Ariana Franklin: A Murderous Procession aka The Assassin

Dr. Lucia said: “Some time ago, that deepest-dyed ruffian of your father’s sent us a most courteous letter, praising you, Adelia, and saying that if we should wish to visit England, he would be delighted to have us under his protection.”

“ Henry did?” Adelia was amazed.

Gershom sniffed. “Every now and then one of his fancy couriers has called in at Salerno on his way to Palermo with a letter to tell us how you get on. Your mother thinks that’s courtesy I say it’s no more than our due for taking our daughter from us and keeping her away His invitation is a puff, a sop to keep us happy.”

“Oh, no,” Adelia said, still surprised, but with certainty. “No, it isn’t. If he’s offered you a place in England, he truly wants you there.”

The Plantagenet did nothing out of sensitivity She wondered why he had done it at all; she hadn’t thought he’d even been aware of her parents’ existence. But he was a canny monarch with a network of information like no other, and two more of the world’s most gifted doctors would be of considerable use to his kingdom.

What amazed her was that they should be considering it; she’d thought them too deeply founded into Southern Appenine rock to be dislodged.

Staring at her mother, Adelia saw what, in the misty happiness of seeing her again, she had missed-a dent on the woman’s cheekbone.

She leaned over to touch it, gently “How did that happen? Has Father been beating you again?”

“I should have,” Gershom said bitterly. “If ever a stubborn, obstinate maypole of a woman deserved knocking down, it is that woman there. Didn’t I tell her not to go visiting her Salerno patients without Halim to guard her? Did she listen? Mansur, my old friend, where were you? You’d have seen them off.” His face changed. “They stoned her.”

“Stoned her… Who did ?”

Unperturbed, Dr. Lucia said: “Oh, it was a monk. In the Via Mercanti. I think he was a brother from the San Mateo monastery. An inept thrower, in any case; his other stones missed.”

“Dear God. But why ?”

“Presumably because I am married to the Jew you are pleased to call a father.”

“It is true,” Gershom said. “The next day the amiable fellow arrived with reinforcements and broke all our front shutters, which, on the whole, was preferable to stoning your mother, though not so good economically Wood is expensive. We complained to Bishop Jerome, but nothing was done; there was no prosecution.”

“ Why ?»

“Child, your parents are an affront to God. A Jew, a Catholic, living together? Insupportable. Enough to make angels weep and disturb the Heavens.” Gershom sighed. “Even your aunt Felicia has found it necessary to leave us and retire to the Convent of San Giorgio.”

Felicia? And this was the woman who’d kept the household in Salerno running with the ease of oiled wheels so that her younger, medically gifted sister could concentrate on her profession.

“Well, well,” Lucia said. “She was getting old. Maybe we had become too much for her.”

“No,” Gershom said. “She was frightened.” He took his daughter’s hand in his. “Things have changed, little one. Simeon and his Arab wife have been driven out, so has our excellent Greek chemist-you remember Hypatos who was so ill-advised as to marry a Catholic girl?”

“Nobody used to mind-well, they minded but it was tolerated…”

“But you are remembering the days when the Christian Church here overlooked mixed marriages. It no longer does. William is being pressured to replace his nonbelieving advisers with those of the Latin faith. Even Jibril has to pretend that he is a Christian convert when he’s in public-he told me so himself when we arrived.”

“I know it,” Mansur said. “Did I not say that there were fewer mosques than there were?”

Aveyron.

Adelia got up and opened the door into the garden so that she could breathe. Not here, oh God, not here.

They had stoned her mother, stoned her, in Salerno, which had been a boiling pot producing the greatest social, political, and scientific advances the world had ever seen. She’d thought that its steam would spread throughout every land to be sniffed appreciatively by men and women with the wit to envisage a future in which there was no racial or religious conflict.

Don’t let the sun set on it.

But the sun was setting. A huge semicircle of orange was turning the gardens into amber as it sank. Far off, she could hear the summonses to evening prayer coming from minarets, muezzins, and campaniles. In town, the white robes of Arabs, Norman tunics, monks’ habits, and Jewish cloaks would be brushing past each other on their way to the mosques, synagogues, and churches of their various faiths.

But Mansur was right; what had once been musically discordant concordance was now dominated by bells for Latin vespers.

Not Aveyron. Not here.

Gershom joined her. He put an arm round her shoulders. “It is grief for me to tell you, my child, but you would not be allowed to study in Salerno’s school now.”

Adelia turned to stare at him. “No women?”

“No women. No autopsy, either. Occasionally old Patricio sneaks the corpse of a destitute to me, but…” His hands went up toward the sky. “How can we mend the human body if we do not know how it works?”

They stood together, watching the great semicircle turn to gold and diminish into a final, lustrous arc before it disappeared entirely and left them in the dark.

IN THE ATTIC of Signor Ettore’s lodging house, Scarry is seated on the truckle bed with its stinking mattress. He stares, unmoving, at the plaster peeling on the wall.

His landlady is right about his eyes; they are beautiful in their way, clearly defined slit pupils set in very white whites and totally without emotion-a wolf’s eyes.

IN ALL ITS HISTORY, Palermo had not seen such splendor as attended the wedding of its lord to the King of England’s daughter. The city was so lit by lanterns and flambeaux that the blaze brightened a dull sky and turned vivid the crowding, exulting press that made its streets almost impassable.

In the cathedral itself, the packed congregation might have been enclosed in a jewel of flashing and infinite color.

Like all the other ladies of privilege crushed into a roped-off area of the nave, Adelia was veiled. Two centuries of Arab rule had left a legacy of Islam that respectable Sicilian women, whatever their religion, had yet to discard.

Boggart and Dr. Lucia, also veiled, were seated in a compartment high up in the southern clerestory-a Christian imposition on what had once been Palermo’s greatest mosque-behind a filigree screen that had a shutter which, should young Donnell start to cry for his next feed, could shut out the noise from the rest of the congregation.

Mansur who, with Ulf and Dr. Gershom, was lost somewhere on the other side amongst the vast, male congregation, had become alarmed again now that they were leaving the protection of the Ziza and had forbidden the women to attend unless they wore the anonymous veil.

“The Scarry may be in the cathedral. He knows your faces, but we do not know his.”

Dr. Gershom hadn’t wanted her to come at all, but Adelia had promised to see Joanna married and would do no other.

The argument had gone on for some time; they were to be carried to the cathedral in palanquins, like potentates. When Mansur, whose height made this form of conveyance too uncomfortable for him, had said he would walk beside them, there was an immediate outcry; it was obvious to everybody that his actual purpose was to scan the people they passed in case Scarrywas among them ready to attack. For the Arab, the assassin had gained superhuman qualities.