“You will not go, Adelia,” Rowley said.

“I must.”

“I fear she should,” said Lady Baldwin. “The prioress does not allow a man in the nuns’ inner sanctum, despite those wicked rumors, except a priest to hear their confession, of course. With the infirmaress hors de combat, Mistress Adelia is the next best thing, an excellent thing. If she keeps a clove of garlic up each nostril, she cannot succumb.” She hurried away to prepare her beef tea.

Adelia was giving explanations and instruction to Mansur. “O friend of the ages, look after this man and this woman and this boy while I am absent. Let them go nowhere alone. The devil is abroad. Guard over them in the name of Allah.”

“And who shall guard over you, little one? The holy women will not object to the presence of a eunuch.”

Adelia smiled. “It is not a harem, the women safeguard their temple from all men. I shall be safe enough.”

Ulf was tugging at her arm. “I can come. I ain’t growed yet, they know me at Saint Raggy’s. And I don’t never catch nothing.”

“You’re not going to catch this, either,” she said.

“You will not go,” Rowley said. Wincing, he dragged Adelia to the window away from the others. “It’s a bloody plot to get you unprotected. Rakshasa’s in it somewhere.”

Back on his feet, Adelia was reminded of how big he was and what it was for a powerful man to be kept powerless. Nor had she realized that, for him, Simon’s murder had seemed a preliminary to her own. Just as she was frightened for him, so was he for her. She was touched, gratified, but there were things to attend to-Gyltha must be told to change the medicines on the table; she had to collect others from Old Benjamin’s…she didn’t have time for him now.

“You’re the one who’s been asking questions,” she said gently. “I beg you to take care of yourself and my people. You merely need nursing at this stage, not a doctor. Gyltha will look after you.” She tried to disengage herself from him. “You must see that I have to go to them.”

“For God’s sake,” he shouted. “You can stop playing the doctor for once, can’t you?”

Playing the doctor. Playing the doctor?

Though his hand was still on her, it was as if the ground had fallen between them, and looking up into his eyes, she saw herself across the chasm-a pleasant little creature enough but a deluded one, merely busying itself, a spinster filling in time until she should be claimed by what was basic for a woman.

But if so, what was the line of suffering that waited for her every day? What was Gil the thatcher who was able to climb up ladders?

And what are you, she thought, amazed, looking into his eyes, who should have bled to death and didn’t?

She knew in absolute certainty now that she should never marry him. She was Vesuvia Adelia Rachel Ortese Aguilar, who would be very, very lonely but always a doctor.

She shook herself free. “The patient can resume solid food, Gyltha, but change all those medicaments for fresh,” she said and went out.

Anyway, she thought, I need that fee the prioress promised.

SAINT RADEGUND’S CHURCH and its outhouses near the river were deceptive, having been built after the Danes stopped invading and before the foundation ran out of money. The main body of the convent, its chapel and residences, was larger and lonelier and had known the reign of Edward the Confessor.

It stood away from the river hidden among trees so that Viking longboats snaking through the shallow waters of the Cam tributaries might not find it. When the monks, who’d inhabited it originally, died out, the place had been granted to religious women.

All this Adelia learned over the shoulder of Edric as, with Safeguard following, his horse carried them both into the convent estate via a side gate in its wall, the main gates having been barred against visitors.

Like Matilda W., the groom was aggrieved by Little Saint Peter’s failure to do his job. “It do look bad shutting up, with the pilgrim season just starting proper,” he said. “Mother Joan’s right put out.”

He set Adelia down by a stable block and kennels, the only well-kept convent buildings she had seen so far, and pointed to a path skirting a paddock. “God go with you, missis.” Obviously, he would not.

Adelia, however, was not prepared to be cut off from the outside world. She ordered the man to go to the castle each morning, taking any message she might need to send and asking how her people did, and to bring back the answer.

She set off with Safeguard. The clatter of the town across the river faded. Larks rose around her, their song like bursting bubbles. Behind her the prioress’s hounds sent up a belling and a roe deer barked somewhere in the forest ahead.

The same forest, she remembered, that contained the manor of Sir Gervase, and into which Little Saint Peter had disappeared.

“CAN THIS BE MANAGED?” Prioress Joan demanded. She was more haggard than when Adelia had last seen her.

“Well, it isn’t the plague,” Adelia told her, “nor typhus, Lord be thanked; none of the sisters has the rash. I believe it to be cholera.”

She added, because the prioress went pale, “A milder form than the one found in the East, though bad enough. I am concerned for your infirmaress and Sister Veronica.” The oldest and the youngest. Sister Veronica was the nun who, praying over Little Saint Peter’s reliquary, had presented Adelia with an image of imperishable grace.

“Veronica.” The prioress appeared distraught-and Adelia liked her better for it. “The sweetest-natured of them all, may God attend her. What is to be done?”

What indeed? Adelia glanced in dismay across to the other side of the cloister, where, beyond the pillars of its walk, rose what looked like an outsize pigeon-loft, two rows of ten doorless arches, each giving to a cell less than five feet wide, inside which lay a prostrate nun.

There was no infirmary-the title “infirmaress” seemed to be an honorary designation settled on the elderly Sister Odilia merely because she was skilled in herbs. No dorter, either-nowhere, in fact, for the nuns to be cared for collectively.

“The original monks were ascetics who preferred the privacy of individual cells,” the prioress said, catching Adelia’s look. “We keep to them because as yet we have had no money to build. Can you manage?”

“I shall need assistance.” Caring single-handedly for twenty women severely afflicted with diarrhea and vomiting would be hard enough in a ward, but to fetch and carry from cell to cell, up and down the wickedly narrow and railless flight of steps that led to the upper cells, would cut down the carer herself.

“I fear our servants fled at the mention of plague.”

“We don’t want them back in any case,” Adelia said firmly. A glimpse of the convent house suggested that those who should have kept it ordered had allowed slovenliness to reign long before disease overtook it, a slackness that might have caused the disease itself.

She said, “May I ask if you eat with your nuns?”

“And what has that to do with the price of fish, mistress?” The prioress was offended, as if Adelia was accusing her of dereliction.

So Adelia was, in a way. She remembered Mother Ambrose’s care for the physical and spiritual nourishment of her nuns while presiding over meals in Saint Giorgio’s immaculate refectory, where wholesome food was accompanied by a reading from the Bible, where a nun’s lack of appetite for either could be noted and acted on. But she did not want confrontation so early and said, “It may have something to do with the poisoning.”

“Poisoning? Do you suggest that someone is trying to murder us?”

“Deliberately, no. Accidentally, yes. Cholera is a form of poisoning. Since you yourself seem to have escaped it…”