Mistress of the Art of Death (15 page)

She set off.

Beyond an orchard, a raised balk ran along the edge of a common field leading down to the river, angled with cultivated strips. Men and women were hoeing the spring planting. One or two touched their forehead to her. Farther along, the breeze bellied washing that was pinned to tenterhooks.

The Cam, Adelia saw, was a boundary. Across the river was a countryside of gently rising uplands, some forested, some parkland, a mansion like a toy in the distance. Behind her, the town with its noisy quays crowded the right bank as if enjoying the uninterrupted view.

"Where's Trumpington?" she asked Ulf.

"Trumpington," the boy grumbled to the dog. They went left. The angle of the afternoon sun showed that they had turned south. Punts went past them, women as well as men poling themselves about their business, the river their thoroughfare. Some waved to Ulf, the boy nodding back and naming each one to the dog. "Sawney on his way for to collect the rents, the old grub...Gammer White with the washing for Chenies...Sister Fatty for to supply the hermits, look a her puff...Old Moggy finished early at the market..."

They were on a causeway that kept Adelia's boots, the boy's bare feet, and Safeguard's paws from sinking into meadows where cows grazed on deep grass and buttercups among willow and alder, their hooves causing a sucking sound as they moved to a fresh patch.

She'd never seen so much greenness in so great a variety. Or so many birds. Or such fat cattle. Pasture in Salerno was burned thin and good only for goats.

The boy stopped and pointed to a cluster of thatch and a church tower in the distance. "Trumpington," he informed the dog.

Adelia nodded. "Now, where is Saint Radegund's tree?"

The boy rolled his eyes, intoned "Saint Raddy's," and set off back the way they had come.

With Safeguard plodding dispiritedly behind them, they crossed the river by a footbridge so that this time they were following the Cam's left bank northward, the boy complaining to the dog at every step. From what Adelia could understand, he resented Gyltha's change of occupation. As errand boy to his grandmother's eel business, he occasionally received pourboires from the customers, a source of money now cut off.

Adelia ignored him.

A hunting horn sounded musically in the hills to the west. Safeguard and Ulf raised their disreputable heads and paused. "Wolf," Ulf told the dog. The echo died and they went on.

Now Adelia was able to look across the water to Cambridge town. Set without competition against pure sky, its jumbled roofs that were spiked with church towers gained significance, even beauty.

In the distance loomed Great Bridge, a massive, workmanlike arch crammed with traffic. Beyond it, where the river formed a deep pool below the castle on its hill--almost a mountain in this terrain--shipping so crowded the quays it seemed impossible, from this view, that it should disentangle itself. Wooden cranes dipped and rose like bowing herons. Shouts and instructions were being issued in different languages. The crafts were as varied as the tongues; wherries, horse-drawn barges, poled barges, rafts, vessels like arks--even, to Adelia's astonishment, a dhow. She could see men with blond plaits, hung about with animal skins so that they looked like bears, performing a leaping dance back and forth between barges for the amusement of working dockers.

Carried on the breeze, the noise and industry accentuated the quietness of the bank where she walked with the boy and the dog. She heard Ulf informing the dog that they were approaching Saint Radegund's tree.

She'd worked that out for herself. It had been fenced off. A stall stood just outside the palings with a pile of branches on it. Two nuns were breaking off twigs, attaching a ribbon to each, and selling them to relic-seekers.

This, then, was where Little Saint Peter had taken his Easter branches and where, subsequently, Chaim the Jew had been hanged.

The tree stood outside the convent grounds, which were marked here by a wall that, on the river side, led down to gates next to a boathouse and a small quay but which, heading west, ran so far back into the forested countryside that Adelia could see no end to it.

Inside the open gates, other nuns busied themselves among a mass of pilgrims like black-and-white bees directing honey-gatherers into their hive. As Adelia went under the entrance arch, a nun sitting at a table in the sunny courtyard was telling a man and wife ahead of her, "Penny to visit Little Saint Peter's tomb," adding, "Or a dozen eggs, we're low on eggs, hens ain't laying."

"Pot of honey?" the wife suggested.

