Mistress of the Art of Death (20 page)

The castle's noise was climbing up its daylong crescendo, diminishing Roger of Acton's ravings to a bird's chirrup.

A bull waiting to be baited was adding its bellow to the rasp of a grindstone where squires were sharpening their master's blades. Soldiers were drilling. Children, newly let out to play in the sheriff's garden, laughed and shouted.

Away in the tiltyard, a tax collector who had decided to shed some of his weight had joined the knights practicing with wooden swords.

"What do you want to know?" Dina asked.

Adelia patted her cheek. "You are worthy of your brave mother." She took in her breath. "Dina, you saw that body on the lawn before the lights were put out, before it was covered by the tablecloth, before it was taken away. What condition was it in?"

"The poor child." This time Dina wept not for herself, nor for her baby, nor for her mother. "The poor little boy. Somebody had cut off his eyelids."

Eight

I
had to make sure," Adelia said. "The boy could have died at the hands of someone other than our killer, or even accidentally--the injuries might have been sustained after death."

"They do that," Simon said. "When they're accidentally dead, they leap up on the nearest Jewish lawn."

"It was necessary to make sure he died as the others did. It had to be proved." Adelia was as tired as Simon, though she didn't regard the Jews' treatment of the body on their lawn with the disgust that he did; she was sorry for them. "We can now be certain the Jews didn't kill him."

"And who will believe it?" Simon was determinedly depressed.

They were at supper. The last of the sun coming almost directly through the ridiculous windows was warming the room and touching Simon's pewter flagon with gold. To save the wine, he'd reverted to English beer. Mansur was drinking the barley water that Gyltha made for him.

It was Mansur who asked now, "Why does the dog cut off their eyelids?"

"I don't know." Adelia didn't want to consider the reason.

"Would you know what I think?" Simon said.

She would not. In Salerno, she was presented with bodies, some of which had died in suspicious circumstances; she examined them; she gave her results to her foster father, who, in turn, told the authorities; the bodies were taken away. Sometimes, always later, she learned what happened to the perpetrator--if he or she had been found. This was the first time she had been involved in physically hunting down a killer, and she was not enjoying it.

"I think they die too quickly for him," Simon said. "I think he wants their attention even after they are dead."

Adelia turned her head away and watched midges dancing in a shaft of sun.

"I know what parts I'll cut off when we catch him,
inshallah,
" Mansur said.

"I shall assist you," Simon agreed.

Two men so different. The Arab, looming in his chair, dark face almost featureless against the white folds of his headdress; the Jew, the sun catching the line of his cheek, leaning forward, his fingers turning and turning his flagon. Both in accord.

Why did men think that was the worst thing? Perhaps, for them, it was. But it was trivial, like castrating a rogue animal. The harm done by this particular creature was too vast for human reprisal, the pain it had caused spread too far. Adelia thought of Agnes, mother of Harold, and her vigil. She thought of the parents who'd gathered round the little catafalques in Saint Augustine's church. Of two men in Chaim's cellar, praying as they did violence to their nature by ridding themselves of a fearful burden. She thought of Dina and the shadow fallen over her that could never be lifted.

It accounted for the wish for eternal damnation, she thought, that there could be no reparation made to such dead, nor for the living they'd left behind. Not in this life.

"Do you agree with me, Doctor?"

"What?"

"My theory on the mutilations."

"It is not in my
brief.
I am not here to understand why a murderer does what he does, merely to prove that he did it."

They stared at her.

"I apologize," she said more quietly, "but I will not enter his mind."

Simon said, "We may have to do that very thing before this business is finished, Doctor. Think as he thinks."

"Then you do it," she said. "You're the subtle one."

He took in a sad breath; they were all gloomy this evening. "Let us consider what we know of him so far. Mansur?"

"No killings here before the saint boy. Maybe he came new to this place a year ago."

"Ah, then you think he's done this before, somewhere else?"

"A jackal is always a jackal."

"True," Simon said. "Or he could be a new recruit to the armies of Beelzebub, just starting to slake his desires."

Adelia frowned; that the killer should be a very young man did not accord with her sense of him.

