Returning from the castle that afternoon to the not inconsiderable house that had accommodated the succession of Saint Augustine ’s priors, Prior Geoffrey had yet more arrangements to make.
“She’s waiting for you in your library,” Brother Gilbert said curtly. He didn’t approve of a tête-à-tête between his superior and a woman.
Prior Geoffrey went in and sat himself in the great chair behind his table desk. He didn’t ask the woman to sit down because he knew she wouldn’t; he didn’t greet her, either-there was no need. He merely explained his responsibility for the Salernitans, his problem, and his proposed solution.
The woman listened. Though neither tall nor fat, in her eelskin boots, her muscled arms folded over her apron, gray hair escaping from the sweat-stained roll round her head, she had the massive, feminine barbarity of a sheela-na-gig that turned the prior’s comfortable, book-lined room into a cave.
“Thus I have need of you, Gyltha,” Prior Geoffrey said, finishing. “They have need of you.”
There was a pause.
“Summer’s a-coming in,” Gyltha said in her deep voice. “Summer I’m busy with eels.”
In late spring, Gyltha and her grandson emerged from the fens wheeling tanks full of squirming, silver eels and settled into their reed-thatched summer residence by the Cam. There, out of a wonderful steam, emerged eels pickled, eels salted, eels smoked, and eels jellied, all of them, thanks to recipes known only to Gyltha, superior to any other and bought up immediately by waiting and appreciative customers.
“I know you are,” Prior Geoffrey said patiently. He sat back in his great chair and reverted to broad East Anglian. “But that’s dang hard work, girl, and you’re getting on.”
“So’re you, bor.”
They knew each other well. Better than most. When a young Norman priest had arrived in Cambridge to take over its parish of Saint Mary’s twenty-five years before, his house had been kept for him by a well-set-up young fenland woman. That they might have been more to each other than employer and employee had not raised an eyebrow, for England’s attitude toward clerical celibacy was tolerant-or slack, depending on which way you looked at it-and Rome had not then begun to shake its fist at “priests’ wives,” as it did now.
Though young Father Geoffrey’s waist had swelled on Gyltha’s cooking, and young Gyltha’s waist had swelled also, though whether from her cooking or something else, nobody knew the truth of it except those two. When Father Geoffrey was called by God to the canonry of Saint Augustine, Gyltha had disappeared into the fenland from which she had come, refusing the allowance offered to her.
“What iffen I throw in a skivvy or two,” the prior said now, winningly. “Bit of cooking, bit of organizing, that’s all.”
“Foreigners,” said Gyltha. “I don’t hold with foreigners.”
Looking at her, the prior was reminded of Guthlac’s description of the fen folk in whom that worthy saint had tried to instill Christianity: “Great heads, long necks, pale faces, and teeth like horses. Save us, from them, O Lord.” But they’d had the means and the independence to resist William the Conqueror longer and more strongly than the rest of the English.
Nor was intelligence lacking among them. Gyltha had it; she was the beau ideal as housekeeper for the ménage Prior Geoffrey had in mind-outré enough, yet sufficiently well known and trusted by the townsfolk of Cambridge to provide a bridge between it and them. If she would agree…
“Weren’t I a foreigner?” he said. “You took me on.”
Gyltha smiled, and for a moment the surprising charm reminded Prior Geoffrey of their years in the priest’s little house next to Saint Mary’s church.
He pressed home his advantage. “Be good for young Ulf.”
“That’s doing well enough at school.”
“When that do bother to come.” Young Ulf’s acceptance at the priory school had been less to do with his cleverness, which was considerable if idiosyncratic, than to Prior Geoffrey’s unconfirmed suspicion that the boy, being Gyltha’s grandson, was also his own. “Sore need of a bit of gentrifying, though, girl.”
Gyltha leaned forward and put a scarred finger on the prior’s writing desk. “What they doing here, bor? You going to tell me?”
“Took ill, didn’t I? Saved my old life, she did.”
“Her? I heard it was the blackie.”
“Her. And not witchery, neither. Proper doctor she is, only best nobody don’t know it.”
There was no point in concealing it from Gyltha, who, if she took on the Salernitans, would find out. In any case, this woman was as close as the seaweeded oysters that she made him a present of every year, of which a fine selection was at this moment in the priory’s ice-house.
