Mistress of the Art of Death

“Amiable beings to a man, each one amiably explaining to me that my ties came from an old batch of wool…something about its nap, apparently…but, oh, dear me, yes, not impossible to trace the bale it came from were I prepared to pursue its history.”

For all the insignificance of his looks and dress, Simon of Naples came of a wealthy family and had never considered before the journey that wool made from the sheep to the clothyard. It amazed him.

He instructed Mansur and Adelia as he ate.

“They use urine to clean the fleeces, did you know? Wash it in vats of piss to which whole families contribute.” Carding, fulling, weaving, dyeing, mordants. “Can you conceive of the difficulty in achieving of the color black? Experto crede. It must be based on deep blue, woad or a combination of tannin and iron. I tell you, yellow is simpler. I have met dyers today who would that we all dressed in yellow, like ladies of the night…”

Adelia’s fingers began to tap; Simon’s glee suggested that his quest had been successful, but she also had news.

He noticed. “Oh, very well. The ties are deemed to be worsted from their solid, compact surface, but, even so, we could not have traced it if this strip…” Simon ran it lovingly through his hand and Adelia saw that in the thrill of investigation he had all but forgotten the use to which it had been put. “If this strip had not included part of a selvedge, a warp-turned selvedge for strengthening edges, distinctive to the weaver…”

He caught her eye and gave in. “It is part of a batch sent to the Abbot of Ely three years ago. The abbot holds the concession to supply all religious houses in Cambridgeshire with the cloth in which to dress their monastics.”

Mansur was the first to respond. “A habit? It is from a monk’s habit?”

“Yes.”

There was one of the reflective silences to which their suppers were becoming subject.

Adelia said, “The only monastic we can absolve is the prior, who was with us all night.”

Simon nodded. “His monks wear black beneath the rochet.”

Mamsur said, “So do the holy women.”

“That is true”-Simon smiled at him-“but in this case irrelevant, for in the course of my investigations I came across the merchant from Cherry Hinton again who, as luck would have it, deals in wool. He assures me that the nuns and his wife and the female servants spent the night under canvas, ringed outside and guarded by the males of the company. If one of those ladies is our murderer, she could not have gone unnoticed to tramp the hills carrying bodies.”

Which left the three monks accompanying Prior Geoffrey. Simon listed them.

Young Brother Ninian? Surely not. Yet why not?

Brother Gilbert? A displeasing fellow, a possible subject.

The other one?

Nobody could remember either the face or the personality of the third monk.

“Until we make more inquiries, speculation is bootless.” Simon said. “A spoiled habit, cast out onto a midden perhaps; the killer could have acquired it anywhere. We will pursue it when we are fresher.”

He sat back and reached for his wine cup. “And now, Doctor, forgive me. We Jews so rarely join the chase, you see, that I have become as tedious as any huntsman with a tale of how he ran his quarry down. What news from your day?”

Adelia began her account chronologically and was more brusque about it; the ending of her own day’s hunt had been more fruitful than Simon’s, but she doubted if he would like it. She didn’t.

He was encouraged by her view of Little Saint Peter’s bones. “I knew it. Here’s a blow for our side. The boy never was crucified.”

“No, he wasn’t,” she said, and took her listeners to the other side of the river and her conversation with Ulf.

“We have it.” Simon spluttered wine. “Doctor, you have saved Israel. The child was seen after leaving Chaim’s house? Then all we must do is gather up this boy Will and take him to the sheriff. ‘You see, my lord Sheriff, here is living proof that the Jews had nothing to do with the death of Little Saint Peter…’” His voice trailed away as he saw the look on Adelia’s face.

“I am afraid they did,” she said.

Seven

Over the year, the watch kept on Cambridge Castle by the townspeople to make sure the Jews inside did not escape from it had dwindled to Agnes, the eel seller’s wife and mother to Harold, whose remains still awaited burial.

The small hut she’d built for herself out of withies looked like a beehive against the great gates. By day she sat at its entrance, knitting, with one of her husband’s eel glaives planted spike end down on one side of her, and on the other a large handbell. By night she slept in the hut.

On the occasion during the winter when the sheriff had tried to smuggle the Jews out through the dark, thinking she was asleep, she had used both weapons. The glaive had near skewered one of the accompanying sheriff’s men; the bell had raised the town. The Jews had been hurried back inside.

The castle postern was also guarded, this time by geese kept there for the purpose of declaring the emergence of anyone trying to get out, much as the geese of the Capitoline had warned Rome that the Gauls were trying to get in. An attempt by the sheriff’s men to shoot them from the castle walls had caused such honking that, again, the alarm was raised.

Climbing the steep, winding, fortified road up to the castle, Adelia expressed surprise that commoners were allowed to flout authority for so long. In Sicily a troop of the king’s soldiers would have solved the problem in minutes.

