She turned away from them to go to the medicine table and noticed for the first time how rigidly Gyltha was standing. “What’s the matter?”

The housekeeper looked worn, suddenly aged. Her hands were flat and supporting a small reed casket in much the same manner as the faithful received consecrated bread from the priest before putting it into the mouth.

Rowley called from his bed, “Sir Joscelin has brought me some sweetmeats, Adelia, but Gyltha won’t let me have them.”

“Not I,” Joscelin said. “I am merely their porter. Lady Baldwin asked me to carry them up the stairs.”

Gyltha’s eyes held Adelia’s, then looked down at the casket. Letting it rest on one hand, she raised its lid slightly with the other.

Inside, lying on pretty leaves, like eggs in a nest, was an assortment of colored, scented, lozenge-shaped jujubes.

The two women stared at each other. Adelia felt ill. With her back to the men, she silently shaped the word: “Poison?”

Gyltha shrugged.

“Where’s Ulf?”

“Mansur,” Gyltha mouthed back. “Safe.”

Adelia said slowly, “The doctor has forbidden Sir Rowley confits.”

“Hand them round to our visitors, then,” Rowley called from his bed.

We can’t hide from Rakshasa, Adelia thought. We are targets; wherever we are, we stand exposed like straw men for him to shoot at.

She nodded her head toward the door and turned to the men, while behind her, Gyltha left the room, carrying the casket with her.

The medicines. Hurriedly, Adelia checked them. All stoppers were in place, the boxes piled neatly as she and Gyltha always left them.

You are being absurd, she thought; he is somewhere outside; he cannot have tampered with anything. But last night’s horror of a Rakshasa with wings was on her and she knew she would change every herb, every syrup on the table before administering them.

Is he outside? Has he been here? Is he here now?

Behind her, the conversation had turned to horses as it always did among knights.

She was aware of Gervase lolling in his chair because she felt his awareness of her. His sentences were grunted and abstracted. When she glanced at him, his look turned to a deliberate sneer.

Killer or not, she thought, you’re a brute and your presence is an insult. She marched to the door and held it open. “The patient is tired, gentlemen.”

Sir Joscelin rose. “We are sorry not to have seen Dr. Mansur, aren’t we, Gervase? Pass on our compliments to him, if you would.”

“Where is he?” Sir Gervase demanded.

“Improving Rabbi Gotsce’s Arabic,” Rowley told him.

As he passed her on his way out, Gervase muttered, as if to his companion, “That’s rich, a Jew and a Saracen in a royal castle. Why to hell did we go on crusade?”

Adelia slammed the door behind him.

Rowley said crossly, “Damn it, woman, I was edging the talk round to Outremer to find out who was where and when; one might let something slip about the other.”

“Did they?” she demanded.

“You ushered them out too fast, damn it.” Adelia recognized the irritability of recuperation. “Oddly enough, though, Brother Gilbert admitted to being in Cyprus at about the right time.”

“Brother Gilbert was here?”

And Prior Geoffrey and Sheriff Baldwin and the apothecary-with a concoction he’d sworn would heal a wound within minutes-and Rabbi Gotsce. “I’m a popular man. What’s the matter?” For Adelia had slammed a box of powdered burdock so hard on the table that its lid came off, emitting a cloud of green dust.

“You are not popular,” she said, teeth gritted. “You are a corpse. Rakshasa would poison you.”

She went back to the door, calling for Gyltha, but the housekeeper was already coming up the stairs, still holding the casket. Adelia snatched it from her, opened it, and shoved it under Rowley’s nose. “What are those?”

“Dear Christ,” he said. “Jujubes.”

“I been asking round,” Gyltha said. “Little girl handed ’em to one of the sentries, saying as they was from her mistress for the poorly gentleman in the tower. Lady Baldwin was going to carry ’em up, but Sir Joscelin said he’d save her legs. Always the polite gentleman, he is, not like t’other.”

Gyltha didn’t hold with Sir Gervase.

“And the little girl?”

“Sentry’s one of them sent from London by the king to help guard the Jews. Barney, his name is. Didn’t know her, he says.”

Mansur and Ulf were summoned so that the matter could be gone over in conference.

“They could be merely jujubes, as they seem,” said Rowley.

“Suck one an’ see,” Ulf told him sharply. “What you think, missus?”

Adelia had picked one up in her tweezers and was smelling it. “I can’t tell.”

“Let’s test them,” Rowley said. “Let’s send them down to the cells for Roger of Acton, with our compliments.”

It was tempting, but instead Mansur took them down to the courtyard to throw the casket on the smithy fire.

“There will be no more visitors to this room,” Adelia instructed. “And none of you, especially Ulf, is to leave the castle or wander in it alone.”

“Goddammit, woman, we’ll never find him like that.”

Rowley, it appeared, had been carrying on his own investigation from his bed, using his role as tax inspector to question his visitors.

From the Jews he had learned that Chaim, according to his code, had never talked about his clients nor mentioned the size of their debts. His only records were those that had burned or been stolen from Simon’s body.

“Unless the Exchequer in Winchester has a list of tallies, which it may well do-I’ve sent my squire there to find out-the king will not be best pleased; the Jews provide a large part of this nation’s income. And when Henry isn’t pleased…”

Brother Gilbert had announced that he would rather burn than approach Jews for money. The crusading apothecary as well as Sir Joscelin and Sir Gervase had said the same, though less forcefully. “They’re not likely to tell me if they did, of course, but all three seem finely set up from their own efforts.”

Gyltha nodded. “They done well out of the Holy Land. John was able to start his ’pothecary shop when he got back. Gervase, nasty little turd he was as a boy and he ain’t any pleasanter now, but he’s getting hisself more land. And young Joscelin as didn’t have a rag to his arse thanks to his pa, he’s made a palace out of Grantchester. Brother Gilbert? He’s allus Brother Gilbert.”

They heard labored breathing on the stairs and Lady Baldwin came in, holding her side with one hand and a letter in the other. “Sickness. At the convent. Lord help us. If it be the plague…”

Matilda W. followed her in.

The letter was for Adelia and had been delivered first to Old Benjamin’s house whence Matilda W. had brought it. It was a scrap of parchment torn from some manuscript, showing its terrible urgency, but the writing on it was strong and clear.

“Prioress Joan presents her compliments to Mistress Adelia, assistant to Dr. Mansur, of whom she has heard good reports. Pestilence has broken out amongst us and I ask in the name of Jesus and his dear Mother for said Mistress Adelia to visit this convent of the blessed Saint Radegund that she may then report to the good doctor and solicit his advice on what may alleviate the sisters’ suffering, it being very severe and some near to death.”

A postscript read: “To be no haggling over fees. All this to be done with discretion so as to avoid the spread of alarm.”

A groom and horse were awaiting Adelia in the courtyard below.

“I shall send you with some of my beef tea,” Lady Baldwin told Adelia. “Joan is not usually alarmed. It must be dire.”

It must be, Adelia thought, for a Christian prioress to beg the aid of a Saracen doctor.

“The infirmaress have gone down with it,” Matilda W. said-she’d heard the groom’s report. “Spewing and shitting fit to bust, the lot of ’em. God help us if it be the plague. Ain’t this town suffered enough? What’s Little Saint Peter at that the holy sisters ain’t spared?”