“But you don’t believe that anymore now that we’re crafting an entire new reliquary,” Edgar said.
“No, and not now that the other man is dead,” Gaudry said. “I saw him several times. An oily minor lord, looked from the south, though he spoke good French. He brought us other things before the reliquary was mentioned, broken church vessels that he wanted reshaped or melted down altogether. He told me they weren’t his, he was simply the courier for the churchmen.”
“Did you believe him?”
“Yes,” Gaudry answered with certainty. “He had the air of one doing a distasteful job as quickly as possible. He wasn’t the one giving the orders. For all his fine dress and manner he didn’t have the … I don’t know, the lordliness, perhaps. You know how they look, like they know they’ll always have food on the table and someone else to serve it. This man didn’t have that. I thought he might have been forced into being the courier because of something he’d been caught in.”
“Like a lady’s bed?” Edgar smirked.
In the corner Odo chuckled. “I’d believe that of him; probably the real reason he’s dead.”
“Maybe,” Gaudry said. “But I think it’s more likely he tried to cheat his employers or threatened to go to the bishop about these ‘repairs’ of church property and had to be killed to keep him quiet.”
“But you don’t know who any of these men were?” Edgar asked. “You never asked for a name?”
“I work outside the guild,” Gaudry said. “I don’t give them my name, either.”
Edgar returned to his work. The description matched. Both Maurice and Gaudry gave the same characteristics for the man who brought the goods to the smith. It sounded as if Natan had gone too far into the business of the Christians. Everyone said he had been greedy. Could he have been so foolish as to threaten the people he was working for? Or perhaps they had decided he was no longer of use to them. If he had been poisoned, then he may have eaten whatever it was thinking that he was among friends.
But what could he have eaten, and with whom? And which of the thousand canons living around Paris had told Gaudry to make a reliquary that could fit the arm of Saint Aldhelm? And how had they come by the arm at all? The unraveling of this knot was going as slowly as his carving.
Edgar gave up on identifying one canon in a city of clerics. His mind went back to how Natan could have been poisoned. How observant a Jew had he been? Solomon ate all sorts of things, except pork, although he preferred food made according to the Law. Eliazar and Johannah would only eat what was prepared in a Jewish home. But what of Natan? Edgar decided to ask Catherine to find out when he saw her tonight. It should make her happy to be given a task. Not being able to move about quickly seemed to be unbalancing her humors. After the consternation her arrival at the tavern had caused, her disposition had not been equable for the past few days. It was his duty as a husband to save her from melancholia.
Edgar was uncomfortably aware that it was also his duty to challenge Jehan for his behavior on the road. There would be a certain satisfaction in feeling his knuckles connect with the man’s chin, but Edgar was too rational not to know that the next thing that would happen would be his own chin hitting the dirt. Knowing that in abandoning Catherine Jehan had destroyed his own hopes for any preferment in the future didn’t make Edgar feel better. If he had been raised to fight as his brothers had, Edgar would have been duty-bound to challenge Jehan, to defeat him in open combat and strip him of all he possessed. That’s what he should do, even now.
Edgar made an altogether too vicious jab at the wood, creating a dent. He was startled to realize that he had not cast aside all the attitudes of the nobility after all. Silently, he apologized to Saint Aldhelm for his temper, adding a prayer that Jehan might be afflicted with boils.
With Agnes and her maids gone and no one left at his home on the Grève, Hubert had suggested that Ullo stay with Eliazar. Johannah was delighted to have a child in the house and had a hard time remembering that he was Christian and only a visitor. He, in turn, found it a novel experience to be listened to and given sweets every time he showed his face in the kitchen. His only tasks, it seemed, were to fetch things for Lucia from the cellar and to take the donkey to Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois morning and evening so that Catherine could ride over.
That spring morning he was seated on a high stool at the kitchen worktable, happily cracking walnuts for a pudding while pretending they were Saracen heads. Catherine sat next to him, picking the seeds from dried fruit. Oddly enough, she was humming the same hymn as Odo, but she knew more than the first two lines.
