Mistress of the Art of Death

“I didn’t know,” Rowley said.

The little rabbi bowed politely. “How should you?”

“We are at an impasse, you see,” Prior Geoffrey said. “The poor body cannot be interred in the castle grounds, yet I doubt we could elude the townspeople long enough, or safely enough, to smuggle it to London.”

London ? Smuggle? Adelia’s distress grew into anger she could hardly contain.

She stepped forward. “Forgive me, but Simon of Naples is not an inconvenience to be disposed of. He was sent to this place by the King of Sicily to root out a killer in your midst, and if this man here is right”-she pointed to the tax collector-“he died for it. In the name of God, the least all of you can do is bury him with respect.”

“She’s right, Prior,” Gyltha said. “Good little man, he was.”

The two women were embarrassing the men. Further embarrassment came from the upper window in another groan that turned into an unmistakably feminine shriek.

Rabbi Gotsce felt called upon to explain. “Mistress Dina.”

“The baby?” demanded Adelia.

“A little before its time,” the rabbi told her, “but the women have hopes of its safe arrival.”

She heard Gyltha say, “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.”

Adelia did not ask how Dina did, for at that moment, Dina obviously did badly. Adelia’s shoulders drooped as a little of the anger went out of her. Something would be gained, then, some new, good thing in a wicked world.

The rabbi saw it. “You are a Jew, madam?”

“I was brought up by a Jew. I am nothing except Simon’s friend.”

“So he told me. Be at peace, my daughter. For us of this poor little community, your friend’s burial is a sacred task obligatory to us all. Already we have performed the Tahara, the washing and cleansing of his body as it begins its journey to its next stage. He has been clad in the simple white shroud of the Tachrichim. A coffin of willow twigs as commanded by the great sage, Rabban Gamliel, is even now being prepared for him. See? I tear my clothes for him.” The rabbi ripped the front of his already somewhat ragged tunic in the gesture of ritual mourning.

She should have known. “Thank you, Rabbi, thank you.” However, there was one more thing. “But he should not be left alone.”

“He is not alone. Old Benjamin acts as shomer and keeps vigil over him and is reciting the appropriate psalms.” Rabbi Gotsce looked around. The prior and the tax collector were deep in discussion. He lowered his voice. “As to the burial. We are a flexible people, we have had to be, and the Lord recognizes what is impossible for us. He is not unkind if we adapt a little.” His voice lowered almost to a whisper. “We have always found that Christian laws, too, are flexible, especially when it comes to money. We are collecting what little cash we have between us to buy a plot in the earth of this castle where our friend may be laid with reverence.”

Adelia smiled for the first time that day. “I have money, and plenty.”

Rabbi Gotsce stood back. “Then what need to worry?” He took her hand to pronounce the blessing prescribed for those that mourned, “Blessed is the Eternal our God, Ruler of the universe, the true judge.”

For a moment, Adelia felt a grateful peace; perhaps it was the blessing, perhaps it was being in the presence of well-intentioned men, perhaps it was the advent of Dina’s baby.

Yet, she thought, however they bury him, Simon is dead; something of great value has been withdrawn from the world. And you, Adelia, are called upon to establish whether it was taken accidentally or through murder-no one else can.

She still felt a reluctance to examine Simon’s body, which, she realized, was partly a fear of what it might tell her. If the beast at large had killed him, it had made a mortal thrust not only at Simon but at her resolve to continue their mission. Without Simon, the responsibility was hers only, and without Simon she was a lonely, broken, and very frightened reed.

But the rabbi, to whom Sir Rowley had been speaking very fast, wasn’t intending to let her near the body of Simon of Naples. “No,” he was saying, “not at all, and certainly not a woman.”

“Dux femina facti,” interjected Prior Geoffrey helpfully.

“Sir, the prior is right,” Rowley pleaded. “In this matter, the leader of our enterprise is a woman. The dead speak to her. They tell her the cause of the death, from which we may deduce who caused it. We owe it to the dead man, to justice, to see if the children’s killer was also his. Lord’s sake, man, he was acting for your people. If he was murdered, don’t you want him avenged?”

“Exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor.” The prior was still being helpful. “Rise up from my dead bones, avenger.”

The rabbi bowed. “Justice is good, my lord,” he said, “but we have found that it is only in the next world that it can be achieved. You ask that this be done for the Lord’s sake, yet how can we please the Lord by breaking His laws?”

“Stubborn beggar, that one,” Gyltha said to Adelia, shaking her head.

“It’s what makes him a Jew.”

