Mistress of the Art of Death

busy as Dover -though blessedly more free of the French. The waters of the Cam may be sluggish, but they are navigable to their conjunction with the River Ouse that, in turn, discharges into the North Sea. I think I may say that there are few countries of the world’s East that do not come to our quays with goods that are then passed on by mule trains to all parts of England along the Roman roads that bisect the town.”

“And what do you send back, my lord?” Simon asked.

“Wool. Fine East Anglian wool.” Prior Geoffrey smirked with the satisfaction of a high prelate whose grazing provided a good proportion of it. “Smoked fish, eels, oysters. Oh, yes, Master Simon, you may mark Cambridge to be prosperous in trade and, dare I say it, cosmopolitan in outlook.”

Dare he say it? His heart misgave as he regarded the three in the cart; even in a town accustomed to mustached Scandinavians, Low Countrymen in clogs, slit-eyed Russians, Templars, Hospitallers from the Holy Lands, curly-hatted Magyars, snake charmers, could this trio of oddities go unremarked? He looked around him, then leaned lower and hissed. “How do you intend to present yourselves?”

Simon said innocently, “Since our good Mansur has already been credited with your cure, my lord, I thought to continue the deception by setting him up as a medical man with Dr. Trotula and myself as his assistants. Perhaps the marketplace? Some center from which to pursue our inquiries…”

“In that damned cart?” The indignation Simon of Naples had courted was forthcoming. “Would you have the lady Adelia spat on by women traders? Importuned by passing vagabonds?” The prior calmed himself. “I see the need to disguise her profession, lady doctors being unknown in England. Certainly, she would be considered outlandish.” Even more outlandish than she is, he thought. “We shall not have her degraded as some quacksalver’s drab. We are a respectable town, Master Simon, we can do better for you than that.”

“My lord.” Simon’s hand touched his forehead in gratitude. And to himself: I thought you might.

“Nor would it be wise for any of you to declare your faith-or lack of it,” the prior continued. “ Cambridge is a tightly wound crossbow, any abnormality may loose it again.” Especially, he thought, as these three particular abnormalities were determined on probing Cambridge ’s wounds.

He paused. The tax collector had come up and reined his horse to the mule’s amble, waving an obeisance to the prior, sending a nod to Simon and Mansur, and addressing Adelia: “Madam, we have been in convoy together, and yet we have not been introduced. Sir Rowley Picot at your service. May I congratulate you on effecting the good prior’s recovery?”

Quickly, Simon leaned forward. “The congratulations belong to this gentleman, sir.” He indicated Mansur, who was driving. “He is our doctor.”

The tax collector was interested. “Indeed? One was informed that a female voice was heard directing the operation.”

Was one, indeed? And by whom? Simon wondered. He nudged Mansur. “Say something,” he told him in Arabic.

Mansur ignored him.

Surreptitiously, Simon kicked him on the ankle “Speak to him, you lump.”

“What does the fat shit want me to say?”

“The doctor is pleased that he has been of service to my lord prior,” Simon told the tax inspector. “He says he hopes he may administer as well to anyone in Cambridge who wishes to consult him.”

“Does he?” Sir Rowley Picot said, neglecting to mention his own knowledge of Arabic. “He says it amazing high.”

“Exactly, Sir Rowley,” Simon said. “His voice can be mistaken for a woman’s.” He became confidential. “I should explain that the lord Mansur was taken by monks while yet a child, and his singing voice was discovered to be so beautiful that they…er…ensured it would remain so.”

“A castrato, by God,” Sir Rowley said, staring.

“He devotes himself to medicine now, of course,” Simon said, “but when he sings in praise of the Lord, the angels weep with envy.”

Mansur had heard the word “castrato” and lapsed into cursing, causing more angels’ tears by his strictures on Christians in general, and the unhealthy affection existing between camels and the mothers of the Byzantine monks who’d gelded him in particular-the sound issuing in an Arabic treble that rivaled birdsong and melted on the air like sweet icicles.

“You see, Sir Rowley?” Simon asked over it. “That was doubtless the voice heard.”

Sir Rowley said, “It must have been.” And again, smiling with apology, “It must have been.”

He continued to try and engage Adelia in conversation, but her replies were short and sullen; she’d had her fill of importuning Englishmen. Her attention was on the countryside. Having lived among hills, she had expected to be repelled by flat land; she had not reckoned on such enormous skies, nor the significance they gave to a lonely tree, the crook of a rare chimney, a single church tower, outlined against them. The multiplicity of greenness suggested unknown herbs to be discovered, the strip fields made chessboards of emerald and black.

And willows. The landscape was full of them, lining streams, dikes, and lanes. Crack willow for stabilizing the banks, golden willow, white willow, gray willow, goat willow, willows for making bats, for growing osiers, bay willow, almond willow, beautiful with the sun dappling through their branches, and more beautiful still because, with a concoction of willow bark, you could relieve pain…

She was jerked forward as Mansur pulled in the mules. The procession had come to an abrupt halt, for Prior Geoffrey had held up his hand and begun to pray. The men swept off their caps and held them to their breasts.

Entering the gate was a dray splashed with mud. A dirty piece of canvas laid on it showed the shape of three small bundles beneath. The drayman led his horses with his head bowed. A woman followed him, shrieking and tearing at her clothing.

The missing children had been found.

THE CHURCH of Saint Andrew the Less in the grounds of Saint Augustine’s, Barnwell, was two hundred feet long, a carved and painted glory to God. But today the grisailled spring sunlight from the high windows ignored the glorious hammer roof, the faces of recumbent stone priors round the walls, the statue of Saint Augustine, the ornate pulpit, the glitter of altar and triptych.

