Mistress of the Art of Death

The king had employed the interim in chatting to Prioress Joan. “I hoped to go after boar tonight. Is it too late, do you think? Will they have returned to their lair?”

The prioress was bewildered but charmed. “Not yet, my lord. May I recommend you employ your hounds toward Babraham, where the woods…” Her voice trailed away as realization overtook her. “I repeat hearsay, my lord. I have little time for hunting.”

“Really, madam?” Henry appeared gently surprised. “I have heard you famed as a regular Diana.”

An ambush, Adelia thought. She realized she was watching an exercise that, whether it succeeded or not, raised cunning to the realm of art.

“So,” the king said, chewing, “thank you, Prior. So, I asked Aaron, ‘Where in hell can I find a master in the art of death?’ And he said, ‘Not in hell, my lord, in Salerno.’ He likes his little quips, does our Aaron. It seems the excellent medical school in Salerno produces men qualified in that recondite science. So, to cut a long story short, I wrote to the King of Sicily.” He beamed at the prioress. “He’s a friend, you know. I wrote begging the services of Simon of Naples and a death master.”

Having swallowed too quickly, the king began to cough and had to be slapped on the back by Hubert Walter.

“Thank you, Hubert.” He wiped his eyes. “Well, two things went awry. For one thing, I was out of England putting down the bloody Lusignans when Simon of Naples arrived in this country. For another, it appears that in Salerno they qualify women in medicine-can you believe it, my lords?-and some idiot who couldn’t tell Adam from Eve sent not a master in the art of death but a mistress. There she is.”

He looked at Adelia, though nobody else did; they watched the king, always the king. “So I’m afraid, my lords, we can’t hang her-much as we want to. She’s not our property, you see, she’s a subject of the King of Sicily, and friend William will want her returned to him in good condition.”

He was down from the table now, walking the floor and picking his teeth as if in deep reflection. “What do you say, my lords? Do you think, in view of the fact that this woman and a Jew, between them, seem to have saved further children from a nasty death at the hands of a gentleman whose head is even now pickling in the castle brine bucket…” He drew a puzzled breath, shaking his head. “Can we so much as scourge her?”

Nobody said anything; they weren’t meant to.

“In fact, my lords, King William will take it amiss if there is interference with Mistress Adelia, any attempt to charge her with witchcraft or malpractice.” The king’s voice had become a whip. “And so shall I.”

I am your servant all my days. Adelia was limp with gratitude and admiration. But can you, even you, great Plantagenet, bring the nun to open trial?

Rowley was in the room now, large, and bowing to the much shorter Henry, handing things to him. “I am sorry to have kept you waiting, my lord.” A look passed between them and Rowley nodded. They were in league, he and the king.

He walked up the refectory to stand beside Prior Geoffrey. His cloak was dark with rain and he smelled of fresh air; he was fresh air, and she was suddenly overjoyed that her bodice was low and her head bare, like a harlot. She could have stripped for him all over again. I am your harlot whenever you want, and proud of it.

He was saying something. The prior was giving instructions to Brother Gilbert, who left the room.

Henry had gone back to his place on the table. He was beckoning to the fattest of the three nuns in the center of the hall. “You, Sister. Yes, you. Come here.”

Prioress Joan watched with suspicion as Walburga advanced hesitantly toward the king. Veronica’s eyes remained downcast, her hands as still as they had been from the first.

More gently now, but with every word audible, the king said, “Tell me, Sister, what you do at the convent? Speak up. Nothing is going to happen to you, I promise.”

It came, breathy at first, but few could resist Henry when he was pleasant, and Walburga wasn’t one of them. “I contemplates the Holy Word, my lord, like the others, and say the prayers. And I pole supplies to the anchorites…” A note of doubt there.

It came to Adelia that Walburga, with her shaky Latin, was so bewildered by the proceedings that she had not attended to most of them.

“And we keep the hours, almost nearly always…”

“Do you eat well? Plenty of meat?”

“Oh, yes, my lord.” Walburga was on firm ground and gaining confidence. “Mother Joan do always brings back a buck or two from the hunt, and my auntie’s good with butter and cream. We eat main well.”

“What else do you do?”

“I polishes Little Saint Peter’s reliquary, and I weaves tokens for the pilgrims to buy, and I-”

“I’ll wager you’re the best weaver in the convent.” Very jovial.

“Well, I’m pretty with it, my lord, though I do say it as shouldn’t, but maybe Sister Veronica and poor Sister Agnes-as-was run me close.”

“I expect you have individual styles?” At Walburga’s blink, Henry rephrased it. “Say I wanted to buy a token from a pile of tokens. Could you tell me which one was yours and which one Agnes’s? Or Veronica’s?”

