It was the custom of those in Cambridge who had been on pilgrimage to hold a feast after their return. Alliances had been made on the journey, business conducted, marriages arranged, holiness and exaltation experienced; the world in general had been widened; and it was pleasurable for those who had shared these things to be brought together once more to discuss them and give thanks for a safe return.
This pilgrimtide it was the turn of the Prioress of Saint Radegund’s to host the feast. Since, however, Saint Radegund was yet a poor, small convent-a situation soon to be altered if Prioress Joan and Little Saint Peter had anything to do with it-the honor of holding it on her behalf had been awarded to her knight and tenant, Sir Joscelin of Grantchester, whose hall and lands were considerably larger and richer than hers, a not unusual anomaly in the case of those who held part in fee of the lesser religious houses.
A famous feast-giver, Sir Joscelin. It was said that when he’d entertained the Abbot of Ramsay last year, thirty beeves, sixty pigs, a hundred and fifty capon, three hundred larks (for their tongues), and two knights had died in the cause, the latter in a melee laid on for the abbot’s entertainment that had gotten gloriously out of hand.
Invitations were therefore valued; those who had not been on the pilgrimage but were closely associated with it, stay-at-home wives, daughters, sons, the good and the great of the shire, canons, and nuns, thought themselves ill-used not to be included. Since most of them were, the caterers t0 Cambridge ’s finery had been kept busy with barely a spare breath to bless the names of Saint Radegund’s prioress and her loyal knight, Sir Joscelin.
It was not until the morning of the day itself that a Grantchester servant arrived with an invitation for the three foreigners in Jesus Lane. Dressed for the occasion, complete with a horn to blow, he was put out when Gyltha took him in at the back door.
“No use going by the front way, Matt, Doctor’s physicking.”
“Let’s just blow a call, Gylth. Master sends his invites with a call.”
He was taken into the kitchen for a cup of home brew; Gyltha liked to know what was going on.
Adelia was in the hall, wrangling with Dr. Mansur’s last patient of the day; she always kept Wulf to the end.
“Wulf, there is nothing wrong with you. Not the strangles, not ague, not the cough, not distemper, not diper bite, whatever that is, and you are certainly not lactating.”
“Do the doctor say that?”
Adelia turned wearily to Mansur. “Say something, Doctor.”
“Give the idle dog a kick up his arse.”
“The doctor prescribes steady work in fresh air,” Adelia said.
“With my back?”
“There is nothing wrong with your back.” She regarded Wulf as a phenomenon. In a feudal society where everybody, except the growing mercantile class, owed work to somebody else for their existence, Wulf had escaped vassalage, probably by running away from his lord and certainly by marrying a Cambridge laundress who was prepared to labor for them both. He was, quite literally, afraid of work; it made him ill. But in order to escape the derision of society, he needed to be adjudged ill in order to avoid becoming so.
Adelia was as gentle with him as with all her patients-she wondered if his brain could be pickled postmortem and sent to her so that she might examine it for some missing ingredient-but she refused to compromise her duty as a doctor by diagnosing or prescribing for a physical complaint where none existed.
“How about malingering? I’m still a-suffering from that, ain’t I?”
“A bad case,” she said and shut the door on him.
It was still raining and therefore chilly and, since Gyltha didn’t hold with lighting a fire in the hall from the end of March to the beginning of November, the warmth of Old Benjamin’s house lay in its kitchen outside, a roaring place equipped with apparatus so fearful that it could be a torture chamber if it weren’t for its ravishing smells.
Today it held a new object, a wooden barrel like a washerwoman’s lessiveuse. Adelia’s best saffron silk underdress, as yet unworn in England, hung from a flitch hook above it to steam out the wrinkles. She had thought the gown to be still in the clothes press upstairs.
“What’s that for?”
“ Bath. You,” Gyltha said.
Adelia was not unwilling; she hadn’t bathed since last climbing out of the tiled and heated pool in her stepparents’ villa that the Romans had installed nearly fifteen hundred years before. The bucket of water carried to the solar every morning by Matilda W. was no replacement. However, the scene before her prefigured an event, so she asked, “Why?”
