Grave Goods Read Free Page B

have been outraged by it and used his power to have this woman put away as an offense against heaven—even now he shook to think how he would explain his connivance when he came to stand before God’s throne. But he’d learned many things since Vesuvia Adelia Rachel Ortese Aguilar, qualified doctor from the School of Medicine in Salerno—the only place in Christendom that suffered, and trained, women students—had come into his life. And saved it.
    The fiction they had all maintained—that Mansur, her Arab attendant, was actually the doctor, and she merely his assistant and translator—would not save her; for one thing, it was wearing thin, and for another, her association with a Saracen, and therefore a heretic, would hoist her on the same gallows.
    The prior wondered what his own association with this extraordinary and dangerous woman was doing to his own reputation, particularly in God’s eyes. In the Almighty’s presence he would have to seek forgiveness and give explanation for himself, and for her. He would ask the Lord why it was so wrong that a female should heal rather than a man.
Are women not natural nurturers? Did not Your holy servant Paul command in his letter to the Corinthians, “Thou shall not muzzle the ox that treadeth out the corn”? Lord, if we have the corn, does it matter if the ox should be feminine?
    Well, of course he’d have to admit that she cut up the dead. But, he would say, she has uncovered murder through it and brought the perpetrators to justice.
Surely You must approve of that.
    The prior sighed. God would send him to hell for his impertinence.
    Yes, he was risking his soul for her, but he loved her like a daughter.
    Also, Lord, she is humble in her way. You can’t find a much humbler dwelling than this one in Waterbeach.
    It was a typical Cambridgeshire fenland cottage, slightly larger than most: walls of lathe and plaster, a reed-thatched roof, a mud floor, a ladder to the sleeping loft, stools made of tussocked rushes. Nothing of stone—there was none in the fens. No animals except the disgusting dog she called Ward. The only steel in the place was in her dissecting knives.
    Prior Geoffrey could hear the prattle of Adelia’s daughter, her illegitimate daughter, from the cottage next door, where Gyltha,the child’s nurse, lived in sin with the Arab eunuch, Adelia’s childhood guardian, whom she’d brought with her from Salerno.
    Prior Geoffrey tried to draw a veil over his memory of Adelia’s explanation that though a castrated man was unable to have children, he could still sustain an erection.
    Forgive her plain speaking, Lord; it is all she knows how to do.
    Outside was a view that kings might envy: a soft, sinuous panorama of alder and willow exactly reflected in the waters of the Cam. Far off were the castle turrets of Cambridge itself and, nearer, a tiny landing stage where, at this moment, his barge was moored, with a path leading from it to her ever-open door.
    The path, of course, was the trouble. It had been beaten flat and deep by the feet of Cambridge’s sick and broken coming to be made better.
    The town’s doctors—Prior Geoffrey drew another veil across Adelia’s plain speaking as far as
those
charlatans were concerned—had lost too many patients to “Dr. Mansur” and had complained to the archdeacon of that abomination—no matter that those same patients fared better.
    At any moment, the summoner would be coming up that same path and, finding a partially dismembered baby, would have Mansur and Adelia put on trial, where she’d be at once condemned and handed over to the civil authorities to be hanged. Nobody could save her.
    Yet Prior Geoffrey knew the woman; she was championing this dead infant that somebody had found and brought to her. Most likely its father had thrown it into the river as unwanted, which, to a poor man with too many children to feed already, it was, but its death, to Adelia, constituted an atrocity that must be brought