Mistress of the Art of Death

felt in private, Lady Baldwin had acceded with grace.

Better still, the principle that giving imposes obligation on the giver as well as the recipient had come into play, and Lady Baldwin was showing concern for the welfare of the strange community in her castle. The newest little Baldwin ’s baby clouts had been passed on to Dina and the suggestion made that the community should have a share in the castle’s great bread oven instead of baking for themselves.

“They’re really human beings just like us, you know,” Lady Baldwin had lectured Adelia when visiting the sickroom bearing calf’s-foot jelly for the patient. “And their rabbi is quite knowledgeable on the subject of herbs, really quite knowledgeable. Apparently they eat a lot of them at Easter, though they seem to choose the bitter ones, horseradish and such. Why not a little angelica, I asked him. To sweeten it up?”

Smiling, Adelia had said, “I think they’re supposed to be bitter.”

“Yes, so he told me.”

Now, asked if she knew of a wet nurse for Baby Simon, Lady Baldwin promised to supply one. “And not one of the castle trollops, either,” she said. “That baby needs respectable Christian milk.”

The only one who had failed Simon, Adelia thought as she placed her posy, was herself. His name on the simple board should shriek of murder instead of portraying a supposed victim of his own negligence.

“Help me, Rabbi,” she said. “I must write to Simon’s family and tell his wife and children he is dead.”

“So write,” Rabbi Gotsce said. “We shall see to sending the letter; we have people in London who correspond with Naples.”

“Thank you, I would be grateful. It’s not that, it’s…what shall I write? That he was murdered but his death has been recorded as an accident?”

The rabbi grunted. “If you were his wife, what would you want to know?”

She said immediately, “The truth.” Then she considered. “Oh, I don’t know.” Better for Simon’s Rebecca to grieve over a drowning accident than to envisage again and again Simon’s last minutes as she did, to have her mourning polluted by horror, as was Adelia’s, to desire justice on his killer so much that she could not take ease in anything else.

“I suppose I shall not tell them,” she said, defeated. “Not while he is unavenged. When the killer is found and punished, perhaps then we can give them the truth.”

“The truth, Adelia? So simple?”

“Isn’t it?”

Rabbi Gotsce sighed. “To you, maybe. But as the Talmud tells us, the name of Mount Sinai comes from our Hebrew word for hatred, sinah, because truth produces hate for those who speak it. Now, Jeremiah…”

Oh, dear, she thought. Jeremiah, the weeping prophet. None of the slow, worldly-wise, clever Jewish voices lecturing in the sunlit atrium of her foster parents’ villa had ever mentioned Jeremiah without prophesying evil. And it was such a nice day, and there was beautiful detail in the flowers of the cherry blossom.

“…we should remember the old Jewish proverb that truth is the safest lie.”

“I’ve never understood it,” she said, coming to.

“No more have I,” the rabbi said. “But by extension it tells us that the rest of the world never wholly believes a Jewish truth. Adelia, do you think that sooner or later the real killer will be revealed and condemned?”

“Sooner or later,” she said. “God send it be sooner.”

“Amen to that. And on that happy day, the good people of Cambridge will line up outside this castle, weeping and sorry, so sorry, for killing two Jews and keeping the rest imprisoned? That also you believe? The news will speed through Christendom that Jews do not crucify children for their pleasure? You believe that, too?”

“Why not? It is the truth.”

Rabbi Gotsce shrugged. “It’s your truth, it’s mine, it was truth for the man who lies here. Maybe even the townsfolk of Cambridge will believe it. But truth travels slowly and gets weaker as it goes. Suitable lies are strong and run faster. And this was a suitable lie; Jews put the Lamb of God to the cross, therefore they crucify children-it fits. A nice, agreeable lie like that, it scampers through all Christendom. Will the villages in Spain believe the truth if it limps so far? Will the peasants of France? Russia?”

“Don’t, Rabbi. Oh, don’t.” It was as if this man had lived a thousand years; perhaps he had.

He bent to remove a piece of blossom from the grave and stood up again, taking her arm and walking her to the gate. “Find the killer, Adelia. Deliver us from this English Egypt. But in the end, it will still be the Jews who crucified that child.”

Find the killer, she thought as she went down the hill. Find the killer, Adelia. No matter that Simon of Naples is dead and Rowley Picot is out of action, leaving only me and Mansur. Mansur doesn’t speak the language and I am a doctor, not a bloodhound. And that’s on top of the fact that we’re the only people who think there is a killer yet to be found.

The ease with which Roger of Acton had enlisted recruits for his attack on the castle garden showed that Cambridge still believed the Jews to be responsible for ritual murder, despite the fact that they were incarcerated when three of the killings had been committed. Logic played no part in it; the Jews were feared because they were different and, for the townspeople, that fear and difference endowed supernatural ability. The Jews had killed Little Saint Peter, ergo they had killed the others.

Despite this, despite the rabbi and Jeremiah, despite grief for Simon, her decision to renounce carnal love and pursue science in chastity, the day persisted in presenting itself as beautiful to her.

