Mistress of the Art of Death

Eleven

The curtain wall was a rampart from which archers could repel-and during the war of Stephen and Matilda had repelled-an attack on the castle. Today it was quiet and empty except for a sentry doing his rounds of the allure and the cloaked woman with a dog standing by one of the crenels to whom he bade an unanswered good-day.

A fine afternoon. The westerly breeze had pushed the rain farther east and was scudding lambswool clouds across a laundered blue sky, making the pretty, busy scene Adelia looked down on prettier and busier by billowing the canvas roofs of the market stalls, fluttering the pennants of the boats moored by the bridge, swaying the willow branches farther down into a synchronized dance, and whisking the river into glistening irregular wavelets.

She didn’t see it.

How did you do it? she was asking Simon’s murderer. What did you say to tempt him into the position enabling you to push him into the water? It would not have taken much strength to hold him down by the pole jabbed into his back; you would have leaned your weight on it, making it impossible to dislodge.

A minute, two, while he scrabbled like a beetle, until that life of complexity and goodness was extinguished.

Oh, dear heaven, what had it been like for him? She saw flurries of silt cloud the encompassing, entrapping weed, watched the rising bubbles of the last remnants of breath. She began to gasp in vicarious panic…as if she were taking in water, not clean Cambridge air.

Stop it. This does not serve him.

What will?

Undoubtedly, to bring his killer, who was also the children’s, to the seat of justice, but how much more difficult that would be without him. “We may have to do that very thing before this business is finished, Doctor. Think as he thinks.”

And she had answered, “Then you do it. You’re the subtle one.”

Now she must try to enter a mind that saw death as an expedient: in the case of children, pleasurable.

But she could see only the diminution it had brought about. She had become smaller. She knew now that the anger she had felt at the children’s torture had been that of a deus ex machina called down to set matters right. She and Simon had been apart, above the action, its finale, not its continuance. For her, she supposed, it had been a form of superiority-it was not in the play that its gods become protagonists-which Simon’s murder had now removed, casting her among the Cambridge players, as ignorant and as helpless as any of those tiny, breeze-blown, fate-driven figures down there.

She was joined in a democracy of misery to Agnes, sitting outside her beehive hut below; to Hugh the huntsman, who had wept for his niece; to Gyltha and every other man and woman with some beloved soul to lose.

It wasn’t until she heard familiar footsteps approaching along the rampart that she knew she had been waiting for them. The only plank she had been given to hold on to in this maelstrom was the knowledge that the tax collector was as innocent of the murders as she herself. She would have been happy, very happy, to apologize humbly to him for her suspicion-except that he added to her confusion.

To all but her intimates, Adelia liked to appear imperturbable, putting on the kindly but detached manner of one called to profession by the god of medicine. It was a veneer that had helped deflect the impertinence and overfamiliarity and, occasionally, the downright physical presumption with which her fellow students and early patients had offered to treat her. Indeed, she actually thought of herself as withdrawn from humanity, a calm and hidden resort that it could call on in need, though one which did not involve itself in its vulnerability.

But to the owner of the coming footsteps, she had shown grief and panic, called for help, pleaded, had leaned on him, even in her misery had been grateful that he was with her.

Accordingly, the face Adelia turned up to Sir Rowley Picot was blank. “What was the verdict?”

She had not been called to give evidence to the jurors hastily assembled for the inquest on Simon’s body. Sir Rowley had felt that it would not be in her interest, nor that of the truth, if she were exposed as an expert on death. “You’re a woman, for one thing, and a foreigner, for another. Even if they believed you, you would achieve notoriety. I will show them the bruise on his back and explain that he was trying to investigate the finances of the children’s killer and therefore became the murderer’s victim, though I doubt whether coroner or jury-they’re all bumpkins-will have the wit to follow that tangled skein with any credence.”

Now, from his look, she saw that they had not. “Accidental death by drowning,” he told her. “They thought I was mad.”

He put his hands on the crenel and expelled an exasperated breath at the town below. “All I may have achieved is to sap their conviction by an inch or two that it was one of their own and not the Jews who murdered Little Saint Peter and the others.”

For a second, something reared in the turbulence of Adelia’s mind, showing hideous teeth, then sank again, to be hidden by grief, disappointment, and anxiety.

“And the burial?” she asked.

“Ah,” he said. “Come with me.”

Slavishly, the Safeguard was on its spindle legs in a minute and trotting after him. Adelia followed more slowly.

Building was in progress in the great courtyard. The chatter of gathered clerks was being drowned by an insistent, deafening banging of hammer on wood. A new scaffold was going up in one corner to hold the triple gallows for use in the assizes when the justices in eyre emptied the county’s gaols and tried the cases of those thus brought before them. Almost as high as the nooses would be, a long table and a bench reached by steps were being erected near the castle doors to place the judges above the multitude.

Some of the din faded as Sir Rowley led Adelia and her dog round a corner. Here, sixteen years of royal Plantagenet peace had allowed Cambridgeshire’s sheriffs to throw out an abutment, an attachment to their quarters from which steps led down to this sunken walled garden approached from outside by a gate in an arch.

