Mistress of the Art of Death

“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.

Six

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 lese-majeste. 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.