Instead it fell in shafts on three small catafalques in the nave, each covered with a violet cloth, and on the heads of the kneeling men and women in working clothes gathered round them.

The remains of the children, all three, had been found on a sheep path near Fleam Dyke that morning. A shepherd had stumbled over them at dawn and was still shuddering. “Weren’t there last night, I’ll take my oath, Prior. Couldn’t have been, could they? The foxes ain’t been at them. Lying neat side by side they was, bless them. Or neat as they could be, considering…” He’d stopped to retch.

An object had been laid on each body, resembling those that had been left at the site of each child’s disappearance. Made from rushes, they resembled the Star of David.

Prior Geoffrey had ordered the three bundles taken to the church, resisting one mother’s desperate attempts to unwrap them. He had sent to the castle, warning the sheriff that it might be attacked again and requesting the sheriff’s reeve in his capacity as coroner to view the remains immediately and order a public inquest. He’d imposed calm-though it rumbled with underlying heat.

Now, resonating with certainty, his voice stilled the mother’s shrieks into a quiet sobbing as he read the assurance that death would be swallowed up in victory. “We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump.”

Almost, the scent issuing in from the bluebells outside the open doors and the lavished incense from within them covered the stench of decay.

Almost, the clear chant of the canons drowned out the buzz of trapped flies coming from under the violet mantles.

Saint Paul ’s words assuaged a little of the prior’s grief as he envisaged the souls of the children romping in God’s meadows, yet not his anger that they had been catapulted into them before their time. Two of the children he did not know, but one of the boys was Harold, the eel seller’s son, who had been a pupil at Saint Augustine ’s own school. Six years old and a bright child, learning his letters once a week. Identified by his red hair. A right little Saxon, too-he’d scrumped apples from the priory orchard last autumn.

And I tanned his backside for him, the prior thought.

From the shadow of a rear pillar, Adelia watched some comfort seep into the faces round the catafalques. The closeness between priory and town was strange to her; in Salerno, monks, even monks who went out into the world to perform their duties, kept a distance between themselves and the laity.

“But we are not monks,” Prior Geoffrey had told her, “we are canons.” It seemed a slight dissimilarity: Both lived in community, both vowed celibacy, both served the Christian God, yet here in Cambridge the distinction made a difference. When the church bell had tolled the news that the children were found, people from the town had come running-to hug and to be hugged in commiseration.

“Our rule is less rigid than Benedictine or Cistercian,” the prior had explained, “less time given to prayer and choral duty and more to education, relief of the poor and sick, hearing confession, and general parish work.” He’d tried to smile. “You will approve, my dear Doctor. Moderation in all things.”

Now she watched him come down from the choir after the dismissal and walk with the parents into the sunlight, promising to officiate at the funerals himself, “and discover the devil who has done this.”

“We know who done it, Prior,” one of the fathers said. Agreement echoed like the growl of dogs.

“It cannot be the Jews, my son. They are still secured in the castle.”

“They’re getting out someways.”

The bodies, still under their violet cloths, were carried reverently on litters out a side door, accompanied by the sheriff’s reeve, wearing his coroner’s hat.

The church emptied. Simon and Mansur had wisely not attempted to come. A Jew and a Saracen among these sacred stones? At such a time?

With her goatskin carryall at her feet, Adelia waited in the shadow of one of the bays next to the tomb of Paulus, Prior Canon of Saint Augustine’s, Barnwell, taken to God in the year of Our Lord 1151. She nerved herself for what was to come.

She had never yet shirked a postmortem examination; she would not shirk this one. It was why she was here. Gordinus had said, “I am sending you with Simon of Naples on this mission not just because you are the only doctor of the dead to speak English, but because you are the best.”

“I know,” she’d said, “but I do not want to go.”

She’d had to. It had been ordered by the King of Sicily.

In the cool stone hall that the Medical School of Salerno devoted to dissection, she’d always had the proper equipment and Mansur to assist her, relying on her foster father, head of the department, to relay her findings to the authorities. For, though Adelia could read death better than her foster father, better than anybody, the fiction had to be maintained that the investigation of bodies sent by the signoria was the province of Dr. Gershom bin Aguilar. Even in Salerno, where female doctors were permitted to practice, the dissection that helped the dead to explain how they’d died-and, very often, at whose hands-was regarded with revulsion by the Church.

So far science had fought off religion; other doctors knew the use of Adelia’s work, and it was an open secret among the lay authorities. But should an official complaint be made to the Pope, she’d be banned from the mortuary and, quite possibly, the school of medicine itself. So, though he writhed under the hypocrisy, Gershom took credit for achievements that were not his.

Which suited Adelia to her boots. Staying in the background was her forte: for one thing, it avoided the Church’s eye; for another thing, she did not know how to converse on womanly subjects as she was expected to, and did it badly because they bored her. Like a hedgehog blending into autumn leaves, she was prickly to those who tried to bring her into the light.

It was another matter if you were ill. Before she devoted herself to postmortem work, the sick had seen a side to Adelia that few others did, and still remembered her as an angel without wings. Recovering male patients had tended to fall in love with her, and it would have surprised the prior to learn that she’d received more requests for her hand in marriage than many a rich Salernitan beauty. All had been turned down. It was said in the school’s mortuary that Adelia was interested in you only if you were dead.

Cadavers of every age came to that long marble table in the school from all over southern Italy and Sicily, sent by signoria and praetori who had reason to want to know how and why they’d died. Usually, she found out for them; corpses were her work, as normal to her as his last to a shoemaker. She approached the bodies of children in the same way, determined that the truth of their death should not be buried with them, but they distressed her, always pitiful and, in the case of those who had been murdered, always shocking. The