Was it true that her own brother had killed their best friend? She could not, she would not believe that, but if it wasn’t Isaac, then the man she loved even more than her brother, the man she had pledged her life to, must be the murderer. And that was equally unthinkable.
She tried to reason it out. Why had Isaac been so desperate to convince her she had imagined the corpse? Was he the shadow she’d seen under the apple tree? He could have waited until she left and then moved the body while she was searching for him. Not to Jacob’s house — there wouldn’t have been time — but he could have dragged the corpse from the chamber into the synagogue and moved it to Jacob’s house later that night. But why would he want to kill poor harmless Nathan?
She tried to visualize the room as she’d seen it that day, but all she could remember clearly was how it had looked this morning. The jumbled parchments and books piled up hastily as if someone had been impatient to get on with another task — those lists of words!
She reached into her scrip and pulled out the sheaf of parchments. Lighting a candle from the embers of the fire, Judith examined them again. Temple, burned offering, consume. Some of the words had been crossed out and different words written over the top. But the random letters alongside the words made no sense at all. Then, with a sudden flash, it came to her. Hebrew letters were also numbers. The letter Dalet was the number 4 and the letter Resh was the number 200. Every word on the list had a number beside it, and that number was the combined value of the letters in that word. The letters written on that stone — Hay, Shin and Mem — each had a numeric value too. Hay was 5, Shin was 300, Mem, 40; that made a total of 345. Was that important?
Judith glanced up. It was dark outside now, and Isaac still hadn’t returned. Something was wrong. She stuffed the parchments back into her scrip and, snatching up her cloak, hurriedly left the house. The streets were almost deserted, save for scavenging dogs. A couple of drunks reeled out from one of the taverns, holding each other up. One of them called out to her, but Judith kept her arms tightly crossed over her chest to hide her white badge and hurried on. The synagogue and the study chamber were in darkness, and there was no sign of Isaac there. She prayed she’d find him at Benedict’s lodging and turned to retrace her steps.
The wooden shutters on the apothecary’s shop, like all the others in the street, had been dropped down, sealing off the shop entrance, but Judith slipped along the alley to the side of the shop and knocked tentatively on the narrow door. Silence. Please be at home, Benedict, please. After the third time of knocking, the door opened a crack and Benedict peered out.
‘Is my brother here?’ Judith asked.
Benedict stared at her distractedly as if he wasn’t really taking in what she was saying.
‘I have to talk to you. It’s about Isaac. I’m worried he may be about to do something stupid, dangerous even. Benedict!’
He finally jerked out of his reverie and, with a worried frown, gestured for her to enter. Judith followed him through the storeroom, threading her way between barrels and great earthenware pots. Shelves were crowded with phials of green, brown and gold liquids, some opaque, some as transparent as the coloured glass in the windows of churches. Sacks of dried herbs lay in dusty corners and bunches of them hung from the beams, thickening the air with a potage of spicy scents. Roughly hewn tables were scattered with yellowing animal bones and black wizened roots like tiny shrivelled babies.
Benedict held aside a leather curtain that separated his own small chamber from the workroom. His bedding was rolled up in one corner, and a small table with two stools occupied another, but the rest of the room was taken up with piles of scrolls, sheaves of parchment and teetering stacks of books. Judith wondered where Benedict found space on the beaten-earth floor to lay out his thin palliasse when it came time to sleep.
He gestured to one of the stools but remained standing himself, hovering awkwardly in the doorway and wiping his grimy hands repeatedly on his sacking apron. Judith realized she had interrupted him grinding up some herbs for the shop.
‘What’s this about Isaac?’ Benedict prompted. ‘It must be serious for you to come here alone.’ There was a reproving note in his tone. Though they were betrothed, tongues would flap if she was seen entering his room at night, and such things mattered to Benedict, Judith thought with sudden irritation. She tried to ignore his frown. She had to tell him about Nathan, but she was unsure how to begin. If he disapproved of her coming to his room alone, he would certainly not like the idea of her going off with another man to an empty house.
‘Aaron has left Norwich, but before he left he told me he found the body of Nathan.’
Benedict stared at her in horror, then his legs seemed to give way and he crumpled against the door frame, pressing his fists to his eyes. Judith wanted to throw her arms around him and hold him, but she knew she had to keep talking or she’d never bring herself to tell him what she feared.
‘Nathan’s body was hidden in Jacob’s house in a secret recess that only you, he and Isaac knew of. Aaron swore that he didn’t put him there, so he reasoned it had to be either you or Isaac. And I’ve been thinking: when I told Isaac about the body, he ran straight to the study chamber, not the synagogue where I told him it was. Then he did everything he could to persuade me that I had imagined a body.’
Benedict thrust his hands palms out as if to push away the very suggestion. ‘You can’t believe your own brother is guilty of murder.’
‘I don’t want to believe it, but who else could have known about the hiding place? Isaac went to Nathan’s house that very afternoon. He must have seen the key there and taken it, just as Aaron did, then slipped it back when he returned later to ask if Nathan had returned.’
‘But why would he want to harm Nathan?’ Benedict asked.
‘I think he wanted the stone. Maybe he didn’t know that the Black Friar had already taken it. There’s something else.’ Judith pulled the lists of words out of her pocket. ‘Look, he has been practising gematria. I think he is trying to find words that add up to the same numeric value as the word on that stone.’
Benedict lunged forward and snatched the lists from her and examined them closely. ‘How… how do you know about gematria or about the word on the stone?’
Judith shook her head impatiently. ‘I overheard you all talking, but that’s not important. What matters is what Isaac is going to do with these words.’ She pointed to the lists.
Benedict took a deep breath and spoke without looking at her. ‘On Erev Shavuoth we were trying to meditate. We had almost succeeded in raising a powerful spirit, one who has the knowledge of the future, at least that’s what Aaron and your brother believed. But Nathan panicked and sent everything crashing to the floor before the spirit could materialize properly.’
‘Did you see it?’ Judith asked
Benedict shook his head. ‘I felt something, a force. It was as if I was hollow and a great wind had roared through me, and for a moment I felt such… but I saw nothing. There was nothing coming to our aid,’ he added bitterly. ‘Isaac wants to try again. But he is not as skilled in the art as Aaron. And it’s dangerous to attempt these things alone. Your brother doesn’t have the strength or knowledge to control what he might raise, and such a powerful spirit can take possession of you or even destroy you if you cannot master it.’