Mistress of the Art of Death

Adelia glanced toward the high table at David and Jonathan, good-looking, confident, so easy together, talking over the prioress’s head.

If there were two killers, both in accord…It hadn’t crossed her mind, but it should have. “Do they have wives?”

“Gervase do, a poor, dribblin’ little piece as stays home.” The bootmaker was happy to display his knowledge of great men. “Sir Joscelin now, he’s atrading for the Baron of Peterborough’s daughter. Good match that’d be.”

A shrill horn blasted away all talk. The guests sat up. Food was coming.

AT THE HIGH TABLE, Rowley Picot allowed his knee to rub against that of the sheriff’s wife, keeping her happy. He also winked at the young nun seated at the trestle below to make her blush, but found that his eyes were more often directed toward little Madam Doctor down among the toilers and hewers. Washed up nicely, he’d give her that. Creamy, velvety skin disappeared into that saffron bodice, inviting touch. Made his fingertips twitch. Not the only thing to twitch, either; that gleaming hair suggested she was blonde all over…

Damn the trollop-Sir Rowley shook off a lubricious reverie-she was finding out too much, and Master Simon with her, relying on their bloody great Arab for protection, a eunuch, for God’s sake.

TO HELL, thought Adelia, there’s more.

For the second time, a blast on the horn had announced another course from the kitchen, led by the marshal. More and even larger platters, piled like petty mountains, each needing two men to carry them, were greeted with cheers from the merry diners, who were getting merrier.

The wreckage from the first course was removed. Gravy-stained trenchers were put into a wheelbarrow and taken outside to where ragged men, women, and children waited to fall on them. Fresh ones took their place.

“Et maintenant, milords, mesdames…” It was the head cook again. “Venyson en furmety gely. Porcelle farce enforce. Pokokkye. Crans. Venyson roste. Conyn. Byttere truffee. Pulle endore. Braun freyes avec graunt tartez. Leche Lumbarde. A soltelle.”

Norman French for Norman food.

“That’s France talk,” explained Master Herbert, the bootmaker, to Adelia kindly, as if he hadn’t said so the first time, “as Sir Joscelin brought that cook from France.”

And I wish he might go back there. Enough, enough.

She was feeling strange.

To begin with, she had refused wine and asked for boiled water, a request that had surprised the servant with the wine pitcher and had not been fulfilled. Persuaded by Master Herbert that the mead being offered as an alternative to wine and ale was an innocuous drink made from honey, and being thirsty, she had emptied several cups.

And was still thirsty. She waved frantically at Ulf to bring her some of the water from Mansur’s ewer. He didn’t see her.

It was Simon of Naples who waved back. He’d just entered and bowed a deep apology to Prioress Joan and Sir Joscelin for his late arrival.

He’s learned something, Adelia thought, sitting up. She could tell from his very walk that his time with the Jews had yielded fruit. She watched him talking excitedly to the tax collector at the end of the high table before he disappeared from her view to take his seat farther up the trestle and on the same side of it as herself.

Week-dead peacocks still displaying their tail were on the board; litters of crispy baby pigs sucked sadly on the apple between their jaws. The eye of a roasted bittern, which would have looked better un-roasted among the fenland reeds where it belonged, stared accusingly into Adelia’s.

Silently, she apologized to it. I’m sorry. I’m sorry they stuffed truffles up your arse.

Again, she glimpsed Gyltha’s face peering round the kitchen door. Adelia sat up straight again. I am doing you credit, I am, I am.

Venison in a stew of corn appeared on her clean trencher. It was joined by “gely” from a saucer. Red currant, probably. “I want salads,” she said hopelessly.

The prioress’s rent had escaped from their cage and joined the sparrows in the rafters to plop droppings on the tables below.

Brother Gilbert, who’d been ignoring the nuns on either side of him and was staring at Adelia instead, leaned across the table. “I should think you ashamed to show your hair, mistress.”

She glared back. “Why?”

“You would better hide your locks beneath a veil, better dress in mourning garments, neglect your exterior. O Daughter of Eve, don the penitential garb that women must derive from Eve’s ignominy, the odium of it being the cause of the fall of the human race.”

“Wasn’t her fault,” said the nun on his left. “Fall of the human race wasn’t her fault. Wasn’t mine, neither.”

She was a skinny, middle-aged woman who had been drinking heavily, as had Brother Gilbert. Adelia liked the cut of her jib.

The monk turned on her. “Silence, woman. Would you argue with the great Saint Tertullian? You, from your house of loose living?”

“Yah,” the nun said, crowing, “we got a better saint than you got. We got Little Saint Peter. Best you’ve got is Saint Etheldreda’s big toe.”

“We have a piece of the True Cross,” Brother Gilbert shouted.

“Who ain’t?” said the nun on his other side.

Brother Gilbert descended from his high horse into the blood and dust of the battleground. “A muck of good Little Saint Peter’ll do you when the archdeacon investigates your convent, you slut. And he will. Oh, I know what goes on at Saint Radegund’s-slackness, holy office neglected, men in your cells, hunting parties, sliding upriver to provision your anchorites. I don’t think. Oh, I know.”

“So we do provision ’em.” This was the nun on Brother Gilbert’s right, as plump as her sister in God was thin. “If I visit my aunty after, where’s the harm?”

