Mistress of the Art of Death (38 page)

"Prior Geoffrey promised to supply the anchorites."

"I have no opinion of Prior Geoffrey's promises."

It was not the first time, nor the second, nor the third, that Joan and Adelia had locked horns. The prioress, conscious that her many absences had brought both convent and nuns to the brink of ruin, involuntarily tried to retain her authority by opposing Adelia's.

They had argued over Safeguard, the prioress saying that he stank, which he did--but not more than the living conditions of the nuns. They had argued over the administration of opium, on which the prioress had decided to take the side of the Church. "Pain is God-sent, only God should take it away."

"Who says so? Where in the Bible does it say that?" Adelia had demanded.

"I am told the plant is addictive. They will form a habit of taking it."

"They won't. They don't know what they are taking. It is a temporary panacea, a soporific to relieve their suffering."

Perhaps because she had won that argument, she lost this. The two nuns were given their superior's permission to take supplies to the anchorites--and Adelia, knowing she could do no more for it, left the convent two days later.

Which was the same time the assize arrived in Cambridge.

T
HE NOISE WAS TREMENDOUS
in any case, but for Adelia, whose ears had become accustomed to silence, it was like being battered. Weighted by her heavy medicine case, the walk from the convent house had been a hard one, and now, wanting only to get back to Old Benjamin's and rest, she stood in a crowd on the wrong side of Bridge Street as the parade passed.

At first she didn't realize this
was
the assize; the cavalcade of musicians in livery blowing trumpets and beating tabors took her back to Salerno, to the week before Ash Wednesday when the
carnevale
came to town despite all the Church could do to prevent it.

Here came more drums--and beadles, such ornate livery, with great gold maces over their shoulders. And heavens, mitered bishops and abbots on caparisoned horses, one or two actually waving. And a comic executioner with hood and ax...

Then she knew the executioner wasn't comic; there would be no tumblers and dancing bears. The three Plantagenet leopards were blazoned everywhere, and the lovely palanquins now going by on the shoulders of tabarded men contained the judges of the king come to weigh Cambridge in their scales and, if Rowley was correct, find much of it wanting.

Yet the people around her cheered as if starved of entertainment, as if the trials and fines and death sentences to come would provide it.

Bewildered by hubbub, Adelia suddenly saw Gyltha pushing to the front of the crowd across the street, her mouth open as if she, too, were cheering. But she wasn't cheering.

Dear God of All, don't let her be saying it. It is unsayable, not to be borne. Don't look like that.

Gyltha ran into the street so that a rider had to rein in, swearing, his horse jittering to one side to avoid trampling her. She was talking, looking, clutching. She was coming close, and Adelia stood back to avoid her, but the shriek penetrated everything. "Any of you seen my little boy?"

She might have been blind. She caught at Adelia's sleeve without recognizing her. "You seen my little boy? Name's Ulf. I can't find un."

Fourteen

S
he sat on the Cam's bank in the same spot, on the same upturned pail that Ulf had sat on to do his fishing.

She watched the river. Nothing else.

Behind the house at her back, the streets were full of noise and bustle, some of it to do with the assize, much of it caused by the search for Ulf. Gyltha herself, Mansur, the two Matildas, Adelia's patients, Gyltha's customers, friends, neighbors, parish reeve, and those merely concerned all were looking for the child--with increasing despair.

"The boy was restive in the castle and wished to go fishing," Mansur had told Adelia, so stolid as to be almost rigid. "I came with him. Then the small, fat one"--he referred to Matilda B.--"called me into the house to mend a table leg. When I came outside again, he was gone." The Arab refused to meet her eye, which told her how upset he was. "You may tell the woman I am sorry," he'd said.

Gyltha hadn't blamed him, hadn't blamed anybody; the terror was too great to convert into anger. Her frame wizened into that of a much smaller, older woman; she would not stay still. Already she and Mansur had been upriver and down, asking everybody they met if they had seen the boy and jumping into boats to tear the cover off anything hidden. Today they were questioning traders by the Great Bridge.

