The air in the room heated and became heavy. Men’s eyelids half closed, their mouths went slack and their bodies rigid. Veronica gyrated among the rushes on the floor, pulling at her habit, pointing to her vagina, shrieking that the devil had entered her there, there.
It was as if the featherweight token had proved a final weight on guilt so heavy and so vast that she assumed it all lay exposed. A door had been broken open and something fetid was coming out of it.
“I prayed to the Mother…save me, save me, dear Mary…but he speared me with his horn, here, here. How it hurt…he had antlers…I couldn’t…sweet Son of Mary, he made me watch him do things…horrible things, horrible…there was blood, such blood. I thirsted for the blood of the Lord, but I was the devil’s slave…he hurt, he hurt…he bit my breasts, here, here, he stripped me…beat me…he put his horn in my mouth…I prayed for sweet Jesus to come…but he is the Prince of Darkness…his voice in my ears telling me to do things…I was afraid…stop him, don’t let him…”
Prayers, abasement. It went on and on.
But so did your alliance with the beast, Adelia thought. On and on. Months of it. Child after child procured, its torture observed, and never an attempt to break free. That’s not enslavement.
If she was exposing her soul, Veronica was also exposing her young body: her skirt was above her hocks; her slight breasts showed beneath the rents in her habit.
It’s a performance; she’s blaming the devil; she killed Simon; she’s enjoying it. It’s sex, that’s what it is.
A glance at the judges showed them enthralled, worse than enthralled: the Bishop of Norwich’s hand was on his crutch; the old archdeacon was puffing. Hubert Walter’s mouth dribbled. Even Rowley was licking his lips.
In a moment’s pause while Veronica gasped for breath, a bishop said, almost reverently, “Demonic possession. As clear a case as I ever saw.”
So the demons did it. Another attempt by the Prince of Darkness to undermine Mother Church, a regrettable but understandable incident in the war between sin and sanctity. Only the devil to blame. In despair, Adelia glanced up and into the face of the one man in the room who was looking on with sardonic admiration.
“She killed Simon of Naples,” Adelia said.
“I know.”
“She helped to kill the children.”
“I know,” the king said.
Veronica was crawling along the floor now, worming her way to the judges. She clasped the archdeacons’ slippers, and her soft, dark hair cascaded over his feet. “Save me, my lord, let him not force me again. I thirst for the Lord; give me back to my Redeemer. Send the devil away.” Reasonless, disheveled, the innocence had gone and sexual beauty had taken its place, older and more bruised than what it replaced but beauty nevertheless.
The archdeacon was reaching down to her. “There, there, my child.”
The table shook as Henry bounced off it. “Do you keep pigs, my lord Prior?”
Prior Geoffrey dragged his eyes away. “Pigs?”
“Pigs. And somebody get that woman to her feet.”
Instructions were given. Hugh left the room. The two men-at-arms raised Veronica so that she hung between them. “Now then, mistress,” Henry said to her, “you may help us.”
Veronica’s eyes as they slid up to his showed a moment’s calculation. “Return me to my Redeemer, my lord. Let me wash my sins in the blood of the Lord.”
“Redemption is in the truth, and therefore in telling us how the devil killed the children. In what manner. You must show us.”
“The Lord wants that? There was blood, so much blood.”
“He insists on it.” Henry held up a warning hand to the judges, who were on their feet. “She knows. She watched. She shall show us.”
Hugh came in with a piglet that he displayed to the king, who nodded. As the hunter carried it past her toward the kitchen, a bewildered Adelia glimpsed a small, rounded, snuffling snout. There was a smell of farmyard.
One of the men-at-arms went by, steering Veronica in the same direction, followed by the other, who held a leaf-shaped knife ceremonially on his outstretched palms, the flint knife, the knife.
Is that what he means to happen? God save us, dear God save us all.
The judges, everybody, Walburga blinking, were crowding toward the kitchen. Prioress Joan would have held back, but King Henry grasped her elbow and took her with him.
As Rowley passed her, Adelia said, “Ulf mustn’t see this.”
“I’ve sent him home with Gyltha.” Then he’d gone, too, and Adelia stood in an empty refectory.
Was it planned? There was more to this than proving Veronica’s guilt: Henry was after the Church that had condemned him for Becket.
That, too, was horrible. A trap laid by an artful king, not just for the creature that might or might not fall into it according to how artful it was, but to show his greater enemy its own weakness. And however vile the creature it was laid for, a trap was always a trap.
Comings and goings had left the door to the cloister open. Dawn was breaking and the canons were chanting, had been chanting all the time. As she listened to the unison weaving back order and grace, she felt the night air cooling tears on her cheeks that she hadn’t known were there.
