“Better’n no bloody foot at all.”

There’d been an alteration in Gyltha, but Adelia was too depressed to notice it. This morning twenty-one desperate people had come to her-or, rather, to Dr. Mansur-and she could have helped eight of them if they’d attended sooner. As it was, she’d saved only three-well, four really-the child with the cough might benefit from inhalation of essence of pine if its lungs weren’t too affected.

The fact that until now she hadn’t been in residence to treat anybody passed her by; they’d been in need.

Absentmindedly, Adelia munched a biscuit Gyltha slid under her hand. Furthermore, she thought, if patients continued to arrive at this rate, she would have to set up her own kitchen. Tinctures, decoctions, ointments, and powders needed space and time for their manufacture.

Shop apothecaries tended to skimp; she’d never trusted them since Signor D’Amelia had been discovered interlacing his more expensive powders with chalk.

Chalk. That’s where she and Simon and Mansur should be this minute, searching the chalk of Wandlebury Hill, though she granted that Simon had been right not to go alone to that eerie place if only because it would need more than one person to peer into all those strange pits, let alone the possibility that the killer might peer back, in which case Mansur would come in handy.

“You say Master Simon is visiting wool merchants?”

Gyltha nodded. “Took they strips as that devil tied the childer up with. See if any on ’em sold it, and who to.”

Yes. Adelia had washed and dried two of the pieces ready for him. Since Wandlebury Hill must wait, Simon was using the time in another direction, though she was surprised that he had made Gyltha privy to what he was up to. Well, since the housekeeper was in their confidence…

“Come upstairs,” Adelia told her, leading the way. Then she paused. “That biscuit…”

“My honey oatcake.”

“Very nourishing.”

She took Gyltha to the table in the solar on which stood the contents of her goatskin bag. She pointed to one of them. “Have you seen anything like that before?”

“What is it?”

“I believe it to be a sweetmeat of some sort.”

The thing was lozenge-shaped, dried rock-hard and gray. It had taken her sharpest knife to shave a sliver from it, an action that revealed a pinkish interior and released, faint as a sought-for memory, a second’s suggestion of perfume. She said, “It was tangled in Mary’s hair.”

Gyltha’s eyes squeezed shut as she crossed herself, then opened to peer closely.

“Gelatine, I would say,” Adelia urged her. “Flower-flavored, or fruit. Sweetened with honey.”

“Rich man’s confit,” Gyltha said immediately. “I ain’t seen the like. Ulf.”

Her grandson was in the room within a second of the call, leading Adelia to suppose he’d been outside the door.

“You seen the like of this?” Gyltha asked him.

“Sweetmeats,” the boy growled-so he had been outside the door. “I buy sweeties all the time, oh, yes, money to burn, me…”

As he grumbled, his sharp little eyes took in the lozenge, the vials, the remaining strips of wool drying by the window, all the exhibits brought back from Saint Werbertha’s anchorage.

Adelia threw a cloth over them. “Well?”

Ulf shook his head with compelling authority. “Wrong shape for round here. Twists and balls, this country.”

“Cut off then,” Gyltha told him. When the boy had gone, she spread her hands. “If he ain’t seen the like, it don’t swim in our pond.”

It was disappointing. Last night the magnitude of suspecting every man in Cambridge had been reduced by the decision to devote their attention to the pilgrims. Even so, discounting wives, nuns, and female servants, the number for investigation was forty-seven. “Surely we may also discount the merchant from Cherry Hinton? He seemed harmless.” But consultation with Gyltha had placed Cherry Hinton to the west of Cambridge and therefore on a line with Wandlebury Hill.

“We discount nobody,” Simon had said.

In order to narrow suspicion through what evidence they had before starting to ask questions of and about forty-seven people, Simon had taken for himself the task of locating the source of the scraps of wool, Adelia the lozenge.

Which was proving unidentifiable.

“Yet we must suppose that its rarity will strengthen its connection with the killer once we find him,” Adelia said now.

Gyltha cocked her head. “You reckon he tempted Mary with it?”

“I do.”

“Poor little cosset Mary was, frit of her father-always fetching her and her mother a blow, he was-frit of everything. Never ventured far.” Gyltha viewed the lozenge: “Did you tempt her away, you beggar?”

The two women shared a moment’s reflection…a beckoning hand, the other holding out an exotic sweetmeat, the child attracted closer, closer, a bird drawn by a gyrating stoat…

Gyltha hurried off down the stairs to lecture Ulf on the danger of men who offered goodies.

Six years old, Adelia thought. Frightened of everything, six years of a brutal father and then a dreadful death. What can I do? What shall I do?

She went downstairs. “May I borrow Ulf? There may be some purpose in seeing the place from which each child disappeared. Also, I should like to examine Little Saint Peter’s bones.”

“They can’t tell you much, girl. The nuns boiled him.”

“I know.” It was the usual practice with the body of a putative saint. “But bones can speak.”

Peter was the primus inter pares of the murdered children, the first to disappear and the first to die. As far as could be deduced, his was the only one whose death did not accord with the others’, since, presumably, it had occurred in Cambridge.

Also, his was the only death to be accredited to crucifixion and, unless that could be disproved, she and Simon would have failed in their mission to exonerate the Jews, no matter how many killers they produced from the chalk hills.

She found herself explaining this to Gyltha. “Perhaps the boy’s parents can be persuaded to talk to me. They would have seen his body before it was boiled.”

“Walter and his missus? They saw nails in them little hands and the crown of thorns on that poor little head and they won’t say no different, not without losing themselves a mort of cash.”

“They’re making money from their son?”

Gyltha pointed upriver. “Get you to Trumpington and their cottage, the which you can’t see for folk clamoring to go inside it so’s to breathe air as Little Saint Peter breathed and touch Little Saint Peter’s shirt, the which they can’t acause he was wearing his only one, and Walter and Ethy sitting at their door charging a penny a time.”

“How shameful.”

Gyltha hung a kettle over the fire and then turned. “Seems you’ve never wanted for much, mistress.” The “mistress” was ominous; such rapport as had been achieved that morning had waned.

Adelia admitted she had not.

“Then s’pose you wait til you got six childer to feed apart from the one that’s dead and obliged for the roof over your head to do four days a week plowing and reaping of the nunnery’s fields as well as your own, to say nought of Agnes being bonded to do its bloody cleaning. Maybe you don’t care for their way, but that’s not shameful, that’s surviving.”

Adelia was silenced. After a while, she said, “Then I shall go to Saint Radegund’s and ask to see the bones in its reliquary.”

“Huh.”

“I shall look around me, at least,” Adelia said, piqued. “Shall Ulf guide me or not?”

Ulf would, though not willingly. So would the dog, though it seemed to scowl as horribly as the boy.

Well, perhaps with such companions-but such companions-she would blend into the Cambridge scenery.

“Blend into the scenery,” she said to Mansur with emphasis when he readied himself to accompany her. “You can’t come. I’d as easy blend in with a troop of acrobats.”