Adelia did not go with them. All that night she'd stayed in the solar window, watching the river. Today she sat where Ulf had sat and went on watching it, gripped by a grief so terrible that she was immobilized--although she would have stayed on the bank in any case.
"It's the river,"
Ulf had said, and in her head she listened to him say it over and over again, because, if she stopped listening, she would hear him scream.

Rowley came crashing through the reeds, limping, and tried to take her away. He said things, held her. He seemed to want her to go to the castle, where he was forced to stay, being so busy with the assize. He kept mentioning the king; she hardly heard him.

"I'm sorry," she said, "but I must remain here. It's the river, you see. The river takes them."

"How can the river take them?" He spoke gently, thinking her mad, which, of course, she was.

"I don't know," she told him. "I have to stay here until I do."

He nagged at her. She loved him but not enough to go with him; she was under the direction of a different, more commanding love.

"I shall come back," he said at last.

She nodded, barely noticing that he had gone.

It was a beautiful day, sunny and warm. Some of the passing boat people who knew what had happened shouted encouragement to the woman on the bank sitting on her upturned bucket with a dog beside her. "Don't worry, my duck. He's maybe playing some'eres. He'll turn up like a bad penny." Others averted their eyes from her and remained silent.

She didn't see or hear them, either. What she saw was Ulf's naked, skinny little body struggling in Gyltha's hands as she held it over the bath preparatory to letting it drop into the water.

It's the river.

She made up her mind when, in the late afternoon, Sister Veronica and Sister Walburga came by in their punt. Walburga saw her and poled to the bank. "Now don't you lecture us, mistress. Prior didn't send enough supplies upriver to feed a kitten, and we got to go up again with more. But we're strong again, ain't we, Sister? Strong in the power of God."

Sister Veronica was concerned. "What is it, mistress? You look tired."

"Not to be wondered at," Walburga said. "Wearied from a-looking after us. Angel, she is, blessings on her."

It's the river.

Adelia got up from her bucket. "I shall come with you, if I may."

Pleased, they helped her into the punt and sat her on the stern thwart, her knees bent up to her chin with a crate of hens under her feet. They laughed when Safeguard--"Old Smelly," they called him--disgruntledly set off to follow them by the towpath.

Prioress Joan, they said, was telling the world that Little Saint Peter had been vindicated, for when had so many been so ill and only two died, one of those elderly? The saint had been tested and not found wanting.

The two nuns took turn-and-turn-about at poling with a frequency that showed they hadn't recovered all their strength yet, but they made little of it. "Harder yesterday," Walburga said, "when us was poling separate punts. But we got the Lord's strength on our side." She could go the farthest before she rested; nevertheless, Veronica was the more lissome and economic in movement and made a lovelier shape as her slim arms pressed on the pole and raised it, hardly stirring water that was turning amber in the setting of the sun.

Trumpington flowed past. Grantchester...

They were on a part of the river left unexplored on Adelia's day with Mansur and Ulf. Here it divided, becoming two rivers, the Cam to the south, the other entering it from the east.

The punt turned east. Walburga, who was poling, answered Adelia's question--the first she had asked. "This? This be the Granta. This un takes us to the anchorages."

"And your auntie," Veronica said, smiling. "It takes us to your auntie as well, Sister."

Walburga grinned. "That it do. Her'll be surprised seeing me twice in a week."

The countryside changed with the river, becoming something resembling flat upland where reed and alder fell back to be replaced by firm grass and taller trees. In the twilight, Adelia could see hedges and fences rather than dikes. The moon, which had been a thin, round wafer in the evening sky, gained substance.

Safeguard was beginning to limp, and Veronica said he should travel with them, poor thing. Once the hens stopped protesting at his presence, there was silence broken only by the last twittering of birds.

Walburga took the punt to an inlet from which a path led to a farm. As she lumbered out, she said, "Now don't you go lifting all that stuff on your own, Sister. Get the old codgers to help you."

"They will."

"And you can manage it back on your own?"

Veronica nodded and smiled. Walburga curtsied to Adelia, then waved them off.