From the kitchen she heard the king’s voice: “Put it on the chopping block. Very well, Sister. Show us what he did.”
They were putting the knife in Veronica’s hand…
Don’t use it, there’s no need…just tell them.
The nun’s voice came clear through the hatch. “I will be redeemed?”
“The truth is redemption.” Henry, inexorable. “Show us.”
Silence.
The nun’s voice again: “He didn’t like them to close their eyes, you see.” There came the first squeal from the piglet. “And then…”
Adelia covered her ears, but her hands couldn’t keep out another squeal, then another, shriller now, another…and the female voice rising over it: “Like this, and then this. And then…”
She’s mad. If there was cunning before, it was the cunning of the insane. Even that has left her now. Dear God, what is it like inside that mind?
Laughter? No, it was giggling, a manic sound and growing, sucking life out of the life it was taking, Veronica’s human voice turning non-human, rising over the dying shrieks of the piglet until it was a bray, a sound that belonged to big, grass-stained teeth and long ears. It went out into the night’s normality to fracture it.
It hee-hawed.
THE MEN-AT-ARMS brought her back into the refectory and threw her on the floor where the piglet’s blood soaking her robe puddled into the rushes. The judges made a wide circle to pass her, the Bishop of Norwich brushing absentmindedly at his splashed gown. Mansur’s and Rowley’s expressions were fixed. Rabbi Gotsce was white to the lips. Prioress Joan sank onto the bench and buried her head in her arms. Hugh leaned against the doorjamb to stare into space
Adelia hurried to Sister Walburga, who’d staggered and fallen, clawing for air. She knelt, her hand tight round the nun’s mouth. “Slowly now. Breathe slowly. Little breaths, shallow.”
She heard Henry say, “Well, my lords? It appears she gave the devil every cooperation.”
Apart from Walburga’s panicking breath, the room was quiet.
After a while, somebody, one of the bishops, spoke: “She will be tried in ecclesiastical court, of course.”
“Given benefit of clergy, you mean,” the king said.
“She is still ours, my lord.”
“And what will you do with her? The Church cannot hang; it can’t shed blood. All your court can do is excommunicate her and send her out into the lay world. What happens the next time a killer whistles for her?”
“Plantagenet, beware.” It was the archdeacon. “Would you yet wrangle with holy Saint Thomas? Is he to die again at the hands of your knights? Would you dispute his own words? ‘The clergy have Christ alone as king and under the King of Heaven; they should be ruled by their own law.’ Bell, book, and candle are the greatest coercion of all; this wretched woman shall lose her soul.”
Here was the voice that had echoed through a cathedral with an archbishop’s blood on its steps. It echoed through a provincial refectory where the blood of a piglet soaked into the tiles.
“She’s already lost her soul. Is England to lose more children?” Here was the other voice, the one that had used secular reason against Becket. It was still reasonable.
Then it wasn’t. Henry was taking one of the men-at-arms by the shoulders and shaking him. He moved on to shake the rabbi, then Hugh. “Do you see? Do you see? This was the quarrel between Becket and me. Have your courts, I said, but hand the guilty over to mine for punishment.” Men were being hurled around the room like rats. “I lost. I lost, d’you see? Murderers and rapists are loose in my land because I lost.”
Hubert Walter was clinging to one of his arms, pleading and being dragged along. “My lord, my lord…remember, I beg you, remember.”
Henry shook him off, stared down at him. “I won’t have it, Hubert.” He dragged his hand across his mouth to wipe away the spittle. “You hear me, my lords? I won’t have it.”
He was calmer now, facing the trembling judges. “Try it, condemn it, take its soul away, but I will not have that creature’s breath polluting my realm. Send it back to Thuringia, to the far Indies, anywhere, but I will lose no more children, and by my soul’s salvation, if that thing is still breathing Plantagenet air in two days’ time, I shall proclaim to the world what the Church has loosed on it. And you, madam…”
It was Prioress Joan’s turn. The king pulled her head up from the table by her veil, dislodging the wimple to show wiry, gray hair. “And you…If you’d controlled your sisterhood with half the discipline you apply to your hounds…She goes, do you understand? She goes or I tear down your convent stone by stone with you in it. Now leave this place and take that stinking maggot with you.”
IT WAS A RAGGED DEPARTURE. Prior Geoffrey stood at the door, looking old and unwell. Rain had stopped, but the chilly, moist dawn air raised a ground mist and the hooded, cloaked figures mounting their horses or getting into palanquins were difficult to distinguish. Quiet, though, except for the strike of hooves on cobbles and the huff from horses’ nostrils and the singing of an early thrush and the crow of a cockerel from a hen run. Nobody spoke. Sleepwalkers, all of them, souls in limbo.
