Ariana Franklin - Mistress of the Art of Death

He leaned forward and said, “Very well. How?” And the longing in his face would have melted a flintier heart than Gyltha’s.

“Lord, for a clever man, you’m a right booby. She’s a doctor, ain’t she?”

“Yes, Gyltha.” He was trying to be patient. “That, I would point out, is why she won’t accept me.”

“And what is it doctors do?”

“They tend their patients.”

“So they do, and I reckon there’s one doctor as might be tenderer than most to a patient, always supposing that patient was taken poorly and always supposing she was fond of un.”

“Gyltha,” Sir Rowley said earnestly, “if I wasn’t suddenly feeling so damn ill, I’d ask you to marry me.”

THEY SAW THE CROWD at the convent gates when they’d crossed the bridge and cleared the willows on the bank. “Oh, dear,” Adelia said, “word has got around.” Agnes and her little hut were there, like a marker to murder.

It was to be expected, she supposed; the town’s anger had been transferred, and a mob was gathering against the nuns just as it had against the Jews.

It wasn’t a mob, though. The crowd was big enough, artisans and market traders mainly, and there was anger, but it was suppressed and mixed with…what? Excitement? She couldn’t tell.

Why weren’t these people more enraged, as they had been against the Jews? Ashamed, perhaps. The killers had turned out to be not a despised group, but two of their own, one respected, one a trusted friend they waved to nearly every day. True, the nun had been sent away to where they couldn’t lynch her, but they must surely blame Prioress Joan for her laxity in allowing a madwoman the terrible freedom she’d had for so long.

Ulf was talking with the thatcher whose foot Adelia had saved, both of them using the dialect in which Cambridge people spoke to each other and that Adelia still found almost incomprehensible. The young thatcher was avoiding her eye; usually, he greeted her with warmth.

Ulf, too, when he came back, wouldn’t look at her. “Don’t you go in there,” he said.

“I must. Walburga is my patient.”

“Well, I ain’t coming.” The boy’s face had narrowed, as it did when he was upset.

“I understand.” She shouldn’t have brought him; for him, the convent had been home to a hag.

The wicket in the solid wooden gates was opening, and two dusty workmen were clambering out; Adelia saw her chance and, with an “excuse me,” stepped in before they could close it. She shut it behind her.

The strangeness was immediate, as was the silence. Somebody, presumably the workmen, had nailed planks of wood diagonally across the church door that had once opened for pilgrims crowding to pray before the reliquary of Little Saint Peter of Trumpington.

How curious, Adelia thought, that the boy’s putative status as a saint would be lost now that he’d been sacrificed not by Jews but Christians.

Curious, too, that the weedy untidiness ignored by an uncaring prioress should so quickly put on the appearance of decay.

Taking the path toward the convent building, Adelia had to prevent herself from thinking that the birds had stopped singing. They hadn’t, but-she shivered-their note was different. Such was the imagination.

Prioress Joan’s stable and mews were deserted. Doors hung open on empty horse boxes.

The sisters’ compound was still. At the entrance to the cloister, Adelia found herself reluctant to go on. In the unseasonable grayness of the day, the pillars round the open grass were a pale remembrance of a night when she’d seen a horned and malevolent shadow in their center, as if the obscene desire of the nun had summoned it.

For heaven’s sake, he’s dead and she’s gone. There’s nothing here.

There was. A veiled shape was praying in the south walk as still as the stones it knelt on.

“Prioress?”

It didn’t move.

Adelia went up to her and touched her arm. “Prioress.” She helped her up.

The woman had aged overnight, her big, plain face etched deep and deformed into a gargoyle’s. Slowly, her head turned. “What?”

“I’ve come to…” Adelia raised her voice; it was like talking to the deaf. “I’ve brought some medicines for Sister Walburga.” She had to repeat it; she didn’t think Joan knew who she was.

“Walburga?”

“She was ill.”

“Was she?” The prioress turned her eyes away. “She’s gone. They’ve all gone.”

So the Church had stepped in.

“I’m sorry,” Adelia said. And she was; there was something terrible in seeing a human being so deteriorated. Not just that, something terrible in the dying convent as if it were sagging; she had the impression that the cloister was tilting sideways. There was a different smell to it, another shape.

And an almost imperceptible sound, like the buzzing of an insect trapped in a jar, only higher.

“Where has Walburga gone?”

“What?”

“Sister Walburga. Where is she?”

“Oh.” An attempt at concentration. “To her aunt’s, I think.”

There was nothing to do here, then; she could get away from this place. But Adelia lingered. “Is there anything I can do for you, Prioress?”

“What? Go away. Leave me alone.”

“You’re ill, let me help you. Is there anyone else here? Lord’s sake, what is that sound ?” Feeble as it was, it irritated the ear like tinnitus. “Don’t you hear it? A sort of vibration?”

“It is a ghost,” the gargoyle said. “It is my punishment to listen to it until it stops. Now go. Leave me to listen to the screams of the dead. Even you cannot help a ghost.”

Adelia backed away. “I’ll send somebody,” she said, and for the first time in her life, she ran from the sick.

Prior Geoffrey. He’d be able to do something, take her away, though the ghosts haunting Joan would follow her wherever she went.

They followed Adelia as she ran, and she almost fell through the wicket in her hurry to get out.

Righting herself, she came face-to-face with the mother of Harold and couldn’t look away. The woman was staring at her as if they shared a secret of supreme power.

Weakly, Adelia said, “She’s gone, Agnes. They’ve sent her away. They’ve all gone; there’s only the prioress…”

It wasn’t enough; a son had died. Agnes’s terrible eyes said there was more; she knew it, they both knew it.

Then she did. All its parts fused into the one knowledge. The smell-so out of context she hadn’t recognized the sour odor of fresh mortar for what it was. God, God, please. She’d seen it, a corner of her eye noting with dissatisfaction an imbalance that was the asymmetry of the nuns’ pigeonholes which should have been ten on top of ten and had been ten on top of nine-a blank wall where the lower tenth cell should have been.

She understood. The silence with its vibration…like the buzzing of an insect trapped in a jar, “the screams of the dead.”

Blind, Adelia stumbled through the crowd and vomited.

Somebody was tugging at her sleeve, saying something. “The king…”

The prior. He could stop it. She must find Prior Geoffrey.

The tugging became insistent. “The king commands your attendance, mistress.”

In the name of Christ, how could they in Christ’s name?

“The king, mistress…” Some liveried fellow.

“To hell with the king,” she said. “I have to find the prior.”

She was gripped by the waist and swung up onto a horse. It was trotting, the royal messenger loping alongside with its reins in his hands. “Better you don’t send kings to hell, mistress,” he said amiably. “They usually been there.”

They were over the bridge, up the hill, through the castle gates, across the bailey. She was lifted off the horse.