The nun tutted, but they were allowed to pass in. Adelia contributed two pennies since the nun was prepared to exclude Safeguard if she did not and Ulf was reluctant to enter without the dog. Her coins clinked into a bowl already nearly full. The argument had held up the line of people that formed behind her, and one of the nuns marshaling it became angry at the delay and almost pushed her through the gates.

Inevitably, Adelia compared this, the first English nunnery she had visited, with Saint Giorgio's, largest of the three female convents in Salerno and the one with which she was most familiar. The comparison was unfair, she knew; Saint Giorgio's was a rich foundation, a place of marble and mosaic, bronze doors opening into courtyards where fountains cooled the air, a place, Mother Ambrose always said, "to feed with beauty the hungry souls who come to us."

If the souls of Cambridge looked for such sustenance from Saint Radegund's, they went empty away. Few had endowed this female house, suggesting that the rich of England did not esteem women's worship. True, there was a pleasing simplicity of line in the convent's collection of plain stone oblong outbuildings, though none of them any bigger nor more ornate than the barn in which Saint Giorgio's kept its grain, but beauty was lacking. So was charity. Here, the nuns were employed in selling rather than giving.

Stalls set up along the path to the church displayed Little Saint Peter talismans, badges, banners, figurines, plaques, weavings from Little Saint Peter's willow, ampullae containing Little Saint Peter's blood, which, if it
were
human blood, had been so watered as to show only the lightest taint of pink.

There was a press to buy. "What one's good for gout?...For the flux?...For fertility?...Can this cure staggers in a cow?"

Saint Radegund's was not waiting on the years it would take for its martyred son to be confirmed in sainthood by the Vatican. But then, neither had Canterbury, where the industry based on the martyrdom of Saint Thomas a Becket was immensely bigger and better organized.

Chastened by Gyltha's strictures on want, Adelia could not blame so poor a convent for exploitation, but she could despise the vulgarity with which it was being done. Roger of Acton was here, striding up and down the line of pilgrims, brandishing an ampulla, urging the crowd to buy: "Whoso shall be washed in the blood of this little one need never wash again." The sour whiff as he passed suggested he took his own advice.

The man had capered the journey from Canterbury, a demented monkey, always shouting. His earflapped cap was still too large for him, his green-black robe daubed with the same mud and food splashes.

On a pilgrimage that had consisted mainly of educated people, the man had appeared an idiot. Yet here, among the desperate, his cracked voice carried compulsion. Roger of Acton said "Buy," and his hearers bought.

It was expected that God's finger infected those it touched with holy madness; Acton was commanding the respect accorded to skeletal men gibbering in the caves of the East, or to a stylite balancing on his pillar. Did not saints embrace discomfort? Had not the corpse of Saint Thomas a Becket been wearing a hair shirt swarming with lice? Dirt, exaltation, and an ability to quote the Bible were signs of sanctity.

He was of a type Adelia had always found to be dangerous; it denounced eccentric old women as witches and hauled adulterers before the courts, its voice inciting violence against other races, other beliefs.

The question was
how
dangerous.

Was it you?
Adelia wondered, watching him.
Do you prowl Wandlebury Ring? Do you truly wash in the blood of children?

Well, she wasn't going to ask him yet, not until she had reason, but in the meantime, he remained a fitting candidate.

He didn't recognize her. Neither did Prioress Joan, who passed them on her way to the gates. She was dressed for riding and had a gyrfalcon on her wrist, encouraging the customers as she went with a "Tallyho."

The woman's confident, bullying manner had led Adelia to expect that the house of which she was the head would prove to be the acme of organization. Instead, slackness was apparent: weeds grew around the church; there were missing tiles on its roof. The nuns' habits were patched, the white linen beneath the black wimples showed mostly dirty; their manners were coarse.

Shuffling behind the line entering the church, she wondered where the money gained from Little Saint Peter was going. Not, so far, to the greater glory of God. Nor on comfort for the pilgrims: no one assisted the sick; there were no benches for the lame while they waited; no refreshment. The only suggestion for overnight accommodation was a curling list of the town's inns pinned to the church gate.

Not that the supplicants shuffling with her seemed to care. A woman on crutches boasted of visits to the glories of Canterbury, Winchester, Walsingham, Bury Saint Edmunds, and Saint Albans as she displayed her badges to those around her, but she was tolerant of the shabbiness here: "I got hopes of this un," she said. "He'm a young saint yet, but he was crucified by Jews; Jesus'll listen to him, I'll be bound."

