A Murderous Procession (31 page)

“
WHAT
IS IT?”

“There’s a light out at sea. Flashing.”

Adelia got out of bed and joined Fabrisse at the slit window in the upper room of the Chateau de Salses’s keep where it looked out on the Mediterranean. “Must be from a ship,” she said helpfully

“Of course from a ship,” Fabrisse said. “The question is, whose?”

It could be the O’Donnell, who so far hadn’t turned up. It could be friendly smugglers. It could be a less friendly force ready to invade the Count of Toulouse’s territory It could be decidedly hostile pirates intent on pillage and rape.

If it was either of the last two, the Chateau de Salses was not equipped to hold them off. In fact, Adelia thought, it couldn’t have held off a couple of determined winkle pickers.

The Chateau de Salses, originally a fortress, was even more dilapidated than the Chateau de Caronne. Beautiful from a distance, Adelia had to grant it that. As she and the others had ridden down the hills toward it on that first day, it had looked like a large crenellated pink cake against the chill blue water lapping its seaward wall.

On closer inspection, defensive walls of the same dusty pink sandstone crumbled into the moat around them, bridges sagged, while a weedy bailey contained a tall keep/watchtower with an unsafe interior circling staircase, and some reed-thatched stables and working quarters.

“I can’t afford to keep it up,” Fabrisse had said cheerfully, if obviously, “even though it provides most of my income. We’re nearly on the border of Spain here and out of the way, so it’s useful for smuggling, though not enough.” Feeling she hadn’t done it justice, she added: “But at some point B.C., Hannibal brought his army through here on his way to Italy.”

Perhaps the elephants trampled it,
Adelia thought. There didn’t seem to have been much renovation since.

“They’re signaling,” she said now, watching the light appear and disappear at erratic intervals.

“Question is, who to?” One never knew who skulked in the lonely hills behind them.

Leaving Boggart to sleep on, they lit a taper, wrapped themselves in cloaks, and went cautiously down the staircase, trying to avoid its missing steps, to the bailey

Deniz, who’d been keeping watch, was in muttered conversation with Johan on the seawall.

And that was another thing; at the Chateau de Salses there had been no sign of the knight whose service in war to Count Raymond of Toulouse, when called on, was the fee Fabrisse should pay for holding the castle. (Knowing Fabrisse, Adelia suspected that she gave her rent to Count Raymond in other ways.)

What it had instead was a flock of goats, and an elderly man with shrewd eyes and a clutch of grandsons whom Fabrisse had introduced as “my bookkeeper, Johan”—a euphemism, as it turned out, for the manager of her smuggling trade.

“Who is it, Deniz?” Fabrisse called softly

“She the Saint
Patrick.”

The O’Donnell’s flagship. That was a relief. It was also a summons they had all been awaiting for some days.

“I shall be losing you tomorrow,” Fabrisse told Adelia sadly “He’ll have made arrangements to send you all back to England.”

“No,” Adelia said. “We’re going with him to Palermo.”

Ever since she’d been surprised by the terrible indignation that had come over her in the cave at Caronne, she had regained certainty.

How dare he, how dare he, I won’t
HAVE
it.
She’d been hired by Henry Plantagenet to do a job; so far Scarry had made her fail in her obligation, but she would see it through to its end if he killed her for it—or she killed him, which she was now perfectly prepared to do.

“Oh-ho,” said Fabrisse, looking at her. “We have stopped being frightened.”

“No, but I have stopped running.”

Oddly enough, it had been overhearing Rankin call her pursuer “the black-avised buzzard” that had raised her spirit. She’d forever cherish the phrase for taking the demonic out of her demon. It had turned hooves into human feet. Whether she could unmask and disable the buzzard, she didn’t know,
but by God,
she would try. After all, madmen had their own vulnerability

She and the others had gone over and over their time with Joanna for any clues to Scarry’s identity; who’d had the opportunity; who’d been where and when to do what he’d been able to do. As Ulf had said: “Who was it in that company kept buggering off?”

Practically everybody on what had turned out to be an erratic and rambling journey, that was the trouble.

Well, who had a mind that could influence other people’s into making Adelia seem a curse they were glad to offload onto a bonfire?

Who indeed?

They had scoured their impressions and memories until they could practically work out Scarry’s shoe size, but putting a face to him eluded them.

