Mistress of the Art of Death

“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.”