“Verbum bonum et suave, Personemus illud Ave, perquod Christi fit conclave, Virgo, mater, filia,” she sang, and Ullo pronounced the words in tune although he didn’t understand their meaning.
“I thought that was a song for Advent,” Lucia said, coming in with a basket of fresh herbs, the first shoots of spring.
“We should only praise the Virgin in one season?” Catherine asked.
Lucia set down the basket and went to the cupboard for a wooden bowl and curved chopping knife to mince the herbs for a meat sauce. “Forgive me,” she said. “I forgot I was speaking with an expert in doctrine, my lady.”
Catherine opened her mouth to apologize, but stopped. That would be even more condescending than giving Lucia a lesson in religion.
Lucia gave no sign of caring whether Catherine apologized or not. She stripped the fresh leaves into the bowl and began chopping them. After a moment, she stopped and looked through what remained in the basket.
“Avoi!” she said. “Not enough chervil. Ullo, do you know what dried chervil looks like?”
“Of course,” Ullo said.
Lucia rolled her eyes. Another arrogant petty lordling.
“Then go down in the cellar and get me three stalks from the dried bunches hanging from the ceiling,” she said.
Ullo went happily. He couldn’t reach the herb bundles without pushing the boxes to stand on. He would be Roland, caught in the pass, at the last minute climbing the rocks to sound his horn, just before death overcame him. Or maybe Godfrey of Boullion, scaling the walls of Antioch, just before death overcame him. Ullo was not at all bothered by the idea that Natan had stumbled into the cellar just before death overcame him.
“I hope you don’t want those herbs immediately,” Catherine said. “He can spend an afternoon down there.”
“Just so I don’t.” Lucia shivered.
Catherine prodded at a recalcitrant plum pit. “Yes, I can understand how you feel,” she said. “But I don’t think Natan’s spirit is lingering nearby.”
“No,” Lucia said, savagely ripping borage. “I’m sure you don’t. You think he’s roasting now in Hell, with imps making him swallow molten gold so that red-hot coins drop from his bottom. Don’t be sympathetic to me. I’ve heard you all. ‘Natan was a bad man. A bad Jew. He aped the Christian lords. He cheated and stole.’ No one shed a tear for Natan!”
Catherine got up and limped to where Lucia stood. In her wrath, the maid was in danger of cutting off one of her own fingers with the knife. Catherine laid a hand over hers.
“Someone did,” she said.
Lucia stopped the chopping. She looked directly at Catherine, her eyes wide and glistening. The pain hit Catherine as if it had been her own.
“You grabbed my shoulder when you learned who the body was,” she reminded Lucia. “Your nails left marks in my skin. He wasn’t a stranger to you.”
Without moving, Lucia seemed to crumple from within. “No,” she whispered. “I knew him.”
Even though Catherine had guessed, she was startled by the depth of Lucia’s grief. It was true. No one, not even Menahem, Natan’s own nephew, could find a good word to say for him. Death could not change the fact that he was despised by all who had known him.
But if he had been so evil, how could Lucia love him? If he had been so heartless, then why did she weep?
And she did. Lucia was bent over, sobbing out her l
oss. There was nothing Catherine could do but hold her. The weight was too much on her good foot and the two of them sank to the floor, Lucia with her head in Catherine’s lap, crying out the grief no one shared.
Catherine could think of nothing to do but sit and stroke her hair until the passion subsided. As Lucia quieted, Catherine leaned over her and asked softly, “Do you need help? Are you pregnant?”
Lucia almost laughed. “No. I wish to God I were. Then there’d be a piece of him left on the earth.”
“Yes,” Catherine said. “I understand that. I’m sorry, truly I am. Would it help to say that I intend to find out who killed him?”
Lucia pulled herself together and got up from the floor. She straightened her scarf and wiped her eyes. “No,” she said. “It wouldn’t.” She held out a hand to help Catherine rise.
“Will you help me find out, all the same?” Catherine asked as she struggled to her feet.
