As they approached the great gate of Barnwell Abbey, they could see Cambridge Castle in the distance on the only height for miles around, its outline made ragged and prickly by the remains of the tower that had been burned the year before and the scaffolding now surrounding it. A pygmy of a fortress compared with the great citadels hung upon the Appenines that Adelia knew, it nevertheless lent a burly charm to the view.
“Of Roman foundation,” Prior Geoffrey said, “built to guard the river crossing, though, like many another, it failed to hold off either Viking or Dane-nor Duke William the Norman, come to that; having destroyed it, he had to build it up again.”
The cavalcade was smaller now; the prioress had hastened ahead, taking her nun, her knight, and cousin Roger of Acton with her. The merchant and his wife had turned off toward Cherry Hinton.
Prior Geoffrey, once more horsed and resplendent at the head of the procession, was forced to lean down to address his saviors on the driving bench of the mule cart. His knight, Sir Gervase, brought up the rear, scowling.
“ Cambridge will surprise you,” the prior was saying. “We have a fine School of Pythagoras, to which students come from all over. Despite its inland position, it is a port, and a busy one, nearly as busy as Dover -though blessedly more free of the French. The waters of the Cam may be sluggish, but they are navigable to their conjunction with the River Ouse that, in turn, discharges into the North Sea. I think I may say that there are few countries of the world’s East that do not come to our quays with goods that are then passed on by mule trains to all parts of England along the Roman roads that bisect the town.”
“And what do you send back, my lord?” Simon asked.
“Wool. Fine East Anglian wool.” Prior Geoffrey smirked with the satisfaction of a high prelate whose grazing provided a good proportion of it. “Smoked fish, eels, oysters. Oh, yes, Master Simon, you may mark Cambridge to be prosperous in trade and, dare I say it, cosmopolitan in outlook.”
Dare he say it? His heart misgave as he regarded the three in the cart; even in a town accustomed to mustached Scandinavians, Low Countrymen in clogs, slit-eyed Russians, Templars, Hospitallers from the Holy Lands, curly-hatted Magyars, snake charmers, could this trio of oddities go unremarked? He looked around him, then leaned lower and hissed. “How do you intend to present yourselves?”
Simon said innocently, “Since our good Mansur has already been credited with your cure, my lord, I thought to continue the deception by setting him up as a medical man with Dr. Trotula and myself as his assistants. Perhaps the marketplace? Some center from which to pursue our inquiries…”
“In that damned cart?” The indignation Simon of Naples had courted was forthcoming. “Would you have the lady Adelia spat on by women traders? Importuned by passing vagabonds?” The prior calmed himself. “I see the need to disguise her profession, lady doctors being unknown in England. Certainly, she would be considered outlandish.” Even more outlandish than she is, he thought. “We shall not have her degraded as some quacksalver’s drab. We are a respectable town, Master Simon, we can do better for you than that.”
“My lord.” Simon’s hand touched his forehead in gratitude. And to himself: I thought you might.
“Nor would it be wise for any of you to declare your faith-or lack of it,” the prior continued. “ Cambridge is a tightly wound crossbow, any abnormality may loose it again.” Especially, he thought, as these three particular abnormalities were determined on probing Cambridge ’s wounds.
He paused. The tax collector had come up and reined his horse to the mule’s amble, waving an obeisance to the prior, sending a nod to Simon and Mansur, and addressing Adelia: “Madam, we have been in convoy together, and yet we have not been introduced. Sir Rowley Picot at your service. May I congratulate you on effecting the good prior’s recovery?”
Quickly, Simon leaned forward. “The congratulations belong to this gentleman, sir.” He indicated Mansur, who was driving. “He is our doctor.”
The tax collector was interested. “Indeed? One was informed that a female voice was heard directing the operation.”
Was one, indeed? And by whom? Simon wondered. He nudged Mansur. “Say something,” he told him in Arabic.
Mansur ignored him.
Surreptitiously, Simon kicked him on the ankle “Speak to him, you lump.”
“What does the fat shit want me to say?”
“The doctor is pleased that he has been of service to my lord prior,” Simon told the tax inspector. “He says he hopes he may administer as well to anyone in Cambridge who wishes to consult him.”
“Does he?” Sir Rowley Picot said, neglecting to mention his own knowledge of Arabic. “He says it amazing high.”
“Exactly, Sir Rowley,” Simon said. “His voice can be mistaken for a woman’s.” He became confidential. “I should explain that the lord Mansur was taken by monks while yet a child, and his singing voice was discovered to be so beautiful that they…er…ensured it would remain so.”
“A castrato, by God,” Sir Rowley said, staring.
