Soft beds were something else Gyltha didn’t hold with. Adelia had wanted a mattress stuffed with goosedown such as she’d slept on in Salerno, and said so. Cambridge skies, after all, were stippled with geese.
“Goose feathers is buggers to wash,” Gyltha said. “Straw’s cleaner, change that every day.”
There was an unsought tension between them; Adelia had requested more salad with her meals, a demand Gyltha treated as lèse-majesté. Now, here was a moment of test; the response would decide who had future authority.
On the one hand, the process of running even such a modest household as this was beyond Adelia, who had few accomplishments necessary for it, knowing little of provisioning nor dealing with any merchants other than apothecaries. She could neither spin nor weave; her knowledge of herbs and spices was medical rather than culinary. Her sewing was restricted to mending torn flesh or cobbling together cadavers she had taken apart.
In Salerno, these things had not mattered; the blessed man who was her foster father had early recognized a brain rivaling his own and, because that was Salerno, had put her to becoming a doctor as he and his wife were. The organization of their large villa was left to his sister-in-law, a woman who had run it as if on greased wheels without ever raising her voice.
To all this, Adelia added the fact that her stay in England was to be temporary and would leave her no time for domesticity.
On the other hand, she was not prepared to be bullied by a servant. She said sharply, “See to it that the straw is indeed changed every day.”
A compromise, honors temporarily in Gyltha’s favor, the final outcome still to be decided. Not now, though, because her head ached.
Last night the Safeguard had shared the solar with her-another battle lost. To Adelia’s protests that the dog stank too much to bed anywhere but outside, Gyltha had said, “Prior’s orders. That’s to go where you go.” And so the animal’s snores had mingled with unaccustomed calls and shrieks from the river, just as her dream had been made terrible by Simon’s suggestion that the killer’s face would be familiar to them.
Before retiring, he’d expanded on it: “Who slept by that campfire on the road and who left it? A monk? A knight? Huntsman? Tax collector? Did any of them steal away to gather up those poor bones-they were light, remember, and perhaps he took a horse from the lines. The merchant? One of the squires? Minstrel? Servants? We must consider them all.”
Whichever one it was had swooped through her solar window last night in the shape of a magpie. It carried a living child in its claws. Sitting on Adelia’s chest, it dismembered the body, a lidless eye gleaming perkily at her as it pecked out the child’s liver.
It was a visitation so vivid that she woke up gasping, convinced a bird had killed the children.
“Where is Master Simon?” she asked Gyltha. It was early; the west-facing windows of the hall gave onto a meadow that was still shadowed by the house until its decline approached the river, where sunlight was shining on a Cam so polished, so deep and flat and wandering among the willows that Adelia had to suppress a sudden urge to go and dabble in it like a duck.
“Gone out. Wanted to know where there was wool merchants.”
Irritably, Adelia said, “We were to go to Wandlebury Hill today.” It had been agreed last night that their priority was to discover the killer’s lair.
“So he did say, but acause Master Darkie can’t go, too, he are going termorrer.”
“Mansur,” Adelia snapped. “His name’s Mansur. Why can’t he go?”
Gyltha beckoned her to the end of the hall and into Old Benjamin’s shop. “Acause of them.”
Standing on tiptoe, Adelia looked through one of the arrow slits.
A crowd of people was by the gate, some of them sitting as if they had been there a long time.
“Waiting to see Dr. Mansur,” Gyltha said with emphasis. “’S why you can’t go pimbling off to the hills.”
Here was a complication. They should have foreseen it but, in allowing Mansur to be set up as a doctor, an untried, foreign doctor in a busy town, it had not occurred to them that he would be burdened with patients. News of their encounter with the prior had spread; a cure for ills was to be found in Jesus Lane.
Adelia was dismayed. “But how can I treat them?”
Gyltha shrugged. “From the look, most of ’em’s dying anyway. Reckon as them’s Little Saint Peter’s failures.”
Little Saint Peter, the small, miraculous skeleton whose bones the prioress had trumpeted like a fairground barker all the way from Canterbury.
Adelia sighed for him, for the desperation that sent the suffering people to him, and, now, the disappointment that brought them to her. The truth was that, except in a few cases, she could do no better. Herbs, leeches, potions, even belief could not hold back the tide of disease to which most of humanity was subject. She wished it wasn’t so. God, she wished it.
It was a long time, in any case, that she’d had to do with living patients-other than those in extremis when no ordinary doctor was available, as the prior had been.
However, pain had gathered outside her door; she could not ignore it; something had to be done. Yet if she were to be seen practicing medicine, every doctor in Cambridge would go running to his bishop. The Church had never approved of human interference in disease, having held for centuries that prayer and holy relics were God’s method of healing and anything else was satanic. It allowed treatment to be carried out in the monasteries and, perforce, tolerated lay doctors as long as they did not overstep the mark, but women, being intrinsically sinful, were necessarily banned except in the case of authenticated midwives-and they had to take care not to be accused of witchcraft.
Even in Salerno, that most esteemed center of medicine, the Church had tried to enforce its rule that physicians should be celibate. It had failed, as it had failed in prohibiting the city’s women practitioners. But that was Salerno, the exception which proved the rule…
“What are we to do?” she said. Margaret, most practical of women, would have known. There’s ways round everything. Just you leave it to old Margaret.
Gyltha tutted. “What you whinnicking for? ’S easy as kiss me hand. You act like you’m the doctor’s assistant, his potions mixer or summat. They tell you in good English what’s up with they. You say it to the doctor in that gobble you talk, he gobbles back, and you tell ’em what to do.”
Crudely put but with a fine simplicity. If treatment were needed, it could appear that Dr. Mansur was instructing his assistant. Adelia said, “That’s rather clever.”
Gyltha shrugged. “Should keep us out the nettles.”
Told of the situation, Mansur took it calmly, as he took everything. Gyltha, however, was dissatisfied with his appearance. “Dr. Braose, him over by the market, he’s got a cloak with stars on it, and a skull on his table and a thing for telling the stars.”
