He protested, but she pointed out that it was daylight, there were plenty of people about, and she had her dagger and a dog whose smell could fell an assailant at twenty paces. In the end, she thought, he was not reluctant to stay behind with Gyltha in the kitchen.
She set off.
Beyond an orchard, a raised balk ran along the edge of a common field leading down to the river, angled with cultivated strips. Men and women were hoeing the spring planting. One or two touched their forehead to her. Farther along, the breeze bellied washing that was pinned to tenterhooks.
The Cam, Adelia saw, was a boundary. Across the river was a countryside of gently rising uplands, some forested, some parkland, a mansion like a toy in the distance. Behind her, the town with its noisy quays crowded the right bank as if enjoying the uninterrupted view.
“Where’s Trumpington?” she asked Ulf.
“Trumpington,” the boy grumbled to the dog. They went left. The angle of the afternoon sun showed that they had turned south. Punts went past them, women as well as men poling themselves about their business, the river their thoroughfare. Some waved to Ulf, the boy nodding back and naming each one to the dog. “Sawney on his way for to collect the rents, the old grub…Gammer White with the washing for Chenies…Sister Fatty for to supply the hermits, look a her puff…Old Moggy finished early at the market…”
They were on a causeway that kept Adelia’s boots, the boy’s bare feet, and Safeguard’s paws from sinking into meadows where cows grazed on deep grass and buttercups among willow and alder, their hooves causing a sucking sound as they moved to a fresh patch.
She’d never seen so much greenness in so great a variety. Or so many birds. Or such fat cattle. Pasture in Salerno was burned thin and good only for goats.
The boy stopped and pointed to a cluster of thatch and a church tower in the distance. “Trumpington,” he informed the dog.
Adelia nodded. “Now, where is Saint Radegund’s tree?”
The boy rolled his eyes, intoned “Saint Raddy’s,” and set off back the way they had come.
With Safeguard plodding dispiritedly behind them, they crossed the river by a footbridge so that this time they were following the Cam ’s left bank northward, the boy complaining to the dog at every step. From what Adelia could understand, he resented Gyltha’s change of occupation. As errand boy to his grandmother’s eel business, he occasionally received pourboires from the customers, a source of money now cut off.
Adelia ignored him.
A hunting horn sounded musically in the hills to the west. Safeguard and Ulf raised their disreputable heads and paused. “Wolf,” Ulf told the dog. The echo died and they went on.
Now Adelia was able to look across the water to Cambridge town. Set without competition against pure sky, its jumbled roofs that were spiked with church towers gained significance, even beauty.
In the distance loomed Great Bridge, a massive, workmanlike arch crammed with traffic. Beyond it, where the river formed a deep pool below the castle on its hill-almost a mountain in this terrain-shipping so crowded the quays it seemed impossible, from this view, that it should disentangle itself. Wooden cranes dipped and rose like bowing herons. Shouts and instructions were being issued in different languages. The crafts were as varied as the tongues; wherries, horse-drawn barges, poled barges, rafts, vessels like arks-even, to Adelia’s astonishment, a dhow. She could see men with blond plaits, hung about with animal skins so that they looked like bears, performing a leaping dance back and forth between barges for the amusement of working dockers.
Carried on the breeze, the noise and industry accentuated the quietness of the bank where she walked with the boy and the dog. She heard Ulf informing the dog that they were approaching Saint Radegund’s tree.
She’d worked that out for herself. It had been fenced off. A stall stood just outside the palings with a pile of branches on it. Two nuns were breaking off twigs, attaching a ribbon to each, and selling them to relic-seekers.
This, then, was where Little Saint Peter had taken his Easter branches and where, subsequently, Chaim the Jew had been hanged.
The tree stood outside the convent grounds, which were marked here by a wall that, on the river side, led down to gates next to a boathouse and a small quay but which, heading west, ran so far back into the forested countryside that Adelia could see no end to it.
Inside the open gates, other nuns busied themselves among a mass of pilgrims like black-and-white bees directing honey-gatherers into their hive. As Adelia went under the entrance arch, a nun sitting at a table in the sunny courtyard was telling a man and wife ahead of her, “Penny to visit Little Saint Peter’s tomb,” adding, “Or a dozen eggs, we’re low on eggs, hens ain’t laying.”
“Pot of honey?” the wife suggested.
The nun tutted, but they were allowed to pass in. Adelia contributed two pennies since the nun was prepared to exclude Safeguard if she did not and Ulf was reluctant to enter without the dog. Her coins clinked into a bowl already nearly full. The argument had held up the line of people that formed behind her, and one of the nuns marshaling it became angry at the delay and almost pushed her through the gates.
Inevitably, Adelia compared this, the first English nunnery she had visited, with Saint Giorgio’s, largest of the three female convents in Salerno and the one with which she was most familiar. The comparison was unfair, she knew; Saint Giorgio’s was a rich foundation, a place of marble and mosaic, bronze doors opening into courtyards where fountains cooled the air, a place, Mother Ambrose always said, “to feed with beauty the hungry souls who come to us.”
If the souls of Cambridge looked for such sustenance from Saint Radegund’s, they went empty away. Few had endowed this female house, suggesting that the rich of England did not esteem women’s worship. True, there was a pleasing simplicity of line in the convent’s collection of plain stone oblong outbuildings, though none of them any bigger nor more ornate than the barn in which Saint Giorgio’s kept its grain, but beauty was lacking. So was charity. Here, the nuns were employed in selling rather than giving.
Stalls set up along the path to the church displayed Little Saint Peter talismans, badges, banners, figurines, plaques, weavings from Little Saint Peter’s willow, ampullae containing Little Saint Peter’s blood, which, if it were human blood, had been so watered as to show only the lightest taint of pink.
There was a press to buy. “What one’s good for gout?…For the flux?…For fertility?…Can this cure staggers in a cow?”
Saint Radegund’s was not waiting on the years it would take for its martyred son to be confirmed in sainthood by the Vatican. But then, neither had Canterbury, where the industry based on the martyrdom of Saint Thomas à Becket was immensely bigger and better organized.
Chastened by Gyltha’s strictures on want, Adelia could not blame so poor a convent for exploitation, but she could despise the vulgarity with which it was being done. Roger of Acton was here, striding up and down the line of pilgrims, brandishing an ampulla, urging the crowd to buy: “Whoso shall be washed in the blood of this little one need never wash again.” The sour whiff as he passed suggested he took his own advice.
The man had capered the journey from Canterbury, a demented monkey, always shouting. His earflapped cap was still too large for him, his green-black robe daubed with the same mud and food splashes.
On a pilgrimage that had consisted mainly of educated people, the man had appeared an idiot. Yet here, among the desperate, his cracked voice carried compulsion. Roger of Acton said “Buy,” and his hearers bought.
It was expected that God’s finger infected those it touched with holy madness; Acton was commanding the respect accorded to skeletal men gibbering in the caves of the East, or to a stylite balancing on his pillar. Did not saints embrace discomfort? Had not the corpse of Saint Thomas à Becket been wearing a hair shirt swarming with lice? Dirt, exaltation, and an ability to quote the Bible were signs of sanctity.