Adelia and Ulf were helped onto one of the horses that Rowley and the huntsman had ridden to the hill. Hugh hoisted the nun onto the other. Taking the reins, the men picked their way down the hill, avoiding rough patches so that Adelia should not be jounced about.
They went in silence.
In his free hand, Rowley carried a bag made out of his cloak. The object in it was round and attracted attention from the hounds until Hugh called them off. After a first glance, Adelia avoided looking at it.
The rain that the dawn had threatened began when they reached the road. Peasants on their way to work put up their hoods, glancing from under them at the little procession with its following of redjowled dogs.
Passing an area of bog, Rowley pulled the horse up and spoke to Hugh, who squelched off the road and came back with a handful of bog moss.
“Is this the muck you put on wounds?”
Adelia nodded, squeezed some of the water out of the sphagnum moss, then applied it to her arm.
It would be nonsensical to die of putrefaction now, though at the moment she had no feeling left in which to wonder why that should be so.
“Better put some on your eye as well,” Rowley said, and she realized that there was yet another pain and that her left eye was closing.
The nun’s horse had drawn level. Adelia saw without interest that the girl sat with her face hidden by the cloak Hugh had wrapped her in for decency’s sake.
Rowley saw her look. “May we go on now?” he asked, as if she had demanded the delay. He pulled on the reins without waiting for a reply.
Adelia roused herself. “I haven’t thanked you,” she told him, and felt the pressure of Ulf’s hand on her shoulders. “We thank you…” There weren’t words for it.
She might have dislodged a stone from a dam.
“What in hell did you think you were doing? Do you know what you put me through?”
“I’m sorry,” she told him.
“Sorry? Is that an apology? Are you apologizing? Have you any conception…? Let me tell you it was God’s mercy I left the assize early. I set out for Old Benjamin’s because I was sorry for you in your misery. Misery? Mary of God, what was it for me when I found you gone?”
“I’m sorry,” she said again. Somewhere, deep in the impassivity of exhaustion that encased her, a tiny shift, a bubble of movement.
“Matilda B. said you’d likely gone to church to pray. But I knew, oh, I knew. She was waiting for the bloody river to tell her something, I said. It’s told her. She’s gone after the bastard like the witless female she is.”
The bubble grew and was joined by others. She heard Ulf snuffling, like he did when he was amused. “You see…” she said.
But Rowley was remorseless, his wrongs too great. He’d heard Hugh’s horn blowing on the other bank and had waded the bloody river to get to him. Immediately, the huntsman had suggested tracking Adelia by Safeguard’s scent.
“Hugh said Prior Geoffrey attached the bloody animal to you for that very purpose, having worried for your safety in an alien town and no other canine leaving a scent so rank. I always wondered why you went everywhere with the cur, but at least it had the sense to leave a trail, which was more than you did”
Bless him, so cross. Adelia looked down at the tax inspector and breathed in the magic of the man.
He’d made a dash into Old Benjamin’s house and up to Adelia’s room, he said. Grabbed the mat the Safeguard slept on and came down again to shove it under Hugh’s hounds’ noses. He’d acquired the horses by snatching them from under passing, innocent, protesting riders.
Galloping along the towpath…following the scent along the Cam, then the Granta. Nearly losing it across country…“And would have if that dog of yours hadn’t stank the heavens out. And years off my life with it, you shatterbrained harpy. Do you know what I’ve suffered?”
Ulf was now openly guffawing. Adelia, hardly able to breathe, thanking Almighty God for such a man. “I do love you, Rowley Picot,” she managed.
“That’s neither here nor there,” he’d said. “And it’s not funny.”
She began drifting off to sleep and was kept in the saddle only by the pressure of Ulf’s hands on her shoulders-for him to clasp her round the body was too painful.
Later, she was to remember passing through Barnwell priory’s great gates and thinking of the last time she and Simon and Mansur had entered them in a peddler’s cart, as ignorant as babes unborn of what faced them. They’ll know now, Simon. Everybody will know.
After that, the dozes deepened into a long unconsciousness in which she was only vaguely aware of Rowley’s voice like the rap of a drum issuing explanation, orders, and Prior Geoffrey’s, appalled but also giving instruction. They were overlooking the most important thing, and Adelia woke up long enough to voice it-“I want a bath”-before relapsing to sleep.
“…AND IN THE NAME OF GOD, stay there,” Rowley told her. A door slammed.
She and Ulf were alone on a bed in a room, and she was looking up at the timber beams and purlins of a ceiling she’d seen before. Candles-candles? Wasn’t it day? Yes, but shutters were closed against rain that beat on them.
“Where are we?”
“Prior’s guesthouse,” Ulf said.
“What’s happening?”
“Dunno.”
He sat beside her with his knees drawn up, staring at nothing.
What is he seeing? Adelia put her undamaged arm round him and hugged him close. He is my only companion, she thought, as I am his. The two of them had survived a travail that no one now living had made; only they knew how great was the distance they’d traveled and how long it had taken them and, indeed, how far they had yet to go. Exposure to the extremes of darkness had made them aware of things, not least about themselves, that they should not have known.
“Tell me,” she said.
“Nothin’ to tell. She poles up to where I was fishing and it’s ‘Oh, Ulf, I think the punt’s leaking.’ Nice as honey. Next thing there’s stuff over my face and I’m gone. Woke up in the pit.”
He threw back his head and an incredulous cry that spoke for the shattered innocence of the ages rang through the room. “Why?”
“I don’t know.”
Desperately, the little boy turned on her. “She was a lily. He was a crusader.”
“They were freaks. It didn’t show in their countenance, but they were freaks that found each other. Ulf, there are more of us than there are of those. Infinitely more. Hold fast to that.” She was trying to hold fast to it herself.
The child’s eyes fed off hers. “You come after me.”
“They were not going to have you.”
He considered it for a while, and then something of its old self crept back into the ugly little face. “I heard you. Gor, you didn’t half swear. I ain’t heard cussing like that, not even when the troopers came to town.”
“You ever tell anybody and it’s back to the pit.”