Simon's head came up. "You don't think so, Doctor?"

She sighed; she was to be drawn in despite herself. "Are we supposing?"

"We can do little else."

Reluctantly, because the apprehension came from less than a shadow glimpsed in a fog, she said, "The attacks are frenzied, which argues youth, but they are planned, which argues maturity. He lures them to a special and isolated place, like the hill; I think that must be so because nobody hears their torture. Possibly, he takes his time, not in the case of Little Peter--he was more hurried there--but with the subsequent children."

She paused because the theory was hideous and founded on such little proof. "It
may
be that they are kept alive for some time after their abduction. That would argue a perverted patience and a love of prolonged agony. I would have expected the corpse of the most recent victim, considering the day he was taken, to have displayed more advanced decomposition than it did."

She glared at them. "But that could be due to so many causes that, as a proposition, it bears no weight at all."

"Ach." Simon pushed his cup away as if it offended him. "We are no further. We shall, after all, have to inquire into the movements of forty-seven people, whether they wear black worsted or not. I shall have to write to my wife and tell her I will not be home yet."

"There is one thing," Adelia said. "It occurred to me today when I talked with Mistress Dina. That poor lady believes all the killings are the result of a conspiracy to blame her people...."

"They are not." Simon said. "Yes, he tries to implicate the Jews with his Stars of David, but that is not why he kills."

"I agree. Whatever the prime motive for these murders, it is not racial; there is too much sexual ferocity involved."

She paused. Having sworn not to enter the mind of the killer, she could feel it reaching out to enmesh her. "Nevertheless, he may see no reason why he should not gain from it. Why did he cast Little Peter's body on Chaim's lawn?"

Simon's eyebrows went up; the question didn't need asking. "Chaim was a Jew, the eternal scapegoat."

"It worked damn well, too," Mansur said. "No suspicion on the killer. And"--he dragged a finger across his throat--"good-bye, Jews."

"Exactly," said Adelia. "Good-bye, Jews. Again, I agree it is probable that the man wanted to implicate the Jews while he was about it. But why choose that particular Jew? Why not put the body near one of the other houses? They were deserted and dark that night because all Jewry was attending Dina's wedding. If he were in a boat--and presumably he was--the killer could have lain the corpse here; this house, Old Benjamin's, is near the river. Instead, he took unnecessary risk and chose Chaim's lawn, which was well lighted, to throw the body onto."

Simon leaned even further forward until his nose almost touched one of the table's candlesticks. "Continue."

Adelia shrugged. "I merely look at the end result. The Jews are blamed; a mob is fired into madness; Chaim, the biggest moneylender in Cambridge, is hanged. The tower holding the records of all those owing money to the usurers goes up in flames, Chaim's with it."

"He owed money to Chaim? Our killer having satisfied his perversion also wants his debt canceled?" Simon considered it. "But could he have reckoned on the mob burning the tower down? Or that it would turn on Chaim and hang him, for that matter?"

"He is in the crowd," Mansur said, and his boy's voice went into a shriek: "Kill the Jews. Kill Chaim. No more filthy usury. To the castle, people. Bring torches."

Startled by the sound, the head of Ulf peeped over the rail of the gallery, a white and unruly dandelion clock in the growing darkness. Adelia shook a finger at it. "Go to bed."

"Why you talking that foreign gobble?"

"So you can't eavesdrop. Go to bed."

More of Ulf appeared over the rail. "You reckon the Judes didn't do for Peter and them after all, then?"

"No," Adelia told him and added, because, after all, it was Ulf who had discovered and shown her the drain, "Peter was dead when they found him on the lawn. They were frightened and put him into the drain to take suspicion off themselves."

"Mighty clever of 'em, weren't it?" The boy gave a grunt of disgust. "Who
did
do for him, then?"

"We don't know. Somebody who wanted to see Chaim blamed, perhaps someone who owed him money. Go to bed."

Simon held up his hand to detain the boy. "We do not know who, my son. We try to find out." To Adelia he said in Salernitan, "The child is intelligent; he has already been of use. Perhaps he can scout for us."

"No."
She was surprised by her own vehemence.

