Mistress of the Art of Death

the same age, had inquired for her.

Perhaps the girl’s beauty and youth were resented, as was the fact that she was the prioress’s obvious favorite.

Favorite, indeed, Adelia thought. There had been agony in Joan’s face that spoke of great love when she looked on Veronica’s suffering. Being sensitive to the existence of love in all its forms now, Adelia found herself sincerely pitying the woman and wondered if the energy she put into her hunting was a way of redirecting a passion for which, as a nun, and especially one in authority, she must be clawed by guilt.

Had Sister Veronica been aware of being an object of desire? Probably not. As Prior Geoffrey said, there was an otherworldliness to the girl that spoke of a spiritual life the rest of the convent lacked.

The other nuns must know of it, though. The young nun didn’t complain, but the bruises on her skin suggested she’d been physically bullied.

When he’d finished in the upper cells, Adelia made the prior wash his hands in the brandy. The procedure bemused him. “Usually, I take it internally. However, I no longer question anything you would have me do.”

She lit him to the gate, where a groom waited for him with their two horses. “A heathenish place, this,” he said, lingering. “Perhaps it is the architecture or the barbarous monks who built it, but I am always more conscious of the Horned One than of sanctity when I am in it, and for once I am not referring to Prioress Joan. The arrangement of those cells alone…” He grimaced. “I am reluctant to leave you here-and with so little help.”

“I have Gyltha and the Matildas,” Adelia told him, “and the Safeguard, of course.”

“Gyltha is with you? Why did I not see her? Then there’s no need for worry; that woman can dispel the forces of darkness single handed.”

He gave her his blessing. The groom took the chrismatory box from him, put it in a saddlebag, heaved him up on his horse, and they were gone.

It had stopped raining, but the moon, which should have been full, was heavily clouded. Adelia stood for a minute or two after they had disappeared, listening to the sound of hooves diminishing into the blackness.

She hadn’t told the prior that Gyltha did not stay at night and that it was at night when she became afraid.

“Heathenish,” she said out loud. “Even the prior feels it.” She went back into the cloister but left the gates open; it was nothing outside the convent that frightened her, it was the convent itself; there was no air to it, nothing of God’s light, no windows even in the chapel, just arrow slits set into walls of heavy, unadorned stone that reflected the savagery they had been built to withstand.

But it has gotten in, Adelia thought. The hideously ancient, hogback tomb in the chapel was carved with wolves and dragons biting each other. Scrollwork on the altar circled a figure with arms upheld, Lazarus perhaps, though candlelight gave it a demonic quality. The foliage surrounding the arches of the cells imitated the encroaching forest that tangled buttresses in ivy and creepers.

At night, sitting by a nun’s cot, she, who did not credit the devil, found herself listening for him and being answered by the shriek of an owl. For Adelia, as for Prior Geoffrey, the twenty gaping holes, ten below, ten above, in which the nuns were stacked, reinforced the barbarity. Called to another cell, she had to urge herself to brave the wicked, black steps and narrow ledge that led to it.

By day, when Gyltha and the Matildas returned, bringing with them noise and common sense, she allowed herself an hour or two’s rest in the prioress’s quarters, but even then the two rows of cells infiltrated her exhausted dozes with reproach, as if they were graves of troglodyte dead.

Tonight, when she walked the length of the cloister to look in on Sister Veronica, the light of her lantern flickered the ugly heads of the pillars’ capitals into life. They grimaced at her. She was glad of the dog by her side.

Veronica lay tossing in her cot, apologizing to God for not dying. “Forgive me, Lord, that I am not with you. Suspend Thy wrath at my transgressions, Dear Master, for I would come to You if I could…”

“Nonsense,” Adelia told her. “God is perfectly happy with you and wants you to live. Open your mouth and have some nice calf’s-foot jelly.”

But Veronica, like Odilia, would not eat. Eventually, Adelia gave her half an opium pill and sat with her until it took effect. It was the barest cell of the twenty, its only ornament a cross that, like all the nuns’ wall crucifixes, was woven from withies.

Somewhere out in the marsh, a bittern boomed. Water dripped on the stones outside with a regularity that made Adelia’s nerves twitch. She heard retching from Sister Agatha’s cell farther along the cloister, and went to her.

Emptying the chamber pot meant leaving the cloister. A shift of cloud allowed some moonlight on her return, and Adelia saw the figure of a man by one of the walk’s pillars.

She closed her eyes against it, then opened them and went forward.

It was a trick of shadow and the glistening of rain. There was nobody there. She put her hand on the pillar to lean against it for a moment, breathing hard; the figure had been wearing horns. Safeguard appeared to have noticed nothing, but then he rarely did.

I am very tired, she thought.

Prioress Joan cried out sharply from Odilia’s cell…

WHEN THEY’D SAID THE PRAYERS, Adelia and the prioress wrapped the infirmaress’s body in a sheet and carried it between them to the chapel. They laid it on a makeshift catafalque of two tables covered by a cloth and lit candles to stand at the head and the foot.