“I ain’t having you let me down at the feast,” Gyltha said.
Sir Joscelin’s invitation to Dr. Mansur and his two assistants, so Gyltha said, having put his man to the inquisition, was at Prior Geoffrey’s prompting-if not true pilgrims, they had at least joined the pilgrimage on its return journey.
To Gyltha it was a challenge; the stoniness of her face showed that she was excited. As she had allied herself with these three queer fish, it was necessary for her self-esteem and social standing that they appear well when exposed to the scrutiny of the town’s illustrious. Her limited knowledge of what such an occasion demanded was being augmented by Matilda B., whose mother was scrubwoman at the castle and had witnessed preparations for the tiring of the sheriff’s lady on feast days, if not the tiring itself.
Adelia had spent too much of her girlhood in study to join the festivity of other young women; later, she had been too busy. Nor, since she was not to marry, had her foster parents encouraged her in the higher social graces. She had subsequently been ill-equipped to attend the masques and revelry in the palaces of Salerno and, when forced to do so, had passed most of the time behind a pillar, both resentful and embarrassed.
This invitation, therefore, sounded an old alarm. Her immediate instinct was to find an excuse to refuse. “I must consult Master Simon.”
But Simon was at the castle, closeted with the Jews in an effort to discover whose indebtedness might have spurred Chaim’s death.
“He’ll say as you all got to go,” Gyltha told her.
He probably would; with almost everyone they suspected gathered under one roof, tongues loosened by drink, it would be an opportunity to find out who knew what about whom.
“Nevertheless, send Ulf to the castle to ask him.”
Truth to tell, now that she thought about it, Adelia was not unwilling to go. Death had overlain her days in Cambridge with the murdered children, also with some of her patients; the little one with the cough had given way to pneumonia, the ague had died, so had the kidney stone, so had a new mother brought in too late. Adelia’s successes-the amputation, the fever, the hernia-were discounted in the sum of what she regarded as her failures.
It would be nice, for once, to forgather with the living healthy at play. As usual, she could hide in the background; she would not be noticed. After all, she thought, a feast in Cambridge could not compete with the sophistication of its Salerno equivalent in the palaces of kings and popes. She need not be daunted by what, inevitably, would be a bucolic affair.
And she wanted that bath. Had she known that such a thing were possible, she would have demanded one before now; she’d assumed that preparing baths was one of the many things Gyltha didn’t hold with.
She had no choice, anyway; Gyltha and the two Matildas were determined. Time was short; an entertainment that could last six or seven hours began at noon.
She was stripped and plunged into the lessiveuse. Washing lye was poured in after her, along with a handful of precious cloves. She was scrubbed with a bathbrick until nearly raw and held under while her hair was attacked with more lye and a brush before being rinsed with lavender water.
Hauled out, she was wrapped in a blanket and her head inserted into the bread oven.
Her hair was a disappointment, more had been expected of its emergence from the cap or coif she always wore; she habitually sheared it off at shoulder length.
“Color’s all right,” Gyltha said grudgingly.
“But that’s too short,” Matilda B. objected. “Us’ll have to put that in net pockets.”
“Net costs.”
“I don’t know that I’m going yet,” Adelia shouted from the oven.
“You bloody are.”
Oh, well. Still on her knees at the oven, she directed her tiring women to her purse. Money was plentiful; Simon had been provided with a letter of credit on Luccan merchant bankers with agents in England and had drawn on it for them both.
She added, “And if you’re for the market, it’s time you three had new kirtles. Buy an ell of best camlet for yourselves.” Their goodwill made her ashamed that they should be shabby while she was resplendent.
“Linen’ll do,” Gyltha said shortly, pleased.
Adelia was pulled out, put into her shift and underdress, and set on a stool to have her hair brushed until it gleamed like white gold. Silver net had been purchased and stitched into little pockets that were now being pinned over the plaits round her ears. The women were still working on it when Simon arrived with Ulf.
