‘You think I’d go with you, a murderer?’ Judith screamed at him.
‘I told you I didn’t mean to kill the friar.’
‘Nathan! I’m talking about poor Nathan lying up there. What did you do, go back and strangle him after you’d finished butchering the friar?’
Aaron sank down on to the bottom step. ‘Is that what you think, that I killed Nathan? Judith, I swear that Nathan was alive when I left him, and I did not go back. I thought… I really thought he’d run off with that girl, until this afternoon when I removed that panel and found him there. I swear to you on my life, I did not kill him.’
‘Who else could have done it? Who else could have put him there?’ Judith raged at him.
Aaron covered his face with his hands and moaned. ‘I wish for your sake I had killed him, Judith, because the alternative…’ He raised his anguished eyes and looked at her. ‘Only five people knew of the existence of that recess. Jacob, Nathan and the three little boys Nathan was playing with that day. There was no one else Nathan would ever have shared the secret with except me, Isaac and Benedict. I know I didn’t kill Nathan, so that leaves only two others who could have done so and hidden his body here — your brother or your future husband.’
Judith sat shivering in her room. It was growing dark, but she hadn’t bothered to stoke up the fire or prepare supper. She couldn’t seem to think how to carry out even the simplest of tasks which she had been performing since she was a child.
Aaron had left Norwich. She had given him the small silver amulet in the shape of a hand that she wore around her neck. She didn’t suppose it would fetch much, but it was all she had, and Aaron had been grateful. Her mother had given her the amulet the day she and Judith’s father had fled before the trial. Judith remembered the fierce hugs. How she’d clung to her parents, desperate for them to stay, but urging them to go, scared that if they didn’t leave at once it would be too late. She’d felt that same fear again that afternoon when she hugged Aaron and pleaded with him to go quickly. His last words to her had been, ‘Take care of yourself.’ Her mother’s last words had been addressed not to her but to Isaac. ‘Look after your little sister, Isaac. You must be father and brother to her now.’
Was it true that her own brother had killed their best friend? She could not, she would not believe that, but if it wasn’t Isaac, then the man she loved even more than her brother, the man she had pledged her life to, must be the murderer. And that was equally unthinkable.
She tried to reason it out. Why had Isaac been so desperate to convince her she had imagined the corpse? Was he the shadow she’d seen under the apple tree? He could have waited until she left and then moved the body while she was searching for him. Not to Jacob’s house — there wouldn’t have been time — but he could have dragged the corpse from the chamber into the synagogue and moved it to Jacob’s house later that night. But why would he want to kill poor harmless Nathan?
She tried to visualize the room as she’d seen it that day, but all she could remember clearly was how it had looked this morning. The jumbled parchments and books piled up hastily as if someone had been impatient to get on with another task — those lists of words!
She reached into her scrip and pulled out the sheaf of parchments. Lighting a candle from the embers of the fire, Judith examined them again. Temple, burned offering, consume. Some of the words had been crossed out and different words written over the top. But the random letters alongside the words made no sense at all. Then, with a sudden flash, it came to her. Hebrew letters were also numbers. The letter Dalet was the number 4 and the letter Resh was the number 200. Every word on the list had a number beside it, and that number was the combined value of the letters in that word. The letters written on that stone — Hay, Shin and Mem — each had a numeric value too. Hay was 5, Shin was 300, Mem, 40; that made a total of 345. Was that important?
Judith glanced up. It was dark outside now, and Isaac still hadn’t returned. Something was wrong. She stuffed the parchments back into her scrip and, snatching up her cloak, hurriedly left the house. The streets were almost deserted, save for scavenging dogs. A couple of drunks reeled out from one of the taverns, holding each other up. One of them called out to her, but Judith kept her arms tightly crossed over her chest to hide her white badge and hurried on. The synagogue and the study chamber were in darkness, and there was no sign of Isaac there. She prayed she’d find him at Benedict’s lodging and turned to retrace her steps.