Gyltha was in the doorway. Like Rowley, who loomed behind her, she was furious with relief. Tears ran down her face. “You little maggot,” she shouted at Ulf. “Didn’t I tell you? I’ll wallop your backside for you.”
Sobbing, she ran to gather up her grandson, who gave a sigh of contentment and held out his arms to her.
“Out,” Rowley told them. There were laden servants behind him; Adelia saw the concerned face of Brother Swithin, the priory guest-master.
As Gyltha headed for the door with Ulf in her arms, she paused to ask Rowley, “Sure as I can’t do nothing for her?”
“No. Out you go.”
Gyltha still lingered, looking at Adelia. “Was a good day when you came to Cambridge,” she said. She went out.
Men came in with a huge tin bath and began pouring steaming jugs of water in it; one had bars of yellow soap resting on a pile of the harsh segments of old sheeting that passed for towels in the monastery.
Adelia watched the preparations hungrily; if she could not wash the filth the killers had imposed on her mind, she could at least scrub it from her body.
Brother Swithin was troubled by the arrangements. “The lady is injured, I should fetch the infirmarian.”
Rowley said, grimly, “When I found the lady, she was rolling on the ground in battle with the forces of darkness; she will survive.”
“There should at least be a female attendant…”
“Out,” Rowley said. “Out now.” He opened his arms and scooped the whole boiling of them to the door and shut it on them. He was a massive man, Adelia realized. The fat she’d derided was lessened; he was still heavy, but great strength of muscle had been revealed.
Lumbering to where she lay, he put his hands under her armpits, lifted her so that she stood on the floor, and began undressing her, picking her dreadful clothes off with surprising delicacy.
She felt very small. Was this seduction? For certain he would stop when he reached her shift.
It wasn’t and he didn’t; this was care. As he picked up her naked body and slipped it into the bath, she looked into his face; it might have been Gordinus’s, intent over an autopsy.
I should be embarrassed, she thought. I would be embarrassed, but I am not.
The bath was warm and she slid down it, grabbing one of the soaps before she went completely underwater, scrubbing, rejoicing in the harshness against her skin. Raising her arms was difficult, so she surfaced long enough to ask him to wash her hair and felt his fingers strong against her scalp. The servants had left ewers of fresh water that he poured over her hair to rinse it.
She couldn’t bend to reach her feet without pain, so he laved those as well, intent, meticulously going between the toes.
She thought, watching him, I am in a bath, naked in a bath with no bubbles, and a man is washing me; my reputation is doomed and to hell with it. I’ve been to hell and all I wanted in it was to be alive for this man. Who carried me out of it.
It was as if she and Ulf, all of them, had fallen into a world not even nightmare had prepared them for but which coexisted with the normal so closely that an unguarded step gained access to it. It was at the end of everything, or perhaps at the beginning, a savagery that, though they had survived it, revealed convention as an illusion. The thread of her life had so nearly been sheared that never again would she depend on having a future.
And in that moment, she had wanted this man. Still wanted him.
Adelia, who’d thought she was conversant with all conditions of the body, was new to this one. She felt soapy, lubricated, within as well as without; it was as if she were bursting into foliage, her skin rising toward him, desperate for him to touch it-he who, at the moment, was regarding not her breasts but the bruises across her poor ribs.
“Did he hurt you? Truly hurt you, I mean?” he asked.
She wondered what he considered the bruises and the wound in her arm to be, and her eye. Then she thought: Ah, was I raped? It matters to them. Virginity is their holy grail.
“And if he did?” she asked gently.
“That’s the thing,” he said. He was kneeling beside the bath now so their heads could be on a level. “All the way to the hill, I was seeing what he could do to you, but, as long you survived it, I didn’t care.” He shook his head at the extraordinary. “Fouled or in pieces, I wanted you back. You were mine, not his.”
Oh, oh.
“He didn’t touch me,” she said, “apart from this and this. I’ll mend.”
“Good,” he said briskly, and got up. “Well, there’s much to do. I can’t be dallying with women in baths; there’s arrangements to be made, not least for our marriage.”
“Marriage?”
“I shall speak to the prior, of course, and he will speak to Mansur; these things must be done with propriety. And there’s the king…tomorrow, perhaps, or the day after, when all’s settled.”
“Marriage?”
“You have to marry me now, woman,” he said, surprised. “I’ve seen you in your bath.”
He was going, actually leaving.
She hauled herself painfully out of the bath, grabbing one of the towels. There wouldn’t be a tomorrow, didn’t he realize? Tomorrows were full of awful things. Today, now, was the essential. There was no time for propriety.
“Don’t leave me, Rowley. I can’t endure to be alone.”
And that was true. Not all the forces of darkness were vanquished; one was still somewhere in this building; some would stalk her memory always. Only he could keep them out.
Wincing, she slid her arms round his neck and felt the warm, damp softness of her skin against his.
Gently, he disengaged them. “This is another thing, don’t you see, woman? This is a marriage between us; it must be in accordance with holy law.”
A fine moment, she thought, for him to worry about holy law. “There isn’t time, Rowley. There isn’t any time beyond that door.”
“No, there isn’t. I’ve got a great deal to see to.” But he was beginning to pant. Her bare feet were standing on his boots, the towel had slipped, and every inch of her body that could reach it was pressed against his.
“You’re making this very hard for me, Adelia.” His mouth quirked. “In more ways than one.”
“I know.” She could feel it.
He pretended to sigh. “It won’t be easy making love to a woman with broken ribs.”
“Try,” she said.
“Oh, dear Christ,” he said harshly. And carried her to the bed. And tried. And did very well, first cradling her and crooning to her in Arabic as if neither English nor French was sufficient to express how beautiful she was to him, black eye or not, and after that, supporting his weight on his arms so as not to crush her.
And she knew herself to be beautiful to him, just as he was beautiful to her, and this was sex, was it, this throbbing, slippery ride to the stars and back.
“Can you do it again?” she asked.
“Good God, woman. No, I can’t. Well, not yet. It’s been a difficult day.” But again, after a while, he tried and did equally well.
