Mistress of the Art of Death

glanced at him, his look turned to a deliberate sneer.

Killer or not, she thought, you’re a brute and your presence is an insult. She marched to the door and held it open. “The patient is tired, gentlemen.”

Sir Joscelin rose. “We are sorry not to have seen Dr. Mansur, aren’t we, Gervase? Pass on our compliments to him, if you would.”

“Where is he?” Sir Gervase demanded.

“Improving Rabbi Gotsce’s Arabic,” Rowley told him.

As he passed her on his way out, Gervase muttered, as if to his companion, “That’s rich, a Jew and a Saracen in a royal castle. Why to hell did we go on crusade?”

Adelia slammed the door behind him.

Rowley said crossly, “Damn it, woman, I was edging the talk round to Outremer to find out who was where and when; one might let something slip about the other.”

“Did they?” she demanded.

“You ushered them out too fast, damn it.” Adelia recognized the irritability of recuperation. “Oddly enough, though, Brother Gilbert admitted to being in Cyprus at about the right time.”

“Brother Gilbert was here?”

And Prior Geoffrey and Sheriff Baldwin and the apothecary-with a concoction he’d sworn would heal a wound within minutes- and Rabbi Gotsce. “I’m a popular man. What’s the matter?” For Adelia had slammed a box of powdered burdock so hard on the table that its lid came off, emitting a cloud of green dust.

“You are not popular,” she said, teeth gritted. “You are a corpse. Rakshasa would poison you.”

She went back to the door, calling for Gyltha, but the housekeeper was already coming up the stairs, still holding the casket. Adelia snatched it from her, opened it, and shoved it under Rowley’s nose. “What are those?”

“Dear Christ,” he said. “Jujubes.”

“I been asking round,” Gyltha said. “Little girl handed ’em to one of the sentries, saying as they was from her mistress for the poorly gentleman in the tower. Lady Baldwin was going to carry ’em up, but Sir Joscelin said he’d save her legs. Always the polite gentleman, he is, not like t’other.”

Gyltha didn’t hold with Sir Gervase.

“And the little girl?”

“Sentry’s one of them sent from London by the king to help guard the Jews. Barney, his name is. Didn’t know her, he says.”

Mansur and Ulf were summoned so that the matter could be gone over in conference.

“They could be merely jujubes, as they seem,” said Rowley.

“Suck one an’ see,” Ulf told him sharply. “What you think, missus?”

Adelia had picked one up in her tweezers and was smelling it. “I can’t tell.”

“Let’s test them,” Rowley said. “Let’s send them down to the cells for Roger of Acton, with our compliments.”

It was tempting, but instead Mansur took them down to the courtyard to throw the casket on the smithy fire.

“There will be no more visitors to this room,” Adelia instructed. “And none of you, especially Ulf, is to leave the castle or wander in it alone.”

“Goddammit, woman, we’ll never find him like that.”

Rowley, it appeared, had been carrying on his own investigation from his bed, using his role as tax inspector to question his visitors.

From the Jews he had learned that Chaim, according to his code, had never talked about his clients nor mentioned the size of their debts. His only records were those that had burned or been stolen from Simon’s body.

“Unless the Exchequer in Winchester has a list of tallies, which it may well do-I’ve sent my squire there to find out-the king will not be best pleased; the Jews provide a large part of this nation’s income. And when Henry isn’t pleased…”

Brother Gilbert had announced that he would rather burn than approach Jews for money. The crusading apothecary as well as Sir Joscelin and Sir Gervase had said the same, though less forcefully. “They’re not likely to tell me if they did, of course, but all three seem finely set up from their own efforts.”

Gyltha nodded. “They done well out of the Holy Land. John was able to start his ’pothecary shop when he got back. Gervase, nasty little turd he was as a boy and he ain’t any pleasanter now, but he’s getting hisself more land. And young Joscelin as didn’t have a rag to his arse thanks to his pa, he’s made a palace out of Grantchester. Brother Gilbert? He’s allus Brother Gilbert.”

They heard labored breathing on the stairs and Lady Baldwin came in, holding her side with one hand and a letter in the other. “Sickness. At the convent. Lord help us. If it be the plague…”

Matilda W. followed her in.

The letter was for Adelia and had been delivered first to Old Benjamin’s house whence Matilda W. had brought it. It was a scrap of parchment torn from some manuscript, showing its terrible urgency, but the writing on it was strong and clear.

“Prioress Joan presents her compliments to Mistress Adelia, assistant to Dr. Mansur, of whom she has heard good reports. Pestilence has broken out amongst us and I ask in the name of Jesus and his dear Mother for said Mistress Adelia to visit this convent of the blessed Saint Radegund that she may then report to the good doctor and solicit his advice on what may alleviate the sisters’ suffering, it being very severe and some near to death.”

A postscript read: “To be no haggling over fees. All this to be done with discretion so as to avoid the spread of alarm.”