Adelia stiffened, as she did at any suggestion of magic. “This one is practicing medicine, not wizardry.” Cambridge would have to settle for a kaffiyeh framing a face like a dark eagle and a voice in the upper ranges. Magic enough for anybody.
Ulf was sent to the apothecaries with a list of requirements. A waiting area was established in the room that had been the pawnshop.
The very rich employed their own doctors; the very poor treated themselves. Those who’d come to Jesus Lane were neither one nor the other: artisans, wage earners who, if the worst came to the worst, could spare a coin or two, even a chicken, to pay for treatment.
The worst had come to most of them; home remedies hadn’t worked, nor had giving their money and poultry to Saint Radegund’s convent. As Gyltha had said, these were Little Saint Peter’s failures.
“How did this come about?” Adelia asked a blacksmith’s wife, gently swabbing eyes gummed tight with yellow encrustation. She remembered to add, “The doctor wants to know.”
It appeared that the woman had been urged by the prioress of Saint Radegund’s to dip a cloth into the ooze of decomposing flesh that had been the body of Little Saint Peter after it was dragged from the river, then wipe her eyes with it in order to cure her increasing blindness.
“Somebody should kill that prioress,” Adelia said to Mansur in Arabic.
The blacksmith’s wife caught the meaning, if not the words, and was defensive. “Weren’t Little Saint Peter’s fault. Prioress said as I didn’t pray hard enough.”
“I’ll kill her,” Adelia said. She could do nothing about the woman’s blindness but sent her on her way with an eyewash of weak, strained agrimony that, with regular use, should get rid of the inflammation.
The rest of the morning did little to alleviate Adelia’s anger. Broken bones had been left too long and set crookedly. A baby, dead in its mother’s arms, could have been saved its convulsions by a decoction of willow bark. Three crushed toes had gone gangrenous-a cloth soaked in opium held for half a minute over the young man’s nose and swift application of the knife saved the foot, but amputation would not have been necessary if the patient hadn’t wasted time appealing to Little Saint Peter.
By the time the amputee had been stitched, bound, rested, and taken home, and the waiting room emptied, Adelia was raving. “God-damn Saint Radegund’s and all its bones. Did you see the baby? Did you see it?” In her temper, she turned on Mansur. “And what were you doing, recommending sugar for that child with the cough?”
Mansur had tasted power; he’d begun to make cabalistic arm movements over the patients’ heads as they bowed before him. He faced Adelia. “Sugar for a cough,” he said.
“Are you the doctor now? Sugar may be the Arab remedy, but it is not grown in this country and is very expensive here; neither, in this case, would it be any damned use.”
She stamped off to the kitchen to take a drink from the bouser, flinging the tin cup back into the water when she’d finished. “Blast them, blast their ignorance.”
Gyltha looked up from rolling pastry crust; she’d been on hand to interpret some of the more impenetrably East Anglian symptoms-“wambly” had proved to mean unsteadiness of the legs. “You saved young Coker’s foot for un, though, bor.”
“He’s a thatcher,” Adelia said. “How can he climb ladders with only two toes on one foot?”
“Better’n no bloody foot at all.”
There’d been an alteration in Gyltha, but Adelia was too depressed to notice it. This morning twenty-one desperate people had come to her-or, rather, to Dr. Mansur-and she could have helped eight of them if they’d attended sooner. As it was, she’d saved only three-well, four really-the child with the cough might benefit from inhalation of essence of pine if its lungs weren’t too affected.
The fact that until now she hadn’t been in residence to treat anybody passed her by; they’d been in need.
Absentmindedly, Adelia munched a biscuit Gyltha slid under her hand. Furthermore, she thought, if patients continued to arrive at this rate, she would have to set up her own kitchen. Tinctures, decoctions, ointments, and powders needed space and time for their manufacture.
Shop apothecaries tended to skimp; she’d never trusted them since Signor D’Amelia had been discovered interlacing his more expensive powders with chalk.
Chalk. That’s where she and Simon and Mansur should be this minute, searching the chalk of Wandlebury Hill, though she granted that Simon had been right not to go alone to that eerie place if only because it would need more than one person to peer into all those strange pits, let alone the possibility that the killer might peer back, in which case Mansur would come in handy.
“You say Master Simon is visiting wool merchants?”
Gyltha nodded. “Took they strips as that devil tied the childer up with. See if any on ’em sold it, and who to.”
Yes. Adelia had washed and dried two of the pieces ready for him. Since Wandlebury Hill must wait, Simon was using the time in another direction, though she was surprised that he had made Gyltha privy to what he was up to. Well, since the housekeeper was in their confidence…
“Come upstairs,” Adelia told her, leading the way. Then she paused. “That biscuit…”
“My honey oatcake.”
“Very nourishing.”
She took Gyltha to the table in the solar on which stood the contents of her goatskin bag. She pointed to one of them. “Have you seen anything like that before?”
“What is it?”
“I believe it to be a sweetmeat of some sort.”
The thing was lozenge-shaped, dried rock-hard and gray. It had taken her sharpest knife to shave a sliver from it, an action that revealed a pinkish interior and released, faint as a sought-for memory, a second’s suggestion of perfume. She said, “It was tangled in Mary’s hair.”
Gyltha’s eyes squeezed shut as she crossed herself, then opened to peer closely.
“Gelatine, I would say,” Adelia urged her. “Flower-flavored, or fruit. Sweetened with honey.”
“Rich man’s confit,” Gyltha said immediately. “I ain’t seen the like. Ulf.”
Her grandson was in the room within a second of the call, leading Adelia to suppose he’d been outside the door.
“You seen the like of this?” Gyltha asked him.
“Sweetmeats,” the boy growled-so he had been outside the door. “I buy sweeties all the time, oh, yes, money to burn, me…”
As he grumbled, his sharp little eyes took in the lozenge, the vials, the remaining strips of wool drying by the window, all the exhibits brought back from Saint Werbertha’s anchorage.
Adelia threw a cloth over them. “Well?”