Brother Swithin was not generous with his candles, and they went out, leaving the room in semidarkness from the rain still lashing against the shutters. She lay crooked in her lover’s arm, breathing in the wonderful smell of soap and sweat.
“I love you so much,” she said.
“Are you crying?” He sat up.
“No.”
“Yes, you are. Coitus does that to some women.”
“You’d know, of course.” Wiping her eyes with the back of her hand.
“Sweetheart, this is completion. He’s gone, she will be…well, we’ll see. I shall be rewarded as I deserve, and you, too-not that you deserve anything. Henry will give me a nice barony that we can both get fat on and rear dozens of nice, fat little barons.”
He got out of bed and reached for his clothes.
His cloak is missing, she thought. It is somewhere outside this room with Rak shasa’s head in it. Everything terrible is beyond that door; the only completion you and I shall ever have is with us now.
“Don’t go,” she said.
“I’ll be back.” His mind had already moved away from her. “I can’t stay here all day, forced to swive insatiable women against my will. There’s things to do. Go to sleep.”
And he’d gone.
Still watching the door, she thought, I could have him for always. I could have him and our little barons. What is playing the doctor compared to happiness like that? Nothing. Who are the dead to rob me of life?
With that settled, she lay back and closed her eyes, yawning, replete. But as she drifted into sleep, her last coherent thought was of the clitoris. What an organ of surprise and wonder it is. I must pay it more attention the next time I dissect a female.
Always and ever the doctor.
SHE CAME TO, protesting at someone’s repetition of her name, determined to stay asleep. She sniffed in the pungency of clothes kept in pennyroyal against the moth.
“Gyltha? What time is it?”
“Night. And time you was up, girl. I brought you fresh clothes.”
“No.” She was stiff and her bruises were aching; she was staying in bed. She made a concession by squinting out of one eye. “How’s Ulf?”
“Sleepin’ the sleep of the just.” Gyltha’s rough hand cupped Adelia’s cheek for a moment. “But you both got to get up. There’s some high-and-mighties gatherin’ over the way as want answers to their questions.”
“I suppose so,” she said wearily. They were quick with their trial. Her evidence and Ulf’s would be essential, but there were things better left unremembered.
Gyltha went for food, collops of bacon swimming in a beany, delicious broth, and Adelia was so hungry that she hoisted herself into a sitting position. “I can feed myself.”
“No, you bloody can’t.” Since words failed her, Gyltha’s gratitude for the safe return of her grandson could best be expressed by stuffing huge spoonfuls into Adelia’s mouth as into a baby bird’s.
There was one question that had to be asked through the bacon. “Where have they put…?” She couldn’t bring herself to name the madwoman. And I suppose, Adelia thought with even greater weariness, because she is a madwoman, I must see to it that they do not torture her.
“Next door. Being waited on like Lady Muck-a-muck.” Gyltha’s lips shriveled as if touched by acid. “They don’t believe it.”
“Don’t believe what? Who don’t?”
“As her did them…things, along of him.” Neither could Gyltha bring herself to use the names of the killers.
“Ulf can tell them. So can I. Gyltha, she threw me down the shaft.”
“See her do it, did you? And what’s Ulf’s word worth? A ignorant little slip as sells eels along of his ignorant old gran?”
“It was her.” Adelia spat out food because panic was rising in her throat. It was one thing for the nun to be spared torture, quite another that she be set free; the woman was insane; she could do it again. “Peter, Mary, Harold, Ulric…of course they went with her; they trusted her. A holy sister? Offering jujubes a crusader taught her how to make? Then the laudanum over their noses-believe me, there’s a plentiful supply at the convent.” Afresh, Adelia saw delicate hands upraised in prayer turn downward into clawed iron bands. “Almighty God…” She rubbed her forehead.
Gyltha shrugged. “Saint Raddy’s nuns don’t do that, seemingly.”
“But it was the river. I knew, that’s why I got into her boat. She had the freedom of the river, up and down-to Grantchester, to him. She was familiar; people waved at her or didn’t notice her at all. A saintly nun taking supplies to anchorites? Nobody to check her movements, certainly not Prioress Joan. And Walburga, if she was with her, Walburga always went off to her aunt’s. What do they think she was doing when she stayed out all night?”
“I know this, Ulf do knows it. But see…” Gyltha was a dogged devil’s advocate. “She’s near as hurt as you are. They brought in one of the sisters to bathe her on account of I wouldn’t touch the hag, but I took a look. Bruises all over, bites, eye closed like yourn. The nun as was a-washing her wept for how the poor thing suffered, and all for coming to help you.”
“She…liked it. She enjoyed him hurting her. It’s true.” For Gyltha had drawn back, frowning with incomprehension. How to explain to her, to anybody, that the nun’s screams of terror during the beast’s attack had mingled with shrieks of insane, exquisite joy?
She can’t understand such perversity, Adelia thought in despair, and I can’t either. Dully, she said, “She procured those children for him. And she killed Simon.”
The bowl slipped out of Gyltha’s hand and rolled across the room, spilling broth over the wide, elm floorboards. “Master Simon?”
Adelia was back in Grantchester on the night of the feast, watching Simon of Naples talk excitedly to the tax collector at the end of the high table, the tallies in his wallet, only a few places from the chair in which sat the giver of the feast, whom they incriminated, only a few more from the woman who had procured the murderer’s victims for him.
“I saw him tell her to kill Simon.” And she saw them again now, dancing together, the crusader and the nun, the one instructing the other.
Dear Lord, she should have realized then. Irascible, woman-hating Brother Gilbert had as good as told her without knowing the import: “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.”
Simon leaving early, to examine the tallies he’d gained and find out who it was who had a financial reason for implicating Jews in the murders. His host coming back from the garden after a short absence, having seen his creature on her way.
“She left the feast early, Grantchester. I think I saw the other nuns later on, but not her. Did I? Yes, I’m sure I did. And the prioress stayed even later.”
And then what? The gentlest and most angelic of the sisters…? “So far to walk on this dark night, Master Simon, may I not punt you home? Yes, yes, there is room. I am alone, glad of your company.”