Only the king’s departure had been noisy, a rush of boar hounds and riders galloping toward the gates and open country.
Adelia thought she saw two veiled figures being escorted away by men-at-arms. Perhaps the hatted, bowed shape plodding on a solitary course toward the castle was the rabbi. Only Mansur was here beside her, God bless him.
She went and put her arm around Walburga, who had been forgotten. Then she waited for Rowley Picot. And waited.
Either he wasn’t coming or he had already gone. Ah, well…
“It seems we must walk,” she said. “Are you well enough?” She was concerned for Walburga; the girl’s pulse had been alarming after she’d seen what she should never have seen in the kitchen.
The nun nodded.
Together they ambled through the mist, Mansur striding beside them. Twice Adelia turned to look for the Safeguard; twice she remembered. When she turned for a third time…“Oh no, dear God, no.”
“What is it?” Mansur asked.
It was Rakshasa walking behind them, his feet hidden in the mist.
Mansur drew his dagger, then half-replaced it. “It’s the other. Stay here.”
Still gasping with shock, Adelia watched him go forward to speak to Gervase of Coton, whose figure so much resembled that of a dead man, a Gervase who now seemed reduced and oddly diffident. He and the Arab strolled farther along the track and were lost to view. Their voices were a mumble. Mansur’s English had improved these last weeks.
He came back alone. The three of them walked on together. “We send him a pot of snakeweed,” Mansur said.
“Why?” Then, because everything normal had been cast adrift, Adelia grinned. “He’s…Mansur, has he got the pox?”
“Other doctors have been of no help to him. The poor man has attempted these many days to consult me. He says he has watched the Jew’s house for my return.”
“I saw him. He scared the wits from me. I’ll give him bloody snakeweed, I’ll put pepper in it, I’ll teach him to lurk on riverbanks. Him and his pox.”
“You will be a doctor,” Mansur reproved her. “He is a worried man, frightened of what his wife will say, Allah pity him.”
“Then he should have been faithful to her,” Adelia said. “Oh, tut, it’ll go in time if it’s gonorrhea.” She was still grinning. “But don’t tell him that.”
It was lighter when they gained the gates toward the town, and they could see the Great Bridge. A flock of sheep was trotting over it, making for the shambles. Some students were stumbling home after a hard night out.
Puffing, Walburga said suddenly in disbelief, “But she were the best of us, the holiest. I admired her, she were so good.”
“She had a madness,” Adelia said. “There’s no accounting for that.”
“Where’d it come from?”
“I don’t know.” Always there, perhaps. Stifled. Doomed to chastity and obedience at the age of three. A chance meeting with a man who overpowered-Rowley had talked of Rakshasa’s attraction for women. “The Lord only knows why; he doesn’t treat them well.” Had that coition of frenzy released the nun’s derangement? Maybe, maybe. “I don’t know,” Adelia said again. “Take shallow breaths. Slowly, now.”
A horseman cantered up as they arrived at the foot of the bridge. Sir Rowley Picot looked down at Adelia. “Am I to be given an explanation, mistress?”
“I explained to Prior Geoffrey. I am grateful and honored by your proposal…” Oh, this was no good. “Rowley, I would have married you, nobody else, ever, ever. But…”
“Did I not fuck you nicely this morning?”
He was deliberately speaking English, and Adelia felt the nun beside her flinch at his use of the old Anglo-Saxon word. “You did,” she said.
“I rescued you. I saved you from that monster.”
“You did that, too.”
But it had been the jumble of powers she and Simon of Naples possessed between them that had led to the discovery on Wandlebury Hill, despite her own misjudgment in going there alone.
Those same powers had led to the saving of Ulf. It had liberated the Jews. Though it had been mentioned by none except the king, their investigation had been a craft of logic and cold reason and…oh, very well, instinct, but instinct based on knowledge; rare skills in this credulous age, too rare to be drowned as Simon’s had been drowned, too valuable to be buried, as hers would be buried in marriage.
All this Adelia had reflected on, in anguish, but the result had been inexorable. Though she had fallen in love, nothing in the rest of the world had changed. Corpses would still cry out. She had a duty to hear them.
“I am not free to marry,” she said. “I am a doctor to the dead.”
“They’re welcome to you.”
He spurred his horse and set it at the bridge, leaving her bereft and oddly resentful. He might at least have seen her and Walburga home.
“Hey,” she yelled after him, “are you sending Rakshasa’s head back east to Hakim?”
His reply floated back: “Yes, I bloody well am.”
He could always make her laugh, even when she was crying. “Good,” she said.