At the sight of her, he blinked. “Well. Well, well, well…”
Ulf’s mouth had fallen open.
Embarrassed, Adelia said crossly, “All this fuss, and I don’t know if we should go at all.”
“Not go? Dear Doctor, if Cambridge were denied the sight of you now, the very skies would weep. I know of only one woman as beautiful, and she is in Naples.”
Adelia smiled at him. Subtle little man that he was, he knew she would be comfortable with a compliment only if it was without coquetry. He was always careful to mention his wife, whom he adored, not just to point out that he was out-of-bounds but to reassure her that she, Adelia, was out-of-bounds to him. Anything else would have jeopardized a relationship that was close of necessity. As it was, it had allowed them to be comrades, he respecting her professionalism, she respecting his.
And it was nice of him, she thought, to put her on a par with the wife whom he still saw in his mind’s eye as the slim, ivory-skinned maiden he had married in Naples twenty years before-though, probably, having since borne him nine children, the lady was not as slim as she had been.
He was triumphant this morning.
“We shall soon be home,” he told her. “I shall not say too much until I have uncovered the requisite documents, but there are copies of the burned tallies. I was sure there must be. Chaim had lodged them with his bankers and, since they are extensive-the man seems to have lent money to all East Anglia -I have taken them to the castle in order that Sir Rowley may assist me in perusing them.”
“Is that wise?” Adelia asked.
“I think it is, I think it is. The man is versed in accounting and as eager as we are to discover who owed what to Chaim and who regretted it so mightily as to want him dead.”
“Hmm.”
He would not listen to Adelia’s doubts; Simon thought he knew the sort of man Sir Rowley was, crusader or not. A hasty change into his best clothes so as to be ready for Grantchester and he was out of the door, heading back to the castle.
Left to herself, Adelia would have put on her gray overdress in order to tone down the brightness of the saffron that would therefore only show at bosom and sleeves. “I don’t want to attract attention.”
The Matildas, however, plumped for the only other item of note in her wardrobe, a brocade with the colors of an autumn tapestry, and Gyltha, after a short waver, agreed with them. It was slid carefully over Adelia’s coiffure. The pointed slippers Margaret had embroidered with silver thread went on with new white stockings.
The three arbiters stood back to consider the result.
The Matildas nodded and clasped their hands. Gyltha said, “Reckon as she’ll do,” which was as near as she approached to hyperbole.
Adelia’s brief glimpse of her reflection in the polished but uneven bottom of a fish kettle showed something like a distorted apple tree, but obviously she passed muster with the others.
“Ought to be a page as’ll stand behind Doctor’s at the feast,” Matilda B. said. “Sheriff and them allus takes a page to stand behind their chairs. Fart-catchers, Ma calls them.”
“Page, eh?”
Ulf, who had been staring at Adelia without closing his mouth, became aware that four pairs of eyes rested on him. He began running.
The ensuing chase and battle were terrible. Ulf’s screams brought neighbors round to see if another child was in danger of its life. Adelia, standing well back in case she be splashed by the lessiveuse’s turmoil, was in pain from laughing.
More cash was expended, this time at the business premises of Ma Mill, whose ragbags contained an old but serviceable tabard of almost the right size that responded nicely to a rub with vinegar. Dressed in it and with his flaxen hair bobbed around a face like a gleaming, discontented pickled onion, Ulf too passed muster.
Mansur eclipsed them both. A gilded agal held the veil of his kaffiyeh in place; silk flowed long and light around a fresh white woollen robe. A jeweled dagger flashed on his belt.
“O Son of the Noonday,” Adelia said, bowing. “Eeh l-Halaawa di!”
Mansur inclined his head, but his eyes were on Gyltha, who took a poker to the fire, face averted. “Girt great maypole,” she said.
Oh ho, Adelia thought.
THERE WAS MUCH to smile at in the aping of fine manners, at the reception of hoods, swords, and gloves from guests whose boots and cloaks were muddied by the walk from the river-nearly everybody had been punted from town-at the stiff use of titles by those who had known each other intimately for years, at the rings on female fingers toughened by the making of cheese in their owner’s home dairy.