Adelia thought of the Cam’s willow-dark stretches and a slim figure with wrists strong as steel stabbing a pole into the water, pressing it down on a man as on a speared fish while he floundered and drowned.
“He told her to kill Simon and steal his wallet,” Adelia said. “She did what he told her; she was enslaved to him. In the pit I had to take Ulf from her. I think she was going to kill him so that he couldn’t give her away.”
“Don’t I know?” Gyltha asked, even as her hands made pushing notions against the knowledge. “Ain’t Ulf told me what she did? And me knowing what both would have done to the boy if the good Lord hadn’t sent you to stop ’em. What they did to the others…” Her eyes went into slits and she stood up. “Let’s you and me go next door and stick a pillow on her face.”
“No. Everyone must know what she did, what he did.”
Rakshasa had escaped justice. His terrible end…Adelia shut her mind to avoid the vision against the sunrise…had not been justice. Eliminating that creature from the earth it sullied had not weighted its side of the scales against the pile of little bodies it had left in its passage from the Holy Land.
Even if they had captured it, dragged it to the assize, put it on trial, and executed it, the scales would have remained unbalanced for those whose children had been torn from them, but at least people would have known what it had done and seen it pay. The Jews would have been publicly exonerated. Most important, the law that brought order from chaos, that separated civilized humanity from the animals, would have been upheld.
While Gyltha helped her to dress, Adelia examined her conscience to see whether her objection against capital punishment had been abandoned. No, it had not; it was a principle. The mad must be restrained, certainly, yet not judicially killed. Rakshasa had escaped legal exposure: His collaborator must not. Her actions had to be recounted in full common view so that some equilibrium was brought into the world.
“She has to stand trial,” Adelia said.
“You think she’s a-going to?”
A knock on the door was Prior Geoffrey’s. “My dear girl, my poor, dear girl. I thank the Lord for your courage and deliverance.”
She brushed his prayers aside. “Prior, the nun…She was his accomplice in everything. As much a killer as he was, she murdered Simon of Naples without a thought. You do believe that?”
“I fear I must. I have listened to Ulf’s account, which, though confused by whatever soporific she gave him, leaves no doubt that she abducted him to that place where he was put in danger of his life. I have also heard what Sir Rowley and the hunter had to tell. This very evening I visited that hole with them…”
“You’ve been to Wandlebury?”
“I have,” the prior said wearily. “And never was I so close to hell. Oh, dear, the equipment we found there. One can only rejoice that Sir Joscelin’s soul will burn for eternity. Joscelin…” The emphasis was to help him believe it. “A local boy. I had marked him as a future sheriff of the county.” A spark of indignation enlivened the prior’s tired eyes. “I even accepted a donation toward our new chapel from those heinous hands.”
“Jews’ money,” Adelia said. “He owed it to the Jews.”
He sighed. “I suppose it was. Well, at least our friends in the tower have been absolved.”
“And is the town to be made aware that they are absolved?” Adelia jerked an inelegant thumb toward the room in which the nun was housed. “She will be put on trial?” She was getting restive; there was a reservation, a fogginess, in some of the prior’s answers.
He went to the window and opened the shutter a crack. “They said it would rain. The dawn was a true shepherd’s warning, apparently. Well, the gardens need it after a dry spring.” He closed the shutter. “Yes, an announcement declaring the Jews’ innocence shall be trumpeted in full assize-thank heaven it is still in progress. But as for the…female…I have asked for a convocation of all those concerned to get to the truth of the matter. They are gathering now.”
“A convocation? Why not a trial?” And why at nighttime?
As if she hadn’t spoken, he said, “I expected it to meet at the castle, but the clerk of the assize deemed that an inquiry be better held here so that the legal processes should not be confused. And after all, it is here that the children are buried. Well, we shall see, we shall see.”
Such a good man, her first friend in England and she had not thanked him. “My lord, I owe you my life. If it hadn’t been for your gift of the dog, bless him…Did you see what was done to him?”
“I saw.” Prior Geoffrey shook his head, then smiled a little. “I ordered his remnants gathered and given to Hugh, whom Brother Gilbert suspects of secretly burying his hounds in the priory graveyard when no one is by. The Safeguard may well lie with human beings who are less faithful.”
It had been a small grief among all the rest but a grief nevertheless; Adelia was comforted.
“However,” the prior went on, “as you and I know, you also owe your life to someone with more right to it, and, in part, I am here for him.”
But her mind had reverted to the nun. They’re going to let her go. None of us saw her kill: not Ulf, not Rowley, not me. She’s a nun; the Church fears a scandal. They’re going to let her go.
“I won’t have it, Prior,” she said.
Prior Geoffrey’s mouth had been shaping words that obviously pleased him; now it stopped, open. He blinked. “A somewhat hasty decision, Adelia.”
“People must know what was done. She must be brought to trial, even if she is adjudged too mad for sentence. For the children’s sake, for Simon’s, for mine; I found their lair and was near killed for it. I will have justice-and it must be seen to be done.” Not from blood-lust, nor even revenge, but because, without a completion, the nightmares of too many people would be left open-ended.
Then something the prior had said caught up with her. “I beg your pardon, my lord?”
Prior Geoffrey sighed and began again. “Before he was forced to return to the assize-the king has arrived, you know-he approached me. For lack of anyone else, he seems to regard me as in loco parentis…”
“The king?” Adelia wasn’t keeping up.
The prior sighed once more. “Sir Rowley Picot. Sir Rowley has asked me to approach you with a request-indeed, his manner suggested it to be a foregone conclusion-for your hand in marriage.”
It was all one with this extraordinary day. She had gone down into the pit and been raised from it. A man had been torn to death. Next door was a murderess. She had lost her virginity, gloriously lost it, and the man who had taken it now reverted to etiquette, using the good offices of a surrogate father to request her hand.
“I should add,” Prior Geoffrey said, “that the proposal is made at some cost. At the assize, the king offered Sir Rowley the bishopric of Saint Albans, and with my own ears I heard Picot reject the position on the grounds that he wished to remain free to marry.”
