Mistress of the Art of Death

“With my back?”

“There is nothing wrong with your back.” She regarded Wulf as a phenomenon. In a feudal society where everybody, except the growing mercantile class, owed work to somebody else for their existence, Wulf had escaped vassalage, probably by running away from his lord and certainly by marrying a Cambridge laundress who was prepared to labor for them both. He was, quite literally, afraid of work; it made him ill. But in order to escape the derision of society, he needed to be adjudged ill in order to avoid becoming so.

Adelia was as gentle with him as with all her patients-she wondered if his brain could be pickled postmortem and sent to her so that she might examine it for some missing ingredient-but she refused to compromise her duty as a doctor by diagnosing or prescribing for a physical complaint where none existed.

“How about malingering? I’m still a-suffering from that, ain’t I?”

“A bad case,” she said and shut the door on him.

It was still raining and therefore chilly and, since Gyltha didn’t hold with lighting a fire in the hall from the end of March to the beginning of November, the warmth of Old Benjamin’s house lay in its kitchen outside, a roaring place equipped with apparatus so fearful that it could be a torture chamber if it weren’t for its ravishing smells.

Today it held a new object, a wooden barrel like a washerwoman’s lessiveuse. Adelia’s best saffron silk underdress, as yet unworn in England, hung from a flitch hook above it to steam out the wrinkles. She had thought the gown to be still in the clothes press upstairs.

“What’s that for?”

“ Bath. You,” Gyltha said.

Adelia was not unwilling; she hadn’t bathed since last climbing out of the tiled and heated pool in her stepparents’ villa that the Romans had installed nearly fifteen hundred years before. The bucket of water carried to the solar every morning by Matilda W. was no replacement. However, the scene before her prefigured an event, so she asked, “Why?”

“I ain’t having you let me down at the feast,” Gyltha said.

Sir Joscelin’s invitation to Dr. Mansur and his two assistants, so Gyltha said, having put his man to the inquisition, was at Prior Geoffrey’s prompting-if not true pilgrims, they had at least joined the pilgrimage on its return journey.

To Gyltha it was a challenge; the stoniness of her face showed that she was excited. As she had allied herself with these three queer fish, it was necessary for her self-esteem and social standing that they appear well when exposed to the scrutiny of the town’s illustrious. Her limited knowledge of what such an occasion demanded was being augmented by Matilda B., whose mother was scrubwoman at the castle and had witnessed preparations for the tiring of the sheriff’s lady on feast days, if not the tiring itself.

Adelia had spent too much of her girlhood in study to join the festivity of other young women; later, she had been too busy. Nor, since she was not to marry, had her foster parents encouraged her in the higher social graces. She had subsequently been ill-equipped to attend the masques and revelry in the palaces of Salerno and, when forced to do so, had passed most of the time behind a pillar, both resentful and embarrassed.

This invitation, therefore, sounded an old alarm. Her immediate instinct was to find an excuse to refuse. “I must consult Master Simon.”

But Simon was at the castle, closeted with the Jews in an effort to discover whose indebtedness might have spurred Chaim’s death.

“He’ll say as you all got to go,” Gyltha told her.

He probably would; with almost everyone they suspected gathered under one roof, tongues loosened by drink, it would be an opportunity to find out who knew what about whom.

“Nevertheless, send Ulf to the castle to ask him.”

Truth to tell, now that she thought about it, Adelia was not unwilling to go. Death had overlain her days in Cambridge with the murdered children, also with some of her patients; the little one with the cough had given way to pneumonia, the ague had died, so had the kidney stone, so had a new mother brought in too late. Adelia’s successes-the amputation, the fever, the hernia-were discounted in the sum of what she regarded as her failures.

It would be nice, for once, to forgather with the living healthy at play. As usual, she could hide in the background; she would not be noticed. After all, she thought, a feast in Cambridge could not compete with the sophistication of its Salerno equivalent in the palaces of kings and popes. She need not be daunted by what, inevitably, would be a bucolic affair.

And she wanted that bath. Had she known that such a thing were possible, she would have demanded one before now; she’d assumed that preparing baths was one of the many things Gyltha didn’t hold with.

She had no choice, anyway; Gyltha and the two Matildas were determined. Time was short; an entertainment that could last six or seven hours began at noon.

She was stripped and plunged into the lessiveuse. Washing lye was poured in after her, along with a handful of precious cloves. She was scrubbed with a bathbrick until nearly raw and held under while her hair was attacked with more lye and a brush before being rinsed with lavender water.

Hauled out, she was wrapped in a blanket and her head inserted into the bread oven.

Her hair was a disappointment, more had been expected of its emergence from the cap or coif she always wore; she habitually sheared it off at shoulder length.

“Color’s all right,” Gyltha said grudgingly.

“But that’s too short,” Matilda B. objected. “Us’ll have to put that in net pockets.”

“Net costs.”

“I don’t know that I’m going yet,” Adelia shouted from the oven.

“You bloody are.”

Oh, well. Still on her knees at the oven, she directed her tiring women to her purse. Money was plentiful; Simon had been provided with a letter of credit on Luccan merchant bankers with agents in England and had drawn on it for them both.

She added, “And if you’re for the market, it’s time you three had new kirtles. Buy an ell of best camlet for yourselves.” Their goodwill made her ashamed that they should be shabby while she was resplendent.

