Mistress of the Art of Death

Adelia knelt beside her, taking the girl’s hand and putting it to her cheek. “She would want you to be brave.”

“I can’t be.” Dina put back her head and let the tears gush.

Adelia glanced to where the other women were teetering anxiously and shook her head to stop them coming forward. “Yes, you can,” she said. She laid Dina’s hand and her own on the swell of the girl’s stomach. “Your mother would want you to be brave for her grandchild.”

But Dina’s grief, having burst out, was mixed with terror. “They’ll kill the baby, too.” She opened her eyes wide. “Can’t you hear them? They’re going to break in. They’re going to break in.”

How hideous it was for them. Adelia had imagined the isolation, even the boredom, but not the day-to-day waiting, like an animal with its leg in a trap, for the wolves to come. There was no forgetting that there was a pack outside; Roger of Acton’s howl was there to remind them.

She made ineffectual pats of comfort. “The king won’t allow them in.” And “Your husband’s here to protect you.”

“Him.” It was said with a contempt that dried tears.

Was it the king so derided? Or the husband? The girl would not have set eyes on the man she’d been told to marry until the day she married him; Adelia had never thought it a good custom. Jewish law did not permit a young woman to be married against her will, but too often that meant only that she could not be forced to wed a man she hated. Adelia herself had escaped marriage through the liberality of a foster father who had complied with her wish to remain celibate. “There are good wives aplenty, thank God,” he’d said, “but few good doctors. And a good woman doctor is above rubies.”

In Dina’s case, a fearful wedding day and the incarceration that followed it had not augured well for marital bliss.

“Listen to me,” Adelia said briskly. “If your baby is not to spend the rest of its life in this castle, if a killer is not to stay free and murder other children, tell me what I want to know.” Out of desperation, she added, “Forgive me but, by extension, he also killed your parents.”

Wet-lashed, beautiful eyes studied her as if she were an innocent. “But that was why they did it. Don’t you know that?”

“Know what?”

“Why they killed the boy. We know that. They killed him only so that we should be blamed. Why else would they put his corpse in our grounds?”

“No,” Adelia said. “No.”

“Of course they did.” Dina’s mouth was ugly with a sneer. “It was planned. Then they set the mob on, kill the Jews, kill Chaim the usurer. That’s what they shouted, and that’s what they did.”

“Kill the Jews.” The echo came parrotlike from the gate.

“Other children have died since,” Adelia said. She was taken aback by a new thought.

“Them too. They were killed so that the mob will have an excuse when they come to hang the rest of us.” Dina was inexorable. Then she wasn’t. “Did you know my mother stepped in front of me? Did you know that? So they tore her apart and not me?”

Suddenly, she covered her face and rocked back and forth as her husband had done minutes before, only Dina was praying for her dead: “Oseh sholom bimromov, hu ya’aseh sholom olaynu, v’al kol yisroel. Omein.”

“Omein.” He who makes peace in his high holy places, may he bring peace upon us and upon all Israel. If you are there, God, Adelia prayed, let it be thus.

Of course these people would see their plight as deliberately engineered, a plot by goyim to murder children if, in so doing, they could murder Jews. Dina did not ask why; history was her answer.

Gently, firmly, Adelia pulled Dina’s hands down so that she could look into the girl’s face. “Listen to me, mistress. One man killed those children, one. I have seen their bodies, and he is inflicting injuries on them so terrible that I will not tell you what they are. He is doing it because he has lusts we do not recognize, because he is not human as we understand it. Now Simon of Naples has come to England to free the Jews of this guilt, but I do not ask you to help him because you are a Jew. I ask you because it is against all the law of God and men that children should suffer as those children suffered.”

The castle’s noise was climbing up its daylong crescendo, diminishing Roger of Acton’s ravings to a bird’s chirrup.

A bull waiting to be baited was adding its bellow to the rasp of a grindstone where squires were sharpening their master’s blades. Soldiers were drilling. Children, newly let out to play in the sheriff’s garden, laughed and shouted.

Away in the tiltyard, a tax collector who had decided to shed some of his weight had joined the knights practicing with wooden swords.

“What do you want to know?” Dina asked.

Adelia patted her cheek. “You are worthy of your brave mother.” She took in her breath. “Dina, you saw that body on the lawn before the lights were put out, before it was covered by the tablecloth, before it was taken away. What condition was it in?”

“The poor child.” This time Dina wept not for herself, nor for her baby, nor for her mother. “The poor little boy. Somebody had cut off his eyelids.”

