I think what I liked best about this book was its setting: Cambridge, England, in 1171. Spring and the rain and the cherry blossoms, and a city centered around its river, a city of traders and barges and punts and quays and bridges. Comparing it to her hometown of Salerno, the main character thinks about the water at the center of it, and I love how Franklin describes it:
Here it was water, not sun, that the town bowed to; it coursed in runnels down both sides of a street so that every dwelling, every shop, had a footbridge to it. Cisterns, troughs, ponds confused the sight into seeing double; a roadside pig was exactly reflected by the puddle it stood in. Swans apparently floated on themselves. Ducks on a pond swam over the arched, chevroned doorway of the church looming above it. Errant streams contained images of roofs and windows, and willow fronds appeared to grow upward from the rivulets that mirrored them. (91)
I like Franklin’s descriptions, generally: of the landscape, the weather, the surroundings: grey dogs are “hounds colored like the English weather”; a character notices how “clouds changed the light as their shadows chased one another briskly across the grass”; there are pleasing reflections on the flatness of the town and the surrounding fens, on how big the sky seems because of it (3, 44).
Not that the town, or this book, is all loveliness: it’s a murder mystery, and the murders are quite gruesome. The murders are what has brought the main character, Adelia, to England: she is a doctor, a woman doctor from the medical school at Salerno, trained in medicine but not a doctor exclusively: more a forensic scientist, “a doctor versed in the morbid sciences,” as another character puts it (69). She’s been sent, along with a Jewish fixer from Naples and her Saracen bodyguard, to find out who’s killed four Cambridge children. The townspeople have blamed Cambridge’s Jews, who are living under protection of the king’s sheriff in the town’s castle, and the king (Henry II, who is really excellently portrayed) is not pleased: he’s sympathetic to the Jews in his kingdom, and not only because he taxes them on their wealth. So Adelia and her companions investigate, trying to find the true killer and to exonerate Cambridge’s Jews: but they’re a set of foreigners who can’t exactly meddle in the town’s affairs outright, so it’s lucky that they find local allies, including one of the king’s tax collectors, the head of the local priory, a woman who was the Prior’s lover long ago, and that woman’s grandson. There is humor and danger and romance—and oh the romance, I’m kind of a sucker for it, even though it’s sort of ridiculous, with both Adelia and her love interest blindsided by the fact of their attraction for one another, both of them acting prickly, pushing each other away in the process of finding their way together. There is also sometimes kind of a lot of exposition about the historical setting, and a few instances where Adelia’s particular hobby-horses are a bit over the top (I’m with Carol over at Book Group of One: Adelia’s objection to capital punishment really bugged me: it seemed like a set piece thrown in by the author rather than a speech that fit with Adelia the character).
But I was engaged enough with the story not to mind too much, and as an added bonus, I’m rather pleased with the walking-near-Cambridge ideas that I got from looking up various places mentioned in the book,
like the 25-mile Fleam Dyke/Roman Road walk.
Leave a Reply