Mistress of the Art of Death

“Reckon as you had enough on your shoulders. Told the watch, though. Shit lot of good they were. Didn’t see nobody nor nothin’, not surprising, the rumpus they made marching over the bridge to get there. Peeping Tom, they reckoned it was.”

Matilda B. went to the middle of the room to replace the poker. For a second, it vibrated against the bars of the fire grate as if the hand that held it was shaking too much to release it. “Ain’t a Peeping Tom, though, is it?”

“No.”

The next day, Adelia moved Ulf into the castle tower to stay with Gyltha and Mansur.

Thirteen

You will not go without me,” Sir Rowley said, struggling out of bed and falling. “Ow, ow, God rot Roger of Acton. Give me a cleaver and I’ll chop his privates for him, I’ll use them for fish bait, I’ll…”

Trying not to laugh, Adelia and Mansur raised her patient from the floor and put him back to bed. Ulf retrieved his nightcap and replaced it on his head.

“It will be safe enough with Mansur and Ulf-and we are going in daylight,” she said. “You, on the other hand, will indulge in light exercise. A gentle walk round the room to strengthen the muscles, that is all you are capable of at the moment, as you see.”

The tax collector let out a snarl of frustration and hammered his bedclothes, an action that caused another moan, this time of pain.

“Stop that nonsense,” Adelia told him. “Anyway, it wasn’t Acton who wielded the cleaver. I’m not sure who it was, there was such a confusion.”

“I don’t care. I want him hanged before the assize judges look at his bloody tonsure and let him go.”

“He should be punished,” she said. Acton was certainly responsible for whipping into a frenzy the group that had forced their way in to desecrate Simon’s grave. “But I hope he is not hanged.”

“He attacked a royal castle, woman, he damn near neutered me, he needs basting over a slow fire with a spit up his arse.” Sir Rowley shifted his position and looked at her sideways. “Have you at all dwelt on the fact that you and I were the only ones to receive injury in the melee? Apart from the likely lads I put out of action, I mean.”

She had not. “In my case, a broken nose hardly merits the title of injury.”

“It could have been a great deal worse.”

It could, but it had been accidental; in a sense, her own fault for running into battle.

“Moreover,” Rowley said, still cunning, “the rabbi remained unhurt.”

She was becoming confused. “Are you implicating the Jews?”

“Of course not. I am merely pointing out that the good rabbi was not set upon. What I’m saying is that only two people remain inquiring into the death of the children now that Simon is dead. You and I. And we were hurt.”

“And Mansur,” she said absently. “He wasn’t hurt.”

“They didn’t see Mansur until he came into the fight. Besides, he hasn’t been asking questions, his English isn’t good enough.”

Adelia pondered it. “I don’t follow your argument,” she said. “Are you saying that Roger of Acton is the children’s killer? Acton ?”

“I’m saying, damn it”-physical weakness was making Rowley testy-“I’m saying that he was put up to it. The suggestion was made to him or to one of his gang that you and I were Jew lovers better off dead.”

“All Jew lovers are better off dead in his view.”

“Somebody,” the tax collector said between gritted teeth, “somebody is after us. Us, you and me.”

You, oh, dear God, she thought. Not us; you. You’ve been asking questions, Simon and you. At the feast, Simon was addressing you: “We have him, Sir Rowley.”

She groped for the edge of the bed and sat down on it.

“Ah ha,” Rowley said, “Now it’s dawning. Adelia, I want you away from Old Benjamin’s. You can move in here with the Jews for a while.”

Adelia thought of last night’s figure among the trees. She had not told Rowley what she and Matilda B. had seen; he could do nothing about it, and there was no point in adding to his frustration because he could not.

It was Ulf the thing had menaced; it was after another child, had specified this particular one for itself. She’d known it then and she knew it now; it was why the boy must spend his nights in the castle and his days always with Mansur nearby.

But, dear God, if the creature considered Rowley a threat to itself-it was so clever; it had resources-two people she loved were in danger.

Then she thought: Damn it, Rakshasa is achieving what he likes at our expense and locking us all in this damned castle. We shall never find him like this. I, at least, must have the freedom to move.

She said, “Ulf, tell Sir Rowley your theory about the river.”

“No. He’ll say that’s squit.”

Adelia sighed at the incipient jealousy between these two males in her life. “Tell him.”

The boy did so sullenly and without conviction.

Rowley pooh-poohed it. “Everybody’s near the river in this town.” He was equally dismissive of Brother Gilbert as an object of suspicion. “You think he’s Rakshasa? A weedy monk like him couldn’t cross Cambridge Heath, let alone the desert.”

The argument swayed back and forth. Gyltha entered carrying Rowley’s breakfast tray and joined in.

