Ariana Franklin - Mistress of the Art of Death

“O Son of the Noonday,” Adelia said, bowing. “Eeh l-Halaawa di!”

Mansur inclined his head, but his eyes were on Gyltha, who took a poker to the fire, face averted. “Girt great maypole,” she said.

Oh ho, Adelia thought.

THERE WAS MUCH to smile at in the aping of fine manners, at the reception of hoods, swords, and gloves from guests whose boots and cloaks were muddied by the walk from the river-nearly everybody had been punted from town-at the stiff use of titles by those who had known each other intimately for years, at the rings on female fingers toughened by the making of cheese in their owner’s home dairy.

But there was also much to admire. How friendlier it was to be greeted at the arched door with its carved Norman chevrons by Sir Joscelin himself than announced by an ivory-wanded, high-chinned majordomo. To be handed warming spiced wine on a cool day, not iced wine. To smell mutton, beef, and pork sizzling on spits in the courtyard rather than to pretend with one’s host, as one did in southern Italy, that food was being conjured by a wave of the hand.

Anyway, with the scowling Ulf and Safeguard at her heels rather than the lapdogs carried by pages attendant on some of the other ladies, Adelia was in no position to be supercilious.

Mansur, obviously, had gained status in Cambridge ’s eyes, and his dress and height came in for attention. Sir Joscelin welcomed him with a graceful salute and a “Salaam alaikum.”

The matter of his kard was also resolved with charm. “The dagger is not a weapon,” Sir Joscelin told his porter, who was struggling to wrest it from Mansur’s belt and put it with the guests’ swords. “It is a decoration for such a gentleman as this, as we old crusaders know.”

He turned to Adelia, bowing, and asked her to translate his apology to the good doctor for the tardiness of their invitation. “I feared he would be bored by our rustic amusements, but Prior Geoffrey assured me otherwise.”

Though he had always shown her civility, even when she must have seemed to him to be a foreign trollop, Adelia realized that Gyltha had circulated word that the doctor’s assistant was virtuous.

The prioress’s welcome was offhand through lack of interest, and she was taken aback by her knight’s greeting to both Mansur and Adelia. “You have had dealing with these people, Sir Joscelin?”

“The good doctor saved the foot of my thatcher, ma’am, and probably his life.” But the blue eyes, amused, were directed at Adelia, who feared that Sir Joscelin knew who had performed the amputation.

“My dear girl, my dear girl.” Prior Geoffrey’s grip on her arm propelled her away. “How beautiful you look. Nec me meminisse pigebit Adeliae, dum memor ipse mei, dum spiritus hos regit artus. ”

She smiled up at him; she had missed him. “Are you well, my lord?”

“Pissing like a racehorse, I thank you.” He bent toward her ear so that she should hear him above the noise of conversation. “And how goes the investigation?”

They had been remiss not to keep him informed; that they had been able to investigate as much as they had was due to this man, but they’d been so busy. “We have made ground and hope to make more tonight,” she told him. “May we report to you tomorrow? Particularly, I want to ask you about…”

But there was the tax collector himself, two yards away and staring at her over the head of the crowd. He began to wade through an intervening group toward her. He looked less plump than he had.

He bowed. “Mistress Adelia.”

She nodded to him. “Is Master Simon with you?”

“He is delayed at the castle.” He gave her a conspiratorial wink. “Having to escort the sheriff and his lady here, I was forced to leave him to his studies. He begged me to tell you he will attend later. May I say…”

Whatever he wished to say was interrupted by a trumpet call. They were to dine.

Her fingers raised high on his, Prior Geoffrey joined the procession to take Adelia into the hall, Mansur at his side. There they had to separate, he to the top table that stood across the dais at one end, she and Mansur to their more lowly position. She was interested to see where this would be; precedence was a formidable concern for host and guest alike.

Adelia had witnessed her Salerno aunt near to collapse from the worry of placing highborn guests at table in an order that would not mortally offend one or the other. Theoretically, the rules were clear: a prince to equal an archbishop, bishop to an earl, baron in fief before a visiting baron, and so on down the line. But suppose a legate, equal to a visiting baron, was papal-where did he sit? What if the archbishop had crossed the prince, as was so often the case? Or vice versa? Which was even more frequent. Fisticuffs, feuds could result from the unintended insult. And the poor host always to blame.

It was a matter that had exercised even Gyltha, whose vicarious honor was involved, and who had also been called to Grantchester for the night to do interesting things with eels in its kitchens. “I’ll be a-watching, and if Sir Joscelin do put any of you below the salt, that’s the last barrel of eels he do get from me.”

As she entered, Adelia glimpsed Gyltha’s head poking out anxiously from behind a door.

She could sense tension, see eyes glancing left and right as Sir Joscelin’s marshal ushered the guests to their places. The lower pecking orders, particularly self-made men whose ambition outran their birth, were as sensitive as the high, perhaps more so.

Ulf had already done some scouting. “He’s up here, and you’re down there,” he said, jerking a thumb back and forth between Adelia and Mansur. He adopted the slow, careful baby talk he always used to Mansur. “You. Sitty. Here.”

Sir Joscelin had been generous, Adelia thought, relieved for Gyltha’s sake-and also for her own; Mansur was touchy about his dignity, and, decoration or not, he had a dagger in his belt. While he hadn’t been put at the top table with the host and hostess, prior, sheriff, et cetera, nor could he expect to be, he was quite near it on one of the long trestles that ran the length of the great hall. The lovely young nun who had allowed Adelia to look at Little Saint Peter’s bones was on his left. Less happily, Roger of Acton had been placed opposite him.

Positioning the tax collector must have called for considerable reflection, she thought. Unpopular in his calling, but nevertheless the king’s man and, at the moment, the sheriff’s right hand. Sir Joscelin had opted for safety as far as Sir Rowley Picot was concerned. He was next to the sheriff’s wife, making her laugh.

As ostensibly a mere female potion-mixing doctor’s attendant, and foreign at that, Adelia found herself on another of the trestles in the body of the hall toward its lower end-though several positions above the ornate salt cellar that marked the division between guests and those serfs who were present to fulfill Christ’s command that the poor be fed. The even poorer were gathered in the courtyard round a brazier, waiting for the scraps.

She was joined on her right by the huntsman, Hugh, his face as impassive as ever, though he bowed to her courteously enough. So did an elderly little man she did not know who took his place on her left.

She was unhappy to see that Brother Gilbert had been placed directly across from her. So was he.

Trenchers were brought round, and there was covert slapping by parents of their young people’s hands as they reached to break off a piece, for there was much to happen before the bread could have food put upon it. Sir Joscelin must declare his fealty for his liege, Prioress Joan, which he did on one knee and with a presentation of his rent, six milk-white doves in a gilt cage.