Ariana Franklin - Mistress of the Art of Death

A jackal is always a jackal.

Simon said, “Ulf could come with us tomorrow and show us where the three children were found.”

“That’s at the foot of the ring,” Gyltha objected. “I don’t want the boy near it.”

“We have Mansur with us. The killer is not on the hill, Gyltha, he is in town; from the town, the children were abducted.”

Gyltha looked toward Adelia, who nodded. Safer that Ulf should be in their company than wandering Cambridge following a trail of his own.

Gyltha considered. “What about the sick?”

“Surgery will be closed for the day,” Simon said firmly.

Equally firmly, Adelia said, “On his way to the hill, the doctor will call on yesterday’s worst cases. I want to make sure of the child with the cough. And the amputation needs his dressing changed.”

Simon sighed. “We should have set up as astrologers. Or lawyers. Something useless. I fear the spirit of Hippocrates has lain a yoke of duty across our shoulders.”

“It has.” In Adelia’s limited pantheon, Hippocrates ruled supreme.

Ulf was persuaded to the undercroft where he and the servants slept, Gyltha retired to the kitchen, and the three others resumed their discussion.

Simon drummed his fingers on the table, thinking. He stopped. “Mansur, my good, wise friend, I believe you are right, our killer was in the crowd a year ago, urging the death of Chaim. Doctor, you agree?”

“It could be so,” Adelia said cautiously. “Certainly Mistress Dina believes the mob was being set on with intent.”

Kill the Jews, she thought, the demand beloved of Roger of Acton. How fitting if that creature proved as horrid in action as in person.

She said so out loud, then doubted it. The children’s murderer was surely persuasive. She could not imagine the timorous Mary being tempted by Acton, however many sweetmeats he offered her. The man lacked guile; he was a ranting buffoon, ugly. Nor, despising the race as he did, was he likely to have borrowed from a Jew.

“Not necessarily so,” Simon told her. “I have seen men leave my father’s counting house, condemning his usury while their purses bulged with his gold. Nevertheless, the fellow wears worsted, and we must see if he was in Cambridge on the requisite dates.”

His spirits had risen; he would not be long returning to his family after all. “Au loup!” Beaming at their puzzlement, he said, “We are on the scent, my friends. We are Nimrods. Lord, if I had known the thrill of the chase, I would have neglected my studies for the hunting field. Tyer-hillaut! Is that not the call?”

Adelia said kindly, “I believe the English cry halloo and tallyho.”

“Do they? How quickly language corrupts. Ah, well. However, our quarry is in sight. Tomorrow I shall return to the castle and use this excellent organ”-he tapped his nose, which was twitching like a questing shrew’s-“to sniff out which man it is in this town that owed Chaim money he was reluctant to repay.”

“Not tomorrow,” Adelia said. “Tomorrow we go to Wandlebury Hill.” To search, it would need all three of them. And Ulf.

“The day after, then.” Simon was not to be put off. He raised his flagon first to Adelia, then Mansur. “We are on his track, my masters. A man of maturity in age, on Wandlebury Hill three nights ago, in Cambridge on such and such a day, a man in heavy debt to Chaim and leading the crowd as it bays for the moneylender’s blood. With access to black worsted.” He drank deep and wiped his mouth. “Almost we know the size of his boots.”

“Who may be someone entirely different,” Adelia said.

To that list she would have added a cloak of geniality, for surely if, like Peter, the children had gone willingly to meet their killer, they had been persuaded by charm, even humor.

She thought of the big tax collector.

Gyltha didn’t hold with her employers staying up too late and came in to clear the table while they were yet sitting at it.

“Here,” she said, “let’s have a look at that confit of yourn. I got Matilda B.’s uncle in the kitchen; he’s in the confectionary trade. Might be as he’s seen the like.”

It wouldn’t do in Salerno, Adelia thought, as she trudged upstairs. In her parents’ villa, her aunt made sure that servants not only knew their place but kept to it, speaking-and with respect-when spoken to.

On the other hand, she thought, which is preferable? Deference? Or collaboration?

She brought down the sweetmeat that had been entangled in Mary’s hair and put it with its square of linen on the table. Simon shrank from it. Matilda B.’s uncle poked at it with a finger like pasty and shook his head.

“Are you sure?” Adelia tipped a candle to give better light.

“It’s a jujube,” Mansur said.

“Made with sugar, I reckon,” the uncle said. “Too dear for my trade, we do sweeten with honey.”

“What did you say?” Adelia asked of Mansur.

“It’s a jujube. My mother made them, may Allah be pleased with her.”

“A jujube. ” Adelia said. “Of course. They make them in the Arab quarter in Salerno. Oh, God…” She sank into a chair.

“What is it?” Simon was on his feet. “What?”

“It wasn’t Jew-Jews, it was jujubes.” She squeezed her eyes shut, hardly able to bear a renewal of the picture in which a little boy looked back before disappearing into the darkness of trees.

By the time she opened them, Gyltha had ushered Matilda B. and her uncle out of the room and then come back to it. Uncomprehending faces stared into hers.

Adelia said in English, “ That’s what Little Saint Peter meant. Ulf told us. He said Peter called across the river to his friend Will that he was going for the Jew-Jews. But he didn’t. He said that he was going for the jujubes. It’s a word Will can’t have heard before; he translated it as ‘Jew-Jews.’”

Nobody spoke. Gyltha had taken a chair and sat with them, elbows on the table, her hands to her forehead.

Simon broke the silence: “You are right, of course.”

Gyltha looked up. “That’s what they was tempted with, sure enough. But I never heard of un.”

“An Arab trader may bring them,” Simon pointed out. “They are a sweetmeat of the East. We look for someone with Arab connections.”

“Crusader with a sweet tooth, maybe,” Mansur said. “Crusaders bring them back to Salerno, maybe one brings them to here.”

“That’s right.” Simon was becoming excited again. “That’s right. Our killer has been to the Holy Land.”

Once again, Adelia thought not of Sir Gervase nor Sir Joscelin, but of the tax collector, another crusader.

SHEEP, LIKE HORSES, will not willingly tread on the fallen. The shepherd called Old Walt, following his flock to its day’s grazing on Wandlebury Hill, had seen a gap appear in its woolly flow as if an unseen prophet had called on it to divide. By the time he’d reached the obstruction it had avoided, the ongoing sea of sheep had become seamless once more.

But his dog had set to howling.

The sight of the children’s bodies, a strange weaving laid on the chest of each one, had broken the tenor of a life into which the only enemy was bad weather, or came on four legs and could be chased away.

Now Old Walt was mending it. His dry, creased hands were folded on his crook, a sack over his bent head and shoulders, eyes like beads set deep, contemplating the grass where the corpses had lain, muttering to himself.

Ulf, who sat close by, said he was praying to The Lady. “To heal the place, like.”

Adelia had moved some yards away, had chosen a tussock, and was sitting on it, Safeguard by her side. She’d tried questioning the shepherd, but, though his glance had swept over her, he had not seen her. She’d seen him not seeing her, as if a foreign woman was so far outside his experience as to be invisible to him.