Eventually… “Ain’t got no further, have we?” Ulf had said, in defeat.

But Adelia, looking out over the Mediterranean, with Fabrisse beside her, was aware that they had. Scarry was like the light she could see flickering out at sea, a promise that he was somewhere in the darkness with the sword he had stolen. How she knew it, she wasn’t sure, but she knew for certain that he was going to Palermo, that she would meet him there—and defeat him.

She heard Deniz’s voice come down to them from the seawall. “Somebody rowing ashore.”

“Now?”

It was an overcast, moonless night, and at this point the land petered out into minuscule islands like scattered, tufty sponges that provided a better, almost unnavigable, defense against nighttime seaborne invasion than the castle walls.

“Signal ‘stand by and show light.’” Deniz came down from the walkway. “He brings goods.”

“Patricio, Don Patricio. My silk, hurrah.” Fabrisse hurried off to prepare food for her visitor.

Adelia waited while Deniz lit a lantern and flashed a signal to the invisible vessel out at sea, then accompanied him through the castle postern to the beach beyond.

Behind them, they could hear Johan calling for his eldest grandson to come and help prepare the mules that would carry the landed contraband into the keep, but on this side the only sound was the waves soughing softly against the shore. Adelia hadn’t stopped to put on her shoes, and the sand was cold against her feet. The ship had ceased signaling now, leaving Deniz’s lantern a solitary gleam in the blackness.

“It’s not just the countess’s silk, is it?” Adelia asked Deniz. She’d seen his face in the lamplight.

The Turk shook his head. “He signals ‘trouble.’”

Adelia ran back the way she’d come in order to rouse Mansur and Ulf and put on her shoes.
Trouble.
God dammit, was there ever anything else?

It was a chilly wait; the northern Mediterranean could be very cold in winter. The men warmed their hands at the lanterns they’d brought. Adelia stamped about in an effort to keep warm and tried to work out the date. It would be what … early January?

More than four months since she’d said good-bye to Allie. If the O’Donnell’s arrival this night meant another delay she’d … she’d kill somebody.

Fabrisse turned up with another lantern.

Ulf looked up; his young ears had heard something. Another second, and theyd all caught the creak of oars straining in rowlocks. Deniz waded out into the water, holding his light high.

Mansur and Ulf went to help him drag the rowing boat in. When they came back, they were supporting someone between them … a woman….

“Blanche?” Adelia shook her head to get her eyes in working order. “Mistress Blanche?”

The lady-in-waiting fell on her. “You’ve got to help her. Mother of God, she’s so ill. Help her. She’s dying.”

“Who?”

But now the O’Donnell was coming ashore, squelching through the water.

He was carrying something in his arms.

It wasn’t Fabrisse’s silk, it was Princess Joanna, and he was echoing Blanche. “Help her,” he said to Adelia. “I think she’s dying.”

THERE
WAS
A scramble to clear the bottom room of the keep and lay Joanna on the table at which soldiers had dined in the days when the room had been a guardhouse. Lanterns were hung.

Joanna was feverish and barely conscious. Her right knee kept rising toward her abdomen. It was a struggle to undress her because Mistress Blanche held on to Adelia like a drowning woman to a raft, begging her to save the child. “Use witchcraft,” she kept saying. “I know you can, everybody knows it. You saved those people from the flux, it was you, I saw you. Save her. I don’t care how, but save her.” Eventually, she had to be forcibly restrained by Ulf and taken outside.

Adelia began her examination, barely listening to the O’Donnell telling the others what had happened.

“She was taken ill almost as soon as we got her on board at Saint Gilles,” he was saying. “Doctor Arnulf diagnosed acute indigestion, he’s been treating her with seethed toad, powdered unicorn, cramp rings, various talismans, and I don’t know what else. The good Bishop of Winchester’s been reciting Psalm 91 over her
ad infinitum.
And her only becoming sicker and sicker.”

He broke off as Adelia abruptly left the room and headed across the bailey to where Blanche sat on a straw bale, her head in her hands, with Ulf awkwardly patting her shoulder.

The lady-in-waiting looked up at Adelia’s approach. “Can you help her? Can you make her well?”

“Has she been constipated?” Adelia asked.

Ulf growled with embarrassment, but it was a measure of Mistress Blanche’s desperation that, after a second’s hesitation, she nodded.

“Nausea? Vomiting?”