“I don’t be sure who sent they three,” he went on, “but they do mean to find out who’s killing the children.”
“Harold.” Gyltha’s face showed no emotion, but her voice was soft; she did business with Harold’s father.
“Harold.”
She nodded. “Weren’t Jews, then?”
“No.”
“Didn’t reckon it was.”
From across the cloisters connecting the prior’s house with the church came the bell calling the brotherhood to vespers.
Gyltha sighed. “Skivvies as promised, and I only do the bloody cooking.”
“Benigne. Deo gratias.” The prior got up and accompanied Gyltha to the door. “Old Tubs still breeding they smelly dogs?”
“Smellier than ever.”
“Bring un with you. Attach it to her, like. If her’s asking questions, it’ll maybe cause trouble. Her needs keeping an eye on. Oh, and they don’t none of ’em eat pork. Or shellfish.” He slapped Gyltha’s rump to send her on her way, folded his arms beneath his apron, and went on his own toward the chapel for vespers.
ADELIA SAT ON A BENCH in the priory’s paradise breathing in the scent of rosemary from the low hedging that bordered the flower bed at her feet and listened to the psalms of vespers filter out of cloister through the evening air across the walled vegetable garden and thence to the paradise with its darkening trees. She tried to empty her mind and let the masculine voices pour salve on the hurt caused by masculine abomination. “Let my prayer be counted as incense before you,” they chanted, “and the lifting of my hands as an evening sacrifice.”
There would be supper at the priory guesthouse, where Prior Geoffrey had lodged her and Simon and Mansur for the night, but it would entail sitting round the table with other travelers, and she was not fit for petty conversation. The straps of her goatskin bag were buckled tight so that, for this little space, the information the dead children had given her was trapped within it, chalk words on a slate. Undo the straps, as she would tomorrow, and their voices would burst out, beseeching, filling her ears. But tonight even they must be muted; she could bear nothing but the stillness of the evening.
Not until it was almost too dark to see did she stand, pick up her bag, and walk along the path leading to the long shafts of candlelight that indicated the windows of the guesthouse.
It was a mistake to go to bed without food; she lay in a narrow cot in a narrow cell off the corridor devoted to women guests, resenting the fact that she was there at all, resenting the King of Sicily, this country, almost the dead children themselves for imposing the burden of their agony on her.
“I cannot possibly go,” she’d told Gordinus when he’d first broached the subject. “I have my students, my work.”
It was not a matter of choice, however. The command for an expert in death had come down from a king against whom, since he also ruled southern Italy, there was no appeal.
“Why do you choose me?”
“You meet the king’s specifications,” Gordinus had said. “I know of no one else who does. Master Simon will be fortunate to have you.”
Simon had considered himself not so much fortunate as burdened; she’d seen that at once. Despite her credentials, the presence of a woman doctor, an attendant Arab, and a female companion-Margaret, blessed Margaret, had been alive then-had piled a Pelion of complication on the Ossa of an already difficult assignment.
But one of Adelia’s skills, honed to perfection in the rough-and-tumble of the schools, was to make her femininity near invisible, to demand no concession, to blend in almost unnoticed among the largely male fraternity. Only when her professionalism had been called into question did her fellow students find that there was a very visible Adelia with a rough edge to her tongue-in listening to them, she had learned how to swear-and an even rougher edge to her temper.
There had been no need to display either to Simon; he had been courteous and, as the journey went on, relieved. He found her modest-a description, Adelia had long decided, that was applied to women who gave men no trouble. Apparently, Simon’s wife was the acme of Jewish modesty, and he judged all other women by her. Mansur, Adelia’s other accessory, proved to be his invaluable self and, until reaching the coast of France, where Margaret had died, they had traveled in sweet accord.
By now, it took the regularity of her periods for her to remember that she was not a neutered being. On reaching England, the trio’s transfer to a cart and adoption of their roles as a traveling medicine troop had caused none of them little more than discomfort and amusement.
There remained the mystery of why the King of Sicily should involve Simon of Naples, one of his most capable investigators, let alone herself, in a predicament that the Jews of a wet, cold little island on the edge of the world had gotten themselves into. Simon had not known, nor had she. Their instructions were to see the Jews’ name washed of the taint of murder, an aim to be accomplished only by discovering the identity of the true killer.
