A Murderous Procession (32 page)

To her right the two Roqua sons were filling sacks from the glaring white squares of the Salses salt pans. Beyond them, naked vines stood in neat rows ready, when in season, to produce Salses wine, a substance so rough it could clean armor.

But it was the sea Adelia looked at; blue and gold in the rising sun, tranquil, its touch on the shore like the regular breathing of a child, its only ornament the distant St.
Patrick,
O’Donnell’s ship, riding quietly at anchor while, on board, its passengers seethed, some with worry for their princess, Dr. Arnulf with resentment, and none of them able to do anything about it unless they swam the couple of miles to the shore.

Adelia would have given anything to change places with them. “Father, help me,” she said, and it wasn’t just God she prayed to but the Jew who had brought her up and had faced what she was facing now.

The responsibility was crushing her. “Father, help me. The only time I’ve used a knife these last months was on a goat—and that was dead.”

A cry came from behind her as Mistress Blanche scurried up the seawall steps, followed by the O’Donnell. “Why are you standing there? Why aren’t you
doing
something?”

“Because what I have to do may kill her anyway,” Adelia said, her eyes still on the sea.

She took a deep breath and turned to face them. “I cannot magic her well, I wish I could. I am merely a doctor. You see, there is an organ in our bodies … here.” She pressed her hand against the right side of her stomach. “Sometimes it goes bad….” She wondered if she should go into the subject of suppuration and fecal matter, and decided against it. “I believe it has done so in the princess’s case and must be removed.”

“Removed, how?”

“Well, by making an incision above the affected area and taking the bad piece out.”
Dear God, if it were only that simple.

“With scissors? Like cutting cloth?” Blanche’s knowledge of incisions extended only to dressmaking.

“Yes, except that we use a knife.”

If Blanche’s face had been wild before, it was ghastly now. “You make a hole? In the skin?”

“Yes. It is sewn up afterward….”

“But it will scar her, won’t it?”

“I’m afraid so, yes….” She was going to go on and assure the poor woman that her princess would feel no pain, that there had been preparations of poppy in Dr. Arnulf’s bag …

This, however, was not the lady-in-waiting’s concern. “You can’t.” She made a rush for the steps as if to go down to Joanna and protect her, but the Irishman stopped her. “Now, now, Blanche. Listen to the nice ladyship.”

Blanche thrashed at him. “Don’t you see?
He’ll reject her.
Dear Mother of God, he’ll reject her.”

“I don’t understand.” Adelia really didn’t. “The princess is very ill. There is a remote chance that by doing this I can save her life.”

Blanche put her hand over her mouth and began rocking.

The O’Donnell took Adelia’s arm and led her farther along the wall. With the sun on it, his face was lined and the eyes she’d distrusted were infinitely tired. “That poor lady is between Scylla and Charybdis, mistress,” he said, quietly. “On the one hand, she’s desperate for her mistress to live. On the other, if the princess survives this procedure …
Will
she?”

“I don’t know.”

He nodded. “If she lives, she’ll be imperfect, d’ye see? Scarred by an unholy operation. Damaged goods, you might say King William could reject her, might even have the right to reject her, I don’t know. And how would our good Henry take that humiliation? A spurned daughter? Wars have started for less.”

Adelia saw. This wasn’t just a sick patient they were discussing, it was a bargain between kings and countries. The girl lying on the table in the keep was of international importance. If she died from the operation, and most likely she might, Adelia herself would be accused of killing her. If Joanna survived—as two of Dr. Gershom’s patients
had
survived—her surgeon would be equally culpable of—what was it this man had said?—damaging the goods, royal goods. Either way, the political ramifications would engulf not only all of them, but a continent.

From the first, she had known that any operation was a sin against the teachings of the Church, subject to rigorous penalty—all surgery was that; it was an accepted hazard for those who possessed the skill and were compassionate enough to use it to save a patient’s life. That the School of Medicine was known to permit it put it at risk from the Church.

But this,
this
intervention could not be hidden; Joanna’s body was a present from the King of England to the King of Sicily; when its wrapping was taken off in the bridal bed, its blemish would be discovered, the jewel found imperfect, deliberately spoiled by what was, in the eyes of the Church and, undoubtedly, a royal Christian husband, an act of the grossest impiety

Adelia thought of all this, of the far-reaching consequences, and knew that in the end,
it didn’t make any difference.

