Mistress of the Art of Death

“He came late to Joscelin’s feast. Are you hearing me?”

“Yes,” she said, “I saw him.”

“He came to the top table to make his apologies for being late. The marshal showed him to his place, but as he went by me, he stopped and patted a wallet on his belt. And he said…Are you listening? He said, ‘We have him, Sir Rowley. I have found the tallies.’ He spoke low, but that’s what he said.”

“‘We have him, Sir Rowley,’” Adelia repeated.

“That’s what he said. I’ve this minute seen his body. There’s no wallet on his belt. He was killed for it.”

Adelia heard Matilda B. squeaking with distress, Gyltha uttering a moan. Were she and Picot speaking English? They must be.

“Why should he tell you that?” she asked.

“Great heavens, woman, we’d been attending to it together all day. It was inconceivable that the only debt tallies were those that were burnt. The damned Jews could have laid their hands on them any day if they’d only realized it; they were with Chaim’s banker.”

“Don’t you say that about them.” She had a hand on his chest and was pushing him. “Don’t say it. Simon was a Jew.”

“Exactly.” He caught her hands. “It’s because he was a Jew that you must come with me now and examine his body before the Jews get hold of it.” He saw her expression and stayed remorseless. “What happened to him. When. From that, with even more luck, we may be able to deduce who. You taught me that.”

“He was my friend,” she said. “I cannot.” Her soul rebelled at the thought, and so would Simon’s-to be exposed, fingered, cut, and by her. Autopsy was against Jewish law in any case. She would defy the Christian Church any day, but, for Simon’s dear sake, she would not offend the Jewish.

Gyltha stepped in between them to peer carefully into the tax collector’s face. “What you’re saying. Master Simon was killed by him as killed the children? Is that right?”

“Yes, yes.”

“And she can tell from looking at his poor corpse?”

Sir Rowley recognized an ally and nodded. “She might.”

Gyltha addressed Matilda B. “Get her cloak.” And to Adelia, “We’ll go together.” And to Ulf, “You stay here, boy. Give the Matildas a hand.”

Between them, with Mansur and the Safeguard following, Adelia was hustled through the streets toward the bridge. She was still gabbling her protest. “It can’t have been the killer. He only attacks the defenseless. This is different, this is…” She slowed as she tried to think what it was. “This is everyday awfulness.”

To the water bailiff, who had come to tell them, bodies in his river were commonplace. Nor had she questioned his verdict of simple drowning, she who had examined so many waterlogged corpses on the marble table in Salerno ’s mortuary. People drowned in their baths; sailors fell overboard, like most sailors, unable to swim; freak waves plucked victims into the sea. Children, men, and women drowned in rivers, pools, fountains, puddles. People made tragic misjudgments, took an unwary step. It was an ordinary way of dying.

She heard the tax collector’s huff of impatience as he hurried her on. “Our man is a wild dog. Wild dogs leap for the throat when they’re threatened. Simon had become a threat.”

“He weren’t very big, neither,” Gyltha said. “Nice little man, but no more to un than a rabbit.”

No, there wasn’t. But to be murdered. Adelia’s mind fought against it. She and Simon had come to resolve a predicament that the people of a minor town in a foreign country had gotten themselves into, not to enter into the same predicament with them. She had regarded the two of them as excluded from it by some special dispensation given to investigators. And so, she knew, had Simon.

She halted in her tracks. “We’ve been at risk?”

The tax collector stopped with her. “Well, I’m glad you’ve seen it. Did you think you had exemption?”

They were bustling her on again, the two of them talking over her head.

“Did you see him leave, Gyltha?”

“Not to say leave. He looked into the kitchen with compliments to the cook and say good-bye to me.” Gyltha’s voice wavered for a moment. “Always the polite gentleman he was.”

“Was that before the dancing began?”

Gyltha sighed. It had been busy in Sir Joscelin’s kitchen last night.

“Beggared if I can remember. Might’ve been. He said as he must apply himself to study afore he went to bed, that I do recall. The which he was a-leaving early.”

“‘Apply himself to study.’”

“His very words.”

“He was going to look through the tallies.”

As usual, the bridge was crowded; they had trouble walking in line and, with Sir Rowley keeping a firm grip on her, Adelia was bumped into by passersby, most of them clerks, all in a hurry, each with a distinctive chain around his neck, lots of them. Officialdom had come to Cambridge. Vaguely, she wondered why.

Question and answer went on over her head.

“Did he say he was walking home? Or going by boat?”

“With never a blink of light? He’d never walk, surely.” Like most Cambridge people, Gyltha regarded the boat as the only form of transport. “There’d be someone leaving the same time as would’ve offered to drop un off home.”

“I fear that is what somebody did.”

“Oh, dear God, help us all.”

No, no, Adelia thought. Simon was not unwary; he was not a child to be tempted by jujubes. Foolishly, townsman that he was, he had attempted to walk back along the riverbank. He slipped in the dark; it was an accident.

“Who did leave at the same time?” Picot’s voice.

But Gyltha could not tell him. Anyway, they had reached the castle. No Jews in the inner court today; instead, there were more clerks, dozens, like an infestation of beetles.

The tax collector was answering Gyltha: “Royal clerks, here to get all ready for the assize. It takes days to be prepared for the justices in eyre. Come on, this way. They took him to the chapel.”