MUCH HAPPENED IN CAMBRIDGE that day.
The judges of the assize listened to and gave their verdict on cases of theft, of coin-clipping, street brawls, a smothered baby, bigamy, land disputes, ale that was too weak, loaves that were short, disputed wills, deodands, vagabondage, begging, shipmasters’ quarrels, fisticuffs among neighbors, arson, runaway heiresses, and naughty apprentices.
At midday, there was a hiatus. Drums rolled and trumpets called the crowds in the castle bailey to attend. A herald stood on the platform before the judges to read from a scroll in a voice that reached to the town: “Let it be known that in the sight of God and to the satisfaction of the judges here present the knight yclept Joscelin of Grantchester has been proved vile murderer of Peter of Trumpington; Harold of Saint Mary Parish; Mary, daughter of Bonning the wildfowler, and Ulric of the parish of Saint John, and that the aforesaid Joscelin of Grantchester died during his capture as befitted his crimes, being eaten by dogs.
“Let it also be known that the Jews of Cambridge have been quitted of these killings and all suspicion thereof, whereby they shall be returned to their lawful homes and business without hindrance. Thus, in the name of Henry, King of England, under God.”
There was no mention of a nun. The Church was silent on that matter. But Cambridge was full of whispers and, in the course of the afternoon, Agnes, eel seller’s wife and mother to Harold, pulled apart the little beehive hut in which she had sat outside the castle gates since the death of her son, hauled its material down the hill, and rebuilt it outside the gates of Saint Radegund’s convent.
All this was seen and heard in the open.
Other things were done in secrecy and darkness, though exactly who did them nobody ever knew. Certainly, men high in the ranks of Holy Church met behind closed doors where one of them begged, “Who will rid us of this shameful woman?” just as Henry II had once cried out to be rid of the turbulent Becket.
What happened next behind those doors is less certain, for no directions were given, though perhaps there were insinuations as light as gnats, so light that it could not be said they had even been made, wishes expressed in a code so byzantine that it could not be translated except by those with the key to it. All this, perhaps, so that the men-and they were not clerics-who went down Castle Hill to Saint Radegund’s could not be said to be acting on anyone’s command to do what they did.
Nor even that they did it.
Possibly Agnes knew, but she never told anybody.
These things, both transparent and shadowed, passed without Adelia’s knowledge. On Gyltha’s orders, she slept round the clock. When she woke up, it was to find a line of patients winding down Jesus Lane, waiting for Dr. Mansur’s attention. She dealt with the severe cases, then called a halt while she consulted Gyltha.
“I should go to the convent and look to Walburga. I’ve been remiss.”
“You been mending.”
“Gyltha, I don’t want to go to that place.”
“Don’t then.”
“I must; another attack like that could stop her heart.”
“Convent gates is closed and nobody answering. So they say. And that, that…” Gyltha still couldn’t bring herself to say the name. “She’s gone. So they say.”
“Gone? Already?” Nobody dallies when the king commands, she thought. Le roi le veut. “Where did they send her?”
Gyltha shrugged. “Just gone. So they say.”
Adelia felt relief spreading down to her ribs and almost mending them. The Plantagenet had cleansed his kingdom’s air so that she could breathe it.
Though, she thought, in doing so, he has fouled another nation’s. What will be done to her there?
Adelia tried to avoid the image of the nun writhing as she had on the floor of the refectory but this time in filth and darkness and chains-and couldn’t. Nor could she avoid concern; she was a doctor, and true doctors made no judgments, only diagnoses. She had treated the wounds and diseases of men and women who’d disgusted her humanity but not her profession. Character repelled; the suffering, needy body did not.
The nun was mad; for society’s sake, she must be restrained for as long as she lived. But “the Lord pity her and treat her well,” Adelia said.
Gyltha looked at her as if she, too, were a lunatic. “She’s been treated like she deserves,” she said stolidly. “So they say.”
Ulf, for a miracle, was at his books. He was quieter and more grave than he had been. According to Gyltha, he was expressing a wish to become a lawyer. All very pleasing and admirable-nevertheless, Adelia missed the old Ulf.
“The convent gates are locked, apparently,” she told him, “yet I need to get in to see Walburga. She’s ill.”
“What? Sister Fatty?” Ulf was suddenly back on form. “You come along of me; they can’t keep me out.”
Gyltha and Mansur could be trusted to treat the rest of the patients. Adelia went for her medicine chest; lady’s slipper was excellent for hysteria, panic, and fearfulness. And rose oil to soothe.
She set off with Ulf.
ON THE CASTLE RAMPARTS, a tax collector who was taking a well-earned rest from assize business recognized two slight figures among the many crossing the Great Bridge below-he would have recognized the slightly larger one in the unattractive headgear among millions.
