Ariana Franklin - Mistress of the Art of Death

He blinked at his wine cup as if seeing it for the first time. “What would my Becca say to all this?” He took a sip.

Adelia and Mansur stayed quiet; there was more-something that had been prowling outside was going to come in.

“No”-Simon was speaking slowly now-“no, there is another explanation. Not one I like, but it must be considered. Almost certainly, our presence at the hill precipitated the removal of the bodies. What if, instead of being spotted by a killer who was already in situ-a most fortuitous happening-what if we brought him with us ?”

It was in the room now.

Simon said, “While we were attending Prior Geoffrey, what were the others of our party doing in that long night? Eh? My friends, we have to consider the possibility that our killer is one of the pilgrims we joined at Canterbury.”

The night beyond the lattices became darker.

Soft beds were something else Gyltha didn’t hold with. Adelia had wanted a mattress stuffed with goosedown such as she’d slept on in Salerno, and said so. Cambridge skies, after all, were stippled with geese.

“Goose feathers is buggers to wash,” Gyltha said. “Straw’s cleaner, change that every day.”

There was an unsought tension between them; Adelia had requested more salad with her meals, a demand Gyltha treated as lèse-majesté. Now, here was a moment of test; the response would decide who had future authority.

On the one hand, the process of running even such a modest household as this was beyond Adelia, who had few accomplishments necessary for it, knowing little of provisioning nor dealing with any merchants other than apothecaries. She could neither spin nor weave; her knowledge of herbs and spices was medical rather than culinary. Her sewing was restricted to mending torn flesh or cobbling together cadavers she had taken apart.

In Salerno, these things had not mattered; the blessed man who was her foster father had early recognized a brain rivaling his own and, because that was Salerno, had put her to becoming a doctor as he and his wife were. The organization of their large villa was left to his sister-in-law, a woman who had run it as if on greased wheels without ever raising her voice.

To all this, Adelia added the fact that her stay in England was to be temporary and would leave her no time for domesticity.

On the other hand, she was not prepared to be bullied by a servant. She said sharply, “See to it that the straw is indeed changed every day.”

A compromise, honors temporarily in Gyltha’s favor, the final outcome still to be decided. Not now, though, because her head ached.

Last night the Safeguard had shared the solar with her-another battle lost. To Adelia’s protests that the dog stank too much to bed anywhere but outside, Gyltha had said, “Prior’s orders. That’s to go where you go.” And so the animal’s snores had mingled with unaccustomed calls and shrieks from the river, just as her dream had been made terrible by Simon’s suggestion that the killer’s face would be familiar to them.

Before retiring, he’d expanded on it: “Who slept by that campfire on the road and who left it? A monk? A knight? Huntsman? Tax collector? Did any of them steal away to gather up those poor bones-they were light, remember, and perhaps he took a horse from the lines. The merchant? One of the squires? Minstrel? Servants? We must consider them all.”

Whichever one it was had swooped through her solar window last night in the shape of a magpie. It carried a living child in its claws. Sitting on Adelia’s chest, it dismembered the body, a lidless eye gleaming perkily at her as it pecked out the child’s liver.

It was a visitation so vivid that she woke up gasping, convinced a bird had killed the children.

“Where is Master Simon?” she asked Gyltha. It was early; the west-facing windows of the hall gave onto a meadow that was still shadowed by the house until its decline approached the river, where sunlight was shining on a Cam so polished, so deep and flat and wandering among the willows that Adelia had to suppress a sudden urge to go and dabble in it like a duck.

“Gone out. Wanted to know where there was wool merchants.”

Irritably, Adelia said, “We were to go to Wandlebury Hill today.” It had been agreed last night that their priority was to discover the killer’s lair.

“So he did say, but acause Master Darkie can’t go, too, he are going termorrer.”

“Mansur,” Adelia snapped. “His name’s Mansur. Why can’t he go?”

Gyltha beckoned her to the end of the hall and into Old Benjamin’s shop. “Acause of them.”

Standing on tiptoe, Adelia looked through one of the arrow slits.

A crowd of people was by the gate, some of them sitting as if they had been there a long time.

“Waiting to see Dr. Mansur,” Gyltha said with emphasis. “’S why you can’t go pimbling off to the hills.”

Here was a complication. They should have foreseen it but, in allowing Mansur to be set up as a doctor, an untried, foreign doctor in a busy town, it had not occurred to them that he would be burdened with patients. News of their encounter with the prior had spread; a cure for ills was to be found in Jesus Lane.

Adelia was dismayed. “But how can I treat them?”

Gyltha shrugged. “From the look, most of ’em’s dying anyway. Reckon as them’s Little Saint Peter’s failures.”

Little Saint Peter, the small, miraculous skeleton whose bones the prioress had trumpeted like a fairground barker all the way from Canterbury.

Adelia sighed for him, for the desperation that sent the suffering people to him, and, now, the disappointment that brought them to her. The truth was that, except in a few cases, she could do no better. Herbs, leeches, potions, even belief could not hold back the tide of disease to which most of humanity was subject. She wished it wasn’t so. God, she wished it.

It was a long time, in any case, that she’d had to do with living patients-other than those in extremis when no ordinary doctor was available, as the prior had been.

However, pain had gathered outside her door; she could not ignore it; something had to be done. Yet if she were to be seen practicing medicine, every doctor in Cambridge would go running to his bishop. The Church had never approved of human interference in disease, having held for centuries that prayer and holy relics were God’s method of healing and anything else was satanic. It allowed treatment to be carried out in the monasteries and, perforce, tolerated lay doctors as long as they did not overstep the mark, but women, being intrinsically sinful, were necessarily banned except in the case of authenticated midwives-and they had to take care not to be accused of witchcraft.

Even in Salerno, that most esteemed center of medicine, the Church had tried to enforce its rule that physicians should be celibate. It had failed, as it had failed in prohibiting the city’s women practitioners. But that was Salerno, the exception which proved the rule…

“What are we to do?” she said. Margaret, most practical of women, would have known. There’s ways round everything. Just you leave it to old Margaret.

Gyltha tutted. “What you whinnicking for? ’S easy as kiss me hand. You act like you’m the doctor’s assistant, his potions mixer or summat. They tell you in good English what’s up with they. You say it to the doctor in that gobble you talk, he gobbles back, and you tell ’em what to do.”

Crudely put but with a fine simplicity. If treatment were needed, it could appear that Dr. Mansur was instructing his assistant. Adelia said, “That’s rather clever.”

Gyltha shrugged. “Should keep us out the nettles.”