Ulf shook his head with compelling authority. “Wrong shape for round here. Twists and balls, this country.”
“Cut off then,” Gyltha told him. When the boy had gone, she spread her hands. “If he ain’t seen the like, it don’t swim in our pond.”
It was disappointing. Last night the magnitude of suspecting every man in Cambridge had been reduced by the decision to devote their attention to the pilgrims. Even so, discounting wives, nuns, and female servants, the number for investigation was forty-seven. “Surely we may also discount the merchant from Cherry Hinton? He seemed harmless.” But consultation with Gyltha had placed Cherry Hinton to the west of Cambridge and therefore on a line with Wandlebury Hill.
“We discount nobody,” Simon had said.
In order to narrow suspicion through what evidence they had before starting to ask questions of and about forty-seven people, Simon had taken for himself the task of locating the source of the scraps of wool, Adelia the lozenge.
Which was proving unidentifiable.
“Yet we must suppose that its rarity will strengthen its connection with the killer once we find him,” Adelia said now.
Gyltha cocked her head. “You reckon he tempted Mary with it?”
“I do.”
“Poor little cosset Mary was, frit of her father-always fetching her and her mother a blow, he was-frit of everything. Never ventured far.” Gyltha viewed the lozenge: “Did you tempt her away, you beggar?”
The two women shared a moment’s reflection…a beckoning hand, the other holding out an exotic sweetmeat, the child attracted closer, closer, a bird drawn by a gyrating stoat…
Gyltha hurried off down the stairs to lecture Ulf on the danger of men who offered goodies.
Six years old, Adelia thought. Frightened of everything, six years of a brutal father and then a dreadful death. What can I do? What shall I do?
She went downstairs. “May I borrow Ulf? There may be some purpose in seeing the place from which each child disappeared. Also, I should like to examine Little Saint Peter’s bones.”
“They can’t tell you much, girl. The nuns boiled him.”
“I know.” It was the usual practice with the body of a putative saint. “But bones can speak.”
Peter was the primus inter pares of the murdered children, the first to disappear and the first to die. As far as could be deduced, his was the only one whose death did not accord with the others’, since, presumably, it had occurred in Cambridge.
Also, his was the only death to be accredited to crucifixion and, unless that could be disproved, she and Simon would have failed in their mission to exonerate the Jews, no matter how many killers they produced from the chalk hills.
She found herself explaining this to Gyltha. “Perhaps the boy’s parents can be persuaded to talk to me. They would have seen his body before it was boiled.”
“Walter and his missus? They saw nails in them little hands and the crown of thorns on that poor little head and they won’t say no different, not without losing themselves a mort of cash.”
“They’re making money from their son?”
Gyltha pointed upriver. “Get you to Trumpington and their cottage, the which you can’t see for folk clamoring to go inside it so’s to breathe air as Little Saint Peter breathed and touch Little Saint Peter’s shirt, the which they can’t acause he was wearing his only one, and Walter and Ethy sitting at their door charging a penny a time.”
“How shameful.”
Gyltha hung a kettle over the fire and then turned. “Seems you’ve never wanted for much, mistress.” The “mistress” was ominous; such rapport as had been achieved that morning had waned.
Adelia admitted she had not.
“Then s’pose you wait til you got six childer to feed apart from the one that’s dead and obliged for the roof over your head to do four days a week plowing and reaping of the nunnery’s fields as well as your own, to say nought of Agnes being bonded to do its bloody cleaning. Maybe you don’t care for their way, but that’s not shameful, that’s surviving.”
Adelia was silenced. After a while, she said, “Then I shall go to Saint Radegund’s and ask to see the bones in its reliquary.”
“Huh.”
“I shall look around me, at least,” Adelia said, piqued. “Shall Ulf guide me or not?”
Ulf would, though not willingly. So would the dog, though it seemed to scowl as horribly as the boy.
Well, perhaps with such companions-but such companions-she would blend into the Cambridge scenery.
“Blend into the scenery,” she said to Mansur with emphasis when he readied himself to accompany her. “You can’t come. I’d as easy blend in with a troop of acrobats.”
He protested, but she pointed out that it was daylight, there were plenty of people about, and she had her dagger and a dog whose smell could fell an assailant at twenty paces. In the end, she thought, he was not reluctant to stay behind with Gyltha in the kitchen.
She set off.
Beyond an orchard, a raised balk ran along the edge of a common field leading down to the river, angled with cultivated strips. Men and women were hoeing the spring planting. One or two touched their forehead to her. Farther along, the breeze bellied washing that was pinned to tenterhooks.
The Cam, Adelia saw, was a boundary. Across the river was a countryside of gently rising uplands, some forested, some parkland, a mansion like a toy in the distance. Behind her, the town with its noisy quays crowded the right bank as if enjoying the uninterrupted view.
“Where’s Trumpington?” she asked Ulf.
“Trumpington,” the boy grumbled to the dog. They went left. The angle of the afternoon sun showed that they had turned south. Punts went past them, women as well as men poling themselves about their business, the river their thoroughfare. Some waved to Ulf, the boy nodding back and naming each one to the dog. “Sawney on his way for to collect the rents, the old grub…Gammer White with the washing for Chenies…Sister Fatty for to supply the hermits, look a her puff…Old Moggy finished early at the market…”
They were on a causeway that kept Adelia’s boots, the boy’s bare feet, and Safeguard’s paws from sinking into meadows where cows grazed on deep grass and buttercups among willow and alder, their hooves causing a sucking sound as they moved to a fresh patch.
She’d never seen so much greenness in so great a variety. Or so many birds. Or such fat cattle. Pasture in Salerno was burned thin and good only for goats.
The boy stopped and pointed to a cluster of thatch and a church tower in the distance. “Trumpington,” he informed the dog.
Adelia nodded. “Now, where is Saint Radegund’s tree?”
The boy rolled his eyes, intoned “Saint Raddy’s,” and set off back the way they had come.