Now was the time, whilst she was out of the way. He called for his horse.
Why Sir Rowley Picot found himself compelled to ask advice for his bruised heart from Gyltha, eel seller and housekeeper, he wasn’t sure. It may be because Gyltha was the closest female friend in Cambridge to the love of his life. Maybe because she had helped to nurse him back to life, was a rock of common sense, maybe because of the indiscretions of her past…he just did, and to hell.
Miserably, he munched on one of Gyltha’s pasties.
“She won’t marry me, Gyltha.”
“’Course she won’t. Be a waste. She’s…” Gyltha tried to think of an analogy to some fabled creature, could only come up with “uni-corn,” and settled for “She’s special.”
“I’m special.”
Gyltha reached up to pat Sir Rowley’s head. “You’re a fine lad and you’ll go far, but she’s…” Again, comparison failed her. “The good Lord broke the mold after He made her. Us needs her, all of us, not just you.”
“And I’m not going to damn well get her, am I?”
“Not in marriage, maybe, but there’s other ways of skinning a cat.” Gyltha had long ago decided that the cat under discussion, special though it was, could do with a good, healthy, and continual skinning. A woman might keep her independence, just as she had herself, and could still have memories to warm the winter nights.
“Good God, woman, are you suggesting…? My intentions toward Mistress Adelia are…were…honorable.”
Gyltha, who had never considered honor a requisite for a man and a maid in springtime, sighed. “That’s pretty. Won’t get you nowhere, though, will it?”
He leaned forward and said, “Very well. How?” And the longing in his face would have melted a flintier heart than Gyltha’s.
“Lord, for a clever man, you’m a right booby. She’s a doctor, ain’t she?”
“Yes, Gyltha.” He was trying to be patient. “That, I would point out, is why she won’t accept me.”
“And what is it doctors do?”
“They tend their patients.”
“So they do, and I reckon there’s one doctor as might be tenderer than most to a patient, always supposing that patient was taken poorly and always supposing she was fond of un.”
“Gyltha,” Sir Rowley said earnestly, “if I wasn’t suddenly feeling so damn ill, I’d ask you to marry me.”
THEY SAW THE CROWD at the convent gates when they’d crossed the bridge and cleared the willows on the bank. “Oh, dear,” Adelia said, “word has got around.” Agnes and her little hut were there, like a marker to murder.
It was to be expected, she supposed; the town’s anger had been transferred, and a mob was gathering against the nuns just as it had against the Jews.
It wasn’t a mob, though. The crowd was big enough, artisans and market traders mainly, and there was anger, but it was suppressed and mixed with…what? Excitement? She couldn’t tell.
Why weren’t these people more enraged, as they had been against the Jews? Ashamed, perhaps. The killers had turned out to be not a despised group, but two of their own, one respected, one a trusted friend they waved to nearly every day. True, the nun had been sent away to where they couldn’t lynch her, but they must surely blame Prioress Joan for her laxity in allowing a madwoman the terrible freedom she’d had for so long.
Ulf was talking with the thatcher whose foot Adelia had saved, both of them using the dialect in which Cambridge people spoke to each other and that Adelia still found almost incomprehensible. The young thatcher was avoiding her eye; usually, he greeted her with warmth.
Ulf, too, when he came back, wouldn’t look at her. “Don’t you go in there,” he said.
“I must. Walburga is my patient.”
“Well, I ain’t coming.” The boy’s face had narrowed, as it did when he was upset.
“I understand.” She shouldn’t have brought him; for him, the convent had been home to a hag.
The wicket in the solid wooden gates was opening, and two dusty workmen were clambering out; Adelia saw her chance and, with an “excuse me,” stepped in before they could close it. She shut it behind her.
The strangeness was immediate, as was the silence. Somebody, presumably the workmen, had nailed planks of wood diagonally across the church door that had once opened for pilgrims crowding to pray before the reliquary of Little Saint Peter of Trumpington.
How curious, Adelia thought, that the boy’s putative status as a saint would be lost now that he’d been sacrificed not by Jews but Christians.
Curious, too, that the weedy untidiness ignored by an uncaring prioress should so quickly put on the appearance of decay.
Taking the path toward the convent building, Adelia had to prevent herself from thinking that the birds had stopped singing. They hadn’t, but-she shivered-their note was different. Such was the imagination.
Prioress Joan’s stable and mews were deserted. Doors hung open on empty horse boxes.
The sisters’ compound was still. At the entrance to the cloister, Adelia found herself reluctant to go on. In the unseasonable grayness of the day, the pillars round the open grass were a pale remembrance of a night when she’d seen a horned and malevolent shadow in their center, as if the obscene desire of the nun had summoned it.
