Ariana Franklin - Mistress of the Art of Death

Picot is right , she thought. Simon should not be put into the ground unheard . The spirit of the man himself would see it as greater desecration that nobody should listen to what his body had to say.

She sat down on a stone stair and composed herself, directing her mind to the mechanism of death by drowning.

It was difficult. Without being able to cut a section of lung to see if it had ballooned and contained silt or weed, the diagnosis would largely depend on excluding other causes of death. In fact, she thought, there was unlikely to be any sign at all to tell them if it were murder. She could probably establish that it was drowning, whether or not Simon was alive when he went into the water, but that would still beg the question: Had he fallen or been pushed?

Old Benjamin’s voice, “ Lord, thou has been our dwelling place in all generations…” And the thud of the tax collector’s boots coming heavily down the stairs to her.

“He looks peaceful. What do we do?”

She said, “Is there froth coming from the mouth and nostrils?”

“No. They’ve washed him.”

“Press on the chest. If there is froth, wipe it away and press again.”

“I don’t know if the rabbi will let me. Gentile hands.”

Adelia stood up. “Don’t ask him, just do it.” She had become doctor to the dead again.

Rowley hurried back upstairs.

“…Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night, nor for the arrow that flieth by day…”

She leaned on the triangle of the arrow slit beside her, absentmindedly stroking Safeguard’s head and looking out at the view she had seen before, of the river and the trees and hills beyond it, a Virgilian pastoral.

But I am afraid of the terror by night , she thought.

Sir Rowley was beside her again. “Froth,” he said, shortly, “both times. Pinkish.”

Alive in the water, then. Indicative but not proof; he could have suffered a disruption of the heart and toppled into the river because of it. “Is there bruising?” she asked.

“I can’t see any. There are cuts between his fingers. Old Benjamin said they found plant stalks in them. Does that mean something?”

Again, it meant that Simon was alive when he went into the river; in the terrible minute or so that it took for him to die, he’d torn at reeds and weed that had been retained as his hands closed in the fatal spasm.

“Look for bruising on his back,” she said, “but don’t lay him on his face; it’s against the law.”

This time she could hear him arguing with the rabbi, Rowley’s voice and Rabbi Gotsce’s both sharp. Old Benjamin ignoring them both. “He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; he leadeth me beside the still waters.”

Sir Rowley won. He came back to her. “There’s a spread of bruising here and here,” he said, putting his hand over one shoulder and then the other to indicate a line across his upper back. “Was he beaten?”

“No. It happens sometimes. The struggle to get back to the surface ruptures muscles around the shoulders and neck. He drowned, Picot. That is all I can tell you, Simon drowned.”

Rowley said, “There’s one very distinct bruise. Here.” This time he crooked his arm around his back, waggling his fingers and turning round so that she could see them. It was a spot between the lower shoulder blades. “What caused that?”

Seeing her frown, he spat on the stair at his feet and knelt down to stir a small wet circle on the stone. “Like this. Round. Distinct, as I say. What is it?”

“I don’t know.” Exasperation overtook her. With their petty laws, with their fear of women’s incipient impurity, with their nonsense , they were erecting a barrier between doctor and patient. Simon was calling out to her, and they wouldn’t let her hear him. “Excuse me,” she said.

She went up the stairs and marched into the room. The body lay on its side. It took less than a moment before she marched out again.

“He was murdered,” she told Rowley.

“A barge pole?” he asked.

“Probably.”

“They held him down with it?”

“Yes,” she said.

The curtain wall was a rampart from which archers could repel-and during the war of Stephen and Matilda had repelled-an attack on the castle. Today it was quiet and empty except for a sentry doing his rounds of the allure and the cloaked woman with a dog standing by one of the crenels to whom he bade an unanswered good-day.

A fine afternoon. The westerly breeze had pushed the rain farther east and was scudding lambswool clouds across a laundered blue sky, making the pretty, busy scene Adelia looked down on prettier and busier by billowing the canvas roofs of the market stalls, fluttering the pennants of the boats moored by the bridge, swaying the willow branches farther down into a synchronized dance, and whisking the river into glistening irregular wavelets.

She didn’t see it.

How did you do it? she was asking Simon’s murderer. What did you say to tempt him into the position enabling you to push him into the water? It would not have taken much strength to hold him down by the pole jabbed into his back; you would have leaned your weight on it, making it impossible to dislodge.

A minute, two, while he scrabbled like a beetle, until that life of complexity and goodness was extinguished.

Oh, dear heaven, what had it been like for him? She saw flurries of silt cloud the encompassing, entrapping weed, watched the rising bubbles of the last remnants of breath. She began to gasp in vicarious panic…as if she were taking in water, not clean Cambridge air.

Stop it. This does not serve him.

What will?

Undoubtedly, to bring his killer, who was also the children’s, to the seat of justice, but how much more difficult that would be without him. “We may have to do that very thing before this business is finished, Doctor. Think as he thinks.”

And she had answered, “Then you do it. You’re the subtle one.”

Now she must try to enter a mind that saw death as an expedient: in the case of children, pleasurable.

But she could see only the diminution it had brought about. She had become smaller. She knew now that the anger she had felt at the children’s torture had been that of a deus ex machina called down to set matters right. She and Simon had been apart, above the action, its finale, not its continuance. For her, she supposed, it had been a form of superiority-it was not in the play that its gods become protagonists-which Simon’s murder had now removed, casting her among the Cambridge players, as ignorant and as helpless as any of those tiny, breeze-blown, fate-driven figures down there.

She was joined in a democracy of misery to Agnes, sitting outside her beehive hut below; to Hugh the huntsman, who had wept for his niece; to Gyltha and every other man and woman with some beloved soul to lose.

It wasn’t until she heard familiar footsteps approaching along the rampart that she knew she had been waiting for them. The only plank she had been given to hold on to in this maelstrom was the knowledge that the tax collector was as innocent of the murders as she herself. She would have been happy, very happy, to apologize humbly to him for her suspicion-except that he added to her confusion.

To all but her intimates, Adelia liked to appear imperturbable, putting on the kindly but detached manner of one called to profession by the god of medicine. It was a veneer that had helped deflect the impertinence and overfamiliarity and, occasionally, the downright physical presumption with which her fellow students and early patients had offered to treat her. Indeed, she actually thought of herself as withdrawn from humanity, a calm and hidden resort that it could call on in need, though one which did not involve itself in its vulnerability.