Mistress of the Art of Death (36 page)

"There will be no more visitors to this room," Adelia instructed. "And none of you, especially Ulf, is to leave the castle or wander in it alone."

"Goddammit, woman, we'll never find him like that."

Rowley, it appeared, had been carrying on his own investigation from his bed, using his role as tax inspector to question his visitors.

From the Jews he had learned that Chaim, according to his code, had never talked about his clients nor mentioned the size of their debts. His only records were those that had burned or been stolen from Simon's body.

"Unless the Exchequer in Winchester has a list of tallies, which it may well do--I've sent my squire there to find out--the king will not be best pleased; the Jews provide a large part of this nation's income. And when Henry isn't pleased..."

Brother Gilbert had announced that he would rather burn than approach Jews for money. The crusading apothecary as well as Sir Joscelin and Sir Gervase had said the same, though less forcefully. "They're not likely to tell me if they did, of course, but all three seem finely set up from their own efforts."

Gyltha nodded. "They done well out of the Holy Land. John was able to start his 'pothecary shop when he got back. Gervase, nasty little turd he was as a boy and he ain't any pleasanter now, but he's getting hisself more land. And young Joscelin as didn't have a rag to his arse thanks to his pa, he's made a palace out of Grantchester. Brother Gilbert? He's allus Brother Gilbert."

They heard labored breathing on the stairs and Lady Baldwin came in, holding her side with one hand and a letter in the other. "Sickness. At the convent. Lord help us. If it be the plague..."

Matilda W. followed her in.

The letter was for Adelia and had been delivered first to Old Benjamin's house whence Matilda W. had brought it. It was a scrap of parchment torn from some manuscript, showing its terrible urgency, but the writing on it was strong and clear.

"Prioress Joan presents her compliments to Mistress Adelia, assistant to Dr. Mansur, of whom she has heard good reports. Pestilence has broken out amongst us and I ask in the name of Jesus and his dear Mother for said Mistress Adelia to visit this convent of the blessed Saint Radegund that she may then report to the good doctor and solicit his advice on what may alleviate the sisters' suffering, it being very severe and some near to death."

A postscript read: "To be no haggling over fees. All this to be done with discretion so as to avoid the spread of alarm."

A groom and horse were awaiting Adelia in the courtyard below.

"I shall send you with some of my beef tea," Lady Baldwin told Adelia. "Joan is not usually alarmed. It must be dire."

It must be,
Adelia thought,
for a Christian prioress to beg the aid of a Saracen doctor.

"The infirmaress have gone down with it," Matilda W. said--she'd heard the groom's report. "Spewing and shitting fit to bust, the lot of 'em. God help us if it be the plague. Ain't this town suffered enough? What's Little Saint Peter at that the holy sisters ain't spared?"

"You will not go, Adelia," Rowley said.

"I must."

"I fear she should," said Lady Baldwin. "The prioress does not allow a man in the nuns' inner sanctum, despite those wicked rumors, except a priest to hear their confession, of course. With the infirmaress hors de combat, Mistress Adelia is the next best thing, an excellent thing. If she keeps a clove of garlic up each nostril, she cannot succumb." She hurried away to prepare her beef tea.

Adelia was giving explanations and instruction to Mansur. "O friend of the ages, look after this man and this woman and this boy while I am absent. Let them go nowhere alone. The devil is abroad. Guard over them in the name of Allah."

"And who shall guard over you, little one? The holy women will not object to the presence of a eunuch."

Adelia smiled. "It is not a harem, the women safeguard their temple from all men. I shall be safe enough."

Ulf was tugging at her arm. "I can come. I ain't growed yet, they know me at Saint Raggy's. And I don't never catch nothing."

"You're not going to catch this, either," she said.

"You will not
go,
" Rowley said. Wincing, he dragged Adelia to the window away from the others. "It's a bloody plot to get you unprotected. Rakshasa's in it somewhere."

Back on his feet, Adelia was reminded of how big he was and what it was for a powerful man to be kept powerless. Nor had she realized that, for him, Simon's murder had seemed a preliminary to her own. Just as she was frightened for him, so was he for her. She was touched, gratified, but there were things to attend to--Gyltha must be told to change the medicines on the table; she had to collect others from Old Benjamin's...she didn't have time for him now.

