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.”
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.
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
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, “A
He looked at her expectantly; this was a test.
“Because,” Adelia said, “bodies do not float upstream.”
