The matter of his kard was also resolved with charm. “The dagger is not a weapon,” Sir Joscelin told his porter, who was struggling to wrest it from Mansur’s belt and put it with the guests’ swords. “It is a decoration for such a gentleman as this, as we old crusaders know.”
He turned to Adelia, bowing, and asked her to translate his apology to the good doctor for the tardiness of their invitation. “I feared he would be bored by our rustic amusements, but Prior Geoffrey assured me otherwise.”
Though he had always shown her civility, even when she must have seemed to him to be a foreign trollop, Adelia realized that Gyltha had circulated word that the doctor’s assistant was virtuous.
The prioress’s welcome was offhand through lack of interest, and she was taken aback by her knight’s greeting to both Mansur and Adelia. “You have had dealing with these people, Sir Joscelin?”
“The good doctor saved the foot of my thatcher, ma’am, and probably his life.” But the blue eyes, amused, were directed at Adelia, who feared that Sir Joscelin knew who had performed the amputation.
“My dear girl, my dear girl.” Prior Geoffrey’s grip on her arm propelled her away. “How beautiful you look.
She smiled up at him; she had missed him. “Are you well, my lord?”
“Pissing like a racehorse, I thank you.” He bent toward her ear so that she should hear him above the noise of conversation. “And how goes the investigation?”
They had been remiss not to keep him informed; that they had been able to investigate as much as they had was due to this man, but they’d been so busy. “We have made ground and hope to make more tonight,” she told him. “May we report to you tomorrow? Particularly, I want to ask you about…”
But there was the tax collector himself, two yards away and staring at her over the head of the crowd. He began to wade through an intervening group toward her. He looked less plump than he had.
He bowed. “Mistress Adelia.”
She nodded to him. “Is Master Simon with you?”
“He is delayed at the castle.” He gave her a conspiratorial wink. “Having to escort the sheriff and his lady here, I was forced to leave him to his studies. He begged me to tell you he will attend later. May I say…”
Whatever he wished to say was interrupted by a trumpet call. They were to dine.
Her fingers raised high on his, Prior Geoffrey joined the procession to take Adelia into the hall, Mansur at his side. There they had to separate, he to the top table that stood across the dais at one end, she and Mansur to their more lowly position. She was interested to see where this would be; precedence was a formidable concern for host and guest alike.
Adelia had witnessed her Salerno aunt near to collapse from the worry of placing highborn guests at table in an order that would not mortally offend one or the other. Theoretically, the rules were clear: a prince to equal an archbishop, bishop to an earl, baron in fief before a visiting baron, and so on down the line. But suppose a legate, equal to a visiting baron, was papal-where did he sit? What if the archbishop had crossed the prince, as was so often the case? Or vice versa? Which was even more frequent. Fisticuffs, feuds could result from the unintended insult. And the poor host always to blame.
It was a matter that had exercised even Gyltha, whose vicarious honor was involved, and who had also been called to Grantchester for the night to do interesting things with eels in its kitchens. “I’ll be a-watching, and if Sir Joscelin do put any of you below the salt, that’s the last barrel of eels he do get from me.”
As she entered, Adelia glimpsed Gyltha’s head poking out anxiously from behind a door.
She could sense tension, see eyes glancing left and right as Sir Joscelin’s marshal ushered the guests to their places. The lower pecking orders, particularly self-made men whose ambition outran their birth, were as sensitive as the high, perhaps more so.
Ulf had already done some scouting. “He’s up here, and you’re down there,” he said, jerking a thumb back and forth between Adelia and Mansur. He adopted the slow, careful baby talk he always used to Mansur. “You. Sitty. Here.”
Sir Joscelin had been generous, Adelia thought, relieved for Gyltha’s sake-and also for her own; Mansur was touchy about his dignity, and, decoration or not, he had a dagger in his belt. While he hadn’t been put at the top table with the host and hostess, prior, sheriff, et cetera, nor could he expect to be, he was quite near it on one of the long trestles that ran the length of the great hall. The lovely young nun who had allowed Adelia to look at Little Saint Peter’s bones was on his left. Less happily, Roger of Acton had been placed opposite him.
Positioning the tax collector must have called for considerable reflection, she thought. Unpopular in his calling, but nevertheless the king’s man and, at the moment, the sheriff’s right hand. Sir Joscelin had opted for safety as far as Sir Rowley Picot was concerned. He was next to the sheriff’s wife, making her laugh.
As ostensibly a mere female potion-mixing doctor’s attendant, and foreign at that, Adelia found herself on another of the trestles in the body of the hall toward its lower end-though several positions above the ornate salt cellar that marked the division between guests and those serfs who were present to fulfill Christ’s command that the poor be fed. The even poorer were gathered in the courtyard round a brazier, waiting for the scraps.
She was joined on her right by the huntsman, Hugh, his face as impassive as ever, though he bowed to her courteously enough. So did an elderly little man she did not know who took his place on her left.
She was unhappy to see that Brother Gilbert had been placed directly across from her. So was he.