She looked up at the Irishman. “It doesn’t make any difference,” she said. “It can’t. A doctor’s duty is only to the patient. Joanna is dying. Because there’s just a chance of saving her, I have to take it.”

“What are the chances?”

“Well, it’s been done. My tutor performed the operation once, on an old man, but the patient died; it was too late, the organ had burst and spread poison. My father … I was assisting when he saved two by it, both children.” It was strange, she thought, how the condition so often affected the very young. “I also assisted when three others died—it’s such a horrible risk.”

“But you know how?”

Tears were making her eyes blink. “O’Donnell, I don’t want to do this, I don’t want to, but I’ve got to. I can’t just let her die.”

“Yes,” he said gently. “It’s the reason I love you.”

He watched her face and gently reached out with his finger to raise her dropped jaw. “Did you not know? Ah, well, it’s no matter.”

No matter?
No matter?
He had stupefied her. All she could find to say was: “
Why
?”

It made him smile. “Now, then, if I knew that, we’d have the answer to why the sun comes up and goes down.”

She would have done anything then, anything, to help the pain of this wonderful man to whom she owed everything, anything not to hurt him. But the one thing he wanted of her, she was incapable of giving him.

“I didn’t know,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry. So sorry”

“No need. But it had to be said. Go along now, and get ready”

THE
OPERATING
TABLE
, Gershom said, was an altar on which the surgeon laid his supplication to God and, like all altars, it had to be pristine. Just as he who was to be dubbed a knight the next day took a bath before his night’s vigil in church, so must the supplicant surgeon and his offering be cleansed in the sight of God so that, if the surgeon’s prayers were accepted, God would return that offering to health.

Now Adelia became tigerish. Everybody was put to work. The suffering princess was removed from the keep’s table and laid on a couch while Ulf and the O’Donnell dragged the table itself out into the open air—there’d be more light there—and made to scrub it as it had never been scrubbed before. Johan’s knives gleamed well enough, but they were nevertheless once again put into boiling water, as were the needles and silk thread from the sewing basket that Mistress Blanche, for all her panic, had brought with her from the ship, along with her face powder, rouge, and scents.

Everything, everything must be holy

As Adelia lowered a basket of the wool swabs she would need into the vat’s bubbling water, Mansur touched her arm. “You know you are mad? You should leave the girl be, she is in the hands of Allah.”

“No, she’s in mine. Oh, God, Mansur, I’m so frightened.”

He sighed. “Well, well, they can only hang us once. What did the gladiators say in the arena? ‘We who are about to die … ‘?”

She wasn’t listening to him. “Is Fabrisse scrubbing our clothes?” She must be washed of her sins, of the guilt of Brune’s death, of Ermengarde’s. She had to be pure for this, all things had to be pure.

The Arab nodded. “Scrubbing hard. We shall be in clean robes.” He allowed himself a smile. “But they may be wet.”

It was in the middle of all this that a cry came from the top room of the tower. Fabrisse went up to see about it and returned, grimacing. “Boggart’s waters have broken,” she said. “The baby’s coming.”

“Not now, oh, not now.”

“Now.”

Adelia took in a deep breath. “You’ll have to see to it. Take one of the
shochet’s
knives. And you …” She turned on Mistress Blanche, whose worry, so far, had kept her from being of use. “You go and help.”

“But I . . .”

“Help, I said.”
Adelia bit her lip and lowered her voice. This was, after all, a brave and loving woman. “Blanche, my dear, you had the courage to bring Joanna to me, now you must leave her in my hands.”

FOR
OVER
AN
HOUR
, Ulf and Johan with his collection of grandsons had been squatting in the bailey, well away from the table in its center, like people watching a sacred, terrible rite from a distance—as they were.

Despite a bright sun, it was bitterly cold. Mansur, who leaned over the table, the long fingers of his left hand holding the cut edges of flesh apart, swabbing with his right, shivered in his damp clothes. O’Donnell, standing next to a smaller table, on which implements and flasks lay on a cloth, also shivered—despite the fire in the brazier next to him.

