Mistress of the Art of Death

Prior Geoffrey dragged his eyes away. “Pigs?”

“Pigs. And somebody get that woman to her feet.”

Instructions were given. Hugh left the room. The two men-at-arms raised Veronica so that she hung between them. “Now then, mistress,” Henry said to her, “you may help us.”

Veronica’s eyes as they slid up to his showed a moment’s calculation. “Return me to my Redeemer, my lord. Let me wash my sins in the blood of the Lord.”

“Redemption is in the truth, and therefore in telling us how the devil killed the children. In what manner. You must show us.”

“The Lord wants that? There was blood, so much blood.”

“He insists on it.” Henry held up a warning hand to the judges, who were on their feet. “She knows. She watched. She shall show us.”

Hugh came in with a piglet that he displayed to the king, who nodded. As the hunter carried it past her toward the kitchen, a bewildered Adelia glimpsed a small, rounded, snuffling snout. There was a smell of farmyard.

One of the men-at-arms went by, steering Veronica in the same direction, followed by the other, who held a leaf-shaped knife ceremonially on his outstretched palms, the flint knife, the knife.

Is that what he means to happen? God save us, dear God save us all.

The judges, everybody, Walburga blinking, were crowding toward the kitchen. Prioress Joan would have held back, but King Henry grasped her elbow and took her with him.

As Rowley passed her, Adelia said, “Ulf mustn’t see this.”

“I’ve sent him home with Gyltha.” Then he’d gone, too, and Adelia stood in an empty refectory.

Was it planned? There was more to this than proving Veronica’s guilt: Henry was after the Church that had condemned him for Becket.

That, too, was horrible. A trap laid by an artful king, not just for the creature that might or might not fall into it according to how artful it was, but to show his greater enemy its own weakness. And however vile the creature it was laid for, a trap was always a trap.

Comings and goings had left the door to the cloister open. Dawn was breaking and the canons were chanting, had been chanting all the time. As she listened to the unison weaving back order and grace, she felt the night air cooling tears on her cheeks that she hadn’t known were there.

From the kitchen she heard the king’s voice: “Put it on the chopping block. Very well, Sister. Show us what he did.”

They were putting the knife in Veronica’s hand…

Don’t use it, there’s no need…just tell them.

The nun’s voice came clear through the hatch. “I will be redeemed?”

“The truth is redemption.” Henry, inexorable. “Show us.”

Silence.

The nun’s voice again: “He didn’t like them to close their eyes, you see.” There came the first squeal from the piglet. “And then…”

Adelia covered her ears, but her hands couldn’t keep out another squeal, then another, shriller now, another…and the female voice rising over it: “Like this, and then this. And then…”

She’s mad. If there was cunning before, it was the cunning of the insane. Even that has left her now. Dear God, what is it like inside that mind?

Laughter? No, it was giggling, a manic sound and growing, sucking life out of the life it was taking, Veronica’s human voice turning non-human, rising over the dying shrieks of the piglet until it was a bray, a sound that belonged to big, grass-stained teeth and long ears. It went out into the night’s normality to fracture it.

It hee-hawed.

THE MEN-AT-ARMS brought her back into the refectory and threw her on the floor where the piglet’s blood soaking her robe puddled into the rushes. The judges made a wide circle to pass her, the Bishop of Norwich brushing absentmindedly at his splashed gown. Mansur’s and Rowley’s expressions were fixed. Rabbi Gotsce was white to the lips. Prioress Joan sank onto the bench and buried her head in her arms. Hugh leaned against the doorjamb to stare into space

Adelia hurried to Sister Walburga, who’d staggered and fallen, clawing for air. She knelt, her hand tight round the nun’s mouth. “Slowly now. Breathe slowly. Little breaths, shallow.”

She heard Henry say, “Well, my lords? It appears she gave the devil every cooperation.”

Apart from Walburga’s panicking breath, the room was quiet.

After a while, somebody, one of the bishops, spoke: “She will be tried in ecclesiastical court, of course.”

“Given benefit of clergy, you mean,” the king said.

“She is still ours, my lord.”

“And what will you do with her? The Church cannot hang; it can’t shed blood. All your court can do is excommunicate her and send her out into the lay world. What happens the next time a killer whistles for her?”

“Plantagenet, beware.” It was the archdeacon. “Would you yet wrangle with holy Saint Thomas? Is he to die again at the hands of your knights? Would you dispute his own words? ‘The clergy have Christ alone as king and under the King of Heaven; they should be ruled by their own law.’ Bell, book, and candle are the greatest coercion of all; this wretched woman shall lose her soul.”

Here was the voice that had echoed through a cathedral with an archbishop’s blood on its steps. It echoed through a provincial refectory where the blood of a piglet soaked into the tiles.

“She’s already lost her soul. Is England to lose more children?” Here was the other voice, the one that had used secular reason against Becket. It was still reasonable.

