Ariana Franklin - Mistress of the Art of Death

She heard the hit, hit, hit of earth being thrown onto the coffin. Now the procession was filing up through the garden to go out of its gate and, although she was not a Jew and a mere woman at that, each man gave her a blessing as he passed the foot of the steps on which she stood. “ Hamakom y’nachem etchem b’toch sh’ar availai tziyon ee yerushalayim. May God comfort you among all the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem.”

The rabbi paused and bowed to the sheriff. “We are grateful for your beneficence, my lord, and may you be spared trouble because of it.” Then they were gone.

”Well,” Sheriff Baldwin said, brushing his gown, “we must get back to work, Sir Rowley. If the devil does indeed find work for idle hands, he will discover none here tonight.”

Adelia expressed her gratitude. “And may I visit the grave tomorrow?”

“I suppose so, I suppose so. You might bring Senor Doctor here with you. All this worry has produced a fistula that makes my sitting uncomfortable.”

He looked toward the gate. “What is that turmoil, Rowley?”

It was ten or so men armed with a variety of domestic weapons, garden forks, eel glaives, led by Roger of Acton, and all of them feverish with a rage that had been pent up too long, all rushing into the garden screaming in so many different curses that it took a moment to distinguish the theme of “child-killer” and “Jew.”

Acton was coming to the steps, waving a flambeau in one hand and a garden fork in the other. He was shouting. “The Jew shall be sunk in the pit he hath made, for the Lord has redeemed us from his filth. We have come to cast him out from our inheritance. O fear the name of the Lord, thou traitors.” His mouth sprayed spit. Behind him, a big man was brandishing a wicked-looking kitchen cleaver.

The other men were scattering in a search and he turned to them. “Find the grave, my brothers, so we may execute our fury upon his carcass. For ye have been promised that he who chastiseth the heathen shall not be corrected.”

“No,” Adelia said. They had come to dig him up. They had come to dig Simon up. “No.”

“Trollop.” Acton was ascending the steps, the fork pointing at her. “Thou hast gone a-whoring after the child-killers, but we shall not bear thy shame anymore.”

One of the men was standing by the cherry tree, shouting and gesticulating at the others. “Here, it’s here.”

Adelia dodged Acton as she went down the steps and began running toward the grave. What she would do when she got there was not in her mind-she could think only of stopping this terrible thing.

Sir Rowley Picot went after her, Mansur just behind him, Roger of Acton on his heels, the other intruders running to intercept. Everybody met in a crashing, howling, punching, beating, stabbing, trampling confluence. Adelia went down under it.

Such violence was unknown to her; it wasn’t the pain but the whacking shock of men’s sudden, furious strength. A boot broke her nose; she covered her head while above her the world fractured into jagged pieces.

Somewhere a voice dominated all, steady and commanding-the prior’s.

Bit by bit, the shards fell away. There was nothing. Then there was something and she was able to stagger to her feet and see figures retreating from the place were Rowley Picot lay with a cleaver end down in his groin, blood overflowing from around the buried part of its blade.

Am I dead?” asked Sir Rowley of nobody in particular.

“No,” Adelia told him.

A weak, pale hand searched beneath the bedclothes. There was a cry of raw agony. “Oh, Jesus God, where’s my prick?”

“If you mean your penis, it is still there. Under the pads.”

“Oh.” The sunken eyes opened again. “Will it work?”

“I am sure,” Adelia said clearly, “that it will function satisfactorily in every respect.”

“Oh.”

He’d gone again, comforted by the brief exchange while unaware that it had taken place.

Adelia leaned over and pulled the blanket straight. “But it was a damned near thing,” she told him softly. Not just the loss of his membrum virilis but his life. The cleaver had struck the artery, and she’d had to keep her fist in the wound while he was carried indoors to stop him bleeding to death before she could use Lady Baldwin’s needle and embroidery thread-and even then to be so hampered by pumping blood that she knew, if none of those gathered anxiously about her did, it was a matter of blind luck whether or not the sutures were in the right place.

That had been only half the battle. She’d managed to extract the pieces of tunic that the cleaver had pushed into the wound, but how much detritus remained from the blade itself had been anyone’s throw of the dice. Foreign matter could, and usually did, lead to poisoning, which led to death. She’d recalled dismembering resultant gangrenous corpses-recalled, too, the remote curiosity with which she’d looked for the site that had spread its fatality.

This time she had not been remote. When Rowley’s wound inflamed and he went into delirium from fever she had never prayed so hard in her life as she bathed him in cold water and dripped cooling draughts between lips that were flaccid and ghastly as a dead man’s.

And to what had she prayed? Something, anything. Pleading, begging, demanding that it should help her pull him back to life.

Damn it. What had she vowed to all the gods she’d called on? Belief? Then she was now a follower of Jehovah, Allah, and the Trinity, with Hippocrates thrown in, and had wept with gratitude to all of them as the sweat broke out on the patient’s face and his breathing returned from stertor to a soft and natural snore.

The next time he woke up, she watched his hand make its instinctive exploration. Such primitive beings, men.

“Still there.” The eyes closed with relief.

“Yes,” she said. Even facing death’s portals, they retained consciousness of their sexuality. Prick, indeed-such an aggressive euphemism.

The eyes opened. “You still here?”

“Yes.”

“How long?”

“Five nights and…” She looked toward the window, where the afternoon sun was sending stripes of light through its mullions onto the floorboards. “Approximately seven hours.”

“So long? Blind me.” He tried lifting his head. “Where is this?”

“The top of the tower.” Shortly after the operation, which had been performed on the sheriff’s kitchen table, Mansur had carried the patient to the Jews’ upper room-an amazing feat of strength-so that doctor and patient should have privacy and quiet while she engaged in the battle for his life.

The room had no garderobe; on the other hand, Adelia had been blessed with people willing-nay, eager-to go up and down the stair carrying chamber pots, most of them Jewish women grateful to Sir Rowley for his defense of a Jewish grave. Indeed, saving Sir Rowley had been a cooperative effort, and if Adelia had refused most of the help on offer, it was in order not to offend Mansur and Gyltha, who made the cause their own.

A breeze came through the room’s unglazed windows, free of the bad airs circulating at the lower level of the castle and its open cesspits, sullied only by a whiff of Safeguard that entered through the gap under the door to the stairs, to which he had been banished. Even after a bath, the dog’s pelt almost immediately acquired a stink that attacked the nose. It was the only thing about him that did attack; he had been notably absent from the melee in the sheriff’s garden, in which, by rights, he should have involved himself on his mistress’s behalf.

The voice from the bed asked now, “Did I kill the bastard?”