He wants me as much as that?
“King Henry was not pleased,” the prior went on. “He has a particular wish to appoint our good tax collector to the see of Saint Albans, nor is he used to being thwarted. But Sir Rowley was not to be moved.”
Now it was Adelia’s mouth that remained paused over the answer she had known she must make, unable to make it.
With the rush of love came fear that she would accept because she so very much wanted to, because this morning Rowley had soothed away the mental damage done and purified it. Which, of course, was the danger in itself. He has made such sacrifice for me. Isn’t it right, and beautiful, that I make similar sacrifice for him?
Sacrifice.
Prior Geoffrey said, “He may have disappointed King Henry, but he charges me to tell you that he is still well regarded and marked for high position so that there can be no disadvantage to you by the match.” When Adelia still didn’t answer, he went on: “Indeed, I have to say I would be content to see you bound to him.”
Bound.
“Adelia, my dear.” Prior Geoffrey took her hand. “The man deserves an answer.”
He did. She gave it.
The door opened and Brother Gilbert stood on the threshold, rendering the scene before him-his superior in the company of two women in a bedroom-into something naughty. “The lords are assembled, Prior.”
“Then we must attend them.” The prior raised Adelia’s hand and kissed it, but it was his wink at Gyltha-who winked back-that was naughty.
THE CONVOKED LORDS were met in the monastery’s refectory rather than its church so that the canons were free to keep the hours of vigil where and when they always did; nor, having taken supper and it being some hours until breakfast, need they disturb the convocation at its business.
Or even know it has taken place, Adelia thought.
They called it a convocation, but it was, in effect, a trial. Not of the young nun who stood suitably chaperoned between her prioress and Sister Walburga, her head modestly bowed and her hands meekly folded.
The accused was Vesuvia Adelia Rachel Ortese Aguilar, a foreigner, who, according to an angry Prioress Joan called from her bed, had made an unwarranted, obscene, devilish accusation against an innocent and godly member of the holy order of Saint Radegund, and must be whipped for it.
Adelia stood in the middle of the hall with the imps that studded the beams of its hammer roof grinning down at her. Its long table with its benches had been pushed to one side against a wall, so that the line of chairs at the far end in which the judges sat was off-center, skewing the room’s otherwise lovely proportions for her and giving another scrape to nerves already quivering from disbelief, anger, and, it had to be said, plain fear.
For facing her were three of the several justices in eyre who had come to Cambridge for its assize-the Bishops of Norwich and Lincoln, and the Abbot of Ely. They represented England’s legal authority. They could close their jeweled fists and crush Adelia like a pomander. Also, they were cross at being summoned from a sleep they deserved after the long day’s hearings at the assize, at traveling from the castle to Saint Augustine’s in darkness and pouring rain-and at her. She could feel hostility emanating from them strong enough to blow the floor’s rushes down its length and into a pile at her feet.
Most hostile of all was an Archdeacon of Canterbury, not a judge but someone who regarded himself, and, apparently, was regarded by the others, as a mouthpiece for the late, sainted Thomas à Becket and seemed to think that any attack on a member of the Church-such as Adelia’s denunciation of Veronica, sister of Saint Radegund-was comparable to Henry II’s knights spilling Becket’s brains on his cathedral floor.
That they were all churchmen had taken Prior Geoffrey aback. “My lords, I’d hoped that some lords temporal might also attend.”
They silenced him; they were, after all, his spiritual superiors. “It is purely a Church matter.”
With them was a young man in nonclerical dress, slightly amused by the whole proceeding and using a portable writing desk to make notes of it on a parchment. Adelia knew his name only because one of the others addressed him by it-Hubert Walter.
Behind their chairs were ranged a selection of assize attendants, two clerks, one of them asleep where he stood, a man-at-arms who’d forgotten to take off his nightcap before putting on his helmet, and two bailiffs with manacles at their belt, each carrying a mace.
Adelia stood apart and alone, though for a while Mansur had stood beside her.
“What is…that, Prior?”
“He is Mistress Adelia’s attendant, my lord.”
“A Saracen?”
“A distinguished Arab doctor, my lords.”
“She has no need of either a doctor or an attendant. Nor have we.”
Mansur had been banished from the room.
Prior Geoffrey was standing to one side of the line of chairs with Sheriff Baldwin-Brother Gilbert behind them both.
He had done his best, bless him; the dreadful story had been told, Adelia’s and Simon’s part in it explained, their discoveries and Simon’s death recounted, the evidence delivered of the prior’s own eyes as to what lay beneath Wandlebury Hill-and he had outlined the charge against Sister Veronica.
He had carefully mentioned neither Adelia’s examination of the children’s bodies nor her qualification for it-a neglect for which she thanked God; she was in enough trouble, she knew, without facing an accusation of witchcraft.
Hugh the hunter had been called into the refectory with his frank-pledges, the men who, under England’s legal system, answered for his honesty. He’d stood with his hat on his heart to state that, looking down the shaft, he had seen a bloody, naked figure that he recognized as Sir Joscelin of Grantchester. That he had later descended into the tunnels. That he had examined the flint knife. That he had recognized the dog collar attached to the chain in the womblike chamber…
“’Twas Sir Joscelin’s, my lords. I’d seen it a dozen times on his own hound in former days-had his seal embossed in its leather, so it did.”
The dog collar was produced, the seal examined.
No doubt that Sir Joscelin of Grantchester had killed the children-the judges had been appalled. “Joscelin of Grantchester shall be declared base felon and murderer. The remains of his corpse shall hang in Cambridge market square for all to see and shall not be accorded Christian burial.”
As for Sister Veronica…
There was no direct evidence against her, because Ulf was not allowed to give it.
“How old is the child, Prior? He may not be accorded frankpledge until he is twelve.”
“Nine, my lord, but a percipient and honest boy.”
“Of what degree?”
“He is free, my lords, not a villein. He works for his grandmother and sells eels.”
