Ariana Franklin: A Murderous Procession aka The Assassin

Relinquishing a post she would have given to nobody else, she lifted her dripping hands from her lover’s back and moved so that her mother’s instantly replaced them.

She went to kneel on the other side of Rowley and put her face close to his, touched it.

“Is it you?”

“It’s me. Don’t talk. We’re going to make you well.”

He smiled and shut his eyes. “Take me home, sweetheart,” he said again. “England… with you. They mustn’t have me again.”

“They won’t.” He wasn’t theirs, he was hers.

“Sweetheart?”

“I’m here, Rowley. Stay still, we’ll have you out of here in a trice.”

“Get me home. Get me to England.”

“I will.”

But Arnulf and Guy were here. Others would come. They’d follow the trail of a man carried through the streets on a stretcher, like the killer had trailed her. Only a matter of time… Time. It was ebbing away… like Rowley’s life.

She said: “We’re taking you to my father’s house first, dearest. We can mend you there.”

“Better be… bloody quick about it.”

He put her back in time and space. If he could swear, he could live.

She looked for the face of the Irishman. “My father and I are going to save him,” she said; she was quite clear about it. “But then I want you to take us home, before the Church can find us. Sail us home, O’Donnell. All of us. To England.”

Father Guy’s back interrupted her view; he was facing the O’Donnell. “Admiral, I forbid it. This man is a lord of the Holy Church. I have men coming…”

There was a smack and he fell. Ulf had punched him. The O’Donnell picked him up and threw him into the street. “And you, too,” he said to Arnulf. “Before I kill you.”

They went, stumbling, shouting for reinforcements.

Mansur and Dr. Gershom were lifting Rowley onto the stretcher, carefully, carefully, putting him on his side so that Dr. Lucia’s hands could keep stanching the wounds.

Adelia’s eyes never left the O’Donnell’s. “We’re going to mend him,” she said, “then you must sail us home. The land route… too hard on him. A calm voyage while he gets better. Please, I beg you.”

He stared back at her. The man was dying; she had his blood on her face. And did she know what she was asking? How long a voyage? Through the Pillars of Hercules with their sudden storms? Running from fokking Barbary pirates? Beating up the bloody coast of Portugal until the Gulf Stream took them north?

But he would. She’d never love him, but he would. He’d still the seas for her.

“I’ll take you,” he said. “All of you.”

He watched her turn to her lover. “My lord O’Donnell’s taking us home, Rowley”

“That’s right…” The voice was getting weaker. “I’ll live if you take me home.”

“Is that a bargain?”

A slight nod.

“It’d better be,” she told him.

Mansur and Ulf lifted the stretcher, Dr. Lucia and Adelia on either side of it, Adelia still holding Rowley’s hand, the dog at her heels. Dr. Gershom. Boggart stooping, with her child in her arms, to pick up a package that contained marionettes. Behind them the O’Donnell.

On their way out, they stepped over the corpse of the man known as Locusta, who’d once been William of Scaresdale, and who’d at last found peace in the filth of a Palermo street.

And left it there.

ADELIA AGUILAR, my fictional mistress of the art of death, came about because in twelfth-century Salerno, then part of the Kingdom of Sicily, there really was a great School of Medicine, which not only permitted the practice of autopsy, but also took women students. We know this because of an extant treatise on women’s medicine, known as the Trotula, which was written by a female professor.

Sicily was then the most liberal, forward-thinking realm in all Christendom, treating its Arabs, Greeks, Jews, and Normans as equal citizens, something that occurred nowhere else. (Two fine books on the subject are The Normans in the South and The Kingdom in the Sun by John Julius Norwich.)

The school disappeared in the thirteenth century, probably under pressure from the Church of Rome, which regarded the science of autopsy and women doctors as anathema.

PRINCESS JOANNA’S JOURNEY from England to Palermo to marry King William of Sicily at the age of ten is another historical event.

We know most of her route. We know that she was accompanied at certain points by two of her brothers-Henry, the Young King, and Richard, later the Lionheart. We know that it was interrupted at one point when she had to be taken ashore because she was ill.

We know that much and little else. But, then, the chroniclers of the early Middle Ages disappoint in giving details of their journeys. Men and women of all sorts, not just royal, traveled extensively in those days; some making pilgrimages over the known Christian world, others flitting off to Rome-a journey that, from England, took only a few weeks. We find laconic references to crossing the Alps with little mention of the hardship that must have involved, especially as some of those climbs were made in winter.

So, in order to prefigure the growing and stultifying power of the Latin Church at that time, I have felt justified in taking that journey and running with it, adding even more drama to what must have been an adventurous undertaking, though I have taken care-I always do-to make sure that none of the historical people in it act out of character.

What I have done is some date fixing. In the story, Joanna still sets off at the age of ten, as she did, and arrives by the time she was eleven years old, again as she did, but I have put her trek to Sicily two years later-in 1178-than when it actually took place in 1176. This is to fit in with my fictional heroine’s time line. In 1176, Adelia was busy elsewhere, so I have used a novelist’s license to enable her to take part in Joanna’s extraordinary journey

HENRY, THE YOUNG KING. It would have been typical of that young man to desert his sister while he went off to fight in one of the tournaments to which he was addicted. Professor W L. Warren, that fine historian of Henry II’s reign, says of the Young King: “He was gracious, benign, affable, courteous, the soul of liberality and generosity Unfortunately he was also shallow, vain, careless, empty-headed, incompetent, and irresponsible.” He let nearly everybody down at one time or another. He died when he was twenty-eight years old of dysentery contracted while he was supporting rebels in Aquitaine in their fight against Richard, the brother with whom he’d once been in alliance against their father.

RICHARD THE LIONHEART. History’s P.R., which so often gives good publicity to the wrong people, has awarded him an almost saintly aura through the Robin Hood legend. Nobody can deny that he was a fine general and a brave fighter, but he was capable of greed and cruelty On crusade, he once ordered his Moslem prisoners to be slaughtered and their bellies slit open to see if they had swallowed any jewels.

He had no care for England, spending less than a year in that country in all his life. His coronation was a signal for a massacre of the English Jews his father had protected. He’s said to have announced that he would sell London if by doing so, he could raise money for crusade. It may be that his bisexuality-he seems to have done penance for sodomy at one point-drove him to try and placate his Christian God by his effort to win back Jerusalem from the Moslems. His death was caused by an inglorious arrow that hit him while he was in what is now France, besieging the castellan of Châlus who he mistakenly thought had unearthed some treasure.

HENRY II OF ENGLAND was damned by history for calling for the death of his Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas à Becket. He was in France at the time and, in a famous rage at Becket’s refusal to allow reform of a corrupt system, cried: “Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?” A few of his knights, who had their own quarrel with the archbishop, immediately took ship to Canterbury and assassinated the man on the steps of his own cathedral. Thus Thomas became a martyr and saint, and the king a sinner. But it was Henry Plantagenet who plucked England out of the legal Dark Ages by introducing the Common Law (i.e., a comprehensive system of justice available to all his people) and that wonder available to the English-speaking people-trial by jury. Until then, judgment on crime had been left to God, by chucking the accused into a pond, for instance, to see if he sank (innocent) or floated (guilty).