Going back down the river toward town, Ulf spat into the water. “Waste of bloody time that was.”

“Not entirely,” Adelia told him. The excursion had brought home something she should have recognized before. Whether they went willingly with their abductor or not, the children would have been seen. Every boat on these stretches below the Great Bridge had a shallow draft and low gunwales, making it impossible to conceal the presence of anyone bigger than a baby-unless he or she were lying flat under the thwarts. Therefore, either the children had hidden themselves or they had been rendered unconscious and a coat, a piece of sacking, something, had been thrown over them for the journey that had taken them to the place of their death.

She pointed this out in Arabic and English.

“He does not use a boat, then,” Mansur said. “The devil throws them across his saddle. Takes a route across country unseen.”

It was possible; most habitation in this part of Cambridgeshire was on a waterway, its interior virtually deserted apart from grazing cloven-hoofed beasts, but Adelia didn’t think so; the predominance of the river in each child’s disappearance argued against it.

“Then it is the thebaicum,” Mansur suggested.

“Opium?” That was more likely. Adelia had been gratified by how extensively the Eastern poppy was grown in this unlikely area of England and by the availability of its properties, but also alarmed. The apothecary, he who visited his mistress by night, distilled it in alcohol, calling it Saint Gregory’s Cordial, and sold it to anybody, though keeping it below his counter out of sight from clerics who condemned the mixture as godless for its ability to relieve pain, an attribute that should be left exclusively to the Lord.

“That’s it,” Ulf said. “He gives ’em a drop of the Gregory’s.” He crinkled up his eyes and exposed his teeth. “Take a sip of this, my pretty, and come along of me to paradise.”

It was a caricature of wheedling malevolence that chilled the warmth of spring.

ADELIA WAS CHILLED AGAIN when, next morning, she sat in the sanctum of a leaded-windowed countinghouse on Castle Hill. The room was stacked with documents and chests bound by chains with locks, a hard-cornered, masculine room built to intimidate would-be borrowers and to accommodate women not at all. Master De Barque, of De Barque Brothers, received her into it with reluctance and met her request with a negative.

“But the letter of credit was in the name both Simon of Naples and myself,” Adelia protested and heard her voice being absorbed into the walls.

De Barque extended a finger and pushed a roll of vellum with a seal on it across the table to her. “Read it for yourself, mistress, if you are capable of understanding Latin.”

She read it. Among the “heretofores” and “wherebys” and “compliance therewith” the Luccan bankers in Salerno, the issuers, promised to pay on behalf of the applicant, the King of Sicily, to the Brothers De Barque of Cambridge such sums as Simon of Naples, the beneficiary, should require. No other name was mentioned.

She looked up into the fat, impatient, disinterested face. How vulnerable to insult you were if you lacked money. “But it was understood,” she said. “I was Master Simon’s equal in the enterprise. I was chosen for it.”

“I am sure you were, mistress,” Master De Barque said.

He thinks I came along as Simon’s strumpet. Adelia sat up, squaring her shoulders. “An application to the Salerno bank or to King William in Sicily will verify me.”

“Then make it, mistress. In the meantime…” Master De Barque picked up a bell on the table and rang it to summon his clerk. He was a busy man.

Adelia sat where she was. “It will take months.” She didn’t have enough money to pay even what it would cost to send the letter. There had been only a few clipped pennies in Simon’s room when she’d gone to look; either he had been preparing to apply to these bankers for more or he had kept what he had in the wallet his killer had taken. “May I borrow until-”

“We do not lend to women.”

She resisted the clerk taking her by the arm to lead her out. “Then what am I to do?” There was the apothecary’s bill to pay, Simon’s headstone to be inscribed by a stonemason, Mansur needed new boots, she needed new boots…

“Mistress, we are a Christian organization. I suggest you apply to the Jews. They are the king’s chosen usurers, and I understand you are close to them.”

There it was, in his eye. She was a woman and a Jew lover.

“You know the Jews’ situation,” she said desperately. “At present they have no access to their money.”

For a moment the flesh on Master De Barque’s face creased into warmth. “Have they not?” he said.

AS THEY WENT UP THE HILL, Adelia and Safeguard were passed by a prison cart containing beggars; the castle beadle was rounding them up ready for sentence at the coming assize. A woman was shaking its bars with skeletal hands.

Adelia stared after her. How powerless we are when we’re destitute.

Never in her life had she been without money. I must go home. But I cannot, not until the killer is found, and even then, how can I leave? She turned her mind from the name; she would have to leave him sooner or later… In any case, I cannot travel. I have no money.

What to do? She was a Ruth amid alien corn. Ruth had solved her situation by marrying, which was not an option in this case.

Could she even exist? Patients had been redirected to the castle while she’d been there, and, in between looking after Rowley, she and Mansur had attended to them. But nearly all were too poor to pay cash.

Her anxiety was not placated when, on entering the castle’s tower room with Safeguard, she found Sir Rowley up and dressed, sitting on the bed, and chatting with Sir Joscelin of Grantchester and Sir Gervase of Coton. As she bustled toward him, she said irritably to Gyltha, who stood sentinel-like in a corner, “He’s supposed to be resting.” She ignored the two knights who had risen at her entrance-Gervase reluctantly and only at a signal from his companion. She took the patient’s pulse. It was steadier than her own.

“Don’t be angry with us, mistress,” Sir Joscelin said. “We came to sympathize with Sir Rowley. It was God’s mercy you and the doctor were by. The wretch Acton…we can only hope the assize will not allow him to escape the rope. We are all agreed hanging’s too good for him.”

“Are you, indeed?” she snapped.

“The lady Adelia does not countenance hanging; she has crueler methods,” Rowley said. “She’d treat all criminals with a hearty dose of hyssop.”

Sir Joscelin smiled. “Now that is cruel.”

“And your methods are effective, are they?” Adelia asked. “Blinding and hanging and cutting off hands makes us all safer in our beds, does it? Kill Roger of Acton and there will be no more crime?”

“And the killer of the children, mistress,” Sir Joscelin asked gently. “What would you have done to him?”

Adelia was slow to answer.

“She hesitates,” Sir Gervase said with disgust. “What sort of woman is she?”

She was a woman who regarded legislated death as an effrontery by those imposing it-so easily and sometimes for so little cause-because life, to her, who wished to save it, was the only true miracle. She was a woman who never sat with the judge or stood with the executioner but always clung to the bar with the accused. Would I have come to this place in his or her circumstances? Had I been born to what he or she was born to, would I have done differently? If someone other than two doctors from Salerno had picked up the baby on Vesuvius, would it cower where this man or woman cowers?

For her, the law should be the point at which savagery ended because civilization stood in its path. We do not kill because we stand for betterment. She supposed the killer had to die and most certainly would, the putting down of a rabid animal, but the doctor in her would always wonder why it had turned rabid and grieve for not knowing.