Mistress of the Art of Death (28 page)

Some of the din faded as Sir Rowley led Adelia and her dog round a corner. Here, sixteen years of royal Plantagenet peace had allowed Cambridgeshire's sheriffs to throw out an abutment, an attachment to their quarters from which steps led down to this sunken walled garden approached from outside by a gate in an arch.

Inside, going down the steps, it was quieter still, and Adelia could hear the first bees of spring blundering in and out of flowers.

A very English garden, planted for medicine and strewing rather than spectacle. At this time of year, color was lacking except for the cowslips between the stones of the paths and a mere impression of blue where a bank of violets crowded along the bottom of a wall. The scent was fresh and earthy.

"Will this do?" Sir Rowley asked casually.

Adelia stared at him, dumb.

He said with exaggerated patience, "This is the garden of the sheriff and his lady. They have agreed to let Simon be buried in it." He took her arm and led her down a path to where a wild cherry tree drifted delicate white blossoms over untended grass sprinkled with daisies. "Here, we thought."

Adelia shut her eyes and breathed in. After a while, she said, "I must pay them."

"Certainly not." The tax collector was offended. "When I say that this is the sheriff's garden, I should more properly call it the king's, the king being the ultimate owner of England's every acre, except those belonging to the Church. And since Henry Plantagenet is fond of his Jews and since I am Henry Plantagenet's man, it was merely a matter of pointing out to Sheriff Baldwin that by accommodating the Jews, he would also be accommodating the king, which, in another sense, he will--and soon, since Henry is due to visit the castle shortly, another factor I pointed out to his lordship."

He paused, frowning. "I shall have to press the king for Jewish cemeteries to be put in each town; the lack is a scandal. I cannot believe he's aware of it."

No money was involved, then. But Adelia knew whom she should pay. It was time to do it, and do it properly.

She bent her knee to Rowley Picot in a deep bow. "Sir, I am in your debt, not only for this kindness, but for ill suspicion that I have harbored against you. I am truly sorry for it."

He looked down at her. "What suspicion?"

She grimaced with reluctance. "I believed you might be the killer."

"Me?"

"You have been on crusade," she pointed out, "as, I think, has he. You were in Cambridge on the pertinent dates. You were among those near Wandlebury Ring on the night the children's bodies were moved...." God's rib, the more she expounded the theory, the more reasonable it seemed; why should she apologize for it? "How else would I think?" she asked him.

He had become statuelike, his blue eyes staring at her, one finger pointing at her in disbelief and then at himself. "Me?"

She became impatient. "I see it was a base suspicion."

"It damned well was," he said with force, and startled a robin into flying away. "Madam, I would have you know I
like
children. I suspect I may have fathered quite a few, even if I can't claim any. Goddammit, I've been hunting the bastard, I told you I was."

"The killer could have said as much. You did not explain why."

He thought for a moment. "I didn't, did I? Strictly speaking, it is nobody's business except mine and...though in the circumstances..." He stared down at her. "This will be a confidence, madam."

"I shall keep it," she said.

There was a turfed seat farther up the garden where young hop leaves formed a tapestry against the brick of the wall. He pointed her to it and then sat beside her, his linked hands cradling one of his knees.

He began with himself. "You should know that I am a fortunate man." He had been fortunate in his father, who was saddler to the lord of Aston in Hertfordshire and had seen to it that he had schooling, fortunate in the size and strength that made people notice him, fortunate in possessing a keen brain. "You should also know that my mathematical prowess is remarkable, as is my grasp of languages...."

Not backward in coming forward, either,
Adelia thought, amused. It was a phrase she'd picked up from Gyltha.

Young Rowley Picot's abilities had early been recognized by his father's lord, who had sent him to the School of Pythagoras here in Cambridge where he had studied Greek and Arab sciences and where, in turn, he'd been recommended by his tutors to Geoffrey De Luci, chancellor to Henry II, and taken into his employment.

"As a tax collector?" Adelia asked innocently.

"As a chancery clerk," Sir Rowley said, "to begin with. Eventually, I came to the attention of the king himself, of course."

"Of course."