What is this? I am extended, stretched thin, vulnerable to death and other people’s pain but also to life in its infinite width.

The town and its people swam in pale gold effervescence like the wine from Champagne. A bunch of students touched their caps to her. She was forgiven the toll for the bridge when, fumbling in her pocket for a halfpenny, it was found that she didn’t have one. “Oh, get on, then, and good day to you,” the tollman said. On the bridge itself, carters raised their whips in salute to her, pedestrians smiled.

Taking the longer way along the riverbank to Old Benjamin’s house, willow fronds brushed her in good fellowship and fish came to the surface of the river in bubbles that responded to those in her veins.

There was a man on Old Benjamin’s roof. He waved at her. Adelia waved back.

“Who is that?”

“Gil the thatcher,” Matilda B. told her. “Reckons his foot’s better and reckons there’s a tile or two on that roof as needs fixing.”

“He’s doing it for nothing?”

“A’course for nothing,” Matilda said, winking. “Doctor mended his foot for un, didn’t he?’

Adelia had put down as bad manners the lack of gratitude shown by Cambridge patients who rarely, if ever, said they were obliged for the treatment they received from Dr. Mansur and his assistant. Usually, they left the room looking as surly as when they’d arrived, in sharp contrast to Salernitan patients who would spend five minutes in her praise.

But as well as the mending of the tiles, there was to be duck for dinner, provided by the woman, whose growing blindness was at least made less miserable by eyes that no longer suppurated. A pot of honey, a clutch of eggs, a pat of butter, and a crock of a repellent-looking something that turned out to be samphire, all left wordlessly at the kitchen door, suggested that Cambridge folk had more concrete ways of saying thank you.

Something important was lacking. “Where’s Ulf?”

Matilda B. pointed toward the river where, under an alder, the top of a dirty brown cap was just apparent above the reeds. “Catching trout for supper, but tell Gyltha as we’re keeping an eye on un. We told un he’s not to shift from that spot. Not for jujubes, not for nobody.”

Matilda W. said, “He’s missed you.”

“I missed him.” And it was true; even in the fury to save Rowley Picot, she had regretted her absence from the boy and sent him messages. She had almost wept over the bunch of primroses tied with a bit of string that he had sent her via Gyltha, “to say he was sorry for your loss.” This new love she felt radiated outward in its incandescence; with the death of Simon, its glow fell on those whom, she realized now, had become necessary to her well-being, not least the small boy sitting and scowling on an upturned bucket among the reeds of the Cam with a homemade fishing line in his grubby hands.

“Move over,” she told him. “Let a lady sit down.”

Grudgingly, he shifted and she took his place. To judge from the number of trout thrashing in the creel, Ulf had picked the spot well; not actually on the Cam proper, he was fishing a stream that welled in the reeds and cut through the silt, forming a decent-sized channel before reaching the river.

Compared with the King’s Ditch on the other side of town, a stinking and mostly stagnant dike that had once served to repel invading Danes, the Cam itself was clean, but the fastidious Adelia, though perforce she ate them on Fridays, entertained a suspicion of fish from a river that received effluent from humans and cattle as it meandered through the county’s southern villages.

She appreciated Ulf’s choice of springwater into which to make his casts. She sat in silence for a while, watching the fish move, sliding through the water, as clear as if they swam in air. Dragonflies flashed, gemlike, among the reeds.

“How’s Rowley-Powley?” It was a sneer.

“Better, and don’t be rude.”

He grunted and got on with his fishing.

“What worms are you using?” she asked politely. “They work well.”

“These?” He spat. “Wait til the hangings when the ’sizes start, then you’ll see proper worms, take any fish they will.”

Unwisely, she asked, “What have hangings to do with it?”

“Best worms is them under a gallows with a rotting corpse on it. I thought ev’body knew that. Take any fish, gallows’ worms will. Di’n’t you know that?”

She hadn’t and wished she didn’t. He was punishing her.

“You’re going to have to talk to me,” she said. “Master Simon is dead, Sir Rowley’s laid up. I need someone who thinks to help me find the killer-and you’re a thinker, Ulf, you know you are.”

“Yes, I bloody am.”

“And don’t swear.”

More silence.

He was using a float, a curious contraption of his own invention that ran his line through a large bird’s quill so that the bait and tiny iron hooks were kept to the surface of the water.

“I missed you,” she said.

“Huh.” If she thought that was going to placate him…but after a while he said, “Do we reckon as he drowned Master Simon?”

“Yes. I know he did.”

Another trout rose to a worm, was unhooked, and thrown into the creel. “It’s the river,” he said.

“What do you mean?” Adelia sat up.

For the first time, he looked at her. The small face was screwed up in concentration. “It’s the river. That’s what takes ’em. I been asking about…”

“No.” She almost screamed it. “Ulf, whatever…you mustn’t, you must not. Simon was asking questions. Promise me, promise me.”