NINE

T he nuns thought the same.

“Let me understand you,” Mother Edyve said. “You are saying that Dame Dakers hanged that poor child?”

They were in the chapter house; the abbess was in conclave with her senior nuns.

They had not welcomed Adelia. After all, they had serious matters to mull over: Their abbey had been as good as invaded; dangerous mercenaries occupied it; there were bodies hanging from their bridge; if the snow continued, they would soon run out of supplies. They did not want to listen to the outlandish, unsettling report of a murder—murder?—in their midst.

However, Adelia had done one thing right; she had brought Mansur along. Gyltha had persuaded her. “They won’t pay you no mind,” she’d said, “but they might attend to that old Arab.” And after a few hours’ sleep, Adelia had decided she was right. Mansur had been recommended to the nuns by their bishop, he looked impressive, he stood high in the estimation of their infirmaress; above all, he was a man, and as such, even though a foreigner, he carried more weight than she did.

It had been difficult to get a hearing until the chapter meeting was over, but Adelia had refused to wait. “This is the king’s business,” she’d said. For so it was; murder, wherever it occurred, came under royal jurisdiction. The lord Mansur, she told them, was skilled in uncovering crimes, had originally been called to England by Henry II’s warrant to look into the deaths of some Cambridgeshire children—well, so he had, in a way—and the killer had been found.

Apologizing for Mansur’s insufficiency in their language, she had pretended to interpret for him. She’d begged them to examine for themselves the marks on Bertha’s neck, had shown them the evidence by which she proved murder…and heard her voice scrabbling at them as uselessly as Bertha’s fingers had scrabbled at the necklet strangling her.

She answered Mother Edyve, “The lord Mansur is not accusing Dame Dakers. He is saying that somebody hanged Bertha. She did not hang herself.”

It was too gruesome for them. Here, in their familiar, wooden-crucked English chapter house, stood a towering figure in outlandish clothing—a heathen, king’s warrant or not—telling them what they did not want to hear through the medium of a woman with a dubious reputation.

They didn’t have investigative minds. It seemed as if none of them, not even their canny old abbess, possessed the ferocious curiosity that drove Adelia herself, nor any curiosity at all. All questions had been answered for them by the resurrection of Jesus Christ and the rule instituted by Saint Benedict.

Nor were they too concerned with earthly justice. The murderer, if a murderer there was, would be sentenced more terribly when he faced the Great Judge, to whom all sins were known, than by any human court.

The belt, the broken chain, and the measuring cord lay snaked on the table before them, but they kept their eyes away.

Well, yes, they said, but was the lack of distance between Bertha’s feet and the milking stool significant? Surely that poor misguided girl could have somehow climbed onto one of the cowshed stalls with the belt round her neck and jumped? Who knew what strength was given to the desperate? Certainly, Bertha had been in fear of what Dame Dakers might do to her, but did not that in itself argue felo-de-se?

Rowley, if only you were here…

“It was murder,” Adelia insisted. “Lord Mansur has proved it was murder.”

Mother Edyve considered the matter. “I would not have credited Dakers with the strength.”

Adelia despaired. It was like being on a toasting fork—whichever side was presented, it was flipped over so that the other faced the fire. If Bertha had been murdered, then Dakers, revenging Rosamund’s death, had been the murderer—who else could it have been? If Dakers wasn’t the murderer, then Bertha had not been murdered.

“Perhaps one of the Flemings did it, Wolvercote’s or Schwyz’s,” Sister Bullard, the cellaress, said. “They are lustful, violent men, especially in liquor. Which reminds me, Mother, we must set a guard on the cellars. They are already stealing our wine.”

That opened a floodgate of complaint: “Mother, how are we to feed them all?”

“Mother, the mercenaries…I fear for our young women.”

“And our people—look how they beat the poor miller.”

“The courtiers are worse, Mother. The lewd songs they sing…”

Adelia was sorry for them. On top of their worries, here were two strange persons, who had arrived at Godstow in company with a murdered body from the bridge, now suggesting that another killer was at large within the abbey’s very walls.

The sisters did not—indeed, could not—blame them for either death, but Adelia knew from some sideways looks from under the nuns’ veils that she and Mansur had acquired the taint of carrion.