"Will I proceed with this narrative?" he wanted to know. "Or shall we discuss the weather?"

Chastened, she said, "I beg you to continue, my lord. Truly, I am interested."
Why am I teasing him,
she wondered,
on this day of all days? Because he makes it bearable for me with everything he does and says.

Oh, dear God,
she thought with shock,
I am attracted to him.

The realization came like an attack, as if it had been gathering itself in some cramped and secret place inside her and had grown suddenly too big to remain unnoticed any longer.
Attracted
? Her legs were weak with it, her mind registering intoxication as well as something like disbelief at the improbability and protest at the sheer inconvenience.

He is too light a man for me; not in weight certainly, but in gravitas. This is an infliction, a madness wreaked on me by a garden in springtime and his unsuspected kindness. Or because I am desolate just now. It will pass; it
has
to pass.

He was talking with animation about Henry II. "I am the king's man in all things. Today his tax collector, tomorrow--whatever he wants me to be." He turned to her. "Who
was
Simon of Naples? What did he do?"

"He was..." Adelia tried to gather her wits "Simon? Well...he worked secretly for the King of Sicily, among others." She clenched her hands--he must not see that they trembled; he must not see that. She concentrated. "He told me once that he was analogous to a doctor of the incorporeal, a mender of broken situations."

"A fixer. 'Don't worry, Simon of Naples will see to it.'"

"Yes. I suppose that is what he was."

The man beside her nodded, and because she was now furiously interested in who he was, in everything about him, she understood that he, too, was a fixer and that the King of England had said in his Angevin French,
"Ne vous en faites pas, Picot va tout arranger."

"Strange, isn't it," the fixer said now, "that the story begins with a dead child."

A royal child, heir to the throne of England and the empire his father had built for him. William Plantagenet, born to King Henry II and Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine in 1153. Died 1156.

Rowley: "Henry doesn't believe in crusade. Turn your back, he says, and while you're away, some bastard'll steal your throne." He smiled. "Eleanor does, however; she went on one with her first husband."

And had created a legend still sung throughout Christendom--though not in churches--and brought to Adelia's mind images of a bare-breasted Amazon blazing her naughty progress across desert sands, trailing Louis, the poor, pious king of France, in her wake.

"Young as he was, the child William was forward and had vowed he would go on crusade when he grew up. They even had a little sword made for him, Eleanor and Henry, and after the boy died, Eleanor wanted it taken to the Holy Land."

Yes,
Adelia thought, touched. She had seen many such pass through Salerno, a father carrying his son's sword, a son his father's, on their way to Jerusalem on vicarious crusade as a result of a penance or in response to a vow, sometimes their own, sometimes that of their dead, which had been left unfulfilled.

Perhaps a day or so ago she would not have been so moved, but it was as if Simon's death and this new, unsuspected passion had opened her to the painful loving of all the world. How pitiable it was.

Rowley said, "For a long time the king refused to spare anybody; he held that God would not refuse Paradise to a three-year-old child because he hadn't fulfilled a vow. But the queen wouldn't let it rest and so, what was it, nearly seven years ago now, I suppose, he chose Guiscard de Saumur, one of his Angevin uncles, to take the sword to Jerusalem."

Again, Rowley grinned. "Henry always has more than one reason for what he does. Lord Guiscard was an admirable choice to take the sword: strong, enterprising, and acquainted with the East, but hot-tempered like all Angevins. A dispute with one of his vassals was threatening peace in the Anjou, and the king felt that Guiscard's absence for a while would allow the matter to calm down. A mounted guard was to go with him. Henry also felt that he should send a man of his own with Guiscard, a wily fellow with diplomatic skills, or, as he put it, 'Someone strong enough to keep the bugger out of trouble.'"

"You?" Adelia asked.

"Me," Rowley said smugly. "Henry knighted me at the same time because I was to be the sword carrier. Eleanor herself strapped it to my back, and from that day until I returned it to young William's tomb, it never left me. At night, when I took it off, I slept with it. And so we all set off for Jerusalem."

The place's name overcame the garden and the two people in it, filling the air with the adoration and agony of three inimical faiths, like planets humming their own lovely chords as they hurtled to collide.

