“I know.” Though there was no court of law that would believe it. Rightly terrified for their own lives, Yehuda and his father-in-law had done a desperate thing and done it badly, gaining themselves only a few days’ respite, during which the body, snagged below the waterline under the pier, swelled to the point where it unsnagged itself and floated to the surface.
She turned to Yehuda, unable to wait any longer. “Before it went into the drain, did you examine the body? What condition was it in? Was it mutilated? Was it clothed?”
Yehuda and Benjamin regarded her with disgust. “You bring a female ghoul into our company?” Benjamin demanded of Simon.
“Ghoul? Ghoul?” Simon was in danger of hitting somebody again, and Mansur put out a hand to stop him. “You shove a poor little boy down a drain and you talk to me of ghouls?”
Adelia left the room, leaving Simon in full tirade. There was one person still in the castle who could tell her what she wanted to know.
As she crossed the hall on her way to the bailey, the tax collector noted her departure. He left the sheriff’s side for a moment to instruct his squire.
“That Saracen’s not with her, is he?” Pipin was nervous; he was still favoring his back.
“Just see whom she talks to.”
Adelia walked across the sunlit bailey toward the corner where the Jewish women were gathered. She was able to pick out the one she sought by her youth and the fact that, of all the women, she had been given a chair to sit on. And by her distended belly. At least eight months gone, Adelia judged.
She bowed to Chaim’s daughter. “Mistress Dina?”
Dark eyes, huge and defensive, turned to look at her. “Yes?”
The girl was too thin for the good of her condition; the rounded stomach might have been an invasive protuberance that had attached itself to a slender plant. Hollowed sockets and cheeks were darkened in a skin like vellum.
The doctor in Adelia thought, You need some of Gyltha’s cooking, lady; I shall see to it.
She introduced herself as Adelia, daughter of Gershom of Salerno. Her foster father might be a lapsed Jew, but this was not the time to bring up either his or her own apostasy. “May we talk together?” She looked around at the other women, who were gathering close. “Alone?”
Dina sat motionless for a moment. She was veiled to keep off the sun in near-transparent gossamer; her ornate headdress was not everyday wear. Silk encrusted with pearls peeped out from under the old shawl wrapped around her shoulders. Adelia thought with pity, She’s in the clothes she was married in.
At last, a flap of the hand sent the other women scattering; fugitive as she was, orphaned as she was, Dina still held rank among her sex as daughter of the man who had been the richest Jew in Cambridgeshire. And she was bored; having been cooped up with them for a year, she would have heard everything her companions had to say-and heard it several times.
“Yes?” The girl lifted her veil. She was sixteen, perhaps, no more, and lovely, but her face was setting into bitterness. When she heard what Adelia wanted, she turned it away. “I will not talk about it.”
“The real murderer must be caught.”
“They are all murderers.” She cocked her head to one side in the attitude of listening, raising a finger so that Adelia should listen with her.
Faintly, from beyond the curtain wall, came shouts indicating that Roger of Acton was responding to the arrival of the bishop at the castle gates. “Kill the Jews” was distinguishable among the gabble.
Dina said, “Do you know what they did to my father? What they did to my mother?” The young face crumpled, becoming even younger. “I miss my mother. I miss her.”
Adelia knelt beside her, taking the girl’s hand and putting it to her cheek. “She would want you to be brave.”
“I can’t be.” Dina put back her head and let the tears gush.
Adelia glanced to where the other women were teetering anxiously and shook her head to stop them coming forward. “Yes, you can,” she said. She laid Dina’s hand and her own on the swell of the girl’s stomach. “Your mother would want you to be brave for her grandchild.”
But Dina’s grief, having burst out, was mixed with terror. “They’ll kill the baby, too.” She opened her eyes wide. “Can’t you hear them? They’re going to break in. They’re going to break in.”
How hideous it was for them. Adelia had imagined the isolation, even the boredom, but not the day-to-day waiting, like an animal with its leg in a trap, for the wolves to come. There was no forgetting that there was a pack outside; Roger of Acton’s howl was there to remind them.
She made ineffectual pats of comfort. “The king won’t allow them in.” And “Your husband’s here to protect you.”
“Him.” It was said with a contempt that dried tears.
Was it the king so derided? Or the husband? The girl would not have set eyes on the man she’d been told to marry until the day she married him; Adelia had never thought it a good custom. Jewish law did not permit a young woman to be married against her will, but too often that meant only that she could not be forced to wed a man she hated. Adelia herself had escaped marriage through the liberality of a foster father who had complied with her wish to remain celibate. “There are good wives aplenty, thank God,” he’d said, “but few good doctors. And a good woman doctor is above rubies.”
In Dina’s case, a fearful wedding day and the incarceration that followed it had not augured well for marital bliss.
“Listen to me,” Adelia said briskly. “If your baby is not to spend the rest of its life in this castle, if a killer is not to stay free and murder other children, tell me what I want to know.” Out of desperation, she added, “Forgive me but, by extension, he also killed your parents.”
Wet-lashed, beautiful eyes studied her as if she were an innocent. “But that was why they did it. Don’t you know that?”
“Know what?”
“Why they killed the boy. We know that. They killed him only so that we should be blamed. Why else would they put his corpse in our grounds?”
“No,” Adelia said. “No.”
“Of course they did.” Dina’s mouth was ugly with a sneer. “It was planned. Then they set the mob on, kill the Jews, kill Chaim the usurer. That’s what they shouted, and that’s what they did.”
“Kill the Jews.” The echo came parrotlike from the gate.
“Other children have died since,” Adelia said. She was taken aback by a new thought.
“Them too. They were killed so that the mob will have an excuse when they come to hang the rest of us.” Dina was inexorable. Then she wasn’t. “Did you know my mother stepped in front of me? Did you know that? So they tore her apart and not me?”
Suddenly, she covered her face and rocked back and forth as her husband had done minutes before, only Dina was praying for her dead: “Oseh sholom bimromov, hu ya’aseh sholom olaynu, v’al kol yisroel. Omein.”
“Omein.” He who makes peace in his high holy places, may he bring peace upon us and upon all Israel. If you are there, God, Adelia prayed, let it be thus.
Of course these people would see their plight as deliberately engineered, a plot by goyim to murder children if, in so doing, they could murder Jews. Dina did not ask why; history was her answer.
Gently, firmly, Adelia pulled Dina’s hands down so that she could look into the girl’s face. “Listen to me, mistress. One man killed those children, one. I have seen their bodies, and he is inflicting injuries on them so terrible that I will not tell you what they are. He is doing it because he has lusts we do not recognize, because he is not human as we understand it. Now Simon of Naples has come to England to free the Jews of this guilt, but I do not ask you to help him because you are a Jew. I ask you because it is against all the law of God and men that children should suffer as those children suffered.”