For Mansur and Simon, however, the ne plus ultra was elsewhere-in the kitchen, a separate building beyond the house. They urged Adelia toward it. “Gyltha is a cook,” Simon said as one emerging from the dust of Egypt into Canaan, “our prior…”

“May his shadow never grow less,” Mansur said.

“…our good, good prior has sent us a cook on a par with my own dear Becca.” Rebecca was his wife. “Gyltha superba. Look, Doctor, look what she is preparing.”

In a huge fireplace, things were turning on spits, spattering fat into glowing peat; kettles hung from hooks exuded herby, fishy steam; cream-colored pastry lay ready to be rolled on the great floured table. “Food, Doctor, succulent fish, lampreys-lampreys, praise to the Lord-duck seethed in honey, suckling lamb.”

Adelia had never seen two men so enthused.

The rest of daylight was spent unpacking. There were rooms to spare. Adelia had been allotted the solar, a pleasant room overlooking the river-a luxury after the communal beds of the inns. Its cupboards were bare, having been ransacked by the rioters, leaving her with welcome shelves on which to lay out her herbs and potions.

That evening, Gyltha, calling them to supper, was irritated by the time it took Mansur and Simon to carry out their ritual ablutions, and Adelia, who suspected that dirt was poisonous, to wash her hands before coming to the table. “That’ll get cold,” she snapped at them. “I ain’t cooking for heathens as don’t care if good food goes cold.”

“You are not,” Simon assured her, “Gyltha, you are not.”

The dining table was garnished with the riches of a fenland seething with fowl and fish; to Adelia’s homesick eyes it lacked sufficient greenstuff, but it was undoubtedly fine.

Simon said, “Blessed are you, HaShem, our God, King of the Universe, who brings forth bread from the earth,” and tore a piece from the white loaf on the table to eat it.

Mansur invoked the blessing of Salman the Persian, who had given Mohammed food.

Adelia said, “May good health attend us,” and they sat down to dine together.

On the boat from Salerno, Mansur had eaten with the crew, but the last leg of the journey through English inns and around campfires had imposed a democracy that none of them was willing to abandon. In any case, since Mansur now posed as head of the household, it was incongruous to send him to eat with the maids in the kitchen.

Adelia would have reported her findings over dinner, but the men, knowing what they were likely to be, refused to disturb their stomachs with anything except Gyltha’s cooking. Or to make any conversation, for that matter. Adelia was amazed by the time and praise two men could lavish on suckling lamb, custards, and cheeses.

For her, food was analogous to the wind-necessary for the propulsion of boats, living beings, and the sails of windmills but otherwise to be unremarked.

Simon drank wine. A barrel from his favorite Tuscan vineyard had traveled with them, English wines reportedly being undrinkable. Mansur and Adelia drank boiled and strained water because they always did.

Simon kept urging Adelia to take some wine and to eat more, despite her protestations that she had breakfasted too well at the priory. He was concerned that her examination of the bodies had sickened her to the point of illness. It was how it would have affected him, but she saw it as a reflection on her professionalism and said sharply, “That was my job. Why else have I come?”

Mansur told him to leave her alone. “Always, the doctor pecks like a sparrow.”

The Arab certainly wasn’t pecking. “You’ll get fat,” Adelia warned him. It was his horror; too many eunuchs ate themselves into obesity.

Mansur sighed. “That woman is a siren of cooking. She calls a man’s soul through his stomach.”

The idea of Gyltha as a siren delighted Adelia. “Shall I tell her so?”

To her surprise, he shrugged and nodded.

“Ooh,” she said. In all the years since he had been appointed by her foster parents to be her bodyguard, she had never known him to pay a compliment to a female. That it should be a woman with the face of a horse and with whom he did not share a common language was unexpected and intriguing.

The two maids who served them, both confusingly called Matilda and differentiated by only the initials of their parish saints, therefore answering to Matilda B. and Matilda W., were as wary of Mansur as of a performing bear that had sat down to dine. They emerged from the open passage that led from the kitchen to a door behind the dais, taking and replacing dish after dish without approaching his end of the table, giggling nervously and leaving the food to be passed down to him.

Well, Adelia thought, they’ll have to get used to him.

At last the table was cleared. Simon metaphorically girded his loins, sighed, and sat back. “And so, Doctor?”

Adelia said, “This is supposition, you understand.” It was her invariable caveat.

She waited for both men to acquiesce, then drew in a deep breath. “I believe the children were taken to chalkland to be killed. This may not apply to Little Saint Peter, who seems to have been a different case, perhaps because he was the first victim and the killer had not yet lapsed into routine. But of the three I examined, there was chalk embedded in the heels of both boys, indicating they were dragged through it, and evidence of it on the remains of all of them. Their hands and feet were bound with torn strips of cloth.”

She looked toward Simon. “Fine, black wool. I have kept samples.”

“I will inquire among the wool merchants.”

“He did not bury one of the bodies but kept that, too, somewhere dry and cool.” She kept her voice steady. “Also, it may be that the female was stabbed repeatedly in the pubic region, as were the boys. The best preserved of the males lacked his genitals, and I would say the others, too, suffered in the same way.”

Simon had covered his face with his hands. Mansur sat very still.

Adelia said, “I believe in each case he cuts off their eyelids, whether before or after death I cannot say.”

Simon said quietly, “Fiends walk among us. What do you do, Lord, to allow the torturers of Gehenna to inhabit human bodies?”

Adelia would have argued that to attribute satanic forces to the murderer was partly to absolve him, making him victim to an outside force. To her, the man was rabid, like a dog. But then, she thought, Perhaps allowing that he is diseased also gives an excuse to what is unpardonable.

“Mary…” She paused. Naming a corpse was a mistake she did not usually make; it did away with objectivity, introduced emotion when it was essential to remain impersonal; she didn’t know why she’d done it.

She began again: “The female had something stuck to her hair. At first I thought it to be semen…” Simon’s hand gripped the table, and she remembered she was not addressing her students. “However, the object has preserved its original oblong shape, probably a sweetmeat.”

Now then.

She said quietly, “We must consider particularly the time and location of the bodies’ discovery. They were found on silt; there was a dusting of it on each, but the shepherd who came across them assured Prior Geoffrey that they were not there the day before. Therefore, they had been taken from where they were kept, in chalk, to the site where the shepherd found them yesterday morning, on silt.”

It seemed a year ago.

Simon’s eyes were on hers, reading them. “We came to Cambridge yesterday morning,” he said. “The night before we were…what was the name of that place?”

“Part of the Gog Magog hills.” Adelia nodded. “On chalk.”

Mansur followed what she was implying. “So in the night the dog moved them. For us?”

She shrugged; she pronounced on only what was provable; others must draw the inference. She waited to see what Simon of Naples would make of it. Journeying together had engendered respect for him; the excitability, near gullibility, he displayed in public was not a deliberate disguise but a reaction to being in public and in no way represented a mind that calculated with brilliance and at speed. She regarded it as a compliment to herself and to Mansur that when they were alone, they were allowed to see his brain at work.