With Safeguard plodding dispiritedly behind them, they crossed the river by a footbridge so that this time they were following the Cam ’s left bank northward, the boy complaining to the dog at every step. From what Adelia could understand, he resented Gyltha’s change of occupation. As errand boy to his grandmother’s eel business, he occasionally received pourboires from the customers, a source of money now cut off.
Adelia ignored him.
A hunting horn sounded musically in the hills to the west. Safeguard and Ulf raised their disreputable heads and paused. “Wolf,” Ulf told the dog. The echo died and they went on.
Now Adelia was able to look across the water to Cambridge town. Set without competition against pure sky, its jumbled roofs that were spiked with church towers gained significance, even beauty.
In the distance loomed Great Bridge, a massive, workmanlike arch crammed with traffic. Beyond it, where the river formed a deep pool below the castle on its hill-almost a mountain in this terrain-shipping so crowded the quays it seemed impossible, from this view, that it should disentangle itself. Wooden cranes dipped and rose like bowing herons. Shouts and instructions were being issued in different languages. The crafts were as varied as the tongues; wherries, horse-drawn barges, poled barges, rafts, vessels like arks-even, to Adelia’s astonishment, a dhow. She could see men with blond plaits, hung about with animal skins so that they looked like bears, performing a leaping dance back and forth between barges for the amusement of working dockers.
Carried on the breeze, the noise and industry accentuated the quietness of the bank where she walked with the boy and the dog. She heard Ulf informing the dog that they were approaching Saint Radegund’s tree.
She’d worked that out for herself. It had been fenced off. A stall stood just outside the palings with a pile of branches on it. Two nuns were breaking off twigs, attaching a ribbon to each, and selling them to relic-seekers.
This, then, was where Little Saint Peter had taken his Easter branches and where, subsequently, Chaim the Jew had been hanged.
The tree stood outside the convent grounds, which were marked here by a wall that, on the river side, led down to gates next to a boathouse and a small quay but which, heading west, ran so far back into the forested countryside that Adelia could see no end to it.
Inside the open gates, other nuns busied themselves among a mass of pilgrims like black-and-white bees directing honey-gatherers into their hive. As Adelia went under the entrance arch, a nun sitting at a table in the sunny courtyard was telling a man and wife ahead of her, “Penny to visit Little Saint Peter’s tomb,” adding, “Or a dozen eggs, we’re low on eggs, hens ain’t laying.”
“Pot of honey?” the wife suggested.
The nun tutted, but they were allowed to pass in. Adelia contributed two pennies since the nun was prepared to exclude Safeguard if she did not and Ulf was reluctant to enter without the dog. Her coins clinked into a bowl already nearly full. The argument had held up the line of people that formed behind her, and one of the nuns marshaling it became angry at the delay and almost pushed her through the gates.
Inevitably, Adelia compared this, the first English nunnery she had visited, with Saint Giorgio’s, largest of the three female convents in Salerno and the one with which she was most familiar. The comparison was unfair, she knew; Saint Giorgio’s was a rich foundation, a place of marble and mosaic, bronze doors opening into courtyards where fountains cooled the air, a place, Mother Ambrose always said, “to feed with beauty the hungry souls who come to us.”
If the souls of Cambridge looked for such sustenance from Saint Radegund’s, they went empty away. Few had endowed this female house, suggesting that the rich of England did not esteem women’s worship. True, there was a pleasing simplicity of line in the convent’s collection of plain stone oblong outbuildings, though none of them any bigger nor more ornate than the barn in which Saint Giorgio’s kept its grain, but beauty was lacking. So was charity. Here, the nuns were employed in selling rather than giving.
Stalls set up along the path to the church displayed Little Saint Peter talismans, badges, banners, figurines, plaques, weavings from Little Saint Peter’s willow, ampullae containing Little Saint Peter’s blood, which, if it were human blood, had been so watered as to show only the lightest taint of pink.
There was a press to buy. “What one’s good for gout?…For the flux?…For fertility?…Can this cure staggers in a cow?”
Saint Radegund’s was not waiting on the years it would take for its martyred son to be confirmed in sainthood by the Vatican. But then, neither had Canterbury, where the industry based on the martyrdom of Saint Thomas à Becket was immensely bigger and better organized.
Chastened by Gyltha’s strictures on want, Adelia could not blame so poor a convent for exploitation, but she could despise the vulgarity with which it was being done. Roger of Acton was here, striding up and down the line of pilgrims, brandishing an ampulla, urging the crowd to buy: “Whoso shall be washed in the blood of this little one need never wash again.” The sour whiff as he passed suggested he took his own advice.
The man had capered the journey from Canterbury, a demented monkey, always shouting. His earflapped cap was still too large for him, his green-black robe daubed with the same mud and food splashes.
On a pilgrimage that had consisted mainly of educated people, the man had appeared an idiot. Yet here, among the desperate, his cracked voice carried compulsion. Roger of Acton said “Buy,” and his hearers bought.
It was expected that God’s finger infected those it touched with holy madness; Acton was commanding the respect accorded to skeletal men gibbering in the caves of the East, or to a stylite balancing on his pillar. Did not saints embrace discomfort? Had not the corpse of Saint Thomas à Becket been wearing a hair shirt swarming with lice? Dirt, exaltation, and an ability to quote the Bible were signs of sanctity.
He was of a type Adelia had always found to be dangerous; it denounced eccentric old women as witches and hauled adulterers before the courts, its voice inciting violence against other races, other beliefs.
The question was how dangerous.
Was it you? Adelia wondered, watching him. Do you prowl Wandlebury Ring? Do you truly wash in the blood of children?
Well, she wasn’t going to ask him yet, not until she had reason, but in the meantime, he remained a fitting candidate.
He didn’t recognize her. Neither did Prioress Joan, who passed them on her way to the gates. She was dressed for riding and had a gyrfalcon on her wrist, encouraging the customers as she went with a “Tallyho.”
