These things, both transparent and shadowed, passed without Adelia’s knowledge. On Gyltha’s orders, she slept round the clock. When she woke up, it was to find a line of patients winding down Jesus Lane, waiting for Dr. Mansur’s attention. She dealt with the severe cases, then called a halt while she consulted Gyltha.
“I should go to the convent and look to Walburga. I’ve been remiss.”
“You been mending.”
“Gyltha, I don’t want to go to that place.”
“Don’t then.”
“I must; another attack like that could stop her heart.”
“Convent gates is closed and nobody answering. So they say. And that, that…” Gyltha still couldn’t bring herself to say the name. “She’s gone. So they say.”
“Gone? Already?” Nobody dallies when the king commands, she thought. Le roi le veut. “Where did they send her?”
Gyltha shrugged. “Just gone. So they say.”
Adelia felt relief spreading down to her ribs and almost mending them. The Plantagenet had cleansed his kingdom’s air so that she could breathe it.
Though, she thought, in doing so, he has fouled another nation’s. What will be done to her there?
Adelia tried to avoid the image of the nun writhing as she had on the floor of the refectory but this time in filth and darkness and chains-and couldn’t. Nor could she avoid concern; she was a doctor, and true doctors made no judgments, only diagnoses. She had treated the wounds and diseases of men and women who’d disgusted her humanity but not her profession. Character repelled; the suffering, needy body did not.
The nun was mad; for society’s sake, she must be restrained for as long as she lived. But “the Lord pity her and treat her well,” Adelia said.
Gyltha looked at her as if she, too, were a lunatic. “She’s been treated like she deserves,” she said stolidly. “So they say.”
Ulf, for a miracle, was at his books. He was quieter and more grave than he had been. According to Gyltha, he was expressing a wish to become a lawyer. All very pleasing and admirable-nevertheless, Adelia missed the old Ulf.
“The convent gates are locked, apparently,” she told him, “yet I need to get in to see Walburga. She’s ill.”
“What? Sister Fatty?” Ulf was suddenly back on form. “You come along of me; they can’t keep me out.”
Gyltha and Mansur could be trusted to treat the rest of the patients. Adelia went for her medicine chest; lady’s slipper was excellent for hysteria, panic, and fearfulness. And rose oil to soothe.
She set off with Ulf.
ON THE CASTLE RAMPARTS, a tax collector who was taking a well-earned rest from assize business recognized two slight figures among the many crossing the Great Bridge below-he would have recognized the slightly larger one in the unattractive headgear among millions.
Now was the time, whilst she was out of the way. He called for his horse.
Why Sir Rowley Picot found himself compelled to ask advice for his bruised heart from Gyltha, eel seller and housekeeper, he wasn’t sure. It may be because Gyltha was the closest female friend in Cambridge to the love of his life. Maybe because she had helped to nurse him back to life, was a rock of common sense, maybe because of the indiscretions of her past…he just did, and to hell.
Miserably, he munched on one of Gyltha’s pasties.
“She won’t marry me, Gyltha.”
“’Course she won’t. Be a waste. She’s…” Gyltha tried to think of an analogy to some fabled creature, could only come up with “uni-corn,” and settled for “She’s special.”
“I’m special.”
Gyltha reached up to pat Sir Rowley’s head. “You’re a fine lad and you’ll go far, but she’s…” Again, comparison failed her. “The good Lord broke the mold after He made her. Us needs her, all of us, not just you.”
“And I’m not going to damn well get her, am I?”
“Not in marriage, maybe, but there’s other ways of skinning a cat.” Gyltha had long ago decided that the cat under discussion, special though it was, could do with a good, healthy, and continual skinning. A woman might keep her independence, just as she had herself, and could still have memories to warm the winter nights.
“Good God, woman, are you suggesting…? My intentions toward Mistress Adelia are…were…honorable.”
Gyltha, who had never considered honor a requisite for a man and a maid in springtime, sighed. “That’s pretty. Won’t get you nowhere, though, will it?”
He leaned forward and said, “Very well. How?” And the longing in his face would have melted a flintier heart than Gyltha’s.
“Lord, for a clever man, you’m a right booby. She’s a doctor, ain’t she?”
“Yes, Gyltha.” He was trying to be patient. “That, I would point out, is why she won’t accept me.”
“And what is it doctors do?”
“They tend their patients.”
“So they do, and I reckon there’s one doctor as might be tenderer than most to a patient, always supposing that patient was taken poorly and always supposing she was fond of un.”
“Gyltha,” Sir Rowley said earnestly, “if I wasn’t suddenly feeling so damn ill, I’d ask you to marry me.”
THEY SAW THE CROWD at the convent gates when they’d crossed the bridge and cleared the willows on the bank. “Oh, dear,” Adelia said, “word has got around.” Agnes and her little hut were there, like a marker to murder.
It was to be expected, she supposed; the town’s anger had been transferred, and a mob was gathering against the nuns just as it had against the Jews.
It wasn’t a mob, though. The crowd was big enough, artisans and market traders mainly, and there was anger, but it was suppressed and mixed with…what? Excitement? She couldn’t tell.
Why weren’t these people more enraged, as they had been against the Jews? Ashamed, perhaps. The killers had turned out to be not a despised group, but two of their own, one respected, one a trusted friend they waved to nearly every day. True, the nun had been sent away to where they couldn’t lynch her, but they must surely blame Prioress Joan for her laxity in allowing a madwoman the terrible freedom she’d had for so long.
Ulf was talking with the thatcher whose foot Adelia had saved, both of them using the dialect in which Cambridge people spoke to each other and that Adelia still found almost incomprehensible. The young thatcher was avoiding her eye; usually, he greeted her with warmth.
Ulf, too, when he came back, wouldn’t look at her. “Don’t you go in there,” he said.
“I must. Walburga is my patient.”
“Well, I ain’t coming.” The boy’s face had narrowed, as it did when he was upset.
“I understand.” She shouldn’t have brought him; for him, the convent had been home to a hag.
The wicket in the solid wooden gates was opening, and two dusty workmen were clambering out; Adelia saw her chance and, with an “excuse me,” stepped in before they could close it. She shut it behind her.
The strangeness was immediate, as was the silence. Somebody, presumably the workmen, had nailed planks of wood diagonally across the church door that had once opened for pilgrims crowding to pray before the reliquary of Little Saint Peter of Trumpington.
How curious, Adelia thought, that the boy’s putative status as a saint would be lost now that he’d been sacrificed not by Jews but Christians.
Curious, too, that the weedy untidiness ignored by an uncaring prioress should so quickly put on the appearance of decay.
Taking the path toward the convent building, Adelia had to prevent herself from thinking that the birds had stopped singing. They hadn’t, but-she shivered-their note was different. Such was the imagination.
Prioress Joan’s stable and mews were deserted. Doors hung open on empty horse boxes.