While it lasted, though they spoke of horror and suspicion, some of the sting was drawn for Adelia. They were dear to her, these people. To banter with them, even about life and death, was so pleasurable to her who had never bantered that for this moment she knew a piercing happiness. Hic habitat felicitas.

As for the big, flawed, magical man in the bed, cramming ham into his mouth, he had been hers, his life hers, gained not only by her expertise but by the strength that had flowed out of her into him, a grace sought and granted.

Though marvelous to her, it was a sadly one-sided love affair, and she would have to live on it for the rest of her life. Every moment spent in his company confirmed that to show her vulnerability to him would be ruinous; he would use it either to reject or, even worse, to manipulate. His and her intents were mutually destructive.

Already, it was ending. With the wound scabbing nicely, he refused to let her dress it, depending instead on the ministrations of Gyltha or Lady Baldwin. “It’s indecent for a maiden female to be finicking about in that man’s part,” he’d said crossly.

She had forborne asking him where he would be if she hadn’t finicked in the first place; she was no longer his necessity; she must withdraw.

“At any rate,” she said now, “we must explore the river.”

“In the name of God, don’t be so bloody stupid,” Rowley said.

Adelia got up; she was prepared to die for the swine but not to be insulted. As she tucked the bedclothes more firmly around him, he was enveloped in the smell of her, a mixture of the bogbean tincture that she administered to him three times a day and the chamomile in which she washed her hair-a scent quickly obliterated by the stink of the dog as it passed the bed to follow her out of the room.

Rowley looked around in the silence she left. “Am I not right?” he said in Arabic to Mansur, and then fractiously, because he was exhausted, “I won’t have her exploring that scum-sucking river.”

“Where would you have her, effendi?”

“Flat on her back where she belongs.” If he hadn’t been weak and pettish, he wouldn’t have said it-at least, not out loud. He looked nervously at the Arab, who was advancing; he was in no state to fight the bastard. “I didn’t mean it,” he said hastily.

“That is as well, effendi,” Mansur said, “or I should be forced to reopen your wound and extend it.”

Now Rowley was enveloped in a smell that took him back to the souqs, a mixture of sweat, burnt frankincense, and sandalwood.

The Arab bent over him and placed the tips of his left fingers and thumb together in front of Rowley’s face, then touched them with his right forefinger, a delicate movement that nevertheless cast doubt on Sir Rowley’s parentage by indicating that he had five fathers.

Then he stood back, bowed, and left the room, followed by the dwarfish child whose own gesture was simpler, cruder, but just as explicit.

Gyltha gathered up the tray and its wreckage before going after them. “Don’t know what you said, bor, but there’s better ways of putting it.”

Oh, Lord, he thought, sinking back, I am become childish. Lord, deliver me, though, it is true. That’s where I want her, in bed, under me.

And he wanted her so much that he’d had to stop her dressing his wound with that green muck-What was it? Comfrey?-because his adjacent part had gotten its strength back and tended to rise every time she touched him.

He berated his god and himself for putting him in such a fix; she was not at all his type of woman. Remarkable? Never a woman more so; he owed her his life. On top of that, he could talk to her as he could to no other, male or female. He had revealed more of himself while telling her about his hunt for Rakshasa than he had when he’d related it to the king-and, he was afraid, had revealed a damn sight more in his delirium. He could swear in her company-though not at her, as her departure from the room had just proved-making her an easy as well as desirable companion.

Could she be seduced? Quite probably; she might be conversant with all the functions of the body, but she was undoubtedly naive about what made its heart beat faster-and Rowley had learned to have faith in his considerable, though little understood, attraction for women.

Seduce her, however, and at one stroke you removed not only her clothing but her honor and, of course, her remarkableness, thus rendering her just another woman in another bed.

And he wanted her as she was; her hmms as she concentrated, her appalling dress sense-though she had looked very nice indeed at the Grantchester feast-the importance she ascribed to all humanity, even its dregs, especially its dregs, the gravity which could dissolve into an astonishing laugh, the way she squared her shoulders when she felt daunted, the way she mixed his dreadful medicines and the kindness of her hands as she held the cup to his mouth, the way she walked, the way she did everything. She had a quality he had never known; she was quality.

“Oh to hell,” said Sir Rowley to the empty room. “I’ll have to marry the woman.”

THE VENTURE UPRIVER, while beautiful, proved fruitless. Considering its purpose, Adelia was ashamed of enjoying so much a day spent in drifting through tunnels formed by overbranching trees from which they emerged into sunlight where women momentarily ceased laundering to wave and call, where an otter swam craftily by the side of the punt while men and hounds on the far side hunted for it, where fowlers spread their nets, where children tickled for trout, where mile-long stretches of bank were empty except for warblers balancing perilously on the reeds as they sang.