Mistress of the Art of Death (27 page)

Adelia smiled for the first time that day. "I have money, and plenty."

Rabbi Gotsce stood back. "Then what need to worry?" He took her hand to pronounce the blessing prescribed for those that mourned,
"Blessed is the Eternal our God, Ruler of the universe, the true judge."

For a moment, Adelia felt a grateful peace; perhaps it was the blessing, perhaps it was being in the presence of well-intentioned men, perhaps it was the advent of Dina's baby.

Yet,
she thought,
however they bury him, Simon is dead; something of great value has been withdrawn from the world. And you, Adelia, are called upon to establish whether it was taken accidentally or through murder--no one else can.

She still felt a reluctance to examine Simon's body, which, she realized, was partly a fear of what it might tell her. If the beast at large had killed him, it had made a mortal thrust not only at Simon but at her resolve to continue their mission. Without Simon, the responsibility was hers only, and without Simon she was a lonely, broken, and very frightened reed.

But the rabbi, to whom Sir Rowley had been speaking very fast, wasn't intending to let her near the body of Simon of Naples. "No," he was saying, "not at all, and certainly not a woman."

"Dux femina facti,"
interjected Prior Geoffrey helpfully.

"Sir, the prior is right," Rowley pleaded. "In this matter, the leader of our enterprise is a woman. The dead speak to her. They tell her the cause of the death, from which we may deduce who caused it. We owe it to the dead man, to justice, to see if the children's killer was also his. Lord's sake, man, he was acting for your people. If he was murdered, don't you want him avenged?"

"Exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor."
The prior was still being helpful. "Rise up from my dead bones, avenger."

The rabbi bowed. "Justice is good, my lord," he said, "but we have found that it is only in the next world that it can be achieved. You ask that this be done for the Lord's sake, yet how can we please the Lord by breaking His laws?"

"Stubborn beggar, that one," Gyltha said to Adelia, shaking her head.

"It's what makes him a Jew."

Sometimes Adelia wondered how both the race and the religion had survived at all in the face of an almost universal and, to her, inexplicable hostility. Homelessness, persecution, degradation, attempted genocide, all these things had been visited on the Jewish people--who clung even more tenaciously to their Jewishness. During the First Crusade, Christian armies, filled with religious zeal and liquor, seeing it as their evangelic duty to convert such Jews they came across, had presented them with the alternative of baptism or death. The answer had been thousands of dead Jews.

A reasonable man, Rabbi Gotsce, but he would die on the steps of this tower before a tenet of his faith was broken and a woman was allowed to touch the corpse of a man, however gainful that touch might prove.

Which only showed, Adelia thought, that the three great religions were at least united when it came to the inferiority of her sex. Indeed, a devout Jew at his prayers thanked God every day that he had not been born a woman.

While her mind was occupied, there had been energetic talk in progress in which Sir Rowley's voice was uppermost. He came over to her now. "I've gained this much," he said. "The prior and I are to be allowed to look at the body. You may stay outside and tell us what to look
for
."

Ludicrous, but it seemed to suit everybody, including herself....

With considerable labor, the Jews had carried the corpse to the room at the top of the tower, the only one unoccupied, in which she and Simon and Mansur had first encountered Old Benjamin and Yehuda.

As if afraid that she might invade it in an excess of zeal, the rabbi made Adelia wait on the landing of the staircase below, the Safeguard with her. She heard the door of the room open. A quick burst of Old Benjamin's voice chanting the Tehillim came down the stairwell to her before the door closed again.

Picot is right
, she thought.
Simon should not be put into the ground unheard
. The spirit of the man himself would see it as greater desecration that nobody should listen to what his body had to say.

She sat down on a stone stair and composed herself, directing her mind to the mechanism of death by drowning.