For heaven’s sake, he’s dead and she’s gone. There’s nothing here.
There was. A veiled shape was praying in the south walk as still as the stones it knelt on.
“Prioress?”
It didn’t move.
Adelia went up to her and touched her arm. “Prioress.” She helped her up.
The woman had aged overnight, her big, plain face etched deep and deformed into a gargoyle’s. Slowly, her head turned. “What?”
“I’ve come to…” Adelia raised her voice; it was like talking to the deaf. “I’ve brought some medicines for Sister Walburga.” She had to repeat it; she didn’t think Joan knew who she was.
“Walburga?”
“She was ill.”
“Was she?” The prioress turned her eyes away. “She’s gone. They’ve all gone.”
So the Church had stepped in.
“I’m sorry,” Adelia said. And she was; there was something terrible in seeing a human being so deteriorated. Not just that, something terrible in the dying convent as if it were sagging; she had the impression that the cloister was tilting sideways. There was a different smell to it, another shape.
And an almost imperceptible sound, like the buzzing of an insect trapped in a jar, only higher.
“Where has Walburga gone?”
“What?”
“Sister Walburga. Where is she?”
“Oh.” An attempt at concentration. “To her aunt’s, I think.”
There was nothing to do here, then; she could get away from this place. But Adelia lingered. “Is there anything I can do for you, Prioress?”
“What? Go away. Leave me alone.”
“You’re ill, let me help you. Is there anyone else here? Lord’s sake, what is that sound?” Feeble as it was, it irritated the ear like tinnitus. “Don’t you hear it? A sort of vibration?”
“It is a ghost,” the gargoyle said. “It is my punishment to listen to it until it stops. Now go. Leave me to listen to the screams of the dead. Even you cannot help a ghost.”
Adelia backed away. “I’ll send somebody,” she said, and for the first time in her life, she ran from the sick.
Prior Geoffrey. He’d be able to do something, take her away, though the ghosts haunting Joan would follow her wherever she went.
They followed Adelia as she ran, and she almost fell through the wicket in her hurry to get out.
Righting herself, she came face-to-face with the mother of Harold and couldn’t look away. The woman was staring at her as if they shared a secret of supreme power.
Weakly, Adelia said, “She’s gone, Agnes. They’ve sent her away. They’ve all gone; there’s only the prioress…”
It wasn’t enough; a son had died. Agnes’s terrible eyes said there was more; she knew it, they both knew it.
Then she did. All its parts fused into the one knowledge. The smell-so out of context she hadn’t recognized the sour odor of fresh mortar for what it was. God, God, please. She’d seen it, a corner of her eye noting with dissatisfaction an imbalance that was the asymmetry of the nuns’ pigeonholes which should have been ten on top of ten and had been ten on top of nine-a blank wall where the lower tenth cell should have been.
She understood. The silence with its vibration…like the buzzing of an insect trapped in a jar, “the screams of the dead.”
Blind, Adelia stumbled through the crowd and vomited.
Somebody was tugging at her sleeve, saying something. “The king…”
The prior. He could stop it. She must find Prior Geoffrey.
The tugging became insistent. “The king commands your attendance, mistress.”
In the name of Christ, how could they in Christ’s name?
“The king, mistress…” Some liveried fellow.
“To hell with the king,” she said. “I have to find the prior.”
She was gripped by the waist and swung up onto a horse. It was trotting, the royal messenger loping alongside with its reins in his hands. “Better you don’t send kings to hell, mistress,” he said amiably. “They usually been there.”
They were over the bridge, up the hill, through the castle gates, across the bailey. She was lifted off the horse.
In the sheriff’s family garden, in which Simon of Naples lay buried, Henry II, who’d been to hell and returned, was sitting cross-legged on the same grass bank where she had sat and listened to Rowley Picot tell of his crusade. He was mending a hunting glove with needle and twine as he dictated to Hubert Walter, who knelt by his side, a portable writing table round his neck.
“Ah, mistress…”
Adelia flung herself at his feet. After all, a king might do. “They’ve walled her up, my lord. I beg you, stop it.”
“Who’s walled up? What am I to stop?”
“The nun. Veronica. Please, my lord, please. They’ve walled her up alive.”
Henry regarded his boots, which were being clutched at. “They told me they’d sent her to Norway. I thought that was odd. Did you know this, Hubert?”
“No, my lord.”
“You’ve got to let her out, it’s obscene, an abomination. Oh my God, my God, I can’t live with this. She’s mad. It’s her madness that’s evil.” In her agony, Adelia’s hands thumped the ground.
