Ariana Franklin - Mistress of the Art of Death

“Thank you.” She returned to the matter in hand. “As a matter of interest, Henry, in what way am I in your debt?”

“You owe me a bishop, mistress. I had hopes of Sir Rowley taking my fight into the Church, but he has turned me down to be free to marry. You, I gather, are the object of his marital affections.”

“No object at all,” she said wearily. “I, too, have turned him down. I am a doctor, not a wife.”

“Really?” Henry brightened and then assumed a look of mourning. “Ah, but I fear neither of us will have him now. The poor man is dying.”

“What?”

“Hubert?”

“So we understand, mistress,” Hubert Walter said, “the wound he received in the attack on the castle has reopened, and a medical man from the town reports that-”

He found himself addressing empty air; lèse majesté again. Adelia had gone.

The king watched the gate slam. “Nevertheless, she’s a woman of her word and, happily for me, she won’t marry him.” He stood up. “I believe, Hubert, that we may yet install Sir Rowley Picot as Bishop of Saint Albans.”

“He will be gratified, my lord.”

“I think he’s going to be-any moment now, lucky devil.”

THREE DAYS AFTER THESE EVENTS, the insect stopped buzzing. Agnes, mother of Harold, dismantled her beehive hut for the last time and went home to her husband.

Adelia didn’t hear the silence. Not until later. At the time, she was in bed with the bishop-elect of Saint Albans.

THERE THEY GO, the justices in eyre, taking the Roman road from Cambridge toward the next town to be assized. Trumpets sound, bailiffs kick out at excited children and barking dogs to clear the way for the caparisoned horses and palanquins, servants urge on mules laden with boxes of closely written vellum, clerks still scribble on their slates, hounds respond to the crack of their masters’ whip.

They’ve gone. The road is empty, except for steaming piles of manure. A swept and garnished Cambridge breathes a sigh of relief. At the castle, Sheriff Baldwin retires to bed with a wet cloth over his head while, in his bailey, corpses on the gallows move in a May breeze that flutters blossoms over them like a benison.

We have been too busied with our own events to watch the assize in action, but, if we had, we should have witnessed a new thing, a wonderful thing, a moment when English law leaped high, high, out of darkness and superstition into light.

For, during the course of the assize, nobody has been thrown into a pond to see if they are innocent or guilty of the crime of which they stand accused. (Innocence is to sink, guilt to float.) No woman has had molten iron placed in her hand to prove whether or not she has committed theft, murder, et cetera. (If the burn heals within a certain number of days, she is acquitted. If not, let her be punished.)

Nor has any dispute over land been settled by the God of Battles. (Champions representing each disputant fight until one or other is killed or cries “craven” and throws down his sword in surrender.)

No. The God of Battles, of water, of hot iron, has not been asked for His opinion as He always has before. Henry Plantagenet does not believe in Him.

Instead, evidence of crime or quarrel has been considered by twelve men who then tell the judge whether or not, in their opinion, the case is proved.

These men are called a jury. They are a new thing.

Something else is new. Instead of the ancient, jumbled inheritance of laws whereby each baron or lord of the manor can pronounce sentence on his malefactors, hanging or not according to his powers, Henry II has given his English a system that is orderly and all of a piece and applies throughout his kingdom. It will be called Common Law.

And where is he, this cunning king who has moved civilization forward?

He has left his judges to proceed about their business and has gone hunting. We can hear his hounds baying over the hills.

Perhaps he knows, as we know, that he will be remembered in popular memory only for the murder of Thomas à Becket.

Perhaps his Jews know-for we know-that, though they have been locally absolved, they still carry the stigma of ritual child murder and will be punished for it through the ages.

It is the way of things.

May God bless us all.

It is almost impossible to write a comprehensible story set in the twelfth century without being anachronistic, in part at least. To avoid confusion, I’ve used modern names and terms. For instance, Cambridge was called Grentebridge or Grantebridge until the fourteenth century, well after the university had been founded. Also, the title of doctor was not given to medical men at that time, only to teachers of logic.

However, the operation described in chapter two is not an anachronism. The idea of using reeds as catheters to relieve a bladder that is under pressure from the prostate may make one wince, but I am assured by an eminent professor of urology that such a procedure has been performed throughout the ages-pictures illustrating it can be found in ancient Egyptian wall paintings.

The use of opium as an anesthetic is not described in medical manuscripts of that time as far as I know, probably because it would have caused an outcry by the Church, which believed in suffering as a form of salvation. But opium was available in England, especially the fenland, very early on, and it is unlikely that less pious and more caring doctors wouldn’t have employed it in the same way that some ship’s surgeons eventually did. (See Rough Medicine by Joan Druett; Rout-ledge, 2000.)

Although I have added fictional missing children and located it in Cambridge, my story of Little Saint Peter of Trumpington is more or less a straight lift from the real-life mystery surrounding eight-year-old William of Norwich, whose death in 1144 began the accusation of ritual murder against the Jews of England.

Though there is no record of a sword belonging to Henry II’s first-born being taken to the Holy Land, the sword of his next son, another Henry, known as the Young King, was carried there after his death by William the Marshal, thereby making him a posthumous crusader.

It was under Henry II that the Jews of England were first allowed to have their own local cemeteries-a grant made in 1177.

It is unlikely that there are mines in the chalk of Wandlebury hill-fort, but who knows? Neolithic miners digging out flint for knives and axes filled their pits with rubble once they’d exhausted them, leaving mere depressions in the grass to show where they had once been. Since Wandlebury became privately owned racing stables in the eighteenth century (it now belongs to the Cambridge Preservations Society), even these would then have been obliterated to make the land smooth for the horses.

So, for the sake of the story, I felt justified in transferring to Cambridgeshire one of the four hundred or so shafts discovered at Grime’s Graves near Thetford in Norfolk. Even these amazing workings-the public is allowed to descend the thirty-foot ladder leading down into one of them-were not recognized for what they were until late in the nineteenth century, the depressions in the ground giving rise to the belief that they were burials, hence the name.

Last, the episcopal sees of twelfth-century England were fewer in number than today, and enormous. For a while, for instance, Cambridge came under the diocesan control of Dorchester in faraway Dorset. Therefore, the bishopric of Saint Albans is fictional.

I have been particularly fortunate in the three fine editors who have guided the manuscript through to publication: Rachel Kahan of Penguin Group USA, Francesca Liversidge of Transworld UK, and David Davadar of Penguin Canada. My gratitude to them all.