Mistress of the Art of Death

rest to our brother Simon under the wings of Your sheltering presence among the lofty, holy, and pure, radiant as the shining firmament, and to the souls of all those of all Your peoples who have been killed in and around the lands where Abraham our Forebear walked…”

Words, thought Adelia. An innocent bird can repeat the words of a killer. Words can be said over the man he killed and pour balm on the soul.

She heard the hit, hit, hit of earth being thrown onto the coffin. Now the procession was filing up through the garden to go out of its gate and, although she was not a Jew and a mere woman at that, each man gave her a blessing as he passed the foot of the steps on which she stood. “Hamakom y’nachem etchem b’toch sh’ar availai tziyon ee yerushalayim. May God comfort you among all the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem.”

The rabbi paused and bowed to the sheriff. “We are grateful for your beneficence, my lord, and may you be spared trouble because of it.” Then they were gone.

”Well,” Sheriff Baldwin said, brushing his gown, “we must get back to work, Sir Rowley. If the devil does indeed find work for idle hands, he will discover none here tonight.”

Adelia expressed her gratitude. “And may I visit the grave tomorrow?”

“I suppose so, I suppose so. You might bring Senor Doctor here with you. All this worry has produced a fistula that makes my sitting uncomfortable.”

He looked toward the gate. “What is that turmoil, Rowley?”

It was ten or so men armed with a variety of domestic weapons, garden forks, eel glaives, led by Roger of Acton, and all of them feverish with a rage that had been pent up too long, all rushing into the garden screaming in so many different curses that it took a moment to distinguish the theme of “child-killer” and “Jew.”

Acton was coming to the steps, waving a flambeau in one hand and a garden fork in the other. He was shouting. “The Jew shall be sunk in the pit he hath made, for the Lord has redeemed us from his filth. We have come to cast him out from our inheritance. O fear the name of the Lord, thou traitors.” His mouth sprayed spit. Behind him, a big man was brandishing a wicked-looking kitchen cleaver.

The other men were scattering in a search and he turned to them. “Find the grave, my brothers, so we may execute our fury upon his carcass. For ye have been promised that he who chastiseth the heathen shall not be corrected.”

“No,” Adelia said. They had come to dig him up. They had come to dig Simon up. “No.”

“Trollop.” Acton was ascending the steps, the fork pointing at her. “Thou hast gone a-whoring after the child-killers, but we shall not bear thy shame anymore.”

One of the men was standing by the cherry tree, shouting and gesticulating at the others. “Here, it’s here.”

Adelia dodged Acton as she went down the steps and began running toward the grave. What she would do when she got there was not in her mind-she could think only of stopping this terrible thing.

Sir Rowley Picot went after her, Mansur just behind him, Roger of Acton on his heels, the other intruders running to intercept. Everybody met in a crashing, howling, punching, beating, stabbing, trampling confluence. Adelia went down under it.

Such violence was unknown to her; it wasn’t the pain but the whacking shock of men’s sudden, furious strength. A boot broke her nose; she covered her head while above her the world fractured into jagged pieces.

Somewhere a voice dominated all, steady and commanding-the prior’s.

Bit by bit, the shards fell away. There was nothing. Then there was something and she was able to stagger to her feet and see figures retreating from the place were Rowley Picot lay with a cleaver end down in his groin, blood overflowing from around the buried part of its blade.

Twelve

Am I dead?” asked Sir Rowley of nobody in particular.

“No,” Adelia told him.

A weak, pale hand searched beneath the bedclothes. There was a cry of raw agony. “Oh, Jesus God, where’s my prick?”

“If you mean your penis, it is still there. Under the pads.”

“Oh.” The sunken eyes opened again. “Will it work?”

“I am sure,” Adelia said clearly, “that it will function satisfactorily in every respect.”

“Oh.”

He’d gone again, comforted by the brief exchange while unaware that it had taken place.

Adelia leaned over and pulled the blanket straight. “But it was a damned near thing,” she told him softly. Not just the loss of his membrum virilis but his life. The cleaver had struck the artery, and she’d had to keep her fist in the wound while he was carried indoors to stop him bleeding to death before she could use Lady Baldwin’s needle and embroidery thread-and even then to be so hampered by pumping blood that she knew, if none of those gathered anxiously about her did, it was a matter of blind luck whether or not the sutures were in the right place.

That had been only half the battle. She’d managed to extract the pieces of tunic that the cleaver had pushed into the wound, but how much detritus remained from the blade itself had been anyone’s throw of the dice. Foreign matter could, and usually did, lead to poisoning, which led to death. She’d recalled dismembering resultant gangrenous corpses-recalled, too, the remote curiosity with which she’d looked for the site that had spread its fatality.

This time she had not been remote. When Rowley’s wound inflamed and he went into delirium from fever she had never prayed so hard in her life as she bathed him in cold water and dripped cooling draughts between lips that were flaccid and ghastly as a dead man’s.

And to what had she prayed? Something, anything. Pleading, begging, demanding that it should help her pull him back to life.