What she had known was that she would not like England -and she didn’t. In Salerno, she was a respected member of a highly regarded medical school where nobody, except newcomers, expressed surprise on meeting a female practitioner. Here, they’d duck her in a pond. The bodies she’d just examined had darkened Cambridge for her; she’d seen the results of murder before but rarely any so terrible as these. Somewhere in this county a butcher of children walked and breathed.
Identifying him would be made harder by her unofficial position and the pretense that she wasn’t doing it at all. In Salerno she worked, however unacknowledged, with the authorities; here she had only the prior on her side, and even he dare not declare the fact.
Still resentful, she went to sleep and dreamed dark dreams.
SHE SLEPT LATE, a concession not usually granted to other guests. “Prior said as you could forgo matins, you being so tired,” Brother Swithin, the chubby little guest-master told her, “but I was to see you ate hearty when you woke.”
She breakfasted in the kitchen on ham, a rare luxury for one who traveled with a Jew and a Moslem, cheese from the priory’s sheep, bread fresh from the priory’s bakery, new-churned butter and preserve of Brother Swithin’s own pickling, a slice of eel pie, and milk warm from the cow.
“You was thrawn, maid,” Brother Swithin said, ladling her more milk from the churn. “Better now?”
She smiled at him through a white mustache. “Much.” She had been thrawn, whatever that was, but vigor had returned, resentment and self-pity gone. What did it matter that she must work in a foreign land? Children were universal; they inhabited a state superseding nationality with a right to protection by an eternal law. The savagery inflicted on Mary, Harold, and Ulric offended no less because they were not Salerno-born. They were everybody’s children; they were hers.
Adelia felt a determination such as she had never known. The world had to be made cleaner by the removal of the killer. “Whoso shall offend one of these little ones, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck…”
Now, round the neck of this offender, though he was as yet in ignorance of it, had been hung Adelia, Medica Trotula of Salerno, doctor to the dead, who would strive with all her knowledge and skill to bring him down.
She returned to her cell to transcribe her observations from slate to paper so that, on her return to Salerno, she might deliver a record of her findings-though what the King of Sicily wanted with it, she did not know.
It was terrible work, and slow; more than once she had to throw down her quill in order to cover her ears. The walls of the cell echoed with the children’s screams. Be quiet, oh, be quiet, so that I may track him down. But they had not wanted to die and could not be hushed.
Simon and Mansur had already departed to take up residence in accommodation the prior had found for them in the town so that the mission might have privacy. It was gone noon before Adelia set off after them.
Believing it to be her business to investigate the murderer’s territory and see something of the town, she was surprised, but not displeased, to find that Brother Swithin, busy with a new influx of travelers, was prepared to let her go without an escort and that in Cambridge’s teeming streets, women of all castes bustled about their business unaccompanied and with faces unveiled.
This was a different world. Only the students from the School of Pythagoras, red-capped and noisy, were familiar to her; students were the same the world over.
In Salerno, thoroughfares were shadowed by upper walkways and overhangs built to keep out a barbarous sun. This town opened itself wide like a flat flower to catch what light the English sky gave it.
True, there were sinister side alleys with tweedy, reed-thatched houses crammed together like fungi, but Adelia kept to main roads, asking her way without fear for her reputation or purse as she would not have done at home.
Here it was water, not sun, that the town bowed to; it coursed in runnels down both sides of a street so that every dwelling, every shop, had a footbridge to it. Cisterns, troughs, ponds confused the sight into seeing double; a roadside pig was exactly reflected by the puddle it stood in. Swans apparently floated on themselves. Ducks on a pond swam over the arched, chevroned doorway of the church looming above it. Errant streams contained images of roofs and windows, and willow fronds appeared to grow upward from the rivulets that mirrored them.
Adelia was aware that Cambridge piped to her, but she would not dance. To her, the double reflection of everything was symptomatic of a deeper duplicity, two-faced, a Janus town, where a creature that killed children walked on two legs like any other man. Until it was discovered, all of Cambridge wore a mask that she could not look on without wondering if a wolf’s muzzle lay beneath.
Inevitably, she lost her way.
