Mistress of the Art of Death

Brother Swithin was not generous with his candles, and they went out, leaving the room in semidarkness from the rain still lashing against the shutters. She lay crooked in her lover’s arm, breathing in the wonderful smell of soap and sweat.

“I love you so much,” she said.

“Are you crying?” He sat up.

“No.”

“Yes, you are. Coitus does that to some women.”

“You’d know, of course.” Wiping her eyes with the back of her hand.

“Sweetheart, this is completion. He’s gone, she will be…well, we’ll see. I shall be rewarded as I deserve, and you, too-not that you deserve anything. Henry will give me a nice barony that we can both get fat on and rear dozens of nice, fat little barons.”

He got out of bed and reached for his clothes.

His cloak is missing, she thought. It is somewhere outside this room with Rak shasa’s head in it. Everything terrible is beyond that door; the only completion you and I shall ever have is with us now.

“Don’t go,” she said.

“I’ll be back.” His mind had already moved away from her. “I can’t stay here all day, forced to swive insatiable women against my will. There’s things to do. Go to sleep.”

And he’d gone.

Still watching the door, she thought, I could have him for always. I could have him and our little barons. What is playing the doctor compared to happiness like that? Nothing. Who are the dead to rob me of life?

With that settled, she lay back and closed her eyes, yawning, replete. But as she drifted into sleep, her last coherent thought was of the clitoris. What an organ of surprise and wonder it is. I must pay it more attention the next time I dissect a female.

Always and ever the doctor.

SHE CAME TO, protesting at someone’s repetition of her name, determined to stay asleep. She sniffed in the pungency of clothes kept in pennyroyal against the moth.

“Gyltha? What time is it?”

“Night. And time you was up, girl. I brought you fresh clothes.”

“No.” She was stiff and her bruises were aching; she was staying in bed. She made a concession by squinting out of one eye. “How’s Ulf?”

“Sleepin’ the sleep of the just.” Gyltha’s rough hand cupped Adelia’s cheek for a moment. “But you both got to get up. There’s some high-and-mighties gatherin’ over the way as want answers to their questions.”

“I suppose so,” she said wearily. They were quick with their trial. Her evidence and Ulf’s would be essential, but there were things better left unremembered.

Gyltha went for food, collops of bacon swimming in a beany, delicious broth, and Adelia was so hungry that she hoisted herself into a sitting position. “I can feed myself.”

“No, you bloody can’t.” Since words failed her, Gyltha’s gratitude for the safe return of her grandson could best be expressed by stuffing huge spoonfuls into Adelia’s mouth as into a baby bird’s.

There was one question that had to be asked through the bacon. “Where have they put…?” She couldn’t bring herself to name the madwoman. And I suppose, Adelia thought with even greater weariness, because she is a madwoman, I must see to it that they do not torture her.

“Next door. Being waited on like Lady Muck-a-muck.” Gyltha’s lips shriveled as if touched by acid. “They don’t believe it.”

“Don’t believe what? Who don’t?”

“As her did them…things, along of him.” Neither could Gyltha bring herself to use the names of the killers.

“Ulf can tell them. So can I. Gyltha, she threw me down the shaft.”

“See her do it, did you? And what’s Ulf’s word worth? A ignorant little slip as sells eels along of his ignorant old gran?”

“It was her.” Adelia spat out food because panic was rising in her throat. It was one thing for the nun to be spared torture, quite another that she be set free; the woman was insane; she could do it again. “Peter, Mary, Harold, Ulric…of course they went with her; they trusted her. A holy sister? Offering jujubes a crusader taught her how to make? Then the laudanum over their noses-believe me, there’s a plentiful supply at the convent.” Afresh, Adelia saw delicate hands upraised in prayer turn downward into clawed iron bands. “Almighty God…” She rubbed her forehead.

Gyltha shrugged. “Saint Raddy’s nuns don’t do that, seemingly.”

“But it was the river. I knew, that’s why I got into her boat. She had the freedom of the river, up and down-to Grantchester, to him. She was familiar; people waved at her or didn’t notice her at all. A saintly nun taking supplies to anchorites? Nobody to check her movements, certainly not Prioress Joan. And Walburga, if she was with her, Walburga always went off to her aunt’s. What do they think she was doing when she stayed out all night?”

“I know this, Ulf do knows it. But see…” Gyltha was a dogged devil’s advocate. “She’s near as hurt as you are. They brought in one of the sisters to bathe her on account of I wouldn’t touch the hag, but I took a look. Bruises all over, bites, eye closed like yourn. The nun as was a-washing her wept for how the poor thing suffered, and all for coming to help you.”

“She…liked it. She enjoyed him hurting her. It’s true.” For Gyltha had drawn back, frowning with incomprehension. How to explain to her, to anybody, that the nun’s screams of terror during the beast’s attack had mingled with shrieks of insane, exquisite joy?

She can’t understand such perversity, Adelia thought in despair, and I can’t either. Dully, she said, “She procured those children for him. And she killed Simon.”