The woman’s confident, bullying manner had led Adelia to expect that the house of which she was the head would prove to be the acme of organization. Instead, slackness was apparent: weeds grew around the church; there were missing tiles on its roof. The nuns’ habits were patched, the white linen beneath the black wimples showed mostly dirty; their manners were coarse.
Shuffling behind the line entering the church, she wondered where the money gained from Little Saint Peter was going. Not, so far, to the greater glory of God. Nor on comfort for the pilgrims: no one assisted the sick; there were no benches for the lame while they waited; no refreshment. The only suggestion for overnight accommodation was a curling list of the town’s inns pinned to the church gate.
Not that the supplicants shuffling with her seemed to care. A woman on crutches boasted of visits to the glories of Canterbury, Winchester, Walsingham, Bury Saint Edmunds, and Saint Albans as she displayed her badges to those around her, but she was tolerant of the shabbiness here: “I got hopes of this un,” she said. “He’m a young saint yet, but he was crucified by Jews; Jesus’ll listen to him, I’ll be bound.”
An English saint, one who’d shared the same fate, and at the same hands, as the Son of God. Who had breathed the air they breathed now. Despite herself, Adelia found herself praying that he would.
She was inside the church now. A clerk sat at a table by the doors, taking down the deposition of a pale-faced woman who was telling him she felt better for having touched the reliquary.
This was too tame for Roger of Acton, who came bounding up. “You were strengthened? You felt the Holy Spirit? Your sins washed away? Your infirmity gone?”
“Yes,” the woman said, and then more excitedly: “Yes.”
“Another miracle!” She was dragged outside to be displayed to the waiting line. “A cure, my people! Let us praise God and his little saint.”
The church smelled of wood and straw. The chalk outline of a maze on the nave suggested that someone had attempted to draw the labyrinth of Jerusalem on the stones, but only a few of the pilgrims were obeying the nun trying to make them walk it. The rest were pushing toward a side chapel where the reliquary lay hidden from Adelia’s view by those in front of her.
While she waited she looked around. A fine stone plaque on one wall declaring that “in the Year of Our Lord 1138, King Stephen confirmed the gift which William le Moyne, goldsmith, made to the nuns of the cell newly founded in the town of Cambridge for the soul of the late King Henry.”
It probably explained the poverty, Adelia thought. Stephen’s war with his cousin Matilda had ended in triumph for Matilda, or, rather, Henry II, her son. The present king would not be happy to endow a house confirmed by the man his mother had fought for thirteen years.
A list of prioresses declared that Joan had taken up her position only two years previously. The church’s general disrepair showed she lacked enthusiasm for it. Her more secular interest was suggested by the painting of a horse with the subscription: “Braveheart. A.D. 1151-A.D. 1169. Well Done, Thou Good and Faithful Servant.” A bridle and bit hung from the wooden fingertips of a statue to Saint Mary.
The couple in front had now reached the reliquary. They dropped to their knees, allowing Adelia to see it for the first time.
She caught her breath. Here in a white blaze of candles was transcendence to forgive all the grossness that had gone before. Not just the glowing reliquary but the young nun at its head who knelt, still as stone, her face tragic, her hands steepled in prayer, brought to life a scene from the Gospels: a mother, her dead child; together they made a scene of tender grace.
Adelia’s neck prickled. She was suddenly ravished by the wish to believe. Here, surely, in this place was radiant truth to sweep doubt up to Heaven for God to laugh at.
The couple was praying. Their son was in Syria -she’d heard them talking of him. Together, as if they’d been practicing, they whispered, “Oh holy child, if you’d mention our boy to the Lord and send him home safe, we’d be grateful evermore.”
Let me believe, God, Adelia thought. A plea as pure and simple as this must prevail. Only let me believe. I am lonely for belief.
Holding each other, the man and woman moved away. Adelia knelt. The nun smiled at her. She was the shy little one who had accompanied the prioress to Canterbury and back, but now timidity had been transfigured into compassion. Her eyes were loving. “Little Saint Peter will hear you, my sister.”
The reliquary was shaped like a coffin and had been placed on top of a carved stone tomb so that it should be on eye level with those who knelt to it. This, then, was where the convent’s money had gone-into a long, jewel-encrusted casket on which a master goldsmith had wrought domestic and agricultural scenes depicting the life of a boy, his martyrdom by fiends, and his ascension to Paradise borne upward by Saint Mary.
Inset along one side was mother-of-pearl so thin that it acted as a window. Peering into it, Adelia could see only the bones of a hand that had been propped up on a small velvet pillow to assume the attitude of benediction.
“You may kiss his knuckle, if you wish.” The nun pointed to a monstrance lying on a cushion on top of the reliquary. It resembled a Saxon brooch and had a knobbled, tiny bone set in gold among precious stones.
It was the trapezium bone of the right hand. The glory faded. Adelia returned to herself. “Another penny to view the whole skeleton,” she said.
The nun’s white brow-she was beautiful-furrowed. Then she leaned forward, removed the monstrance, and lifted the reliquary’s lid. As she did so, her sleeve crumpled to show an arm blackened with bruises.
Adelia, shocked, looked at her; they beat this gentle, lovely girl. The nun smiled and smoothed her sleeve down. “God is good,” she said.
Adelia hoped He was. Without asking permission, she picked up one of the candles and directed its flame toward the bones.
Bless him, they were so small. Prioress Joan had magnified her saint in her mind; the reliquary was too large; the skeleton was lost in it. She was reminded of a little boy dressed in clothes too big for him.
Tears prickled Adelia’s eyes even as they took in the fact that the only distortion of the hands and feet was from the missing trapezoid. No nails had been hammered into these extremities, neither was the rib cage or spine punctured. The wound from a spear that Prior Geoffrey had described to Simon had more likely been due to the process of mortification swelling the body beyond what the skin could bear. The stomach had split open.
But there, around the pelvic bones, were the same sharp, irregular chippings she had seen on the other children. She had to stop herself from putting her hand into the reliquary to lift them out for examination, but she was almost sure; the boy had been repeatedly stabbed with that distinctive blade of a kind she had never seen before.
