Ariana Franklin - Mistress of the Art of Death

A list of prioresses declared that Joan had taken up her position only two years previously. The church’s general disrepair showed she lacked enthusiasm for it. Her more secular interest was suggested by the painting of a horse with the subscription: “Braveheart. A.D. 1151-A.D. 1169. Well Done, Thou Good and Faithful Servant.” A bridle and bit hung from the wooden fingertips of a statue to Saint Mary.

The couple in front had now reached the reliquary. They dropped to their knees, allowing Adelia to see it for the first time.

She caught her breath. Here in a white blaze of candles was transcendence to forgive all the grossness that had gone before. Not just the glowing reliquary but the young nun at its head who knelt, still as stone, her face tragic, her hands steepled in prayer, brought to life a scene from the Gospels: a mother, her dead child; together they made a scene of tender grace.

Adelia’s neck prickled. She was suddenly ravished by the wish to believe. Here, surely, in this place was radiant truth to sweep doubt up to Heaven for God to laugh at.

The couple was praying. Their son was in Syria -she’d heard them talking of him. Together, as if they’d been practicing, they whispered, “Oh holy child, if you’d mention our boy to the Lord and send him home safe, we’d be grateful evermore.”

Let me believe, God, Adelia thought. A plea as pure and simple as this must prevail. Only let me believe. I am lonely for belief.

Holding each other, the man and woman moved away. Adelia knelt. The nun smiled at her. She was the shy little one who had accompanied the prioress to Canterbury and back, but now timidity had been transfigured into compassion. Her eyes were loving. “Little Saint Peter will hear you, my sister.”

The reliquary was shaped like a coffin and had been placed on top of a carved stone tomb so that it should be on eye level with those who knelt to it. This, then, was where the convent’s money had gone-into a long, jewel-encrusted casket on which a master goldsmith had wrought domestic and agricultural scenes depicting the life of a boy, his martyrdom by fiends, and his ascension to Paradise borne upward by Saint Mary.

Inset along one side was mother-of-pearl so thin that it acted as a window. Peering into it, Adelia could see only the bones of a hand that had been propped up on a small velvet pillow to assume the attitude of benediction.

“You may kiss his knuckle, if you wish.” The nun pointed to a monstrance lying on a cushion on top of the reliquary. It resembled a Saxon brooch and had a knobbled, tiny bone set in gold among precious stones.

It was the trapezium bone of the right hand. The glory faded. Adelia returned to herself. “Another penny to view the whole skeleton,” she said.

The nun’s white brow-she was beautiful-furrowed. Then she leaned forward, removed the monstrance, and lifted the reliquary’s lid. As she did so, her sleeve crumpled to show an arm blackened with bruises.

Adelia, shocked, looked at her; they beat this gentle, lovely girl. The nun smiled and smoothed her sleeve down. “God is good,” she said.

Adelia hoped He was. Without asking permission, she picked up one of the candles and directed its flame toward the bones.

Bless him, they were so small. Prioress Joan had magnified her saint in her mind; the reliquary was too large; the skeleton was lost in it. She was reminded of a little boy dressed in clothes too big for him.

Tears prickled Adelia’s eyes even as they took in the fact that the only distortion of the hands and feet was from the missing trapezoid. No nails had been hammered into these extremities, neither was the rib cage or spine punctured. The wound from a spear that Prior Geoffrey had described to Simon had more likely been due to the process of mortification swelling the body beyond what the skin could bear. The stomach had split open.

But there, around the pelvic bones, were the same sharp, irregular chippings she had seen on the other children. She had to stop herself from putting her hand into the reliquary to lift them out for examination, but she was almost sure; the boy had been repeatedly stabbed with that distinctive blade of a kind she had never seen before.

“Hey, missus.” The line behind her was becoming restive.

Adelia crossed herself and walked away, putting her penny onto the table of the clerk at the door. “Are you cured, mistress?” he asked her. “I must record any miracles.”

“You may put down that I feel better,” she said.

“Justified” would have been a more accurate word; she knew where she was now. Little Saint Peter had not been crucified; he had died even more obscenely. Like the others.

And how to declare that to a coroner’s inquest? she thought, sourly. I, Dr. Trotula, have physical proof that this boy did not die on a cross but at the hands of a butcher who still walks among you.

Play that to a jury knowing nothing of anatomical sciences and caring less, demonstrated to them by a foreign woman.

It wasn’t until she was outside in the air that she realized Ulf had not come in with her. She found him sitting on the ground by the gates with his arms round his knees.

It occurred to Adelia that she had been unthinking. “Were you acquainted with Little Saint Peter?”

Labored sarcasm was addressed to the Safeguard. “Never went to bloody school with un wintertime, did I? ’Course I never.”

“I see. I am sorry.” She had been thoughtless; the skeleton back there was once a schoolfellow and a friend to this one, who, presumably, must grieve for him. She said politely, “However, not many of us can say we attended lessons with a saint.”

The boy shrugged.

Adelia was unacquainted with children; mostly she dealt with dead ones. She saw no reason to address them other than as cognitive human beings, and when they did not respond, like this one, she was at a loss.

“We will go back to Saint Radegund’s tree,” she said. She wanted to talk to the nuns there.

They retraced their steps. A thought struck Adelia. “By any chance did you see your schoolfellow on the day he disappeared?”

The boy rolled his eyes at the dog in exasperation. “Easter that was. Easter me and Gran was still in the fens.”

“Oh.” She walked on. It had been worth a try.

Behind her, the boy addressed the dog: “Will did, though. Will was with him, wasn’t he?”

Adelia turned round. “Will?”

Ulf tutted; the dog was being obtuse. “Him and Will was picking pussy willow both.”

There’d been no mention of a Will in the account of Little Saint Peter’s last day that Prior Geoffrey had given to Simon and that Simon had passed on to her. “Who is Will?”

When the child was about to speak to the dog, Adelia put her hand on the boy’s head and screwed it round to face her. “I would prefer it if you talked directly to me.”

Ulf retwisted his neck so that he could look back at the Safeguard. “We don’t like her,” he told it.

“I don’t like you, either,” Adelia pointed out, “but the matter at issue is who killed your schoolmate, how, and why. I am skilled in the investigation of such things, and in this case I have need of your local knowledge-to which, since you and your grandmother are in my employment, I am entitled. Our liking for each other, or lack of it, is irrelevant.”

“Jews bloody did it.”

“Are you sure?”

For the first time, Ulf looked straight at her. Had the tax collector been with them at that moment, he would have seen that, like Adelia’s when she was working, the boy’s eyes aged the face they were set in. Adelia saw an almost appalling shrewdness.

“You come along o’ me,” Ulf said.

Adelia wiped her hand down her skirt-the child’s hair where it stuck out from his cap had been greasy and quite possibly inhabited-and followed him. He stopped.