“Yes,” Lucia said. “I want someone to pay.”
When Ullo returned, having also conquered Jerusalem with Godfrey’s brother, King Baldwin, Catherine and Lucia were just where he had left them, busy with their tasks.
There was another group of English students sharing their table that night, so it wasn’t until they were in bed that Catherine told Edgar what she had found out from Lucia.
“She was in love with him?” Edgar found that hard to believe.
“Both Maurice and Gaudry assumed he was a Christian lord,” Catherine reminded him. “He must have had a certain exotic charm.”
“But Lucia knew he was Jewish,” Edgar said.
“That’s true,” Catherine said. “Of course, I knew you were English. Perhaps she thought she could convert him.”
“You want me to turn French?” Edgar was horrified.
Catherine shook her head sadly. “I haven’t a hope. Not with the way you eat. Although, you know, listening to the others tonight, I realized that you’ve almost lost your accent.”
“I shall endeavor to regain it at once,” he said firmly. “Now about Natan. We know he worked with Christians. Was he the kind of man who would ingratiate himself by eating their food?”
Catherine tried to remember what she had overheard. “I doubt it,” she said finally. “From what Solomon and Uncle Eliazar said, he was very particular about his food. Unlike some people who don’t even stop to see what it is before they fill their mouths.”
Edgar was stung. “I didn’t know it bothered you.”
Catherine laughed. “It doesn’t. Well, not anymore. Actually, it’s rather satisfying to watch you shoveling food in with such enthusiasm. All that fuel has to be expended eventually.”
She was awake enough to suggest how. But Edgar was still puzzling over how Natan could have been poisoned.
“It would have to be someone he trusted,” Edgar said. “No, don’t stop. I can think about this while you do that.”
“Then I must not be doing it properly,” she answered.
They were quiet a moment.
“Someone could have bribed one of the Christian servants to put something in Natan’s dish,” she suggested. “But that doesn’t seem very likely. It would have to be done at the table without anyone noticing. We don’t even know where Natan ate that night, do we?”
Silence.
“Do we?” she repeated. “Edgar, what do you think? Edgar? What are you … Edgar!”
She must have been doing it properly after all.
When Catherine arrived at her aunt’s and uncle’s on Thursday, she was surprised to see Andrew, the canon from Saint-Victor, waiting in the hallway.
“I’ve met you, haven’t I?” he asked. “With John in the street and then the other night in a tavern. What are you doing here?”
Catherine grappled for a plausible answer. She thought of none and so decided to attack instead.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
“Old Eliazar teaches me Hebrew and explains passages of the Pentateuch in the original for me, remember?” he said. “Master Hugh, may his soul now rejoice in heaven, instructed me to seek the truth of the New Testament in the words of the Old.”
“I see,” Catherine said. “I was also grieved to hear of Master Hugh’s death. I’m sure his erudition lives on in his students.”
Andrew studied her for signs of sarcasm. Catherine looked back at him, her eyes wide, sincere and disturbingly blue. He blinked.
“Are you also here to study Hebrew?” he asked more politely. “I recall hearing that Abbess Héloïse was a student of the language.”
“Yes, she taught us some at the Paraclete,” Catherine answered, glad he had come up with an excuse on his own. “Eliazar’s wife is helping me so that I don’t forget it.”
Andrew was honestly confused. “But you’ve left the convent. What possible use could you have for Hebrew now?”
“I don’t know,” Catherine answered. “But if an occasion arises, I would not wish to be found wanting.”
What a tangle of lies and half-truths she was creating! She had never progressed much in Hebrew beyond the aleph bet and that was so that she could do accounts for her father using the letters as numbers. Solomon had taught her a few phrases and she had picked up a little more from Johannah. Now Catherine wished she had taken the time to learn. Heloise would have taught her more, if she had asked.
Andrew was dubious. Then his face lit with understanding. “Oh, of course. I know why you’ve really come here. You don’t need to be embarrassed. John told me that your families had disowned both you and Edgar. I can’t blame them, considering your rash marriage, but in your situation, I might be forced to do the same.”