“Hey, missus.” The line behind her was becoming restive.
Adelia crossed herself and walked away, putting her penny onto the table of the clerk at the door. “Are you cured, mistress?” he asked her. “I must record any miracles.”
“You may put down that I feel better,” she said.
“Justified” would have been a more accurate word; she knew where she was now. Little Saint Peter had not been crucified; he had died even more obscenely. Like the others.
And how to declare that to a coroner’s inquest? she thought, sourly. I, Dr. Trotula, have physical proof that this boy did not die on a cross but at the hands of a butcher who still walks among you.
Play that to a jury knowing nothing of anatomical sciences and caring less, demonstrated to them by a foreign woman.
It wasn’t until she was outside in the air that she realized Ulf had not come in with her. She found him sitting on the ground by the gates with his arms round his knees.
It occurred to Adelia that she had been unthinking. “Were you acquainted with Little Saint Peter?”
Labored sarcasm was addressed to the Safeguard. “Never went to bloody school with un wintertime, did I? ’Course I never.”
“I see. I am sorry.” She had been thoughtless; the skeleton back there was once a schoolfellow and a friend to this one, who, presumably, must grieve for him. She said politely, “However, not many of us can say we attended lessons with a saint.”
The boy shrugged.
Adelia was unacquainted with children; mostly she dealt with dead ones. She saw no reason to address them other than as cognitive human beings, and when they did not respond, like this one, she was at a loss.
“We will go back to Saint Radegund’s tree,” she said. She wanted to talk to the nuns there.
They retraced their steps. A thought struck Adelia. “By any chance did you see your schoolfellow on the day he disappeared?”
The boy rolled his eyes at the dog in exasperation. “Easter that was. Easter me and Gran was still in the fens.”
“Oh.” She walked on. It had been worth a try.
Behind her, the boy addressed the dog: “Will did, though. Will was with him, wasn’t he?”
Adelia turned round. “Will?”
Ulf tutted; the dog was being obtuse. “Him and Will was picking pussy willow both.”
There’d been no mention of a Will in the account of Little Saint Peter’s last day that Prior Geoffrey had given to Simon and that Simon had passed on to her. “Who is Will?”
When the child was about to speak to the dog, Adelia put her hand on the boy’s head and screwed it round to face her. “I would prefer it if you talked directly to me.”
Ulf retwisted his neck so that he could look back at the Safeguard. “We don’t like her,” he told it.
“I don’t like you, either,” Adelia pointed out, “but the matter at issue is who killed your schoolmate, how, and why. I am skilled in the investigation of such things, and in this case I have need of your local knowledge-to which, since you and your grandmother are in my employment, I am entitled. Our liking for each other, or lack of it, is irrelevant.”
“Jews bloody did it.”
“Are you sure?”
For the first time, Ulf looked straight at her. Had the tax collector been with them at that moment, he would have seen that, like Adelia’s when she was working, the boy’s eyes aged the face they were set in. Adelia saw an almost appalling shrewdness.
“You come along o’ me,” Ulf said.
Adelia wiped her hand down her skirt-the child’s hair where it stuck out from his cap had been greasy and quite possibly inhabited-and followed him. He stopped.
They were looking across the river at a large and imposing mansion with a lawn that led down to a small pier. Closed shutters on every window and weeds growing from the gutters showed it to be abandoned.
“Chief Jew’s place,” Ulf said.
“Chaim’s house? Where Peter was assumed to have been crucified?”
The boy nodded. “Only he weren’t. Not then.”
“My information is that a woman saw the body hanging in one of the rooms.”
“Martha,” the boy said, his tone putting the name into the same category as rheumatism, unadmired but to be put up with. “That’ll say anything to get her bloody noticed.” As if he’d gone too far in condemning a fellow Cambriensan, he added, “I ain’t saying her never, I’m saying her never bloody see it when her says she did. Like old Peaty. Look here.”
They were off again, past Saint Radegund’s willow and its stall of branches, to the bridge.
Here was where a man delivering peat to the castle had seen two Jews casting a bundle, presumed to be the body of Little Peter, into the Cam. She said, “The peat seller was also mistaken?”
The boy nodded. “Old Peaty, he’m half blind and a wormy old liar. He didn’t see nothing. Acause…”
Now they were returning the way they’d come, back to the spot opposite Chaim’s house.
“Acause,” said Ulf, pointing to the empty pier protruding into the water, “Acause that’s where they found the body. Caught under them bloody stanchions like. So nobody threw nothing over the bridge acause…?”
He looked at her expectantly; this was a test.
“Because,” Adelia said, “bodies do not float upstream.”
The worldly wise eyes were suddenly amused, like those of a teacher whose student had unexpectedly come up to scratch. She’d passed.
But if the testimony of the peat seller was so obviously false, thus casting doubt on that of the woman who claimed that only a little while before, she had seen the crucified body of the child in Chaim’s house, why had the finger of guilt pointed straight at the Jews?
“Acause they bloody did it,” the boy said, “only not then.” He gestured with a grubby hand for her to sit down on the grass, then sat beside her. He began talking fast, allowing her entrance into a world of juveniles who formed theory based on data differently observed and at odds with the conclusions of adults.
Adelia had difficulty following not only the accent but the patois; she leaped onto phrases she could recognize as if jumping from tussock to tussock across a morass.
Will, she gathered, was a boy of about Ulf’s age, and he had been on the same errand as Peter, to gather pussy willow for Palm Sunday decoration. Will lived in Cambridge proper, but he and the boy from Trumpington had encountered each other at Saint Radegund’s tree, where both had been attracted by the sight of the wedding celebrations on Chaim’s lawn across the river. Will had thereupon accompanied Peter over the bridge and through the town in order to see what was to be seen in the stables at the back of Chaim’s house.
Afterward, Will had left his companion to take the needed willow branches back home to his mother.
