The prioress stayed to chant a requiem. Adelia went back to the cells to sit with Agatha. All the nuns were asleep, for which she was thankful; they need not know of the death until the morning, when they would be stronger.

That is, if morning ever comes to this awful place, she thought. “Heathenish,” the prior had said. At this distance, the strong, single contralto echoing from the chapel sounded not so much a Christian requiem as a lament for a fallen warrior. Had it been Odilia’s death or some element in the very stones that conjured the horned figure in the cloister?

Fatigue, Adelia told herself again. You are tired.

But the image persisted, and to rid herself of it, she used her imagination to transpose it with another figure, this one more rotund, more funny, infinitely beloved, until Rowley stood there in the horror’s stead. With that comforting presence on guard outside, she fell asleep.

Sister Agatha died the next night. “Her heart seems to have just stopped beating,” Adelia wrote in a message to Prior Geoffrey. “She was doing well. I did not expect it.” And had cried for it.

With rest and Gyltha’s good food, the remaining nuns recovered swiftly. Veronica and Walburga, being younger than the others, were up and about sooner than Adelia would have liked, though it was difficult to resist their high spirits. However, their insistence that they should go upriver to supply the neglected anchorites was not sensible, especially as, in order to take sufficient food and fuel, one nun would be poling one punt and her sister yet another.

Adelia went to Prioress Joan with an appeal that they be stopped from exhausting themselves.

Being worn out herself, she did so tactlessly: “They are still my patients. I cannot allow it.”

“They are still my nuns. And the anchorites my responsibility. From time to time, Sister Veronica, especially, needs the freedom and solitude to be found among them; she has sought it, and I have always granted it.”

“Prior Geoffrey promised to supply the anchorites.”

“I have no opinion of Prior Geoffrey’s promises.”

It was not the first time, nor the second, nor the third, that Joan and Adelia had locked horns. The prioress, conscious that her many absences had brought both convent and nuns to the brink of ruin, involuntarily tried to retain her authority by opposing Adelia’s.

They had argued over Safeguard, the prioress saying that he stank, which he did-but not more than the living conditions of the nuns. They had argued over the administration of opium, on which the prioress had decided to take the side of the Church. “Pain is God-sent, only God should take it away.”

“Who says so? Where in the Bible does it say that?” Adelia had demanded.

“I am told the plant is addictive. They will form a habit of taking it.”

“They won’t. They don’t know what they are taking. It is a temporary panacea, a soporific to relieve their suffering.”

Perhaps because she had won that argument, she lost this. The two nuns were given their superior’s permission to take supplies to the anchorites-and Adelia, knowing she could do no more for it, left the convent two days later.

Which was the same time the assize arrived in Cambridge.

THE NOISE WAS TREMENDOUS in any case, but for Adelia, whose ears had become accustomed to silence, it was like being battered. Weighted by her heavy medicine case, the walk from the convent house had been a hard one, and now, wanting only to get back to Old Benjamin’s and rest, she stood in a crowd on the wrong side of Bridge Street as the parade passed.

At first she didn’t realize this was the assize; the cavalcade of musicians in livery blowing trumpets and beating tabors took her back to Salerno, to the week before Ash Wednesday when the carnevale came to town despite all the Church could do to prevent it.

Here came more drums-and beadles, such ornate livery, with great gold maces over their shoulders. And heavens, mitered bishops and abbots on caparisoned horses, one or two actually waving. And a comic executioner with hood and ax…

Then she knew the executioner wasn’t comic; there would be no tumblers and dancing bears. The three Plantagenet leopards were blazoned everywhere, and the lovely palanquins now going by on the shoulders of tabarded men contained the judges of the king come to weigh Cambridge in their scales and, if Rowley was correct, find much of it wanting.

Yet the people around her cheered as if starved of entertainment, as if the trials and fines and death sentences to come would provide it.

Bewildered by hubbub, Adelia suddenly saw Gyltha pushing to the front of the crowd across the street, her mouth open as if she, too, were cheering. But she wasn’t cheering.

Dear God of All, don’t let her be saying it. It is unsayable, not to be borne. Don’t look like that.

Gyltha ran into the street so that a rider had to rein in, swearing, his horse jittering to one side to avoid trampling her. She was talking, looking, clutching. She was coming close, and Adelia stood back to avoid her, but the shriek penetrated everything. “Any of you seen my little boy?”

She might have been blind. She caught at Adelia’s sleeve without recognizing her. “You seen my little boy? Name’s Ulf. I can’t find un.”

Fourteen

She sat on the Cam ’s bank in the same spot, on the same upturned pail that Ulf had sat on to do his fishing.

She watched the river. Nothing else.

Behind the house at her back, the streets were full of noise and bustle, some of it to do with the assize, much of it caused by the search for Ulf. Gyltha herself, Mansur, the two Matildas, Adelia’s patients, Gyltha’s customers, friends, neighbors, parish reeve, and those merely concerned all were looking for the child-with increasing despair.

“The boy was restive in the castle and wished to go fishing,” Mansur had told Adelia, so stolid as to be almost rigid. “I came with him. Then the small, fat one”-he referred to Matilda B.-“called me into the house to mend a table leg. When I came outside again, he was gone.” The Arab refused to meet her eye, which told her how upset he was. “You may tell the woman I am sorry,” he’d said.

Gyltha hadn’t blamed him, hadn’t blamed anybody; the terror was too great to convert into anger. Her frame wizened into that of a much smaller, older woman; she would not stay still. Already she and Mansur had been upriver and down, asking everybody they met if they had seen the boy and jumping into boats to tear the cover off anything hidden. Today they were questioning traders by the Great Bridge.

Adelia did not go with them. All that night she’d stayed in the solar window, watching the river. Today she sat where Ulf had sat and went on watching it, gripped by a grief so terrible that she was immobilized-although she would have stayed on the bank in any case. “It’s the river,” Ulf had said, and in her head she listened to him say it over and over again, because, if she stopped listening, she would hear him scream.

Rowley came crashing through the reeds, limping, and tried to take her away. He said things, held her. He seemed to want her to go to the castle, where he was forced to stay, being so busy with the assize. He kept mentioning the king; she hardly heard him.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “but I must remain here. It’s the river, you see. The river takes them.”

“How can the river take them?” He spoke gently, thinking her mad, which, of course, she was.

“I don’t know,” she told him. “I have to stay here until I do.”

He nagged at her. She loved him but not enough to go with him; she was under the direction of a different, more commanding love.

“I shall come back,” he said at last.