Ariana Franklin - Mistress of the Art of Death

But it has gotten in, Adelia thought. The hideously ancient, hogback tomb in the chapel was carved with wolves and dragons biting each other. Scrollwork on the altar circled a figure with arms upheld, Lazarus perhaps, though candlelight gave it a demonic quality. The foliage surrounding the arches of the cells imitated the encroaching forest that tangled buttresses in ivy and creepers.

At night, sitting by a nun’s cot, she, who did not credit the devil, found herself listening for him and being answered by the shriek of an owl. For Adelia, as for Prior Geoffrey, the twenty gaping holes, ten below, ten above, in which the nuns were stacked, reinforced the barbarity. Called to another cell, she had to urge herself to brave the wicked, black steps and narrow ledge that led to it.

By day, when Gyltha and the Matildas returned, bringing with them noise and common sense, she allowed herself an hour or two’s rest in the prioress’s quarters, but even then the two rows of cells infiltrated her exhausted dozes with reproach, as if they were graves of troglodyte dead.

Tonight, when she walked the length of the cloister to look in on Sister Veronica, the light of her lantern flickered the ugly heads of the pillars’ capitals into life. They grimaced at her. She was glad of the dog by her side.

Veronica lay tossing in her cot, apologizing to God for not dying. “Forgive me, Lord, that I am not with you. Suspend Thy wrath at my transgressions, Dear Master, for I would come to You if I could…”

“Nonsense,” Adelia told her. “God is perfectly happy with you and wants you to live. Open your mouth and have some nice calf’s-foot jelly.”

But Veronica, like Odilia, would not eat. Eventually, Adelia gave her half an opium pill and sat with her until it took effect. It was the barest cell of the twenty, its only ornament a cross that, like all the nuns’ wall crucifixes, was woven from withies.

Somewhere out in the marsh, a bittern boomed. Water dripped on the stones outside with a regularity that made Adelia’s nerves twitch. She heard retching from Sister Agatha’s cell farther along the cloister, and went to her.

Emptying the chamber pot meant leaving the cloister. A shift of cloud allowed some moonlight on her return, and Adelia saw the figure of a man by one of the walk’s pillars.

She closed her eyes against it, then opened them and went forward.

It was a trick of shadow and the glistening of rain. There was nobody there. She put her hand on the pillar to lean against it for a moment, breathing hard; the figure had been wearing horns. Safeguard appeared to have noticed nothing, but then he rarely did.

I am very tired, she thought.

Prioress Joan cried out sharply from Odilia’s cell…

WHEN THEY’D SAID THE PRAYERS, Adelia and the prioress wrapped the infirmaress’s body in a sheet and carried it between them to the chapel. They laid it on a makeshift catafalque of two tables covered by a cloth and lit candles to stand at the head and the foot.

The prioress stayed to chant a requiem. Adelia went back to the cells to sit with Agatha. All the nuns were asleep, for which she was thankful; they need not know of the death until the morning, when they would be stronger.

That is, if morning ever comes to this awful place, she thought. “Heathenish,” the prior had said. At this distance, the strong, single contralto echoing from the chapel sounded not so much a Christian requiem as a lament for a fallen warrior. Had it been Odilia’s death or some element in the very stones that conjured the horned figure in the cloister?

Fatigue, Adelia told herself again. You are tired.

But the image persisted, and to rid herself of it, she used her imagination to transpose it with another figure, this one more rotund, more funny, infinitely beloved, until Rowley stood there in the horror’s stead. With that comforting presence on guard outside, she fell asleep.

Sister Agatha died the next night. “Her heart seems to have just stopped beating,” Adelia wrote in a message to Prior Geoffrey. “She was doing well. I did not expect it.” And had cried for it.

With rest and Gyltha’s good food, the remaining nuns recovered swiftly. Veronica and Walburga, being younger than the others, were up and about sooner than Adelia would have liked, though it was difficult to resist their high spirits. However, their insistence that they should go upriver to supply the neglected anchorites was not sensible, especially as, in order to take sufficient food and fuel, one nun would be poling one punt and her sister yet another.

Adelia went to Prioress Joan with an appeal that they be stopped from exhausting themselves.

Being worn out herself, she did so tactlessly: “They are still my patients. I cannot allow it.”

“They are still my nuns. And the anchorites my responsibility. From time to time, Sister Veronica, especially, needs the freedom and solitude to be found among them; she has sought it, and I have always granted it.”

“Prior Geoffrey promised to supply the anchorites.”

“I have no opinion of Prior Geoffrey’s promises.”

It was not the first time, nor the second, nor the third, that Joan and Adelia had locked horns. The prioress, conscious that her many absences had brought both convent and nuns to the brink of ruin, involuntarily tried to retain her authority by opposing Adelia’s.

They had argued over Safeguard, the prioress saying that he stank, which he did-but not more than the living conditions of the nuns. They had argued over the administration of opium, on which the prioress had decided to take the side of the Church. “Pain is God-sent, only God should take it away.”

“Who says so? Where in the Bible does it say that?” Adelia had demanded.

“I am told the plant is addictive. They will form a habit of taking it.”

“They won’t. They don’t know what they are taking. It is a temporary panacea, a soporific to relieve their suffering.”

Perhaps because she had won that argument, she lost this. The two nuns were given their superior’s permission to take supplies to the anchorites-and Adelia, knowing she could do no more for it, left the convent two days later.

Which was the same time the assize arrived in Cambridge.

THE NOISE WAS TREMENDOUS in any case, but for Adelia, whose ears had become accustomed to silence, it was like being battered. Weighted by her heavy medicine case, the walk from the convent house had been a hard one, and now, wanting only to get back to Old Benjamin’s and rest, she stood in a crowd on the wrong side of Bridge Street as the parade passed.

At first she didn’t realize this was the assize; the cavalcade of musicians in livery blowing trumpets and beating tabors took her back to Salerno, to the week before Ash Wednesday when the carnevale came to town despite all the Church could do to prevent it.

Here came more drums-and beadles, such ornate livery, with great gold maces over their shoulders. And heavens, mitered bishops and abbots on caparisoned horses, one or two actually waving. And a comic executioner with hood and ax…

Then she knew the executioner wasn’t comic; there would be no tumblers and dancing bears. The three Plantagenet leopards were blazoned everywhere, and the lovely palanquins now going by on the shoulders of tabarded men contained the judges of the king come to weigh Cambridge in their scales and, if Rowley was correct, find much of it wanting.

Yet the people around her cheered as if starved of entertainment, as if the trials and fines and death sentences to come would provide it.

Bewildered by hubbub, Adelia suddenly saw Gyltha pushing to the front of the crowd across the street, her mouth open as if she, too, were cheering. But she wasn’t cheering.