“He devotes himself to medicine now, of course,” Simon said, “but when he sings in praise of the Lord, the angels weep with envy.”
Mansur had heard the word “castrato” and lapsed into cursing, causing more angels’ tears by his strictures on Christians in general, and the unhealthy affection existing between camels and the mothers of the Byzantine monks who’d gelded him in particular-the sound issuing in an Arabic treble that rivaled birdsong and melted on the air like sweet icicles.
“You see, Sir Rowley?” Simon asked over it. “That was doubtless the voice heard.”
Sir Rowley said, “It must have been.” And again, smiling with apology, “It must have been.”
He continued to try and engage Adelia in conversation, but her replies were short and sullen; she’d had her fill of importuning Englishmen. Her attention was on the countryside. Having lived among hills, she had expected to be repelled by flat land; she had not reckoned on such enormous skies, nor the significance they gave to a lonely tree, the crook of a rare chimney, a single church tower, outlined against them. The multiplicity of greenness suggested unknown herbs to be discovered, the strip fields made chessboards of emerald and black.
And willows. The landscape was full of them, lining streams, dikes, and lanes. Crack willow for stabilizing the banks, golden willow, white willow, gray willow, goat willow, willows for making bats, for growing osiers, bay willow, almond willow, beautiful with the sun dappling through their branches, and more beautiful still because, with a concoction of willow bark, you could relieve pain…
She was jerked forward as Mansur pulled in the mules. The procession had come to an abrupt halt, for Prior Geoffrey had held up his hand and begun to pray. The men swept off their caps and held them to their breasts.
Entering the gate was a dray splashed with mud. A dirty piece of canvas laid on it showed the shape of three small bundles beneath. The drayman led his horses with his head bowed. A woman followed him, shrieking and tearing at her clothing.
The missing children had been found.
THE CHURCH of Saint Andrew the Less in the grounds of Saint Augustine’s, Barnwell, was two hundred feet long, a carved and painted glory to God. But today the grisailled spring sunlight from the high windows ignored the glorious hammer roof, the faces of recumbent stone priors round the walls, the statue of Saint Augustine, the ornate pulpit, the glitter of altar and triptych.
Instead it fell in shafts on three small catafalques in the nave, each covered with a violet cloth, and on the heads of the kneeling men and women in working clothes gathered round them.
The remains of the children, all three, had been found on a sheep path near Fleam Dyke that morning. A shepherd had stumbled over them at dawn and was still shuddering. “Weren’t there last night, I’ll take my oath, Prior. Couldn’t have been, could they? The foxes ain’t been at them. Lying neat side by side they was, bless them. Or neat as they could be, considering…” He’d stopped to retch.
An object had been laid on each body, resembling those that had been left at the site of each child’s disappearance. Made from rushes, they resembled the Star of David.
Prior Geoffrey had ordered the three bundles taken to the church, resisting one mother’s desperate attempts to unwrap them. He had sent to the castle, warning the sheriff that it might be attacked again and requesting the sheriff’s reeve in his capacity as coroner to view the remains immediately and order a public inquest. He’d imposed calm-though it rumbled with underlying heat.
Now, resonating with certainty, his voice stilled the mother’s shrieks into a quiet sobbing as he read the assurance that death would be swallowed up in victory. “We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump.”
Almost, the scent issuing in from the bluebells outside the open doors and the lavished incense from within them covered the stench of decay.
Almost, the clear chant of the canons drowned out the buzz of trapped flies coming from under the violet mantles.
Saint Paul ’s words assuaged a little of the prior’s grief as he envisaged the souls of the children romping in God’s meadows, yet not his anger that they had been catapulted into them before their time. Two of the children he did not know, but one of the boys was Harold, the eel seller’s son, who had been a pupil at Saint Augustine ’s own school. Six years old and a bright child, learning his letters once a week. Identified by his red hair. A right little Saxon, too-he’d scrumped apples from the priory orchard last autumn.
And I tanned his backside for him, the prior thought.
From the shadow of a rear pillar, Adelia watched some comfort seep into the faces round the catafalques. The closeness between priory and town was strange to her; in Salerno, monks, even monks who went out into the world to perform their duties, kept a distance between themselves and the laity.
“But we are not monks,” Prior Geoffrey had told her, “we are canons.” It seemed a slight dissimilarity: Both lived in community, both vowed celibacy, both served the Christian God, yet here in Cambridge the distinction made a difference. When the church bell had tolled the news that the children were found, people from the town had come running-to hug and to be hugged in commiseration.
“Our rule is less rigid than Benedictine or Cistercian,” the prior had explained, “less time given to prayer and choral duty and more to education, relief of the poor and sick, hearing confession, and general parish work.” He’d tried to smile. “You will approve, my dear Doctor. Moderation in all things.”