“Even if what Lord Mansur says is true, Mother,” said Sister Gregoria, the almoner, “what can be done about it? We are snowed up; we cannot send for the sheriff’s coroner until the thaw.”

“And while the snow lasts, King Henry cannot rescue us,” Sister Bullard pointed out. “Until he can, our abbey, our very existence, is in peril.”

That was what mattered to them. Their abbey had survived one conflict between warring monarchs; it might not survive another. If the queen should oust the king, she would necessarily reward the blackguard Wolvercote, who had secured her victory—and Lord Wolvercote had long desired Godstow and its lands. The nuns could envisage a future in which they begged for their bread in the streets.

“Allow Lord Mansur to continue his inquiries,” Adelia pleaded. “At least do not bury Bertha in unconsecrated ground until all the facts are known.”

Mother Edyve nodded. “Please tell Lord Mansur we are grateful for his interest,” she said in her fluting, emotionless voice. “You may leave us to question Dame Dakers. After that, we shall pray for guidance in the matter.”

It was a dismissal. Mansur and Adelia had to bow and leave.

Discussion broke out behind them almost before they’d reached the door—but it was not about Bertha. “Yes, but where is the king? How may he come to our aid if he doesn’t even know we are in need of it? We cannot trust that Bishop Rowley reached him—I fear for his death.”

As the two went out of the chapter house door, Mansur said, “The women are frightened. They will not help us search for the killer.”

“I haven’t even persuaded them there is a killer,” Adelia said.

They were skirting the infirmary when, behind them, a voice called Adelia’s name. It was the prioress. She came up, puffing. “A word, if I may, mistress.” Adelia nodded, bowed a farewell to Mansur, and turned back.

For a while, the two women went in silence.

Sister Havis, Adelia realized, had not spoken a word during the discussion in the chapter house. She was aware, too, that the nun did not like her. To walk with her was like accompanying the apotheosis of the cold that gripped the abbey, a figure denuded of warmth, as frozen as the icicles spiking the edge of every roof.

Outside the nuns’ chapel, the prioress stopped. She kept her face averted from Adelia, and her voice was hard. “I cannot approve of you,” she said. “I did not approve of Rosamund. The tolerance that Mother Abbess extends to sins of the flesh is not mine.”

“If that’s all you have to say…” Adelia said, walking away.

Sister Havis strode after her. “It is not, but it has to be spoken.” She withdrew a mittened hand from under her scapular and held it out to bar Adelia’s progress. In it were the broken necklet, the measuring cord, and the belt. She said, “I intend to use these objects as you have done, in investigation. I shall go to the cowshed. Whatever your weaknesses, mistress, I recognize an analytical soul.”

Adelia stopped.

The prioress kept her thin face turned away. “I travel,” she said. “Mine is the work to administer our lands around the country, in consequence of which I see more of the dung heap of humanity than do my sisters. I see it in its iniquity and error, its disregard for the flames of hell which await it.”

Adelia was still. This was not just a lecture on sin; Sister Havis had something to tell her.

“Yet,” the prioress went on, “there is greater evil. I was present at Rosamund Clifford’s bedside; I witnessed her terrible end. For all that she was adulterous, the woman should not have died as she did.”

Adelia went on waiting.

“Our bishop had visited her a day or two before; he questioned her servants and went away again. Rosamund was still well then, but he believed from what he’d been told that there had been a deliberate attempt to poison her, which, as you and I know, subsequently succeeded.” Suddenly, the prioress’s head turned and she was glaring into Adelia’s eyes. “Is that what he told you?”

“Yes,” Adelia said. “It was why he brought us here. He knew the blame would fall on the queen. He wanted to uncover the real killer and avert a war.”

“He set great store by you, then, mistress.” It was a sneer.

“Yes, he did,” Adelia hissed back at her. Her feet were numb with standing, and her grief for Rowley was undoing her. “Tell me whatever you want to tell me, or let me go. In God’s name, are we discussing Rosamund, Bertha, or the bishop?”

The prioress blinked; she had not expected anger.

“Bertha,” she said, with something like conciliation. “We are discussing Bertha. It may interest you to know, mistress, that I took charge of Dame Dakers yesterday. The female is deranged, and I did not want her roaming the abbey. Just before Vespers I locked her in the warming room for the night.”