The Granta became narrower and darker, finding its way through a winding, shallow valley in which beeches occasionally came down to the water and Veronica had to crouch to avoid branches. She stopped to light a lantern, which she placed on the board at her feet so that it lit the black water ahead for a yard or so and reflected the green eyes of some animal that looked at them before turning away into the undergrowth.

As they cleared the trees, the moon reached them again to silver a black-and-white landscape of pasture and hedge. Veronica poled to the left bank. "Journey's end, the Lord be praised," she said.

Adelia peered ahead and pointed to a huge, flattopped shape in the distance. "What's that?"

Veronica turned to look. "There? That's Wandlebury Hill."

Of course, it would be.

A tiny, twinkling star seemed to have landed on the hill's head, deceptive in the nature of stars so that a blink sent it away and another blink brought it back.

She shifted in order to let Veronica lift the hen crate from under her legs. "I shall wait here," she said.

The nun looked at her doubtfully, and then at the baskets still in the punt needing to be carried to the unseen anchorages.

Adelia said, "Would you leave the lantern with me?"

Sister Veronica cocked her head. "Feared of the dark?"

Adelia considered the question. "Yes."

"Keep it then, and the Lord take care of you. I'll be back in a while." The nun hefted a sack over her shoulder and, gripping the crate in her other hand, set off up a moonlit track leading into trees.

Adelia waited until she'd gone, then lifted Safeguard onto the bank, picked up the lantern, raised it to see that its candle was good and stout, and began walking.

For a while, the river and its accompanying path meandered in the general direction in which she headed, but, after perhaps a mile, she saw that it would take her too far to the south. She left it to keep due east as the crow flew--except that a crow wouldn't have been impeded by the obstacles that now met Adelia: great stretches of brambles, hillocks, and dips made slippery by the recent rain, hurdle fences that sometimes could be climbed or crawled through and sometimes couldn't.

If human eyes watched from Wandlebury Hill, they saw a tiny, errant light straying across the dark country, going this way and that with apparent aimlessness as Adelia circumambulated one obstruction, then another. Sometimes the light paused because she fell, and fell awkwardly in an attempt to keep the lantern from hitting the ground and going out, Safeguard standing by until she got up.

Occasionally, not having heard it, she was startled by a deer or fox fleeing across her path--her own sobbing breath being too loud to hear anything else, though she sobbed not from grief nor exhaustion but from effort.

However, the watcher on Wandlebury Hill, if there were a watcher, could have seen that for all its vagaries, the little light was coming closer.

And Adelia, struggling through her valley of shadows, saw the hill slowly swell until it dominated everything else ahead. The star that had gotten entangled on its brow was no longer intermittent but sent out a steady glow.

She nearly retched as she went, sick with her own stupidity.
Why didn't I go here straight away? The bodies of the children told me, told me. Chalk, they said. We were killed on chalk. The river fixated me. But the river leads to Wandlebury Hill. I should have known.

Scratched and bleeding, limping, yet with the lantern still lit, she heaved herself up onto a flat surface and found it to be the spot on the Roman road where Prior Geoffrey had once screamed to anyone who would listen that he could not piss.

There was nobody about; indeed, it was late now and the moon was high, but Adelia was encapsulated away from time; there was no past where people lived; there wasn't a child called Ulf, she had stopped hearing or seeing him; there was a hill, and she must reach its top. Followed by the dog, she took the steep track without recalling the occasion on which she had first taken it, merely knowing that it was the way to go.

When she gained the top, she had to look for the twinkling light, bewildered that it had led her from a distance but was no longer apparent.
Oh, God, don't let it be put out.
In darkness and among this vast expanse of hummocks, she'd never find the place.

She saw it, a glow through some bushes ahead, and ran, forgetting the depressions in the ground. This time, when she fell, the lantern went out. No matter. She began to crawl.

It was a strange light, neither a fire nor the diffusion of candles--more like a beam directed upward. Scrabbling toward it, her hands touched nothing and she was jerked forward so that she was humped over a slope. Safeguard was looking straight ahead, and there it was, three yards away from her in the center of the bowl-like depression. It wasn't a fire or lanterns. There was nobody there. The light came from a hole in the ground. It was the gaping mouth of hell lit by the flames below.