"Jerusalem," Rowley said again, and his words were those of the Queen of Sheba: "Behold, the half was not told me."

As a man entranced, he had trodden the stones made sacred by his Savior, shuffled on his knees along the Via Dolorosa, prostrated himself, weeping, at the Holy Sepulchre. It had seemed good to him, then, that this navel of all virtue should have been cleansed of heathen tyranny by the men of the First Crusade so that Christian pilgrims should once more be able to worship it as he worshipped. He had floundered in admiration for them.

"Even now I don't know how they did it." He was shaking his head, still wondering. "Flies, scorpions, thirst, the heat--your horse dies under you, just touching your damned armor blisters your hands. And they were outnumbered, ravaged by disease. No, God the Father was with those early crusaders, else they could never have recaptured His Son's home. Or that's what I thought then."

There were other, profane pleasures. The descendants of the original crusaders had come to terms with the land they called Outremer; indeed, it was difficult to distinguish between them and the Arabs whose style of living they now imitated.

The tax collector described their marble palaces, courtyards with fountains and fig trees, their baths--"I swear to you, great Moorish baths sunk into the floor"--and the rich, pungent scent of seduction drenched the little garden.

Rowley, particularly, of all his group of knights, had been bewitched, not just by the outlandish, exotic holiness of the place but by its diffusion and complexity. "That's what you don't expect--how tangled it all is. It's not plain Christian against plain Saracen, nothing as straightforward as that. You think, God bless, that man's an enemy because he worships Allah. And, God bless, that fellow kneeling to a cross, he's a Christian, he must be on our side--and he
is
a Christian, but he isn't necessarily on your side, he's just as likely to be in alliance with a Moslem prince."

That much Adelia knew. Italian merchant-venturers had traded happily with their Moslem counterparts in Syria and Alexandria long before Pope Urban called for the deliverance of the Holy Places from Mohammedan rule in 1096, and they had cursed the crusade to hell then and cursed again in 1147, when men of the Second Crusade went into the Holy Land once more with no more understanding than their predecessors had had of the human mosaic they were invading, thus disrupting a profitable cooperation that had existed for generations between differing faiths.

As Rowley described a melange that had delighted him, Adelia was alarmed at how the last of her defenses against him crumbled. Always one to categorize, quick to condemn, she was finding in this man a breadth of perception rare in crusaders.
Don't,
don't.
This infatuation must be dispelled; it is necessary for me not to admire you. I do not wish to fall in love.

Unaware, Rowley went on. "At first I was amazed that Jew and Moslem were as ardent in their attachment to the Holy Temple as I was, that it was equally holy to them." While he did not allow the realization to put a creep of doubt into his mind about the rightness of the crusading cause--"that came later"--he nevertheless began to find distasteful the loud, bullying intolerance of most of the other newcomers. He preferred the company and way of life of crusaders who were descendants of crusaders and who had accommodated themselves to its melting pot. Thanks to their hospitality, the aristocratic Guiscard and his entourage were able to enjoy it.

No question of returning home, not yet. They learned Arabic, they bathed in unguent-scented water, joining their hosts in hunting with ferocious little Barbary falcons, enjoying loose robes and the company of compliant women, sherbet, soft cushions, black servants, spiced food. When they went to war, they covered their armor with burnooses against the sun, indistinguishable from the Saracen enemy apart from the crosses on their shields.

For go to war Guiscard and his little band did, so completely had they turned from pilgrims into crusaders. King Amalric had issued an urgent call to arms to all the Franks in order to prevent the Arab general Nur-ad-Din, who had marched into Egypt, from uniting the Moslem world against Christians.

"A great warrior, Nur-ad-Din, and a great bastard. It seemed to us, then, you see, that in joining the King of Jerusalem's army, we were also joining the King of Heaven's."

They marched south.

Until now, Adelia noticed, the man next to her had spoken in detail, building for her white and golden domes, great hospitals, teeming streets, the vastness of the desert. But the account of his crusade itself was sparse. "Sacred madness" was all he had to say, though he added, "There was chivalry on both sides, even so. When Amalric fell ill, Nur-ad-Din ceased fighting until he was better."