Ariana Franklin: A Murderous Procession aka The Assassin

“Was she here?”

“Such a nice lady, the dog… well. Bought my best creations… for her daughter, she said. I have others, sir, if you…”

Rowley shook him. “Where did she go ?”

“Out the back, sir, I don’t know why. She was running…”

So was Rowley, through the long tent, into the alley, shouting her name. Running, Jesus, she’d been running. He felt for his sword and remembered that he was a bishop-had been-and bishops didn’t wear swords, not in a cathedral at least.

Just as well; if he found her, he’d kill her with it. “Where are you, damn you?”

The alleys turned and twisted; he turned and twisted with them.

He saw a tattered shrub in a pot indicating that the hovel it stood outside served ale. He’d seen it before, minutes ago, same hovel, same fucking shrub. He was going in circles.

Stopping, he could hear other voices shouting her name; he thought one of them was Mansur’s high treble.

And someone else, nearer, was calling his. “My lord bishop. Bishop Rowley Bishop Ro-ow-leee.”

Father Guy Father Guy had run after him.

Almighty God, they were looking for him; him, the bishop who’d gone insane. He’d shamed the English Church in front of a thousand Sicilians; he was their responsibility; they couldn’t let him scamper the streets yelling for a woman. They’d take him back and shut him up somewhere because, whatever he was, he’d always belong to the Church.

The chaplain had people with him, was coming nearer, talking. “He must be found, proctor, you understand? I want all your men out.”

A deep voice: “We’ll find him, Father.”

The bastards’ll hold me up.

He backed into a doorway and stood still as death.

Nearer now. “Lost his wits, poor fellow. Ugh, these stinking by-ways.” It was Dr. Arnulf.

When they’d passed, he dodged down a narrow cut-through to get away from them and found himself in a dilapidated square with a horse trough in its middle. His eye caught a movement on the far side, the flick of a cloak’s edge as its owner disappeared around a corner. He ran after it and leaped on a hurrying figure, bringing it to the ground.

It swore as he turned it over. It was Ulf.

“Have you seen her?”

“No. Thought I heard the bloody dog bark, though.”

“Which way?”

“This way”

They hared off together, but there were a thousand dogs loose in the city and-“ Sod it ”-Ulf’s boots slid in a deposit left by one of them, sending him sprawling.

Rowley ran on. Ahead was a cross street with a flambeau guttering in its bracket at a corner of the intersection.

And there she was. He saw her as if in a bright frame. She was standing on tiptoe with her back to him, trying to read a street name by the light of the expiring flambeau. The dog was at her feet.

He heard Ulf coming up behind him, cursing. To his left, at the top of the street, a tall man in white robes was hurrying down it. Mansur.

Another figure was coming up on his right out of the darkness.

Hearing him swear, she turned around and came toward him, smiling. He went forward and took her in his arms, still cursing her for the fright she’d given him.

The miserable light from the flambeau glinted on an upraised blade over her shoulder.

He swung her round so that the blade went into his own back, once, twice, before the killer was pulled away and Ulf pinioned the arms while Mansur drew the curved dagger from his sash and cut Locusta’s throat with it.

THEY DRAGGED ROWLEY into the vestibule of a shabby tenement. Adelia never let go of him, crawling beside him with one arm under his back so that it was raised above the dirty floor, the blood from it pouring over the crook of her elbow.

Knowledge deserted her; she didn’t know what to do.

Help me, I don’t know what to do. But her mouth was too frozen to say the words, and she looked up into the faces of Mansur, Ulf… and recognized neither of them.

“Get away, woman. Let a proper doctor see to him.” Another face, mouth puffing from exertion. Arnulf’s hands were on her shoulders, trying to pull her off, so she sank her teeth into his wrist to stop him.

He fell back. “She’s bitten me, the bitch has bitten me.”

A calm voice said: “Adelia.” It was Dr. Gershom’s.

“Yes?”

“Let me look, child. We’ll see what the damage is.”

“Yes, Father.” Sense came back to her; she had help; she was a doctor again. She said: “Somebody bring a light.”

Light came.

Calling for quiet, Dr. Gershom tore open the front of Rowley’s shirt and pressed an ear against his chest to listen for any sucking sound. He heard none. “Not the lung, I think,” he told her.

“I’m frightened it’s the liver.”

“Let’s see.”

Rowleywas heaved onto his side, and they ripped away the back of his shirt to see what lay underneath.

Two wounds, both gaping, both deep. Downward and sideways strokes had gone into the heavy musculature of the back between the posterior axillary lines.

“I don’t know,” Dr. Gershom said. “I don’t know. Maybe…” He avoided looking at his daughter. She was bunching the folds of her skirt around her fists to press them into the wounds-the blood immediately soaked into the silk until it dripped.

Gershom knew, as she knew, that even if no major organ had been touched, part of Rowley’s clothing had most likely gone in with the passage of the knife and would turn the area round it putrid if it wasn’t got out.

“I need my equipment,” he said. “We’ll get him to my house… operate… something to carry him on.”

Mansur moved to the stairs and ripped out two of its risers with the ease of a man pulling up grass.

“No.” For a dying man, the voice was clear. “They’ll find me. Take me home. Adelia? Are you there?”

“I’m here, dearest.”

“Who, my son? Who will find you?” Dr. Gershom asked.

Adelia knew. They. The “they” who would claim her lover for their own, who’d absorb their bishop back into the organism that was blanketing the world, the “they” who would take this man away from her for the last time and give him to the torture of their doctors.

She looked up and around. So many people in this dirty place. How had they all come here? Had they flown?

There were those she loved; her father, her mother-tearing her own petticoat into strips for bandages-an agonized Ulf and Boggart with her baby, Mansur, tight-lipped, efficiently making a stretcher… And the O‘Donnell, the O’Donnell had come…

Behind them, the enemy; Dr. Arnulf, Father Guy, outraged and giving orders to a large man in clerical robes. “Fetch help, Master Proctor. It is not seemly for a bishop to die here. Bring assistance. He must be taken to the cathedral, relics, the last rites…”

“You shan’t have him.” In this unreality, it was all she knew.

“The woman is a witch and must be arrested…”

Now the O’Donnell had the chaplain by the throat and was shaking him like a bundle of straw. “You touch her, you bastard…”

But the proctor had gone. They’d be here soon to take him. They’d taken Ermengarde.

There was a bloodied bundle half in, half out of the vestibule’s entrance where somebody had kicked it out of the way. Its throat was severed. Her eyes passed over it, had no interest in it; the insect had done its damage and now was squashed; she felt nothing for it. Only Rowley mattered.

“Adelia?”

Her mother was pushing her gently. “Let me take over now, little one.” Dr. Lucia was holding clean, folded pieces of petticoat to stanch the wounds, other strips were bandages. “He needs to be able to see you.”