Blanche nodded again.

“Hmm.”

Adelia went back to the keep.

The O’Donnell was still talking: “... frantic she was. It’s my opinion, Blanche is the only one of those three women who cares more for Joanna than for herself Lord bless her. When I suggested to them we sail to Salses, where her ladyship here was
in situ,
the other two set up a caterwauling about what’d the king do to them if he learned they’d delivered his daughter to a witch and a Saracen, what’d Sicily do, what’d dear Doctor Arnulf do. I told them, I said, dear Doctor Arnulf’s doing damn all except kill her quicker….”

On the table, Adelia pressed gently on the lower right quadrant of the girl’s abdomen and then quickly removed her hand. There was a moan. The right knee flexed again.

“So we kidnapped her, Blanche and I. Left the other ladies asleep, had my lads lower the dinghy with Joanna in it, and here we are, and may God save us all from perdition.”

“So brave to dare it.” This was Fabrisse. “‘Delia, isn’t he
brave?”

Adelia didn’t hear her. The muscles she’d pressed had been rigid.

“And Duke Richard?” Mansur was asking.

“He doesn’t know. He’d already left for Sicily aboard my
Nostre Dame.
The royalty don’t travel together in case of accidents.” O’Donnell broke off again and looked toward Adelia, who’d left the table and was sitting on a chair, much as Blanche had done, with her head in her hands.

He strode over to her: “She’s dying, isn’t she?”

“I think so.”

“Can you save her?”

Adelia shook her head. “Even if I could have, and that’s very doubtful, I’ve no equipment. It was at Ermengarde’s.”

“Now, then.” He went away calling for Deniz: “What did you do with that damned contraption I brought?”

When he came back, he was carrying a wrought-leather, silver-bound case. “Will this do? I, er … liberated it from Arnulf’s cabin while the good doctor was sleeping.”

Inside, calfskin pockets held flasks, a well-thumbed urine chart, greasy ointment pots, tweezers, a rusty wound-cauterizing tool, a mallet, presumably for rendering difficult patients unconscious, pliers for pulling teeth, also rusty …

Adelia threw the instruments on the floor as she delved for the pots and flasks, opening them, sniffing, discarding. The tenth pot held what she’d been looking for—and had dreaded. So did one of the larger flasks. It appeared that, for all his pious protestations. Dr. Arnulf kept anesthetics among his medicaments.

There were no knives—apparently like Arnulf obeyed the papal edict of 1163, which had banned the shedding of blood.

“No knives,” she said, and was ashamed of the relief in her voice.

“For what do you need knives?” the Irishman asked. “I’ve a fine dagger, if that’s of use.”

“Knives?” asked Fabrisse. “If it’s knives you want, Johan’s the man; he travels to Leucate every week. There are some of his fellow Jews there, and he does their slaughtering. He’s a, what’s it called … a crocket?”

“A
shochet?”
Adelia raised her head. “He’s a
shochet?”

“I believe so. Anyway, he has a fine collection of knives, very sharp, very clean; he’s particular about them.”

“Yes,” Adelia said slowly. “Yes, he would be.”

It was why Jews often stayed healthier than their neighbors, and so were accused of poisoning Christian wells when plague broke out. Adelia’s foster father, Dr. Gershom, a nonpracticing Jew himself put it down to the religion’s command that ritual slaughtering equipment must be be kept honed and clean. It was his contention that the stale, stinking, bloody filth on the knives of Gentile butchers helped to putrefy their meat.

God, dear God, every excuse she had for doing nothing was being taken away from her.

She closed her eyes and went over her diagnosis again. Pain in the abdomen’s lower right quadrant, the flexing knee, rigid muscles. Classic symptoms, her foster father had told her. On the corpse of a child he’d shown her what lay beneath those muscles—the large intestine with a small, wormlike pouch emerging from the bottom of it.

Neither Gershom, nor Gordinus the African, her tutor at the Salerno School, had been able to explain its function. Gordinus had referred to it as “the vermiform addimentum.” Gershom called it “an appendix to the cecum of no damned use whatever except to become diseased.”

And Joanna’s appendix was diseased.

I need air.
Adelia got up and went out into the bailey, puffing hard. Dawn was breaking, the clouds had cleared, and, with her dog wheezing behind her, she climbed the steps of the seawall into the light of a freezing, breathless day