Mistress of the Art of Death by Ariana Franklin Read Free Book Online Page B

for herself.
    And here they were, its illustrations, growing in real life at her feet, as thrilling as if she'd encountered a famed face in the street.
    The herbalist author, relying heavily on Galen, like most of his kind, had made the usual claims: laurel to protect from lightning, all-heal to ward off the plague, marjoram to secure the uterus--as if a woman's uterus floated up to the neck and down again like a cherry in a bottle. Why did they never look ?
    She began picking.
    All at once she was uneasy. There was no reason for it; the great ring was as deserted as it had been. Clouds changed the light as their shadows chased one another briskly across the grass; a stunted hawthorn assumed the shape of a bent old woman; a sudden screech--a magpie--sent smaller birds flying.
    Whatever it was, she had an apprehension that made her want to be less vertical in all this flatness. So foolish she'd been. Tempted by its plants and the apparent isolation of this place, tired of the chattering company she'd been surrounded with since Canterbury, she'd committed the error, the idiocy, of venturing out alone, telling Mansur to stay and care for the prior. A mistake. She had abrogated all right to immunity from predation. Indeed, without the company of Margaret and Mansur, and as far as men in the vicinity were concerned, she might as well be wearing a placard saying "Rape me." If the invitation were accepted, it would be regarded as her fault, not the rapist's.
    Damn the prison in which men incarcerated women. She'd resented its invisible bars when Mansur had insisted on accompanying her along the long, dark corridors of the Salerno school, making her look overprivileged and ridiculous as she went from lecture to lecture, and marking her out. But she'd learned--oh, she'd learned--her lesson, that day when she'd avoided his chaperonage: the outrage, the desperation with which she'd had to scrabble against a male fellow student; the indignity of having to scream for help, which, thank God, had been answered; the subsequent lecture from her professors and, of course, Mansur and Margaret, on the sins of arrogance and carelessness of reputation.
    Nobody had blamed the young man, although Mansur had afterward broken his nose by way of teaching him manners.
    Being Adelia and still arrogant, she forced herself to walk a little farther, though in the direction of the trees, and pick a plant or two more before looking around.
    Nothing. The flutter of hawthorn blossom on the breeze, another sudden dimming of light as a cloud chased across the sun.
    A pheasant rose, clattering and shrieking. She turned.
    It was as if he had sprung out of the ground. He was marching toward her, casting a long shadow. No pimply student this time. One of the pilgrimage's heavy and confident crusaders, the metal links of his mail hissing beneath the tabard, the mouth smiling but the eyes as hard as the iron encasing head and nose. "Well, well, now," he was saying with anticipation. "Well, well, now, mistress."
    Adelia experienced a deep weariness--at her own stupidity, at what was to come. She had resources; one of them, a wicked little dagger, was tucked in her boot, given to her by her Sicilian foster mother, a straightforward woman with the advice to stick it in the assailant's eye. Her Jewish stepfather had suggested a more subtle defense: "Tell them you're a doctor and appear concerned by their appearance. Ask if they've been in contact with the plague. That'll lower any man's flag."
    She doubted, though, whether either ploy would prevail against this advancing mailed mass. Nor, considering her mission, did she want to broadcast her profession.
    She stood straight and tried loftiness while he was still a way off. "Yes?" she called sharply. Which might have been impressive had she been Vesuvia Adelia Rachel Ortese Aguilar in Salerno, but on this lonely hill, it did little for a poorly dressed foreign trull known to travel in a peddler's cart with two men.
    "That's