"You're the one who's been asking questions," she said gently. "I beg you to take care of yourself and my people. You merely need nursing at this stage, not a doctor. Gyltha will look after you." She tried to disengage herself from him. "You must see that I have to go to them."

"For God's sake," he shouted. "You can stop playing the doctor for once, can't you?"

Playing the doctor.
Playing the doctor?

Though his hand was still on her, it was as if the ground had fallen between them, and looking up into his eyes, she saw herself across the chasm--a pleasant little creature enough but a deluded one, merely busying itself, a spinster filling in time until she should be claimed by what was basic for a woman.

But if so, what was the line of suffering that waited for her every day? What was Gil the thatcher who was able to climb up ladders?

And what are
you, she thought, amazed, looking into his eyes,
who should have bled to death and didn't?

She knew in absolute certainty now that she should never marry him. She was Vesuvia Adelia Rachel Ortese Aguilar, who would be very, very lonely but always a doctor.

She shook herself free. "The patient can resume solid food, Gyltha, but change all those medicaments for fresh," she said and went out.

Anyway,
she thought,
I need that fee the prioress promised.

S
AINT
R
ADEGUND'S CHURCH
and its outhouses near the river were deceptive, having been built after the Danes stopped invading and before the foundation ran out of money. The main body of the convent, its chapel and residences, was larger and lonelier and had known the reign of Edward the Confessor.

It stood away from the river hidden among trees so that Viking longboats snaking through the shallow waters of the Cam tributaries might not find it. When the monks, who'd inhabited it originally, died out, the place had been granted to religious women.

All this Adelia learned over the shoulder of Edric as, with Safeguard following, his horse carried them both into the convent estate via a side gate in its wall, the main gates having been barred against visitors.

Like Matilda W., the groom was aggrieved by Little Saint Peter's failure to do his job. "It do look bad shutting up, with the pilgrim season just starting proper," he said. "Mother Joan's right put out."

He set Adelia down by a stable block and kennels, the only well-kept convent buildings she had seen so far, and pointed to a path skirting a paddock. "God go with you, missis." Obviously, he would not.

Adelia, however, was not prepared to be cut off from the outside world. She ordered the man to go to the castle each morning, taking any message she might need to send and asking how her people did, and to bring back the answer.

She set off with Safeguard. The clatter of the town across the river faded. Larks rose around her, their song like bursting bubbles. Behind her the prioress's hounds sent up a belling and a roe deer barked somewhere in the forest ahead.

The same forest, she remembered, that contained the manor of Sir Gervase, and into which Little Saint Peter had disappeared.

"C
AN THIS BE MANAGED
?" Prioress Joan demanded. She was more haggard than when Adelia had last seen her.

"Well, it isn't the plague," Adelia told her, "nor typhus, Lord be thanked; none of the sisters has the rash. I believe it to be cholera."

She added, because the prioress went pale, "A milder form than the one found in the East, though bad enough. I am concerned for your infirmaress and Sister Veronica." The oldest and the youngest. Sister Veronica was the nun who, praying over Little Saint Peter's reliquary, had presented Adelia with an image of imperishable grace.

"Veronica." The prioress appeared distraught--and Adelia liked her better for it. "The sweetest-natured of them all, may God attend her. What is to be done?"

What indeed?
Adelia glanced in dismay across to the other side of the cloister, where, beyond the pillars of its walk, rose what looked like an outsize pigeon-loft, two rows of ten doorless arches, each giving to a cell less than five feet wide, inside which lay a prostrate nun.

There was no infirmary--the title "infirmaress" seemed to be an honorary designation settled on the elderly Sister Odilia merely because she was skilled in herbs. No dorter, either--nowhere, in fact, for the nuns to be cared for collectively.

"The original monks were ascetics who preferred the privacy of individual cells," the prioress said, catching Adelia's look. "We keep to them because as yet we have had no money to build. Can you manage?"

