“Do you eat well? Plenty of meat?”

“Oh, yes, my lord.” Walburga was on firm ground and gaining confidence. “Mother Joan do always brings back a buck or two from the hunt, and my auntie’s good with butter and cream. We eat main well.”

“What else do you do?”

“I polishes Little Saint Peter’s reliquary, and I weaves tokens for the pilgrims to buy, and I-”

“I’ll wager you’re the best weaver in the convent.” Very jovial.

“Well, I’m pretty with it, my lord, though I do say it as shouldn’t, but maybe Sister Veronica and poor Sister Agnes-as-was run me close.”

“I expect you have individual styles?” At Walburga’s blink, Henry rephrased it. “Say I wanted to buy a token from a pile of tokens. Could you tell me which one was yours and which one Agnes’s? Or Veronica’s?”

My God. Adelia’s skin was prickling. She tried to catch Rowley’s eye, but he would not look at her.

Walburga chuckled. “No need, my lord. I’ll do one for you for free.”

Henry smiled. “Tut, and I’ve just sent Sir Rowley to fetch some.” He held out one of the small objects, some figures, some mats that Rowley had given him. “Did you make this one?”

“Oh, no, that’s Sister Odilia’s afore she died.”

“And this one?”

“That’s Magdalene’s.”

“This?”

“Sister Veronica’s.”

“Prior.” It was a command.

Brother Gilbert was back. Prior Geoffrey was bringing another object for Walburga to look at. “And this, my child? Who made this one?” It lay on his outstretched palm, like a star made of rushes, beautifully and intricately woven into quincuncial shape.

Walburga was enjoying the game. “Why, that’s Sister Veronica’s, too.”

“Are you sure?”

“Sure as sure, my lord. It’s her fun. Poor Sister Agnes said as perhaps she shouldn’t, them looking heathenlike, but we didn’t see no harm.”

“No harm,” the king said, softly. “Prior?”

Prior Geoffrey faced the judges. “My lords, that is one of the tokens that were lying on the corpses of the Wandlebury children when we found them. This nun has just identified it as being made by the accused sister. Look.”

Instead, the judges looked at Sister Veronica.

Adelia held her breath. It’s not conclusive; she can make a hundred excuses. It’s clever, but it’s not proof.

It was proof for Prioress Joan; she was staring at her protégée in agony.

It was proof for Veronica. For a moment, she was still. Then she shrieked, raising her head and two shaking hands. “Protect me, my lords. You think he was eaten by dogs, but he’s up there. Up there.”

Every eye followed hers to the rafters where the gargoyles laughed back at them from the shadows, then down again to Veronica. She had fallen to the floor, squirming. “He’ll hurt you. He hurts me when I don’t obey him. He hurt when he entered me. He hurts. Oh, save me from the devil.”

Sixteen

The air in the room heated and became heavy. Men’s eyelids half closed, their mouths went slack and their bodies rigid. Veronica gyrated among the rushes on the floor, pulling at her habit, pointing to her vagina, shrieking that the devil had entered her there, there.

It was as if the featherweight token had proved a final weight on guilt so heavy and so vast that she assumed it all lay exposed. A door had been broken open and something fetid was coming out of it.

“I prayed to the Mother…save me, save me, dear Mary…but he speared me with his horn, here, here. How it hurt…he had antlers…I couldn’t…sweet Son of Mary, he made me watch him do things…horrible things, horrible…there was blood, such blood. I thirsted for the blood of the Lord, but I was the devil’s slave…he hurt, he hurt…he bit my breasts, here, here, he stripped me…beat me…he put his horn in my mouth…I prayed for sweet Jesus to come…but he is the Prince of Darkness…his voice in my ears telling me to do things…I was afraid…stop him, don’t let him…”

Prayers, abasement. It went on and on.

But so did your alliance with the beast, Adelia thought. On and on. Months of it. Child after child procured, its torture observed, and never an attempt to break free. That’s not enslavement.

If she was exposing her soul, Veronica was also exposing her young body: her skirt was above her hocks; her slight breasts showed beneath the rents in her habit.

It’s a performance; she’s blaming the devil; she killed Simon; she’s enjoying it. It’s sex, that’s what it is.

A glance at the judges showed them enthralled, worse than enthralled: the Bishop of Norwich’s hand was on his crutch; the old archdeacon was puffing. Hubert Walter’s mouth dribbled. Even Rowley was licking his lips.

In a moment’s pause while Veronica gasped for breath, a bishop said, almost reverently, “Demonic possession. As clear a case as I ever saw.”

So the demons did it. Another attempt by the Prince of Darkness to undermine Mother Church, a regrettable but understandable incident in the war between sin and sanctity. Only the devil to blame. In despair, Adelia glanced up and into the face of the one man in the room who was looking on with sardonic admiration.

“She killed Simon of Naples,” Adelia said.

“I know.”

“She helped to kill the children.”

“I know,” the king said.

Veronica was crawling along the floor now, worming her way to the judges. She clasped the archdeacons’ slippers, and her soft, dark hair cascaded over his feet. “Save me, my lord, let him not force me again. I thirst for the Lord; give me back to my Redeemer. Send the devil away.” Reasonless, disheveled, the innocence had gone and sexual beauty had taken its place, older and more bruised than what it replaced but beauty nevertheless.

The archdeacon was reaching down to her. “There, there, my child.”

The table shook as Henry bounced off it. “Do you keep pigs, my lord Prior?”

Prior Geoffrey dragged his eyes away. “Pigs?”

“Pigs. And somebody get that woman to her feet.”

Instructions were given. Hugh left the room. The two men-at-arms raised Veronica so that she hung between them. “Now then, mistress,” Henry said to her, “you may help us.”

Veronica’s eyes as they slid up to his showed a moment’s calculation. “Return me to my Redeemer, my lord. Let me wash my sins in the blood of the Lord.”

“Redemption is in the truth, and therefore in telling us how the devil killed the children. In what manner. You must show us.”

“The Lord wants that? There was blood, so much blood.”

“He insists on it.” Henry held up a warning hand to the judges, who were on their feet. “She knows. She watched. She shall show us.”

Hugh came in with a piglet that he displayed to the king, who nodded. As the hunter carried it past her toward the kitchen, a bewildered Adelia glimpsed a small, rounded, snuffling snout. There was a smell of farmyard.

One of the men-at-arms went by, steering Veronica in the same direction, followed by the other, who held a leaf-shaped knife ceremonially on his outstretched palms, the flint knife, the knife.

Is that what he means to happen? God save us, dear God save us all.

The judges, everybody, Walburga blinking, were crowding toward the kitchen. Prioress Joan would have held back, but King Henry grasped her elbow and took her with him.

As Rowley passed her, Adelia said, “Ulf mustn’t see this.”

“I’ve sent him home with Gyltha.” Then he’d gone, too, and Adelia stood in an empty refectory.

Was it planned? There was more to this than proving Veronica’s guilt: Henry was after the Church that had condemned him for Becket.

That, too, was horrible. A trap laid by an artful king, not just for the creature that might or might not fall into it according to how artful it was, but to show his greater enemy its own weakness. And however vile the creature it was laid for, a trap was always a trap.