Now she watched him come down from the choir after the dismissal and walk with the parents into the sunlight, promising to officiate at the funerals himself, “and discover the devil who has done this.”
“We know who done it, Prior,” one of the fathers said. Agreement echoed like the growl of dogs.
“It cannot be the Jews, my son. They are still secured in the castle.”
“They’re getting out someways.”
The bodies, still under their violet cloths, were carried reverently on litters out a side door, accompanied by the sheriff’s reeve, wearing his coroner’s hat.
The church emptied. Simon and Mansur had wisely not attempted to come. A Jew and a Saracen among these sacred stones? At such a time?
With her goatskin carryall at her feet, Adelia waited in the shadow of one of the bays next to the tomb of Paulus, Prior Canon of Saint Augustine’s, Barnwell, taken to God in the year of Our Lord 1151. She nerved herself for what was to come.
She had never yet shirked a postmortem examination; she would not shirk this one. It was why she was here. Gordinus had said, “I am sending you with Simon of Naples on this mission not just because you are the only doctor of the dead to speak English, but because you are the best.”
“I know,” she’d said, “but I do not want to go.”
She’d had to. It had been ordered by the King of Sicily.
In the cool stone hall that the Medical School of Salerno devoted to dissection, she’d always had the proper equipment and Mansur to assist her, relying on her foster father, head of the department, to relay her findings to the authorities. For, though Adelia could read death better than her foster father, better than anybody, the fiction had to be maintained that the investigation of bodies sent by the signoria was the province of Dr. Gershom bin Aguilar. Even in Salerno, where female doctors were permitted to practice, the dissection that helped the dead to explain how they’d died-and, very often, at whose hands-was regarded with revulsion by the Church.
So far science had fought off religion; other doctors knew the use of Adelia’s work, and it was an open secret among the lay authorities. But should an official complaint be made to the Pope, she’d be banned from the mortuary and, quite possibly, the school of medicine itself. So, though he writhed under the hypocrisy, Gershom took credit for achievements that were not his.
Which suited Adelia to her boots. Staying in the background was her forte: for one thing, it avoided the Church’s eye; for another thing, she did not know how to converse on womanly subjects as she was expected to, and did it badly because they bored her. Like a hedgehog blending into autumn leaves, she was prickly to those who tried to bring her into the light.
It was another matter if you were ill. Before she devoted herself to postmortem work, the sick had seen a side to Adelia that few others did, and still remembered her as an angel without wings. Recovering male patients had tended to fall in love with her, and it would have surprised the prior to learn that she’d received more requests for her hand in marriage than many a rich Salernitan beauty. All had been turned down. It was said in the school’s mortuary that Adelia was interested in you only if you were dead.
Cadavers of every age came to that long marble table in the school from all over southern Italy and Sicily, sent by signoria and praetori who had reason to want to know how and why they’d died. Usually, she found out for them; corpses were her work, as normal to her as his last to a shoemaker. She approached the bodies of children in the same way, determined that the truth of their death should not be buried with them, but they distressed her, always pitiful and, in the case of those who had been murdered, always shocking. The three awaiting her now were likely to be as terrible as any she had seen. Not only that, but she must examine them in secrecy, without the equipment provided by the school, without Mansur to assist her, and, most of all, without her foster father’s encouragement: “Adelia, you must not quail. You are confounding inhumanity.”
He never told her she was confounding evil-at least, not Evil with a capital E, for Gershom bin Aguilar believed that Man provided his own evil and his own good, neither the devil nor God having anything to do with it. Only in the medical school of Salerno could he preach that doctrine, and even there not very loudly.
The concession to allow her to carry out this particular investigation, in a backward English town where she could be stoned for doing it, was a marvel in itself and one that Simon of Naples had fought hard to gain. The prior had been reluctant to give his permission, appalled that a woman was prepared to carry out such work and fearing what would happen if it were known that a foreigner had peered at and prodded the poor corpses: “ Cambridge would regard it as desecration; I’m not sure it isn’t.”
Simon had said, “My lord, let us find out how the children died, for it is certain that incarcerated Jews could have had no hand in it; we are modern men, we know wings do not sprout from human shoulders. Somewhere, a murderer walks free. Allow those sad little bodies to tell us who he is. The dead speak to Dr. Trotula. It is her work. They will talk to her.”
As far as Prior Geoffrey was concerned, talking dead were in the same category as winged humans: “It is against the teaching of Holy Mother Church to invade the sanctity of the body.”
He gave way at last only on Simon’s promise that there would be no dissection, only examination.