Eight

I had to make sure,” Adelia said. “The boy could have died at the hands of someone other than our killer, or even accidentally-the injuries might have been sustained after death.”

“They do that,” Simon said. “When they’re accidentally dead, they leap up on the nearest Jewish lawn.”

“It was necessary to make sure he died as the others did. It had to be proved.” Adelia was as tired as Simon, though she didn’t regard the Jews’ treatment of the body on their lawn with the disgust that he did; she was sorry for them. “We can now be certain the Jews didn’t kill him.”

“And who will believe it?” Simon was determinedly depressed.

They were at supper. The last of the sun coming almost directly through the ridiculous windows was warming the room and touching Simon’s pewter flagon with gold. To save the wine, he’d reverted to English beer. Mansur was drinking the barley water that Gyltha made for him.

It was Mansur who asked now, “Why does the dog cut off their eyelids?”

“I don’t know.” Adelia didn’t want to consider the reason.

“Would you know what I think?” Simon said.

She would not. In Salerno, she was presented with bodies, some of which had died in suspicious circumstances; she examined them; she gave her results to her foster father, who, in turn, told the authorities; the bodies were taken away. Sometimes, always later, she learned what happened to the perpetrator-if he or she had been found. This was the first time she had been involved in physically hunting down a killer, and she was not enjoying it.

“I think they die too quickly for him,” Simon said. “I think he wants their attention even after they are dead.”

Adelia turned her head away and watched midges dancing in a shaft of sun.

“I know what parts I’ll cut off when we catch him, inshallah,” Mansur said.

“I shall assist you,” Simon agreed.

Two men so different. The Arab, looming in his chair, dark face almost featureless against the white folds of his headdress; the Jew, the sun catching the line of his cheek, leaning forward, his fingers turning and turning his flagon. Both in accord.

Why did men think that was the worst thing? Perhaps, for them, it was. But it was trivial, like castrating a rogue animal. The harm done by this particular creature was too vast for human reprisal, the pain it had caused spread too far. Adelia thought of Agnes, mother of Harold, and her vigil. She thought of the parents who’d gathered round the little catafalques in Saint Augustine ’s church. Of two men in Chaim’s cellar, praying as they did violence to their nature by ridding themselves of a fearful burden. She thought of Dina and the shadow fallen over her that could never be lifted.

It accounted for the wish for eternal damnation, she thought, that there could be no reparation made to such dead, nor for the living they’d left behind. Not in this life.

“Do you agree with me, Doctor?”

“What?”

“My theory on the mutilations.”

“It is not in my brief. I am not here to understand why a murderer does what he does, merely to prove that he did it.”

They stared at her.

“I apologize,” she said more quietly, “but I will not enter his mind.”

Simon said, “We may have to do that very thing before this business is finished, Doctor. Think as he thinks.”

“Then you do it,” she said. “You’re the subtle one.”

He took in a sad breath; they were all gloomy this evening. “Let us consider what we know of him so far. Mansur?”

“No killings here before the saint boy. Maybe he came new to this place a year ago.”

“Ah, then you think he’s done this before, somewhere else?”

“A jackal is always a jackal.”

“True,” Simon said. “Or he could be a new recruit to the armies of Beelzebub, just starting to slake his desires.”

Adelia frowned; that the killer should be a very young man did not accord with her sense of him.

Simon’s head came up. “You don’t think so, Doctor?”

She sighed; she was to be drawn in despite herself. “Are we supposing?”

“We can do little else.”

Reluctantly, because the apprehension came from less than a shadow glimpsed in a fog, she said, “The attacks are frenzied, which argues youth, but they are planned, which argues maturity. He lures them to a special and isolated place, like the hill; I think that must be so because nobody hears their torture. Possibly, he takes his time, not in the case of Little Peter-he was more hurried there-but with the subsequent children.”

She paused because the theory was hideous and founded on such little proof. “It may be that they are kept alive for some time after their abduction. That would argue a perverted patience and a love of prolonged agony. I would have expected the corpse of the most recent victim, considering the day he was taken, to have displayed more advanced decomposition than it did.”

She glared at them. “But that could be due to so many causes that, as a proposition, it bears no weight at all.”

“Ach.” Simon pushed his cup away as if it offended him. “We are no further. We shall, after all, have to inquire into the movements of forty-seven people, whether they wear black worsted or not. I shall have to write to my wife and tell her I will not be home yet.”