"I shall need assistance." Caring single-handedly for twenty women severely afflicted with diarrhea and vomiting would be hard enough in a ward, but to fetch and carry from cell to cell, up and down the wickedly narrow and railless flight of steps that led to the upper cells, would cut down the carer herself.

"I fear our servants fled at the mention of plague."

"We don't want them back in any case," Adelia said firmly. A glimpse of the convent house suggested that those who should have kept it ordered had allowed slovenliness to reign long before disease overtook it, a slackness that might have caused the disease itself.

She said, "May I ask if you eat with your nuns?"

"And what has that to do with the price of fish, mistress?" The prioress was offended, as if Adelia was accusing her of dereliction.

So Adelia was, in a way. She remembered Mother Ambrose's care for the physical and spiritual nourishment of her nuns while presiding over meals in Saint Giorgio's immaculate refectory, where wholesome food was accompanied by a reading from the Bible, where a nun's lack of appetite for either could be noted and acted on. But she did not want confrontation so early and said, "It may have something to do with the poisoning."

"Poisoning? Do you suggest that someone is trying to murder us?"

"Deliberately, no. Accidentally, yes. Cholera is a form of poisoning. Since you yourself seem to have escaped it..."

The prioress's expression suggested that she was beginning to regret calling Adelia in. "As it happens, I have my own quarters, and I am usually too occupied by convent business to eat with the sisters. I have been at Ely this last week, consulting with the abbot on...on religious matters."

Buying one of the abbot's horses, so Edric the groom had said.

Prioress Joan went on: "I suggest you confine your interest to the matter in hand. Inform your doctor that there are no poisoners here and, in the name of God, ask him what is to be done."

What had to be done was to solicit help. Satisfied that it was not the convent's air causing the nuns' sickness--though the place was dank and smelled of rot--Adelia walked back to the kennels and sent Edric the groom for the Matildas.

They arrived, and Gyltha with them. "The boy's safe in the castle with Sir Rowley and Mansur," she said when Adelia reproved her. "Reckon you need me more than he do."

That was undoubted, but it was dangerous for them all.

"I shall be glad of you by day," Adelia told the three women. "You shall not stay by night because, while the pestilence lasts, you will not eat any of the convent's food nor drink its water. I insist on this. Also, buckets of brandy will stand in the cloister, and after touching the nuns, or their chamber pots, or anything that is theirs, you must lave your hands in them."

"Brandy?"

"Brandy."

Adelia had her own theory concerning diseases such as the one ravaging the nuns. Like so many of her theories, it did not accord with that of Galen or any other medical influences in vogue. She believed that the flux in cases like this was the body's attempt to rid itself of a substance it could not tolerate. Poison in one form or another had gone in and, ergo, poison was coming out. Water itself was so often contaminated--as in the poorer districts of Salerno, where disease was ever-present--it must be treated as a source of the original poison until proved otherwise. Since anything distilled, in this case brandy, frequently stopped wounds from putrefying, it might also act on any ejected poison that touched the hands of a nurse and prevent her from ingesting it herself.

So Adelia reasoned and acted on.

"My brandy?"
The prioress expressed dissatisfaction at seeing the cask from her cellar poured into two buckets.

"The doctor insists on it," Adelia told her, as if the messages Edric brought from the castle had contained instructions from Mansur.

"I would have you know that is best Spanish," Joan said.

"An even stronger specific."

Since they were all in the kitchen at that moment, Adelia had the prioress at a disadvantage; she suspected the woman of never having entered it. The place was dark and verminous; several rats had fled at their entrance--Safeguard yelping after them with the most animation Adelia had ever seen in him. The stone walls were encrusted with grease. Such grooves of the pine table block that could be seen beneath litter were filled with grime. There was a smell of rotting sweetness. Pots hanging from hooks retained furred remnants of meals, flour bins were uncovered, and there was a suggestion of movement in their contents, the same applied to the open vats of cooking water--Adelia wondered if it was in one of these that the nuns had boiled Little Saint Peter's corpse and whether it had been cleaned afterward. Shreds clinging to the blade of a meat cleaver stank like pus.