But there was also much to admire. How friendlier it was to be greeted at the arched door with its carved Norman chevrons by Sir Joscelin himself than announced by an ivory-wanded, high-chinned majordomo. To be handed warming spiced wine on a cool day, not iced wine. To smell mutton, beef, and pork sizzling on spits in the courtyard rather than to pretend with one’s host, as one did in southern Italy, that food was being conjured by a wave of the hand.
Anyway, with the scowling Ulf and Safeguard at her heels rather than the lapdogs carried by pages attendant on some of the other ladies, Adelia was in no position to be supercilious.
Mansur, obviously, had gained status in Cambridge ’s eyes, and his dress and height came in for attention. Sir Joscelin welcomed him with a graceful salute and a “Salaam alaikum.”
The matter of his kard was also resolved with charm. “The dagger is not a weapon,” Sir Joscelin told his porter, who was struggling to wrest it from Mansur’s belt and put it with the guests’ swords. “It is a decoration for such a gentleman as this, as we old crusaders know.”
He turned to Adelia, bowing, and asked her to translate his apology to the good doctor for the tardiness of their invitation. “I feared he would be bored by our rustic amusements, but Prior Geoffrey assured me otherwise.”
Though he had always shown her civility, even when she must have seemed to him to be a foreign trollop, Adelia realized that Gyltha had circulated word that the doctor’s assistant was virtuous.
The prioress’s welcome was offhand through lack of interest, and she was taken aback by her knight’s greeting to both Mansur and Adelia. “You have had dealing with these people, Sir Joscelin?”
“The good doctor saved the foot of my thatcher, ma’am, and probably his life.” But the blue eyes, amused, were directed at Adelia, who feared that Sir Joscelin knew who had performed the amputation.
“My dear girl, my dear girl.” Prior Geoffrey’s grip on her arm propelled her away. “How beautiful you look. Nec me meminisse pigebit Adeliae, dum memor ipse mei, dum spiritus hos regit artus.”
She smiled up at him; she had missed him. “Are you well, my lord?”
“Pissing like a racehorse, I thank you.” He bent toward her ear so that she should hear him above the noise of conversation. “And how goes the investigation?”
They had been remiss not to keep him informed; that they had been able to investigate as much as they had was due to this man, but they’d been so busy. “We have made ground and hope to make more tonight,” she told him. “May we report to you tomorrow? Particularly, I want to ask you about…”
But there was the tax collector himself, two yards away and staring at her over the head of the crowd. He began to wade through an intervening group toward her. He looked less plump than he had.
He bowed. “Mistress Adelia.”
She nodded to him. “Is Master Simon with you?”
“He is delayed at the castle.” He gave her a conspiratorial wink. “Having to escort the sheriff and his lady here, I was forced to leave him to his studies. He begged me to tell you he will attend later. May I say…”
Whatever he wished to say was interrupted by a trumpet call. They were to dine.
Her fingers raised high on his, Prior Geoffrey joined the procession to take Adelia into the hall, Mansur at his side. There they had to separate, he to the top table that stood across the dais at one end, she and Mansur to their more lowly position. She was interested to see where this would be; precedence was a formidable concern for host and guest alike.
Adelia had witnessed her Salerno aunt near to collapse from the worry of placing highborn guests at table in an order that would not mortally offend one or the other. Theoretically, the rules were clear: a prince to equal an archbishop, bishop to an earl, baron in fief before a visiting baron, and so on down the line. But suppose a legate, equal to a visiting baron, was papal-where did he sit? What if the archbishop had crossed the prince, as was so often the case? Or vice versa? Which was even more frequent. Fisticuffs, feuds could result from the unintended insult. And the poor host always to blame.
It was a matter that had exercised even Gyltha, whose vicarious honor was involved, and who had also been called to Grantchester for the night to do interesting things with eels in its kitchens. “I’ll be a-watching, and if Sir Joscelin do put any of you below the salt, that’s the last barrel of eels he do get from me.”
