Only the king’s departure had been noisy, a rush of boar hounds and riders galloping toward the gates and open country.
Adelia thought she saw two veiled figures being escorted away by men-at-arms. Perhaps the hatted, bowed shape plodding on a solitary course toward the castle was the rabbi. Only Mansur was here beside her, God bless him.
She went and put her arm around Walburga, who had been forgotten. Then she waited for Rowley Picot. And waited.
Either he wasn’t coming or he had already gone. Ah, well…
“It seems we must walk,” she said. “Are you well enough?” She was concerned for Walburga; the girl’s pulse had been alarming after she’d seen what she should never have seen in the kitchen.
The nun nodded.
Together they ambled through the mist, Mansur striding beside them. Twice Adelia turned to look for the Safeguard; twice she remembered. When she turned for a third time…“Oh no, dear God, no.”
“What is it?” Mansur asked.
It was Rakshasa walking behind them, his feet hidden in the mist.
Mansur drew his dagger, then half-replaced it. “It’s the other. Stay here.”
Still gasping with shock, Adelia watched him go forward to speak to Gervase of Coton, whose figure so much resembled that of a dead man, a Gervase who now seemed reduced and oddly diffident. He and the Arab strolled farther along the track and were lost to view. Their voices were a mumble. Mansur’s English had improved these last weeks.
He came back alone. The three of them walked on together. “We send him a pot of snakeweed,” Mansur said.
“Why?” Then, because everything normal had been cast adrift, Adelia grinned. “He’s…Mansur, has he got the pox?”
“Other doctors have been of no help to him. The poor man has attempted these many days to consult me. He says he has watched the Jew’s house for my return.”
“I saw him. He scared the wits from me. I’ll give him bloody snakeweed, I’ll put pepper in it, I’ll teach him to lurk on riverbanks. Him and his pox.”
“You will be a doctor,” Mansur reproved her. “He is a worried man, frightened of what his wife will say, Allah pity him.”
“Then he should have been faithful to her,” Adelia said. “Oh, tut, it’ll go in time if it’s gonorrhea.” She was still grinning. “But don’t tell him that.”
It was lighter when they gained the gates toward the town, and they could see the Great Bridge. A flock of sheep was trotting over it, making for the shambles. Some students were stumbling home after a hard night out.
Puffing, Walburga said suddenly in disbelief, “But she were the best of us, the holiest. I admired her, she were so good.”
“She had a madness,” Adelia said. “There’s no accounting for that.”
“Where’d it come from?”
“I don’t know.” Always there, perhaps. Stifled. Doomed to chastity and obedience at the age of three. A chance meeting with a man who overpowered-Rowley had talked of Rakshasa’s attraction for women. “The Lord only knows why; he doesn’t treat them well.” Had that coition of frenzy released the nun’s derangement? Maybe, maybe. “I don’t know,” Adelia said again. “Take shallow breaths. Slowly, now.”
A horseman cantered up as they arrived at the foot of the bridge. Sir Rowley Picot looked down at Adelia. “Am I to be given an explanation, mistress?”
“I explained to Prior Geoffrey. I am grateful and honored by your proposal…” Oh, this was no good. “Rowley, I would have married you, nobody else, ever, ever. But…”
“Did I not fuck you nicely this morning?”
He was deliberately speaking English, and Adelia felt the nun beside her flinch at his use of the old Anglo-Saxon word. “You did,” she said.
“I rescued you. I saved you from that monster.”
“You did that, too.”
But it had been the jumble of powers she and Simon of Naples possessed between them that had led to the discovery on Wandlebury Hill, despite her own misjudgment in going there alone.
Those same powers had led to the saving of Ulf. It had liberated the Jews. Though it had been mentioned by none except the king, their investigation had been a craft of logic and cold reason and…oh, very well, instinct, but instinct based on knowledge; rare skills in this credulous age, too rare to be drowned as Simon’s had been drowned, too valuable to be buried, as hers would be buried in marriage.
All this Adelia had reflected on, in anguish, but the result had been inexorable. Though she had fallen in love, nothing in the rest of the world had changed. Corpses would still cry out. She had a duty to hear them.
“I am not free to marry,” she said. “I am a doctor to the dead.”
“They’re welcome to you.”
He spurred his horse and set it at the bridge, leaving her bereft and oddly resentful. He might at least have seen her and Walburga home.
“Hey,” she yelled after him, “are you sending Rakshasa’s head back east to Hakim?”
His reply floated back: “Yes, I bloody well am.”
He could always make her laugh, even when she was crying. “Good,” she said.
MUCH HAPPENED IN CAMBRIDGE that day.
The judges of the assize listened to and gave their verdict on cases of theft, of coin-clipping, street brawls, a smothered baby, bigamy, land disputes, ale that was too weak, loaves that were short, disputed wills, deodands, vagabondage, begging, shipmasters’ quarrels, fisticuffs among neighbors, arson, runaway heiresses, and naughty apprentices.
At midday, there was a hiatus. Drums rolled and trumpets called the crowds in the castle bailey to attend. A herald stood on the platform before the judges to read from a scroll in a voice that reached to the town: “Let it be known that in the sight of God and to the satisfaction of the judges here present the knight yclept Joscelin of Grantchester has been proved vile murderer of Peter of Trumpington; Harold of Saint Mary Parish; Mary, daughter of Bonning the wildfowler, and Ulric of the parish of Saint John, and that the aforesaid Joscelin of Grantchester died during his capture as befitted his crimes, being eaten by dogs.
“Let it also be known that the Jews of Cambridge have been quitted of these killings and all suspicion thereof, whereby they shall be returned to their lawful homes and business without hindrance. Thus, in the name of Henry, King of England, under God.”
There was no mention of a nun. The Church was silent on that matter. But Cambridge was full of whispers and, in the course of the afternoon, Agnes, eel seller’s wife and mother to Harold, pulled apart the little beehive hut in which she had sat outside the castle gates since the death of her son, hauled its material down the hill, and rebuilt it outside the gates of Saint Radegund’s convent.
All this was seen and heard in the open.
Other things were done in secrecy and darkness, though exactly who did them nobody ever knew. Certainly, men high in the ranks of Holy Church met behind closed doors where one of them begged, “Who will rid us of this shameful woman?” just as Henry II had once cried out to be rid of the turbulent Becket.
What happened next behind those doors is less certain, for no directions were given, though perhaps there were insinuations as light as gnats, so light that it could not be said they had even been made, wishes expressed in a code so byzantine that it could not be translated except by those with the key to it. All this, perhaps, so that the men-and they were not clerics-who went down Castle Hill to Saint Radegund’s could not be said to be acting on anyone’s command to do what they did.
Nor even that they did it.
Possibly Agnes knew, but she never told anybody.