won’t.”
Gyltha pressed on Adelia’s shoulders to force her down onto a hassock, then sat beside her. “He’s right.”
“He’s not. Suppose we get cut off by snow, by anything? She needs to be fed.”
“Then I’ll see as she is.” Gyltha took Adelia’s hand and bounced it gently. “It’s time, girl,” she said. “Time she was weaned proper. You’re a’drying up; you know it, the little un knows it.”
Adelia was hearing the truth; Gyltha never told her anything else. In fact, the weaning process had been going on for some weeks as her breast milk diminished, both women chewing food to a pap and supplementing it with cow’s milk to spoon into Allie’s eager mouth.
If breast-feeding, which the childless Adelia had considered would be an oozing embarrassment, had proved to be one of life’s natural pleasures, it had also been the excuse to have her child always with her. For motherhood, while another joy, had burdened her with a tearing and unexpected anxiety, as if her senses had been transferred into the body of her daughter, and, by a lesser extension, into that of all children. Adelia, who’d once considered anyone below the age of reason to be alien and had treated them as such, was now open to their grief, their slightest pain, any unhappiness.
Allie suffered few of these emotions; she was a sturdy baby, and gradually Adelia had become aware that the agony was for herself, for the two-day-old creature that had been abandoned by an unknown parent on a rocky slope in Italy’s Campania nearly thirty years before. During her growing up it had not mattered; an incident, even amusing in that the couple who’d discovered her had commemorated an event all three had considered fortunate by giving her Vesuvia as one of her names. Childless, loving, clever, eccentric, Signor and Signora Aguilar, both doctors trained in the liberal tradition of Salerno’s great School of Medicine, he a Jew, she a Catholic Christian, had found in Adelia not only a beloved daughter but a brain that superseded even their intelligence, and had educated it accordingly. No, abandonment hadn’t mattered. It had, in fact, turned out to be the greatest gift that the real, unknown, desperate, sorrowing, or uncaring mother could have bestowed on her child.
Until that child had given birth to a baby of her own.
Oh, God, if the poisoner was not content merely with Rosamund’s death…or if the killers from the bridge were waiting en route…or if she should leave her child in a Godstow suddenly overwhelmed by fire…
This was obsession, and Adelia had just enough sense to know that, if it persisted, it would damage both herself and Allie.
“It’s time,” Gyltha said again, and since Gyltha, most reliable of women, said it was, then it was.
But she resented the ease with which Rowley demanded a separation that would cause her grief and, however unfounded, fear as well. “It’s not up to him to tell me to leave her behind. I hate leaving her, I hate it.”
Gyltha shrugged. “His child, too.”
“You wouldn’t think so.”
The messenger’s voice came from the door. “My apologies, mistress, but his lordship asks that you will interview Bertha.”
“Bertha?”
“Lady Rosamund’s servant, mistress. The mushrooming one.”
“Oh, yes.”
Apart from the unremitting prayers for the dead in the church and the canonical hours, the convent had shut down, leaving it in a total, moonless black. The compass of light from Jacques’s lantern lit only the bottom of walls and a few feet of pathway lined by snow as he led the two women to their quarters. There Adelia kissed her baby good night and left Gyltha to put her to bed.
She and the messenger went on alone, leaving the outer courtyard for open ground. A faint smell suggested that somewhere nearby were vegetable gardens, rotted now by the frost.
“Where are you taking me?” Her voice went querulous into the blackness.
“The cowshed, I’m afraid, mistress.” Jacques was apologetic. “The girl’s hidden herself there. The abbess put her to the kitchens, but the cooks refused to work with her, seeing it was her hand that fed the poison to the lady Rosamund. The nuns have tried talking to her but they say it’s difficult to get sense from the poor soul, and she dreads the arrival of the lady’s housekeeper.”
The messenger chatted on, eager to prove himself worthy of inclusion into his bishop’s strange, investigative inner circle.
“About the blazon on the poor young man’s purse, mistress. It might profit you to consult Sister Lancelyne. She keeps the convent’s cartulary and register, and has a record of the device of every family who’s made a gift at some time or another.”
He’d been making good use of his time. It was a messenger’s attribute to persuade himself into the good books of the servants of households he visited. It got him better food and drink before he had to set off again.
Walls closed in again. Adelia’s boots splashed through the slush of what, in daytime, must be much-used lanes. Her nose registered that they were passing a bakehouse, now a kitchen, a laundry, all silent and invisible in the darkness.
More open land. More slush, but here and there footprints in a bank of snow where someone had stepped off the path.
It came at her, unseen, unaccountable, but so strong that she hunched and stood still under its attack as if she were back in the alleys of Salerno and had seen the shadow of a man with a knife.
The messenger stopped with her. ”What is it, mistress?”
“I don’t know. Nothing.” There were footprints in the snow, valid, explicable footprints no doubt, but for her, remembering those on the bridge, they pointed to death.
She forced herself to trudge on.
The acrid stink of hot iron and a remnant of warmth on the air told her they were passing a smithy, its fire banked down for the night. Now a stable and the smell of horse manure that, as they walked on, became bovine- they had reached the cowshed.
Jacques heaved open one of the double doors to reveal a wide, bespattered aisle between partitioned stalls, most of which were empty. Few beasts anywhere survived the Michaelmas cull-there was never enough fodder to see herds through the winter-but farther up the aisle, the lantern shone on the crusted backsides and tails of the cows that had been left alive to provide winter milk.
“Where is she?”
“They said she was here. Bertha,” Jacques called.
From somewhere in the dark at the far end of the shed came a squeak and rustle of straw as if an extra-large mouse were making for its hole.
Jacques lit their way up the aisle and shone the lantern into the last of the stalls before hanging it from the hook of an overhead beam. “She’s there, I think, mistress.” He stood back so Adelia could see inside it.
There was a big pile of straw against the stall’s back wall. Adelia addressed it. “Bertha? I mean you no harm. Please talk to me.”
She had to say it several times before there was a heave and a face was framed in the straw. At first, with the lantern sending downward light on it, Adelia thought it was a pig’s, then saw that it belonged to a girl with a nose so retrousse as to present only nostrils, giving it the appearance of a snout. Small, almost lashless eyes fixed on Adelia’s face. The wide mouth moved and produced sound high up the scale. “Non me faux,” it sounded like. “Non me faux, non me faux.”
Adelia turned back to Jacques. “Is she French?”
“Not as far as I know, mistress. I think she’s saying it was not her fault.”
The bleat changed. “Donagemme.”
“‘Don’t let her get me,’” Jacques translated.
“Dame Dakers?” Adelia asked.
Bertha hunched in terror. “Turmeinamouse.”
“‘She’ll turn me into a mouse,’” Jacques said helpfully.
The irresistible thought came, shamefully, that in the case of this child, the dame’s powers to turn her into an
