He looked up. “Well, there we are, then. Now we know our body’s name.”
Adelia nodded slowly. “Hmm.”
“What’s wrong with that? The boy’s got a name, a twenty-first birthday, and an affectionate cousin with an address. Plenty for you to work on. What he hasn’t got is two silver marks. I imagine the thieves took those.”
Adelia noted the “you”; this was to be her business, not the bishop’s. “Don’t you think it odd,” she asked, “if the family arms on his purse were not to tell us who he was, here is a letter that does. It gives us almost too much information. What affectionate writer calls his cousin Talbot of Kidlington rather than just Talbot?”
Rowley shrugged. “A perfectly standard superscription.”
Adelia took the letter from him. “And it’s on vellum. Expensive for such a brief, personal note. Why didn’t Master Warin use rag paper?”
“All lawyers use vellum or parchment. They think paper is infra dignitatem.”
But Adelia mused on. “And it’s crumpled, just shoved between the buckles. Look, it’s torn on one of them. Nobody treats vellum like that-it can always be scraped down to use again.”
“Perhaps the lad was in a rush when he received it, stuffed it away quickly. Or he was angry because he was expecting more than two marks? Or he doesn’t give an owl’s hoot for vellum. Which”-the bishop was losing his patience-“at this moment, I don’t, either. What is your point, mistress?”
Adelia considered for a moment.
Whether the body in the icehouse was that of Talbot of Kidlington or not, when alive it had belonged to a neat man; his clothing had told her that. So did the care he’d expended on wrapping the contents of his saddle roll. People with such tidy habits-and Adelia was one of their number-did not carelessly thrust a document on vellum into an aperture with the flat of the hand, as this had been.
“I don’t think he even saw this letter,” she said. “I think the men who killed him put it there.”
“For the Lord’s sake,” Rowley hissed at her, “this is overelaboration. Adelia, highway villains do not endow their victim with correspondence. What are you saying? It’s a forgery to put us off the track? Talbot of Kidlington isn’t Talbot of Kidlington? The belt and the purse belong to someone else entirely?”
“I don’t know.” But something about the letter was wrong.
Arrangements were made for the next day’s excursion. Adelia would accompany bishop, messenger, groom, and one of the men-at-arms on a ride upriver, using the towpath to Rosamund’s tower while Mansur and the other man-at-arms would travel by water, bringing a barge on which to carry back the corpse.
While discussion went on, Adelia took the opportunity to examine the blazons on all the hassocks. None of them matched the device on the young man’s purse or belt.
Rowley was talking to Gyltha. “You must stay here, mistress. We can’t take the baby with us.”
Adelia looked up. “I’m not leaving her behind.”
He said, “You’ll have to, it won’t be a family outing.” He took Mansur by the arm. “Come along, my friend, let’s see what the convent has in the way of boats.” They went out, the messenger with them.
“I’m not leaving her,” Adelia shouted after him, causing a momentary pause in the recital of souls from beyond the screen. She turned to Gyltha. “How dare he. I won’t.”
Gyltha pressed on Adelia’s shoulders to force her down onto a hassock, then sat beside her. “He’s right.”
“He’s not. Suppose we get cut off by snow, by anything? She needs to be fed.”
“Then I’ll see as she is.” Gyltha took Adelia’s hand and bounced it gently. “It’s time, girl,” she said. “Time she was weaned proper. You’re a’drying up; you know it, the little un knows it.”
Adelia was hearing the truth; Gyltha never told her anything else. In fact, the weaning process had been going on for some weeks as her breast milk diminished, both women chewing food to a pap and supplementing it with cow’s milk to spoon into Allie’s eager mouth.
If breast-feeding, which the childless Adelia had considered would be an oozing embarrassment, had proved to be one of life’s natural pleasures, it had also been the excuse to have her child always with her. For motherhood, while another joy, had burdened her with a tearing and unexpected anxiety, as if her senses had been transferred into the body of her daughter, and, by a lesser extension, into that of all children. Adelia, who’d once considered anyone below the age of reason to be alien and had treated them as such, was now open to their grief, their slightest pain, any unhappiness.
Allie suffered few of these emotions; she was a sturdy baby, and gradually Adelia had become aware that the agony was for herself, for the two-day-old creature that had been abandoned by an unknown parent on a rocky slope in Italy’s Campania nearly thirty years before. During her growing up it had not mattered; an incident, even amusing in that the couple who’d discovered her had commemorated an event all three had considered fortunate by giving her Vesuvia as one of her names. Childless, loving, clever, eccentric, Signor and Signora Aguilar, both doctors trained in the liberal tradition of Salerno’s great School of Medicine, he a Jew, she a Catholic Christian, had found in Adelia not only a beloved daughter but a brain that superseded even their intelligence, and had educated it accordingly. No, abandonment hadn’t mattered. It had, in fact, turned out to be the greatest gift that the real, unknown, desperate, sorrowing, or uncaring mother could have bestowed on her child.
Until that child had given birth to a baby of her own.
Then it came. Fear like a typhoon that wouldn’t stop blowing, not just fear that Allie would die but fear that she herself would die and leave the child without the mercy that had been bestowed on her. Better they both die together.
Oh, God, if the poisoner was not content merely with Rosamund’s death…or if the killers from the bridge were waiting en route…or if she should leave her child in a Godstow suddenly overwhelmed by fire…
This was obsession, and Adelia had just enough sense to know that, if it persisted, it would damage both herself and Allie.
“It’s time,” Gyltha said again, and since Gyltha, most reliable of women, said it was, then it was.
But she resented the ease with which Rowley demanded a separation that would cause her grief and, however unfounded, fear as well. “It’s not up to him to tell me to leave her behind. I hate leaving her, I hate it.”
Gyltha shrugged. “His child, too.”
“You wouldn’t think so.”
The messenger’s voice came from the door. “My apologies, mistress, but his lordship asks that you will interview Bertha.”
“Bertha?”
“Lady Rosamund’s servant, mistress. The mushrooming one.”
“Oh, yes.”
Apart from the unremitting prayers for the dead in the church and the canonical hours, the convent had shut down, leaving it in a total, moonless black. The compass of light from Jacques’s lantern lit only the bottom of walls and a few feet of pathway lined by snow as he led the two women to their quarters. There Adelia kissed her baby good night and left Gyltha to put her to bed.
She and the messenger went on alone, leaving the outer courtyard for open ground. A faint smell suggested that somewhere nearby were vegetable gardens, rotted now by the frost.
“Where are you taking me?” Her voice went querulous into the blackness.