"I can help." Ulf left the balustrade to come pattering down the stairs in a rush. "I'm a tracker. I got my hoof all over this town."

Gyltha came in to light the candles. "Ulf, you get to bed afore I feed you to the cats."

"Tell 'em, Gran," Ulf said desperately. "Tell how I'm a fine tracker. And I hear things, don't I, Gran? I hear things nobody else don't acause nobody don't notice me, I can go places.... I got a right, Gran, Harold and Peter was my friends."

Gyltha's eyes met Adelia's and the momentary terror in them told Adelia that Gyltha knew what she knew: The killer would kill again.

A jackal is always a jackal.

Simon said, "Ulf could come with us tomorrow and show us where the three children were found."

"That's at the foot of the ring," Gyltha objected. "I don't want the boy near it."

"We have Mansur with us. The killer is not on the hill, Gyltha, he is in town; from the town, the children were abducted."

Gyltha looked toward Adelia, who nodded. Safer that Ulf should be in their company than wandering Cambridge following a trail of his own.

Gyltha considered. "What about the sick?"

"Surgery will be closed for the day," Simon said firmly.

Equally firmly, Adelia said, "On his way to the hill, the doctor will call on yesterday's worst cases. I want to make sure of the child with the cough. And the amputation needs his dressing changed."

Simon sighed. "We should have set up as astrologers. Or lawyers. Something useless. I fear the spirit of Hippocrates has lain a yoke of duty across our shoulders."

"It has." In Adelia's limited pantheon, Hippocrates ruled supreme.

Ulf was persuaded to the undercroft where he and the servants slept, Gyltha retired to the kitchen, and the three others resumed their discussion.

Simon drummed his fingers on the table, thinking. He stopped. "Mansur, my good, wise friend, I believe you are right, our killer was in the crowd a year ago, urging the death of Chaim. Doctor, you agree?"

"It could be so," Adelia said cautiously. "Certainly Mistress Dina believes the mob was being set on with intent."

Kill the Jews,
she thought, the demand beloved of Roger of Acton. How fitting if that creature proved as horrid in action as in person.

She said so out loud, then doubted it. The children's murderer was surely persuasive. She could not imagine the timorous Mary being tempted by Acton, however many sweetmeats he offered her. The man lacked guile; he was a ranting buffoon, ugly. Nor, despising the race as he did, was he likely to have borrowed from a Jew.

"Not necessarily so," Simon told her. "I have seen men leave my father's counting house, condemning his usury while their purses bulged with his gold. Nevertheless, the fellow wears worsted, and we must see if he was in Cambridge on the requisite dates."

His spirits had risen; he would not be long returning to his family after all.
"Au loup!"
Beaming at their puzzlement, he said, "We are on the scent, my friends. We are Nimrods. Lord, if I had known the thrill of the chase, I would have neglected my studies for the hunting field.
Tyer-hillaut!
Is that not the call?"

Adelia said kindly, "I believe the English cry halloo and tallyho."

"Do they? How quickly language corrupts. Ah, well. However, our quarry is in sight. Tomorrow I shall return to the castle and use this excellent organ"--he tapped his nose, which was twitching like a questing shrew's--"to sniff out which man it is in this town that owed Chaim money he was reluctant to repay."

"Not tomorrow," Adelia said. "Tomorrow we go to Wandlebury Hill." To search, it would need all three of them. And Ulf.

"The day after, then." Simon was not to be put off. He raised his flagon first to Adelia, then Mansur. "We are on his track, my masters. A man of maturity in age, on Wandlebury Hill three nights ago, in Cambridge on such and such a day, a man in heavy debt to Chaim and leading the crowd as it bays for the moneylender's blood. With access to black worsted." He drank deep and wiped his mouth. "Almost we know the size of his boots."

"Who may be someone entirely different," Adelia said.

To that list she would have added a cloak of geniality, for surely if, like Peter, the children had gone willingly to meet their killer, they had been persuaded by charm, even humor.

She thought of the big tax collector.

Gyltha didn't hold with her employers staying up too late and came in to clear the table while they were yet sitting at it.