Adelia’s head went up. “What time is evening milking?”

“After Vespers.”

They had begun walking in step. “Bertha was still alive then,” Adelia said. “The milkmaid saw her.”

“Yes, I have talked to Peg.”

“I knew it wasn’t Dakers.”

The prioress nodded. “Not unless the wretched female can walk through a thick and bolted door. Which, I may say, most of my sisters are prepared to believe that she can.”

“You may say, you may say.” Adelia stopped, furious. “Why didn’t you say all this in chapter?”

The prioress faced her. “You were making yourself busy proving to us that Bertha was murdered. I happened to know Dakers could not have killed her. The question then arose, who did? And why? It was not a wolf I wanted to loose amongst sisters who are troubled and frightened enough already.”

Ah. At last, Adelia thought, a logical mind. Hostile, cold as winter to me, but brave. Here, beside her, was a woman prepared to follow terrible events to their terrible conclusion.

She said, “Bertha had some knowledge about the person who gave her the mushrooms in the forest. She didn’t know she had it. It came to her yesterday, and I think, I think, that she left the cowshed to come and tell me. Something, or perhaps it was someone, stopped her, and she went back again. To be strangled and then hanged.”

“Not a random killing?”

“I don’t believe so. Nor was there any sexual interference, as far as I can tell. It wasn’t robbery, either; the chain was not stolen.”

Unconsciously, they had begun pacing up and down together outside the chapel. Adelia said, “What she told Peg was that it wasn’t a her, it was a him.”

“Meaning the person in the forest?”

“I think so. I think, I think, Bertha remembered something, something about the old woman who gave her the mushrooms for Rosamund. I think it came to her that it wasn’t an old woman at all—her description always sounded…I don’t know, odd.”

“Old women peddling poisoned mushrooms aren’t odd?”

Adelia smiled. “Overdone, then. Playacting. I think that’s what Bertha wanted to tell me. Not a her but a him.”

“A man? Dressed as a woman?”

“I think so.”

The prioress crossed herself. “The inference being that Bertha could have told us who it was that killed Rosamund…”

“Yes.”

“…but was strangled before she could tell us…by that same person.”

“I think so.”

“I was afraid of it. The Devil stalks secretly amongst us.”

“In human form, yes.”

“‘I shall not fear,’” quoted Sister Havis. “‘I shall not fear for the arrow that flieth by day, for the matter that walketh in darkness, nor for the Devil that is in the noonday.’” She looked at Adelia. “Yet I do.”

“So do I.” Oddly, though, not as much as she had; there was a tiny comfort in having passed on what she knew to authority, and here, though personally hostile, was almost the only authority the convent could offer.

After a while, Sister Havis said, “We have had to take the body from the bridge out of the icehouse. A man came asking for him, a cousin, he said—a Master Warin, a lawyer from Oxford. We laid out the body in the church for its vigil and so that he might identify it. Apparently, it is that of a young man called Talbot of Kidlington. Is he another of this devil’s victims?”

“I don’t know.” She realized she had been saying “I” all this time. “I shall consult with the Lord Mansur. He will investigate.”

The slightest flicker of amusement crossed the prioress’s face; she knew who the investigator was. “Pray do,” she said.

From the cloister ahead of them came the sound of laughter and singing. It had, Adelia realized, been going on for some time. Music, happiness, still existed, then.

Automatically, the prioress began walking toward it. Adelia went with her.

A couple of the younger nuns were screaming joyously in the garth as they dodged snowballs being pelted at them by a scarlet-clad youth. Another young man was strumming a viol and singing, his head upraised to an upper window of the abbess’s house, at which Eleanor stood laughing at the antics.

This, in the sanctum. Where no layman should set foot. Probably never had until now.

From Eleanor’s window came a trail of perfume, elusive as a mirage, shimmering with sensuality, a siren scent beckoning toward palm-fringed islands, a smell so lovely that Adelia’s nose, even while it analyzed—bergamot, sandalwood, roses—sought longingly after its luxury before the icy air took it away from her.

Oh, Lord, I am so tired of death and cold.