An English saint, one who'd shared the same fate, and at the same hands, as the Son of God. Who had breathed the air they breathed now. Despite herself, Adelia found herself praying that he would.

She was inside the church now. A clerk sat at a table by the doors, taking down the deposition of a pale-faced woman who was telling him she felt better for having touched the reliquary.

This was too tame for Roger of Acton, who came bounding up. "You were strengthened? You felt the Holy Spirit? Your sins washed away? Your infirmity gone?"

"Yes," the woman said, and then more excitedly: "Yes."

"Another miracle!" She was dragged outside to be displayed to the waiting line. "A cure, my people! Let us praise God and his little saint."

The church smelled of wood and straw. The chalk outline of a maze on the nave suggested that someone had attempted to draw the labyrinth of Jerusalem on the stones, but only a few of the pilgrims were obeying the nun trying to make them walk it. The rest were pushing toward a side chapel where the reliquary lay hidden from Adelia's view by those in front of her.

While she waited she looked around. A fine stone plaque on one wall declaring that "in the Year of Our Lord 1138, King Stephen confirmed the gift which William le Moyne, goldsmith, made to the nuns of the cell newly founded in the town of Cambridge for the soul of the late King Henry."

It probably explained the poverty, Adelia thought. Stephen's war with his cousin Matilda had ended in triumph for Matilda, or, rather, Henry II, her son. The present king would not be happy to endow a house confirmed by the man his mother had fought for thirteen years.

A list of prioresses declared that Joan had taken up her position only two years previously. The church's general disrepair showed she lacked enthusiasm for it. Her more secular interest was suggested by the painting of a horse with the subscription: "Braveheart. A.D. 1151--A.D. 1169. Well Done, Thou Good and Faithful Servant." A bridle and bit hung from the wooden fingertips of a statue to Saint Mary.

The couple in front had now reached the reliquary. They dropped to their knees, allowing Adelia to see it for the first time.

She caught her breath. Here in a white blaze of candles was transcendence to forgive all the grossness that had gone before. Not just the glowing reliquary but the young nun at its head who knelt, still as stone, her face tragic, her hands steepled in prayer, brought to life a scene from the Gospels: a mother, her dead child; together they made a scene of tender grace.

Adelia's neck prickled. She was suddenly ravished by the wish to believe. Here, surely, in this place was radiant truth to sweep doubt up to Heaven for God to laugh at.

The couple was praying. Their son was in Syria--she'd heard them talking of him. Together, as if they'd been practicing, they whispered, "Oh holy child, if you'd mention our boy to the Lord and send him home safe, we'd be grateful evermore."

Let me believe, God,
Adelia thought. A plea as pure and simple as this must prevail.
Only let me believe. I am lonely for belief.

Holding each other, the man and woman moved away. Adelia knelt. The nun smiled at her. She was the shy little one who had accompanied the prioress to Canterbury and back, but now timidity had been transfigured into compassion. Her eyes were loving. "Little Saint Peter will hear you, my sister."

The reliquary was shaped like a coffin and had been placed on top of a carved stone tomb so that it should be on eye level with those who knelt to it. This, then, was where the convent's money had gone--into a long, jewel-encrusted casket on which a master goldsmith had wrought domestic and agricultural scenes depicting the life of a boy, his martyrdom by fiends, and his ascension to Paradise borne upward by Saint Mary.

Inset along one side was mother-of-pearl so thin that it acted as a window. Peering into it, Adelia could see only the bones of a hand that had been propped up on a small velvet pillow to assume the attitude of benediction.

"You may kiss his knuckle, if you wish." The nun pointed to a monstrance lying on a cushion on top of the reliquary. It resembled a Saxon brooch and had a knobbled, tiny bone set in gold among precious stones.

It was the trapezium bone of the right hand. The glory faded. Adelia returned to herself. "Another penny to view the whole skeleton," she said.

The nun's white brow--she was beautiful--furrowed. Then she leaned forward, removed the monstrance, and lifted the reliquary's lid. As she did so, her sleeve crumpled to show an arm blackened with bruises.