Simon suspected that the prior’s compliance also arose less from belief that the corpses would speak than from the fear that, if she were refused, Adelia would return to the place from which she’d come, leaving him to face the next onslaught of his bladder without her.
So now, here, in a country she hadn’t wanted to come to in the first place, she must confront the worst of all inhumanities alone.
But that, Vesuvia Adelia Rachel Ortese Aguilar, is your purpose, she told herself. In times of uncertainty, she liked to recount the names that had been lavished on her, along with education and their own extraordinary ideas, by the couple that had picked her up from her lava-strewn cradle on Vesuvius and taken her home. Only you are fitted to do it, so do it.
In her hand was one of the three objects that had been found on the bodies of the dead children. One had been already delivered to the sheriff, one torn to pieces by a rampaging father. The third had been saved by the prior, who had quietly passed it to her.
Carefully, so as not to attract attention, she held it up to catch a shaft of light. It was made of rushes, beautifully and with great intricacy woven into a quincunx. If it was meant to be a Star of David, the weaver had left out one of the points. A message? An attempt to incriminate the Jews by someone poorly acquainted with Judaism? A signature?
In Salerno, she thought, it would have been possible to locate the limited number of people with skill enough to make it, but in Cambridge, where rushes grew inexhaustibly by the rivers and streams, weaving them was a household activity; merely passing along the road to this great priory, she had seen women sitting in doorways, their hands engaged in making mats and baskets that were works of art, men thatching rush roofs into ornate sculptures.
No, there was nothing the star could tell her at this stage.
Prior Geoffrey came bustling back in. “The coroner has looked at the bodies and ordered a public inquest-”
“What did he have to say?”
“He pronounced them dead.” At Adelia’s blink, he said, “Yes, yes, but it is his duty-coroners are not chosen for their medical knowledge. Now then, I’ve lodged the remains in Saint Werbertha’s anchorage. It is quiet there, and cold, a little dark for your purposes, but I have provided lamps. A vigil will be kept, of course, but it shall be delayed until you have made your examination. Officially, you are there to do the laying out.”
Again, a blink.
“Yes, yes, it will be regarded as strange, but I am the prior of this foundation and my law is second only to Almighty God’s.” He bustled her to the side door of the church and gave her directions. A novice weeding the cloister garden looked up in curiosity, but a click of his superior’s fingers sent him back to work. “I would come with you, but I must go to the castle and discuss eventualities with the sheriff. Between us, we have to prevent another riot.”
Watching the small, brown-clad figure trudge off carrying its goatskin bag, the prior prayed that in this case, his law and Almighty God’s coincided.
He turned round in order to snatch a minute in prayer at the altar, but a large shadow detached itself from one of the nave’s pillars, startling him and making him angry. It had a roll of vellum in its hand.
“What do you here, Sir Rowley?”
“I was about to plead for a private view of the bodies, my lord,” the tax collector said, “but it seems I have been preempted.”
“That is the job of the coroner, and he’s done it. There will be an official inquest in a day or two.”
Sir Rowley nodded toward the side door. “Yet I heard you instructing that lady to examine them further. Do you hope for her to tell you more?”
Prior Geoffrey looked around for help and found none.
The tax collector asked with apparent genuine interest, “How might she do that? Conjurement? Invocation? Is she a necromancer? A witch?”
He’d gone too far. The prior said quietly, “Those children are sacred to me, my son, as is this church. You may leave.”
“I apologize, my lord.” The tax collector didn’t look sorry. “But I too have a concern in this matter, and I have here the king’s warrant whereby to pursue it.” He waved a roll so that the royal seal swung. “What is that woman?”
A king’s warrant trumped the authority of a canonry prior, even one whose word was next to God’s. Sullenly, Prior Geoffrey said, “She is a doctor versed in the morbid sciences.”
“Of course. Salerno . I should have known.” The tax collector whistled with satisfaction. “A woman doctor from the only place in Christendom where that is not a contradiction in terms.”
“You know it?”
“Stopped there once.”
“Sir Rowley.” The prior raised his hand in admonition. “For the safety of that young woman, for the peace of this community and town, what I have told you must remain within these walls.”
“Vir sapit qui pauca loquitur, my lord. First thing they teach a tax collector.”
Not so much wise as cunning, the prior decided, but probably able to keep silent. What was the man’s purpose? At a sudden thought, he held out his hand. “Let me see that warrant.” He examined it, then handed it back. “This is merely the usual tax collector’s warrant. Is the king taxing the dead now?”