“Can you direct me to Old Benjamin’s house, if you please?”
“What you want with that, then, maid?”
This was the third person she’d stopped with a request for direction and the third to inquire why she wanted it. “I’m considering opening a bawdy house” was an answer that came to mind, but she’d already learned that Cambridge inquisitiveness needed no tweaking; she merely said, “I should like to know where it is.”
“Up the road a ways, turn left onto Jesus Lane, corner facing the river.”
Turning to the river, she found a small crowd had gathered in order to watch Mansur unpack the last contents of the cart, ready to carry them up a flight of steps to the front door.
Prior Geoffrey had considered it only just, since the three were here on the Jews’ behalf, that the Salernitans should occupy one of Jewry’s abandoned houses during their stay.
He’d considered that to move them into Chaim’s rich mansion a little farther along the river would be ill-advised.
“But Old Benjamin has inspired less animosity in the town, for all he’s a pawnbroker, than did poor Chaim with his riches,” he’d said, “and he has a good view of the river.”
That there was an area called Jewry, of which this place stood on the edge, brought home to Adelia how the Jews of Cambridge had been excluded from or had excluded themselves from the life of the town-as they had been from nearly all the English towns she’d passed through on the way.
However privileged, this was a ghetto, now deserted. Old Benjamin’s house spoke of an incipient fear. It stood gable end on the alley to present as little of itself as possible to outside attack. It was built of stone rather than wattle and daub, with a door capable of withstanding a battering ram. The niche on one of the doorposts was empty, showing that the case holding the mezuzah had been torn out.
A woman had appeared at the top of the steps to help Mansur with their luggage. As Adelia approached, an onlooker called, “You doing for they now, then, Gyltha?”
“My bloody business,” the woman on the steps called back. “You mind yours.”
The crowd tittered but did not move away, discussing the situation in uninhibited East Anglian English. Already, something of what had happened to the prior on the road had become common currency.
“Not Jews, then. Our Gyltha wouldn’t hold with doing for the ungodly.”
“Saracens, so I heard.”
“That with the towel over his head, ’tis said he’s the doctor.”
“More devil than doctor from the look of he.”
“Cured Prior, so they say, Saracen or not.”
“How much do he charge, I wonder?”
“That their fancy piece?” This was addressed over Adelia’s head with a nod toward her.
“No, it is not,” she said.
The questioner, a man, was taken aback. “Talk English then, maid?”
“Yes. Do you?” Their accent-a chant of oy’s, strange inflections, and rising sentence endings-was different from the West Country English she’d learned at Margaret’s knee, but she could just understand it.
She appeared to have amused rather than offended. “Sparky little moggy, in’t she?” the man said to the assembly. Then, to her: “That blackie. Mix a good physic, can he?”
“As good as any you’ll find round here,” she told him. Probably true, she thought. The infirmarian at the priory would be a mere herbalist who, though he rendered it freely, gained his knowledge from books-most of them wildly inaccurate, in Adelia’s opinion. Those he couldn’t treat and who were beyond treating themselves would be at the mercy of the town’s quacks, to be sold elaborate, useless, costly, and probably disgusting potions, more intended to impress than cure.
Her new acquaintance took it as a recommendation. “Reckon as I’ll pay that a visit, then. Brother Theo up at the priory, he’s given up on I.”
A grinning woman nudged her neighbor. “Tell her what’s wrong with thee, Wulf.”
“He do reckon as I’ve a bad case of malingering,” Wulf said obediently, “an he be at a loss how to treat it.”
Adelia noticed there were no questions as to why she and Simon and Mansur had come. To Cambridge men and women, it was natural that foreigners should settle in their town. Didn’t they come from all parts to do business? Where better? Abroad was dragon country.
She tried to push her way through to get to the gate, but a woman holding up a small child blocked her way. “That ear’s hurting him bad. He do need doctoring.” Not everybody in the crowd was here out of curiosity.
“He’s busy,” Adelia said. But the child was whimpering with pain. “Oh, I’ll look at it.”
Someone in the crowd obligingly held up a lantern while she examined the ear, tutted, opened her bag for her tweezers-“Hold him still, now”-and extracted a small bead.
She might as well have breached a dam. “A wise woman, by lumme,” somebody said, and within seconds she was being jostled for her attention. In the absence of a doctor, a wise woman would do.
