Ariana Franklin - Mistress of the Art of Death

They were looking across the river at a large and imposing mansion with a lawn that led down to a small pier. Closed shutters on every window and weeds growing from the gutters showed it to be abandoned.

“Chief Jew’s place,” Ulf said.

“Chaim’s house? Where Peter was assumed to have been crucified?”

The boy nodded. “Only he weren’t. Not then.”

“My information is that a woman saw the body hanging in one of the rooms.”

“Martha,” the boy said, his tone putting the name into the same category as rheumatism, unadmired but to be put up with. “That’ll say anything to get her bloody noticed.” As if he’d gone too far in condemning a fellow Cambriensan, he added, “I ain’t saying her never, I’m saying her never bloody see it when her says she did. Like old Peaty. Look here.”

They were off again, past Saint Radegund’s willow and its stall of branches, to the bridge.

Here was where a man delivering peat to the castle had seen two Jews casting a bundle, presumed to be the body of Little Peter, into the Cam. She said, “The peat seller was also mistaken?”

The boy nodded. “Old Peaty, he’m half blind and a wormy old liar. He didn’t see nothing. Acause…”

Now they were returning the way they’d come, back to the spot opposite Chaim’s house.

“Acause,” said Ulf, pointing to the empty pier protruding into the water, “A cause that’s where they found the body. Caught under them bloody stanchions like. So nobody threw nothing over the bridge acause…?”

He looked at her expectantly; this was a test.

“Because,” Adelia said, “bodies do not float upstream.”

The worldly wise eyes were suddenly amused, like those of a teacher whose student had unexpectedly come up to scratch. She’d passed.

But if the testimony of the peat seller was so obviously false, thus casting doubt on that of the woman who claimed that only a little while before, she had seen the crucified body of the child in Chaim’s house, why had the finger of guilt pointed straight at the Jews?

“Acause they bloody did it,” the boy said, “only not then.” He gestured with a grubby hand for her to sit down on the grass, then sat beside her. He began talking fast, allowing her entrance into a world of juveniles who formed theory based on data differently observed and at odds with the conclusions of adults.

Adelia had difficulty following not only the accent but the patois; she leaped onto phrases she could recognize as if jumping from tussock to tussock across a morass.

Will, she gathered, was a boy of about Ulf’s age, and he had been on the same errand as Peter, to gather pussy willow for Palm Sunday decoration. Will lived in Cambridge proper, but he and the boy from Trumpington had encountered each other at Saint Radegund’s tree, where both had been attracted by the sight of the wedding celebrations on Chaim’s lawn across the river. Will had thereupon accompanied Peter over the bridge and through the town in order to see what was to be seen in the stables at the back of Chaim’s house.

Afterward, Will had left his companion to take the needed willow branches back home to his mother.

There was a pause in the narration, but Adelia knew there was more to come-Ulf was a born storyteller. The sun was warm, and it was not unpleasant to sit in the dappling shade of the willows, though Safeguard’s coat had acquired something noisome on the walk that became more pungent as it dried. Ulf, with his prehensile little feet in the river, complained of hunger. “Give us a penny and I’ll go to the pie shop for us.”

“Later.” Adelia prodded him on. “Let me recapitulate. Will went home and Peter disappeared into Chaim’s house, never to be seen again.”

The child gave a mocking sniff. “Never to be seen by any bugger ’cept Will.”

“Will saw him again?”

It had been later that day, getting dark. Will had returned to the Cam to bring a supper pail to his father, who was working into the night caulking one of the barges ready for the morning.

And Will on the Cambridge side had seen Peter across the river, standing on the left bank-“Here he was, right here. Where we’re bloody sitting.” Will had called out to Peter that he should be getting home.

“So he ought’ve,” Ulf added, virtuously, “you get caught in them Trumpington marshes of a night, will o’the wisps lead you down to the Pit.”

Adelia ignored will o’the wisps, not knowing, nor caring, what they were. “Go on.”

“So Peter, he calls back he’s going to meet someone for the Jew-Jews.”

“Ju-jus?”

“Jew- Jews .” Ulf was impatient, twice prodding a finger in the air toward Chaim’s house. “Jew-Jews, that’s what he said. He was going to meet someone for the Jew-Jews, and would Will come with him. But Will says no, and he’s bloody glad he did, acause that ’ s when nobody saw Peter after.”

Jew-Jews. Meeting someone for the Jew-Jews? Running an errand on the Jew-Jews’ behalf? And why that infantile term? There were a hundred derogatory terms for Jews; since she’d been in England she’d heard most of them, but not that one.

She puzzled over it, recreating the scene at the river on that night. Even today in full sunlight, even with the crowd around Saint Radegund’s tree farther up, this bit of bank was quiet, forest and parkland closing in behind it. How shadowy it would have been then.

Peter’s character, she thought, emerged from the narrative as fey, romantic; Ulf had described a child more easily distracted than the dependable Will.

She saw him now: a small figure, waving to his friend, pale among the dusk of the trees, disappearing into them forever.

“Did Will inform anyone of this?”

Will had not, at least not the adults. Too scared the bloody Jews would come after him next. And right to be so, in Ulf’s opinion. Only to his peers, that knee-high, hidden, disregarded, secret world of childhood camaraderie, had Will committed his secret.

The result, in any case, had been the desired one: The Jews had been accused and the perpetrator and his wife punished.

Leaving the ground clear for the murderer to kill again, Adelia thought.

Ulf was watching her. “You want more? There’s more. Get your boots wet, though.”

He showed her his final proof that Peter had returned to Chaim’s house later that night, proof of Chaim’s guilt. Because she had to scramble down the bank to the river’s edge and bend low, it did indeed involve getting her feet wet. And the bottom of her skirt. And a considerable amount of Cambridge silt over the rest of her. Safeguard came with them.

It was when the three emerged back onto the bank that darker shadows than those of the trees fell across them.

“God’s eyes, it’s the foreign bitch,” Sir Gervase said.

“Rising as Aphrodite from the river,” Sir Joscelin said.

They were in hunting leathers, sitting their sweat-flecked horses like gods. The corpse of a wolf slung in front of Sir Joscelin had a cloak lain over it from which a dripping muzzle hung down, still caught in the rictus of a snarl.

The huntsman who’d accompanied them on the pilgrimage was in the background, holding three wolfhounds on a leash, each one of which was big enough to pick Adelia up and carry her off. The dogs’ eyes watched her mildly from rough, mustachioed faces.

She would have walked away, but Sir Gervase kneed his horse forward so that she and Ulf and Safeguard were in a triangle formed on two sides by horses with the river as its base behind them.

“We should ask ourselves what our visitor to Cambridge is doing paddling in the mud, Gervase.” Sir Joscelin was amused.