The wooden shutters on the apothecary’s shop, like all the others in the street, had been dropped down, sealing off the shop entrance, but Judith slipped along the alley to the side of the shop and knocked tentatively on the narrow door. Silence. Please be at home, Benedict, please. After the third time of knocking, the door opened a crack and Benedict peered out.
‘Is my brother here?’ Judith asked.
Benedict stared at her distractedly as if he wasn’t really taking in what she was saying.
‘I have to talk to you. It’s about Isaac. I’m worried he may be about to do something stupid, dangerous even. Benedict!’
He finally jerked out of his reverie and, with a worried frown, gestured for her to enter. Judith followed him through the storeroom, threading her way between barrels and great earthenware pots. Shelves were crowded with phials of green, brown and gold liquids, some opaque, some as transparent as the coloured glass in the windows of churches. Sacks of dried herbs lay in dusty corners and bunches of them hung from the beams, thickening the air with a potage of spicy scents. Roughly hewn tables were scattered with yellowing animal bones and black wizened roots like tiny shrivelled babies.
Benedict held aside a leather curtain that separated his own small chamber from the workroom. His bedding was rolled up in one corner, and a small table with two stools occupied another, but the rest of the room was taken up with piles of scrolls, sheaves of parchment and teetering stacks of books. Judith wondered where Benedict found space on the beaten-earth floor to lay out his thin palliasse when it came time to sleep.
He gestured to one of the stools but remained standing himself, hovering awkwardly in the doorway and wiping his grimy hands repeatedly on his sacking apron. Judith realized she had interrupted him grinding up some herbs for the shop.
‘What’s this about Isaac?’ Benedict prompted. ‘It must be serious for you to come here alone.’ There was a reproving note in his tone. Though they were betrothed, tongues would flap if she was seen entering his room at night, and such things mattered to Benedict, Judith thought with sudden irritation. She tried to ignore his frown. She had to tell him about Nathan, but she was unsure how to begin. If he disapproved of her coming to his room alone, he would certainly not like the idea of her going off with another man to an empty house.
‘Aaron has left Norwich, but before he left he told me he found the body of Nathan.’
Benedict stared at her in horror, then his legs seemed to give way and he crumpled against the door frame, pressing his fists to his eyes. Judith wanted to throw her arms around him and hold him, but she knew she had to keep talking or she’d never bring herself to tell him what she feared.
‘Nathan’s body was hidden in Jacob’s house in a secret recess that only you, he and Isaac knew of. Aaron swore that he didn’t put him there, so he reasoned it had to be either you or Isaac. And I’ve been thinking: when I told Isaac about the body, he ran straight to the study chamber, not the synagogue where I told him it was. Then he did everything he could to persuade me that I had imagined a body.’
Benedict thrust his hands palms out as if to push away the very suggestion. ‘You can’t believe your own brother is guilty of murder.’
‘I don’t want to believe it, but who else could have known about the hiding place? Isaac went to Nathan’s house that very afternoon. He must have seen the key there and taken it, just as Aaron did, then slipped it back when he returned later to ask if Nathan had returned.’
‘But why would he want to harm Nathan?’ Benedict asked.
‘I think he wanted the stone. Maybe he didn’t know that the Black Friar had already taken it. There’s something else.’ Judith pulled the lists of words out of her pocket. ‘Look, he has been practising gematria. I think he is trying to find words that add up to the same numeric value as the word on that stone.’
Benedict lunged forward and snatched the lists from her and examined them closely. ‘How… how do you know about gematria or about the word on the stone?’
Judith shook her head impatiently. ‘I overheard you all talking, but that’s not important. What matters is what Isaac is going to do with these words.’ She pointed to the lists.
Benedict took a deep breath and spoke without looking at her. ‘On Erev Shavuoth we were trying to meditate. We had almost succeeded in raising a powerful spirit, one who has the knowledge of the future, at least that’s what Aaron and your brother believed. But Nathan panicked and sent everything crashing to the floor before the spirit could materialize properly.’
