Free Mistress of the Art of Death by Ariana Franklin Page A

next to the tomb of Paulus, Prior Canon of Saint Augustine's, Barnwell, taken to God in the year of Our Lord 1151. She nerved herself for what was to come.
    She had never yet shirked a postmortem examination; she would not shirk this one. It was why she was here. Gordinus had said, "I am sending you with Simon of Naples on this mission not just because you are the only doctor of the dead to speak English, but because you are the best."
    "I know," she'd said, "but I do not want to go."
    She'd had to. It had been ordered by the King of Sicily.
    In the cool stone hall that the Medical School of Salerno devoted to dissection, she'd always had the proper equipment and Mansur to assist her, relying on her foster father, head of the department, to relay her findings to the authorities. For, though Adelia could read death better than her foster father, better than anybody, the fiction had to be maintained that the investigation of bodies sent by the signoria was the province of Dr. Gershom bin Aguilar. Even in Salerno, where female doctors were permitted to practice, the dissection that helped the dead to explain how they'd died--and, very often, at whose hands--was regarded with revulsion by the Church.
    So far science had fought off religion; other doctors knew the use of Adelia's work, and it was an open secret among the lay authorities. But should an official complaint be made to the Pope, she'd be banned from the mortuary and, quite possibly, the school of medicine itself. So, though he writhed under the hypocrisy, Gershom took credit for achievements that were not his.
    Which suited Adelia to her boots. Staying in the background was her forte: for one thing, it avoided the Church's eye; for another thing, she did not know how to converse on womanly subjects as she was expected to, and did it badly because they bored her. Like a hedgehog blending into autumn leaves, she was prickly to those who tried to bring her into the light.
    It was another matter if you were ill. Before she devoted herself to postmortem work, the sick had seen a side to Adelia that few others did, and still remembered her as an angel without wings. Recovering male patients had tended to fall in love with her, and it would have surprised the prior to learn that she'd received more requests for her hand in marriage than many a rich Salernitan beauty. All had been turned down. It was said in the school's mortuary that Adelia was interested in you only if you were dead.
    Cadavers of every age came to that long marble table in the school from all over southern Italy and Sicily, sent by signoria and praetori who had reason to want to know how and why they'd died. Usually, she found out for them; corpses were her work, as normal to her as his last to a shoemaker. She approached the bodies of children in the same way, determined that the truth of their death should not be buried with them, but they distressed her, always pitiful and, in the case of those who had been murdered, always shocking. The three awaiting her now were likely to be as terrible as any she had seen. Not only that, but she must examine them in secrecy, without the equipment provided by the school, without Mansur to assist her, and, most of all, without her foster father's encouragement: "Adelia, you must not quail. You are confounding inhumanity."
    He never told her she was confounding evil--at least, not Evil with a capital E, for Gershom bin Aguilar believed that Man provided his own evil and his own good, neither the devil nor God having anything to do with it. Only in the medical school of Salerno could he preach that doctrine, and even there not very loudly.
    The concession to allow her to carry out this particular investigation, in a backward English town where she could be stoned for doing it, was a marvel in itself and one that Simon of Naples had fought hard to gain. The prior had been reluctant to give his permission, appalled that a woman was prepared to carry out such work and fearing