Ariana Franklin - Mistress of the Art of Death

Dear God of All, don’t let her be saying it. It is unsayable, not to be borne. Don’t look like that.

Gyltha ran into the street so that a rider had to rein in, swearing, his horse jittering to one side to avoid trampling her. She was talking, looking, clutching. She was coming close, and Adelia stood back to avoid her, but the shriek penetrated everything. “Any of you seen my little boy?”

She might have been blind. She caught at Adelia’s sleeve without recognizing her. “You seen my little boy? Name’s Ulf. I can’t find un.”

She sat on the Cam ’s bank in the same spot, on the same upturned pail that Ulf had sat on to do his fishing.

She watched the river. Nothing else.

Behind the house at her back, the streets were full of noise and bustle, some of it to do with the assize, much of it caused by the search for Ulf. Gyltha herself, Mansur, the two Matildas, Adelia’s patients, Gyltha’s customers, friends, neighbors, parish reeve, and those merely concerned all were looking for the child-with increasing despair.

“The boy was restive in the castle and wished to go fishing,” Mansur had told Adelia, so stolid as to be almost rigid. “I came with him. Then the small, fat one”-he referred to Matilda B.-“called me into the house to mend a table leg. When I came outside again, he was gone.” The Arab refused to meet her eye, which told her how upset he was. “You may tell the woman I am sorry,” he’d said.

Gyltha hadn’t blamed him, hadn’t blamed anybody; the terror was too great to convert into anger. Her frame wizened into that of a much smaller, older woman; she would not stay still. Already she and Mansur had been upriver and down, asking everybody they met if they had seen the boy and jumping into boats to tear the cover off anything hidden. Today they were questioning traders by the Great Bridge.

Adelia did not go with them. All that night she’d stayed in the solar window, watching the river. Today she sat where Ulf had sat and went on watching it, gripped by a grief so terrible that she was immobilized-although she would have stayed on the bank in any case. “It’s the river,” Ulf had said, and in her head she listened to him say it over and over again, because, if she stopped listening, she would hear him scream.

Rowley came crashing through the reeds, limping, and tried to take her away. He said things, held her. He seemed to want her to go to the castle, where he was forced to stay, being so busy with the assize. He kept mentioning the king; she hardly heard him.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “but I must remain here. It’s the river, you see. The river takes them.”

“How can the river take them?” He spoke gently, thinking her mad, which, of course, she was.

“I don’t know,” she told him. “I have to stay here until I do.”

He nagged at her. She loved him but not enough to go with him; she was under the direction of a different, more commanding love.

“I shall come back,” he said at last.

She nodded, barely noticing that he had gone.

It was a beautiful day, sunny and warm. Some of the passing boat people who knew what had happened shouted encouragement to the woman on the bank sitting on her upturned bucket with a dog beside her. “Don’t worry, my duck. He’s maybe playing some’eres. He’ll turn up like a bad penny.” Others averted their eyes from her and remained silent.

She didn’t see or hear them, either. What she saw was Ulf’s naked, skinny little body struggling in Gyltha’s hands as she held it over the bath preparatory to letting it drop into the water.

It’s the river.

She made up her mind when, in the late afternoon, Sister Veronica and Sister Walburga came by in their punt. Walburga saw her and poled to the bank. “Now don’t you lecture us, mistress. Prior didn’t send enough supplies upriver to feed a kitten, and we got to go up again with more. But we’re strong again, ain’t we, Sister? Strong in the power of God.”

Sister Veronica was concerned. “What is it, mistress? You look tired.”

“Not to be wondered at,” Walburga said. “Wearied from a-looking after us. Angel, she is, blessings on her.”

It’s the river.

Adelia got up from her bucket. “I shall come with you, if I may.”

Pleased, they helped her into the punt and sat her on the stern thwart, her knees bent up to her chin with a crate of hens under her feet. They laughed when Safeguard-“Old Smelly,” they called him-disgruntledly set off to follow them by the towpath.

Prioress Joan, they said, was telling the world that Little Saint Peter had been vindicated, for when had so many been so ill and only two died, one of those elderly? The saint had been tested and not found wanting.

The two nuns took turn-and-turn-about at poling with a frequency that showed they hadn’t recovered all their strength yet, but they made little of it. “Harder yesterday,” Walburga said, “when us was poling separate punts. But we got the Lord’s strength on our side.” She could go the farthest before she rested; nevertheless, Veronica was the more lissome and economic in movement and made a lovelier shape as her slim arms pressed on the pole and raised it, hardly stirring water that was turning amber in the setting of the sun.

Trumpington flowed past. Grantchester…

They were on a part of the river left unexplored on Adelia’s day with Mansur and Ulf. Here it divided, becoming two rivers, the Cam to the south, the other entering it from the east.

The punt turned east. Walburga, who was poling, answered Adelia’s question-the first she had asked. “This? This be the Granta. This un takes us to the anchorages.”

“And your auntie,” Veronica said, smiling. “It takes us to your auntie as well, Sister.”

Walburga grinned. “That it do. Her’ll be surprised seeing me twice in a week.”

The countryside changed with the river, becoming something resembling flat upland where reed and alder fell back to be replaced by firm grass and taller trees. In the twilight, Adelia could see hedges and fences rather than dikes. The moon, which had been a thin, round wafer in the evening sky, gained substance.

Safeguard was beginning to limp, and Veronica said he should travel with them, poor thing. Once the hens stopped protesting at his presence, there was silence broken only by the last twittering of birds.

Walburga took the punt to an inlet from which a path led to a farm. As she lumbered out, she said, “Now don’t you go lifting all that stuff on your own, Sister. Get the old codgers to help you.”

“They will.”

“And you can manage it back on your own?”

Veronica nodded and smiled. Walburga curtsied to Adelia, then waved them off.

The Granta became narrower and darker, finding its way through a winding, shallow valley in which beeches occasionally came down to the water and Veronica had to crouch to avoid branches. She stopped to light a lantern, which she placed on the board at her feet so that it lit the black water ahead for a yard or so and reflected the green eyes of some animal that looked at them before turning away into the undergrowth.

As they cleared the trees, the moon reached them again to silver a black-and-white landscape of pasture and hedge. Veronica poled to the left bank. “Journey’s end, the Lord be praised,” she said.

Adelia peered ahead and pointed to a huge, flattopped shape in the distance. “What’s that?”

Veronica turned to look. “There? That’s Wandlebury Hill.”

Of course, it would be.

A tiny, twinkling star seemed to have landed on the hill’s head, deceptive in the nature of stars so that a blink sent it away and another blink brought it back.