There was a pause in the narration, but Adelia knew there was more to come-Ulf was a born storyteller. The sun was warm, and it was not unpleasant to sit in the dappling shade of the willows, though Safeguard’s coat had acquired something noisome on the walk that became more pungent as it dried. Ulf, with his prehensile little feet in the river, complained of hunger. “Give us a penny and I’ll go to the pie shop for us.”
“Later.” Adelia prodded him on. “Let me recapitulate. Will went home and Peter disappeared into Chaim’s house, never to be seen again.”
The child gave a mocking sniff. “Never to be seen by any bugger ’cept Will.”
“Will saw him again?”
It had been later that day, getting dark. Will had returned to the Cam to bring a supper pail to his father, who was working into the night caulking one of the barges ready for the morning.
And Will on the Cambridge side had seen Peter across the river, standing on the left bank-“Here he was, right here. Where we’re bloody sitting.” Will had called out to Peter that he should be getting home.
“So he ought’ve,” Ulf added, virtuously, “you get caught in them Trumpington marshes of a night, will o’the wisps lead you down to the Pit.”
Adelia ignored will o’the wisps, not knowing, nor caring, what they were. “Go on.”
“So Peter, he calls back he’s going to meet someone for the Jew-Jews.”
“Ju-jus?”
“Jew-Jews.” Ulf was impatient, twice prodding a finger in the air toward Chaim’s house. “Jew-Jews, that’s what he said. He was going to meet someone for the Jew-Jews, and would Will come with him. But Will says no, and he’s bloody glad he did, acause that’s when nobody saw Peter after.”
Jew-Jews. Meeting someone for the Jew-Jews? Running an errand on the Jew-Jews’ behalf? And why that infantile term? There were a hundred derogatory terms for Jews; since she’d been in England she’d heard most of them, but not that one.
She puzzled over it, recreating the scene at the river on that night. Even today in full sunlight, even with the crowd around Saint Radegund’s tree farther up, this bit of bank was quiet, forest and parkland closing in behind it. How shadowy it would have been then.
Peter’s character, she thought, emerged from the narrative as fey, romantic; Ulf had described a child more easily distracted than the dependable Will.
She saw him now: a small figure, waving to his friend, pale among the dusk of the trees, disappearing into them forever.
“Did Will inform anyone of this?”
Will had not, at least not the adults. Too scared the bloody Jews would come after him next. And right to be so, in Ulf’s opinion. Only to his peers, that knee-high, hidden, disregarded, secret world of childhood camaraderie, had Will committed his secret.
The result, in any case, had been the desired one: The Jews had been accused and the perpetrator and his wife punished.
Leaving the ground clear for the murderer to kill again, Adelia thought.
Ulf was watching her. “You want more? There’s more. Get your boots wet, though.”
He showed her his final proof that Peter had returned to Chaim’s house later that night, proof of Chaim’s guilt. Because she had to scramble down the bank to the river’s edge and bend low, it did indeed involve getting her feet wet. And the bottom of her skirt. And a considerable amount of Cambridge silt over the rest of her. Safeguard came with them.
It was when the three emerged back onto the bank that darker shadows than those of the trees fell across them.
“God’s eyes, it’s the foreign bitch,” Sir Gervase said.
“Rising as Aphrodite from the river,” Sir Joscelin said.
They were in hunting leathers, sitting their sweat-flecked horses like gods. The corpse of a wolf slung in front of Sir Joscelin had a cloak lain over it from which a dripping muzzle hung down, still caught in the rictus of a snarl.
The huntsman who’d accompanied them on the pilgrimage was in the background, holding three wolfhounds on a leash, each one of which was big enough to pick Adelia up and carry her off. The dogs’ eyes watched her mildly from rough, mustachioed faces.
She would have walked away, but Sir Gervase kneed his horse forward so that she and Ulf and Safeguard were in a triangle formed on two sides by horses with the river as its base behind them.
“We should ask ourselves what our visitor to Cambridge is doing paddling in the mud, Gervase.” Sir Joscelin was amused.
“We should. We should also damn well tell the sheriff about her magic axes when a gentleman deigns to notice her.” More jovial now, but still threatening, Gervase was out to regain the supremacy he’d lost to Adelia in their encounter. “Eh? What about that, witch? Where’s your Saracen lover now?” Each question came louder. “What about ducking you back in the water? Eh? Eh? Is that his brat? It looks dirty enough.”
She wasn’t frightened this time. You ignorant clod, she thought. You dare talk to me.
At the same time she was fascinated; she didn’t take her eyes off him. More hatred here, enough to eclipse Roger of Acton’s. He’d have raped her on that hill merely to show that he could-and would now if his friend were not by. Power over the powerless.
Was it you?
The boy beside her was as still as death. The dog had crept behind her legs where the wolfhounds couldn’t see him.
“Gervase,” Sir Joscelin said sharply. Then, to her: “Pay my friend no mind, mistress. He’s waxy because his spear missed old Lupus here”-he patted the wolf’s head-“and mine didn’t.” He smiled at his companion before turning to look down again on Adelia. “I hear the good prior has found you better accommodation than a cart.”
“Thank you,” she said, “he has.”
“And your doctor friend? Is he setting up here?”
“He is.”
“Saracen Quack and Whore, that’ll look good on the shingle.” Sir Gervase was getting restive and more outrageous.
This is what it’s like to be among the weak, Adelia thought. The strong insult you with impunity. Well, we’ll see.
Sir Joscelin was ignoring the man. “I suppose your doctor can do nothing for poor Gelhert here, can he? The wolf sliced his leg.” He jerked his head toward one of the hounds. It had a paw raised.
And that, too, is an insult, Adelia thought, though you may not mean it to be. She said, “He is better with humans. You should advise your friend to consult him as soon as possible.”
“Eh? What’s the bitch say?”
“Do you think him ill then?” Joscelin asked.
“There are signs.”
“What signs?” Gervase was suddenly anxious. “What signs, woman?”
“I am not in a position to say,” she told Joscelin. Which was true, since there were none. “But it would be as well for him to consult a doctor-and quickly.”
Anxiety was turning to alarm. “Oh my God, I sneezed a full seven times this morning.”
