Vignettes glimpsed for a second, and then gone. Simon signaling to her that he was leaving but his smile-she was being revolved with speed by Sir Rowley at that moment-telling her to stay and enjoy herself. A tall prioress and a small Ulf swinging round on the centrifuge of their crossed hands. Sir Joscelin talking earnestly to the little nun as they passed back-to-back in a corner. An admiring circle round Mansur, his face impassive as he danced over crossed swords to an intoned maqam. Roger of Acton trying to make a circling carole go to the right: “Those that turn to the left are perverse, and God hates them. Proverbs twenty-seven.” And being trampled.
Dear Lord, the cook and the sheriff’s lady. No time to marvel. Right shoulder to right shoulder. Dance, dance. Her arms and Picot’s forming an arch, Gyltha and Prior Geoffrey passing under it. The skinny nun with the apothecary. Now Hugh the huntsman and Matilda B. Those below the salt, those above it in thrall to a democratic god who danced. Oh, God, this is joy on the wing. Catch it, catch it.
Adelia danced her slippers through and didn’t know it until friction burns afflicted the soles of her feet.
She spun out of the melee. It was time to go. A few guests were leaving, though most were congregating at the sideboards on which supper was being set out.
She limped to the doorway. Mansur joined her. “Did I see Master Simon leave?” she asked him.
He went to look and came back from the direction of the kitchen with a sleeping Ulf in his arms. “The woman says he went ahead.” Mansur never used Gyltha’s name; she was always “the woman.”
“Are she and the Matildas staying?”
“They help to clear up. We take the boy.”
It seemed that Prior Geoffrey and his monks had long gone. So had the nuns, except for Prioress Joan, who was at a sideboard with a piece of game pie in one hand and a tankard in the other; she was so far mellowed as to smile on Mansur and wave a benediction with the pie over Adelia’s curtseyed thanks.
Sir Joscelin they met coming in from the courtyard where firelit figures gnawed on bones.
“You honored us, my lord,” Adelia told him. “Dr. Mansur wishes me to express our gratitude to you.”
“Do you go back via the river? I can call my barge…”
No, no, they had come in Old Benjamin’s punt, but thank you.
Even with the flambeau burning in its holder on a stanchion at the river’s edge, it was almost too dark to distinguish Old Benjamin’s punt from the others waiting along the bank, but since all of them, bar Sheriff Baldwin’s, were uniformly plain, they took the first in line.
The still-sleeping Ulf was lain across Adelia’s lap where she sat in the bow; Safeguard stood unhappily with his paws in bilge. Mansur took up the pole…
The punt rocked dangerously as Sir Rowley Picot leaped into it. “To the castle, boatman.” He settled himself on a thwart. “Now, isn’t this nice?”
A slight mist rose from the water and a gibbous moon shone weakly, intermittently, sometimes disappearing altogether as over-arching trees on the banks turned the river into a tunnel. A lump of ghastly white transformed into a flurry of wings as a protesting swan got out of their way.
Mansur, as he always did when he was poling, sang quietly to himself, an atonal reminiscence of water and rushes in another land.
Sir Rowley complimented Adelia on her boatman’s skill.
“He is a Marsh Arab,” she said. “He feels at home in fenland.”
“Does he now? How unexpected in a eunuch.”
Immediately, she was defensive. “And what do you expect? Fat men lolling around a harem?”
He was taken aback. “Yes, actually. The only ones I ever saw were.”
“When you were crusading?” she asked, still on the attack.
“When I was crusading,” he admitted.
“Then your experience of eunuchs is limited, Sir Rowley. I fully expect Mansur to marry Gyltha one day.” Oh, damn it, her tongue was still loose from the mead. Had she betrayed her dear Arab? And Gyltha?
But she would not have this, this fellow, this possible murderer, denigrate a man whose boots he was not fit to lick.
Rowley leaned forward. “Really? I thought his, er, condition would put marriage out of the question.”
Damn and blast and hellfire, now she had placed herself into the position of having to explain the circumstances of the castrated. But how to put it? “It is only that children of such a union are out of the question. Since Gyltha is past childbearing age anyway, I doubt that will concern them.”
“I see. And the other, er, condolences of marriage?”
“They can sustain an erection,” she said sharply. To hell with euphemisms; why sheer away from physical fact? If he hadn’t wanted to know, he shouldn’t have asked.
She’d shocked him, she could tell; but she hadn’t finished with him. “Do you think Mansur chose to be as he is? He was taken by slavers when he was a small child and sold for his voice to Byzantine monks, where he was castrated so that he might keep his treble. It is a common practice with them. He was eight years old, and he had to sing for the monks, Christian monks, his torturers.”
“May I ask how you acquired him?”
“He ran away. My foster father found him on a street in Alexandria and brought him home to Salerno. My father specializes in acquiring the lost and abandoned.”
Stop it, stop it, she told herself. Why this wish to inform? He is nothing to you; he may be worse than nothing. That you have just spent the time of your life with him is nothing.
A moorhen clooped and rustled in the reeds. Something, a water rat, slid into the water and swam away, leaving a wake of moonlit ripples. The punt entered another tunnel.
Sir Rowley’s voice sounded in it. “Adelia.”
She closed her eyes. “Yes?”
“You have contributed all you can to this business. When we reach Old Benjamin’s, I shall come in with you and have a word with Master Simon. He must be made to see that it is time you went home to Salerno.”
“I do not understand,” she said. “The killer is not yet uncovered.”
“We’re closing on his coverts; if we flush him, he’ll be dangerous until we can bring him down. I don’t want him leaping on one of the beaters.”
The anger the tax collector always inspired in her came hot and sharp. “One of the beaters? I am qualified, qualified, and chosen for this mission by the King of Sicily, not by Simon, and certainly not by you.”
“Madam, I am merely concerned for your safety.”
It was too late; he would not have suggested that a man in her position go home; he had insulted her professional ability.
Adelia lapsed into Arabic, the only tongue in which she could swear freely, because Margaret had never understood it. She used phrases overheard during Mansur’s frequent quarrels with her foster parents’ Moroccan cook, the one language that could counteract the fury Sir Rowley Picot ever inspired in her. She spoke of diseased donkeys and his unnatural preference for them, of his doglike attributes, his fleas, his bowel performance, and his eating habits. She told him what he could do with his concern, an injunction again involving his bowels. Whether Picot knew what she was saying or didn’t was irrelevant; he could get the gist.
Mansur poled them out of the tunnel, grinning.
The rest of the journey passed in silence.
When they reached Old Benjamin’s house, Adelia would not let Picot accompany her to it. “Shall I take him on to the castle?” Mansur wanted to know.