“I know you are,” Prior Geoffrey said patiently. He sat back in his great chair and reverted to broad East Anglian. “But that’s dang hard work, girl, and you’re getting on.”

“So’re you, bor.”

They knew each other well. Better than most. When a young Norman priest had arrived in Cambridge to take over its parish of Saint Mary’s twenty-five years before, his house had been kept for him by a well-set-up young fenland woman. That they might have been more to each other than employer and employee had not raised an eyebrow, for England’s attitude toward clerical celibacy was tolerant-or slack, depending on which way you looked at it-and Rome had not then begun to shake its fist at “priests’ wives,” as it did now.

Though young Father Geoffrey’s waist had swelled on Gyltha’s cooking, and young Gyltha’s waist had swelled also, though whether from her cooking or something else, nobody knew the truth of it except those two. When Father Geoffrey was called by God to the canonry of Saint Augustine, Gyltha had disappeared into the fenland from which she had come, refusing the allowance offered to her.

“What iffen I throw in a skivvy or two,” the prior said now, winningly. “Bit of cooking, bit of organizing, that’s all.”

“Foreigners,” said Gyltha. “I don’t hold with foreigners.”

Looking at her, the prior was reminded of Guthlac’s description of the fen folk in whom that worthy saint had tried to instill Christianity: “Great heads, long necks, pale faces, and teeth like horses. Save us, from them, O Lord.” But they’d had the means and the independence to resist William the Conqueror longer and more strongly than the rest of the English.

Nor was intelligence lacking among them. Gyltha had it; she was the beau ideal as housekeeper for the ménage Prior Geoffrey had in mind-outré enough, yet sufficiently well known and trusted by the townsfolk of Cambridge to provide a bridge between it and them. If she would agree…

“Weren’t I a foreigner?” he said. “You took me on.”

Gyltha smiled, and for a moment the surprising charm reminded Prior Geoffrey of their years in the priest’s little house next to Saint Mary’s church.

He pressed home his advantage. “Be good for young Ulf.”

“That’s doing well enough at school.”

“When that do bother to come.” Young Ulf’s acceptance at the priory school had been less to do with his cleverness, which was considerable if idiosyncratic, than to Prior Geoffrey’s unconfirmed suspicion that the boy, being Gyltha’s grandson, was also his own. “Sore need of a bit of gentrifying, though, girl.”

Gyltha leaned forward and put a scarred finger on the prior’s writing desk. “What they doing here, bor? You going to tell me?”

“Took ill, didn’t I? Saved my old life, she did.”

“Her? I heard it was the blackie.”

“Her. And not witchery, neither. Proper doctor she is, only best nobody don’t know it.”

There was no point in concealing it from Gyltha, who, if she took on the Salernitans, would find out. In any case, this woman was as close as the seaweeded oysters that she made him a present of every year, of which a fine selection was at this moment in the priory’s ice-house.

“I don’t be sure who sent they three,” he went on, “but they do mean to find out who’s killing the children.”

“Harold.” Gyltha’s face showed no emotion, but her voice was soft; she did business with Harold’s father.

“Harold.”

She nodded. “Weren’t Jews, then?”

“No.”

“Didn’t reckon it was.”

From across the cloisters connecting the prior’s house with the church came the bell calling the brotherhood to vespers.

Gyltha sighed. “Skivvies as promised, and I only do the bloody cooking.”

“Benigne. Deo gratias.” The prior got up and accompanied Gyltha to the door. “Old Tubs still breeding they smelly dogs?”

“Smellier than ever.”

“Bring un with you. Attach it to her, like. If her’s asking questions, it’ll maybe cause trouble. Her needs keeping an eye on. Oh, and they don’t none of ’em eat pork. Or shellfish.” He slapped Gyltha’s rump to send her on her way, folded his arms beneath his apron, and went on his own toward the chapel for vespers.

ADELIA SAT ON A BENCH in the priory’s paradise breathing in the scent of rosemary from the low hedging that bordered the flower bed at her feet and listened to the psalms of vespers filter out of cloister through the evening air across the walled vegetable garden and thence to the paradise with its darkening trees. She tried to empty her mind and let the masculine voices pour salve on the hurt caused by masculine abomination. “Let my prayer be counted as incense before you,” they chanted, “and the lifting of my hands as an evening sacrifice.”

There would be supper at the priory guesthouse, where Prior Geoffrey had lodged her and Simon and Mansur for the night, but it would entail sitting round the table with other travelers, and she was not fit for petty conversation. The straps of her goatskin bag were buckled tight so that, for this little space, the information the dead children had given her was trapped within it, chalk words on a slate. Undo the straps, as she would tomorrow, and their voices would burst out, beseeching, filling her ears. But tonight even they must be muted; she could bear nothing but the stillness of the evening.

Not until it was almost too dark to see did she stand, pick up her bag, and walk along the path leading to the long shafts of candlelight that indicated the windows of the guesthouse.

It was a mistake to go to bed without food; she lay in a narrow cot in a narrow cell off the corridor devoted to women guests, resenting the fact that she was there at all, resenting the King of Sicily, this country, almost the dead children themselves for imposing the burden of their agony on her.

“I cannot possibly go,” she’d told Gordinus when he’d first broached the subject. “I have my students, my work.”

It was not a matter of choice, however. The command for an expert in death had come down from a king against whom, since he also ruled southern Italy, there was no appeal.

“Why do you choose me?”

“You meet the king’s specifications,” Gordinus had said. “I know of no one else who does. Master Simon will be fortunate to have you.”

Simon had considered himself not so much fortunate as burdened; she’d seen that at once. Despite her credentials, the presence of a woman doctor, an attendant Arab, and a female companion-Margaret, blessed Margaret, had been alive then-had piled a Pelion of complication on the Ossa of an already difficult assignment.

But one of Adelia’s skills, honed to perfection in the rough-and-tumble of the schools, was to make her femininity near invisible, to demand no concession, to blend in almost unnoticed among the largely male fraternity. Only when her professionalism had been called into question did her fellow students find that there was a very visible Adelia with a rough edge to her tongue-in listening to them, she had learned how to swear-and an even rougher edge to her temper.

There had been no need to display either to Simon; he had been courteous and, as the journey went on, relieved. He found her modest-a description, Adelia had long decided, that was applied to women who gave men no trouble. Apparently, Simon’s wife was the acme of Jewish modesty, and he judged all other women by her. Mansur, Adelia’s other accessory, proved to be his invaluable self and, until reaching the coast of France, where Margaret had died, they had traveled in sweet accord.

By now, it took the regularity of her periods for her to remember that she was not a neutered being. On reaching England, the trio’s transfer to a cart and adoption of their roles as a traveling medicine troop had caused none of them little more than discomfort and amusement.