A Murderous Procession aka The Assassin

She hurried from the room to fetch poppy juice from her pack and found Rowley waiting for her outside. “Is Ivo dying?”

“Yes. All we can do is to relieve the pain.”

“How long?”

“I don’t know.” She was distressed.

“I’ll go in. God have mercy on a good friend and a fine soldier.”

When Adelia returned to the room, Rowley was holding Lord Ivo’s hand while the Bishop of Winchester prayed as he readied the oils in his chrismatory box preparatory to giving the last rites. The abbot, still in hunting clothes, Father Guy and Dr. Arnulf were discussing in low voices such of Saint Benoit’s relics as could help forward Lord Ivo’s soul to its immortal rest, while Mansur, apparently detached from the conversation, looked on with a concern unlike his usual impassivity

Candles in their holders at the head and foot of the bed cast upward shadows that distorted the faces of the men standing up, turning their eye sockets into those of skulls.

Only the dying man’s features were fully lit, and Adelia gritted her teeth at the thought of what agony he was in and with what courage he was bearing it. His eyes were shut, his lips compressed, but his hand gripped at Rowley’s like a raptor’s.

“Here, my lord,” she said, passing the phial to Mansur.

Dr. Arnulf was on them in a second. “And what is that?”

“Poppy juice. Lord Mansur has prescribed it for the pain.”

“Poppy juice?” This was Father Guy “It is the devil’s concoction. That dear man on the bed is being purified and redeemed by what he suffers. The agony of Christ endowed pain with his own touch of divinity. You, Arnulf, you are a clerk in minor orders as well as a doctor, you surely cannot agree to this. There are edicts from the Vatican…”

“Indeed I cannot,” Dr. Arnulf said firmly “The poppy mandragora, hemp seed, all are absent from my medicine chest.”

Adelia stared at them, trying to understand what she was hearing. “That man is in torment. You can’t, you can’t deny him relief.”

“Better torment of the body than the soul,” Father Guy told her.

The abbot joined them, still smelling of the wide outdoors and the blood, Lord Ivo’s blood, on the sleeves of his leather tunic. “My child, I have sent for the femur of Saint Stephen, the first martyr. We must pray that its application will aid this good knight through his martyrdom.”

“Help me,” Adelia said in Arabic.

Mansur acted. Snatching the phial from her hand, he showed it to Rowley who looked toward Adelia. She nodded.

While the Arab held Lord Ivo’s head up, Rowley administered the opiate: “Here, my dear friend.”

While Father Guy raved that the noble lord had not yet made his confession, a furious Arnulf pulled Adelia out of the room.

“You chit,” he hissed. “Do you and your master set yourselves up against the Holy Fathers, against practice as laid down by Blessed Mother Church?”

This was too much. She hissed back, “Since when would a true mother allow any son of hers to suffer as that poor man is suffering? Or any true doctor, either?”

“Do you question my authority?”

“Yes, I bloody well do.” She stamped off down the corridor.

IT TOOK ALL DAY for Lord Ivo to die. Joanna and the ladies-in-waiting spent it in the abbey church, praying for the soul that had departed and the one that was about to depart.

Adelia spent it in her room. Twice more, Mansur came in to have the phial refilled. Lord Ivo had gained consciousness long enough to make his confession and receive the last rites from the Bishop of Winchester.

Dr. Arnulf and Father Guy having washed their hands of the business, Mansur said, had left the sickroom.

“Good.” But she grimaced. “We haven’t made any friends today you and I.”

“Do we want friends such as those?”

“No. They call themselves Christians. When did Christ ever look on suffering without being moved to help it?”

“I do not think they are Christians, I think they are churchmen.”

When he’d gone, she turned back to the window. It had begun to rain hard. She could see a river not far away, the heavy raindrops making discs in its surface. Under a dark gray sky, the forest beyond it appeared an indeterminate mass. It occurred to her that she knew the name of neither and felt the panic of an orphaned child taken away from everything it loved to be abandoned in a hostile landscape. The thought that Allie could be feeling the same bowed her down.

She longed for the comfort Gyltha would have given her. “We been through worse nor this, bor.”

And so they had, but not apart.

It was dark when Mansur returned to say that Lord Ivo was dead. He handed her a monk’s habit. “You are to put this on and join the bishop in the Lady Chapel.”

“Why?”

“He thinks there was something strange about Sir Nicholas’s death.”

The awfulness of the day was suddenly released by the ridiculous. How typical of Rowley; not a beckoning to a lovers’ tryst, but a command to waddle through a crowded abbey in disguise. To do what? Perform an autopsy?

She would go, of course. If she was caught, she could hardly be in worse odor with everybody than she was now. She would go because she was an iron filing drawn to that man’s magnet. She would go because… well, because it was a silly thing to do, and silliness just now was a blessing.

She took her veil and circlet off her hair and pulled on the habit, putting its cowl over her head until the hem dangled over her eyes. “Do I look like a monk?”

“You do. A short one.”

In fact, nobody noticed her. The abbey was in uproar: two important guests killed while under its aegis; people to be told, messages sent; funerals to be arranged; special services to be held; and, with it all, the holy hours to be kept. Monks scurried anxiously in from the rain and out again, cowls dripping, heads bent in an effort to keep their sandaled feet out of puddles. She could have made her way through them and been paid no attention if she’d been clashing two cymbals together as she went.

The Lady Chapel stood by itself an adjunct of the abbey’s church, and possibly its oldest building. The figure waiting for her was taller than its carved, chevroned porch.

“You took your time,” it said. He twisted the handle ring and flung one of the door’s leaves open with a crash.

Immediately Adelia smelled incense, beeswax, and death. Inside the only light came from two tall candles on stanchions at the head and base of the catafalque where Sir Nicholas lay Two monks knelt on either side.

The only sound in the silence was the plink-plink of rainwater seeping through a leak in the roof and into a bucket that was lost in the shadows.

Rowley said: “Thank you, brothers, you may leave. I’ll watch over my friend for a while.”

They were glad to go and rose at once. Rubbing their poor knees, they bowed to the corpse, the altar, then to the Bishop of Saint Albans before gliding out.

Rowley banged the door shut behind them and bolted it. “Now, then, come and look at this.”

The body had been wrapped in a silk winding sheet. Usually, the face was left exposed, but not this time. Adelia might have been looking down on an Egyptian mummy.

Together and with difficulty-Sir Nicholas had been a heavy man-she and Rowley labored to unwind it from its cocoon.

When at last the corpse was exposed, she saw why the face had been covered; there was a jagged gap where one of the eyes should have been.

“What happened?”