As she entered, Adelia glimpsed Gyltha’s head poking out anxiously from behind a door.
She could sense tension, see eyes glancing left and right as Sir Joscelin’s marshal ushered the guests to their places. The lower pecking orders, particularly self-made men whose ambition outran their birth, were as sensitive as the high, perhaps more so.
Ulf had already done some scouting. “He’s up here, and you’re down there,” he said, jerking a thumb back and forth between Adelia and Mansur. He adopted the slow, careful baby talk he always used to Mansur. “You. Sitty. Here.”
Sir Joscelin had been generous, Adelia thought, relieved for Gyltha’s sake-and also for her own; Mansur was touchy about his dignity, and, decoration or not, he had a dagger in his belt. While he hadn’t been put at the top table with the host and hostess, prior, sheriff, et cetera, nor could he expect to be, he was quite near it on one of the long trestles that ran the length of the great hall. The lovely young nun who had allowed Adelia to look at Little Saint Peter’s bones was on his left. Less happily, Roger of Acton had been placed opposite him.
Positioning the tax collector must have called for considerable reflection, she thought. Unpopular in his calling, but nevertheless the king’s man and, at the moment, the sheriff’s right hand. Sir Joscelin had opted for safety as far as Sir Rowley Picot was concerned. He was next to the sheriff’s wife, making her laugh.
As ostensibly a mere female potion-mixing doctor’s attendant, and foreign at that, Adelia found herself on another of the trestles in the body of the hall toward its lower end-though several positions above the ornate salt cellar that marked the division between guests and those serfs who were present to fulfill Christ’s command that the poor be fed. The even poorer were gathered in the courtyard round a brazier, waiting for the scraps.
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’être 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.
AT 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.
TO 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 truffée. 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.”
The nuns rejoiced. “Didn’t know that, did you?” the skinny one said.
Brother Gilbert’s reply was drowned by yet another trumpet blast and another course processing by the high table.
“Blaundersorye. Quincys in comfyte. Curlews en miel. Pertyche. Eyround angels. Pety-perneux…”
“What’s petty-perno?” asked the huntsman, still crying.
“Little lost eggs,” Adelia told him and began to weep uncontrollably.
The part of her brain that hadn’t totally lost its battle with mead got her to her feet and carried her to a sideboard containing a jug of water. Clutching it, she aimed for the door, Safeguard behind her.
The tax collector watched her go.
Several guests were already in the garden. Men were contemplatively facing tree trunks; women were scattering to find a quiet place to squat. The more modest were forming an agitated queue for the shrouded benches with bottom-sized holes that Sir Joscelin had provided over the stream running down to the Cam.
Drinking fiercely from her jug, Adelia wandered off, past stables and the comforting smell of horses, past dark mews where hooded raptors dreamed of the swoop and kill. There was a moon. There was grass, an orchard…
The tax collector found her asleep beneath an apple tree. As he reached out, a small, dark, smelly shape beside her raised its head and another, much taller and with a dagger at its belt, stepped from the shadows.
Sir Rowley displayed empty hands to them both. “Would I hurt her?”
Adelia opened her eyes. She sat up, feeling her forehead. “Tertullian wasn’t a saint, Picot,” she told him.
“I always wondered.” He squatted down beside her. She’d used his name as if they were old friends-he was dismayed by the pleasure that gave him. “What were you drinking?”
She concentrated. “It was yellow.”
“Mead. You need a Saxon constitution to survive mead.” He pulled her to her feet. “Come along, you’ll have to dance it off.”
“I don’t dance. Shall we go and kick Brother Gilbert?”
“You tempt me, but I think we’ll just dance.”
The hall had been cleared of its tables. The gentle musicians of the gallery had transformed into three perspiring, burly men on the dais, a tabor player and two fiddlers, one of them calling the steps in a howl that overrode the squealing, laughing, stamping whirl on what was now a dance floor.
The tax collector pulled Adelia into it.