Rescue came in the form of the one who’d been addressed as Gyltha. She came down the steps and made a path to Adelia by jabbing obstructing bodies with her elbows. “Clear off,” she told them. “Ain’t even moved in yet. Come back a’morrow.” She pushed Adelia through the gate. “Quick, girl.” Then she used her bulk to shut the gate and hissed, “You done it now.”
Adelia ignored her. “That old man there,” she said, pointing. “He has an ague.” It looked like malaria and was unexpected; she’d thought the disease to be confined to the Roman marshes.
“That’s for the doctor to say,” Gyltha said loudly for the benefit of her listeners, then, for Adelia’s, “Get in, girl. He’ll still have it a’morrow.”
There was probably little to be done, anyway. As Gyltha pulled her up the steps, Adelia shouted, “Put him to bed,” at a woman supporting the shaking old man. “Try and cool the fever,” managing to add, “Wet cloths,” before the housekeeper hauled her inside and shut the door.
Gyltha shook her head at her. So did Simon, who’d been watching.
Of course. Mansur was the doctor now; she must remember it.
“But it is interesting if it is malaria,” she said to Simon. “ Cambridge and Rome. The common feature is marshland, I suppose.” In Rome, the disease was attributed by some to bad air, hence its name, by others to drinking stagnant water. Adelia, for whom neither supposition had been proved, kept an open mind.
“Wonderful lot of ague in the fens,” Gyltha told her. “Us do treat that with opium. Stops the shakes.”
“Opium? You grow the poppy round here?” God’s rib, with access to opium, she could alleviate a lot of suffering. Her mind reverting to malaria, she muttered to Simon, “I wonder if I might have the chance to look at the old man’s spleen when he dies.”
“We could ask,” Simon said, rolling his eyes. “Ague, child murder: What’s the difference? Let’s declare ourselves.”
“I had not forgotten the killer,” Adelia said, sharply. “I have been examining his work.”
He touched her hand. “Bad?”
“Bad.”
The worn face before her became distressed; here was a man with children, imagining the worst that could happen to them. He has a rare sympathy, Simon, she thought, it’s what makes him a fine investigator. But it takes its toll.
Much of his sympathy was for her. “Can you bear it, Doctor?”
“It’s what I am trained for,” she told him.
He shook his head. “Nobody is trained for what you have seen today.” He took in a deep breath and said in his labored English, “This is Gyltha. Prior Geoffrey send her to keep house kindly. She know what we do here.”
So, it appeared, did someone who’d been lurking in a corner with an animal. “This is Ulf. Grandson of Gyltha, I think. Also this-what is?”
“Safeguard,” Gyltha told him. “And take off thy bloody cap to the lady, Ulf.”
Never had Adelia seen a trio more comprehensively ugly. Woman and boy had coffin-shaped heads, big-boned faces, and large teeth, a combination she was to recognize as a fenland trait. If the child Ulf wasn’t as alarming as his grandmother, it was because he was a child, eight or nine years old, his features still blunted by puppyhood.
The “safeguard” was an overlarge ball of matted wool from which emerged four legs like knitting needles. It appeared ovine but was probably a dog; no sheep smelled as bad.
“Present from Prior,” Gyltha said. “You’re to do the feeding of it.”
Nor was the room they were gathered in any more prepossessing. Cramped and mean, the front door led straight into it, with an equally heavy door opposite giving to the rest of the house. Light from two arrow slits showed bare and broken shelving.
“Where Old Ben did his pawnbroking,” Gyltha said, adding with force, “only some bugger’s stole all the pledge goods.”
Some other bugger, or perhaps the same one, had also used the place as a latrine.
Adelia was clawed by homesickness. Most of all for Margaret, that loving presence. But also, oh, God, for Salerno. For orange trees and sun and shade, for aqueducts, for the sea, for the sunken Roman bath in the house she shared with her foster parents, for mosaic floors, for trained servants, for acceptance of her position as medica, for the facilities of the school, for salads-she hadn’t eaten green stuff since arriving in this godforsaken, meat-stuffing country.
But Gyltha had pushed open the inner door, and they were looking down the length of Old Benjamin’s hall-which was better.
