Mistress of the Art of Death

He was as grateful to her for that as for his deliverance. He hurried forward and took her hand to his lips. “Puella mirabile.”

Had Adelia been demonstrative, which she wasn’t, she would have hugged the man. It had worked then. Not having practiced general medicine for so long, she had forgotten the incalculable pleasure of seeing a creature released from suffering. However, he had to be aware of the prognosis.

“Not as mirabile as all that,” she told him. “It could happen again.”

“Damn,” the prior said, “damn, damn it.” He recovered himself. “I beg your pardon, mistress.”

She patted his hand and sat him down on the log, settling herself on the grass, her legs tucked beneath her. “Men have a gland that is accessory to the male generative organs,” she said. “It surrounds the neck of the bladder and the commencement of the urethra. In your case, I believe it to be enlarged. Yesterday it pressed so hard that the bladder could not function.”

“What am I to do?” he asked.

“You must learn to relieve the bladder, should the occasion arise, as I did-using a reed as a catheter.”

“Catheter?” She’d used the Greek word for a tube.

“You should practice. I can show you.”

Dear God, he thought, she would. Nor would it mean anything to her but a medical procedure. I am discussing these things with a woman; she is discussing them with me.

On the journey from Canterbury he’d barely noticed her, except as one of the ragtag-though, now that he came to think of it, during the overnight rests at the inns she had joined the nuns in the women’s quarters rather than staying in the cart with her men. Last night, when she had frowned down on his privates, she might have been one of his scribes concentrating on a difficult manuscript. This morning, her professionalism sustained them both above the murky waters of gender.

Yet she was a woman and, poor thing, as plain as her talk. A woman to blend so well into a crowd as to disappear, a background woman, a mouse among mice. Since she was now in the forefront of his attention, Prior Geoffrey felt an irritation that this should be so. There was no reason for such homeliness; the features were small and regular, as was what little he could see of her body beneath an enveloping cloak. The complexion was good, with the dusky, downy fairness to be found sometimes in northern Italy and Greece. Teeth white. Presumably there was hair beneath the cap with its rolled brim pulled down to her ears. How old was she? Still young.

The sun shone on a face that eschewed prettiness for intelligence, shrewdness taking away its femininity. No trace of artifice, she was clean, he gave her that, scrubbed like a washboard, but, while the prior was the first to condemn paint on women, this one’s lack of artifice was very nearly an affront. A virgin still, he would swear to it.

Adelia saw a man overfed, as so many monastic superiors were, though in this case gluttony was not the result of an appetite for food compensating for the deprivation of sex; she felt safe in his company. Women were natural beings for him; she knew that in an instant because it was so rare, neither harpies nor temptresses. The desires of the flesh were there but not indulged, nor kept in check by the birch. The nice eyes spoke of someone at ease with himself, worldliness living cheek by jowl-too much jowl-with goodness, a man who tolerated petty sins, including his own. He found her curious, of course-everybody did once they’d noticed her.

Nice as he was, she was becoming irritated; she’d been up most of the night attending to him; the least he could do was attend to her advice now.

“Are you listening to me, my lord?”

“I beg pardon, mistress.” He sat up straight.

“I said I can show you the use of a catheter. The procedure is not difficult when you know how to do it.”

He said, “I think, madam, we will wait upon the necessity.”

“Very well.” It was up to him. “In the meantime, you carry too much weight. You must take more exercise and eat less.”

Stung, he said, “I hunt every week.”

“On horseback. Follow the hounds on foot instead.”

Domineering, Prior Geoffrey thought. And she comes from Sicily? His experience of Sicilian women-it had been short but unforgettable- remembered the allures of Araby: dark eyes smiling at him above a veil, the touch of hennaed fingers, words as soft as the skin, the scent of…

God’s bones, Adelia thought, why do they attach such importance to frippery? “I can’t be bothered,” she said snappily.

“Eh?”

She sighed with impatience. “I see you are regretting that the woman, like the doctor, is unadorned. It always happens.” She glared at him. “You are getting the truth of both, Master Prior. If you want them bedecked, go elsewhere. Turn over that stone”-she pointed to a flint nearby-“and you will find a charlatan who will dazzle you with the favorable conjunction of Mercury and Venus, flatter your future, and sell you colored water for a gold piece. I can’t be bothered with it. From me you get the actuality.”

He was taken aback. Here was the confidence, even arrogance, of a skilled artisan. She might be a plumber he’d called in to mend a burst pipe.

Except, he remembered, that she’d stopped his particular pipe from bursting. However, even practicality could do with ornamentation. “Are you as direct with all your patients?” he asked.

“I don’t have patients usually,” she said.

“I’m not surprised.”

And she laughed.

