The Safeguard loped dolefully along the bank, having rolled in something that made his presence in the punt untenable, while Mansur and Ulf took turns poling, competing with each other in a skill seeming so easy that Adelia asked if she might try, eventually clinging to the pole like a monkey as the punt proceeded without her and having to be rescued by Mansur because Ulf was laughing too hard to move.
Shacks, huts, fowlers’ hides aplenty lined the river-each one likely to be deserted by night and each desolate enough for any scream issuing from it to be heard only by the wildlife-so many that it would have taken a month to investigate them all and a year to follow the little beaten paths and bridges through the reeds that led to others.
Tributaries flowed into the Cam, some of them mere streams, some of considerable size and navigable. These great flatlands, Adelia realized, were veined with waterways; causeways, bridges, roads were ill-kept and often impassable, but anybody could go anywhere with a boat.
While Safeguard chased birds, the other three explorers ate some of the bread and cheese and drank half the cider that Gyltha had provided, sitting on a bank by the boathouse at Grantchester where Sir Joscelin stored his punts.
Water sent quiet, wobbling reflections onto walls that held oars, poles, and fishing tackle; nothing spoke of death. In any case, a look toward the great house in the distance showed that, like all manors, Sir Joscelin’s was too occupied for horror to take place unnoticed. Unless dairymaids, cowherds, stablers, fieldhands, and the house servants were all complicit in the children’s abduction, the crusader was not a murderer in his own home.
Going back down the river toward town, Ulf spat into the water. “Waste of bloody time that was.”
“Not entirely,” Adelia told him. The excursion had brought home something she should have recognized before. Whether they went willingly with their abductor or not, the children would have been seen. Every boat on these stretches below the Great Bridge had a shallow draft and low gunwales, making it impossible to conceal the presence of anyone bigger than a baby-unless he or she were lying flat under the thwarts. Therefore, either the children had hidden themselves or they had been rendered unconscious and a coat, a piece of sacking, something, had been thrown over them for the journey that had taken them to the place of their death.
She pointed this out in Arabic and English.
“He does not use a boat, then,” Mansur said. “The devil throws them across his saddle. Takes a route across country unseen.”
It was possible; most habitation in this part of Cambridgeshire was on a waterway, its interior virtually deserted apart from grazing cloven-hoofed beasts, but Adelia didn’t think so; the predominance of the river in each child’s disappearance argued against it.
“Then it is the thebaicum,” Mansur suggested.
“Opium?” That was more likely. Adelia had been gratified by how extensively the Eastern poppy was grown in this unlikely area of England and by the availability of its properties, but also alarmed. The apothecary, he who visited his mistress by night, distilled it in alcohol, calling it Saint Gregory’s Cordial, and sold it to anybody, though keeping it below his counter out of sight from clerics who condemned the mixture as godless for its ability to relieve pain, an attribute that should be left exclusively to the Lord.
“That’s it,” Ulf said. “He gives ’em a drop of the Gregory’s.” He crinkled up his eyes and exposed his teeth.
It was a caricature of wheedling malevolence that chilled the warmth of spring.
ADELIA WAS CHILLED AGAIN when, next morning, she sat in the sanctum of a leaded-windowed countinghouse on Castle Hill. The room was stacked with documents and chests bound by chains with locks, a hard-cornered, masculine room built to intimidate would-be borrowers and to accommodate women not at all. Master De Barque, of De Barque Brothers, received her into it with reluctance and met her request with a negative.
“But the letter of credit was in the name both Simon of Naples and myself,” Adelia protested and heard her voice being absorbed into the walls.
De Barque extended a finger and pushed a roll of vellum with a seal on it across the table to her. “Read it for yourself, mistress, if you are capable of understanding Latin.”
She read it. Among the “heretofores” and “wherebys” and “compliance therewith” the Luccan bankers in Salerno, the issuers, promised to pay on behalf of the applicant, the King of Sicily, to the Brothers De Barque of Cambridge such sums as Simon of Naples, the beneficiary, should require. No other name was mentioned.
She looked up into the fat, impatient, disinterested face. How vulnerable to insult you were if you lacked money. “But it was understood,” she said. “I was Master Simon’s equal in the enterprise. I was chosen for it.”
“I am sure you were, mistress,” Master De Barque said.
He thinks I came along as Simon’s strumpet. Adelia sat up, squaring her shoulders. “An application to the Salerno bank or to King William in Sicily will verify me.”
“Then make it, mistress. In the meantime…” Master De Barque picked up a bell on the table and rang it to summon his clerk. He was a busy man.
