Mistress of the Art of Death

traveled more than a thousand miles to get there.

“Maybe, maybe a little bit, Chaim was showing off to the town,” Benjamin admitted.

Inevitably, he was, Adelia thought. To burghers who would not invite him to their houses yet were quick enough to borrow from him? Of course he was.

“Get on.” Simon was remorseless, but at that moment Mansur raised a hand and began tiptoeing to the door.

Him. Adelia tensed. The tax collector was listening.

Mansur opened the door with a pull that took half of it off its hinges. It was not Sir Rowley who knelt on the threshold, ear at keyhole level, it was his squire. A tray with a flagon and cups was on the floor beside him.

In one flowing movement, Mansur scooped up the tray and kicked the eavesdropper down the stairs. The man-he was very young-tumbled to the turn of the stairwell which caught him so that he was doubled with his legs higher than his head. “Ow. Ow.” But when Mansur shifted as if to follow him down and kick him again, the boy writhed to his feet and pattered away down the steps, holding his back.

The odd thing was, Adelia thought, that the three Jews sitting on the stools paid the incident little attention, as if it was of no more moment than another bird landing on the windowsill.

Is that plump Sir Rowley the killer? What exercises him about these murdered children?

There were people-she knew because she’d encountered them-who became excited by death, who tried to bribe their way into the school’s stone chamber when she was working on a corpse. Gordinus had been obliged to put a guard on his death field to shoo away men, even women, wanting to gaze on the festering carcasses of the pigs.

She hadn’t detected that particular salacity in Sir Rowley during the examination she’d carried out in Saint Werbertha’s cell; he’d seemed appalled.

But he’d sent his creature-Pipin, that was the squire’s name-to listen at the keyhole, which suggested that Sir Rowley wished to keep himself abreast of her and Simon’s investigation, either through interest-in which case, why doesn’t he ask us directly?-or through fear that it would lead to him.

What are you?

Not what he seemed was the only answer. Adelia returned her attention to the three men in their circle.

Simon had not yet allowed Mansur to offer round the contents of the tray; he was forcing the two Jews on, through the events of Chaim’s daughter’s wedding.

To the evening. A chilly dusk descending, the guests had retired back into the house to dance, but the lamps across the garden were left burning. “And maybe, a little bit, the men were getting drunk,” Benjamin said.

“Will you tell us?” Never had Simon shown anger like this.

“I’m telling you, I’m telling. So the bride and her mother-two women closer than those two ain’t been seen-they wander outside for air, talking…” Benjamin was slowing up, reluctant to get to whatever it was.

“There was a body.” Everybody turned to Yehuda; he’d been forgotten. “In the middle of the lawn, like someone throw it from the river, from a boat. The women saw it. A lamp shone on it.”

“A little boy?”

“Perhaps.” Yehuda, if he’d seen it at all, had glimpsed it through a haze of wine. “Chaim saw it. The women screamed.”

“Did you see it, Benjamin?” Adelia made her first interjection.

Benjamin glanced at her, dismissed her, and said to Simon, as if it was an answer, “I was the shadchan.” The arranger of this great wedding, feted with wine on all sides? He should be capable of seeing anything?

“What did Chaim do?”

Yehuda said, “He put out all the lamps.”

Adelia saw Simon nod, as if it was reasonable; the first thing you did when you discovered a corpse on your lawn, you put out the lamps so that neighbors or passersby should not see it.

It shocked her. But then, she thought, she was not a Jew. The libel that at Passover time Jews sacrificed Christian children was attached to them like an extra shadow sewn on their heels to follow them everywhere. “The legend is a tool,” her foster father had told her, “used against every feared and hated religion by those who fear and hate it. In the first century, under Rome, the ones accused of taking the blood and flesh of children for ritual purposes were the early Christians.”

Now, and for many ages, the child-eaters had been the Jews. So deeply entrenched in Christian mythology was the belief, and so often had Jews suffered for it, that the automatic response to finding the body of a Christian child on a Jewish lawn was to hide it.

“What could we do?” Benjamin shouted. “You tell me what we should have done. Every important Jew in England was with us that night. Rabbi David had come from Paris, Rabbi Meir from Germany, great biblical commentators, Sholem of Chester had brought his family. Did we want lords like these torn to pieces? We needed time for them to get away.”

So while his important guests took horse and scattered into the night, Chaim wrapped the body in a tablecloth and carried it to his cellar.

How and why the little corpse had appeared on the lawn, who had done whatever it was that had been done to it, these things hardly entered the discussion among the remaining Cambridge Jews. The concern was how to get rid of it.

They didn’t lack humanity, Adelia assured herself, but each Jew had now felt so close to being murdered himself, and his family with him, that any other preoccupation was beyond him.

And they’d botched it.

“Dawn was breaking,” Benjamin said. “We’d come to no conclusion-how could we think? The wine, the fear. Chaim it was who decided for us, his neighbors, God rest his soul. ‘Go home,’ he said to us. ‘Go home and be about your business as if nothing has happened. I will deal with it, me and my son-in-law.’” Benjamin raised his cap and clawed his fingers over his scalp as if it still had hair on it. “Yahweh forgive us, that’s what we did.”