This was not the disciplined, fingertip-holding, toe-pointing, complex dancing of Salerno ’s high society. No elegance here. These people of Cambridge hadn’t time to attend lessons in Terpsichore, they just danced. Indefatigably, ceaselessly, with sweat and stamina, with zest, compelled by savage ancestral gods. A stumble here or there, a wrong move, what matter? Back into the fray, dance, dance. “Strike.” Left foot to the left, the right stamped against it. “Back to back.” Catch up one’s skirt. Smile. “Right shoulder to right shoulder.” “Left circle hey.” “Straight hey.” “Corner.” “Weave, my lords and ladies, weave, you buggers.” “Home.”
The flambeaux in their holders flickered like sacrificial fires. Bruised rushes on the floor released green incense into the room. No time to breathe, this is “Horses Brawl,” back, circle, up the middle, under the arch, again, again.
The mead in her body vaporized and was replaced by the intoxication of cooperative movement. Glistening faces appeared and disappeared, slippery hands grasped Adelia’s, swung her: Sir Gervase, an unknown, Master Herbert, sheriff, prior, tax collector, Sir Gervase again, swinging her so roughly that she was afraid he might let go and send her propelling into the wall. Up the middle, under the arch, gallop, weave.
Vignettes glimpsed for a second, and then gone. Simon signaling to her that he was leaving but his smile-she was being revolved with speed by Sir Rowley at that moment-telling her to stay and enjoy herself. A tall prioress and a small Ulf swinging round on the centrifuge of their crossed hands. Sir Joscelin talking earnestly to the little nun as they passed back-to-back in a corner. An admiring circle round Mansur, his face impassive as he danced over crossed swords to an intoned maqam. Roger of Acton trying to make a circling carole go to the right: “Those that turn to the left are perverse, and God hates them. Proverbs twenty-seven.” And being trampled.
Dear Lord, the cook and the sheriff’s lady. No time to marvel. Right shoulder to right shoulder. Dance, dance. Her arms and Picot’s forming an arch, Gyltha and Prior Geoffrey passing under it. The skinny nun with the apothecary. Now Hugh the huntsman and Matilda B. Those below the salt, those above it in thrall to a democratic god who danced. Oh, God, this is joy on the wing. Catch it, catch it.
Adelia danced her slippers through and didn’t know it until friction burns afflicted the soles of her feet.
She spun out of the melee. It was time to go. A few guests were leaving, though most were congregating at the sideboards on which supper was being set out.
She limped to the doorway. Mansur joined her. “Did I see Master Simon leave?” she asked him.
He went to look and came back from the direction of the kitchen with a sleeping Ulf in his arms. “The woman says he went ahead.” Mansur never used Gyltha’s name; she was always “the woman.”
“Are she and the Matildas staying?”
“They help to clear up. We take the boy.”
It seemed that Prior Geoffrey and his monks had long gone. So had the nuns, except for Prioress Joan, who was at a sideboard with a piece of game pie in one hand and a tankard in the other; she was so far mellowed as to smile on Mansur and wave a benediction with the pie over Adelia’s curtseyed thanks.
Sir Joscelin they met coming in from the courtyard where firelit figures gnawed on bones.
“You honored us, my lord,” Adelia told him. “Dr. Mansur wishes me to express our gratitude to you.”
“Do you go back via the river? I can call my barge…”
No, no, they had come in Old Benjamin’s punt, but thank you.
Even with the flambeau burning in its holder on a stanchion at the river’s edge, it was almost too dark to distinguish Old Benjamin’s punt from the others waiting along the bank, but since all of them, bar Sheriff Baldwin’s, were uniformly plain, they took the first in line.
The still-sleeping Ulf was lain across Adelia’s lap where she sat in the bow; Safeguard stood unhappily with his paws in bilge. Mansur took up the pole…
The punt rocked dangerously as Sir Rowley Picot leaped into it. “To the castle, boatman.” He settled himself on a thwart. “Now, isn’t this nice?”
A slight mist rose from the water and a gibbous moon shone weakly, intermittently, sometimes disappearing altogether as over-arching trees on the banks turned the river into a tunnel. A lump of ghastly white transformed into a flurry of wings as a protesting swan got out of their way.
