“You see, Sir Rowley?” Simon asked over it. “That was doubtless the voice heard.”

Sir Rowley said, “It must have been.” And again, smiling with apology, “It must have been.”

He continued to try and engage Adelia in conversation, but her replies were short and sullen; she’d had her fill of importuning Englishmen. Her attention was on the countryside. Having lived among hills, she had expected to be repelled by flat land; she had not reckoned on such enormous skies, nor the significance they gave to a lonely tree, the crook of a rare chimney, a single church tower, outlined against them. The multiplicity of greenness suggested unknown herbs to be discovered, the strip fields made chessboards of emerald and black.

And willows. The landscape was full of them, lining streams, dikes, and lanes. Crack willow for stabilizing the banks, golden willow, white willow, gray willow, goat willow, willows for making bats, for growing osiers, bay willow, almond willow, beautiful with the sun dappling through their branches, and more beautiful still because, with a concoction of willow bark, you could relieve pain…

She was jerked forward as Mansur pulled in the mules. The procession had come to an abrupt halt, for Prior Geoffrey had held up his hand and begun to pray. The men swept off their caps and held them to their breasts.

Entering the gate was a dray splashed with mud. A dirty piece of canvas laid on it showed the shape of three small bundles beneath. The drayman led his horses with his head bowed. A woman followed him, shrieking and tearing at her clothing.

The missing children had been found.

THE CHURCH of Saint Andrew the Less in the grounds of Saint Augustine’s, Barnwell, was two hundred feet long, a carved and painted glory to God. But today the grisailled spring sunlight from the high windows ignored the glorious hammer roof, the faces of recumbent stone priors round the walls, the statue of Saint Augustine, the ornate pulpit, the glitter of altar and triptych.

Instead it fell in shafts on three small catafalques in the nave, each covered with a violet cloth, and on the heads of the kneeling men and women in working clothes gathered round them.

The remains of the children, all three, had been found on a sheep path near Fleam Dyke that morning. A shepherd had stumbled over them at dawn and was still shuddering. “Weren’t there last night, I’ll take my oath, Prior. Couldn’t have been, could they? The foxes ain’t been at them. Lying neat side by side they was, bless them. Or neat as they could be, considering…” He’d stopped to retch.

An object had been laid on each body, resembling those that had been left at the site of each child’s disappearance. Made from rushes, they resembled the Star of David.

Prior Geoffrey had ordered the three bundles taken to the church, resisting one mother’s desperate attempts to unwrap them. He had sent to the castle, warning the sheriff that it might be attacked again and requesting the sheriff’s reeve in his capacity as coroner to view the remains immediately and order a public inquest. He’d imposed calm-though it rumbled with underlying heat.

Now, resonating with certainty, his voice stilled the mother’s shrieks into a quiet sobbing as he read the assurance that death would be swallowed up in victory. “We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump.”

Almost, the scent issuing in from the bluebells outside the open doors and the lavished incense from within them covered the stench of decay.

Almost, the clear chant of the canons drowned out the buzz of trapped flies coming from under the violet mantles.

Saint Paul ’s words assuaged a little of the prior’s grief as he envisaged the souls of the children romping in God’s meadows, yet not his anger that they had been catapulted into them before their time. Two of the children he did not know, but one of the boys was Harold, the eel seller’s son, who had been a pupil at Saint Augustine ’s own school. Six years old and a bright child, learning his letters once a week. Identified by his red hair. A right little Saxon, too-he’d scrumped apples from the priory orchard last autumn.

And I tanned his backside for him, the prior thought.

From the shadow of a rear pillar, Adelia watched some comfort seep into the faces round the catafalques. The closeness between priory and town was strange to her; in Salerno, monks, even monks who went out into the world to perform their duties, kept a distance between themselves and the laity.

“But we are not monks,” Prior Geoffrey had told her, “we are canons.” It seemed a slight dissimilarity: Both lived in community, both vowed celibacy, both served the Christian God, yet here in Cambridge the distinction made a difference. When the church bell had tolled the news that the children were found, people from the town had come running-to hug and to be hugged in commiseration.

“Our rule is less rigid than Benedictine or Cistercian,” the prior had explained, “less time given to prayer and choral duty and more to education, relief of the poor and sick, hearing confession, and general parish work.” He’d tried to smile. “You will approve, my dear Doctor. Moderation in all things.”

Now she watched him come down from the choir after the dismissal and walk with the parents into the sunlight, promising to officiate at the funerals himself, “and discover the devil who has done this.”

“We know who done it, Prior,” one of the fathers said. Agreement echoed like the growl of dogs.

“It cannot be the Jews, my son. They are still secured in the castle.”

“They’re getting out someways.”

The bodies, still under their violet cloths, were carried reverently on litters out a side door, accompanied by the sheriff’s reeve, wearing his coroner’s hat.

The church emptied. Simon and Mansur had wisely not attempted to come. A Jew and a Saracen among these sacred stones? At such a time?

With her goatskin carryall at her feet, Adelia waited in the shadow of one of the bays next to the tomb of Paulus, Prior Canon of Saint Augustine’s, Barnwell, taken to God in the year of Our Lord 1151. She nerved herself for what was to come.

She had never yet shirked a postmortem examination; she would not shirk this one. It was why she was here. Gordinus had said, “I am sending you with Simon of Naples on this mission not just because you are the only doctor of the dead to speak English, but because you are the best.”

“I know,” she’d said, “but I do not want to go.”

She’d had to. It had been ordered by the King of Sicily.

In the cool stone hall that the Medical School of Salerno devoted to dissection, she’d always had the proper equipment and Mansur to assist her, relying on her foster father, head of the department, to relay her findings to the authorities. For, though Adelia could read death better than her foster father, better than anybody, the fiction had to be maintained that the investigation of bodies sent by the signoria was the province of Dr. Gershom bin Aguilar. Even in Salerno, where female doctors were permitted to practice, the dissection that helped the dead to explain how they’d died-and, very often, at whose hands-was regarded with revulsion by the Church.

So far science had fought off religion; other doctors knew the use of Adelia’s work, and it was an open secret among the lay authorities. But should an official complaint be made to the Pope, she’d be banned from the mortuary and, quite possibly, the school of medicine itself. So, though he writhed under the hypocrisy, Gershom took credit for achievements that were not his.

Which suited Adelia to her boots. Staying in the background was her forte: for one thing, it avoided the Church’s eye; for another thing, she did not know how to converse on womanly subjects as she was expected to, and did it badly because they bored her. Like a hedgehog blending into autumn leaves, she was prickly to those who tried to bring her into the light.