“And how did Chaim and his son-in-law deal with it?” Simon was leaning forward toward Yehuda, whose face was again hidden by his hands. “It was daytime now-you couldn’t smuggle it out of the house without someone seeing you.”

There was silence.

“Maybe,” Simon went on, “maybe at this point perhaps Chaim remembers the conduit in his cellar.”

Yehuda looked up.

“What is it?” Simon asked, almost without interest. “A shit hole? An escape route?”

“A drain,” Yehuda said sullenly. “There’s a stream through the cellar.”

Simon nodded. “So there’s a drain in the cellar? A large drain? Leading into the river?” For a second his gaze shifted to Adelia, who nodded back at him. “The mouth comes out under the pier where Chaim’s barges tie up?”

“How did you know?”

“So,” Simon said, still mild, “you pushed the body down it.”

Yehuda rocked, crying again. “We said prayers over it. We stood in the dark of the cellar and recited the prayers for the dead.”

“You recited the prayers for the dead? Good, that’s good. That will please the Lord. But you didn’t go to see if the body floated free when it got to the river.”

Yehuda stopped crying in surprise. “It didn’t?”

Simon was on his feet, raising his arms in supplication to the Lord, who allowed fools like these.

“The river was searched,” Adelia interposed in Salernitan patois for Simon’s and Mansur’s ears only. “The whole town was out. Even if the body had been caught by a stanchion under the pier, a search such as that would have found it.”

Simon shook his head at her. “They had been talking,” he said, wearily, in the same tongue. “We are Jews, Doctor. We talk. We consider the outcome, the ramifications; we wonder if it is acceptable to the Lord and if we should do it anyway. I tell you, by the time they finished gabbing and made their decision, the searchers had been and gone.” He sighed. “They are donkeys and worse than donkeys, but they didn’t kill the boy.”

“I know.” Though there was no court of law that would believe it. Rightly terrified for their own lives, Yehuda and his father-in-law had done a desperate thing and done it badly, gaining themselves only a few days’ respite, during which the body, snagged below the waterline under the pier, swelled to the point where it unsnagged itself and floated to the surface.

She turned to Yehuda, unable to wait any longer. “Before it went into the drain, did you examine the body? What condition was it in? Was it mutilated? Was it clothed?”

Yehuda and Benjamin regarded her with disgust. “You bring a female ghoul into our company?” Benjamin demanded of Simon.

“Ghoul? Ghoul?” Simon was in danger of hitting somebody again, and Mansur put out a hand to stop him. “You shove a poor little boy down a drain and you talk to me of ghouls?”

Adelia left the room, leaving Simon in full tirade. There was one person still in the castle who could tell her what she wanted to know.

As she crossed the hall on her way to the bailey, the tax collector noted her departure. He left the sheriff’s side for a moment to instruct his squire.

“That Saracen’s not with her, is he?” Pipin was nervous; he was still favoring his back.

“Just see whom she talks to.”

Adelia walked across the sunlit bailey toward the corner where the Jewish women were gathered. She was able to pick out the one she sought by her youth and the fact that, of all the women, she had been given a chair to sit on. And by her distended belly. At least eight months gone, Adelia judged.

She bowed to Chaim’s daughter. “Mistress Dina?”

Dark eyes, huge and defensive, turned to look at her. “Yes?”

The girl was too thin for the good of her condition; the rounded stomach might have been an invasive protuberance that had attached itself to a slender plant. Hollowed sockets and cheeks were darkened in a skin like vellum.

The doctor in Adelia thought, You need some of Gyltha’s cooking, lady; I shall see to it.

She introduced herself as Adelia, daughter of Gershom of Salerno. Her foster father might be a lapsed Jew, but this was not the time to bring up either his or her own apostasy. “May we talk together?” She looked around at the other women, who were gathering close. “Alone?”

Dina sat motionless for a moment. She was veiled to keep off the sun in near-transparent gossamer; her ornate headdress was not everyday wear. Silk encrusted with pearls peeped out from under the old shawl wrapped around her shoulders. Adelia thought with pity, She’s in the clothes she was married in.

At last, a flap of the hand sent the other women scattering; fugitive as she was, orphaned as she was, Dina still held rank among her sex as daughter of the man who had been the richest Jew in Cambridgeshire. And she was bored; having been cooped up with them for a year, she would have heard everything her companions had to say-and heard it several times.

“Yes?” The girl lifted her veil. She was sixteen, perhaps, no more, and lovely, but her face was setting into bitterness. When she heard what Adelia wanted, she turned it away. “I will not talk about it.”

“The real murderer must be caught.”

“They are all murderers.” She cocked her head to one side in the attitude of listening, raising a finger so that Adelia should listen with her.

Faintly, from beyond the curtain wall, came shouts indicating that Roger of Acton was responding to the arrival of the bishop at the castle gates. “Kill the Jews” was distinguishable among the gabble.

Dina said, “Do you know what they did to my father? What they did to my mother?” The young face crumpled, becoming even younger. “I miss my mother. I miss her.”