Your holy servant Paul command in his letter to the Corinthians, “Thou shall not muzzle the ox that treadeth out the corn”? Lord, if we have the corn, does it matter if the ox should be feminine?
Well, of course he’d have to admit that she cut up the dead. But, he would say, she has uncovered murder through it and brought the perpetrators to justice. Surely You must approve of that.
The prior sighed. God would send him to hell for his impertinence.
Yes, he was risking his soul for her, but he loved her like a daughter.
Also, Lord, she is humble in her way. You can’t find a much humbler dwelling than this one in Waterbeach.
It was a typical Cambridgeshire fenland cottage, slightly larger than most: walls of lathe and plaster, a reed-thatched roof, a mud floor, a ladder to the sleeping loft, stools made of tussocked rushes. Nothing of stone-there was none in the fens. No animals except the disgusting dog she called Ward. The only steel in the place was in her dissecting knives.
Prior Geoffrey could hear the prattle of Adelia’s daughter, her illegitimate daughter, from the cottage next door, where Gyltha, the child’s nurse, lived in sin with the Arab eunuch, Adelia’s childhood guardian, whom she’d brought with her from Salerno.
Prior Geoffrey tried to draw a veil over his memory of Adelia’s explanation that though a castrated man was unable to have children, he could still sustain an erection.
Forgive her plain speaking, Lord; it is all she knows how to do.
Outside was a view that kings might envy: a soft, sinuous panorama of alder and willow exactly reflected in the waters of the Cam. Far off were the castle turrets of Cambridge itself and, nearer, a tiny landing stage where, at this moment, his barge was moored, with a path leading from it to her ever-open door.
The path, of course, was the trouble. It had been beaten flat and deep by the feet of Cambridge ’s sick and broken coming to be made better.
The town’s doctors-Prior Geoffrey drew another veil across Adelia’s plain speaking as far as those charlatans were concerned-had lost too many patients to “Dr. Mansur” and had complained to the archdeacon of that abomination-no matter that those same patients fared better.
At any moment, the summoner would be coming up that same path and, finding a partially dismembered baby, would have Mansur and Adelia put on trial, where she’d be at once condemned and handed over to the civil authorities to be hanged. Nobody could save her.
Yet Prior Geoffrey knew the woman; she was championing this dead infant that somebody had found and brought to her. Most likely its father had thrown it into the river as unwanted, which, to a poor man with too many children to feed already, it was, but its death, to Adelia, constituted an atrocity that must be brought home.
“A great evil, I grant you,” he said to her, “but we can do nothing about it now.”
Adelia was sewing up the incision. She paused to consider. “We could,” she said. “I’ve often wondered if I could start teaching women how to prevent conception when they need to. There are some sure methods.”
“I don’t want to hear them,” Prior Geoffrey said hurriedly.
That would finish it. The idea that the marital embrace could be for sinful pleasure rather than for the transmission of life would cause the judges to strike this woman down where she stood. Even he, Geoffrey, loving her as he did, was confounded by her temerity. What did they teach them in Salerno?
Picking up the embroidered hem of his gown, he left her and ran next door, the dog cantering interestedly after him.
Young Allie was sitting on the grass, weaving a birdcage under the tutelary eye of Gyltha, both of them wearing rush hats to protect their eyes from the sun.
Mansur was kneeling on his prayer mat, facing east, his torso rising and lowering. Dear Lord, it was noon, of course, time for what the prior had learned to be the Muslim hour for Dhur. How many heresies was he to encounter this day?
Well, Gyltha would do, dear, sensible woman that she was.
He gabbled his explanation. “So the two of them must leave, Gyltha. Now.”
“Where we going to go?”
The immediate reaction of the down-to-earth Gyltha-that she too would go with them-was a comfort. More calmly, the prior said, “Lady Wolvercote is at the priory…”
“Emma? Young Emma’s in Cambridge?”
“By God’s mercy, she happened to arrive last night asking where to find you all. She is touring her estates and desires Adelia’s company. It is at least a temporary expedient until I can arrange… something.”
The prior removed his cap to wipe his forehead and think what the “something” could be, which he couldn’t. “Gyltha, they’re coming for her and Mansur, and she won’t attend to me.”
Gyltha’s mouth set. “She’ll bloody well attend to me.”
By the time the prior had signaled to his boatman to help transfer possessions to the barge, Gyltha had kicked Mansur to his feet, run with Allie to Adelia’s cottage, wrapped the dead baby in a rug, and was now handing it to the Arab. “Here, hide this poor thing and be quick about it.”
Adelia snatched it back. “Not like that. She deserves better.”
So a funeral was held. Mansur dug a small grave in the orchard, under a budding pear tree. While the last of its blossoms fell on him, Prior Geoffrey rushed through the obsequies, again imperiling his soul, for certainly this baby had not been baptized and, according to Saint Augustine, would share in the common misery of the damned in hell for its inheritance of original sin.
Though, he thought, lately there had been a softening of this precept in the teachings of Abelard and others. Yet Abelard… The prior shook his head at his own propensity for fondness for the world’s sinners.
“Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis. Requiescant in pace. Amen. And now let’s go.”
About to step aboard the barge, Adelia turned to look at what had been her English home for four years, as dear to her as that of her youth in the Kingdom of Sicily. “I can’t say good-bye,” she said, “I love this place, I love its people.”