It smelled of water, lye, beeswax. At their entrance, two maids with buckets and mops whisked out of sight through a door at the far end. From a barrel-vaulted roof hung burnished synagogue lamps on chains, lighting fresh green rushes and the soft polish of elm floorboards. A stone pillar supported a winding staircase leading up to an attic floor and down to the undercroft.
It was a long room, made extraordinary by glazed windows that ran higgledy-piggledy along its left length, their different sizes suggesting that Old Benjamin, on a waste-not-want-not principle, had enlarged or reduced the original casements to fit in their place such unreclaimed glass as came into his possession. There was an oriel, two lattices-both open to allow in the scent of the river-one small sheer pane, and a rose of stained glass that could have originated only in a Christian church. The effect was untidy but a change from the usual bare shuttering, and not without charm.
For Mansur and Simon, however, the ne plus ultra was elsewhere-in the kitchen, a separate building beyond the house. They urged Adelia toward it. “Gyltha is a cook,” Simon said as one emerging from the dust of Egypt into Canaan, “our prior…”
“May his shadow never grow less,” Mansur said.
“…our good, good prior has sent us a cook on a par with my own dear Becca.” Rebecca was his wife. “Gyltha superba. Look, Doctor, look what she is preparing.”
In a huge fireplace, things were turning on spits, spattering fat into glowing peat; kettles hung from hooks exuded herby, fishy steam; cream-colored pastry lay ready to be rolled on the great floured table. “Food, Doctor, succulent fish, lampreys-lampreys, praise to the Lord-duck seethed in honey, suckling lamb.”
Adelia had never seen two men so enthused.
The rest of daylight was spent unpacking. There were rooms to spare. Adelia had been allotted the solar, a pleasant room overlooking the river-a luxury after the communal beds of the inns. Its cupboards were bare, having been ransacked by the rioters, leaving her with welcome shelves on which to lay out her herbs and potions.
That evening, Gyltha, calling them to supper, was irritated by the time it took Mansur and Simon to carry out their ritual ablutions, and Adelia, who suspected that dirt was poisonous, to wash her hands before coming to the table. “That’ll get cold,” she snapped at them. “I ain’t cooking for heathens as don’t care if good food goes cold.”
“You are not,” Simon assured her, “Gyltha, you are not.”
The dining table was garnished with the riches of a fenland seething with fowl and fish; to Adelia’s homesick eyes it lacked sufficient greenstuff, but it was undoubtedly fine.
Simon said, “Blessed are you, HaShem, our God, King of the Universe, who brings forth bread from the earth,” and tore a piece from the white loaf on the table to eat it.
Mansur invoked the blessing of Salman the Persian, who had given Mohammed food.
Adelia said, “May good health attend us,” and they sat down to dine together.
On the boat from Salerno, Mansur had eaten with the crew, but the last leg of the journey through English inns and around campfires had imposed a democracy that none of them was willing to abandon. In any case, since Mansur now posed as head of the household, it was incongruous to send him to eat with the maids in the kitchen.
Adelia would have reported her findings over dinner, but the men, knowing what they were likely to be, refused to disturb their stomachs with anything except Gyltha’s cooking. Or to make any conversation, for that matter. Adelia was amazed by the time and praise two men could lavish on suckling lamb, custards, and cheeses.
For her, food was analogous to the wind-necessary for the propulsion of boats, living beings, and the sails of windmills but otherwise to be unremarked.
Simon drank wine. A barrel from his favorite Tuscan vineyard had traveled with them, English wines reportedly being undrinkable. Mansur and Adelia drank boiled and strained water because they always did.
Simon kept urging Adelia to take some wine and to eat more, despite her protestations that she had breakfasted too well at the priory. He was concerned that her examination of the bodies had sickened her to the point of illness. It was how it would have affected him, but she saw it as a reflection on her professionalism and said sharply, “That was my job. Why else have I come?”
Mansur told him to leave her alone. “Always, the doctor pecks like a sparrow.”
The Arab certainly wasn’t pecking. “You’ll get fat,” Adelia warned him. It was his horror; too many eunuchs ate themselves into obesity.
Mansur sighed. “That woman is a siren of cooking. She calls a man’s soul through his stomach.”
The idea of Gyltha as a siren delighted Adelia. “Shall I tell her so?”
