Ariana Franklin - Mistress of the Art of Death

Could she even exist? Patients had been redirected to the castle while she’d been there, and, in between looking after Rowley, she and Mansur had attended to them. But nearly all were too poor to pay cash.

Her anxiety was not placated when, on entering the castle’s tower room with Safeguard, she found Sir Rowley up and dressed, sitting on the bed, and chatting with Sir Joscelin of Grantchester and Sir Gervase of Coton. As she bustled toward him, she said irritably to Gyltha, who stood sentinel-like in a corner, “He’s supposed to be resting.” She ignored the two knights who had risen at her entrance-Gervase reluctantly and only at a signal from his companion. She took the patient’s pulse. It was steadier than her own.

“Don’t be angry with us, mistress,” Sir Joscelin said. “We came to sympathize with Sir Rowley. It was God’s mercy you and the doctor were by. The wretch Acton…we can only hope the assize will not allow him to escape the rope. We are all agreed hanging’s too good for him.”

“Are you, indeed?” she snapped.

“The lady Adelia does not countenance hanging; she has crueler methods,” Rowley said. “She’d treat all criminals with a hearty dose of hyssop.”

Sir Joscelin smiled. “Now that is cruel.”

“And your methods are effective, are they?” Adelia asked. “Blinding and hanging and cutting off hands makes us all safer in our beds, does it? Kill Roger of Acton and there will be no more crime?”

“And the killer of the children, mistress,” Sir Joscelin asked gently. “What would you have done to him?”

Adelia was slow to answer.

“She hesitates,” Sir Gervase said with disgust. “What sort of woman is she?”

She was a woman who regarded legislated death as an effrontery by those imposing it-so easily and sometimes for so little cause-because life, to her, who wished to save it, was the only true miracle. She was a woman who never sat with the judge or stood with the executioner but always clung to the bar with the accused. Would I have come to this place in his or her circumstances? Had I been born to what he or she was born to, would I have done differently? If someone other than two doctors from Salerno had picked up the baby on Vesuvius, would it cower where this man or woman cowers?

For her, the law should be the point at which savagery ended because civilization stood in its path. We do not kill because we stand for betterment. She supposed the killer had to die and most certainly would, the putting down of a rabid animal, but the doctor in her would always wonder why it had turned rabid and grieve for not knowing.

She turned away from them to go to the medicine table and noticed for the first time how rigidly Gyltha was standing. “What’s the matter?”

The housekeeper looked worn, suddenly aged. Her hands were flat and supporting a small reed casket in much the same manner as the faithful received consecrated bread from the priest before putting it into the mouth.

Rowley called from his bed, “Sir Joscelin has brought me some sweetmeats, Adelia, but Gyltha won’t let me have them.”

“Not I,” Joscelin said. “I am merely their porter. Lady Baldwin asked me to carry them up the stairs.”

Gyltha’s eyes held Adelia’s, then looked down at the casket. Letting it rest on one hand, she raised its lid slightly with the other.

Inside, lying on pretty leaves, like eggs in a nest, was an assortment of colored, scented, lozenge-shaped jujubes.

The two women stared at each other. Adelia felt ill. With her back to the men, she silently shaped the word: “Poison?”

Gyltha shrugged.

“Where’s Ulf?”

“Mansur,” Gyltha mouthed back. “Safe.”

Adelia said slowly, “The doctor has forbidden Sir Rowley confits.”

“Hand them round to our visitors, then,” Rowley called from his bed.

We can’t hide from Rakshasa, Adelia thought. We are targets; wherever we are, we stand exposed like straw men for him to shoot at.

She nodded her head toward the door and turned to the men, while behind her, Gyltha left the room, carrying the casket with her.

The medicines. Hurriedly, Adelia checked them. All stoppers were in place, the boxes piled neatly as she and Gyltha always left them.

You are being absurd, she thought; he is somewhere outside; he cannot have tampered with anything. But last night’s horror of a Rakshasa with wings was on her and she knew she would change every herb, every syrup on the table before administering them.

Is he outside? Has he been here? Is he here now?

Behind her, the conversation had turned to horses as it always did among knights.

She was aware of Gervase lolling in his chair because she felt his awareness of her. His sentences were grunted and abstracted. When she glanced at him, his look turned to a deliberate sneer.

Killer or not, she thought, you’re a brute and your presence is an insult. She marched to the door and held it open. “The patient is tired, gentlemen.”

Sir Joscelin rose. “We are sorry not to have seen Dr. Mansur, aren’t we, Gervase? Pass on our compliments to him, if you would.”

“Where is he?” Sir Gervase demanded.

“Improving Rabbi Gotsce’s Arabic,” Rowley told him.

As he passed her on his way out, Gervase muttered, as if to his companion, “That’s rich, a Jew and a Saracen in a royal castle. Why to hell did we go on crusade?”

Adelia slammed the door behind him.

Rowley said crossly, “Damn it, woman, I was edging the talk round to Outremer to find out who was where and when; one might let something slip about the other.”

“Did they?” she demanded.

“You ushered them out too fast, damn it.” Adelia recognized the irritability of recuperation. “Oddly enough, though, Brother Gilbert admitted to being in Cyprus at about the right time.”

“Brother Gilbert was here?”

And Prior Geoffrey and Sheriff Baldwin and the apothecary-with a concoction he’d sworn would heal a wound within minutes- and Rabbi Gotsce. “I’m a popular man. What’s the matter?” For Adelia had slammed a box of powdered burdock so hard on the table that its lid came off, emitting a cloud of green dust.

“You are not popular,” she said, teeth gritted. “You are a corpse. Rakshasa would poison you.”

She went back to the door, calling for Gyltha, but the housekeeper was already coming up the stairs, still holding the casket. Adelia snatched it from her, opened it, and shoved it under Rowley’s nose. “What are those?”

“Dear Christ,” he said. “Jujubes.”

“I been asking round,” Gyltha said. “Little girl handed ’em to one of the sentries, saying as they was from her mistress for the poorly gentleman in the tower. Lady Baldwin was going to carry ’em up, but Sir Joscelin said he’d save her legs. Always the polite gentleman, he is, not like t’other.”

Gyltha didn’t hold with Sir Gervase.

“And the little girl?”

“Sentry’s one of them sent from London by the king to help guard the Jews. Barney, his name is. Didn’t know her, he says.”

Mansur and Ulf were summoned so that the matter could be gone over in conference.

“They could be merely jujubes, as they seem,” said Rowley.

“Suck one an’ see,” Ulf told him sharply. “What you think, missus?”

Adelia had picked one up in her tweezers and was smelling it. “I can’t tell.”

“Let’s test them,” Rowley said. “Let’s send them down to the cells for Roger of Acton, with our compliments.”

It was tempting, but instead Mansur took them down to the courtyard to throw the casket on the smithy fire.