Sister Havis stood beside her, rigid with disapproval, saying nothing. But in a minute the players saw her. The scene froze instantly; the troubadour’s song stopped in his throat, snow dropped harmlessly from the hand of his companion, and the young nuns assumed attitudes of outraged piety and continued their walk as if they had never broken stride. The snowballer swept his hat from his head and held it to his chest in parodied remorse.

Eleanor waved from her window. “Sorry,” she called, and closed the shutters.

So I am not the only taint, Adelia thought, amused. The queen and her people were bringing the rich colors of worldliness into the convent’s black-and-white domain; the presence of Eleanor, which had undermined an entire Crusade, threatened Godstow’s foundations as even Wolvercote and his mercenaries did not.

Then the amusement went. Did she bring a killer with her?

 

Adelia was too tired to do much for the rest of the morning except look after Allie while Gyltha went off to meet friends in the kitchen. It was where she picked up a good deal of information and gossip.

On her return, she said, “They’re busy cooking for young Emma’s wedding now that Old Wolfie’s turned up. Poor soul, I wouldn’t fancy marryin’ that viper. They’re wondering if she’s having second thoughts—she’s keeping to the cloister and ain’t spoke a word to him, so they say.”

“It’s bad luck to see your bridegroom before the wedding,” Adelia said vaguely.

“I wouldn’t want to see him after,” Gyltha said. “Oh, and later on the sisters is going to see about them hangin’ off the bridge. Abbess says it’s time they was buried.” She took off her cloak. “Should be interestin’. Old Wolfie, he’ll be the sort as likes corpses decoratin’ the place.” There was gleam in her eye. “Maybe as there’ll be a battle atwixt ’em. Oh, Lord, where you going now?”

“The infirmary.” Adelia had remembered her patient.

Sister Jennet greeted her warmly. “Perhaps you can convey my gratitude to the Lord Mansur. Such a neat, clean stump, and the patient is progressing well.” She looked wistful. “How I should have liked to witness the operation.”

It was the instinct of a doctor, and Adelia thought of the women lost to her own profession, as this one was, and thanked her god for the privilege that had been Salerno.

She was escorted down the ward. All the patients were men—“women mainly treat themselves”—most of them suffering from congestion of the lungs caused, the infirmaress said, by living on low-lying ground subject to unhealthy vapors from the river.

Three were elderly, from Wolvercote. “These are malnourished,” the infirmaress said of them, not bothering to lower her voice. “Lord Wolvercote neglects his villagers shamefully; they haven’t so much as a church to pray in, not since it fell down. It is God’s grace to them that we are nearby.”

She passed on to another bed where a nun was applying warm water to a patient’s ear. “Frostnip,” she said.

With a pang of guilt, Adelia recognized Oswald, Rowley’s man-at-arms. She’d forgotten him, yet he had been one of those, along with Mansur, poling the barge that the convent had sent to Wormhold.

Walt was sitting at his bedside. He knuckled his forehead as Adelia came up.

“I’m sorry,” she told Oswald. “Is it bad?”

It looked bad. Dark blisters had formed on the outer curve of the ear so that the man appeared to have a fungus attached to his head. He glowered at her.

“Shoulda kept his hood pulled down,” Walt said, cheerfully. “We did, didn’t we, mistress?” The mutual suffering on the boat had become a bond.

Adelia smiled at him. “We were fortunate.”

“We’re keeping an eye on the ear,” Sister Jennet said, equally cheerful. “As I tell him, it will either stay on or fall off. Come along.”

There were still screens round young Poyns’s bed—not so much, Sister Jennet explained, to provide privacy for him as to prevent his evil mercenary ways from infecting the rest of the ward.

“Though I must say he has not uttered a single oath since he’s been here, which is unusual in a Fleming.” She pulled the screen aside, still talking. “I can’t say the same for his friend.” She shook a finger at Cross, who, like Walt, was visiting.

“We ain’t bloody Flemings,” Cross said wearily.

Adelia was not allowed to look at the wound. Dr. Mansur, apparently, had already done so and declared himself satisfied.

The stump was well bandaged and—Adelia sniffed it—had no smell of corruption. Mansur, having attended so many operations with her, would have been able to tell if there was any sign of mortification.

Poyns himself was pale but without fever and taking food. For a moment, Adelia allowed herself to glory in him, orgulous as a peacock at her achievement, even while she marveled at the hardihood of the human frame.

