Ariana Franklin - Mistress of the Art of Death

“Roger of Acton? No, he is well, though incarcerated in the donjon. You managed to lame Quincy the butcher and hack Colin of Saint Giles in the neck, and there’s a blacksmith whose prospects of fatherhood are not as sanguine as your own, but Master Acton escaped unharmed.”

“Merde.”

Even this much conversation had tired him; he drifted off.

Copulation as the first priority, she thought. Battle as the second. And although you are now considerably thinner, gluttony has been in evidence, so has arrogance. That represents most of the cardinal sins. So why, out of all humanity, are you the one for me?

Gyltha had guessed. At the height of Rowley’s fever, when Adelia had refused to let the housekeeper replace her at the bedside, Gyltha had said, “Love un you may, woman, but that’ll not help un iffen you drop.”

“Love him?” It was a screech. “I am caring for a patient; he’s not…oh, Gyltha, what am I to do? He’s not my sort of man.”

“What sort’s got bugger-all to do with it,” Gyltha had said, sighing.

And, indeed, Adelia was compelled to confess that it hadn’t.

True, there was much to be said for him. As he had demonstrated for the Jews, he was an incipient defender of the defenseless. He was funny, he made her laugh. And in his fever, he had visited again and again the dune where a child’s torn body lay-to suffer once more the same guilt and grief. His mind had pursued the killer through a delirium as hot and terrible as desert sands until Adelia had fed him an opiate for fear that it would wear out the weakened body.

But there was as much to be said against him. In the same fever he had babbled with carnal appreciation of the women he had known, often confusing their attributes with food he’d also enjoyed in the East. Small, slender Sagheerah, tender as an asparagus spear; Samina, sufficiently fleshed for a full-course meal; Abda, black and beautiful as caviar. It had been not so much a list as a menu. As for Zabidah…Adelia’s narrow knowledge of what men and women got up to in bed had been stretched to shocked amazement by the antics of that acrobatic and communally minded female.

More chilling was the revelation of a driving ambition. At first Adelia, listening to the fantastical conversations he was holding with an unseen person, had mistaken his frequent use of “my lord” as being directed at his heavenly king-until it turned out he was referring to Henry II. The compelling need to find and punish Rakshasa had allied itself to serving the King of England at the same time. If he should rid Henry of a nuisance that was depriving the Exchequer of its income from Cambridge ’s Jews, Rowley expected royal gratitude and advancement.

Very considerable advancement, too. “Baron or bishop?” he would ask in his dementia, clutching at Adelia’s hand as it tried to soothe him, as if it were her decision. “Bishopric or barony?”

The golden prospect of either would add to his agitation-“It won’t move, I can’t move it”-as if the wagon he had attached to the royal star was proving too heavy to stir.

Such, then, was the man. Undoubtedly brave and compassionate but a gourmandizing, womanizing, cunning, and greedy seeker after status. Imperfect, licentious. Not a man Adelia had expected, or wanted, to love.

But did.

When that suffering head had turned on the pillow, exposing the line of the throat, and he had pleaded for her-“Doctor, are you there? Adelia?”-his sins, like her heart, had melted away.

As Gyltha said, the sort of man he was had bugger-all to do with it.

Yet it must matter. Vesuvia Adelia Rachel Ortese Aguilar had her own fixity of purpose. It did not aspire to preferment or riches but to serving the particular gift she had been given. For a gift it was, and with it had come the obligation not to give birth to life as other women did but to discover more about life’s nature and thereby save it.

She had always known, and still knew it, that romantic love was not for her; in that respect, she was as bound to chastity as any nun married to God. As long as that chastity had been cloistered in the Medical School of Salerno, she had envisaged its untroubled continuance into a quiet, useful, and respected old age, contemptuous-she admitted it-of women who surrendered to flailing passion.

Sitting in this tower room, she accused that former self of plain damned ignorance. You didn’t know. Didn’t know of this rampage that makes the mind lose its reason against all better judgment.

But you must reason, woman, reason.

The hours during which she had labored to save the man had been a privilege; saving anybody’s life was a privilege; his, her joy. She had begrudged being called away from his side to treat the patients whom the Matildas redirected to the castle so that she and Mansur could heal them, though she had done it.

Now it was time for common sense.

Marriage was out of the question, even supposing he offered it, which was unlikely. Adelia had a strong estimation of her own worth, but she doubted it if he could recognize it. For one thing, to judge from the color of the pubic hair he had described during his more lubricious ravings, his preference was for brunettes. For another, she could not-would not-enter the lists against the likes of Zabidah.

No, a reserved, plain-faced woman doctor was unlikely to attract him; such yearning as he had shown for her in his fever had been a request for relief.

In any case, he thought of her as sexless or his account of his crusade would not have been so frank and so full of swear words. A man talked to a friendly priest in those terms, to a Prior Geoffrey perhaps, not to the lady of his fancy.

In any case, with a bishopric in his sights, he could not offer marriage to anybody. And a bishop’s mistress? There were plenty of them, some being ostentatious, shameless strumpets, others a rumor, a thing of gossip and sniggers, hidden away in a secret bower, dependent on the whim of their particular diocesan lover.

Welcome to the Gates of Heaven, Adelia, and what did you do with your life? My lord, I was a bishop’s whore.

And if he became a baron? He would look for an heiress to increase his estates, as they all did. Poor heiress, a life devoted to store cupboard, children, entertaining, and setting one’s husband’s bloody deeds to song when he came back from whatever battlefield his king had dragged him off to. Where, undoubtedly, said husband had taken other women-brunettes, in this case-and fathered bastards on them with the concupiscence of a rutting rabbit.

Deliberately, exhausted, she worked herself into such a fury at the hypothetically adulterous Sir Rowley Picot with his hypothetical and illegitimate brats that, Gyltha now coming into the room with a bowl of gruel for him, Adelia told her, “You and Mansur look after the swine tonight. I’m going home.”

Yehuda waylaid her at the bottom of the steps to inquire after Rowley and to drag her off to see his new son. The baby nuzzling at Dina’s breast was tiny but seemed to have all its requisites, though its parents were concerned that it was not gaining sufficient weight.

“We’ve agreed with Rabbi Gotsce that Brit Mila should be delayed beyond the eight days. Do it when he is stronger,” Yehuda said, anxiously. “What do you think, mistress?”

Adelia said that it was probably wise not to subject the child to circumcision until it was a better size.

“Is it my milk, do you think?” Dina said. “I don’t have enough?”

Midwifery was not Adelia’s field; she knew the principles, but Gordinus had always taught his students that the practice was better left to wise women of whatever denomination unless there were complications in the case. His belief, based on observation, was that more babies survived when delivered by experienced women than by male doctors. It was not a teaching that made him popular with either the general medical profession or the Church, both of which found it profitable to condemn most midwives as witches, but the death toll in Salerno not only among babies but their mothers whose accouchement had been attended by male physicians suggested that Gordinus was right.