Mistress of the Art of Death

The wicket in the solid wooden gates was opening, and two dusty workmen were clambering out; Adelia saw her chance and, with an “excuse me,” stepped in before they could close it. She shut it behind her.

The strangeness was immediate, as was the silence. Somebody, presumably the workmen, had nailed planks of wood diagonally across the church door that had once opened for pilgrims crowding to pray before the reliquary of Little Saint Peter of Trumpington.

How curious, Adelia thought, that the boy’s putative status as a saint would be lost now that he’d been sacrificed not by Jews but Christians.

Curious, too, that the weedy untidiness ignored by an uncaring prioress should so quickly put on the appearance of decay.

Taking the path toward the convent building, Adelia had to prevent herself from thinking that the birds had stopped singing. They hadn’t, but-she shivered-their note was different. Such was the imagination.

Prioress Joan’s stable and mews were deserted. Doors hung open on empty horse boxes.

The sisters’ compound was still. At the entrance to the cloister, Adelia found herself reluctant to go on. In the unseasonable grayness of the day, the pillars round the open grass were a pale remembrance of a night when she’d seen a horned and malevolent shadow in their center, as if the obscene desire of the nun had summoned it.

For heaven’s sake, he’s dead and she’s gone. There’s nothing here.

There was. A veiled shape was praying in the south walk as still as the stones it knelt on.

“Prioress?”

It didn’t move.

Adelia went up to her and touched her arm. “Prioress.” She helped her up.

The woman had aged overnight, her big, plain face etched deep and deformed into a gargoyle’s. Slowly, her head turned. “What?”

“I’ve come to…” Adelia raised her voice; it was like talking to the deaf. “I’ve brought some medicines for Sister Walburga.” She had to repeat it; she didn’t think Joan knew who she was.

“Walburga?”

“She was ill.”

“Was she?” The prioress turned her eyes away. “She’s gone. They’ve all gone.”

So the Church had stepped in.

“I’m sorry,” Adelia said. And she was; there was something terrible in seeing a human being so deteriorated. Not just that, something terrible in the dying convent as if it were sagging; she had the impression that the cloister was tilting sideways. There was a different smell to it, another shape.

And an almost imperceptible sound, like the buzzing of an insect trapped in a jar, only higher.

“Where has Walburga gone?”

“What?”

“Sister Walburga. Where is she?”

“Oh.” An attempt at concentration. “To her aunt’s, I think.”

There was nothing to do here, then; she could get away from this place. But Adelia lingered. “Is there anything I can do for you, Prioress?”

“What? Go away. Leave me alone.”

“You’re ill, let me help you. Is there anyone else here? Lord’s sake, what is that sound?” Feeble as it was, it irritated the ear like tinnitus. “Don’t you hear it? A sort of vibration?”

“It is a ghost,” the gargoyle said. “It is my punishment to listen to it until it stops. Now go. Leave me to listen to the screams of the dead. Even you cannot help a ghost.”

Adelia backed away. “I’ll send somebody,” she said, and for the first time in her life, she ran from the sick.

Prior Geoffrey. He’d be able to do something, take her away, though the ghosts haunting Joan would follow her wherever she went.

They followed Adelia as she ran, and she almost fell through the wicket in her hurry to get out.

Righting herself, she came face-to-face with the mother of Harold and couldn’t look away. The woman was staring at her as if they shared a secret of supreme power.

Weakly, Adelia said, “She’s gone, Agnes. They’ve sent her away. They’ve all gone; there’s only the prioress…”

It wasn’t enough; a son had died. Agnes’s terrible eyes said there was more; she knew it, they both knew it.

Then she did. All its parts fused into the one knowledge. The smell-so out of context she hadn’t recognized the sour odor of fresh mortar for what it was. God, God, please. She’d seen it, a corner of her eye noting with dissatisfaction an imbalance that was the asymmetry of the nuns’ pigeonholes which should have been ten on top of ten and had been ten on top of nine-a blank wall where the lower tenth cell should have been.

She understood. The silence with its vibration…like the buzzing of an insect trapped in a jar, “the screams of the dead.”

Blind, Adelia stumbled through the crowd and vomited.

Somebody was tugging at her sleeve, saying something. “The king…”

The prior. He could stop it. She must find Prior Geoffrey.

The tugging became insistent. “The king commands your attendance, mistress.”

In the name of Christ, how could they in Christ’s name?

“The king, mistress…” Some liveried fellow.

“To hell with the king,” she said. “I have to find the prior.”

She was gripped by the waist and swung up onto a horse. It was trotting, the royal messenger loping alongside with its reins in his hands. “Better you don’t send kings to hell, mistress,” he said amiably. “They usually been there.”

They were over the bridge, up the hill, through the castle gates, across the bailey. She was lifted off the horse.