She inquired after Dame Dakers; here was another she had neglected, and for whom she felt a responsibility.

“We keep her in the warming room,” Sister Jennet said, as of an exhibit. “Once she was recovered, I couldn’t let her stay here—she frightened my patients.”

 

In a monastery, the warming room would have been the scriptorium where such monks as had the skill spent their days copying manuscripts while carefully guarded braziers saved their poor fingers from cramping with cold.

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.

At the gates, Sister Havis’s voice came clear. “Open up, Fitchet, and bring me a knife.”

Outside, a path had been dug through the snow on the bridge to facilitate traffic between village and convent. Why, since it led to nowhere else, Lord Wolverscote had thought it necessary to put a sentry on it was anybody’s guess. But he had—and one who, facing a gaggle of black-clad, veiled women, each with a cross hanging on her chest, still found it necessary to ask, “Who goes there?”

Sister Havis advanced on him, as had Cross upon his fellow the night before. Adelia almost expected her to knock him out; she looked capable of it. Instead, the prioress pushed aside the leveled pike with the back of her hand and marched on.

“I wouldn’t arse about, friend,” Fitchet advised the sentry, almost sympathetically. “Not when they’re on God’s business.”

When she’d glimpsed the bodies from the boat, Adelia had been too cold, too scared, too occupied to consider the manner in which they’d been hanged—only the image of their dangling feet had stayed in her memory.

Now she saw it. The two men, their arms tied, had been stood on the bridge while one end of a rope was attached round each neck and the other to one of the bridge’s stanchions. Then they’d been thrown over the balustrade.

Bridges were communication between man and man, too sacred to be used as gallows. Adelia wished that Gyltha hadn’t brought Allie; this was not going to be a scene she wanted her daughter to watch. On the other hand, her child was looking around in a concentration of pleasure; the surrounding scenery was a change, a lovely change, from the alleys of the convent where she was taken for her daily outings in fresh air. The bridge formed part of a white tableau, its reflection in the sheeted river below was absolute, and the waterfall on its mill side had frozen in sculptured pillars.

The mill wheel beyond was motionless and glistened with icicles as if from a thousand stalactites. It was an obscenity for distorted death to decorate it. “Don’t let her see the bodies,” she told Gyltha.

“Get her used to it,” Gyltha said. “Her’ll see plenty of hangings as she grows. My pa took me to my first when I were three year old. Enjoyed it, too, I did.”

“I don’t want her to enjoy it.”

Getting the bodies up wasn’t going to be easy; they were weighted by accumulated ice, and the rope holding them was stretched so tightly over the balustrade that it had frozen to it.

Walt joined Adelia. “Prioress says we ain’t to help; they got to do it theyselves, seemingly.”

Sister Havis considered for a moment and then gave her orders. While one used Fitchet’s knife to scrape the ice from the ropes, the tallest of the nuns, the cellaress, leaned over, stretching her arm to grasp the hair of one of the hanging men. She lifted, giving the rope some slack.

A seagull that had been pecking at the man’s eyes flew off, yelping, into the clear sky. Allie watched it go.

“Haul, my sisters.” The prioress’s voice rang after it. “Haul for the mercy of Mary.”

A row of black backsides bent over the balustrade. They hauled, their breath streaming upward like smoke.

“What in hell are you women doing?”

Lord Wolvercote was on the bridge, to be no more regarded by the sisters than the seagull. He stepped forward, hand on his sword. Fitchet and Walt and some other men rolled up their sleeves. Wolvercote looked round. His sentry’s helpless shrug told him he would get no help against God’s female battalion. He was outnumbered. He shouted instead, “Leave them. This is my land, my half of the bridge, and villains shall hang from it as and when I see fit.”

“It’s our bridge, my lord, as you well know.” This was Fitchet, loud but weary with the repetition of an old argument. “And Mother Abbess don’t want it decorated with no corpses.”

One body was up now, too stiff to bend, so the sisters were having to lift it vertically over the balustrade, its cocked head angled inquiringly toward the man who had sentenced it to death.

The nuns laid him on the cart, then returned to the balustrade to raise his fellow.

The dispute had brought the miller’s family to their windows, and faces lined the sills to watch the puffs of air issuing like dragons’ breath from the two arguing men.

