“Yes. What is that?”
“I don’t know.”
They trotted toward it, being joined as they went by other lanterns that gave glimpses of alarmed faces and slippered feet.
Past the laundry, past the smithy, past the stables-all of it déjà vu, and horrible because Adelia now knew where the screams were coming from.
The cowshed doors were open, with people clustering around outside them, some trying to comfort a hysterical milkmaid, though most were transfixed and gaping, holding their lanterns high so that light shone on the dangling figure of Bertha.
A strap round her neck hung her from a hook in a beam. Her bare toes pointed downward toward a milking stool where it lay on its side among the straw.
The nuns lamented over the dead girl. What, they asked, could have possessed her to commit suicide, that so very grievous sin? Had she not known that God was the owner of her life and, consequently, that she had committed an unlawful act against God’s own dominion, forbidden by Scripture and Church?
No, Adelia thought angrily, Bertha hadn’t known that; nobody would have taught her.
Guilt, the sisters said. Hers was the hand that had given poisoned mushrooms to Rosamund; remorse had overcome her.
But they were good and charitable women, and though Bertha would have to be interred in unconsecrated ground outside their convent walls, they took the body to their own chapel to keep a vigil over it in the meantime. They chanted prayers for the dead as they went. The crowd from the cowshed followed them.
Bertha had never had so much attention. Death in such a small community, after all, was always an event; felo-de-se was unheard of and worthy of much attention.
As she followed the procession through the dark alleys, Adelia stayed angry, thinking how wrong it was that a creature who had been denied so much in her short life must now be denied even a Christian burial.
Jacques, walking beside her, shook his head. “Terrible thing this is, mistress. To hang herself, poor soul. Felt herself responsible for Lady Rosamund’s death, I reckon.”
“She didn’t, though, Jacques. You were there. ‘Not my fault, not my fault.’ She said it over and over.” It was one thing Bertha had been clear about.
“Well, then, she was mortal afraid of Dame Dakers. Couldn’t face her, I reckon.”
Yes, she had been afraid of Dakers. That would be the verdict. Either Bertha had suffered intolerable remorse for the death of her mistress or she had been so terrified of what Dakers would do to her that she had preferred to take her own life.
“It’s wrong,” Adelia said.
“A sin,” Jacques agreed. “God have mercy on her soul all the same.”
But it was wrong, everything was wrong. The scene of Bertha hanging from the hook had been wrong.
They were approaching the chapel. Such laypeople as had been accompanying the body stopped. This was the nuns’ territory; they must stay outside. Even if she could have gone on, Adelia couldn’t bear it anymore, not Jacques and his gloomy chatter, not the accompanying, expostulating men and women, not the nuns’ chanting. “Where’s the guesthouse from here?”
Jacques showed her the way back. “A good night’s sleep, mistress. That’s what you need.”
“Yes.” But it wasn’t fatigue, though she was very tired, it was the wrongness of everything. It hammered at her mind like something wanting to come in.
The messenger lighted her up the steps and then went off, muttering and shaking his head.
Gyltha had heard the screaming even from their room and had called out the window to find its cause. “Bad business,” she said. “They’re saying sorrow made her do it, poor mite.”
“Or perhaps she was frightened that Dame Dakers would turn her into a mouse and give her to the cat, yes, I know.”
Gyltha looked up from her knitting, alerted. “Oh, ar? What’s this?”
“It’s wrong.” Adelia fondled Ward’s ears, then pushed the dog away.
Gyltha’s eyes narrowed, but she said nothing more on the subject. “How’s the Fleming?”
“I don’t think he’ll survive.” Adelia wandered to their communal bed and soothed back her sleeping daughter’s hair.
“Serve un right.” Gyltha didn’t hold with mercenaries, whose extensive use during the Stephen and Matilda war had made them universally loathed. Whether they came from Flanders or not-and most of them did-the name “Fleming” had become a euphemism for rape, pillage, and cruelty. “One thing about the king,” she said, “he got rid of all they bastards, and now Eleanor’s bringing ’em back.”
“Hmmm.”
Gyltha raised her eyebrows. She’d prepared a hot posset-the room smelled deliciously of hot milk and rum. She handed a beaker to Adelia. “You know what time it is?” She pointed to the hour marks on the candle by the bed. “Time you was in bed. Nearly morning. They’ll be singing Matins soon.”
“It’s all wrong, Gyltha.”
Gyltha sighed; she knew the signs. “It’ll keep til morning.”
“No, it won’t.” Adelia roused herself and refastened her cloak. “A measure, I need a measure. Have we any string?”
There was cord that they used to bind their traveling packs. “And I want that back,” Gyltha said. “Good cord that is. Where you going?”
“I left the medicine bag in the kitchen. I’d better go and get it.”
“You stay there,” Gyltha told her sharply. “You ain’t going nowhere without that old Arab goes, too.”
But Adelia had gone, taking the cord and a lantern with her. Not to the kitchen. She made her way to the nuns’ chapel. It was dawn.
They had laid Bertha’s body on a catafalque in the little nave. The sheet they’d covered it with dragged all the vague light from the high windows to its own oblong whiteness, condemning the rest of the space to a misty dust.
Adelia strode up the nave, the shushing of her feet in the rushes disturbing the quiet so that the nun on her knees at the foot of the catafalque turned to see who it was.
Adelia paid her no attention. She put the lantern on the floor while she turned back the sheet.
Bertha’s face had a bluish tint; the tip of her tongue was just visible where it stuck out of the side of her mouth. This, with her tiny nose, gave her a look of impudence, like some fairy child.
The nun-she was one Adelia didn’t know-hissed her concern as Adelia picked up the lantern and, with the other hand, pulled back Bertha’s lids to expose the eyes.
There were flecks of blood in their whites. Only to be expected.
Getting onto her knees, Adelia held the lantern as close as she could to the neck. There were lines from the edges of the strap that the girl had hung by, but there were other marks-gouges that traveled down the throat.
And running horizontally around the skin of the neck beneath the strap bruises was a line of tiny circular indentations.
The nun was on her feet, trying to flap Adelia away from the body. “What are you doing? You are disturbing the dead.”
Adelia ignored her, didn’t even hear her. She recovered Bertha’s face with the sheet and turned it back at the other end, lifting the girl’s skirts to expose the lower body.
The nun ran from the chapel.
The vagina showed no sign of tearing or, as far as it was possible to see, any trace of semen.
Adelia replaced the sheet.
Damn. There was a way of knowing. Her old tutor, Gordinus, had shown her by opening the necks of prisoners who’d been hanged and comparing their hyoid bones with bones of those who’d been garroted-a form of execution peculiar to a district of Pavia, which had inherited it from the Romans. “See, my dear? The bone is rarely broken in garroting, whereas it is, almost invariably, in hanging. Thus, if we are suspicious in a case of strangulation, we may distinguish whether it was self-inflicted or the result of an attack by another. Also, in the case of hanged suicides, there is seldom bleeding into the neck muscles, whereas if we find it in a corpse supposed to have hanged itself, we have cause to be suspicious that we are looking at a case of murder.”