Hubert Walter lifted the little desk from his neck and then Adelia to sitting position on the bank, speaking gently as if to a horse, “Quietly, mistress. Steady. There, there, calmly now.”
He passed her an inky handkerchief. Adelia, fighting for control, blew her nose on it. “My lord…my lord. They have walled up her cell in the convent with her inside. I heard her screaming. Whatever she did, this cannot…cannot be allowed. It is a crime against heaven.”
“Seems a bit harsh, I must say,” Henry said. “That’s the Church for you. I’d have just hanged her.”
“Well, stop it,” Adelia shouted at him. “If she’s without water…without water the human body can still survive three or four days, the suffering.”
Henry was interested. “I didn’t know that. Did you know that, Hubert?” He took the handkerchief from Adelia’s fist and wiped her face with it, very sober now. “You realize I can’t do anything, don’t you?”
“No, I don’t. The king is the king.”
“And the Church is the Church. Were you listening last night? Then listen to me now, mistress.” He slapped her hand as she turned her head away, then took it in his own. “Listen to me.” He raised both their hands so that they pointed in the direction of the town. “Down there is a crazed tatterdemalion they call Roger of Acton. A few days ago, the wretch incited a mob to attack this castle, this royal castle, my castle, in the course of which your friend and my friend, Rowley Picot, was injured. And I can do nothing. Why? Because the wretch wears a tonsure on his head and can spout a paternoster, thus making him a clerk of the Church and entitled to benefit of clergy. Can I punish him, Hubert?”
“You kicked his arse for him, my lord.”
“I kicked his arse for him, and even for that, the Church takes me to task.”
Adelia’s arm bobbed up and down as the king made his point with it. “After those damned knights interpreted my anger as instruction and rode to kill Becket, I had to submit to scourging by every member of Canterbury Cathedral’s chapter. Humiliation, baring my back to their whips, was the only way to prevent the Pope laying all England under interdict. Every bloody monk-and believe me, those bastards can lay it on.” He sighed and dropped Adelia’s hand. “One day this country will be rid of papal rule, God willing. But not yet. And not through me.”
Adelia had stopped listening, absorbing the gist perhaps but not the words. Now she got up and began to walk down the garden path toward the place where they’d buried Simon of Naples.
Hubert Walter, shocked by such lèse-majesté, would have gone after her but was restrained. He said, “You take great pains over that rude and recalcitrant female, my lord.”
“I have a use for the useful, Hubert. Phenomena like her don’t fall into my lap every day.”
May was becoming itself at last, and the sun had emerged to enliven a garden refreshed by rain. Lady Baldwin’s tansy had taken, bees were busy among the cowslips.
A robin that was perched on the grave hopped away at her approach, though not far. Stooping, Adelia used Hubert Walter’s handkerchief to brush off its droppings.
We are among barbarians, Simon.
The wooden board had been replaced by a handsome slab of marble incised with his name and the words: May his soul be bound up in the bond of life eternal.
Kindly barbarians, Simon said to her now. Fighting their own barbarity. Think of Gyltha, Prior Geoffrey, Rowley, that strange king…
Nevertheless, Adelia told him, I cannot bear it.
She turned and, collected now, walked back up the path. Henry had returned to mending his glove and looked up at Adelia’s approach. “Well?”
Bowing, Adelia said, “I thank you for your indulgence, my lord, but I can stay here no longer. I must return to Salerno.”
He bit off the thread with his strong little teeth. “No.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I said no.” The glove was put on, and Henry waggled his fingers, admiring the mending. “By the Lord, I’m clever. Must get it from the tanner’s daughter. Did you know I had a tanner in my ancestry, mistress?” He smiled up at her. “I said no, you can’t go. I have a need for your particular talents, Doctor. There are plenty of dead in my realm that I would wish to be listened to, by God there are, and I want to know what they say.”
She stared at him. “You can’t keep me here.”
“Hubert?”
“I think you will find that he can, mistress,” Hubert Walter said apologetically. “Le roi le veut. Even now on my lord’s instructions, I am penning a letter to the King of Sicily, asking if we may borrow you a while longer.”
“I’m not an object,” Adelia shouted. “You can’t borrow me, I’m a human being.”
“And I’m a king,” the king said. “I may not be able to control the Church, but, by my soul’s salvation, I control every bloody port in this country. If I say you stay, you stay.”
His face as he looked at her had a kindly disinterest, even in its pretended anger, and she saw that his amiability, the frankness so charming, was a mere tool helping him rule an empire and that, to him, she was nothing more than a gadget that might one day come in useful.
“I also am to be walled up, then,” she said.