The bowl slipped out of Gyltha’s hand and rolled across the room, spilling broth over the wide, elm floorboards. “Master Simon?”

Adelia was back in Grantchester on the night of the feast, watching Simon of Naples talk excitedly to the tax collector at the end of the high table, the tallies in his wallet, only a few places from the chair in which sat the giver of the feast, whom they incriminated, only a few more from the woman who had procured the murderer’s victims for him.

“I saw him tell her to kill Simon.” And she saw them again now, dancing together, the crusader and the nun, the one instructing the other.

Dear Lord, she should have realized then. Irascible, woman-hating Brother Gilbert had as good as told her without knowing the import: “They stay out all night. They comport themselves in licentiousness and lust. In a decent house, they’d be whipped until their arses bled, but where’s their prioress? Out hunting.”

Simon leaving early, to examine the tallies he’d gained and find out who it was who had a financial reason for implicating Jews in the murders. His host coming back from the garden after a short absence, having seen his creature on her way.

“She left the feast early, Grantchester. I think I saw the other nuns later on, but not her. Did I? Yes, I’m sure I did. And the prioress stayed even later.”

And then what? The gentlest and most angelic of the sisters…? “So far to walk on this dark night, Master Simon, may I not punt you home? Yes, yes, there is room. I am alone, glad of your company.”

Adelia thought of the Cam’s willow-dark stretches and a slim figure with wrists strong as steel stabbing a pole into the water, pressing it down on a man as on a speared fish while he floundered and drowned.

“He told her to kill Simon and steal his wallet,” Adelia said. “She did what he told her; she was enslaved to him. In the pit I had to take Ulf from her. I think she was going to kill him so that he couldn’t give her away.”

“Don’t I know?” Gyltha asked, even as her hands made pushing notions against the knowledge. “Ain’t Ulf told me what she did? And me knowing what both would have done to the boy if the good Lord hadn’t sent you to stop ’em. What they did to the others…” Her eyes went into slits and she stood up. “Let’s you and me go next door and stick a pillow on her face.”

“No. Everyone must know what she did, what he did.”

Rakshasa had escaped justice. His terrible end…Adelia shut her mind to avoid the vision against the sunrise…had not been justice. Eliminating that creature from the earth it sullied had not weighted its side of the scales against the pile of little bodies it had left in its passage from the Holy Land.

Even if they had captured it, dragged it to the assize, put it on trial, and executed it, the scales would have remained unbalanced for those whose children had been torn from them, but at least people would have known what it had done and seen it pay. The Jews would have been publicly exonerated. Most important, the law that brought order from chaos, that separated civilized humanity from the animals, would have been upheld.

While Gyltha helped her to dress, Adelia examined her conscience to see whether her objection against capital punishment had been abandoned. No, it had not; it was a principle. The mad must be restrained, certainly, yet not judicially killed. Rakshasa had escaped legal exposure: His collaborator must not. Her actions had to be recounted in full common view so that some equilibrium was brought into the world.

“She has to stand trial,” Adelia said.

“You think she’s a-going to?”

A knock on the door was Prior Geoffrey’s. “My dear girl, my poor, dear girl. I thank the Lord for your courage and deliverance.”

She brushed his prayers aside. “Prior, the nun…She was his accomplice in everything. As much a killer as he was, she murdered Simon of Naples without a thought. You do believe that?”

“I fear I must. I have listened to Ulf’s account, which, though confused by whatever soporific she gave him, leaves no doubt that she abducted him to that place where he was put in danger of his life. I have also heard what Sir Rowley and the hunter had to tell. This very evening I visited that hole with them…”

“You’ve been to Wandlebury?”

“I have,” the prior said wearily. “And never was I so close to hell. Oh, dear, the equipment we found there. One can only rejoice that Sir Joscelin’s soul will burn for eternity. Joscelin…” The emphasis was to help him believe it. “A local boy. I had marked him as a future sheriff of the county.” A spark of indignation enlivened the prior’s tired eyes. “I even accepted a donation toward our new chapel from those heinous hands.”

“Jews’ money,” Adelia said. “He owed it to the Jews.”

He sighed. “I suppose it was. Well, at least our friends in the tower have been absolved.”

“And is the town to be made aware that they are absolved?” Adelia jerked an inelegant thumb toward the room in which the nun was housed. “She will be put on trial?” She was getting restive; there was a reservation, a fogginess, in some of the prior’s answers.

He went to the window and opened the shutter a crack. “They said it would rain. The dawn was a true shepherd’s warning, apparently. Well, the gardens need it after a dry spring.” He closed the shutter. “Yes, an announcement declaring the Jews’ innocence shall be trumpeted in full assize-thank heaven it is still in progress. But as for the…female…I have asked for a convocation of all those concerned to get to the truth of the matter. They are gathering now.”

“A convocation? Why not a trial?” And why at nighttime?

As if she hadn’t spoken, he said, “I expected it to meet at the castle, but the clerk of the assize deemed that an inquiry be better held here so that the legal processes should not be confused. And