“Linen’ll do,” Gyltha said shortly, pleased.

Adelia was pulled out, put into her shift and underdress, and set on a stool to have her hair brushed until it gleamed like white gold. Silver net had been purchased and stitched into little pockets that were now being pinned over the plaits round her ears. The women were still working on it when Simon arrived with Ulf.

At the sight of her, he blinked. “Well. Well, well, well…”

Ulf’s mouth had fallen open.

Embarrassed, Adelia said crossly, “All this fuss, and I don’t know if we should go at all.”

“Not go? Dear Doctor, if Cambridge were denied the sight of you now, the very skies would weep. I know of only one woman as beautiful, and she is in Naples.”

Adelia smiled at him. Subtle little man that he was, he knew she would be comfortable with a compliment only if it was without coquetry. He was always careful to mention his wife, whom he adored, not just to point out that he was out-of-bounds but to reassure her that she, Adelia, was out-of-bounds to him. Anything else would have jeopardized a relationship that was close of necessity. As it was, it had allowed them to be comrades, he respecting her professionalism, she respecting his.

And it was nice of him, she thought, to put her on a par with the wife whom he still saw in his mind’s eye as the slim, ivory-skinned maiden he had married in Naples twenty years before-though, probably, having since borne him nine children, the lady was not as slim as she had been.

He was triumphant this morning.

“We shall soon be home,” he told her. “I shall not say too much until I have uncovered the requisite documents, but there are copies of the burned tallies. I was sure there must be. Chaim had lodged them with his bankers and, since they are extensive-the man seems to have lent money to all East Anglia -I have taken them to the castle in order that Sir Rowley may assist me in perusing them.”

“Is that wise?” Adelia asked.

“I think it is, I think it is. The man is versed in accounting and as eager as we are to discover who owed what to Chaim and who regretted it so mightily as to want him dead.”

“Hmm.”

He would not listen to Adelia’s doubts; Simon thought he knew the sort of man Sir Rowley was, crusader or not. A hasty change into his best clothes so as to be ready for Grantchester and he was out of the door, heading back to the castle.

Left to herself, Adelia would have put on her gray overdress in order to tone down the brightness of the saffron that would therefore only show at bosom and sleeves. “I don’t want to attract attention.”

The Matildas, however, plumped for the only other item of note in her wardrobe, a brocade with the colors of an autumn tapestry, and Gyltha, after a short waver, agreed with them. It was slid carefully over Adelia’s coiffure. The pointed slippers Margaret had embroidered with silver thread went on with new white stockings.

The three arbiters stood back to consider the result.

The Matildas nodded and clasped their hands. Gyltha said, “Reckon as she’ll do,” which was as near as she approached to hyperbole.

Adelia’s brief glimpse of her reflection in the polished but uneven bottom of a fish kettle showed something like a distorted apple tree, but obviously she passed muster with the others.

“Ought to be a page as’ll stand behind Doctor’s at the feast,” Matilda B. said. “Sheriff and them allus takes a page to stand behind their chairs. Fart-catchers, Ma calls them.”

“Page, eh?”

Ulf, who had been staring at Adelia without closing his mouth, became aware that four pairs of eyes rested on him. He began running.

The ensuing chase and battle were terrible. Ulf’s screams brought neighbors round to see if another child was in danger of its life. Adelia, standing well back in case she be splashed by the lessiveuse’s turmoil, was in pain from laughing.

More cash was expended, this time at the business premises of Ma Mill, whose ragbags contained an old but serviceable tabard of almost the right size that responded nicely to a rub with vinegar. Dressed in it and with his flaxen hair bobbed around a face like a gleaming, discontented pickled onion, Ulf too passed muster.

Mansur eclipsed them both. A gilded agal held the veil of his kaffiyeh in place; silk flowed long and light around a fresh white woollen robe. A jeweled dagger flashed on his belt.

“O Son of the Noonday,” Adelia said, bowing. “Eeh l-Halaawa di!”

Mansur inclined his head, but his eyes were on Gyltha, who took a poker to the fire, face averted. “Girt great maypole,” she said.

Oh ho, Adelia thought.

THERE WAS MUCH to smile at in the aping of fine manners, at the reception of hoods, swords, and gloves from guests whose boots and cloaks were muddied by the walk from the river-nearly everybody had been punted from town-at the stiff use of titles by those who had known each other intimately for years, at the rings on female fingers toughened by the making of cheese in their owner’s home dairy.

But there was also much to admire. How friendlier it was to be greeted at the arched door with its carved Norman chevrons by Sir Joscelin himself than announced by an ivory-wanded, high- chinned majordomo. To be handed warming spiced wine on a cool day, not iced wine. To smell mutton, beef, and pork sizzling on spits in the courtyard rather than to pretend with one’s host, as one did in southern Italy, that food was being conjured by a wave of the hand.

Anyway, with the scowling Ulf and Safeguard at her heels rather than the lapdogs carried by pages attendant on some of the other ladies, Adelia was in no position to be supercilious.

Mansur, obviously, had gained status in Cambridge ’s eyes, and his dress and height came in for attention. Sir Joscelin welcomed him with a graceful salute and a “Salaam