Trenchers were brought round, and there was covert slapping by parents of their young people’s hands as they reached to break off a piece, for there was much to happen before the bread could have food put upon it. Sir Joscelin must declare his fealty for his liege, Prioress Joan, which he did on one knee and with a presentation of his rent, six milk-white doves in a gilt cage.
Prior Geoffrey must say grace. Wine cups must be filled for the dedicatory toast to Thomas of Canterbury and his new recruit to martyred glory, Little Peter of Trumpington, the raisons d’etre of the feast.
A discordant shriek cut across the respectful murmurs. “The infidel insults our holy saints.” Roger of Acton was pointing in triumphant outrage at Mansur. “He drinks to them in water.”
Adelia closed her eyes.
But Mansur stayed calm, sipping his water. It was Sir Joscelin who administered a rebuke clear to the entire hall: “By his faith, this gentleman forswears liquor, Master Roger. If you cannot hold yours, may I suggest you follow his example.”
And so was another man on the top table; Sir Gervase had watched every step of her progress into the hall.
Adelia was assured now that the man who had murdered the children had been on crusade. It was not merely identification of the sweetmeat as an Arab jujube, but that the hiatus between the attack on the sheep and the one on the children coincided exactly with a period when Cambridge had responded to the call of Outremer and sent some of its men to answer it.
The trouble was that there had been the absence of so many…
“Who left town in the Great Storm year?” Gyltha had said when applied to. “Well, there was Ma Mill’s daughter as got herself in the family way by the peddler…”
“Men, Gyltha, men.”
“Oh, there was a mort of young men went. See, the Abbot of Ely called for the country to take the Cross.” By “country” Gyltha meant “county.” “Must of been hundreds went off with Lord Fitzgilbert to the Holy Places.”
It had been a bad year, Gyltha said. The Great Storm had flattened crops, flood swept away people and buildings, the fens were inundated, even the gentle Cam rose in fury. God had shown His anger at Cambridgeshire’s sins. Only a crusade against His enemies could placate Him.
Lord Fitzgilbert, looking for lands in Syria to replace his drowned estates, had planted Christ’s banner in Cambridge ’s marketplace. Young men with livelihoods destroyed by the storm came to it, and so did the ambitious, the adventurous, rejected suitors, and husbands with nagging wives. Courts gave criminals the option of going to prison or taking the Cross. Sins whispered to priests in confession were absolved-as long as the perpetrator joined the crusade.
A small army marched away.
Lord Fitzgilbert had returned pickled in a coffin and now lay in his own chapel under a marble effigy of himself, its mailed legs crossed in the sign of a crusader. Some arrived home and died of the diseases they carried with them, to lie in less exalted graves with a plain sword carved into the stone above. Some were merely a name on a mortuary list carried by survivors. Some had found a richer, drier life in Syria and opted to stay there.
Others came back to take up their former occupation so that, according to Gyltha, Adelia and Simon must now take a keen look at two shopkeepers, several villeins, a blacksmith, and the very apothecary who supplied Dr. Mansur’s medicines, not to mention Brother Gilbert and the silent canon who had accompanied Prior Geoffrey on the road.
“Brother Gilbert went on crusade?”
“That he did. Nor it ain’t no good suspecting only them as came back rich like sirs Joscelin and Gervase,” Gyltha had said relentlessly. “There’s lots borrow from Jews, small amounts maybe but big enough to them as can’t pay the interest. Nor it ain’t certain a fellow yelling for the Jew to swing was the same devil killed the little uns. There’s plenty like to see a Jew’s neck stretch
Daunted by the size of the problem, Adelia had grimaced at the housekeeper for her logic even as she’d acknowledged it as inescapable.
So now, looking around, she must attach no sinister significance to Sir Joscelin’s obvious wealth. It could have been gained in Syria, rather than from Chaim the Jew. It had certainly transformed a Saxon holding into a flint-built manor of considerable beauty. The enormous hall in which they ate possessed a newly carved roof as fine as any she’d seen in England. From the gallery above the dais issued music played with professional skill on recorder, vielle, and flute. The personal eating irons that a guest usually took to a meal had been made redundant by a knife and spoon laid at each place. Saucers, finger bowls waiting on the table were of exquisite silverwork, the napkins of damask.
She expressed her admiration to her companions. Hugh the huntsman merely nodded. The little man on her left said, “But you ought to’ve seen that in old days, wonderful wormy barn of a place near to falling down that was when Sir Tibault had un, him as was Joscelin’s father. Nasty old brute he was, God rest him, as drank hisself to death in the end. Ain’t I right, Hugh?”
Hugh grunted. “Son’s different.”
“That he is. Different as chalk and cheese. Brought the place back to life, Joscelin has. Used un’s gold well.”
“Gold?” Adelia asked.
The little man warmed to her interest. “So he told me. ‘There’s gold in Outremer, Master Herbert,’ he said to me. ‘Hatfuls of it, Master Herbert.’ See, I’m by way of being his bootmaker; a man don’t fib to his bootmaker.”
“Did Sir Gervase come back with gold as well?”
“A ton or more, so they say, only he ain’t so free with his money.”
“Did they acquire this gold together?”
“Can’t answer for that. Probable they did. They ain’t hardly apart. David and Jonathan, them.”