“Indeed not, my lord.” Sir Rowley seemed affronted by the idea. “Or not more than usual. But if the lady is to conduct an unofficial inquest, it might subject both town and priory to punitive taxes-I don’t say it will, but the regular amercements, confiscation of goods, et cetera, might apply.” The plump cheeks bunched in an engaging smile. “Unless, of course, I am present to see that all is correct.”
The prior was beaten. So far Henry II had withheld his hand, but it was fairly certain that at the next assize, Cambridge would be fined, and fined heavily, for the death of one of the king’s most profitable Jews.
Any infringement of his laws gave the king an opportunity to fill his coffers at the expense of the infringers. Henry listened to his tax collectors, the most dreaded of royal underlings; if this one should report to him an irregularity connected with the children’s deaths, then the teeth of that rapacious Plantagenet leopard might tear the heart out of the town.
“What do you want of us, Sir Rowley?” Prior Geoffrey asked wearily.
“I want to see those bodies.” The words were spoken quietly, but they flicked at the prior like a lash.
APART FROM THE FACT that its three-foot-thick walls kept it cool, and its situation in a glade at the far end of Barnwell’s deer park was isolated, the cell in which the Saxon anchoress Saint Werbertha had passed her adult life-until, that is, it had been ended somewhat abruptly by invading Danes-was unsuitable for Adelia’s purposes. For one thing, it was small. For another, despite the two lamps the prior had provided, it was dark. A slit of a window was shut by a wooden slide. Cow parsley frothed waist-high around a tiny door set in an arch.
Damn all this secrecy. She would have to keep the door open in order to have enough light-and the place was already beset by flies trying to get in. How did they expect her to work in these conditions?
Adelia put her goatskin bag on the grass outside, opened it to check its contents, checked them again-and knew she was putting off the moment when she would have to open the door.
This was ridiculous; she was not an amateur. Quickly, she knelt and asked the dead beyond the door to forgive her for handling their remains. She asked to be reminded not to forget the respect owed to them. “Permit your flesh and bone to tell me what your voices cannot.”
She always did this; whether the dead heard her she was unsure, but she was not the complete atheist her foster father was, though she suspected that what lay ahead of her this afternoon might convert her into one.
She rose, took her oilcloth apron from the bag, put it on, removed her cap, tied the gauze helmet with its glazed eyepiece over her head, and opened the cell door…
SIR ROWLEY PICOT enjoyed the walk, pleased with himself. It was going to be easier than he’d thought. A mad female, a mad foreign female, was always going to be forced to succumb to his authority, but it was unexpected bounty that someone of Prior Geoffrey’s standing should also be under his thumb through association with the same female.
Nearing the anchorage, he paused. It looked like an overgrown beehive-Lord, how the old hermits loved discomfort. And there she was, a figure bending over something on a table just inside its open door.
To test her, he called out, “Doctor.”
“Yes?”
Ah, hah, Sir Rowley thought. How easy. Like snatching a moth.
As she straightened and turned toward him, he began, “You remember me, madam? I am Sir Rowley Picot, whom the prior-”
“I don’t care who you are,” the moth snapped. “Come in here and keep the flies off.” She emerged, and he was presented with an aproned human figure with the head of an insect. It tore a clump of cow parsley from the ground and, at his approach, shoved the umbellifers at him.
It wasn’t what Sir Rowley had in mind, but he followed her, squeezing through the door to the beehive with some difficulty.
And squeezing out again. “Oh my God.”
“What’s the matter?” She was cross, nervy.
He leaned against the arch of the doorway, breathing deeply. “Sweet Jesus, have mercy on us all.” The stench was appalling. Even worse was what lay exposed on the table.
She tutted with irritation. “Stand in the doorway then. Can you write?”
With his eyes closed, Rowley nodded. “First thing they teach a tax collector.”
She handed him a slate and chalk. “Put down what I tell you. In between times, keep fanning the flies away.”
The anger went out of her voice, and she began speaking in monotone. “The remains of a young female. Some fair hair still attached to the skull. Therefore she is”-she broke off to consult a list she’d inked onto the back of her hand-“Mary. The wildfowler’s daughter. Six years old. Disappeared Saint Ambrose, that is, what, a year ago? Are you writing?”
“Yes, ma’am.” The chalk squeaked over the slate, but Sir Rowley kept his face to the open air.
“The bones are unclothed. Flesh almost entirely decomposed; what there is has been in contact with chalk. There is a dusting of what appears to be dried silt on the spine, also some lodged in the rear of the pelvis. Is there silt near here?”
“We’re on the edge of the silt fens. They were found on the fen edge.”
“Were the bodies lying faceup?”
“God, I don’t know.”
“Hmm, if so, it would account for the traces on the back. They are slight; she wasn’t buried in silt, more likely chalk. Hands and feet tied by strips of black material.” There was a pause. “There are tweezers in my bag. Give them to me.”