“I know,” the prior said, grabbing her hand. “Come along.”
“And I love you,” she said.
As the boatman poled the barge into a tributary that led to the back of Saint Augustine ’s canonry, they saw a skiff flying the pennant of the consistory court being rowed swiftly up the Cam toward Waterbeach, on its way to fetch two heretics to justice.
By the mercy of God, its occupants didn’t see them.
THREE
AS THE CAVALCADE left Cambridgeshire and passed the old Roman milestone indicating that they were in the county of Hertfordshire, Emma, Lady Wolvercote, relaxed. “Being in the company of a wanted criminal was, well, somewhat exciting,” she said.
They smiled at each other. “You still are,” Adelia told her. “I imagine the authority of a bishop’s court doesn’t halt at boundaries.”
“I hope it may when one knows the bishop.” Emma said it tentatively. Adelia had once known the man who was now bishop of Saint Albans too well, having borne him a child.
“He’s a man of God now,” Adelia said. “I doubt he could break the rules for me. Or would.”
Her tone suggested that the subject be dropped. Which Emma did, though dying to know more; she was, after all, in debt to this woman, who had made King Henry promise not to sell her, Emma, into a second marriage-her first having been forced on her by abduction and rape. The Baron of Wolvercote was dead now, God rot him, and his death had left her with estates and with a son who, somewhat to her surprise, considering the circumstances of his conception, she adored.
Ordinarily, the widow of one of his nobles was in the gift of the king to be conferred on, or sold to, whomever he wished. Also, because her husband had joined a rebellion against Henry Plantagenet, the land he’d left Emma could well have been forfeited to the royal treasury.
That neither eventuality had come about was due to Adelia. Wolvercote had been hanged not because he was a rebel-Henry II found it better to bring such men to heel by making peace with them once they’d surrendered-but because he’d secretly murdered the young man Emma had preferred to him. It was Adelia who’d uncovered the crime and brought it to the king’s attention. For that, bless her, she’d demanded payment, not for herself but for Emma’s peace of mind. Henry-usually the least generous of monarchs where money was concerned-had granted the boon to the one he called his “mistress of the art of death” because she’d asked for it.
Looking at her as they rode side by side, Emma marveled at this woman who hobnobbed with kings and had, once, more than hobnobbed with a future bishop. She looked so… dowdy. Emma, who delighted in fine clothes, longed to drag off the unattractive cap covering Adelia’s dark blond hair and dress her in a style to show off the slim figure that at the moment was hidden under a brown and shapeless garment better suited to the lesser clergy.
Adelia, as she knew, preferred not to stand out in a crowd, but garbed like that, Emma thought, she wouldn’t stand out in a clump of trees. It was like being accompanied by a servant-in fact, the Wolvercote servants in their bright livery were better dressed than this extraordinary female.
“Aren’t you hot in that?” Emma asked, for the sun was exceptional, even for late May.
“Yes,” Adelia said, and left it there.
But perhaps it was as well that the eyes of everybody they passed turned to Emma on her pretty white palfrey and not toward the small, brown-clad woman on the small brown pony. When he’d seen them off, Prior Geoffrey had insisted Adelia be hidden inside Emma’s traveling cart until they were over the county border-and Mansur, too; that exotic and fearsome figure in Arab robes and headdress was too well known not to give the game away, for he was never far away from Adelia’s side.
Now, however, and justified or not, tension evaporated in the Hertfordshire sunlight, and both Mansur and Adelia had emerged into it to take their places on horseback.
It was still a small group considering the danger on the roads from robbers, though that was better under Plantagenet rule than it had been. Emma traveled with her child’s nurse, a serving woman, two grooms, a confessor, and a knight with his squire-such a knight, an enormous man, taller even than Mansur, with an air that left no doubt he could use the sword in the scabbard at his waist to effect, his nasaled helmet giving ferocity to a face that was otherwise gentle.
“Master Roetger,” Emma had said, introducing him. “He’s German. My champion.” She meant it literally, for Emma was touring the estates her husband had left, ensuring that their tenants acknowledged her two-year-old son as heir to the property-not always successfully. Her forced marriage to Wolvercote had been abrupt and had so few witnesses that in the complicated system of feudal landholding, more than one lord was disputing the claim of Baby Philip, the new Baron Wolvercote, to the income from the land they’d held from his father. An elderly cousin, for instance, had refused to give up the rents from a thousand Yorkshire acres to a child he’d called a bastard and a usurper.
“The God of Battles told him whose land it was,” Emma said with vengeful satisfaction. “Master Roetger had his champion disabled in twenty minutes.”
It was the way things were done in England, Adelia the foreigner had learned. Trial by combat. A judicium Dei. Since Almighty God knew to whom disputed land truly belonged, the disputants-or more often, their champions-fought a judicial battle under His invisible but all-seeing eye, leaving it to Him to show which party had the right of it according to which contestant He let win.
“God is on our side,” Emma said, “and will be again in Aylesbury.”
“Another combat?”
“There was a married sister,” Emma said-she never named her late husband if she could help it. “A widow whose children died before she did, so she inherited a nice property near Tring, which, by rights, is my boy’s. Her brother-in-law is contesting our claim, but he’s a miserable, cheeseparing creature, Sir Gerald. I doubt he will spend much in acquiring their champion.”
“Master Roetger being expensive?” Adelia asked.
