A Murderous Procession aka The Assassin

Adelia didn’t hear her. The muscles she’d pressed had been rigid.

“And Duke Richard?” Mansur was asking.

“He doesn’t know. He’d already left for Sicily aboard my Nostre Dame. The royalty don’t travel together in case of accidents.” O’Donnell broke off again and looked toward Adelia, who’d left the table and was sitting on a chair, much as Blanche had done, with her head in her hands.

He strode over to her: “She’s dying, isn’t she?”

“I think so.”

“Can you save her?”

Adelia shook her head. “Even if I could have, and that’s very doubtful, I’ve no equipment. It was at Ermengarde’s.”

“Now, then.” He went away calling for Deniz: “What did you do with that damned contraption I brought?”

When he came back, he was carrying a wrought-leather, silver-bound case. “Will this do? I, er… liberated it from Arnulf’s cabin while the good doctor was sleeping.”

Inside, calfskin pockets held flasks, a well-thumbed urine chart, greasy ointment pots, tweezers, a rusty wound-cauterizing tool, a mallet, presumably for rendering difficult patients unconscious, pliers for pulling teeth, also rusty…

Adelia threw the instruments on the floor as she delved for the pots and flasks, opening them, sniffing, discarding. The tenth pot held what she’d been looking for-and had dreaded. So did one of the larger flasks. It appeared that, for all his pious protestations. Dr. Arnulf kept anesthetics among his medicaments.

There were no knives-apparently like Arnulf obeyed the papal edict of 1163, which had banned the shedding of blood.

“No knives,” she said, and was ashamed of the relief in her voice.

“For what do you need knives?” the Irishman asked. “I’ve a fine dagger, if that’s of use.”

“Knives?” asked Fabrisse. “If it’s knives you want, Johan’s the man; he travels to Leucate every week. There are some of his fellow Jews there, and he does their slaughtering. He’s a, what’s it called… a crocket?”

“A shochet?” Adelia raised her head. “He’s a shochet?”

“I believe so. Anyway, he has a fine collection of knives, very sharp, very clean; he’s particular about them.”

“Yes,” Adelia said slowly. “Yes, he would be.”

It was why Jews often stayed healthier than their neighbors, and so were accused of poisoning Christian wells when plague broke out. Adelia’s foster father, Dr. Gershom, a nonpracticing Jew himself put it down to the religion’s command that ritual slaughtering equipment must be be kept honed and clean. It was his contention that the stale, stinking, bloody filth on the knives of Gentile butchers helped to putrefy their meat.

God, dear God, every excuse she had for doing nothing was being taken away from her.

She closed her eyes and went over her diagnosis again. Pain in the abdomen’s lower right quadrant, the flexing knee, rigid muscles. Classic symptoms, her foster father had told her. On the corpse of a child he’d shown her what lay beneath those muscles-the large intestine with a small, wormlike pouch emerging from the bottom of it.

Neither Gershom, nor Gordinus the African, her tutor at the Salerno School, had been able to explain its function. Gordinus had referred to it as “the vermiform addimentum.” Gershom called it “an appendix to the cecum of no damned use whatever except to become diseased.”

And Joanna’s appendix was diseased.

I need air. Adelia got up and went out into the bailey, puffing hard. Dawn was breaking, the clouds had cleared, and, with her dog wheezing behind her, she climbed the steps of the seawall into the light of a freezing, breathless day

To her right the two Roqua sons were filling sacks from the glaring white squares of the Salses salt pans. Beyond them, naked vines stood in neat rows ready, when in season, to produce Salses wine, a substance so rough it could clean armor.

But it was the sea Adelia looked at; blue and gold in the rising sun, tranquil, its touch on the shore like the regular breathing of a child, its only ornament the distant St. Patrick, O’Donnell’s ship, riding quietly at anchor while, on board, its passengers seethed, some with worry for their princess, Dr. Arnulf with resentment, and none of them able to do anything about it unless they swam the couple of miles to the shore.

Adelia would have given anything to change places with them. “Father, help me,” she said, and it wasn’t just God she prayed to but the Jew who had brought her up and had faced what she was facing now.

The responsibility was crushing her. “Father, help me. The only time I’ve used a knife these last months was on a goat-and that was dead.”

A cry came from behind her as Mistress Blanche scurried up the seawall steps, followed by the O’Donnell. “Why are you standing there? Why aren’t you doing something?”

“Because what I have to do may kill her anyway,” Adelia said, her eyes still on the sea.

She took a deep breath and turned to face them. “I cannot magic her well, I wish I could. I am merely a doctor. You see, there is an organ in our bodies… here.” She pressed her hand against the right side of her stomach. “Sometimes it goes bad…” She wondered if she should go into the subject of suppuration and fecal matter, and decided against it. “I believe it has done so in the princess’s case and must be removed.”

“Removed, how?”

“Well, by making an incision above the affected area and taking the bad piece out.” Dear God, if it were only that simple.

“With scissors? Like cutting cloth?” Blanche’s knowledge of incisions extended only to dressmaking.

“Yes, except that we use a knife.”

If Blanche’s face had been wild before, it was ghastly now. “You make a hole? In the skin?”

“Yes. It is sewn up afterward…”

“But it will scar her, won’t it?”

“I’m afraid so, yes…” She was going to go on and assure the poor woman that her princess would feel no pain, that there had been preparations of poppy in Dr. Arnulf’s bag…

This, however, was not the lady-in-waiting’s concern. “You can’t.” She made a rush for the steps as if to go down to Joanna and protect her, but the Irishman stopped her. “Now, now, Blanche. Listen to the nice ladyship.”

Blanche thrashed at him. “Don’t you see? He’ll reject her. Dear Mother of God, he’ll reject her.”

“I don’t understand.” Adelia really didn’t. “The princess is very ill. There is a remote chance that by doing this I can save her life.”

Blanche put her hand over her mouth and began rocking.

The O’Donnell took Adelia’s arm and led her farther along the wall. With the sun on it, his face was lined and the eyes she’d distrusted were infinitely tired. “That poor lady is between Scylla and Charybdis, mistress,” he said, quietly. “On the one hand, she’s desperate for her mistress to live. On the other, if the princess survives this procedure… Will she?”

“I don’t know.”

He nodded. “If she lives, she’ll be imperfect, d’ye see? Scarred by an unholy operation. Damaged goods, you might say King William could reject her, might even have the right to reject her, I don’t know. And how would our good Henry take that humiliation? A spurned daughter? Wars have started for less.”

Adelia saw. This wasn’t just a sick patient they were discussing, it was a bargain between kings and countries. The girl lying on the table in the keep was of international importance. If she died from the operation, and most likely she might, Adelia herself would be accused of killing her. If Joanna survived-as two of Dr. Gershom’s patients had survived-her surgeon would be equally culpable of-what was it this man had said?- damaging the goods, royal goods. Either way, the political ramifications would engulf not only all of them, but a continent.

From the first, she had known that any operation was a sin against the teachings of the Church, subject to rigorous penalty-all surgery was that; it was an accepted hazard for those who possessed the skill and were