Widow of Jerusalem: A Medieval Mystery Read Free

that I am supposed to do?”
    ‘’Do you see the sign over the tavern door?”
    She glanced down.
    “I see it.”
    “Remove it.”
    “And then?”
    “And then we go back to the hut.”
    She slithered back up toward me, her face a mask of anger and bewilderment.
    “Do you mean to say that you are risking both of our deaths, or at the very least imprisonment and separation from our daughter, to steal a sign?” she hissed.
    “Yes,” I replied.
    She smoldered for a moment, but thankfully did not catch fire.
    “All right, lower away,” she sighed, placing her feet back in my lap.
    We inched carefully down the roof until we were at its edge. Some martial drinking song was being bellowed out by the customers inside. I dangled my wife headfirst over the entrance and lowered her, bracing my feet against the edge.
    The sign was a broad, painted wooden plank suspended on a pair of hooks, which made it easy to remove. Claudia took it and tucked it under her arm. I was about to haul her back up when the door swung open and a particularly tall and extremely drunk soldier walked out and came face to face with her.
    Of course, the face he faced was upside down and painted white. He blinked. She blew him a kiss with one hand, and with the other whacked him on top of his head with the sign. He stumbled back into the tavern. I pulled her back up, and we scrambled over the roof to the rear of the tavern.
    We could hear a commotion inside, then the sound of the front door opening.
    “It was a ghost, I tell you,” shouted my wife’s victim. “Floating in air right here.”
    “A ghost, eh?” said someone else. “What did it look like?”
    “It was a woman,” said the soldier. “She was upside down. But I think she was pretty. She tried to kiss me.”
    There was a roar of laughter at this.
    “You see,” I said as we ran through the fields. “You’re in town only a couple of minutes, and already you’ve become a legend.”
    “You, on the other hand, may become a ghost if you don’t come up with a good reason why we did this,” she said. “I can’t even see what’s on the sign. There’s no moon tonight.”
    “Give it a night’s rest, my love,” I implored her. “I’ll tell you on the morrow.”
    We went over the fence and stumbled through the woods until we found the hut. Niccolo was inside, bouncing Portia on his knee. She looked at him with devotion.
    “Thank Christ,” he muttered when we came in. “This child does not want to sleep.”
    “Give her over,” commanded Claudia, and soon the baby was fed and out.
    “Did you get it?” asked Niccolo.
    I held up the sign.
    He shook his head. “You’re insane,” he muttered. “And she’s crazy. It’s a match made in heaven.”
    “You know why I can’t leave it behind,” I said.
    “I know, I know,” he replied. “I’m sorry we forgot about it. I should have known you would do something like this. But at least you got away with it. Now, get some sleep. You should be on the road at sunrise.”
----
    T he next morning , a merchant family emerged from the forest.
    “Which way do we go now?” asked Claudia, as Portia began babbling at everything in sight.
    “Back across the Adige river, then we follow the road north through the Alps until we reach Innsbruck.”
    “We’re going to Austria?”
    “Yes.”
    “Oh, dear,” she sighed. “I suppose we’d better speak German to Portia.”
    “No, let’s stick with Tuscan. We’ll only use German when we need to. It’s such an ugly language. I’d hate to hear it coming out of a baby.” We rode on. When the sun was a little higher, Claudia picked the sign out of her saddlebag and held it in front of her for examination. Portia immediately tried to grab it, pointing excitedly at the painting on it. It was of a litde man, dressed in scarlet, juggling three tankards of beer and grinning merrily.
    “So that’s the Scarlet Dwarf,” she observed. “Why is it so important to you?”
    “It’s a long