So they had, but, by the time the three reached it, the chapel was empty except for the castle priest, who was busily swinging a thurible up and down the nave to resanctify it. “Did you know the corpse was that of a Jew, Sir Rowley? Such a thing. We thought him to be Christian, but when we laid it out…” Father Alcuin took the tax collector by the arm and led him away so that the women should not hear. “When we unclothed it, we saw the evidence. It was circumcised.”

“What’s been done with him?”

“It could not stay here, for all heaven. I called for it to be taken away. It cannot be buried here, however the Jews fuss for it. I have sent for the prior, though it is more a matter for the bishop, but Prior Geoffrey knows how to quiet the Israelites.”

Father Alcuin caught sight of Mansur and paled. “Will you bring another paynim into this holy place? Get him out, get him out.”

Sir Rowley saw the despair in Adelia’s face and took the little priest by the front of his robe, raising him several inches off the ground. “Where have they taken the body?”

“I do not know. Let me down, you fiend.” As he regained his feet, he said defiantly, “Nor do I care.” He returned to clanking the thurible, disappearing in a cloud of incense and bad temper.

“They’re not treating him with respect,” Adelia said. “Oh, Picot, see that he has a proper Jewish burial.” Cosmopolitan humanist he might have appeared, but au fond Simon of Naples had been a devout Jew; her own nonobservance had always troubled him. For his body to be merely disposed of, the rites of his religion ignored, was terrible to her.

“That’s not right,” Gyltha agreed. “It’s like the Good Book says, ‘They have taken away my Lord and I know not where they have laid him.’”

Blasphemy perhaps, but it was said with indignation and sorrow.

“Ladies,” Sir Rowley Picot said, “if I have to go to the Holy Ghost for it, Master Simon will be buried with reverence.” He went off and came back. “The Jews have already taken him, it seems.”

He set off toward the Jews’ tower. As they followed him, Adelia slipped her hand into that of her housekeeper.

Prior Geoffrey was at its door, talking to a man Adelia did not know but whom she recognized at once to be a rabbi. It wasn’t the locks or the untrimmed beard; he was dressed much the same, and as shabbily, as his fellow Jews. It was the eyes; they were scholarly, sterner than Prior Geoffrey’s but with the same breadth of knowledge and a wearier amusement. Men with eyes like those had gently disputed Jewish law with her foster father. A Talmudic scholar, she thought, and was relieved; he would care for Simon’s body as Simon would have wished. But he would not, since it was forbidden, allow the corpse to be subject to an autopsy, despite anything Sir Rowley could do-and that also was a relief to Adelia.

Prior Geoffrey was holding her hands. “My dear girl, such a blow, such a blow for us all. The loss to you must be incalculable. God’s grace and how I liked the man, ours was a brief acquaintance, yet I perceived the sweetness of soul in Master Simon of Naples and I grieve at his passing.”

“Prior, he must be buried according to Jewish law, which means he has to be buried today.” To keep a corpse above ground any longer than twenty-four hours was to humiliate it.

“Ah, as to that…” Prior Geoffrey was uneasy. He turned to the tax collector, as did the rabbi-this was men’s business. “A situation has arisen, Sir Rowley. Indeed, I am surprised it has not come up before, but it appears-happily, of course-that none of Rabbi Gotsce’s people here in the castle have died during their year of incarceration…”

“It must be the cooking.” It was a deep voice, Rabbi Gotsce’s, and, if he’d made a joke, his face showed no sign of it.

“Accordingly,” the prior went on, “and I admit my fault in this, no arrangement has yet been made…”

“There is no burial ground for Jews in the castle,” Rabbi Gotsce said.

Prior Geoffrey nodded. “I fear Father Alcuin is claiming the entire precinct as Christian ground.”

Sir Rowley grimaced. “Perhaps we can smuggle him down to the town tonight.”

“There is no burial ground for Jews in Cambridge,” Rabbi Gotsce said.

They all stared at him, except the prior, who looked ashamed.

“What was done for Chaim and his wife, then?” Rowley asked.

Reluctantly, the prior said, “In unsanctified ground, with the suicides. Anything else would have inflamed another riot.”

The open door of the tower before which they all stood showed a to-do in progress behind it. Women with basins and cloths in their arms were running up and down the circular stair while a group of men stood in the hallway, talking. Adelia saw Yehuda Gabirol in the middle of it, clutching his forehead.

She clutched her own because, on top of everything else, confusing the issue, somebody was in pain. The conversation of prior, rabbi, and tax collector was being interrupted every now and then by a loud and deep sound issuing from one of the tower’s upper windows, something between a groan and the huff of a faulty pair of bellows. The men were ignoring it.

“Who is that?” she asked, but nobody attended to her.

“Where do you usually take your dead, then?” Rowley asked the rabbi.

“To London. The king is good enough to allow us a cemetery near the Jewish quarter in London. It has always been so.”

“It’s the only one?”

“The only one. If we die in York or on the border to Scotland, in Devon or Cornwall, we must take our coffin to London. We have to pay a special toll, of course. And then there’s the hiring of the dogs that bark at us as we pass through the towns.” He smiled without mirth. “It comes expensive.”