Damn it. What had she vowed to all the gods she’d called on? Belief? Then she was now a follower of Jehovah, Allah, and the Trinity, with Hippocrates thrown in, and had wept with gratitude to all of them as the sweat broke out on the patient’s face and his breathing returned from stertor to a soft and natural snore.

The next time he woke up, she watched his hand make its instinctive exploration. Such primitive beings, men.

“Still there.” The eyes closed with relief.

“Yes,” she said. Even facing death’s portals, they retained consciousness of their sexuality. Prick, indeed-such an aggressive euphemism.

The eyes opened. “You still here?”

“Yes.”

“How long?”

“Five nights and…” She looked toward the window, where the afternoon sun was sending stripes of light through its mullions onto the floorboards. “Approximately seven hours.”

“So long? Blind me.” He tried lifting his head. “Where is this?”

“The top of the tower.” Shortly after the operation, which had been performed on the sheriff’s kitchen table, Mansur had carried the patient to the Jews’ upper room-an amazing feat of strength- so that doctor and patient should have privacy and quiet while she engaged in the battle for his life.

The room had no garderobe; on the other hand, Adelia had been blessed with people willing-nay, eager-to go up and down the stair carrying chamber pots, most of them Jewish women grateful to Sir Rowley for his defense of a Jewish grave. Indeed, saving Sir Rowley had been a cooperative effort, and if Adelia had refused most of the help on offer, it was in order not to offend Mansur and Gyltha, who made the cause their own.

A breeze came through the room’s unglazed windows, free of the bad airs circulating at the lower level of the castle and its open cesspits, sullied only by a whiff of Safeguard that entered through the gap under the door to the stairs, to which he had been banished. Even after a bath, the dog’s pelt almost immediately acquired a stink that attacked the nose. It was the only thing about him that did attack; he had been notably absent from the melee in the sheriff’s garden, in which, by rights, he should have involved himself on his mistress’s behalf.

The voice from the bed asked now, “Did I kill the bastard?”

“Roger of Acton? No, he is well, though incarcerated in the donjon. You managed to lame Quincy the butcher and hack Colin of Saint Giles in the neck, and there’s a blacksmith whose prospects of fatherhood are not as sanguine as your own, but Master Acton escaped unharmed.”

“Merde.”

Even this much conversation had tired him; he drifted off.

Copulation as the first priority, she thought. Battle as the second. And although you are now considerably thinner, gluttony has been in evidence, so has arrogance. That represents most of the cardinal sins. So why, out of all humanity, are you the one for me?

Gyltha had guessed. At the height of Rowley’s fever, when Adelia had refused to let the housekeeper replace her at the bedside, Gyltha had said, “Love un you may, woman, but that’ll not help un iffen you drop.”

“Love him?” It was a screech. “I am caring for a patient; he’s not…oh, Gyltha, what am I to do? He’s not my sort of man.”

“What sort’s got bugger-all to do with it,” Gyltha had said, sighing.

And, indeed, Adelia was compelled to confess that it hadn’t.

True, there was much to be said for him. As he had demonstrated for the Jews, he was an incipient defender of the defenseless. He was funny, he made her laugh. And in his fever, he had visited again and again the dune where a child’s torn body lay-to suffer once more the same guilt and grief. His mind had pursued the killer through a delirium as hot and terrible as desert sands until Adelia had fed him an opiate for fear that it would wear out the weakened body.

But there was as much to be said against him. In the same fever he had babbled with carnal appreciation of the women he had known, often confusing their attributes with food he’d also enjoyed in the East. Small, slender Sagheerah, tender as an asparagus spear; Samina, sufficiently fleshed for a full-course meal; Abda, black and beautiful as caviar. It had been not so much a list as a menu. As for Zabidah…Adelia’s narrow knowledge of what men and women got up to in bed had been stretched to shocked amazement by the antics of that acrobatic and communally minded female.

More chilling was the revelation of a driving ambition. At first Adelia, listening to the fantastical conversations he was holding with an unseen person, had mistaken his frequent use of “my lord” as being directed at his heavenly king-until it turned out he was referring to Henry II. The compelling need to find and punish Rakshasa had allied itself to serving the King of England at the same time. If he should rid Henry of a nuisance that was depriving the Exchequer of its income from Cambridge ’s Jews, Rowley expected royal gratitude and advancement.

Very considerable advancement, too. “Baron or bishop?” he would ask in his dementia, clutching at Adelia’s hand as it tried to soothe him, as if it were her decision. “Bishopric or barony?”

The golden prospect of either would add to his agitation-“It won’t move, I can’t move it”-as if the wagon he had attached to the royal star was proving too heavy to stir.

Such, then, was the man. Undoubtedly brave and compassionate but a gourmandizing, womanizing, cunning, and greedy seeker after status. Imperfect, licentious. Not a man Adelia had expected, or wanted, to love.

But did.

When that suffering head had turned on the pillow, exposing the line of the throat, and he had pleaded for her-“Doctor, are you there? Adelia?”-his sins, like her heart, had melted away.

As Gyltha said, the sort of man he was had bugger-all to do with it.