It was difficult. Without being able to cut a section of lung to see if it had ballooned and contained silt or weed, the diagnosis would largely depend on excluding other causes of death. In fact, she thought, there was unlikely to be any sign at all to tell them if it were murder. She could probably establish that it
was
drowning, whether or not Simon was alive when he went into the water, but that would still beg the question: Had he fallen or been pushed?

Old Benjamin's voice, "
Lord, thou has been our dwelling place in all generations...."
And the thud of the tax collector's boots coming heavily down the stairs to her.

"He looks peaceful. What do we do?"

She said, "Is there froth coming from the mouth and nostrils?"

"No. They've washed him."

"Press on the chest. If there is froth, wipe it away and press again."

"I don't know if the rabbi will let me. Gentile hands."

Adelia stood up. "Don't ask him, just do it." She had become doctor to the dead again.

Rowley hurried back upstairs.

"...Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night, nor for the arrow that flieth by day...."

She leaned on the triangle of the arrow slit beside her, absentmindedly stroking Safeguard's head and looking out at the view she had seen before, of the river and the trees and hills beyond it, a Virgilian pastoral.

But
I am
afraid of the terror by night
, she thought.

Sir Rowley was beside her again. "Froth," he said, shortly, "both times. Pinkish."

Alive in the water, then. Indicative but not proof; he could have suffered a disruption of the heart and toppled into the river because of it. "Is there bruising?" she asked.

"I can't see any. There are cuts between his fingers. Old Benjamin said they found plant stalks in them. Does that mean something?"

Again, it meant that Simon was alive when he went into the river; in the terrible minute or so that it took for him to die, he'd torn at reeds and weed that had been retained as his hands closed in the fatal spasm.

"Look for bruising on his back," she said, "but don't lay him on his face; it's against the law."

This time she could hear him arguing with the rabbi, Rowley's voice and Rabbi Gotsce's both sharp. Old Benjamin ignoring them both.
"He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; he leadeth me beside the still waters."

Sir Rowley won. He came back to her. "There's a spread of bruising here and here," he said, putting his hand over one shoulder and then the other to indicate a line across his upper back. "Was he beaten?"

"No. It happens sometimes. The struggle to get back to the surface ruptures muscles around the shoulders and neck. He drowned, Picot. That is all I can tell you, Simon drowned."

Rowley said, "There's one very distinct bruise. Here." This time he crooked his arm around his back, waggling his fingers and turning round so that she could see them. It was a spot between the lower shoulder blades. "What caused that?"

Seeing her frown, he spat on the stair at his feet and knelt down to stir a small wet circle on the stone. "Like this. Round. Distinct, as I say. What is it?"

"I don't know." Exasperation overtook her. With their petty laws, with their fear of women's incipient impurity, with their
nonsense
, they were erecting a barrier between doctor and patient. Simon was calling out to her, and they wouldn't let her hear him. "Excuse me," she said.

She went up the stairs and marched into the room. The body lay on its side. It took less than a moment before she marched out again.

"He was murdered," she told Rowley.

"A barge pole?" he asked.

"Probably."

"They held him down with it?"

"Yes," she said.

Eleven

T
he curtain wall was a rampart from which archers could repel--and during the war of Stephen and Matilda
had
repelled--an attack on the castle. Today it was quiet and empty except for a sentry doing his rounds of the allure and the cloaked woman with a dog standing by one of the crenels to whom he bade an unanswered good-day.

A fine afternoon. The westerly breeze had pushed the rain farther east and was scudding lambswool clouds across a laundered blue sky, making the pretty, busy scene Adelia looked down on prettier and busier by billowing the canvas roofs of the market stalls, fluttering the pennants of the boats moored by the bridge, swaying the willow branches farther down into a synchronized dance, and whisking the river into glistening irregular wavelets.

She didn't see it.

How did you do it?
she was asking Simon's murderer.
What did you say to tempt him into the position enabling you to push him into the water? It would not have taken much strength to hold him down by the pole jabbed into his back; you would have leaned your weight on it, making it impossible to dislodge.

