Ariana Franklin - Mistress of the Art of Death

“No,” she’d said.

“Or into a child.”

“No.”

“Or a baby.”

“No.”

“Oh, yes,” he’d said, “I have seen it. Does that spoil the Georgics for you?”

“It spoils everything.” Then she’d said, “I cannot continue.”

“Man hovers between Paradise and the Pit,” Gordinus told her cheerfully. “Sometimes rising to one, sometimes swooping to the other. To ignore his capacity for evil is as obtuse as blinding oneself to the heights to which he can soar. It may be that it is all one to the sweep of the planets. You have seen Man’s depths for yourself. I have just read you some lines of his upward flight. Go home, then, Doctor, and put on the blindfold, I do not blame you. But at the same time, plug your ears to the cries of the dead. The truth is not for you.”

She had gone home, to the schools and hospitals to receive the plaudits of those she taught and to whom she administered, but her eyes were unbound now, and her ears unplugged, and she had become pestered by the cries of the dead, so she’d returned to the study of pigs and, when she was ready, to human corpses.

However, in cases like the one on the table before her now, she resumed a metaphorical blindfold so that she could still function, donning self-imposed blinkers to halt a descent into uselessness through despair, a necessary obscurity that permitted sight but allowed her to see not the torn, once immaculate body of a child but instead the familiar corpse of a pig.

The stabbing around the pelvis had left distinctive marks; she had seen knife wounds before, but none like these. The blade of the instrument that had caused them appeared to be much faceted. She would have liked to remove the pelvis for leisurely examination in better light, but she had promised Prior Geoffrey to do no dissection. She clicked her fingers for the man to pass her the slate and chalk.

He studied her while she drew. Slants of sunlight from between the bars of Saint Werbertha’s tiny window fell on her as on a monstrous blowfly hovering over the thing on the table. The gauze smoothed the features of her face into something lepidopteral, pressing strands of hair against her head like flattened antennae. And hmmm, the thing buzzed with the insistence of the feeding, winging, clustering cloud that hovered with her.

She finished the diagram and held out the slate and chalk so that the man could receive them back. “Take them,” she snapped. She was missing Mansur. When Sir Rowley didn’t move, she turned and saw his look. She’d seen it on others. Wearily, she said, almost to herself, “Why do they always want to shoot the messenger?”

He stared back at her. Was that what his anger was?

She came outside, brushing away flies. “This child is telling me what happened to her. With luck, she may even tell me where. From that, with even more luck, we may be able to deduce who. If you do not wish to learn these things, then get to hell. But first, fetch me someone who does.”

She lifted the helmet from her head, clawing her fingers through her hair, a glimpse of dark blond, turning her face to the sun.

It was the eyes, he thought. With her eyes closed, she reverted to her years, which, he saw, numbered a few less than his own, and to something approximating the feminine. Not for him; he preferred them sweeter. And plumper. The eyes, when open, aged her. Cold and dark like pebbles-and with as much emotion. Not surprising, when you considered what they looked on.

But if in truth she could work the oracle…

The eyes turned on him. “Well?”

He snatched the slate and chalk from her hand. “Your servant, mistress.”

“There’s more gauze in there,” she said. “Cover your face, then come in and make yourself useful.”

And manners, he thought, he liked them with manners. But as she retied her mask over her head, squared her skinny shoulders, and marched back into the charnel house, he recognized the gallantry of a tired soldier reentering battle.

The second bundle contained Harold, redheaded son of the eel seller, pupil at the priory school.

“The flesh is better preserved than Mary’s, to the point of mummification. The eyelids have been cut away. Also the genitals.”

Rowley put down the whisk to cross himself.

The slate became covered with unutterable words, except that she uttered them: binding cord. A sharp instrument. Anal insertion.

And, again, chalk.

That interested her. He could tell from the humming. “Chalkland.”

“The Icknield Way is near here,” he told her helpfully. “The Gog Magog hills, where we stopped for the prior, are of chalk.”

“Both children have chalk in their hair. In Harold’s case, some has been embedded in his heels.”

“What does that say?”

“He was dragged through chalk.”

The third bundle contained the remains of Ulric, eight years old, gone missing on Saint Edward’s of this year and which, because his disappearance had taken place more recently than the others’, brought forth frequent hmm s from the examiner-an alert to Rowley, who’d begun to recognize the signs that she had more and better material to investigate.

“No eyelids, no genitals. This one wasn’t buried at all. What was the weather this March in this area?”

“I believe it to have been dry all over East Anglia, ma’am. There was general complaint that newly planted crops were withering. Cold but dry.”

Cold but dry. Her memory, renowned in Salerno, searched the death farm and fell on early-spring pig number 78. About the same weight. That, too, had been dead just over a month in the cold and dry, and was of more advanced decomposition. She would have expected this one to be in an approximately similar state. “Were you kept alive after you went missing?” she asked the body, forgetting that a stranger, and not Mansur, was listening.

“Jesus God, why do you say that?”

She quoted Ecclesiastes as she did to her students: “ To everything there is a season…a time to be born and a time to die; a time to plant, a time to pluck up that which is planted. Also a time to putrefy.”

“So the devil kept him alive? How long?”

“I don’t know. ”

There were a thousand variations that could cause the difference between this corpse and pig 78. She was irritable because she was tired and distressed. Mansur wouldn’t have asked, knowing better than to treat her observations as conversation. “I won’t be drawn on it.”

Ulric also had chalk embedded in his heels.

The sun was beginning to go down by the time each body had been wrapped up again, ready for encoffining. The woman went outside to take off her apron and helmet while Sir Rowley took down the lamps and put them out, leaving the cell and its contents in blessed darkness.

At the door, he knelt as he once had in front of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. That tiny chamber had been barely larger than the one now before him. The table on which the Cambridge children lay was about the same size as Christ’s tomb. It had been dark there, too. Beyond and about had been the conglomeration of altars and chapels that made up the great basilica that the first crusaders had built over the holy places, echoing with the whispers of pilgrims and the chant of Greek Orthodox monks singing their unending hymns at the site of Golgotha.

Here there was only the buzz of flies.

He’d prayed for the souls of the departed then, and for help and forgiveness for himself.

He prayed for them now.

When he came out, the woman was washing herself, laving her face and hands from the bowl. After she had finished, he did the same-she’d lathered the water with soapwort. Crushing the stems, he washed his hands. He was tired; oh, Jesus, he was tired.