Ariana Franklin - Mistress of the Art of Death

A more curious passage no man ever took in a Christian country, he told her, because Christians played so little part in it. His helpers were the disregarded: Arabs and Jews, artisans in the jewel trade, trinket makers, pawnbrokers, moneylenders, workers in alleys where Christian townsmen and women sent their servants with objects for mending, ghetto dwellers-the sort of people to whom a pursued and desperate killer with a jewel to sell was forced to apply for money.

“It wasn’t the France I knew; I might have been in a different country altogether. I was a blind man in it, and they were my knotted string. They’d ask me, ‘Why do you hunt this man?’ And I would answer, ‘He killed a child.’ It was enough. Yes, their cousin, aunt, sister-in-law’s son had heard of a stranger in the next town with a bauble to sell-and at a knockdown price, for he must sell it quickly.”

Rowley paused. “Are you aware that every Jew and Arab in Christendom seems to know every other Jew and Arab?”

“They have to,” Adelia said.

Rowley shrugged. “Anyway, he never stayed anywhere long enough for me to catch up with him. By the time I got to the next town, he’d taken the road north. Always north. I knew he was heading for somewhere particular.”

There were other, dreadful knots in the string. “He killed at Rhodes before I got there, a little Christian girl found in a vineyard. The whole island was in uproar.” At Marseilles there’d been another death, this time of a beggar boy snatched from the roadside, whose corpse had suffered such injuries that even the authorities, not usually troubled by the fate of vagabonds, had issued a reward for the killer.

In Montpellier another boy, this one only four years old.

Rowley said, “‘ By their deeds ye shall know them,’ the Bible tells us. I knew him by his. He marked my map with children’s bodies; it was as if he couldn’t go more than three months without sating himself. When I lost him, I only had to wait to hear the scream of a parent echoing from one town to another. Then I took horse to follow it.”

He also found the women Rakshasa left in his wake. “He has an attraction for women, the Lord only knows why; he doesn’t treat them well.” All the bruised creatures Rowley had questioned refused to help him in his quest. “They seemed to expect and hope he would come back to them. It didn’t matter; by this time, anyway, I was following the bird he had with him.”

“A bird ?”

“A mynah bird. In a cage. I knew where he’d bought it, in a souq in Gaza. I could even tell you how much he paid for it. But why he kept it with him…perhaps it was his only friend.” There was the rictus of a smile on Rowley’s face. “It got him noticed, thanks be to God; more than once I received word of a tall man with a birdcage on his saddle. And in the end, it told me where he was going.”

By this time hunter and hunted were approaching the Loire Valley, Sir Rowley distracted because Angers was the home of the bones he carried. “Should I follow Rakshasa as I had sworn? Or fulfill my vow to Guiscard and take him to his last resting place?”

It was in Tours, he said, that his dilemma took him to its cathedral to pray for guidance. “And there Almighty God, in His wonder and grace and seeing the justice of my cause, opened His hand unto me.”

For, as Rowley left the cathedral by its great west door and went blinking into the sunlight, he heard the squawk of a bird coming from an alley where its cage hung in the window of a house.

“I looked up at it. It looked down at me and said good-day in English. And I thought, the Lord has led me to this alley for a purpose; let us see if this is Rakshasa’s pet. So I knocked on the door and a woman opened it. I asked for her man. She said he was out, but I could tell that he was there and that it was him-she was just such a one as the others, draggled and frightened. I drew my sword and pushed past her, but she fought me as I tried to go up the stairs, clinging to my arm like a cat and screaming. I heard him shout from the upstairs room, then a thump. He’d leapt out of the window. I turned back down, but the woman hampered me all the way, and by the time I regained the alley, he’d gone.”

Rowley ran his hands over his thick, curly hair in despair at describing the fruitless chase that had followed. “In the end, I went back to the house. The woman had left, but in the upstairs room the bird was fluttering in its cage on the floor where he’d knocked it down as he jumped. I picked the cage up and the bird told me where I would find him.”

“How? How did it tell you?”

“Well, it didn’t give me his address. It looked at me out of that wattled, cocky eye they have and said I was a pretty boy, a clever boy-all the usual things, their banality made shocking by the knowledge that I was hearing Rakshasa’s voice. He had trained it. No, there was nothing special in what it said but in how it said it. It was the accent. It spoke in a Cambridgeshire accent. The bird had copied the speech of its master. Rakshasa was a Cambridgeshire man.”

The tax collector crossed himself in gratitude to the god who had been good to him. “I let the bird prattle through its repertoire,” he said. “There was time enough now, I could take Guiscard to Angers. I knew where Rakshasa was heading; he was going home to settle down with what remained of Guiscard’s jewels. So he did and so he has, and this time he shall not escape me.”

Rowley looked at Adelia. “I’ve still got the cage,” he said.

“What happened to the bird?”

“I wrung its neck.”

The gravediggers had left, unnoticed, their work done. The long shadow of the wall at the end of the garden had reached the turf seat.

Adelia, shivering from the chilly descent of evening, realized she had been cold for some time. Perhaps there was more to say, but at the moment she could not think of it. Nor could he. He got up. “I must see to the arrangements.”

Others had seen to them for him.

A sheriff, an Arab, a tax collector, an Augustine prior, two women, and a dog stood at the top of the steps outside the house as Simon of Naples in his willow coffin, preceded by torchbearers and followed by every male Jew in the castle, was carried to his place beneath the cherry tree at the other end of the garden. They were invited no nearer. Under a waxing, gibbous moon the figures of the mourners appeared very dark and the cherry blossom very white, a flurry of suspended snow.

The sheriff fidgeted. Mansur put his hands on Adelia’s shoulders and she leaned back against him, listening more to the cascade of the rabbi’s deep notes as he repeated the ninety-first Psalm than able to distinguish its words.

What she disregarded, what all of them paid no attention to because they were used to a noisy castle, was the sound of raised voices down by the main gates to which Father Alcuin, the priest, had taken his discontent.

There, having listened to it, Agnes had left her hut and run into town, and Roger of Acton had begun to persuade the guards that their castle was being desecrated by the secret burial of a Jew in its precincts.

The mourners under the cherry tree heard it; their ears were attuned to trouble.

“El ma’aleh rachamim.” Rabbi Gotsce’s voice didn’t falter. “ Sho-chayn bahm-ro… Lord, filled with Motherly Compassion, grant a full and perfect rest to our brother Simon under the wings of Your sheltering presence among the lofty, holy, and pure, radiant as the shining firmament, and to the souls of all those of all Your peoples who have been killed in and around the lands where Abraham our Forebear walked…”

Words, thought Adelia. An innocent bird can repeat the words of a killer. Words can be said over the man he killed and pour balm on the soul.