A groom and horse were awaiting Adelia in the courtyard below.

“I shall send you with some of my beef tea,” Lady Baldwin told Adelia. “Joan is not usually alarmed. It must be dire.”

It must be, Adelia thought, for a Christian prioress to beg the aid of a Saracen doctor.

“The infirmaress have gone down with it,” Matilda W. said-she’d heard the groom’s report. “Spewing and shitting fit to bust, the lot of ’em. God help us if it be the plague. Ain’t this town suffered enough? What’s Little Saint Peter at that the holy sisters ain’t spared?”

“You will not go, Adelia,” Rowley said.

“I must.”

“I fear she should,” said Lady Baldwin. “The prioress does not allow a man in the nuns’ inner sanctum, despite those wicked rumors, except a priest to hear their confession, of course. With the infirmaress hors de combat, Mistress Adelia is the next best thing, an excellent thing. If she keeps a clove of garlic up each nostril, she cannot succumb.” She hurried away to prepare her beef tea.

Adelia was giving explanations and instruction to Mansur. “O friend of the ages, look after this man and this woman and this boy while I am absent. Let them go nowhere alone. The devil is abroad. Guard over them in the name of Allah.”

“And who shall guard over you, little one? The holy women will not object to the presence of a eunuch.”

Adelia smiled. “It is not a harem, the women safeguard their temple from all men. I shall be safe enough.”

Ulf was tugging at her arm. “I can come. I ain’t growed yet, they know me at Saint Raggy’s. And I don’t never catch nothing.”

“You’re not going to catch this, either,” she said.

“You will not go,” Rowley said. Wincing, he dragged Adelia to the window away from the others. “It’s a bloody plot to get you unprotected. Rakshasa’s in it somewhere.”

Back on his feet, Adelia was reminded of how big he was and what it was for a powerful man to be kept powerless. Nor had she realized that, for him, Simon’s murder had seemed a preliminary to her own. Just as she was frightened for him, so was he for her. She was touched, gratified, but there were things to attend to-Gyltha must be told to change the medicines on the table; she had to collect others from Old Benjamin’s…she didn’t have time for him now.

“You’re the one who’s been asking questions,” she said gently. “I beg you to take care of yourself and my people. You merely need nursing at this stage, not a doctor. Gyltha will look after you.” She tried to disengage herself from him. “You must see that I have to go to them.”

“For God’s sake,” he shouted. “You can stop playing the doctor for once, can’t you?”

Playing the doctor. Playing the doctor?

Though his hand was still on her, it was as if the ground had fallen between them, and looking up into his eyes, she saw herself across the chasm-a pleasant little creature enough but a deluded one, merely busying itself, a spinster filling in time until she should be claimed by what was basic for a woman.

But if so, what was the line of suffering that waited for her every day? What was Gil the thatcher who was able to climb up ladders?

And what are you, she thought, amazed, looking into his eyes, who should have bled to death and didn’t?

She knew in absolute certainty now that she should never marry him. She was Vesuvia Adelia Rachel Ortese Aguilar, who would be very, very lonely but always a doctor.

She shook herself free. “The patient can resume solid food, Gyltha, but change all those medicaments for fresh,” she said and went out.

Anyway, she thought, I need that fee the prioress promised.

SAINT RADEGUND’S CHURCH and its outhouses near the river were deceptive, having been built after the Danes stopped invading and before the foundation ran out of money. The main body of the convent, its chapel and residences, was larger and lonelier and had known the reign of Edward the Confessor.

It stood away from the river hidden among trees so that Viking longboats snaking through the shallow waters of the Cam tributaries might not find it. When the monks, who’d inhabited it originally, died out, the place had been granted to religious women.

All this Adelia learned over the shoulder of Edric as, with Safeguard following, his horse carried them both into the convent estate via a side gate in its wall, the main gates having been barred against visitors.

Like Matilda W., the groom was aggrieved by Little Saint Peter’s failure to do his job. “It do look bad shutting up, with the pilgrim season just starting proper,” he said. “Mother Joan’s right put out.”

He set Adelia down by a stable block and kennels, the only well-kept convent buildings she had seen so far, and pointed to a path skirting a paddock. “God go with you, missis.” Obviously, he would not.

Adelia, however, was not prepared to be cut off from the outside world. She ordered the man to go to the castle each morning, taking any message she might need to send and asking how her people did, and to bring back the answer.

She set off with Safeguard. The clatter of the town across the river faded. Larks rose around her, their song like bursting bubbles. Behind her the prioress’s hounds sent up a belling and a roe deer barked somewhere in the forest ahead.

The same forest, she remembered, that contained the manor of Sir Gervase, and into which Little Saint Peter had disappeared.

“CAN THIS BE MANAGED?” Prioress Joan demanded. She was more haggard than when Adelia had last seen her.