The prioress stayed to chant a requiem. Adelia went back to the cells to sit with Agatha. All the nuns were asleep, for which she was thankful; they need not know of the death until the morning, when they would be stronger.

That is, if morning ever comes to this awful place, she thought. “Heathenish,” the prior had said. At this distance, the strong, single contralto echoing from the chapel sounded not so much a Christian requiem as a lament for a fallen warrior. Had it been Odilia’s death or some element in the very stones that conjured the horned figure in the cloister?

Fatigue, Adelia told herself again. You are tired.

But the image persisted, and to rid herself of it, she used her imagination to transpose it with another figure, this one more rotund, more funny, infinitely beloved, until Rowley stood there in the horror’s stead. With that comforting presence on guard outside, she fell asleep.

Sister Agatha died the next night. “Her heart seems to have just stopped beating,” Adelia wrote in a message to Prior Geoffrey. “She was doing well. I did not expect it.” And had cried for it.

With rest and Gyltha’s good food, the remaining nuns recovered swiftly. Veronica and Walburga, being younger than the others, were up and about sooner than Adelia would have liked, though it was difficult to resist their high spirits. However, their insistence that they should go upriver to supply the neglected anchorites was not sensible, especially as, in order to take sufficient food and fuel, one nun would be poling one punt and her sister yet another.

Adelia went to Prioress Joan with an appeal that they be stopped from exhausting themselves.

Being worn out herself, she did so tactlessly: “They are still my patients. I cannot allow it.”

“They are still my nuns. And the anchorites my responsibility. From time to time, Sister Veronica, especially, needs the freedom and solitude to be found among them; she has sought it, and I have always granted it.”

“Prior Geoffrey promised to supply the anchorites.”

“I have no opinion of Prior Geoffrey’s promises.”

It was not the first time, nor the second, nor the third, that Joan and Adelia had locked horns. The prioress, conscious that her many absences had brought both convent and nuns to the brink of ruin, involuntarily tried to retain her authority by opposing Adelia’s.

They had argued over Safeguard, the prioress saying that he stank, which he did-but not more than the living conditions of the nuns. They had argued over the administration of opium, on which the prioress had decided to take the side of the Church. “Pain is God-sent, only God should take it away.”

“Who says so? Where in the Bible does it say that?” Adelia had demanded.

“I am told the plant is addictive. They will form a habit of taking it.”

“They won’t. They don’t know what they are taking. It is a temporary panacea, a soporific to relieve their suffering.”

Perhaps because she had won that argument, she lost this. The two nuns were given their superior’s permission to take supplies to the anchorites-and Adelia, knowing she could do no more for it, left the convent two days later.

Which was the same time the assize arrived in Cambridge.

THE NOISE WAS TREMENDOUS in any case, but for Adelia, whose ears had become accustomed to silence, it was like being battered. Weighted by her heavy medicine case, the walk from the convent house had been a hard one, and now, wanting only to get back to Old Benjamin’s and rest, she stood in a crowd on the wrong side of Bridge Street as the parade passed.

At first she didn’t realize this was the assize; the cavalcade of musicians in livery blowing trumpets and beating tabors took her back to Salerno, to the week before Ash Wednesday when the carnevale came to town despite all the Church could do to prevent it.

Here came more drums-and beadles, such ornate livery, with great gold maces over their shoulders. And heavens, mitered bishops and abbots on caparisoned horses, one or two actually waving. And a comic executioner with hood and ax…

Then she knew the executioner wasn’t comic; there would be no tumblers and dancing bears. The three Plantagenet leopards were blazoned everywhere, and the lovely palanquins now going by on the shoulders of tabarded men contained the judges of the king come to weigh Cambridge in their scales and, if Rowley was correct, find much of it wanting.

Yet the people around her cheered as if starved of entertainment, as if the trials and fines and death sentences to come would provide it.

Bewildered by hubbub, Adelia suddenly saw Gyltha pushing to the front of the crowd across the street, her mouth open as if she, too, were cheering. But she wasn’t cheering.

Dear God of All, don’t let her be saying it. It is unsayable, not to be borne. Don’t look like that.

Gyltha ran into the street so that a rider had to rein in, swearing, his horse jittering to one side to avoid trampling her. She was talking, looking, clutching. She was coming close, and Adelia stood back to avoid her, but the shriek penetrated everything. “Any of you seen my little boy?”

She might have been blind. She caught at Adelia’s sleeve without recognizing her. “You seen my little boy? Name’s Ulf. I can’t find un.”

Fourteen

She sat on the Cam ’s bank in the same spot, on the same upturned pail that Ulf had sat on to do his fishing.

She watched the river. Nothing else.

Behind the house at her back, the streets were full of noise and bustle, some of it to do with the assize, much of it caused by the search for Ulf. Gyltha herself, Mansur, the two Matildas, Adelia’s patients, Gyltha’s customers, friends, neighbors, parish reeve, and those merely concerned all were looking for the child-with increasing despair.

“The boy was restive in the castle and wished to go fishing,” Mansur had told Adelia, so stolid as to be almost rigid. “I came with him. Then the small, fat one”-he referred to Matilda B.-“called me