To her surprise, he shrugged and nodded.
“Ooh,” she said. In all the years since he had been appointed by her foster parents to be her bodyguard, she had never known him to pay a compliment to a female. That it should be a woman with the face of a horse and with whom he did not share a common language was unexpected and intriguing.
The two maids who served them, both confusingly called Matilda and differentiated by only the initials of their parish saints, therefore answering to Matilda B. and Matilda W., were as wary of Mansur as of a performing bear that had sat down to dine. They emerged from the open passage that led from the kitchen to a door behind the dais, taking and replacing dish after dish without approaching his end of the table, giggling nervously and leaving the food to be passed down to him.
Well, Adelia thought, they’ll have to get used to him.
At last the table was cleared. Simon metaphorically girded his loins, sighed, and sat back. “And so, Doctor?”
Adelia said, “This is supposition, you understand.” It was her invariable caveat.
She waited for both men to acquiesce, then drew in a deep breath. “I believe the children were taken to chalkland to be killed. This may not apply to Little Saint Peter, who seems to have been a different case, perhaps because he was the first victim and the killer had not yet lapsed into routine. But of the three I examined, there was chalk embedded in the heels of both boys, indicating they were dragged through it, and evidence of it on the remains of all of them. Their hands and feet were bound with torn strips of cloth.”
She looked toward Simon. “Fine, black wool. I have kept samples.”
“I will inquire among the wool merchants.”
“He did not bury one of the bodies but kept that, too, somewhere dry and cool.” She kept her voice steady. “Also, it may be that the female was stabbed repeatedly in the pubic region, as were the boys. The best preserved of the males lacked his genitals, and I would say the others, too, suffered in the same way.”
Simon had covered his face with his hands. Mansur sat very still.
Adelia said, “I believe in each case he cuts off their eyelids, whether before or after death I cannot say.”
Simon said quietly, “Fiends walk among us. What do you do, Lord, to allow the torturers of Gehenna to inhabit human bodies?”
Adelia would have argued that to attribute satanic forces to the murderer was partly to absolve him, making him victim to an outside force. To her, the man was rabid, like a dog. But then, she thought, Perhaps allowing that he is diseased also gives an excuse to what is unpardonable.
“Mary…” She paused. Naming a corpse was a mistake she did not usually make; it did away with objectivity, introduced emotion when it was essential to remain impersonal; she didn’t know why she’d done it.
She began again: “The female had something stuck to her hair. At first I thought it to be semen…” Simon’s hand gripped the table, and she remembered she was not addressing her students. “However, the object has preserved its original oblong shape, probably a sweetmeat.”
Now then.
She said quietly, “We must consider particularly the time and location of the bodies’ discovery. They were found on silt; there was a dusting of it on each, but the shepherd who came across them assured Prior Geoffrey that they were not there the day before. Therefore, they had been taken from where they were kept, in chalk, to the site where the shepherd found them yesterday morning, on silt.”
It seemed a year ago.
Simon’s eyes were on hers, reading them. “We came to Cambridge yesterday morning,” he said. “The night before we were…what was the name of that place?”
“Part of the Gog Magog hills.” Adelia nodded. “On chalk.”
Mansur followed what she was implying. “So in the night the dog moved them. For us?”
She shrugged; she pronounced on only what was provable; others must draw the inference. She waited to see what Simon of Naples would make of it. Journeying together had engendered respect for him; the excitability, near gullibility, he displayed in public was not a deliberate disguise but a reaction to being in public and in no way represented a mind that calculated with brilliance and at speed. She regarded it as a compliment to herself and to Mansur that when they were alone, they were allowed to see his brain at work.
“He did.” Simon’s fists gently drummed the table. “It is too immediate for coincidence. How long have the little souls been missing? A year in one case? But when our cavalcade of pilgrims stops on the road and our cart moves up the hillside…all at once they are found.”
Mansur said, “He sees us.”
“He saw us.”
“And he moves the bodies.”
“He moved the bodies.” Simon splayed his hands. “And why? He was afraid we would find where he kept them on the hill.”
Adelia, playing devil’s advocate, asked, “Why should he be afraid of us discovering them? Other people must have walked those hills these past months and not found them.”
