Mistress of the Art of Death

“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.”