“Sneezing,” Adelia said, reflectively. “There it is, then.”
“Oh my God.” He wrenched the reins and wheeled his horse, spiking its side with his spurs, leaving Adelia spattered with mud but content.
Smiling, Joscelin raised his cap. “Good day, mistress.”
The huntsman bowed to her, gathered the hounds, and followed them.
It could be either of them, Adelia told herself, watching them go. Because Gervase is a brute and the other is not means nothing.
Sir Joscelin, for all his pleasant manner, was as likely a candidate as his objectionable companion, of whom he was obviously fond. He’d been on the hill that morning.
But then, who had not? Hugh, the huntsman with a face as bland as milk that might well harbor as much viciousness as Roger of Acton without showing it. The fat-cheeked merchant from Cherry Hinton. The minstrel, too. The monks-the one they called Brother Gilbert was a hater if ever she’d met one. All had access to Wandlebury Ring that night. As for the inquisitive tax inspector, everything about him was subject to suspicion.
And why do I consider only the men? There’s the prioress, nun, merchant’s wife, servants.
But, no, she absolved all females; this was not a woman’s crime. Not that women were incapable of cruelty to children-she had examined many results of torture and neglect-but the only cases that even approached this one’s savage, sexual assault had involved men, always men.
“They talked to you.” Ulf’s stillness, unlike her own, had been the grip of awe. “Crusaders, they are. Both on ’em. Been to the Holy Land.”
“Have they indeed,” she said flatly.
They had, and had come back rich, having won their spurs. Sir Gervase held Coton manor by knight’s fee of the priory. Sir Joscelin held Grantchester manor of Saint Radegund’s. Great hunters they were and borrowed Hugh and his wolfhounds from Prior Geoffrey when they had to run down a devil like the one across Sir Joscelin’s horse-been taking lambs over Trumpington way, it had-acause Hugh was the best wolf hunter in Cambridgeshire…
Men, she thought, listening to him run on in his admiration. Even when they are small boys…
But this one was looking up at her now, worldly wise again. “And you stood to ’em,” he said.
She, too, had won her spurs.
Companionably, they walked back to Old Benjamin’s together, the disgraced Safeguard trailing behind them.
IT WAS DARK by the time Simon returned to the house, hungry for the eel stew with dumplings and fish pie awaiting him-the day was Friday and Gyltha strictly observed it-complaining of the great number of wool merchants plying their trade in and around Cambridge.
“Amiable beings to a man, each one amiably explaining to me that my ties came from an old batch of wool…something about its nap, apparently…but, oh, dear me, yes, not impossible to trace the bale it came from were I prepared to pursue its history.”
For all the insignificance of his looks and dress, Simon of Naples came of a wealthy family and had never considered before the journey that wool made from the sheep to the clothyard. It amazed him.
He instructed Mansur and Adelia as he ate.
“They use urine to clean the fleeces, did you know? Wash it in vats of piss to which whole families contribute.” Carding, fulling, weaving, dyeing, mordants. “Can you conceive of the difficulty in achieving of the color black? Experto crede. It must be based on deep blue, woad or a combination of tannin and iron. I tell you, yellow is simpler. I have met dyers today who would that we all dressed in yellow, like ladies of the night…”
Adelia’s fingers began to tap; Simon’s glee suggested that his quest had been successful, but she also had news.
He noticed. “Oh, very well. The ties are deemed to be worsted from their solid, compact surface, but, even so, we could not have traced it if this strip…” Simon ran it lovingly through his hand and Adelia saw that in the thrill of investigation he had all but forgotten the use to which it had been put. “If this strip had not included part of a selvedge, a warp-turned selvedge for strengthening edges, distinctive to the weaver…”
He caught her eye and gave in. “It is part of a batch sent to the Abbot of Ely three years ago. The abbot holds the concession to supply all religious houses in Cambridgeshire with the cloth in which to dress their monastics.”
Mansur was the first to respond. “A habit? It is from a monk’s habit?”
“Yes.”
There was one of the reflective silences to which their suppers were becoming subject.
Adelia said, “The only monastic we can absolve is the prior, who was with us all night.”
Simon nodded. “His monks wear black beneath the rochet.”
Mamsur said, “So do the holy women.”
“That is true”-Simon smiled at him-“but in this case irrelevant, for in the course of my investigations I came across the merchant from Cherry Hinton again who, as luck would have it, deals in wool. He assures me that the nuns and his wife and the female servants spent the night under canvas, ringed outside and guarded by the males of the company. If one of those ladies is our murderer, she could not have gone unnoticed to tramp the hills carrying bodies.”
Which left the three monks accompanying Prior Geoffrey. Simon listed them.
Young Brother Ninian? Surely not. Yet why not?
Brother Gilbert? A displeasing fellow, a possible subject.
The other one?
Nobody could remember either the face or the personality of the third monk.
“Until we make more inquiries, speculation is bootless.” Simon said. “A spoiled habit, cast out onto a midden perhaps; the killer could have acquired it anywhere. We will pursue it when we are fresher.”
He sat back and reached for his wine cup. “And now, Doctor, forgive me. We Jews so rarely join the chase, you see, that I have become as tedious as any huntsman with a tale of how he ran his quarry down. What news from your day?”
Adelia began her account chronologically and was more brusque about it; the ending of her own day’s hunt had been more fruitful than Simon’s, but she doubted if he would like it. She didn’t.
He was encouraged by her view of Little Saint Peter’s bones. “I knew it. Here’s a blow for our side. The boy never was crucified.”
“No, he wasn’t,” she said, and took her listeners to the other side of the river and her conversation with Ulf.
“We have it.” Simon spluttered wine. “Doctor, you have saved Israel. The child was seen after leaving Chaim’s house? Then all we must do is gather up this boy Will and take him to the sheriff. ‘You see, my lord Sheriff, here is living proof that the Jews had nothing to do with the death of Little Saint Peter…’” His voice trailed away as he saw the look on Adelia’s face.
“I am afraid they did,” she said.