Ariana Franklin - Mistress of the Art of Death

This must be left to Ulf, who, like the shepherd, was a fenlander and therefore claimed a solid position in the landscape.

Such a weird landscape. To her left the land descended to the flatness of the fens and the ocean of alder and willow that kept its secrets. Away to her right, in the distance, was the bare hilltop with its wooded sides where she, Simon, Mansur, and Ulf had spent the last three hours examining the strange depressions in its ground, bending to peer under bushes, looking for a lair where murder had been done-and not finding it.

Light rain came and went as clouds obscured the sun and then let it shine again.

Knowing that a Golgotha was nearby had affected natural sound: the song of warblers, leaves trembling in the rain, the breeze creaking an ancient apple tree, the puffing of Simon the townsman as he stumbled. The crisp sound of sheep tearing mouthfuls of grass had, for her, been overlaid by a heavy silence still vibrating with unheard screams.

She’d been glad of an excuse when, far off, she saw the shepherd, the priory’s shepherd-for these were Saint Augustine sheep-and had gone with Ulf to talk to him, leaving the two men still searching.

For the tenth time, she went over the reasoning that had brought them all to this place. The children had died in chalk, no doubt of it.

They had been found on silt-down there, on a muddy sheepwalk that led eventually to the hill. And, what’s more, found on the very morning after the hill had been disturbed by an ingress of strangers.

Ergo, the corpses had been moved in the night. From their chalk graves. And the nearest chalk, the only possible chalk outcrop from which they could have been carried in the time, was Wandlebury Ring.

She looked toward it, blinking away rain from the latest shower, and saw that Simon and Mansur had disappeared.

They would be scrambling among the deep, dark avenues, made darker by overhanging trees, that had once been the hill’s encircling ditches.

What ancient people had fortified the place with those ditches and for what purpose? She found herself wondering if the children’s was the only blood that had been shed there. Could a place be intrinsically evil and attract to itself the blackness in men’s souls as it had attracted the killer’s?

Or was Vesuvia Adelia Rachel Ortese Aguilar as prey to superstition as an old man muttering spells over a stretch of grass?

“Is he going to talk to us or not?” she hissed at Ulf. “He must know if there’s a cave up there. Something.”

“He don’t go up there no more,” Ulf hissed back. “Says Old Nick dances on that of nights. Them hollows is his footprints.”

“He allows his sheep up there.”

“Best grazing for miles this time of year. His dog’s with ’em. Dog allus tells un if aught’s amiss.”

An intelligent dog, and a mere lift of its lip had sent Safeguard cowering.

She wondered which lady the shepherd was praying to. Mary, mother of Jesus? Or a more ancient mother?

The Church had not managed to banish all the earth gods; for this old man, the depressions on the hilltop would be the hoofprints of a horror that predated Christianity’s Satan by thousands of years.

Into her mind’s eye came the picture of a giant horned beast trampling on the children. She grew cross with herself in consequence-what was the matter with her?

She was also becoming wet and cold. “Ask him if he’s actually seen Old Nick up there, blast him.”

Ulf put the question in a low-voiced singsong that she couldn’t catch. The old man replied in the same tone.

“He don’t go near, he says. And I won’t blame un. He seen the fire o’ nights, though.”

“What fire?”

“Lights. Old Nick’s fire, Walt reckons. The which he dances round.”

“What sort of fire? When? Where?”

But the staccato of questions had disturbed the peace the shepherd was making with the spirit of the place. Ulf gestured for quiet and Adelia returned to her contemplation of the spiritual, good and bad.

Today on the hill, she had been glad that beneath her tunic was the little wooden crucifix that Margaret had given to her, though it was for Margaret’s sake that she always wore it.

It wasn’t that she had anything against the faith of the New Testament; left alone, it would be a tender and compassionate religion; indeed, on her knees beside her dying nurse, it had been Margaret’s Jesus she had beseeched to save her. He hadn’t, but Adelia forgave him that; Margaret’s loving old heart had grown too tired to go on-and at least the end had been peaceful.

No, what Adelia objected to was the Church’s interpretation of God as a petty, stupid, moneygrubbing, retrograde, antediluvian tyrant who, having created a stupendously varied world, had forbidden any inquiry into its complexity, leaving His people flailing in ignorance.

And the lies. At seven years old, learning her letters at Saint Giorgio’s convent, Adelia had been prepared to believe what the nuns and the Bible told her-until Mother Ambrose had mentioned the ribs…

The shepherd had finished his prayers and was telling Ulf something.

“What does he say?”

“He’s saying about the bodies, what the devil done to them.”

It was noticeable that Old Walt addressed Ulf as an equal. Perhaps, Adelia thought, the fact that the boy could read raised him to a level in the shepherd’s eyes that obviated the difference in their ages.

“What’s he saying now?”

“He’s saying the which he never saw the like of it, not since Old Nick was here last time and did similar to some of the sheep.”

“Oh.” A wolf or something.

“Says he’d hoped he’d seen the last of the bugger then, but he’s come back.”

What Old Nick did to the sheep. Sharply, Adelia asked, “What did he do?” And then she asked, “What sheep? When?”

Ulf put out the question and received the answer. “Year of the great storm, that was.”

“For God’s sake. Oh, never mind. Where did he put the carcasses? ”

AT FIRST ADELIA AND ULF used tree branches as spades, but the chalk was too friable to be raised in chunks, and they were reduced to digging with their hands. “What we looking for?” Ulf had asked, not unreasonably.

“Bones, boy, bones. Somebody, not a fox, not a wolf, not a dog…some body attacked those sheep, he said so.”

“Old Nick, he said.”

“There isn’t any Old Nick. The wounds were similar, didn’t he say?”

Ulf’s face went dull, a sign-she was beginning to know him-that he hadn’t enjoyed hearing the shepherd’s description of the wounds.

And perhaps he should not have heard it, she thought, but it was too late now. “Keep digging. In what year was the great storm?”

“Year Saint Ethel’s bell tower fell down.”

Adelia sighed. Seasons went by uncounted in Ulf’s world, birthdays passed without recognition, only unusual events recorded the passage of time. “How long ago was that?” She added, helpfully, “In yuletides?”

“Weren’t yuletide, were prim-e-rose time.” But the look on Adelia’s chalk-streaked face urged Ulf to put his mind to it. “Six, seven Christmases gone.”

“Keep digging.”

Six, seven years ago.

That, then, was when there had been a sheep stall on Wandlebury Ring. Old Walt said he used to shut the flock in it overnight. Not anymore, not since the morning he’d found its door torn open and carnage in the grass around it.

Prior Geoffrey, on being told, had discounted his shepherd’s tale of the devil. A wolf, Prior Geoffrey had said, and set the hunt to find it.

But Walt knew it wasn’t a wolf; wolves didn’t do that, not that. He had dug a pit at the bottom of the hill, away from the grazing, and carried the carcasses down one by one to bury them in it, “laying them out reverent,” as he told Ulf.