He raised his eyebrows. “I suppose you are, though I hope you will find your confines somewhat larger and more pleasing than…well, we won’t talk of it.”
Nobody will talk of it, she thought. The insect will buzz in its bottle until it falls silent. And I shall have to live with the sound for the rest of my life.
“I’d let her out if I could, you know,” Henry said.
“Yes. I know.”
“In any case, mistress, you owe me your services.”
How long will I have to buzz before you let me out? she wondered. The fact that this particular bottle has become beloved to me is neither here nor there.
Though it was.
She was recovering now and able to think; she took time to do it. The king waited her out-an indication, she thought, of her value to him. Very well, then, let me capitalize on it. She said, “I refuse to stay in a country so backward that its Jews are afforded only the one burial ground in London.”
He was taken aback. “God’s teeth, aren’t there any others?”
“You must know there are not.”
“I didn’t, actually,” he said. “We kings have a great deal to concern ourselves with.” He snapped his fingers. “Write it down, Hubert. The Jews to have burial grounds.” And to Adelia: “There you are. It is done. Le roi le veut.”
“Thank you.” She returned to the matter in hand. “As a matter of interest, Henry, in what way am I in your debt?”
“You owe me a bishop, mistress. I had hopes of Sir Rowley taking my fight into the Church, but he has turned me down to be free to marry. You, I gather, are the object of his marital affections.”
“No object at all,” she said wearily. “I, too, have turned him down. I am a doctor, not a wife.”
“Really?” Henry brightened and then assumed a look of mourning. “Ah, but I fear neither of us will have him now. The poor man is dying.”
“What?”
“Hubert?”
“So we understand, mistress,” Hubert Walter said, “the wound he received in the attack on the castle has reopened, and a medical man from the town reports that-”
He found himself addressing empty air; lèse majesté again. Adelia had gone.
The king watched the gate slam. “Nevertheless, she’s a woman of her word and, happily for me, she won’t marry him.” He stood up. “I believe, Hubert, that we may yet install Sir Rowley Picot as Bishop of Saint Albans.”
“He will be gratified, my lord.”
“I think he’s going to be-any moment now, lucky devil.”
THREE DAYS AFTER THESE EVENTS, the insect stopped buzzing. Agnes, mother of Harold, dismantled her beehive hut for the last time and went home to her husband.
Adelia didn’t hear the silence. Not until later. At the time, she was in bed with the bishop-elect of Saint Albans.
THERE THEY GO, the justices in eyre, taking the Roman road from Cambridge toward the next town to be assized. Trumpets sound, bailiffs kick out at excited children and barking dogs to clear the way for the caparisoned horses and palanquins, servants urge on mules laden with boxes of closely written vellum, clerks still scribble on their slates, hounds respond to the crack of their masters’ whip.
They’ve gone. The road is empty, except for steaming piles of manure. A swept and garnished Cambridge breathes a sigh of relief. At the castle, Sheriff Baldwin retires to bed with a wet cloth over his head while, in his bailey, corpses on the gallows move in a May breeze that flutters blossoms over them like a benison.
We have been too busied with our own events to watch the assize in action, but, if we had, we should have witnessed a new thing, a wonderful thing, a moment when English law leaped high, high, out of darkness and superstition into light.
For, during the course of the assize, nobody has been thrown into a pond to see if they are innocent or guilty of the crime of which they stand accused. (Innocence is to sink, guilt to float.) No woman has had molten iron placed in her hand to prove whether or not she has committed theft, murder, et cetera. (If the burn heals within a certain number of days, she is acquitted. If not, let her be punished.)
Nor has any dispute over land been settled by the God of Battles. (Champions representing each disputant fight until one or other is killed or cries “craven” and throws down his sword in surrender.)
No. The God of Battles, of water, of hot iron, has not been asked for His opinion as He always has before. Henry Plantagenet does not believe in Him.
Instead, evidence of crime or quarrel has been considered by twelve men who then tell the judge whether or not, in their opinion, the case is proved.
These men are called a jury. They are a new thing.
Something else is new. Instead of the ancient, jumbled inheritance of laws whereby each baron or lord of the manor can pronounce sentence on his malefactors, hanging or not according to his powers, Henry II has given his English a system that is orderly and all of a piece and applies throughout his kingdom. It will be called Common Law.
And where is he, this cunning king who has moved civilization forward?
He has left his judges to proceed about their business and has gone hunting. We can hear his hounds baying over the hills.
Perhaps he knows, as we know, that he will be remembered in popular memory only for the murder of Thomas à Becket.
Perhaps his Jews know-for we know-that, though they have been locally absolved, they still carry the stigma of ritual child murder and will be punished for it through the ages.
It is the way of things.
May God bless us all.