Entrancing, the prior thought. He remembered Horace: Dulce riden tem Lalagen amabo. I will love Lalage, who laughs so sweetly. Yet laughter in this young woman gave her instant vulnerability and innocence, being at such odds with the stern lecturing she’d assumed before, so that his sudden welling affection was not for a Lalage but for a daughter. I must protect her, he thought.

She was holding something out to him. “I have prescribed a diet for you.”

“Paper, by the Lord,” he said. “Where did you obtain paper?”

“The Arabs make it.”

He glanced at the list; her writing was abominable, but he could just decipher it. “Water? Boiled water? Eight cups a day? Madam, would you kill me? The poet Horace tells us that nothing of worth can come from drinkers of water.”

“Try Martial,” she said. “He lived longer. Non est vivere, sed valere vita est. Life’s not just being alive but being well.”

He shook his head in wonder. Humbly, he said, “I beg you, tell me your name.”

“Vesuvia Adelia Rachel Ortese Aguilar,” Adelia said. “Or Dr. Trotula, if you prefer, which is a title conferred on women professors in the school.”

He didn’t prefer. “Vesuvia? A pretty name, most unusual.”

“Adelia,” she said, “I was merely found on Vesuvius.” She was stretching out her hand as if to hold his. He held his breath.

Instead she took his wrist, her thumb on its top, the other fingers pressed into its soft underpart. Her fingernails were short and clean, like the rest of her. “I was exposed on the mountain as a baby. In a crock.” She talked absently, and he saw that she was not really informing him, merely keeping him quiet while she sounded his pulse. “The two doctors who found and raised me thought it possible I was Greek, exposure having been a Greek custom with an unwanted daughter.”

She let go of his wrist, shaking her head. “Too fast,” she said. “Truly, you should lose weight.” He must be preserved, she thought. He would be a loss.

Peculiarity after peculiarity was making the prior’s head reel. And while the Lord might exalt those of low degree, there was no necessity for her to display her ignoble beginnings to all and sundry. Dear, dear. Away from her milieu, she would be as exposed as a snail without its shell. He asked, “You were raised by two men?”

She was affronted, as if he suggested her upbringing had been abnormal. “They were married,” she said, frowning. “My foster mother is also a Trotula. A Christian-born Salernitan.”

“And your foster father?”

“A Jew.”

Here it was again. Did these people blurt it to the fowls of the air? “So you were brought up in his faith?” It mattered to him; she was a brand, his brand, a most precious brand, to be saved from the burning.

She said, “I have no faith except in what can be proved.”

The prior was appalled. “Do you not acknowledge the Creation? God’s purpose?”

“There was creation, certainly. Whether there was purpose, I don’t know.”

My God, my God, he thought, do not strike her down. I have need of her. She knows not what she says.

She was standing up. Her eunuch had turned the cart ready for its descent to the road. Simon was walking toward them.

The prior said, because even apostates had to be paid, and he pitied this one with all his heart, “Mistress Adelia, I am in your debt and would weight my end of the scales. A boon and, with God’s grace, I will grant it.”

She turned and regarded him, considering. She saw the nice eyes, the clever mind, the goodness; she liked him. But the command of her profession was for his body-not yet, but one day. The gland that had restricted the bladder, weigh it, compare it…

Simon broke into a run; he’d seen that look of hers before. She had no judgment other than in medicine; she was about to ask the prior for his corpse when he died. “My lord, my lord.” He was panting. “My lord, if you would grant a kindness, prevail upon the prioress to let Dr. Trotula view Little Saint Peter’s remains. It may be that she can throw light on the manner of his passing.”

“Indeed?” Prior Geoffrey looked at Vesuvia Adelia Rachel Ortese Aguilar. “And how may you do that?”

“I am a doctor to the dead,” she said.

Four

As they approached the great gate of Barnwell Abbey, they could see Cambridge Castle in the distance on the only height for miles around, its outline made ragged and prickly by the remains of the tower that had been burned the year before and the scaffolding now surrounding it. A pygmy of a fortress compared with the great citadels hung upon the Appenines that Adelia knew, it nevertheless lent a burly charm to the view.

“Of Roman foundation,” Prior Geoffrey said, “built to guard the river crossing, though, like many another, it failed to hold off either Viking or Dane-nor Duke William the Norman, come to that; having destroyed it, he had to build it up again.”

The cavalcade was smaller now; the prioress had hastened ahead, taking her nun, her knight, and cousin Roger of Acton with her. The merchant and his wife had turned off toward Cherry Hinton.

Prior Geoffrey, once more horsed and resplendent at the head of the procession, was forced to lean down to address his saviors on the driving bench of the mule cart. His knight, Sir Gervase, brought up the rear, scowling.

“ Cambridge will surprise you,” the prior was saying. “We have a fine School of Pythagoras, to which students come from all over. Despite its inland position, it is a port, and a busy one, nearly as