“They were rogues, you dolt. Thieves. In possession of stolen property, and I made an example of them, as I have a right to do by infangthief. Leave them alone.”

He was tall, dark-complexioned, age about thirty or so, and would have been handsome if his thin face hadn’t settled into lines of contempt that at the moment were emphasized by fury. Emma had talked joyously of her future husband’s poetry, but Adelia saw no poetry here. Only stupidity. He had made an example of the two thieves; they’d been hanging here for two days, and the river’s lack of traffic meant that anybody who was going to see them had already done it. A more sensible man would have bowed to the inevitable, given his blessing, and walked away.

Wolvercote can’t, Adelia thought. He sees the sisters as undermining his authority, and it frightens him; he must be cock of the heap or he is nothing.

Infangthief. She searched her memory—one of the English customary laws; Rowley had once mentioned it, told her, “Infangthief? Well, it’s a sort of legal franchise that certain lords of the manor hold by ancient right to pass the death penalty on thieves caught on their property. The king hates it. He says it means the buggers can hang anybody they’ve a mind to.”

“Why doesn’t he get rid of it, then?”

But ancient rights, apparently, were not to be discarded without resentment, even rebellion, by those who held them. “He will—in time.”

The second corpse had been retrieved, and sacking was laid over both. The nuns were beginning to push their loaded cart back across the bridge, their feet slipping on the ice.

“See, my duck,” Gyltha said to Allie. “That were fun, weren’t it?”

Sister Havis stopped as they passed Wolvercote, and her voice was colder than the dead men. “What were their names?”

“Names? What do you want their names for?”

“For their graves.”

“They didn’t have names, for God’s sake. They’d have gone on to take the chalice off your own damned altar if I hadn’t stopped them. They were thieves, woman.”

“So were the two crucified with Our Lord; I don’t remember Him withholding mercy from them.” The prioress turned and followed her sisters.

He couldn’t leave it. He called after her, “You’re an interfering old bitch, Havis. No wonder you never got a man.”

She didn’t look back.

“They’re going to bury them,” Adelia said. “Oh, dear.”

Jacques, nearby, grinned at her. “It’s a fairly usual custom with the dead,” he said.

“Yes, but I didn’t look at their boots. And you,” she said to Gyltha. “Take that child home.” She hurried after the nuns and delayed the cart by standing in front of it. “Would you mind? Just a minute?”

She knelt down in the snow so that her eyes were on a level with the legs of the corpses and raised the sacking.

She was transferred to the bridge when she had first seen it, at nighttime, when the awful burden it carried and the footprints in its snow had told her the sequence of murder as clearly as if the two killers had confessed to it.

She heard her own voice speaking to Rowley: “See? One wears hobnails, the other’s boots have bars across the soles, maybe clogs bound with strips. They arrived here on horseback and took their horses into those trees…. They ate as they waited….”

Facing her was a pair of stout hobnailed boots. The other corpse had lost the footwear from its right foot, but the clog on its left had been retained by the tight bands of leather passing under the sole and cross-gartered around the lower leg.

Carefully, she replaced the sacking and stood up. “Thank you.”

Nonplussed, the nuns with the cart continued on their way. Sister Havis’s eyes met Adelia’s for a moment. “Were they the ones?”

“Yes.”

Walt overheard. “Here, is these the buggers as done for that poor horse?”

Adelia smiled at him. “And the traveler. Yes, I think so.” She turned and found that Wolvercote had approached to see what she’d been up to. The crowd of abbey people waited to hear the exchange.

“Do you know where they came from?” she asked him.

“What do you care where they came from? I found them robbing my house; they had a silver cup, my silver cup, and that’s all I needed to know.” He turned to the porter. “Who is this female? What’s she doing here?”

“Came with the bishop,” Fitchet told him shortly.

Walt piped up, proprietorially: “She’s with the darky doctor. She can tell things, she can. Looks at things and knows what happened.”

It was badly phrased. Adelia hunched as she waited for the inevitable.

Wolvercote looked at her. “A witch, then,” he said.

The word dropped into the air like ink into pristine water, discoloring it, webbing it with black, spiky traces before graying it forever.