At this point, there was an interjection from Brother Gilbert, who whispered treacherously into the ear of the archdeacon with every sign of satisfaction.
Ah, the grandmother was not married, never had been, possibly the progenitor of illegitimate children. The boy was likely a bastard, then, of no degree whatsoever: “The law does not recognize him.”
So Ulf, like Mansur, was banished to the kitchen that lay behind the refectory, with Gyltha’s hand over his mouth to stop him from shouting out, both of them listening on the other side of the open hatch from which a smell of bacon and broth came to mingle with that of the rich, rain-dampened ermine lining the judges’ cloaks, while Rabbi Gotsce, also in the kitchen, translated into English for them proceedings that were being held in Latin.
The court had been scandalized by his very presence.
“You would bring a Jew before us, Prior Geoffrey?”
“My lords, the Jews of this town have been grossly maligned. It can be shown that Sir Joscelin was one of their chief debtors, and it was part of his wickedness to see them accused of murder and their tallies burned.”
“Has the Jew evidence of this?”
“The tallies were destroyed, my lord, as I said. But surely the rabbi is entitled to…”
“The law does not recognize him.”
The law didn’t recognize, either, that a nun whose purity of soul shone in her face could do what Adelia had said she had done.
Her prioress spoke for her…
“Like Saint Radegund, our beloved foundress, Sister Veronica was born in Thuringia,” she said. “But her father, a merchant, settled in Poitiers, where she was offered to the convent at the age of three and sent to England while still a child, though one whose devotion to God and His Holy Mother was in evidence then and has been ever since.”
Prioress Joan had tempered her voice; her rein-callused hands were in her sleeves; she was every inch the superior of a well-ordered house of God. “My lords, I stand for this nun’s modesty and temperance and her devotion to the Lord-many a time when the other nuns were at recreation, Sister Veronica has been on her knees beside our blessed little saint, Peter of Trumpington.”
There was a muffled squeak from the kitchen.
“Whom she lured to his death,” Adelia said.
“Hold your tongue, woman,” the archdeacon told her.
The prioress turned on Adelia, finger pointing, her voice a hunting horn. “Judge, my lords. Judge between that, a slandering viper, and here, this exemplar of saintliness.”
It was a pity that the dress Gyltha had brought her from Old Benjamin’s was the one Adelia had worn to the Grantchester feast, too low in the bodice and too high in color to compare well with the nuns’ sleekly sober black and white. A pity, too, that in her joyous fluster over Ulf’s return, Gyltha had forgotten to bring a veil or cap and that, therefore, Adelia, whose previous cap lay somewhere under Wandlebury Hill, was as bareheaded as a harlot.
No one except Prior Geoffrey spoke for her.
Not Sir Rowley Picot; he wasn’t there.
The Archdeacon of Canterbury rose to his feet, which were still in slippers. He was a tiny old man, full of energy. “Let us expedite this matter, my lords, that we may return to our beds and, should we find it has been raised out of malice”-the face he turned on Adelia was that of a malevolent monkey-“let those responsible be sent to the whipping post. Now, then…”
One by one, the bricks on which Adelia had built her case were examined and discarded.
The word of an eel-selling bastard minor to condemn a bride of Christ?
The good sister’s familiarity with the river? But who was not familiar with boatmanship in this waterlogged town?
Laudanum? Was it not generally available at any apothecary’s?
Spending the occasional night away from her convent? Well…
For the first time, the young man called Hubert Walter raised his voice, and his head from his note-taking: “Perhaps that does call for explanation, my lord. It is…unusual.”
“If I may speak, your lordships.” Prioress Joan stepped forward again. “Taking supplies to our anchorites is an act of charity that exhausts Sister Veronica’s strength-see how frail she is. Accordingly, I have allowed her permission to spend such nights in rest and contemplation with one of our lady eremites before returning to the convent.”
“Laudable, laudable.” The eyes of the judges rested appreciatively on Sister Veronica’s willow-wand figure.
Which lady eremite, Adelia wondered, and why should she not be hauled before this court to be asked how many nights she and the frail Veronica have spent in contemplation?
None, I’ll warrant.
But it was useless; the anchorite, being an anchorite, would not come. Demanding that she attend could only confirm Adelia’s stridency as opposed to Veronica’s respectful silence.
Where are you, Rowley? I cannot stand here alone. Rowley, they’re going to let her go.
The dismemberment went on. Who had seen Simon of Naples die? Had not the inquest confirmed that the Jew drowned accidentally?
The walls of the great room were closing in. A bailiff studied the manacles he carried as if to judge them small enough for Adelia’s wrists. Above her head, the gargoyles gibbered in glee and the eyes of the judges stripped the skin off her.
Now the archdeacon was questioning her motive in going to Wandlebury Hill at all. “What led her to that infamous place, my lords? How did she know what went on there? Can we not assume that it was she who was in league with the devil of Grantchester, and not the holy sister she accuses-whose only crime, it seems, was to follow her out of concern for her safety?”
Prior Geoffrey opened his mouth but was forestalled by the clerk Hubert Walter, still amused. “I think we must accept, my lords, that all four children died before this female set foot in England. We may at least acquit her of their murder.”
“Really?” The archdeacon was disappointed. “Nevertheless, we have proved her a slanderer and, by her own statement, she had knowledge of the pit and its circumstances. I find that curious, my lords. I find it suspicious.”
“So do I.” The Bishop of Norwich broke in, yawning. “Take the damned female to the whipping post and be done with it.”
“Is that the verdict of you all?”
It was.
Adelia shouted, not for herself but for Cambridgeshire’s children. “Don’t let her go, I beg you. She can kill again.”
The judges weren’t listening, not looking at her-their attention had been claimed by somebody who’d entered the refectory from the kitchen, where he’d taken himself a bowl of bacon broth and was now eating it.
He blinked at the assembly. “A trial, is it?”
Adelia waited for this plainly dressed man in leather to be blasted back to where he came from. A couple of boar hounds had slouched in with him-a hunter, then, who’d wandered here by mistake.
But the lord judges were standing. Were bowing. Were remaining on their feet.
