Here were only Sister Lancelyne and Father Paton-he came as a surprise; Adelia had forgotten the existence of Rowley’s secretary. Both were writing, though not books.
Thin winter sun shone on their bent heads and on the documents with large seals attached to them by ribbon covering the table at which they sat.
Adelia introduced herself. Father Paton screwed up his eyes and then nodded; he’d forgotten her also.
Sister Lancelyne was delighted to make her acquaintance. She was the sort of person to whom gossip was without interest unless it was literary. Nor did she seem to know that Rowley was lost. “Of course, you came with the bishop’s party, did you not? Please extend to his lordship my gratitude for Father Paton; what I would do without this gentleman…I had vowed to arrange our cartulary and register in some sort of order, a task that proved beyond me until his lordship sent this Hercules into my Augean stables.”
Father Paton as Hercules was something to savor; so was Sister Lancelyne herself, an old, small, gnomelike woman with the bright, jewellike eyes of a toad; so was the room, shelved from floor to ceiling, each shelf stacked with rolls of deeds and charters showing their untidy, sealed ends.
“Alphabetical order, you see,” chanted Sister Lancelyne. “That is what we have to achieve, and a calendar showing which tithe is due to us on what day, what rent…but I see you are looking at our book.”
It was the only book, a slim volume bound in calfskin; it had a small shelf to itself that had been lined with velvet like a jewel box. “We have a Testament, of course,” Sister Lancelyne said, apologizing for the lack of library, “and a breviary, both are in the chapel, but…oh, dear.” For Adelia had advanced on the book. As she took its spine between finger and thumb to remove it, there was a gasp of relief from the nun. “I see you care for books; so many drag at its top with a forefinger and break…”
“Boethius,” Adelia said with pleasure. “‘O happy race of men if love that rules the stars may also rule your hearts.’”
“‘To acquire divinity, become gods,’” exulted Sister Lancelyne. “‘Omnis igitur beatus deus…by participation.’ They imprisoned him for it.”
“And killed him. I know, but as my foster father says, if he hadn’t been in prison, he would never have written The Consolation of Philosophy.”
“We only have the Fides and Ratio,” said Sister Lancelyne. “I long for…no, mea culpa, I covet the rest as King David lusted on Bathsheba. They have an entire Consolation in the library at Eynsham, and I ventured to beg the abbot if I might borrow it to copy, but he wrote back to say it was too precious to send. He does not credit women with scholarship and, of course, you can’t blame him.”
Adelia was not a scholar herself-too much of her reading had largely and necessarily been expended on medical treatises-but she possessed a high regard for those who were; the talk of her foster father and her tutor, Gordinus, had opened a door to the literature of the mind so that she’d glimpsed a shining path to the stars, which, she promised herself, she would investigate one day. In the meantime, it was nice to discover it here among shelves and the smell of vellum and this little old woman’s unextinguished desire for knowledge.
Carefully, she replaced the book. “I was hoping to find Dame Dakers with you.”
“Another great help,” Sister Lancelyne said happily, pointing to a hooded figure squatting on the floor, half-hidden by the shelves.
They’d given Rosamund’s housekeeper a knife with which to sharpen their quills. Goose feathers lay beside her, and she held one in her hand, the shreds of its calamus scattered on her lap. A harmless occupation, and one she must have engaged in a hundred times for Rosamund, yet Adelia was irresistibly reminded of something being dismembered.
She went to squat beside the woman. The two scribes had gone back to their work. “Do you remember me, mistress?”
“I remember you.” Dakers went on shaving the quill end, making quick movements with the knife.
She had been fed and rested; she looked less bleached, but no amount of well-being was ever going to plump the skin over Dakers’s skeleton, nor was it going to distract her hatred. The eyes bent on her work still glowed with it. “Found my darling’s killer yet?” she asked.
“Not yet. Did you hear of Bertha’s death?”
Dakers’s mouth stretched, showing her teeth. She had-and happily. “I summoned my master to punish her, and he’s a’done it.”
“What master?”
Dakers turned her head so that Adelia stared full into her face; it was like looking into a charnel pit. “There is only The One.”
Cross was waiting for her outside, and loped truculently alongside as she walked. “Here,” he said, “what they goin’ to do with Giorgio?”
“Who? Oh, Giorgio. Well, I suppose the sisters will bury him.” The corpses were piling up at Godstow.
“Where, though? I want him planted proper. He was a Christian, was Giorgio.”
And a mercenary, thought Adelia, which might, in Godstow’s eyes, put him in the same category as others who’d relinquished their right to a Christian grave. She said, “Have you asked the nuns?”
“Can’t talk to ’em.” Cross found the holy sisters intimidating. “You ask ’em.”
“Why should I?” The sheer gracelessness of this little man…
“You’re a Sicilian, ain’t you? Like Giorgio. You said you was, so you got to see him planted proper, with a priest and the blessing of…what was that saint had her tits cut off?”
“I suppose you mean Saint Agnes,” Adelia said coldly.
“Yeah, her.” Cross’s unlovely features creased into a salacious grin. “They still carry her tits around on festival days?”
“I’m afraid so.” She had always considered it an unfortunate custom, but the particularly horrible martyrdom of poor Saint Agnes was still commemorated in Palermo by a procession bearing the replicas of two severed breasts on a tray, like little nippled cakes.
“He thought a lot of Saint Agnes, Giorgio did. So you tell ’em.”
Adelia opened her mouth to tell him something, then saw the mercenary’s eyes and stopped. The man agonized for his dead friend, as he had agonized for the injured Poyns; there was a soul here, however ungainly.
“I’ll try,” she said.
“See you do.”
In the large open area beyond the grain barn, one of Wolvercote’s liveried men was walking up and down outside the pepper pot lockup, though what he might be guarding Adelia couldn’t imagine.
Farther along, the convent smith was pounding at the ice on the pond to crack a hole through which some aggrieved-looking ducks might have access to water. Children-presumably his-were skimming around the edges of the pond with bone skates strapped to their boots.
Wistfully, Adelia paused to watch. The joy of skating had come to her late-not until she’d spent a winter in the fens, where iced rivers made causeways and playgrounds. Ulf had taught her. Fen people were wonderful skaters.
To skim away from here, free, letting the dead bury the dead. But even if it were possible, she could not leave while the person was at liberty who had hung Bertha up on a hook like a side of meat…
“You skate?” Cross asked, watching her.
“I do, but we have no skates,” she said.
As they approached the church, a dozen or so nuns, led by their prioress, came marching out of its doors like a line of disciplined, determined jackdaws.
They were heading for the convent gates and the bridge beyond, one of them pushing a two-wheeled cart. A sizable number of Godstow’s lay residents scurried behind them expectantly. Adelia saw Walt and Jacques among the followers and joined them; Cross went with her. As they passed the guesthouse, Gyltha came down its steps with Mansur, Allie cocooned in her arms. “Don’t want to miss this,” she said.