Just as the allusion to Havis as a frustrated virgin would be a label that stuck to her, so the surrounding people hearing the name “witch” applied to Adelia would always remember it. The word that had stoned and set fire to women. There was no appeal against it. It tinged the faces of the men and women listening. Even Jacques’s and Walt’s showed a new doubt.

She castigated herself. Lord, what a fool; why didn’t I wait? She could have found some other opportunity to look at the men’s boots before they were buried. But no, she’d had to make sure immediately. Thoughtless, thoughtless.

“Damn it,” she said. “Damn.” She looked back. Lord Wolvercote had gone, but everybody else was looking in her direction; she could hear the murmurs. The damage had been done.

Breathily, Jacques came loping up to her. “I don’t think you’re a witch, mistress. Just stay in your room, eh? Out of sight, out of mind. Like Saint Matthew says: ‘Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.’”

But the day was not gone yet. As they passed through the gates of the convent, a fat man, wild-eyed, emerged out of the church door farther along. He gestured at Jacques. “You,” he shouted, “fetch the infirmaress.”

The messenger went running. The fat man turned and rushed back into the church.

Adelia teetered outside. ‘Sufficient unto the day…’ There’s been enough evil, and you’ve brought some of it on yourself. Whatever this is, it is not for you.

But the sounds coming from inside the building were of distress.

She went in.

The sunshine was managing poorly within the large church, where, by day, candles were unlit. Glacial shafts of sun were lancing into the dark interior from the high, narrow windows above the clerestory, splashing a pillar here and there and cutting across the nave in thin stripes that avoided the middle, where the distress was centered.

Until her eyes adjusted to the contrast, Adelia couldn’t make out what was happening. Slowly, it took shape. There was a catafalque, and two burly figures, a male and a female, were trying to drag something off it.

The something—she could see it now—was young Emma, very still, but her hands were gripping the far side of the catafalque so that her body could not be shifted away from the body that lay beneath her.

“Leave un, girl. Come on up now. ’Tis shameful, this. Gor dang it, what be it with her?” The fat man’s voice.

The woman’s was kinder but no less disturbed. “Yere, yere, don’t take on like this, my duck, you’m upsetting your pa. What’s this dead un to you? Come on up now.”

The fat man looked around in desperation and caught sight of Adelia standing in the doorway, illuminated by the sun behind her. “Here, you, come and give us a hand. Reckon our girl’s fainted.”

Adelia moved closer. Emma hadn’t fainted; her eyes were wide and stared at nothing. She had thrown herself so that she lay arched over the corpse under her. The knuckles of her gripping hands were like tiny white pebbles against the black wood of the catafalque beneath it.

Going closer still, Adelia peered down.

The nuns had put coins over the eyes, but the face was the face of the dead young man on the bridge, whom she and Rowley had lowered into the icehouse. This was Master Talbot of Kidlington.

Only minutes before, she had been examining the boots of his murderers.

She became aware that the fat man was blustering—though not at her. “Fine convent this is, leaving dead people round the place. It’s right upset our girl, and I don’t wonder. Is this what we pay our tithes for?”

The infirmaress had come into the church, Jacques with her. Exclamation and exhortation created a hubbub that had an echo, Sister Jennet’s crisp pipe—“Now, now, child, this will not do”—interspersed with the bellows of the father, who was becoming outraged and looking for someone to blame, while the mother’s anxiety made a softer counterpoint to them both.

Adelia touched Emma’s clawed hand, gently. The girl raised her head, but what she saw with those tormented eyes Adelia couldn’t tell. “Do you see what they’ve done? To him, to him?”

The father and Sister Jennet were standing away now, openly quarreling. The mother had stopped attending to her daughter in order to join in.

“Control yourself, Master Bloat. Where else should we have lain a body but in a church?” Sister Jennet did not add that as far as Godstow and bodies were concerned, they were running out of space.

“Not where a man can fall over it; that’s not what we pay our tithes for.”

“That’s right, Father, that’s right….” This was Mistress Bloat. “We was just being shown round, wasn’t us? Our girl was showing us round.”

Emma’s eyes still stared into Adelia’s as if into the Pit. “Do you see, oh, God, do you see?”

“I see,” Adelia told her.

And she did, wondering how she could have been so blind not to see it before. So that was why Talbot of Kidlington had been murdered.