Henry Plantagenet, King of England, Duke of Normandy and Aquitaine, Count of Anjou, hoisted himself up on the refectory table, letting his legs dangle, and looked around. “Well?”
“Not a trial, my lord.” The Bishop of Norwich was as awake and fluttering as a lark now. “A convocation, merely a preliminary inquiry into the matter of the town’s murdered children. The killer has been identified, but that”-he pointed in the direction of Adelia-“that female has brought an accusation of complicity against this nun of Saint Radegund.”
“Ah, yes,” the king said, pleasantly, “I thought our lords spiritual were somewhat overrepresented. Where’s De Luci? De Glanville? The lords temporal?”
“We did not wish to disturb their rest, my lord.”
“Very thoughtful,” Henry said, still pleasant though the bishop quailed. “And how are we getting on?”
Hubert Walter had left his place to stand by the king, holding out his parchment.
Henry took it, putting down his bowl of broth. “I hope nobody minds if I make myself familiar with the case-it’s been causing me some trouble, you see; my Cambridge Jews have been incarcerated in the castle tower because of it.”
He added mildly enough, but, again, the judges shifted in discomfort, “And I’ve lost revenue accordingly.”
Scanning the parchment, he leaned down and took a handful of rushes from the floor. There was silence as he read, except for the beat of rain against the high windows and a contented gnawing from one of the dogs, who’d found a bone under the table.
Adelia’s legs were trembling so much that she didn’t know whether they’d hold her up; this plain, casual-seeming man had brought a directionless terror into the refectory.
He began murmuring, holding the parchment to a candelabra on the table in order to see it better. “Boy says abducted by the nun…not recognizable in law…hmm.” He put one of the rushes he was holding down beside the light. Absently, he said, “Splendid broth, Prior.”
“Thank you, my lord.”
“The nun’s knowledge and use of the river”-another rush was laid beside the first-“An opiate…” This time, the rush was put across the top of the other two. “All-night vigils with an anchorite…” He looked up. “Has the anchorite been called to witness? Oh, no, I forgot-this is not a trial.”
Adelia’s legs became weaker, this time with a hope so tenuous she hardly dared entertain it. Henry Plantagenet’s rushes, neatly crisscrossed as if he were going to play spillikin with them, were multiplying with each piece of evidence she’d brought against Veronica.
“Simon of Naples…drowned whilst in possession of tallies…the river again…a Jew, of course, well, what can you expect…” Henry shook his head at the carelessness of Jews and read on.
“The laywoman’s suspicions…Wand-le-bury Hill…maintains she was thrown down a pit…didn’t see who…tussles…laywoman and nun…both injured…child rescued…local knight responsible…”
He looked up, then down at the pile of rushes, then at the judges.
The Bishop of Norwich cleared his throat. “As you see, my lord, all the charges against Sister Veronica are unsubstantiated. Nobody can incriminate her because…”
“Except the boy, of course,” Henry interrupted, “but we can’t give any legal weight to him, can we? No, I agree…all circumstantial.”
He looked once more at his rushes. “Hell of a lot of circumstance, mind you, but…” The king puffed out his cheeks, blew hard, and the rushes scattered. “So what did you decide to do about this slanderous lady…what’s her name? Adele? Your handwriting is pitiable, Hubert.”
“I apologize, my lord. She is called Adelia.”
The archdeacon was becoming restive. “It is unpardonable that she should level calumnies such as these against a religious; it cannot be overlooked.”
“It certainly can’t,” Henry agreed. “Should we hang her, do you think?”
The archdeacon battled on. “The woman is a foreigner; she has come from nowhere in company with a Jew and a Saracen. Is she to be allowed to slander Holy Mother Church? By what right? Who sent her and why? To sow discord? I say the devil has put her amongst us.”
“It was me, really,” the king said.
The room was silenced as if an avalanche of snow had muffled it. From the door behind the judges came the sound of shuffling, splashing feet as Barnwell’s canons groped their way through the rain along the cloister to church.
Henry looked at Adelia for the first time and exposed his ferocious little teeth in a grin. “Didn’t know that, did you?”
He turned on the judges, who, not having been invited to sit, were still standing. “You see, my lords, children were disappearing in Cambridge and so were my revenues. Jews in the tower. Trouble in the streets. As I said to Aaron of Lincoln-you know him, Bishop; he lent you money for your cathedral-Aaron, I said, something must be done about Cambridge. If the Jews are slaughtering infants for their rituals, we must hang them. If not, somebody else must hang. Which reminds me…” He raised his voice. “Come in, Rabbi, I’m told this is not a trial.”
The door from the kitchen opened and Rabbi Gotsce entered cautiously, bowing with a frequency that showed he was nervous.
The king took no more notice of him. “Anyway, Aaron went away to consider and, having considered, returned. He said that the man we needed was a certain Simon of Naples-another Jew, I fear, my lords, but an investigator of renown. Aaron also suggested that Simon be asked to bring with him a master in the art of death.” Henry bestowed another of his smiles on the judges. “I expect you are asking yourselves: What is a master in the art of death? I know I did. A necromancer? A species of refined torturer? But no, it appears there are qualified men who can read corpses and, in this case, might gain from the manner of the Cambridge children’s murder an indication as to the perpetrator. Is there any more of this excellent broth?”
The transition was so fast that it was some minutes before Prior Geoffrey roused himself and crossed to the hatch as if a man in a dream. It seemed natural that a woman’s hand extend a steaming bowl to him. He took it, walked back, and proffered it to the king on bended knee.
The king had employed the interim in chatting to Prioress Joan. “I hoped to go after boar tonight. Is it too late, do you think? Will they have returned to their lair?”
The prioress was bewildered but charmed. “Not yet, my lord. May I recommend you employ your hounds toward Babraham, where the woods…” Her voice trailed away as realization overtook her. “I repeat hearsay, my lord. I have little time for hunting.”
“Really, madam?” Henry appeared gently surprised. “I have heard you famed as a regular Diana.”
An ambush, Adelia thought. She realized she was watching an exercise that, whether it succeeded or not, raised cunning to the realm of art.