Sometimes Adelia wondered how both the race and the religion had survived at all in the face of an almost universal and, to her, inexplicable hostility. Homelessness, persecution, degradation, attempted genocide, all these things had been visited on the Jewish people-who clung even more tenaciously to their Jewishness. During the First Crusade, Christian armies, filled with religious zeal and liquor, seeing it as their evangelic duty to convert such Jews they came across, had presented them with the alternative of baptism or death. The answer had been thousands of dead Jews.

A reasonable man, Rabbi Gotsce, but he would die on the steps of this tower before a tenet of his faith was broken and a woman was allowed to touch the corpse of a man, however gainful that touch might prove.

Which only showed, Adelia thought, that the three great religions were at least united when it came to the inferiority of her sex. Indeed, a devout Jew at his prayers thanked God every day that he had not been born a woman.

While her mind was occupied, there had been energetic talk in progress in which Sir Rowley’s voice was uppermost. He came over to her now. “I’ve gained this much,” he said. “The prior and I are to be allowed to look at the body. You may stay outside and tell us what to look for.”

Ludicrous, but it seemed to suit everybody, including herself…

With considerable labor, the Jews had carried the corpse to the room at the top of the tower, the only one unoccupied, in which she and Simon and Mansur had first encountered Old Benjamin and Yehuda.

As if afraid that she might invade it in an excess of zeal, the rabbi made Adelia wait on the landing of the staircase below, the Safeguard with her. She heard the door of the room open. A quick burst of Old Benjamin’s voice chanting the Tehillim came down the stairwell to her before the door closed again.

Picot is right, she thought. Simon should not be put into the ground unheard. The spirit of the man himself would see it as greater desecration that nobody should listen to what his body had to say.

She sat down on a stone stair and composed herself, directing her mind to the mechanism of death by drowning.

It was difficult. Without being able to cut a section of lung to see if it had ballooned and contained silt or weed, the diagnosis would largely depend on excluding other causes of death. In fact, she thought, there was unlikely to be any sign at all to tell them if it were murder. She could probably establish that it was drowning, whether or not Simon was alive when he went into the water, but that would still beg the question: Had he fallen or been pushed?

Old Benjamin’s voice, “Lord, thou has been our dwelling place in all generations…” And the thud of the tax collector’s boots coming heavily down the stairs to her.

“He looks peaceful. What do we do?”

She said, “Is there froth coming from the mouth and nostrils?”

“No. They’ve washed him.”

“Press on the chest. If there is froth, wipe it away and press again.”

“I don’t know if the rabbi will let me. Gentile hands.”

Adelia stood up. “Don’t ask him, just do it.” She had become doctor to the dead again.

Rowley hurried back upstairs.

“…Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night, nor for the arrow that flieth by day…”

She leaned on the triangle of the arrow slit beside her, absentmindedly stroking Safeguard’s head and looking out at the view she had seen before, of the river and the trees and hills beyond it, a Virgilian pastoral.

But I am afraid of the terror by night, she thought.

Sir Rowley was beside her again. “Froth,” he said, shortly, “both times. Pinkish.”

Alive in the water, then. Indicative but not proof; he could have suffered a disruption of the heart and toppled into the river because of it. “Is there bruising?” she asked.

“I can’t see any. There are cuts between his fingers. Old Benjamin said they found plant stalks in them. Does that mean something?”

Again, it meant that Simon was alive when he went into the river; in the terrible minute or so that it took for him to die, he’d torn at reeds and weed that had been retained as his hands closed in the fatal spasm.

“Look for bruising on his back,” she said, “but don’t lay him on his face; it’s against the law.”

This time she could hear him arguing with the rabbi, Rowley’s voice and Rabbi Gotsce’s both sharp. Old Benjamin ignoring them both. “He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; he leadeth me beside the still waters.”

Sir Rowley won. He came back to her. “There’s a spread of bruising here and here,” he said, putting his hand over one shoulder and then the other to indicate a line across his upper back. “Was he beaten?”

“No. It happens sometimes. The struggle to get back to the surface ruptures muscles around the shoulders and neck. He drowned, Picot. That is all I can tell you, Simon drowned.”

Rowley said, “There’s one very distinct bruise. Here.” This time he crooked his arm around his back, waggling his fingers and turning round so that she could see them. It was a spot between the lower shoulder blades. “What caused that?”

Seeing her frown, he spat on the stair at his feet and knelt down to stir a small wet circle on the stone. “Like this. Round. Distinct, as I say. What is it?”

“I don’t know.” Exasperation overtook her. With their petty laws, with their fear of women’s incipient impurity, with their nonsense, they were erecting a barrier between doctor and patient. Simon was calling out to her, and they wouldn’t let her hear him. “Excuse me,” she said.

She went up the stairs and marched into the room. The body lay on its side. It took less than a moment before she marched out again.

“He was murdered,” she told Rowley.

“A barge pole?” he asked.

“Probably.”

“They held him down with it?”

“Yes,” she said.