He fumbled in the bag and passed on a pair of thin wooden tweezers, saw her use them to pick at a strip of something and hold it to the light.
“Mother of God.” He returned to the doorway, his arm reaching inside to continue whisking the cow parsley about. From the woodland beyond came the call of the cuckoo, confirming the warmth of the day, and the smell of bluebells among the trees. Welcome, he thought, oh God, welcome. You’re late this year.
“Fan harder,” she snapped at him, then resumed her monotone. “These ties are strips of wool. Mmm. Pass me a vial. Here, here. Where are you, blast you?” He retrieved a vial from her bag, gave it to her, waited, and retook possession of it, now containing a dreadful strip. “There are crumbs of chalk in the hair. Also, an object adhering to it. Hmm. Lozenge-shaped, possibly a sticky sweetmeat of some kind that has now dried to the strands. It will need further examination. Hand me another vial.”
He was instructed to seal both vials with red clay from the bag. “Red for Mary, a different color for each of the others. See to it, please.”
“Yes, Doctor.”
USUALLY PRIOR GEOFFREY went in pomp to the castle, just as Sheriff Baldwin returned his visits with equal pomp; a town must always be aware of its two most important men. Today, however, it was a sign of how troubled the prior was that trumpeter and retinue had been left behind and he rode across Great Bridge to Castle Hill with only Brother Ninian in attendance.
Townspeople pursued him, hanging on to his stirrups. To all of them he replied in the negative. No, it wasn’t the Jews. How could it have been? No, be calm. No, the fiend hadn’t been caught yet, but he would be, God’s grace he would be. No, leave the Jews be, they did not do this.
He worried for Jew and Gentile. Another riot would bring the king’s anger down on the town.
And as if that wasn’t enough, the prior thought savagely, there was the tax collector, God punish him and all his breed. Apart from the fact that Sir Rowley’s probing fingers were now investigating a matter the prior would rather, much rather, they had not meddled with, he was concerned for Adelia-and for himself.
The upstart will tell the king, he thought. Both she and I will be undone. He suspects necromancy; she will be hanged for it, while I…I shall be reported to the Pope and cast out. And why, if the taxman wished to see the bodies so much, did he not insist on being present when the coroner examined them? Why avoid officialdom when the man was, himself, official?
Just as troubling was the familiarity of Sir Rowley’s round face-Sir Rowley, indeed; since when did the king confer knighthood on tax collectors?-it had bothered him all the way from Canterbury.
As his horse began to labor up the steep road to the castle, the prior’s mind’s eye pictured the scene that had been played out on this very hill a year ago. Sheriff’s men trying to hold off a maddened crowd from frightened Jews, himself and the sheriff bellowing uselessly for order.
Panic and loathing, ignorance and violence…the devil had been in Cambridge that day.
And so had the tax collector. A face glimpsed in the crowd and forgotten until now. Contorted like all the others as its owner struggled…struggled with whom? Against the sheriff’s men? Or for them? In that hideous conglomeration of noise and limbs, it had been impossible to tell.
The prior clicked his horse to go on.
The man’s presence on that day in this place was not necessarily sinister; sheriffs and taxmen went together. The sheriff collected the king’s revenue; the king’s collector ensured that the sheriff didn’t keep too much of it.
The prior reined in. But I saw him at Saint Radegund’s fair much later. The man was applauding a stilt-walker. And that was when little Mary went missing. God save us.
The prior dug his heels into the horse’s side. Quickly now. More urgent than ever to talk to the sheriff.
“MMM. The pelvis is chipped from below, possibly accidental damage postmortem but, since the slashes seem to have been inflicted with considerable force and the other bones show no damage, more probably caused by a instrument piercing upward in an attack on the vagina…”
Rowley hated her, hated her equable, measured voice. She did violence to the feminine even by enunciating the words. It was not for her to open her woman’s lips and give them shape, loosing foulness into the air. She had become spokesman for the deed and thereby complicit in its doing. A perpetrator, a hag. Her eyes should not look on what she saw without expelling blood.
Adelia was forcing herself to see a pig. Pigs were what she’d learned on. Pigs-the nearest approximation in the animal world to human flesh and bone. Up in the hills, behind a high wall, Gordinus had kept dead pigs for his students, some buried, some exposed to the air, some in a wooden hut, others in a stone byre.
Most of the students introduced to his death farm had been revolted by the flies and stench and had fallen away; only Adelia saw the wonder of the process that reduced a cadaver to nothing. “For even a skeleton is impermanent and, left to itself, will eventually crumble to dust,” Gordinus had said. “What marvelous design it is, my dear, that we are not overwhelmed by a thousand years’ worth of accumulated corpses.”