“Maybe not so many. What was the name, the name of the hill we were on?…The prior told me…” He tapped his forehead, then looked up as a maid came in to trim the candlewicks. “Ah. Matilda.”
“Yes, master?”
Simon leaned forward. “Wand-le-bury Ring.”
The girl’s eyes widened; she made the sign of the cross and backed out the way she had come.
Simon looked round. “Wandlebury Ring,” he said. “What did I say? Our prior was right; it is a place of superstition. Nobody goes there; it is left to sheep. But we went there last night. He saw us. Why had we come? He does not know. To spread our tents? To stay? To walk the ground? He cannot be sure what we will do, and he is afraid because that is where the bodies are and we may find them. He moves them.” He leaned back in his chair. “His lair is on Wandlebury Ring.”
He saw us. Adelia was inflicted by an image of batlike wings cringing over a pile of bones, a snout sniffing the air for intruders, a sudden gripe of the talons.
“So he digs the bodies up? He carries them a distance? He leaves them to be found?” Mansur said, his voice higher than ever with incredulity. “Can he be so foolish?”
“He was trying to lead us away, so we would not know the bodies were first laid in chalk,” said Simon. “He didn’t reckon with Dr. Trotula here.”
“Or does he want them to be found?” Adelia suggested. “Is he laughing at us?”
Gyltha came in. “Who’s been scaring my Matildas?” She was aggressive and was holding a pair of candle trimmers in a manner that caused Simon to fold his hands over his lap.
“Wand-le-bury Ring, Gyltha,” Simon said.
“What about it? Don’t you credit that squit they talk about the ring. Wild Hunt? I don’t hold with it.” She took down a lantern and began snipping. “Just a bloody hill, Wandlebury is. I don’t hold with hills.”
“Wild Hunt?” Simon asked. “What is Wild Hunt?”
“Pack of bloody hounds with red eyes led by the Prince of Darkness, and I don’t credit a word of it, them’s ordinary sheep-killers, I reckon, and you come down out of there, Ulf, you liddle grub, afore I set the pack on you.”
There was a gallery at the other end of the hall, its staircase hidden by a door in the wainscoting, out of which now sidled the small, unprepossessing figure of Gyltha’s grandson. He was muttering and glaring at them.
“What does the boy say?”
“Nothing.” She cuffed the child toward the kitchens. “You ask that loafer Wulf about the Wild Hunt; he’s full of squit. Reckons he saw it once, and he’ll sell you the tale for a drink of ale.”
When she’d gone, Simon said, “Wild Hunt, Benandanti, the Chausse Sauvage. Das Woden here. It is a superstition encountered all over Europe and varies very little; always hounds with eyes of fire, always a black and terrible horseman, always death to those seeing them.”
Quiet fell on the room. Adelia was more aware than she had been of the darkness beyond the two open lattice windows, where things rustled in the long grass. From the reeds by the river, the spring call of a bittern had accompanied their meal; now the notes took on the resonance of a drum heralding an approaching funeral.
She rubbed her arms to rid them of gooseflesh. “So we are to assume that the killer lives on the hill?” she asked.
Simon said, “It may be that he does. Maybe not. As I understand it, the children went missing from around the town; it is unlikely that all three would have ventured so far as the hill at different times under their own volition. There are long odds against a creature spending every minute in such surroundings so that he may guard his lair and espy someone approaching it. Either they were lured there, which is also unlikely-it is a distance of some miles-or they were taken. We may assume, therefore, that our man looks for his victims in Cambridge and uses the hill as his killing ground.”
He blinked at his wine cup as if seeing it for the first time. “What would my Becca say to all this?” He took a sip.
Adelia and Mansur stayed quiet; there was more-something that had been prowling outside was going to come in.
“No”-Simon was speaking slowly now-“no, there is another explanation. Not one I like, but it must be considered. Almost certainly, our presence at the hill precipitated the removal of the bodies. What if, instead of being spotted by a killer who was already in situ-a most fortuitous happening-what if we brought him with us?”
It was in the room now.
Simon said, “While we were attending Prior Geoffrey, what were the others of our party doing in that long night? Eh? My friends, we have to consider the possibility that our killer is one of the pilgrims we joined at Canterbury.”
The night beyond the lattices became darker.