“I beg your pardon?” Catherine had no idea what he was talking about.
At that moment Johannah entered the hall, followed by Lucia with a plate of cheese and cups of wine for Andrew and Eliazar.
“It’s all right,” the canon whispered. “I’ll tell no one I saw you here.” He followed Lucia up the stairs.
Johannah greeted Catherine with a hug. “What was that about?” she asked.
“I can’t imagine,” Catherine said. Then she realized. “Oh, of course!” She almost laughed. “That stultus thought I was here to pawn my jewelry to you, now that I’ve been cast out by my family to starve.”
“He should have known I don’t lend money,” Johannah sniffed. “Though I’ll say nothing against those who do. The Christians make it harder every year to survive any other way. Andrew’s been coming here long enough and asked enough questions to realize that I don’t need to do such work. But he can’t see beyond his own beliefs. I liked his friend better.”
“His friend?”
“There used to be two of them who would come each week for lessons,” Johannah explained. “Brother Andrew and Brother Thomas. They were both good enough boys, for Christians, but Thomas was more open-minded in his questions. Andrew often refuses to look at the peshat, the simple meaning of the text. Everything for him has to somehow predict his Messiah. Although I think that Eliazar has managed to convince him of his error once or twice.”
“That the Messiah has not yet appeared?” Catherine said, shocked.
“Of course not,” Johannah said. “Nothing will convince him of that. Eliazar has only made him admit that sometimes your scholars see predictions of your Christ in the Torah that simply aren’t there. But Thomas was different. He would listen and smile and ask intelligent questions. He was very respectful. For a while, he even came twice a week, once with Andrew and again on his own. But then, about a year ago, he stopped.”
“What happened to him?” Catherine asked.
“I don’t know,” Johannah said. “Perhaps he went to another city, or home to his family. No one ever told me.”
Something was worrying Catherine. There was a connection forming that she didn’t want to make. Leaning on her aunt’s arm, she went with her to the kitchen, where Lucia was scrubbing out all the cupboards in preparation for Passover.
“I have
some bread that we won’t use before the holiday,” Johannah said. “It’s in a bag on the table. Why don’t you take it home with you?”
Catherine suspected that her aunt had bought too much on purpose but accepted the gift gratefully.
There was a clattering sound from the cellar and a cry. Lucia screamed and bumped her head on the inside of the cupboard. Catherine dropped the bag, scattering crumbs on the floor. Johannah sighed, knowing it would now have to be scrubbed again.
At the same time she rushed to the trapdoor, which was propped open. “Ullo!” she called. “Are you hurt?”
“They’ll never take me alive!” a high defiant voice called back.
“Just don’t destroy all our provisions in the heat of battle,” she warned.
Johannah came back to the table, where Catherine sat laughing. Lucia was muttering curses under her breath. If even one of them came true, the defender of Jerusalem would suffer an ignominious end.
“Let the child play,” Johannah said. “His young eyes will find the smallest bit of chametz whatever he pretends it is.”
“The smallest bit of what?” Catherine asked.
“Leaven,” Johannah told her. “There mustn’t be a trace of it anywhere. We’ll have the ritual hunt later, but I like to be certain. Of course, I simply told him to move all the boxes and sweep around the barrels, that we were cleaning for the holiday. I believe he thinks I mean Easter.”
“Ullo’s head is so full of gestes and legends that I doubt he notices where he really is or who we are,” Catherine said. “Or else he takes your customs for granted. He’s the son of a friend of Father’s from Rouen.”
“Ah, yes, the community there is fairly large,” Johannah said. “Our ways might not be that strange to him.”
The sound of battle clanked from below for a few more minutes. Then Ullo came back up the stairs, broom under one arm and the spoils of war in a basket hooked over the other. He handed the basket to Johannah with a bow.
“You’re sure you got everything that was on the floor?” she asked. “Even in the corners?”
The Wandering Arm: A Catherine LeVendeur Mystery Page 23