Mansur, as he always did when he was poling, sang quietly to himself, an atonal reminiscence of water and rushes in another land.
Sir Rowley complimented Adelia on her boatman’s skill.
“He is a Marsh Arab,” she said. “He feels at home in fenland.”
“Does he now? How unexpected in a eunuch.”
Immediately, she was defensive. “And what do you expect? Fat men lolling around a harem?”
He was taken aback. “Yes, actually. The only ones I ever saw were.”
“When you were crusading?” she asked, still on the attack.
“When I was crusading,” he admitted.
“Then your experience of eunuchs is limited, Sir Rowley. I fully expect Mansur to marry Gyltha one day.” Oh, damn it, her tongue was still loose from the mead. Had she betrayed her dear Arab? And Gyltha?
But she would not have this, this fellow, this possible murderer, denigrate a man whose boots he was not fit to lick.
Rowley leaned forward. “Really? I thought his, er, condition would put marriage out of the question.”
Damn and blast and hellfire, now she had placed herself into the position of having to explain the circumstances of the castrated. But how to put it? “It is only that children of such a union are out of the question. Since Gyltha is past childbearing age anyway, I doubt that will concern them.”
“I see. And the other, er, condolences of marriage?”
“They can sustain an erection,” she said sharply. To hell with euphemisms; why sheer away from physical fact? If he hadn’t wanted to know, he shouldn’t have asked.
She’d shocked him, she could tell; but she hadn’t finished with him. “Do you think Mansur chose to be as he is? He was taken by slavers when he was a small child and sold for his voice to Byzantine monks, where he was castrated so that he might keep his treble. It is a common practice with them. He was eight years old, and he had to sing for the monks, Christian monks, his torturers.”
“May I ask how you acquired him?”
“He ran away. My foster father found him on a street in Alexandria and brought him home to Salerno. My father specializes in acquiring the lost and abandoned.”
Stop it, stop it, she told herself. Why this wish to inform? He is nothing to you; he may be worse than nothing. That you have just spent the time of your life with him is nothing.
A moorhen clooped and rustled in the reeds. Something, a water rat, slid into the water and swam away, leaving a wake of moonlit ripples. The punt entered another tunnel.
Sir Rowley’s voice sounded in it. “Adelia.”
She closed her eyes. “Yes?”
“You have contributed all you can to this business. When we reach Old Benjamin’s, I shall come in with you and have a word with Master Simon. He must be made to see that it is time you went home to Salerno.”
“I do not understand,” she said. “The killer is not yet uncovered.”
“We’re closing on his coverts; if we flush him, he’ll be dangerous until we can bring him down. I don’t want him leaping on one of the beaters.”
The anger the tax collector always inspired in her came hot and sharp. “One of the beaters? I am qualified, qualified, and chosen for this mission by the King of Sicily, not by Simon, and certainly not by you.”
“Madam, I am merely concerned for your safety.”
It was too late; he would not have suggested that a man in her position go home; he had insulted her professional ability.
Adelia lapsed into Arabic, the only tongue in which she could swear freely, because Margaret had never understood it. She used phrases overheard during Mansur’s frequent quarrels with her foster parents’ Moroccan cook, the one language that could counteract the fury Sir Rowley Picot ever inspired in her. She spoke of diseased donkeys and his unnatural preference for them, of his doglike attributes, his fleas, his bowel performance, and his eating habits. She told him what he could do with his concern, an injunction again involving his bowels. Whether Picot knew what she was saying or didn’t was irrelevant; he could get the gist.
Mansur poled them out of the tunnel, grinning.
The rest of the journey passed in silence.
When they reached Old Benjamin’s house, Adelia would not let Picot accompany her to it. “Shall I take him on to the castle?” Mansur wanted to know.
“Anywhere, take him anywhere,” she said.
THE NEXT MORNING, when a water bailiff came to tell Gyltha that Simon’s corpse was being delivered to the castle, Adelia knew she had been swearing as their punt passed his body where it had floated, face down, in the Trumpington reeds.