Mistress of the Art of Death

enjoy herself. A tall prioress and a small Ulf swinging round on the centrifuge of their crossed hands. Sir Joscelin talking earnestly to the little nun as they passed back-to-back in a corner. An admiring circle round Mansur, his face impassive as he danced over crossed swords to an intoned maqam. Roger of Acton trying to make a circling carole go to the right: “Those that turn to the left are perverse, and God hates them. Proverbs twenty-seven.” And being trampled.

Dear Lord, the cook and the sheriff’s lady. No time to marvel. Right shoulder to right shoulder. Dance, dance. Her arms and Picot’s forming an arch, Gyltha and Prior Geoffrey passing under it. The skinny nun with the apothecary. Now Hugh the huntsman and Matilda B. Those below the salt, those above it in thrall to a democratic god who danced. Oh, God, this is joy on the wing. Catch it, catch it.

Adelia danced her slippers through and didn’t know it until friction burns afflicted the soles of her feet.

She spun out of the melee. It was time to go. A few guests were leaving, though most were congregating at the sideboards on which supper was being set out.

She limped to the doorway. Mansur joined her. “Did I see Master Simon leave?” she asked him.

He went to look and came back from the direction of the kitchen with a sleeping Ulf in his arms. “The woman says he went ahead.” Mansur never used Gyltha’s name; she was always “the woman.”

“Are she and the Matildas staying?”

“They help to clear up. We take the boy.”

It seemed that Prior Geoffrey and his monks had long gone. So had the nuns, except for Prioress Joan, who was at a sideboard with a piece of game pie in one hand and a tankard in the other; she was so far mellowed as to smile on Mansur and wave a benediction with the pie over Adelia’s curtseyed thanks.

Sir Joscelin they met coming in from the courtyard where firelit figures gnawed on bones.

“You honored us, my lord,” Adelia told him. “Dr. Mansur wishes me to express our gratitude to you.”

“Do you go back via the river? I can call my barge…”

No, no, they had come in Old Benjamin’s punt, but thank you.

Even with the flambeau burning in its holder on a stanchion at the river’s edge, it was almost too dark to distinguish Old Benjamin’s punt from the others waiting along the bank, but since all of them, bar Sheriff Baldwin’s, were uniformly plain, they took the first in line.

The still-sleeping Ulf was lain across Adelia’s lap where she sat in the bow; Safeguard stood unhappily with his paws in bilge. Mansur took up the pole…

The punt rocked dangerously as Sir Rowley Picot leaped into it. “To the castle, boatman.” He settled himself on a thwart. “Now, isn’t this nice?”

A slight mist rose from the water and a gibbous moon shone weakly, intermittently, sometimes disappearing altogether as over-arching trees on the banks turned the river into a tunnel. A lump of ghastly white transformed into a flurry of wings as a protesting swan got out of their way.

Mansur, as he always did when he was poling, sang quietly to himself, an atonal reminiscence of water and rushes in another land.

Sir Rowley complimented Adelia on her boatman’s skill.

“He is a Marsh Arab,” she said. “He feels at home in fenland.”

“Does he now? How unexpected in a eunuch.”

Immediately, she was defensive. “And what do you expect? Fat men lolling around a harem?”

He was taken aback. “Yes, actually. The only ones I ever saw were.”

“When you were crusading?” she asked, still on the attack.

“When I was crusading,” he admitted.

“Then your experience of eunuchs is limited, Sir Rowley. I fully expect Mansur to marry Gyltha one day.” Oh, damn it, her tongue was still loose from the mead. Had she betrayed her dear Arab? And Gyltha?

But she would not have this, this fellow, this possible murderer, denigrate a man whose boots he was not fit to lick.

Rowley leaned forward. “Really? I thought his, er, condition would put marriage out of the question.”

Damn and blast and hellfire, now she had placed herself into the position of having to explain the circumstances of the castrated. But how to put it? “It is only that children of such a union are out of the question. Since Gyltha is past childbearing age anyway, I doubt that will concern them.”

“I see. And the other, er, condolences of marriage?”

“They can sustain an erection,” she said sharply. To hell with euphemisms; why sheer away from physical fact? If he hadn’t wanted to know, he shouldn’t have asked.

She’d shocked him, she could tell; but she hadn’t finished with him. “Do you think Mansur chose to be as he is? He was taken by slavers when he was a small child and sold for his voice to Byzantine monks, where he was castrated so that he might keep his treble. It is a common practice with them. He was eight years old, and he had to sing for the monks, Christian monks, his torturers.”