My God. Adelia’s skin was prickling. She tried to catch Rowley’s eye, but he would not look at her.

Walburga chuckled. “No need, my lord. I’ll do one for you for free.”

Henry smiled. “Tut, and I’ve just sent Sir Rowley to fetch some.” He held out one of the small objects, some figures, some mats that Rowley had given him. “Did you make this one?”

“Oh, no, that’s Sister Odilia’s afore she died.”

“And this one?”

“That’s Magdalene’s.”

“This?”

“Sister Veronica’s.”

“Prior.” It was a command.

Brother Gilbert was back. Prior Geoffrey was bringing another object for Walburga to look at. “And this, my child? Who made this one?” It lay on his outstretched palm, like a star made of rushes, beautifully and intricately woven into quincuncial shape.

Walburga was enjoying the game. “Why, that’s Sister Veronica’s, too.”

“Are you sure?”

“Sure as sure, my lord. It’s her fun. Poor Sister Agnes said as perhaps she shouldn’t, them looking heathenlike, but we didn’t see no harm.”

“No harm,” the king said, softly. “Prior?”

Prior Geoffrey faced the judges. “My lords, that is one of the tokens that were lying on the corpses of the Wandlebury children when we found them. This nun has just identified it as being made by the accused sister. Look.”

Instead, the judges looked at Sister Veronica.

Adelia held her breath. It’s not conclusive; she can make a hundred excuses. It’s clever, but it’s not proof.

It was proof for Prioress Joan; she was staring at her protegee in agony.

It was proof for Veronica. For a moment, she was still. Then she shrieked, raising her head and two shaking hands. “Protect me, my lords. You think he was eaten by dogs, but he’s up there. Up there.”

Every eye followed hers to the rafters where the gargoyles laughed back at them from the shadows, then down again to Veronica. She had fallen to the floor, squirming. “He’ll hurt you. He hurts me when I don’t obey him. He hurt when he entered me. He hurts. Oh, save me from the devil.”

Sixteen

The air in the room heated and became heavy. Men’s eyelids half closed, their mouths went slack and their bodies rigid. Veronica gyrated among the rushes on the floor, pulling at her habit, pointing to her vagina, shrieking that the devil had entered her there, there.

It was as if the featherweight token had proved a final weight on guilt so heavy and so vast that she assumed it all lay exposed. A door had been broken open and something fetid was coming out of it.

“I prayed to the Mother…save me, save me, dear Mary…but he speared me with his horn, here, here. How it hurt…he had antlers…I couldn’t…sweet Son of Mary, he made me watch him do things…horrible things, horrible…there was blood, such blood. I thirsted for the blood of the Lord, but I was the devil’s slave…he hurt, he hurt…he bit my breasts, here, here, he stripped me…beat me…he put his horn in my mouth…I prayed for sweet Jesus to come…but he is the Prince of Darkness…his voice in my ears telling me to do things…I was afraid…stop him, don’t let him…”

Prayers, abasement. It went on and on.

But so did your alliance with the beast, Adelia thought. On and on. Months of it. Child after child procured, its torture observed, and never an attempt to break free. That’s not enslavement.

If she was exposing her soul, Veronica was also exposing her young body: her skirt was above her hocks; her slight breasts showed beneath the rents in her habit.

It’s a performance; she’s blaming the devil; she killed Simon; she’s enjoying it. It’s sex, that’s what it is.

A glance at the judges showed them enthralled, worse than enthralled: the Bishop of Norwich’s hand was on his crutch; the old archdeacon was puffing. Hubert Walter’s mouth dribbled. Even Rowley was licking his lips.

In a moment’s pause while Veronica gasped for breath, a bishop said, almost reverently, “Demonic possession. As clear a case as I ever saw.”

So the demons did it. Another attempt by the Prince of Darkness to undermine Mother Church, a regrettable but understandable incident in the war between sin and sanctity. Only the devil to blame. In despair, Adelia glanced up and into the face of the one man in the room who was looking on with sardonic admiration.

“She killed Simon of Naples,” Adelia said.

“I know.”

“She helped to kill the children.”

“I know,” the king said.

Veronica was crawling along the floor now, worming her way to the judges. She clasped the archdeacons’ slippers, and her soft, dark hair cascaded over his feet. “Save me, my lord, let him not force me again. I thirst for the Lord; give me back to my Redeemer. Send the devil away.” Reasonless, disheveled, the innocence had gone and sexual beauty had taken its place, older and more bruised than what it replaced but beauty nevertheless.

The archdeacon was reaching down to her. “There, there, my child.”

The table shook as Henry bounced off it. “Do you keep pigs, my lord Prior?”