It was marvelous, a mechanism that went into action as breath departed the body, releasing it to its own device. Decomposition fascinated her because-and she still didn’t understand how-it would occur even without the help of the flesh flies and blowflies, which, if the corpse were accessible to them, came in next.
So, having achieved qualification as a doctor, she’d learned her new trade on pigs. On pigs in spring, pigs in summer, pigs in autumn and winter, each season with its own rate of decay. How they died. When. Pigs set up, pigs with heads down, pigs lying, pigs slaughtered, pigs dead from disease, pigs buried, pigs unburied, pigs kept in water, old pigs, sows that had littered, boars, piglets.
The piglet. The moment of divide. Recently dead, only a few days old. She’d carried it to Gordinus’s house. “Something new,” she’d said. “This matter in its anus, I can’t place it.”
“Something old,” he’d told her, “old as sin. It is human semen.”
He’d guided her to his balcony overlooking the turquoise sea and sat her down and fortified her with a glass of his best red wine and asked her if she wanted to proceed or return to ordinary doctoring. “Will you see the truth or avoid it?”
He’d read her Virgil, one of the Georgics, she couldn’t remember which, that took her into roadless, sun-soaked Tuscan hills, where lambs, full of winey milk, leaped for the joy of leaping, tended by shepherds swaying to the pipes of Pan.
“Any one of which may take a sheep, shove its back legs into his boots and his organ into its back passage,” Gordinus had said.
“No,” she’d said.
“Or into a child.”
“No.”
“Or a baby.”
“No.”
“Oh, yes,” he’d said, “I have seen it. Does that spoil the Georgics for you?”
“It spoils everything.” Then she’d said, “I cannot continue.”
“Man hovers between Paradise and the Pit,” Gordinus told her cheerfully. “Sometimes rising to one, sometimes swooping to the other. To ignore his capacity for evil is as obtuse as blinding oneself to the heights to which he can soar. It may be that it is all one to the sweep of the planets. You have seen Man’s depths for yourself. I have just read you some lines of his upward flight. Go home, then, Doctor, and put on the blindfold, I do not blame you. But at the same time, plug your ears to the cries of the dead. The truth is not for you.”
She had gone home, to the schools and hospitals to receive the plaudits of those she taught and to whom she administered, but her eyes were unbound now, and her ears unplugged, and she had become pestered by the cries of the dead, so she’d returned to the study of pigs and, when she was ready, to human corpses.
However, in cases like the one on the table before her now, she resumed a metaphorical blindfold so that she could still function, donning self-imposed blinkers to halt a descent into uselessness through despair, a necessary obscurity that permitted sight but allowed her to see not the torn, once immaculate body of a child but instead the familiar corpse of a pig.
The stabbing around the pelvis had left distinctive marks; she had seen knife wounds before, but none like these. The blade of the instrument that had caused them appeared to be much faceted. She would have liked to remove the pelvis for leisurely examination in better light, but she had promised Prior Geoffrey to do no dissection. She clicked her fingers for the man to pass her the slate and chalk.
He studied her while she drew. Slants of sunlight from between the bars of Saint Werbertha’s tiny window fell on her as on a monstrous blowfly hovering over the thing on the table. The gauze smoothed the features of her face into something lepidopteral, pressing strands of hair against her head like flattened antennae. And hmmm, the thing buzzed with the insistence of the feeding, winging, clustering cloud that hovered with her.
She finished the diagram and held out the slate and chalk so that the man could receive them back. “Take them,” she snapped. She was missing Mansur. When Sir Rowley didn’t move, she turned and saw his look. She’d seen it on others. Wearily, she said, almost to herself, “Why do they always want to shoot the messenger?”
He stared back at her. Was that what his anger was?
She came outside, brushing away flies. “This child is telling me what happened to her. With luck, she may even tell me where. From that, with even more luck, we may be able to deduce who. If you do not wish to learn these things, then get to hell. But first, fetch me someone who does.”
She lifted the helmet from her head, clawing her fingers through her hair, a glimpse of dark blond, turning her face to the sun.
It was the eyes, he thought. With her eyes closed, she reverted to her years, which, he saw, numbered a few less than his own, and to something approximating the feminine. Not for him; he preferred them sweeter. And plumper. The eyes, when open, aged her. Cold and dark like pebbles-and with as much emotion. Not surprising, when you considered what they looked on.
But if in truth she could work the oracle…
The eyes turned on him. “Well?”
He snatched the slate and chalk from her hand. “Your servant, mistress.”