“May I ask how you acquired him?”

“He ran away. My foster father found him on a street in Alexandria and brought him home to Salerno. My father specializes in acquiring the lost and abandoned.”

Stop it, stop it, she told herself. Why this wish to inform? He is nothing to you; he may be worse than nothing. That you have just spent the time of your life with him is nothing.

A moorhen clooped and rustled in the reeds. Something, a water rat, slid into the water and swam away, leaving a wake of moonlit ripples. The punt entered another tunnel.

Sir Rowley’s voice sounded in it. “Adelia.”

She closed her eyes. “Yes?”

“You have contributed all you can to this business. When we reach Old Benjamin’s, I shall come in with you and have a word with Master Simon. He must be made to see that it is time you went home to Salerno.”

“I do not understand,” she said. “The killer is not yet uncovered.”

“We’re closing on his coverts; if we flush him, he’ll be dangerous until we can bring him down. I don’t want him leaping on one of the beaters.”

The anger the tax collector always inspired in her came hot and sharp. “One of the beaters? I am qualified, qualified, and chosen for this mission by the King of Sicily, not by Simon, and certainly not by you.”

“Madam, I am merely concerned for your safety.”

It was too late; he would not have suggested that a man in her position go home; he had insulted her professional ability.

Adelia lapsed into Arabic, the only tongue in which she could swear freely, because Margaret had never understood it. She used phrases overheard during Mansur’s frequent quarrels with her foster parents’ Moroccan cook, the one language that could counteract the fury Sir Rowley Picot ever inspired in her. She spoke of diseased donkeys and his unnatural preference for them, of his doglike attributes, his fleas, his bowel performance, and his eating habits. She told him what he could do with his concern, an injunction again involving his bowels. Whether Picot knew what she was saying or didn’t was irrelevant; he could get the gist.

Mansur poled them out of the tunnel, grinning.

The rest of the journey passed in silence.

When they reached Old Benjamin’s house, Adelia would not let Picot accompany her to it. “Shall I take him on to the castle?” Mansur wanted to know.

“Anywhere, take him anywhere,” she said.

THE NEXT MORNING, when a water bailiff came to tell Gyltha that Simon’s corpse was being delivered to the castle, Adelia knew she had been swearing as their punt passed his body where it had floated, face down, in the Trumpington reeds.

Ten

Is she hearing me?” Sir Rowley asked Gyltha.

“They’re hearing you in Peterborough,” Gyltha said. The tax collector had been shouting. “She just ain’t listening.”

She was listening, but not to Sir Rowley Picot. The voice she heard was that of Simon of Naples, clear as clear, and saying nothing significant, merely chatting as he’d used to chat in his light, busy tenor-actually, at the moment, about wool and its processes. “Can you conceive of the difficulty in achieving of the color black?”

She wanted to tell him that her difficulty now was of conceiving him to be dead, that she was delaying the moment because the loss was too great and must therefore be ignored, a life removed revealing a chasm that she had not seen because he’d filled it.

They were mistaken. Simon was not the sort of person to be dead.

Sir Rowley looked around Old Benjamin’s kitchen for help. Were all its women poleaxed? And the boy? Was she going to sit and stare into the fire forever?

He appealed to the eunuch, who stood with folded arms, staring out the doorway at the river.

“Mansur.” He had to go close so that their faces were level. “Mansur. The body is at the castle. Any minute the Jews are going to discover that it is there and bury it themselves. They know him to be one of their own. Listen to me.” He reached up to the man’s shoulders and shook him. “There’s no time for her to mourn. She must examine the corpse first. He was murdered, don’t you see?”

“You speak Arabic?”

“What do you think I’m speaking, you great camel? Wake her up, make her move.”

Adelia put her head on one side to consider the balance that had been maintained, the sexless affection and acceptance, respect with humor, a friendship so rare between a man and a woman that such a one was unlikely to be granted to her again. She knew now something of what it would be like to lose her foster father.

She grew angry, accusing Simon’s shade of culpability. How could you be so careless? You were of value to us all; it is a deprivation; dying in a muddy English river is so silly.

That poor woman he had loved so much. His children.

Mansur’s hand was on her shoulder. “This man is saying Simon was murdered.”

It took a minute, then she was on her feet. “No.” She was facing Picot. “It was an accident. That man, the waterman, told Gyltha it was an accident.”

“He’d found the tallies, woman, he knew who it was.” Sir Rowley clenched his teeth with exasperation, then began to speak slowly. “Listen to me. Are you listening?”

“Yes.”