Ulf’s voice repeated itself in Adelia’s head. Sister Fatty for to supply the hermits, look a her puff. She squinted at the nun. “I saw you,” she said happily. “I saw you poling a punt upriver.”

“I’ll wager you didn’t see her poling back.” Brother Gilbert was spitting in his fury. “They stay out all night. They comport themselves in licentiousness and lust. In a decent house, they’d be whipped until their arses bled, but where’s their prioress? Out hunting.”

A man who hates, Adelia thought, a hateful man. And a crusader. She leaned across the table. “Do you like jujubes, Brother Gilbert?”

“What? What? No, I loathe confits.” He turned from her to resume his denunciation of Saint Radegund’s.

A quiet, sad voice on Adelia’s right said, “Our Mary liked confits.” Appallingly, tears were running down the sinewy cheeks of Hugh the huntsman and plopping into his stew.

“Don’t cry,” she said, “don’t cry.”

A whisper came from the bootmaker on her left: “She was his niece. Little Mary as was murdered. His sister’s child.”

“I’m sorry.” Adelia touched the huntsman’s hand. “I’m so sorry.”

Bleary, infinitely sad, his blue eyes looked into hers. “I’ll get him. I’ll tear his liver out.”

“We’ll both get him,” she said and became irritated that Brother Gilbert’s harangue should be intruding on such a moment. She stretched across the board to poke the monk in his chest. “Not Saint Tertullian.”

“What?”

“Tertullian. Fellow you quoted on Eve. He wasn’t a saint. Did you think he was a saint? He wasn’t. He left the Church. He was”-she said it carefully-“heterodoxal. That’s what he was. Joined the Montanists, Subsequently never declared a saint.”

The nuns rejoiced. “Didn’t know that, did you?” the skinny one said.

Brother Gilbert’s reply was drowned by yet another trumpet blast and another course processing by the high table.

“Blaundersorye. Quincys in comfyte. Curlews en miel. Pertyche. Eyround angels. Pety-perneux…”

“What’s petty-perno?” asked the huntsman, still crying.

“Little lost eggs,” Adelia told him and began to weep uncontrollably.

The part of her brain that hadn’t totally lost its battle with mead got her to her feet and carried her to a sideboard containing a jug of water. Clutching it, she aimed for the door, Safeguard behind her.

The tax collector watched her go.

Several guests were already in the garden. Men were contemplatively facing tree trunks; women were scattering to find a quiet place to squat. The more modest were forming an agitated queue for the shrouded benches with bottom-sized holes that Sir Joscelin had provided over the stream running down to the Cam.

Drinking fiercely from her jug, Adelia wandered off, past stables and the comforting smell of horses, past dark mews where hooded raptors dreamed of the swoop and kill. There was a moon. There was grass, an orchard…

The tax collector found her asleep beneath an apple tree. As he reached out, a small, dark, smelly shape beside her raised its head and another, much taller and with a dagger at its belt, stepped from the shadows.

Sir Rowley displayed empty hands to them both. “Would I hurt her?”

Adelia opened her eyes. She sat up, feeling her forehead. “Tertullian wasn’t a saint, Picot,” she told him.

“I always wondered.” He squatted down beside her. She’d used his name as if they were old friends-he was dismayed by the pleasure that gave him. “What were you drinking?”

She concentrated. “It was yellow.”

“Mead. You need a Saxon constitution to survive mead.” He pulled her to her feet. “Come along, you’ll have to dance it off.”

“I don’t dance. Shall we go and kick Brother Gilbert?”

“You tempt me, but I think we’ll just dance.”

The hall had been cleared of its tables. The gentle musicians of the gallery had transformed into three perspiring, burly men on the dais, a tabor player and two fiddlers, one of them calling the steps in a howl that overrode the squealing, laughing, stamping whirl on what was now a dance floor.

The tax collector pulled Adelia into it.

This was not the disciplined, fingertip-holding, toe-pointing, complex dancing of Salerno ’s high society. No elegance here. These people of Cambridge hadn’t time to attend lessons in Terpsichore, they just danced. Indefatigably, ceaselessly, with sweat and stamina, with zest, compelled by savage ancestral gods. A stumble here or there, a wrong move, what matter? Back into the fray, dance, dance. “Strike.” Left foot to the left, the right stamped against it. “Back to back.” Catch up one’s skirt. Smile. “Right shoulder to right shoulder.” “Left circle hey.” “Straight hey.” “Corner.” “Weave, my lords and ladies, weave, you buggers.” “Home.”

The flambeaux in their holders flickered like sacrificial fires. Bruised rushes on the floor released green incense into the room. No time to breathe, this is “Horses Brawl,” back, circle, up the middle, under the arch, again, again.

The mead in her body vaporized and was replaced by the intoxication of cooperative movement. Glistening faces appeared and disappeared, slippery hands grasped Adelia’s, swung her: Sir Gervase, an unknown, Master Herbert, sheriff, prior, tax collector, Sir Gervase again, swinging her so roughly that she was afraid he might let go and send her propelling into the wall. Up the middle, under the arch, gallop, weave.

Vignettes glimpsed for a second, and then gone. Simon signaling to her that he was leaving but his smile-she was being revolved with speed by Sir Rowley at that moment-telling her to stay and