Adelia sat where she was. “It will take months.” She didn’t have enough money to pay even what it would cost to send the letter. There had been only a few clipped pennies in Simon’s room when she’d gone to look; either he had been preparing to apply to these bankers for more or he had kept what he had in the wallet his killer had taken. “May I borrow until-”
“We do not lend to women.”
She resisted the clerk taking her by the arm to lead her out. “Then what am I to do?” There was the apothecary’s bill to pay, Simon’s headstone to be inscribed by a stonemason, Mansur needed new boots,
“Mistress, we are a Christian organization. I suggest you apply to the Jews. They are the king’s chosen usurers, and I understand you are close to them.”
There it was, in his eye. She was a woman and a Jew lover.
“You know the Jews’ situation,” she said desperately. “At present they have no access to their money.”
For a moment the flesh on Master De Barque’s face creased into warmth. “Have they not?” he said.
AS THEY WENT UP THE HILL, Adelia and Safeguard were passed by a prison cart containing beggars; the castle beadle was rounding them up ready for sentence at the coming assize. A woman was shaking its bars with skeletal hands.
Adelia stared after her. How powerless we are when we’re destitute.
Never in her life had she been without money.
What to do? She was a Ruth amid alien corn. Ruth had solved her situation by marrying, which was not an option in this case.
Could she even exist? Patients had been redirected to the castle while she’d been there, and, in between looking after Rowley, she and Mansur had attended to them. But nearly all were too poor to pay cash.
Her anxiety was not placated when, on entering the castle’s tower room with Safeguard, she found Sir Rowley up and dressed, sitting on the bed, and chatting with Sir Joscelin of Grantchester and Sir Gervase of Coton. As she bustled toward him, she said irritably to Gyltha, who stood sentinel-like in a corner, “He’s supposed to be resting.” She ignored the two knights who had risen at her entrance-Gervase reluctantly and only at a signal from his companion. She took the patient’s pulse. It was steadier than her own.
“Don’t be angry with us, mistress,” Sir Joscelin said. “We came to sympathize with Sir Rowley. It was God’s mercy you and the doctor were by. The wretch Acton…we can only hope the assize will not allow him to escape the rope. We are all agreed hanging’s too good for him.”
“Are you, indeed?” she snapped.
“The lady Adelia does not countenance hanging; she has crueler methods,” Rowley said. “She’d treat all criminals with a hearty dose of hyssop.”
Sir Joscelin smiled. “Now that
“And your methods are effective, are they?” Adelia asked. “Blinding and hanging and cutting off hands makes us all safer in our beds, does it? Kill Roger of Acton and there will be no more crime?”
“And the killer of the children, mistress,” Sir Joscelin asked gently. “What would you have done to him?”
Adelia was slow to answer.
“She hesitates,” Sir Gervase said with disgust. “What sort of woman is she?”
She was a woman who regarded legislated death as an effrontery by those imposing it-so easily and sometimes for so little cause-because life, to her, who wished to save it, was the only true miracle. She was a woman who never sat with the judge or stood with the executioner but always clung to the bar with the accused.
For her, the law should be the point at which savagery ended because civilization stood in its path. We do not kill because we stand for betterment. She supposed the killer had to die and most certainly would, the putting down of a rabid animal, but the doctor in her would always wonder why it had turned rabid and grieve for not knowing.
She turned away from them to go to the medicine table and noticed for the first time how rigidly Gyltha was standing. “What’s the matter?”
The housekeeper looked worn, suddenly aged. Her hands were flat and supporting a small reed casket in much the same manner as the faithful received consecrated bread from the priest before putting it into the mouth.
Rowley called from his bed, “Sir Joscelin has brought me some sweetmeats, Adelia, but Gyltha won’t let me have them.”
“Not I,” Joscelin said. “I am merely their porter. Lady Baldwin asked me to carry them up the stairs.”
Gyltha’s eyes held Adelia’s, then looked down at the casket. Letting it rest on one hand, she raised its lid slightly with the other.
Inside, lying on pretty leaves, like eggs in a nest, was an assortment of colored, scented, lozenge-shaped jujubes.
The two women stared at each other. Adelia felt ill. With her back to the men, she silently shaped the word:
Gyltha shrugged.
Adelia said slowly, “The doctor has forbidden Sir Rowley confits.”
“Hand them round to our visitors, then,” Rowley called from his bed.
She nodded her head toward the door and turned to the men, while behind her, Gyltha left the room, carrying the casket with her.
Is
Behind her, the conversation had turned to horses as it always did among knights.
She was aware of Gervase lolling in his chair because she felt