“So,” the king said, chewing, “thank you, Prior. So, I asked Aaron, ‘Where in hell can I find a master in the art of death?’ And he said, ‘Not in hell, my lord, in Salerno.’ He likes his little quips, does our Aaron. It seems the excellent medical school in Salerno produces men qualified in that recondite science. So, to cut a long story short, I wrote to the King of Sicily.” He beamed at the prioress. “He’s a friend, you know. I wrote begging the services of Simon of Naples and a death master.”
Having swallowed too quickly, the king began to cough and had to be slapped on the back by Hubert Walter.
“Thank you, Hubert.” He wiped his eyes. “Well, two things went awry. For one thing, I was out of England putting down the bloody Lusignans when Simon of Naples arrived in this country. For another, it appears that in Salerno they qualify women in medicine-can you believe it, my lords?-and some idiot who couldn’t tell Adam from Eve sent not a master in the art of death but a mistress. There she is.”
He looked at Adelia, though nobody else did; they watched the king, always the king. “So I’m afraid, my lords, we can’t hang her-much as we want to. She’s not our property, you see, she’s a subject of the King of Sicily, and friend William will want her returned to him in good condition.”
He was down from the table now, walking the floor and picking his teeth as if in deep reflection. “What do you say, my lords? Do you think, in view of the fact that this woman and a Jew, between them, seem to have saved further children from a nasty death at the hands of a gentleman whose head is even now pickling in the castle brine bucket…” He drew a puzzled breath, shaking his head. “Can we so much as scourge her?”
Nobody said anything; they weren’t meant to.
“In fact, my lords, King William will take it amiss if there is interference with Mistress Adelia, any attempt to charge her with witchcraft or malpractice.” The king’s voice had become a whip. “And so shall I.”
I am your servant all my days. Adelia was limp with gratitude and admiration. But can you, even you, great Plantagenet, bring the nun to open trial?
Rowley was in the room now, large, and bowing to the much shorter Henry, handing things to him. “I am sorry to have kept you waiting, my lord.” A look passed between them and Rowley nodded. They were in league, he and the king.
He walked up the refectory to stand beside Prior Geoffrey. His cloak was dark with rain and he smelled of fresh air; he was fresh air, and she was suddenly overjoyed that her bodice was low and her head bare, like a harlot. She could have stripped for him all over again. I am your harlot whenever you want, and proud of it.
He was saying something. The prior was giving instructions to Brother Gilbert, who left the room.
Henry had gone back to his place on the table. He was beckoning to the fattest of the three nuns in the center of the hall. “You, Sister. Yes, you. Come here.”
Prioress Joan watched with suspicion as Walburga advanced hesitantly toward the king. Veronica’s eyes remained downcast, her hands as still as they had been from the first.
More gently now, but with every word audible, the king said, “Tell me, Sister, what you do at the convent? Speak up. Nothing is going to happen to you, I promise.”
It came, breathy at first, but few could resist Henry when he was pleasant, and Walburga wasn’t one of them. “I contemplates the Holy Word, my lord, like the others, and say the prayers. And I pole supplies to the anchorites…” A note of doubt there.
It came to Adelia that Walburga, with her shaky Latin, was so bewildered by the proceedings that she had not attended to most of them.
“And we keep the hours, almost nearly always…”
“Do you eat well? Plenty of meat?”
“Oh, yes, my lord.” Walburga was on firm ground and gaining confidence. “Mother Joan do always brings back a buck or two from the hunt, and my auntie’s good with butter and cream. We eat main well.”
“What else do you do?”
“I polishes Little Saint Peter’s reliquary, and I weaves tokens for the pilgrims to buy, and I-”
“I’ll wager you’re the best weaver in the convent.” Very jovial.
“Well, I’m pretty with it, my lord, though I do say it as shouldn’t, but maybe Sister Veronica and poor Sister Agnes-as-was run me close.”
“I expect you have individual styles?” At Walburga’s blink, Henry rephrased it. “Say I wanted to buy a token from a pile of tokens. Could you tell me which one was yours and which one Agnes’s? Or Veronica’s?”
My God. Adelia’s skin was prickling. She tried to catch Rowley’s eye, but he would not look at her.
Walburga chuckled. “No need, my lord. I’ll do one for you for free.”
Henry smiled. “Tut, and I’ve just sent Sir Rowley to fetch some.” He held out one of the small objects, some figures, some mats that Rowley had given him. “Did you make this one?”
“Oh, no, that’s Sister Odilia’s afore she died.”
“And this one?”
“That’s Magdalene’s.”
“This?”
“Sister Veronica’s.”
“Prior.” It was a command.
Brother Gilbert was back. Prior Geoffrey was bringing another object for Walburga to look at. “And this, my child? Who made this one?” It lay on his outstretched palm, like a star made of rushes, beautifully and intricately woven into quincuncial shape.
Walburga was enjoying the game. “Why, that’s Sister Veronica’s, too.”
“Are you sure?”
“Sure as sure, my lord. It’s her fun. Poor Sister Agnes said as perhaps she shouldn’t, them looking heathenlike, but we didn’t see no harm.”
“No harm,” the king said, softly. “Prior?”
Prior Geoffrey faced the judges. “My lords, that is one of the tokens that were lying on the corpses of the Wandlebury children when we found them. This nun has just identified it as being made by the accused sister. Look.”
Instead, the judges looked at Sister Veronica.
Adelia held her breath. It’s not conclusive; she can make a hundred excuses. It’s clever, but it’s not proof.
It was proof for Prioress Joan; she was staring at her protégée in agony.
It was proof for Veronica. For a moment, she was still. Then she shrieked, raising her head and two shaking hands. “Protect me, my lords. You think he was eaten by dogs, but he’s up there. Up there.”
Every eye followed hers to the rafters where the gargoyles laughed back at them from the shadows, then down again to Veronica. She had fallen to the floor, squirming. “He’ll hurt you. He hurts me when I don’t obey him. He hurt when he entered me. He hurts. Oh, save me from the devil.”