“There’s more gauze in there,” she said. “Cover your face, then come in and make yourself useful.”
And manners, he thought, he liked them with manners. But as she retied her mask over her head, squared her skinny shoulders, and marched back into the charnel house, he recognized the gallantry of a tired soldier reentering battle.
The second bundle contained Harold, redheaded son of the eel seller, pupil at the priory school.
“The flesh is better preserved than Mary’s, to the point of mummification. The eyelids have been cut away. Also the genitals.”
Rowley put down the whisk to cross himself.
The slate became covered with unutterable words, except that she uttered them: binding cord. A sharp instrument. Anal insertion.
And, again, chalk.
That interested her. He could tell from the humming. “Chalkland.”
“The Icknield Way is near here,” he told her helpfully. “The Gog Magog hills, where we stopped for the prior, are of chalk.”
“Both children have chalk in their hair. In Harold’s case, some has been embedded in his heels.”
“What does that say?”
“He was dragged through chalk.”
The third bundle contained the remains of Ulric, eight years old, gone missing on Saint Edward’s of this year and which, because his disappearance had taken place more recently than the others’, brought forth frequent hmms from the examiner-an alert to Rowley, who’d begun to recognize the signs that she had more and better material to investigate.
“No eyelids, no genitals. This one wasn’t buried at all. What was the weather this March in this area?”
“I believe it to have been dry all over East Anglia, ma’am. There was general complaint that newly planted crops were withering. Cold but dry.”
Cold but dry. Her memory, renowned in Salerno, searched the death farm and fell on early-spring pig number 78. About the same weight. That, too, had been dead just over a month in the cold and dry, and was of more advanced decomposition. She would have expected this one to be in an approximately similar state. “Were you kept alive after you went missing?” she asked the body, forgetting that a stranger, and not Mansur, was listening.
“Jesus God, why do you say that?”
She quoted Ecclesiastes as she did to her students: “To everything there is a season…a time to be born and a time to die; a time to plant, a time to pluck up that which is planted. Also a time to putrefy.”
“So the devil kept him alive? How long?”
“I don’t know.”
There were a thousand variations that could cause the difference between this corpse and pig 78. She was irritable because she was tired and distressed. Mansur wouldn’t have asked, knowing better than to treat her observations as conversation. “I won’t be drawn on it.”
Ulric also had chalk embedded in his heels.
The sun was beginning to go down by the time each body had been wrapped up again, ready for encoffining. The woman went outside to take off her apron and helmet while Sir Rowley took down the lamps and put them out, leaving the cell and its contents in blessed darkness.
At the door, he knelt as he once had in front of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. That tiny chamber had been barely larger than the one now before him. The table on which the Cambridge children lay was about the same size as Christ’s tomb. It had been dark there, too. Beyond and about had been the conglomeration of altars and chapels that made up the great basilica that the first crusaders had built over the holy places, echoing with the whispers of pilgrims and the chant of Greek Orthodox monks singing their unending hymns at the site of Golgotha.
Here there was only the buzz of flies.
He’d prayed for the souls of the departed then, and for help and forgiveness for himself.
He prayed for them now.
When he came out, the woman was washing herself, laving her face and hands from the bowl. After she had finished, he did the same-she’d lathered the water with soapwort. Crushing the stems, he washed his hands. He was tired; oh, Jesus, he was tired.
“Where are you staying, Doctor?” he asked her.
She looked at him as if she hadn’t seen him before. “What did you say your name was?”
He tried not to be irritated; from the look of her, she was even more weary than he was. “Sir Roland Picot, ma’am. Rowley to my friends.”
Of which, he saw, she was not likely to be one. She nodded. “Thank you for your assistance.” She packed her bag, picked it up, and set off.
He hurried after her. “May I ask what conclusions you draw from your investigation?”
She didn’t answer.
Damn the woman. He supposed that, since he’d written down her notes, she was leaving him to draw his own conclusions, but Rowley, who was not a humble man, was aware that he had encountered someone with knowledge he could not hope to attain. He tried again: “To whom will you report your findings, Doctor?”
No answer.
They were walking through the long shadows of the oaks that fell over the wall of the priory deer park. From the priory chapel came the clap of a bell sounding vespers, and ahead, where the bakery and brew house stood outlined against the dying sun, figures in violet rochets were spilling out of the buildings into the walkways like petals being blown in one direction.
“Shall we attend vespers?” If ever he’d needed the balm of the evening litany, Sir Rowley felt he needed it now.
She shook her head.
Angrily, he said, “Will you not pray for those children?”
She turned and he saw a face ghastly with fatigue and an anger that outmatched his. “I am not here to pray for them,” she said. “I have come to speak for them.”