A fresh blanket had been tucked around the head, arms, and legs of Joanna in her laudanum sleep, but the flesh of her bare, white stomach was goose-pimpled, except for the gaping slash down it.

From the top bedroom of the keep, where Boggart’s contractions were coming hard and fast, deep, loud, involuntary huffs from her lungs groaned round the bailey like the blasts of a horn.

Adelia was aware of none of it, not noise, not the passing of time, not people, not fear, not even the humanity of the body on which she operated. She was battling with the enemy, a plump, yellowish, glistening, red-veined vermiform tube proving difficult for her tweezers to tease away from the rest of the gut. It hadn’t yet perforated, thank God. But it was taking too long.

At last she had it. Still holding the tweezers in place, she gestured for O’Donnell to pass her a knife, and cut.

“Cauterizing iron. Quick.”

There was a hiss. The body on the table jumped and Mansur, in response to Adelia’s brief look, held the laudanum sponge to Joanna’s nose.

The worm was thrown into a bucket.

Now the sewing up. “Needle.” She was passed the curved steel needle from Blanche’s sewing kit and knotted the sutures.

“Brandy” The wound had alcohol squeezed over it and was covered with lint.

Adelia took a swig of brandy herself and then sat down on the ground, staring into space, still clutching the bottle.

She only looked up as Fabrisse came out of the keep with a lustily bawling baby in her arms.

Joanna was breathing, but the battle for her life would continue and was now mostly in the hands of God. Adelia had done her best; it remained to be seen whether it was good enough.

FOR
A
WHILE
it looked as if the Lord had given and the Lord was taking away. Donnell, as the new baby boy was called, thrived while Joanna went into a delirium and Adelia into panic.

The Irishman rowed out to his anchored ship to tell those aboard that it was still touch-and-go for the princess, but that “Lord Mansur’s ministrations” were doing her good.

He refused their demands to take them ashore and ordered his crew to keep all passengers on board, where water, wine, and food would be rowed out to them.

There was to be no mention of an operation; if Joanna died, it must be assumed that she had succumbed to the illness that had been the reason for her abduction in the first place—some small protection for Mansur and Adelia, who would be blamed by Arnulf and the others for the princess’s death in any case, but might possibly save them from their almost certain execution were it known that death had been caused by the child’s body being cut open.

Even Henry I I’s fondness for Adelia would not outlive that.

Blanche, however, was unlikely to keep silent. She struggled between Scylla and Charybdis, the two monstrous, crushing rocks between which she had placed herself. Her grief and self-condemnation were heaped on Adelia’s head as the two of them kept their vigil beside Joanna’s bed. Sometimes it was: “You have killed her.” At other times: “Better I had let her die than bring her to you.”

Even when Joanna’s fever began to abate, the outpourings continued—though always where the girl couldn’t hear them: “What is she now? Dear Mary, Mother of God, you have ruined her.”

The scar was undoubtedly terrible; Adelia was no needlewoman; on the seventh day, when she took out the stitches, it remained a violent, puckered obscenity on otherwise pearl-colored young flesh.

Adelia said nothing in her own defense. She was too humbled. For her, the scar represented only the amazing endurance of the human body, the quick healing of young flesh, and a loving God who had forgiven the temerity of the one who’d inflicted it by granting a miracle.

THOUGH
THE
O’Donnell was impatient to begin the long sail down the coast of Italy, Adelia insisted that Joanna recuperate for another week after the removal of the stitches. The child did well, though when, on the third day—the tenth after the operation—she was allowed to begin walks around the bailey, Mistress Blanche pointed out angrily that the princess did so with a certain stiffness.

More days, then, to help the muscles recover, days to discover what a nice child she was. Without the enterprise of Eleanor, and with none of Henry’s command, she had a gentle charm all her own. An intimacy grew between them all that allowed the princess to discard royal aloofness and be lighthearted in their company Ulf told her bloodcurdling stories of Hereward the Wake, which delighted her, even though most of that fenland gentleman’s exploits had been directed against her great-great-grandfather, William the Conqueror. There were more bloodcurdling pirate tales from O’Donnell, while Mansur, for whom she’d developed a great regard, improved her chess.