A minute, two, while he scrabbled like a beetle, until that life of complexity and goodness was extinguished.

Oh, dear heaven, what had it been like for him?
She saw flurries of silt cloud the encompassing, entrapping weed, watched the rising bubbles of the last remnants of breath. She began to gasp in vicarious panic...as if she were taking in water, not clean Cambridge air.

Stop it. This does not serve him.

What will?

Undoubtedly, to bring his killer, who was also the children's, to the seat of justice, but how much more difficult that would be without him.
"We may have to do that very thing before this business is finished, Doctor. Think as he thinks."

And she had answered,
"Then you do it. You're the subtle one."

Now she must try to enter a mind that saw death as an expedient: in the case of children, pleasurable.

But she could see only the diminution it had brought about. She had become smaller. She knew now that the anger she had felt at the children's torture had been that of a deus ex machina called down to set matters right. She and Simon had been apart, above the action, its finale, not its continuance. For her, she supposed, it had been a form of superiority--it was not in the play that its gods become protagonists--which Simon's murder had now removed, casting her among the Cambridge players, as ignorant and as helpless as any of those tiny, breeze-blown, fate-driven figures down there.

She was joined in a democracy of misery to Agnes, sitting outside her beehive hut below; to Hugh the huntsman, who had wept for his niece; to Gyltha and every other man and woman with some beloved soul to lose.

It wasn't until she heard familiar footsteps approaching along the rampart that she knew she had been waiting for them. The only plank she had been given to hold on to in this maelstrom was the knowledge that the tax collector was as innocent of the murders as she herself. She would have been happy, very happy, to apologize humbly to him for her suspicion--except that he added to her confusion.

To all but her intimates, Adelia liked to appear imperturbable, putting on the kindly but detached manner of one called to profession by the god of medicine. It was a veneer that had helped deflect the impertinence and overfamiliarity and, occasionally, the downright physical presumption with which her fellow students and early patients had offered to treat her. Indeed, she actually thought of herself as withdrawn from humanity, a calm and hidden resort that it could call on in need, though one which did not involve itself in its vulnerability.

But to the owner of the coming footsteps, she had shown grief and panic, called for help, pleaded, had leaned on him, even in her misery had been grateful that he was with her.

Accordingly, the face Adelia turned up to Sir Rowley Picot was blank. "What was the verdict?"

She had not been called to give evidence to the jurors hastily assembled for the inquest on Simon's body. Sir Rowley had felt that it would not be in her interest, nor that of the truth, if she were exposed as an expert on death. "You're a woman, for one thing, and a foreigner, for another. Even if they believed you, you would achieve notoriety. I will show them the bruise on his back and explain that he was trying to investigate the finances of the children's killer and therefore became the murderer's victim, though I doubt whether coroner or jury--they're all bumpkins--will have the wit to follow that tangled skein with any credence."

Now, from his look, she saw that they had not. "Accidental death by drowning," he told her. "They thought I was mad."

He put his hands on the crenel and expelled an exasperated breath at the town below. "All I may have achieved is to sap their conviction by an inch or two that it was one of their own and not the Jews who murdered Little Saint Peter and the others."

For a second, something reared in the turbulence of Adelia's mind, showing hideous teeth, then sank again, to be hidden by grief, disappointment, and anxiety.

"And the burial?" she asked.

"Ah," he said. "Come with me."

Slavishly, the Safeguard was on its spindle legs in a minute and trotting after him. Adelia followed more slowly.

Building was in progress in the great courtyard. The chatter of gathered clerks was being drowned by an insistent, deafening banging of hammer on wood. A new scaffold was going up in one corner to hold the triple gallows for use in the assizes when the justices in eyre emptied the county's gaols and tried the cases of those thus brought before them. Almost as high as the nooses would be, a long table and a bench reached by steps were being erected near the castle doors to place the judges above the multitude.