Inside, going down the steps, it was quieter still, and Adelia could hear the first bees of spring blundering in and out of flowers.

A very English garden, planted for medicine and strewing rather than spectacle. At this time of year, color was lacking except for the cowslips between the stones of the paths and a mere impression of blue where a bank of violets crowded along the bottom of a wall. The scent was fresh and earthy.

“Will this do?” Sir Rowley asked casually.

Adelia stared at him, dumb.

He said with exaggerated patience, “This is the garden of the sheriff and his lady. They have agreed to let Simon be buried in it.” He took her arm and led her down a path to where a wild cherry tree drifted delicate white blossoms over untended grass sprinkled with daisies. “Here, we thought.”

Adelia shut her eyes and breathed in. After a while, she said, “I must pay them.”

“Certainly not.” The tax collector was offended. “When I say that this is the sheriff’s garden, I should more properly call it the king’s, the king being the ultimate owner of England ’s every acre, except those belonging to the Church. And since Henry Plantagenet is fond of his Jews and since I am Henry Plantagenet’s man, it was merely a matter of pointing out to Sheriff Baldwin that by accommodating the Jews, he would also be accommodating the king, which, in another sense, he will-and soon, since Henry is due to visit the castle shortly, another factor I pointed out to his lordship.”

He paused, frowning. “I shall have to press the king for Jewish cemeteries to be put in each town; the lack is a scandal. I cannot believe he’s aware of it.”

No money was involved, then. But Adelia knew whom she should pay. It was time to do it, and do it properly.

She bent her knee to Rowley Picot in a deep bow. “Sir, I am in your debt, not only for this kindness, but for ill suspicion that I have harbored against you. I am truly sorry for it.”

He looked down at her. “What suspicion?”

She grimaced with reluctance. “I believed you might be the killer.”

“Me?”

“You have been on crusade,” she pointed out, “as, I think, has he. You were in Cambridge on the pertinent dates. You were among those near Wandlebury Ring on the night the children’s bodies were moved…” God’s rib, the more she expounded the theory, the more reasonable it seemed; why should she apologize for it? “How else would I think?” she asked him.

He had become statuelike, his blue eyes staring at her, one finger pointing at her in disbelief and then at himself. “Me?”

She became impatient. “I see it was a base suspicion.”

“It damned well was,” he said with force, and startled a robin into flying away. “Madam, I would have you know I like children. I suspect I may have fathered quite a few, even if I can’t claim any. Goddammit, I’ve been hunting the bastard, I told you I was.”

“The killer could have said as much. You did not explain why.”

He thought for a moment. “I didn’t, did I? Strictly speaking, it is nobody’s business except mine and…though in the circumstances…” He stared down at her. “This will be a confidence, madam.”

“I shall keep it,” she said.

There was a turfed seat farther up the garden where young hop leaves formed a tapestry against the brick of the wall. He pointed her to it and then sat beside her, his linked hands cradling one of his knees.

He began with himself. “You should know that I am a fortunate man.” He had been fortunate in his father, who was saddler to the lord of Aston in Hertfordshire and had seen to it that he had schooling, fortunate in the size and strength that made people notice him, fortunate in possessing a keen brain. “You should also know that my mathematical prowess is remarkable, as is my grasp of languages…”

Not backward in coming forward, either, Adelia thought, amused. It was a phrase she’d picked up from Gyltha.

Young Rowley Picot’s abilities had early been recognized by his father’s lord, who had sent him to the School of Pythagoras here in Cambridge where he had studied Greek and Arab sciences and where, in turn, he’d been recommended by his tutors to Geoffrey De Luci, chancellor to Henry II, and taken into his employment.

“As a tax collector?” Adelia asked innocently.

“As a chancery clerk,” Sir Rowley said, “to begin with. Eventually, I came to the attention of the king himself, of course.”

“Of course.”

“Will I proceed with this narrative?” he wanted to know. “Or shall we discuss the weather?”

Chastened, she said, “I beg you to continue, my lord. Truly, I am interested.” Why am I teasing him, she wondered, on this day of all days? Because he makes it bearable for me with everything he does and says.

Oh, dear God, she thought with shock, I am attracted to him.

The realization came like an attack, as if it had been gathering itself in some cramped and secret place inside her and had grown suddenly too big to remain unnoticed any longer. Attracted? Her legs were weak with it, her mind registering intoxication as well as something like disbelief at the improbability and protest at the sheer inconvenience.

He is too light a man for me; not in weight certainly, but in gravitas. This is an infliction, a madness wreaked on me by a garden in springtime and his unsuspected kindness. Or because I am desolate just now. It will pass; it has to pass.

He was talking with animation about Henry II. “I am the king’s man in all things. Today his tax collector, tomorrow-whatever he wants me to be.” He turned to her. “Who was Simon of Naples? What did he do?”

“He was…” Adelia tried to gather her wits “Simon? Well…he worked secretly for the King of Sicily, among others.” She clenched her hands-he must not see that they trembled; he must not see