Mistress of the Art of Death

“The Icknield Way is near here,” he told her helpfully. “The Gog Magog hills, where we stopped for the prior, are of chalk.”

“Both children have chalk in their hair. In Harold’s case, some has been embedded in his heels.”

“What does that say?”

“He was dragged through chalk.”

The third bundle contained the remains of Ulric, eight years old, gone missing on Saint Edward’s of this year and which, because his disappearance had taken place more recently than the others’, brought forth frequent hmms from the examiner-an alert to Rowley, who’d begun to recognize the signs that she had more and better material to investigate.

“No eyelids, no genitals. This one wasn’t buried at all. What was the weather this March in this area?”

“I believe it to have been dry all over East Anglia, ma’am. There was general complaint that newly planted crops were withering. Cold but dry.”

Cold but dry. Her memory, renowned in Salerno, searched the death farm and fell on early-spring pig number 78. About the same weight. That, too, had been dead just over a month in the cold and dry, and was of more advanced decomposition. She would have expected this one to be in an approximately similar state. “Were you kept alive after you went missing?” she asked the body, forgetting that a stranger, and not Mansur, was listening.

“Jesus God, why do you say that?”

She quoted Ecclesiastes as she did to her students: “To everything there is a season…a time to be born and a time to die; a time to plant, a time to pluck up that which is planted. Also a time to putrefy.”

“So the devil kept him alive? How long?”

“I don’t know.”

There were a thousand variations that could cause the difference between this corpse and pig 78. She was irritable because she was tired and distressed. Mansur wouldn’t have asked, knowing better than to treat her observations as conversation. “I won’t be drawn on it.”

Ulric also had chalk embedded in his heels.

The sun was beginning to go down by the time each body had been wrapped up again, ready for encoffining. The woman went outside to take off her apron and helmet while Sir Rowley took down the lamps and put them out, leaving the cell and its contents in blessed darkness.

At the door, he knelt as he once had in front of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. That tiny chamber had been barely larger than the one now before him. The table on which the Cambridge children lay was about the same size as Christ’s tomb. It had been dark there, too. Beyond and about had been the conglomeration of altars and chapels that made up the great basilica that the first crusaders had built over the holy places, echoing with the whispers of pilgrims and the chant of Greek Orthodox monks singing their unending hymns at the site of Golgotha.

Here there was only the buzz of flies.

He’d prayed for the souls of the departed then, and for help and forgiveness for himself.

He prayed for them now.

When he came out, the woman was washing herself, laving her face and hands from the bowl. After she had finished, he did the same-she’d lathered the water with soapwort. Crushing the stems, he washed his hands. He was tired; oh, Jesus, he was tired.

“Where are you staying, Doctor?” he asked her.

She looked at him as if she hadn’t seen him before. “What did you say your name was?”

He tried not to be irritated; from the look of her, she was even more weary than he was. “Sir Roland Picot, ma’am. Rowley to my friends.”

Of which, he saw, she was not likely to be one. She nodded. “Thank you for your assistance.” She packed her bag, picked it up, and set off.

He hurried after her. “May I ask what conclusions you draw from your investigation?”

She didn’t answer.

Damn the woman. He supposed that, since he’d written down her notes, she was leaving him to draw his own conclusions, but Rowley, who was not a humble man, was aware that he had encountered someone with knowledge he could not hope to attain. He tried again: “To whom will you report your findings, Doctor?”

No answer.

They were walking through the long shadows of the oaks that fell over the wall of the priory deer park. From the priory chapel came the clap of a bell sounding vespers, and ahead, where the bakery and brew house stood outlined against the dying sun, figures in violet rochets were spilling out of the buildings into the walkways like petals being blown in one direction.

“Shall we attend vespers?” If ever he’d needed the balm of the evening litany, Sir Rowley felt he needed it now.

She shook her head.

Angrily, he said, “Will you not pray for those children?”

She turned and he saw a face ghastly with fatigue and an anger that outmatched his. “I am not here to pray for them,” she said. “I have come to speak for them.”

Five

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 tete-a-tete 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 menage Prior Geoffrey had in mind-outre 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