The prioress’s expression suggested that she was beginning to regret calling Adelia in. “As it happens, I have my own quarters, and I am usually too occupied by convent business to eat with the sisters. I have been at Ely this last week, consulting with the abbot on…on religious matters.”

Buying one of the abbot’s horses, so Edric the groom had said.

Prioress Joan went on: “I suggest you confine your interest to the matter in hand. Inform your doctor that there are no poisoners here and, in the name of God, ask him what is to be done.”

What had to be done was to solicit help. Satisfied that it was not the convent’s air causing the nuns’ sickness-though the place was dank and smelled of rot-Adelia walked back to the kennels and sent Edric the groom for the Matildas.

They arrived, and Gyltha with them. “The boy’s safe in the castle with Sir Rowley and Mansur,” she said when Adelia reproved her. “Reckon you need me more than he do.”

That was undoubted, but it was dangerous for them all.

“I shall be glad of you by day,” Adelia told the three women. “You shall not stay by night because, while the pestilence lasts, you will not eat any of the convent’s food nor drink its water. I insist on this. Also, buckets of brandy will stand in the cloister, and after touching the nuns, or their chamber pots, or anything that is theirs, you must lave your hands in them.”

“Brandy?”

“Brandy.”

Adelia had her own theory concerning diseases such as the one ravaging the nuns. Like so many of her theories, it did not accord with that of Galen or any other medical influences in vogue. She believed that the flux in cases like this was the body’s attempt to rid itself of a substance it could not tolerate. Poison in one form or another had gone in and, ergo, poison was coming out. Water itself was so often contaminated-as in the poorer districts of Salerno, where disease was ever-present-it must be treated as a source of the original poison until proved otherwise. Since anything distilled, in this case brandy, frequently stopped wounds from putrefying, it might also act on any ejected poison that touched the hands of a nurse and prevent her from ingesting it herself.

So Adelia reasoned and acted on.

“My brandy?” The prioress expressed dissatisfaction at seeing the cask from her cellar poured into two buckets.

“The doctor insists on it,” Adelia told her, as if the messages Edric brought from the castle had contained instructions from Mansur.

“I would have you know that is best Spanish,” Joan said.

“An even stronger specific.”

Since they were all in the kitchen at that moment, Adelia had the prioress at a disadvantage; she suspected the woman of never having entered it. The place was dark and verminous; several rats had fled at their entrance-Safeguard yelping after them with the most animation Adelia had ever seen in him. The stone walls were encrusted with grease. Such grooves of the pine table block that could be seen beneath litter were filled with grime. There was a smell of rotting sweetness. Pots hanging from hooks retained furred remnants of meals, flour bins were uncovered, and there was a suggestion of movement in their contents, the same applied to the open vats of cooking water-Adelia wondered if it was in one of these that the nuns had boiled Little Saint Peter’s corpse and whether it had been cleaned afterward. Shreds clinging to the blade of a meat cleaver stank like pus.

Adelia looked up from sniffing them. “No poisoner here, you say? Your cooks should be arrested.”

“Nonsense,” the prioress said. “A bit of dirt never hurt anybody.” But she pulled at the collar of her pet gazehound to stop him from licking an unidentified mess sticking to a platter on the floor. Rallying, she said, “I am paying Dr. Mansur that my nuns be made well, not for his subordinate to spy on the premises.”

“Dr. Mansur says that to treat the premises is to treat the patient.”

Adelia would not give way on this. She had fed a pill of opium to the worst cases in the cells in order to relieve their cramps, and now, apart from washing the rest and giving them sips of boiled water-which Gyltha and Matilda W. were already about-little could be done for the invalids until the kitchen was fit to use on their behalf.

Adelia turned to Matilda B., whose Herculean task this was to be. “Can you do it, little one? Cleanse these Augean stables?”

“Kept horses in here as well, did they?” Rolling up her sleeves, Matilda B. looked around her.

“Quite probably.”

Followed resentfully by the prioress, Adelia went on a tour of inspection. An aumbry in the refectory contained labeled jars that spoke well of Sister Odilia’s knowledge of herbology, though it also held a plentiful supply of opium-too plentiful, in the opinion of Adelia, who, knowing the drug’s power, kept her own cache to a minimum in case of theft.

The convent’s water proved healthy. A peat-colored but pure ground spring had been enclosed in a conduit that ran through the buildings, first to serve the kitchen before supplying the fish in the convent’s stew outside, then on to the nuns’ laundry, lavatorium, and, finally, to course along a helpful slope under the long, many-holed bench in the outhouse that was the privy. The bench was clean enough, though nobody had brushed out the runnel beneath it for many a long month-a job that Adelia reserved for the prioress, seeing no reason why Gyltha or the Matildas should have to do it.

But that was for later. Having done her best to ensure that the condition of her patients was not made worse, Adelia turned her energy to saving their lives.

PRIOR GEOFFREY CAME to save their souls. It was generous of him, considering the feud between him and the prioress. It was also brave; the priest who usually heard the sisters’ confession had refused to risk the plague and instead sent a letter containing a generalized absolution for any sins that might come up.

It was raining. Gargoyles spouted water from the roof of the cloister walk into the unkempt garden at its center. Prioress Joan received the prior, thanking him with stiff politeness. Adelia took his wet cloak to the kitchen to dry.

By the time she returned, Prior Geoffrey was alone. “Bless the woman,” he said. “I believe her to suspect me of trying to steal Little Saint Peter’s bones while she is yet at this disadvantage.”

Adelia was happy to see him. “Are you well, Prior?”

“Well enough.” He winked at her. “Functioning nicely so far.”

He was leaner than he had been and looked fitter. She was relieved for that, and also by his mission. “Their sins seem so little, except to them,” she said of the nuns. In their more terrible moments, when they thought themselves near death, she had heard most of her patients’ reasons for dreading hellfire. “Sister Walburga ate some of the sausage she was taking upriver for the anchorites, but you’d think from her distress that she was a Horseman of the Apocalypse and the Whore of Babylon rolled into one.”

Indeed, Adelia had already discounted the accusations made by Brother Gilbert against the nuns’ behavior. A doctor learned many secrets from an acutely ill patient, and Adelia found these women to be slapdash perhaps, undisciplined, mostly illiterate-all failings that she put down to the negligence of their prioress-but not immoral.

“She shall be reconciled through Christ for the sausage,” Prior Geoffrey said solemnly.

By the time he had finished confessing the sisters on the ground floor, it was dark. Adelia waited for him outside Sister Veronica’s cell at the end of the row, to light him to the upper cells.

He paused. “I have given Sister Odilia the last rites.”

“Prior, I hope to save her yet.”

He patted her shoulder. “Not even you can perform miracles, my child.” He looked back to the cell he had just left. “I worry for Sister Veronica.”