Ariana Franklin - Mistress of the Art of Death

He was taken aback. Here was the confidence, even arrogance, of a skilled artisan. She might be a plumber he’d called in to mend a burst pipe.

Except, he remembered, that she’d stopped his particular pipe from bursting. However, even practicality could do with ornamentation. “Are you as direct with all your patients?” he asked.

“I don’t have patients usually,” she said.

“I’m not surprised.”

And she laughed.

Entrancing, the prior thought. He remembered Horace: Dulce riden tem Lalagen amabo. I will love Lalage, who laughs so sweetly. Yet laughter in this young woman gave her instant vulnerability and innocence, being at such odds with the stern lecturing she’d assumed before, so that his sudden welling affection was not for a Lalage but for a daughter. I must protect her, he thought.

She was holding something out to him. “I have prescribed a diet for you.”

“Paper, by the Lord,” he said. “Where did you obtain paper?”

“The Arabs make it.”

He glanced at the list; her writing was abominable, but he could just decipher it. “Water? Boiled water? Eight cups a day? Madam, would you kill me? The poet Horace tells us that nothing of worth can come from drinkers of water.”

“Try Martial,” she said. “He lived longer. Non est vivere, sed valere vita est. Life’s not just being alive but being well.”

He shook his head in wonder. Humbly, he said, “I beg you, tell me your name.”

“Vesuvia Adelia Rachel Ortese Aguilar,” Adelia said. “Or Dr. Trotula, if you prefer, which is a title conferred on women professors in the school.”

He didn’t prefer. “Vesuvia? A pretty name, most unusual.”

“Adelia,” she said, “I was merely found on Vesuvius.” She was stretching out her hand as if to hold his. He held his breath.

Instead she took his wrist, her thumb on its top, the other fingers pressed into its soft underpart. Her fingernails were short and clean, like the rest of her. “I was exposed on the mountain as a baby. In a crock.” She talked absently, and he saw that she was not really informing him, merely keeping him quiet while she sounded his pulse. “The two doctors who found and raised me thought it possible I was Greek, exposure having been a Greek custom with an unwanted daughter.”

She let go of his wrist, shaking her head. “Too fast,” she said. “Truly, you should lose weight.” He must be preserved, she thought. He would be a loss.

Peculiarity after peculiarity was making the prior’s head reel. And while the Lord might exalt those of low degree, there was no necessity for her to display her ignoble beginnings to all and sundry. Dear, dear. Away from her milieu, she would be as exposed as a snail without its shell. He asked, “You were raised by two men?”

She was affronted, as if he suggested her upbringing had been abnormal. “They were married ,” she said, frowning. “My foster mother is also a Trotula. A Christian-born Salernitan.”

“And your foster father?”

“A Jew.”

Here it was again. Did these people blurt it to the fowls of the air? “So you were brought up in his faith?” It mattered to him; she was a brand, his brand, a most precious brand, to be saved from the burning.

She said, “I have no faith except in what can be proved.”

The prior was appalled. “Do you not acknowledge the Creation? God’s purpose?”

“There was creation, certainly. Whether there was purpose, I don’t know.”

My God, my God, he thought, do not strike her down. I have need of her. She knows not what she says.

She was standing up. Her eunuch had turned the cart ready for its descent to the road. Simon was walking toward them.

The prior said, because even apostates had to be paid, and he pitied this one with all his heart, “Mistress Adelia, I am in your debt and would weight my end of the scales. A boon and, with God’s grace, I will grant it.”

She turned and regarded him, considering. She saw the nice eyes, the clever mind, the goodness; she liked him. But the command of her profession was for his body-not yet, but one day. The gland that had restricted the bladder, weigh it, compare it…

Simon broke into a run; he’d seen that look of hers before. She had no judgment other than in medicine; she was about to ask the prior for his corpse when he died. “My lord, my lord.” He was panting. “My lord, if you would grant a kindness, prevail upon the prioress to let Dr. Trotula view Little Saint Peter’s remains. It may be that she can throw light on the manner of his passing.”

“Indeed?” Prior Geoffrey looked at Vesuvia Adelia Rachel Ortese Aguilar. “And how may you do that?”

“I am a doctor to the dead,” she said.

As they approached the great gate of Barnwell Abbey, they could see Cambridge Castle in the distance on the only height for miles around, its outline made ragged and prickly by the remains of the tower that had been burned the year before and the scaffolding now surrounding it. A pygmy of a fortress compared with the great citadels hung upon the Appenines that Adelia knew, it nevertheless lent a burly charm to the view.

“Of Roman foundation,” Prior Geoffrey said, “built to guard the river crossing, though, like many another, it failed to hold off either Viking or Dane-nor Duke William the Norman, come to that; having destroyed it, he had to build it up again.”

The cavalcade was smaller now; the prioress had hastened ahead, taking her nun, her knight, and cousin Roger of Acton with her. The merchant and his wife had turned off toward Cherry Hinton.

Prior Geoffrey, once more horsed and resplendent at the head of the procession, was forced to lean down to address his saviors on the driving bench of the mule cart. His knight, Sir Gervase, brought up the rear, scowling.

“ Cambridge will surprise you,” the prior was saying. “We have a fine School of Pythagoras, to which students come from all over. Despite its inland position, it is a port, and a busy one, nearly as busy as Dover -though blessedly more free of the French. The waters of the Cam may be sluggish, but they are navigable to their conjunction with the River Ouse that, in turn, discharges into the North Sea. I think I may say that there are few countries of the world’s East that do not come to our quays with goods that are then passed on by mule trains to all parts of England along the Roman roads that bisect the town.”

“And what do you send back, my lord?” Simon asked.

“Wool. Fine East Anglian wool.” Prior Geoffrey smirked with the satisfaction of a high prelate whose grazing provided a good proportion of it. “Smoked fish, eels, oysters. Oh, yes, Master Simon, you may mark Cambridge to be prosperous in trade and, dare I say it, cosmopolitan in outlook.”

Dare he say it? His heart misgave as he regarded the three in the cart; even in a town accustomed to mustached Scandinavians, Low Countrymen in clogs, slit-eyed Russians, Templars, Hospitallers from the Holy Lands, curly-hatted Magyars, snake charmers, could this trio of oddities go unremarked? He looked around him, then leaned lower and hissed. “How do you intend to present yourselves?”

Simon said innocently, “Since our good Mansur has already been credited with your cure, my lord, I thought to continue the deception by setting him up as a medical man with Dr. Trotula and myself as his assistants. Perhaps the marketplace? Some center from which to pursue our inquiries…”

“In that damned cart?” The indignation Simon of Naples had courted was forthcoming. “Would you have the lady Adelia spat on by women traders? Importuned by passing vagabonds?” The prior calmed himself. “I see the need to disguise her profession, lady doctors being unknown in England. Certainly, she would be considered outlandish.” Even more outlandish than she is, he thought. “We shall not have her degraded as some quacksalver’s drab. We are a respectable town, Master Simon, we can do better for you than that.”