Then it wasn’t. Henry was taking one of the men-at-arms by the shoulders and shaking him. He moved on to shake the rabbi, then Hugh. “Do you see? Do you see? This was the quarrel between Becket and me. Have your courts, I said, but hand the guilty over to mine for punishment.” Men were being hurled around the room like rats. “I lost. I lost, d’you see? Murderers and rapists are loose in my land because I lost.”

Hubert Walter was clinging to one of his arms, pleading and being dragged along. “My lord, my lord…remember, I beg you, remember.”

Henry shook him off, stared down at him. “I won’t have it, Hubert.” He dragged his hand across his mouth to wipe away the spittle. “You hear me, my lords? I won’t have it.”

He was calmer now, facing the trembling judges. “Try it, condemn it, take its soul away, but I will not have that creature’s breath polluting my realm. Send it back to Thuringia, to the far Indies, anywhere, but I will lose no more children, and by my soul’s salvation, if that thing is still breathing Plantagenet air in two days’ time, I shall proclaim to the world what the Church has loosed on it. And you, madam…”

It was Prioress Joan’s turn. The king pulled her head up from the table by her veil, dislodging the wimple to show wiry, gray hair. “And you…If you’d controlled your sisterhood with half the discipline you apply to your hounds…She goes, do you understand? She goes or I tear down your convent stone by stone with you in it. Now leave this place and take that stinking maggot with you.”

IT WAS A RAGGED DEPARTURE. Prior Geoffrey stood at the door, looking old and unwell. Rain had stopped, but the chilly, moist dawn air raised a ground mist and the hooded, cloaked figures mounting their horses or getting into palanquins were difficult to distinguish. Quiet, though, except for the strike of hooves on cobbles and the huff from horses’ nostrils and the singing of an early thrush and the crow of a cockerel from a hen run. Nobody spoke. Sleepwalkers, all of them, souls in limbo.

Only the king’s departure had been noisy, a rush of boar hounds and riders galloping toward the gates and open country.

Adelia thought she saw two veiled figures being escorted away by men-at-arms. Perhaps the hatted, bowed shape plodding on a solitary course toward the castle was the rabbi. Only Mansur was here beside her, God bless him.

She went and put her arm around Walburga, who had been forgotten. Then she waited for Rowley Picot. And waited.

Either he wasn’t coming or he had already gone. Ah, well…

“It seems we must walk,” she said. “Are you well enough?” She was concerned for Walburga; the girl’s pulse had been alarming after she’d seen what she should never have seen in the kitchen.

The nun nodded.

Together they ambled through the mist, Mansur striding beside them. Twice Adelia turned to look for the Safeguard; twice she remembered. When she turned for a third time…“Oh no, dear God, no.”

“What is it?” Mansur asked.

It was Rakshasa walking behind them, his feet hidden in the mist.

Mansur drew his dagger, then half-replaced it. “It’s the other. Stay here.”

Still gasping with shock, Adelia watched him go forward to speak to Gervase of Coton, whose figure so much resembled that of a dead man, a Gervase who now seemed reduced and oddly diffident. He and the Arab strolled farther along the track and were lost to view. Their voices were a mumble. Mansur’s English had improved these last weeks.

He came back alone. The three of them walked on together. “We send him a pot of snakeweed,” Mansur said.

“Why?” Then, because everything normal had been cast adrift, Adelia grinned. “He’s…Mansur, has he got the pox?”

“Other doctors have been of no help to him. The poor man has attempted these many days to consult me. He says he has watched the Jew’s house for my return.”

“I saw him. He scared the wits from me. I’ll give him bloody snakeweed, I’ll put pepper in it, I’ll teach him to lurk on riverbanks. Him and his pox.”

“You will be a doctor,” Mansur reproved her. “He is a worried man, frightened of what his wife will say, Allah pity him.”

“Then he should have been faithful to her,” Adelia said. “Oh, tut, it’ll go in time if it’s gonorrhea.” She was still grinning. “But don’t tell him that.”

It was lighter when they gained the gates toward the town, and they could see the Great Bridge. A flock of sheep was trotting over it, making for the shambles. Some students were stumbling home after a hard night out.

Puffing, Walburga said suddenly in disbelief, “But she were the best of us, the holiest. I admired her, she were so good.”

“She had a madness,” Adelia said. “There’s no accounting for that.”

“Where’d it come from?”

“I don’t know.” Always there, perhaps. Stifled. Doomed to chastity and obedience at the age of three. A chance meeting with a man who overpowered-Rowley had talked of Rakshasa’s attraction for women. “The Lord only knows why; he doesn’t treat them well.” Had that coition of frenzy released the nun’s derangement? Maybe, maybe. “I don’t know,” Adelia said again. “Take shallow breaths. Slowly, now.”

A horseman cantered up as they arrived at the foot of the bridge. Sir Rowley Picot looked down at Adelia. “Am I to be given an explanation, mistress?”

“I explained to Prior Geoffrey. I am grateful and honored by your proposal…” Oh, this was no good. “Rowley, I would have married you, nobody else, ever, ever. But…”

“Did I not fuck you nicely this morning?”

He was deliberately speaking English, and Adelia felt the nun beside her flinch at his use of the old Anglo-Saxon word. “You did,” she said.