In the sheriff’s family garden, in which Simon of Naples lay buried, Henry II, who’d been to hell and returned, was sitting cross-legged on the same grass bank where she had sat and listened to Rowley Picot tell of his crusade. He was mending a hunting glove with needle and twine as he dictated to Hubert Walter, who knelt by his side, a portable writing table round his neck.

“Ah, mistress…”

Adelia flung herself at his feet. After all, a king might do. “They’ve walled her up, my lord. I beg you, stop it.”

“Who’s walled up? What am I to stop?”

“The nun. Veronica. Please, my lord, please. They’ve walled her up alive.”

Henry regarded his boots, which were being clutched at. “They told me they’d sent her to Norway. I thought that was odd. Did you know this, Hubert?”

“No, my lord.”

“You’ve got to let her out, it’s obscene, an abomination. Oh my God, my God, I can’t live with this. She’s mad. It’s her madness that’s evil.” In her agony, Adelia’s hands thumped the ground.

Hubert Walter lifted the little desk from his neck and then Adelia to sitting position on the bank, speaking gently as if to a horse, “Quietly, mistress. Steady. There, there, calmly now.”

He passed her an inky handkerchief. Adelia, fighting for control, blew her nose on it. “My lord…my lord. They have walled up her cell in the convent with her inside. I heard her screaming. Whatever she did, this cannot…cannot be allowed. It is a crime against heaven.”

“Seems a bit harsh, I must say,” Henry said. “That’s the Church for you. I’d have just hanged her.”

“Well, stop it,” Adelia shouted at him. “If she’s without water…without water the human body can still survive three or four days, the suffering.”

Henry was interested. “I didn’t know that. Did you know that, Hubert?” He took the handkerchief from Adelia’s fist and wiped her face with it, very sober now. “You realize I can’t do anything, don’t you?”

“No, I don’t. The king is the king.”

“And the Church is the Church. Were you listening last night? Then listen to me now, mistress.” He slapped her hand as she turned her head away, then took it in his own. “Listen to me.” He raised both their hands so that they pointed in the direction of the town. “Down there is a crazed tatterdemalion they call Roger of Acton. A few days ago, the wretch incited a mob to attack this castle, this royal castle, my castle, in the course of which your friend and my friend, Rowley Picot, was injured. And I can do nothing. Why? Because the wretch wears a tonsure on his head and can spout a paternoster, thus making him a clerk of the Church and entitled to benefit of clergy. Can I punish him, Hubert?”

“You kicked his arse for him, my lord.”

“I kicked his arse for him, and even for that, the Church takes me to task.”

Adelia’s arm bobbed up and down as the king made his point with it. “After those damned knights interpreted my anger as instruction and rode to kill Becket, I had to submit to scourging by every member of Canterbury Cathedral’s chapter. Humiliation, baring my back to their whips, was the only way to prevent the Pope laying all England under interdict. Every bloody monk-and believe me, those bastards can lay it on.” He sighed and dropped Adelia’s hand. “One day this country will be rid of papal rule, God willing. But not yet. And not through me.”

Adelia had stopped listening, absorbing the gist perhaps but not the words. Now she got up and began to walk down the garden path toward the place where they’d buried Simon of Naples.

Hubert Walter, shocked by such lese-majeste, would have gone after her but was restrained. He said, “You take great pains over that rude and recalcitrant female, my lord.”

“I have a use for the useful, Hubert. Phenomena like her don’t fall into my lap every day.”

May was becoming itself at last, and the sun had emerged to enliven a garden refreshed by rain. Lady Baldwin’s tansy had taken, bees were busy among the cowslips.

A robin that was perched on the grave hopped away at her approach, though not far. Stooping, Adelia used Hubert Walter’s handkerchief to brush off its droppings.

We are among barbarians, Simon.

The wooden board had been replaced by a handsome slab of marble incised with his name and the words: May his soul be bound up in the bond of life eternal.

Kindly barbarians, Simon said to her now. Fighting their own barbarity. Think of Gyltha, Prior Geoffrey, Rowley, that strange king…

Nevertheless, Adelia told him, I cannot bear it.

She turned and, collected now, walked back up the path. Henry had returned to mending his glove and looked up at Adelia’s approach. “Well?”

Bowing, Adelia said, “I thank you for your indulgence, my lord, but I can stay here no longer. I must return to Salerno.”

He bit off the thread with his strong little teeth. “No.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I said no.” The glove was put on, and Henry waggled his fingers, admiring the mending. “By the Lord, I’m clever. Must get it from the tanner’s daughter. Did you know I had a tanner in my ancestry, mistress?” He smiled up at her. “I said no, you can’t go. I have a need for your particular talents, Doctor. There are plenty of dead in my realm that I would wish to be listened to, by God there are, and I want to know what they say.”

She stared at him. “You can’t keep me here.”

“Hubert?”