no judgments, only diagnoses. She had treated the wounds and diseases of men and women who'd disgusted her humanity but not her profession. Character repelled; the suffering, needy body did not.

The nun was mad; for society's sake, she must be restrained for as long as she lived. But "the Lord pity her and treat her well," Adelia said.

Gyltha looked at her as if she, too, were a lunatic. "She's been treated like she deserves," she said stolidly. "So they say."

Ulf, for a miracle, was at his books. He was quieter and more grave than he had been. According to Gyltha, he was expressing a wish to become a lawyer. All very pleasing and admirable--nevertheless, Adelia missed the old Ulf.

"The convent gates are locked, apparently," she told him, "yet I need to get in to see Walburga. She's ill."

"What? Sister Fatty?" Ulf was suddenly back on form. "You come along of me; they can't keep me out."

Gyltha and Mansur could be trusted to treat the rest of the patients. Adelia went for her medicine chest; lady's slipper was excellent for hysteria, panic, and fearfulness. And rose oil to soothe.

She set off with Ulf.

ON THE CASTLE RAMPARTS, a tax collector who was taking a well-earned rest from assize business recognized two slight figures among the many crossing the Great Bridge below--he would have recognized the slightly larger one in the unattractive headgear among millions.

Now was the time, whilst she was out of the way. He called for his horse.

Why Sir Rowley Picot found himself compelled to ask advice for his bruised heart from Gyltha, eel seller and housekeeper, he wasn't sure. It may be because Gyltha was the closest female friend in Cambridge to the love of his life. Maybe because she had helped to nurse him back to life, was a rock of common sense, maybe because of the indiscretions of her past...he just did, and to hell.

Miserably, he munched on one of Gyltha's pasties.

"She won't marry me, Gyltha."

"'Course she won't. Be a waste. She's..." Gyltha tried to think of an analogy to some fabled creature, could only come up with "uni-corn," and settled for "She's special."

"
I'm
special."

Gyltha reached up to pat Sir Rowley's head. "You're a fine lad and you'll go far, but she's..." Again, comparison failed her. "The good Lord broke the mold after He made her. Us needs her, all of us, not just you."

"And I'm not going to damn well get her, am I?"

"Not in marriage, maybe, but there's other ways of skinning a cat." Gyltha had long ago decided that the cat under discussion, special though it was, could do with a good, healthy, and continual skinning. A woman might keep her independence, just as she had herself, and could still have memories to warm the winter nights.

"Good God, woman, are you suggesting...? My intentions toward Mistress Adelia are...were...
honorable
."

Gyltha, who had never considered honor a requisite for a man and a maid in springtime, sighed. "That's pretty. Won't get you nowhere, though, will it?"

He leaned forward and said, "Very well. How?" And the longing in his face would have melted a flintier heart than Gyltha's.

"Lord, for a clever man, you'm a right booby. She's a doctor, ain't she?"

"Yes, Gyltha." He was trying to be patient. "That, I would point out, is why she won't accept me."

"And what is it doctors do?"

"They tend their patients."

"So they do, and I reckon there's one doctor as might be tenderer than most to a patient, always supposing that patient was taken poorly and always supposing she was fond of un."

"Gyltha," Sir Rowley said earnestly, "if I wasn't suddenly feeling so damn ill, I'd ask
you
to marry me."

T
HEY SAW THE CROWD
at the convent gates when they'd crossed the bridge and cleared the willows on the bank. "Oh, dear," Adelia said, "word has got around." Agnes and her little hut were there, like a marker to murder.

It was to be expected, she supposed; the town's anger had been transferred, and a mob was gathering against the nuns just as it had against the Jews.