Ariana Franklin - Mistress of the Art of Death

The same forest, she remembered, that contained the manor of Sir Gervase, and into which Little Saint Peter had disappeared.

“CAN THIS BE MANAGED?” Prioress Joan demanded. She was more haggard than when Adelia had last seen her.

“Well, it isn’t the plague,” Adelia told her, “nor typhus, Lord be thanked; none of the sisters has the rash. I believe it to be cholera.”

She added, because the prioress went pale, “A milder form than the one found in the East, though bad enough. I am concerned for your infirmaress and Sister Veronica.” The oldest and the youngest. Sister Veronica was the nun who, praying over Little Saint Peter’s reliquary, had presented Adelia with an image of imperishable grace.

“Veronica.” The prioress appeared distraught-and Adelia liked her better for it. “The sweetest-natured of them all, may God attend her. What is to be done?”

What indeed? Adelia glanced in dismay across to the other side of the cloister, where, beyond the pillars of its walk, rose what looked like an outsize pigeon-loft, two rows of ten doorless arches, each giving to a cell less than five feet wide, inside which lay a prostrate nun.

There was no infirmary-the title “infirmaress” seemed to be an honorary designation settled on the elderly Sister Odilia merely because she was skilled in herbs. No dorter, either-nowhere, in fact, for the nuns to be cared for collectively.

“The original monks were ascetics who preferred the privacy of individual cells,” the prioress said, catching Adelia’s look. “We keep to them because as yet we have had no money to build. Can you manage?”

“I shall need assistance.” Caring single-handedly for twenty women severely afflicted with diarrhea and vomiting would be hard enough in a ward, but to fetch and carry from cell to cell, up and down the wickedly narrow and railless flight of steps that led to the upper cells, would cut down the carer herself.

“I fear our servants fled at the mention of plague.”

“We don’t want them back in any case,” Adelia said firmly. A glimpse of the convent house suggested that those who should have kept it ordered had allowed slovenliness to reign long before disease overtook it, a slackness that might have caused the disease itself.

She said, “May I ask if you eat with your nuns?”

“And what has that to do with the price of fish, mistress?” The prioress was offended, as if Adelia was accusing her of dereliction.

So Adelia was, in a way. She remembered Mother Ambrose’s care for the physical and spiritual nourishment of her nuns while presiding over meals in Saint Giorgio’s immaculate refectory, where wholesome food was accompanied by a reading from the Bible, where a nun’s lack of appetite for either could be noted and acted on. But she did not want confrontation so early and said, “It may have something to do with the poisoning.”

“Poisoning? Do you suggest that someone is trying to murder us?”

“Deliberately, no. Accidentally, yes. Cholera is a form of poisoning. Since you yourself seem to have escaped it…”

The prioress’s expression suggested that she was beginning to regret calling Adelia in. “As it happens, I have my own quarters, and I am usually too occupied by convent business to eat with the sisters. I have been at Ely this last week, consulting with the abbot on…on religious matters.”

Buying one of the abbot’s horses, so Edric the groom had said.

Prioress Joan went on: “I suggest you confine your interest to the matter in hand. Inform your doctor that there are no poisoners here and, in the name of God, ask him what is to be done.”

What had to be done was to solicit help. Satisfied that it was not the convent’s air causing the nuns’ sickness-though the place was dank and smelled of rot-Adelia walked back to the kennels and sent Edric the groom for the Matildas.

They arrived, and Gyltha with them. “The boy’s safe in the castle with Sir Rowley and Mansur,” she said when Adelia reproved her. “Reckon you need me more than he do.”

That was undoubted, but it was dangerous for them all.

“I shall be glad of you by day,” Adelia told the three women. “You shall not stay by night because, while the pestilence lasts, you will not eat any of the convent’s food nor drink its water. I insist on this. Also, buckets of brandy will stand in the cloister, and after touching the nuns, or their chamber pots, or anything that is theirs, you must lave your hands in them.”

“Brandy?”

“Brandy.”

Adelia had her own theory concerning diseases such as the one ravaging the nuns. Like so many of her theories, it did not accord with that of Galen or any other medical influences in vogue. She believed that the flux in cases like this was the body’s attempt to rid itself of a substance it could not tolerate. Poison in one form or another had gone in and, ergo, poison was coming out. Water itself was so often contaminated-as in the poorer districts of Salerno, where disease was ever-present-it must be treated as a source of the original poison until proved otherwise. Since anything distilled, in this case brandy, frequently stopped wounds from putrefying, it might also act on any ejected poison that touched the hands of a nurse and prevent her from ingesting it herself.

So Adelia reasoned and acted on.

“My brandy?” The prioress expressed dissatisfaction at seeing the cask from her cellar poured into two buckets.

“The doctor insists on it,” Adelia told her, as if the messages Edric brought from the castle had contained instructions from Mansur.

“I would have you know that is best Spanish,” Joan said.

“An even stronger specific.”

Since they were all in the kitchen at that moment, Adelia had the prioress at a disadvantage; she suspected the woman of never having entered it. The place was dark and verminous; several rats had fled at their entrance-Safeguard yelping after them with the most animation Adelia had ever seen in him. The stone walls were encrusted with grease. Such grooves of the pine table block that could be seen beneath litter were filled with grime. There was a smell of rotting sweetness. Pots hanging from hooks retained furred remnants of meals, flour bins were uncovered, and there was a suggestion of movement in their contents, the same applied to the open vats of cooking water-Adelia wondered if it was in one of these that the nuns had boiled Little Saint Peter’s corpse and whether it had been cleaned afterward. Shreds clinging to the blade of a meat cleaver stank like pus.

Adelia looked up from sniffing them. “No poisoner here, you say? Your cooks should be arrested.”

“Nonsense,” the prioress said. “A bit of dirt never hurt anybody.” But she pulled at the collar of her pet gazehound to stop him from licking an unidentified mess sticking to a platter on the floor. Rallying, she said, “I am paying Dr. Mansur that my nuns be made well, not for his subordinate to spy on the premises.”

“Dr. Mansur says that to treat the premises is to treat the patient.”

Adelia would not give way on this. She had fed a pill of opium to the worst cases in the cells in order to relieve their cramps, and now, apart from washing the rest and giving them sips of boiled water-which Gyltha and Matilda W. were already about-little could be done for the invalids until the kitchen was fit to use on their behalf.

Adelia turned to Matilda B., whose Herculean task this was to be. “Can you do it, little one? Cleanse these Augean stables?”

“Kept horses in here as well, did they?” Rolling up her sleeves, Matilda B. looked around her.

“Quite probably.”

Followed resentfully by the prioress, Adelia went on a tour of inspection. An aumbry in the refectory contained labeled jars that spoke well of Sister Odilia’s knowledge of herbology, though it also held a plentiful supply of opium- too plentiful, in the opinion of Adelia, who, knowing the drug’s power, kept her own cache to a minimum in case of theft.