Ariana Franklin - Mistress of the Art of Death

“Where are you staying, Doctor?” he asked her.

She looked at him as if she hadn’t seen him before. “What did you say your name was?”

He tried not to be irritated; from the look of her, she was even more weary than he was. “Sir Roland Picot, ma’am. Rowley to my friends.”

Of which, he saw, she was not likely to be one. She nodded. “Thank you for your assistance.” She packed her bag, picked it up, and set off.

He hurried after her. “May I ask what conclusions you draw from your investigation?”

She didn’t answer.

Damn the woman. He supposed that, since he’d written down her notes, she was leaving him to draw his own conclusions, but Rowley, who was not a humble man, was aware that he had encountered someone with knowledge he could not hope to attain. He tried again: “To whom will you report your findings, Doctor?”

No answer.

They were walking through the long shadows of the oaks that fell over the wall of the priory deer park. From the priory chapel came the clap of a bell sounding vespers, and ahead, where the bakery and brew house stood outlined against the dying sun, figures in violet rochets were spilling out of the buildings into the walkways like petals being blown in one direction.

“Shall we attend vespers?” If ever he’d needed the balm of the evening litany, Sir Rowley felt he needed it now.

She shook her head.

Angrily, he said, “Will you not pray for those children?”

She turned and he saw a face ghastly with fatigue and an anger that outmatched his. “I am not here to pray for them,” she said. “I have come to speak for them.”

Returning from the castle that afternoon to the not inconsiderable house that had accommodated the succession of Saint Augustine ’s priors, Prior Geoffrey had yet more arrangements to make.

“She’s waiting for you in your library,” Brother Gilbert said curtly. He didn’t approve of a tête-à-tête between his superior and a woman.

Prior Geoffrey went in and sat himself in the great chair behind his table desk. He didn’t ask the woman to sit down because he knew she wouldn’t; he didn’t greet her, either-there was no need. He merely explained his responsibility for the Salernitans, his problem, and his proposed solution.

The woman listened. Though neither tall nor fat, in her eelskin boots, her muscled arms folded over her apron, gray hair escaping from the sweat-stained roll round her head, she had the massive, feminine barbarity of a sheela-na-gig that turned the prior’s comfortable, book-lined room into a cave.

“Thus I have need of you, Gyltha,” Prior Geoffrey said, finishing. “ They have need of you.”

There was a pause.

“Summer’s a-coming in,” Gyltha said in her deep voice. “Summer I’m busy with eels.”

In late spring, Gyltha and her grandson emerged from the fens wheeling tanks full of squirming, silver eels and settled into their reed-thatched summer residence by the Cam. There, out of a wonderful steam, emerged eels pickled, eels salted, eels smoked, and eels jellied, all of them, thanks to recipes known only to Gyltha, superior to any other and bought up immediately by waiting and appreciative customers.

“I know you are,” Prior Geoffrey said patiently. He sat back in his great chair and reverted to broad East Anglian. “But that’s dang hard work, girl, and you’re getting on.”

“So’re you, bor.”

They knew each other well. Better than most. When a young Norman priest had arrived in Cambridge to take over its parish of Saint Mary’s twenty-five years before, his house had been kept for him by a well-set-up young fenland woman. That they might have been more to each other than employer and employee had not raised an eyebrow, for England’s attitude toward clerical celibacy was tolerant-or slack, depending on which way you looked at it-and Rome had not then begun to shake its fist at “priests’ wives,” as it did now.

Though young Father Geoffrey’s waist had swelled on Gyltha’s cooking, and young Gyltha’s waist had swelled also, though whether from her cooking or something else, nobody knew the truth of it except those two. When Father Geoffrey was called by God to the canonry of Saint Augustine, Gyltha had disappeared into the fenland from which she had come, refusing the allowance offered to her.

“What iffen I throw in a skivvy or two,” the prior said now, winningly. “Bit of cooking, bit of organizing, that’s all.”

“Foreigners,” said Gyltha. “I don’t hold with foreigners.”

Looking at her, the prior was reminded of Guthlac’s description of the fen folk in whom that worthy saint had tried to instill Christianity: “Great heads, long necks, pale faces, and teeth like horses. Save us, from them, O Lord.” But they’d had the means and the independence to resist William the Conqueror longer and more strongly than the rest of the English.

Nor was intelligence lacking among them. Gyltha had it; she was the beau ideal as housekeeper for the ménage Prior Geoffrey had in mind-outré enough, yet sufficiently well known and trusted by the townsfolk of Cambridge to provide a bridge between it and them. If she would agree…

“Weren’t I a foreigner?” he said. “You took me on.”

Gyltha smiled, and for a moment the surprising charm reminded Prior Geoffrey of their years in the priest’s little house next to Saint Mary’s church.

He pressed home his advantage. “Be good for young Ulf.”

“That’s doing well enough at school.”

“When that do bother to come.” Young Ulf’s acceptance at the priory school had been less to do with his cleverness, which was considerable if idiosyncratic, than to Prior Geoffrey’s unconfirmed suspicion that the boy, being Gyltha’s grandson, was also his own. “Sore need of a bit of gentrifying, though, girl.”

Gyltha leaned forward and put a scarred finger on the prior’s writing desk. “What they doing here, bor? You going to tell me?”

“Took ill, didn’t I? Saved my old life, she did.”

“Her? I heard it was the blackie.”

“Her. And not witchery, neither. Proper doctor she is, only best nobody don’t know it.”

There was no point in concealing it from Gyltha, who, if she took on the Salernitans, would find out. In any case, this woman was as close as the seaweeded oysters that she made him a present of every year, of which a fine selection was at this moment in the priory’s ice-house.

“I don’t be sure who sent they three,” he went on, “but they do mean to find out who’s killing the children.”

“Harold.” Gyltha’s face showed no emotion, but her voice was soft; she did business with Harold’s father.

“Harold.”

She nodded. “Weren’t Jews, then?”

“No.”

“Didn’t reckon it was.”

From across the cloisters connecting the prior’s house with the church came the bell calling the brotherhood to vespers.

Gyltha sighed. “Skivvies as promised, and I only do the bloody cooking.”

“Benigne. Deo gratias.” The prior got up and accompanied Gyltha to the door. “Old Tubs still breeding they smelly dogs?”

“Smellier than ever.”

“Bring un with you. Attach it to her, like. If her’s asking questions, it’ll maybe cause trouble. Her needs keeping an eye on. Oh, and they don’t none of ’em eat pork. Or shellfish.” He slapped Gyltha’s rump to send her on her way, folded his arms beneath his apron, and went on his own toward the chapel for vespers.

ADELIA SAT ON A BENCH in the priory’s paradise breathing in the scent of rosemary from the low hedging that bordered the flower bed at her feet and listened to the psalms of vespers filter out of cloister through the evening air across the walled vegetable garden and thence to the paradise with its darkening trees. She tried to empty her mind and let the masculine voices pour salve on the hurt caused by masculine abomination. “Let my prayer be counted as incense before you,” they chanted, “and the lifting of my hands as an evening sacrifice.”