“And result in massacre?” Simon said. “Where could it escort the Jews that would not give rise to the same situation? The whole country believes the Jews of Cambridge to be child- crucifiers.”

He was downcast today and, Adelia suspected, very angry.

“I suppose so.” She reflected on the restraint with which the king of England was dealing with the matter. She could have expected a man like him, a man of blood, to wreak awful revenge on the people of Cambridge for killing one of his most profitable Jews. Henry had been responsible for the death of Becket; he was a tyrant, after all, like any other. But so far he had held his hand.

When asked what she thought might happen, Gyltha had said the town did not look forward to the fine that would be imposed on it for Chaim’s death, but she wasn’t anticipating wholesale hangings. This king was a tolerant king as long as you didn’t poach his deer. Or cross him beyond endurance, as Archbishop Thomas had.

“Ain’t like the old days when his ma and uncle Stephen were warring with each other,” she’d said. “Hangings? A baron’d come galloping up-didn’t matter which side he was on, didn’t matter which side you was on, he’d hang you just for scratching your arse.”

“Quite right, too,” Adelia had said. “A nasty habit.” The two of them were beginning to get on well.

The civil war between Matilda and Stephen, Gyltha said, had even penetrated the fens. The Isle of Ely with its cathedral had changed hands so many times, you never knew who was abbot and who wasn’t. “Like we poor folk was a carcass and wolves was ripping us apart. And when Geoffrey de Mandeville came through…” At that point, Gyltha had shaken her head and fallen silent. Then she said, “Thirteen years of it. Thirteen years with God and saints sleeping and taking no bloody notice.”

“Thirteen years when God and his saints slept.” Since her arrival in England, Adelia had heard that phrase used about the civil war a score of times. People still blanched at the memory. Yet on the accession of Henry II, it had stopped. In twenty years it had never restarted. England had become a peaceful country.

The Plantagenet was a more subtle man than she’d classified him; perhaps he should be reconsidered.

They turned the last corner of the approach and emerged onto the apron before the castle.

The simple motte and bailey the Conqueror had built to guard the river crossing had gone, its wooden palisade replaced by curtain walls, its keep grown into the accommodation, church, stables, mews, barracks, women’s quarters, kitchens, laundry, vegetable and herb gardens, dairy, tiltyards, and gallows and lockup necessary for a sheriff administering a sizable, prosperous town. At one end, scaffolding and platforms clad the growing tower that would replace the one that had burned down.

Outside the gates, two sentries leaned on their spears and talked to Agnes where she sat, knitting, on a stool outside her beehive. Somebody else was sitting on the ground, resting his head against the castle wall.

Adelia groaned. “Is the man ubiquitous?”

At the sight of the newcomers, Roger of Acton leaped to his feet, picked up a wooden board on a stick that had been lying beside him, and began shouting. The chalked message read: “Pray for Littel Saint Peter, who was crucafid by the Jews.”

Yesterday he’d favored the pilgrims to Saint Radegund’s; today, it appeared, the bishop was coming to visit the sheriff and Acton was ready to waylay him.

Again, there was no recognition of Adelia, nor, despite Mansur’s singularity, of the two men with her. He doesn’t see people, she thought, only fodder for hell. She noticed that the man’s dirty soutane was of worsted.

If he was disappointed that he didn’t yet have the bishop to hector, he made do. “They did scourge the poor child till the blood flowed,” he yelled at them. “They kept gnashing their teeth and calling him Jesus the false prophet. They tormented him in divers ways and then crucified him…”

Simon went up to the soldiers and asked to see the sheriff. They were from Salerno, he said. He had to raise his voice to be heard.

The elder of the guards was unimpressed. “Where’s that when it’s at home?” He turned to the yelling clerk. “Shut up, will you?”

“Prior Geoffrey has asked us to attend on the sheriff.”

“What? I can’t hear you over that crazy bastard.”

The younger sentry pricked up. “Here, is this the darky doctor as cured the prior?”

“The same.”

Roger of Acton had spotted Mansur now and come up close; his breath was rank. “Saracen, do you acknowledge our Lord Jesus Christ?”

The older sentry cuffed him round the ear. “Shut up.” He turned back to Simon. “And that?”

“Milady’s dog.”

Ulf had, with difficulty, been left behind, but Gyltha had insisted that the Safeguard must go with Adelia everywhere. “He is no protection,” Adelia had protested. “When I was facing those damned crusaders, he skulked behind me. He’s a skulker.”

“Protection ain’t his job,” Gyltha had said. “He’s a safeguard.”

“Reckon as they can go in, eh, Rob?” The sentry winked at the woman in the entrance to her withy hut. “All right by you, Agnes?”

Even so, the guard captain was fetched, and was satisfied that the three were not concealing weapons before they were allowed through the wicket. Acton had to be restrained from going in with