He took my measure again, but I didn't step aside for him.
He turned to address the crowd.
"Let me remind you good people that these Jews are the property of His Highness King Henry, and if you do any damage to them or their houses or their property, you do damage to the King, and I'll place you under arrest and hold you completely accountable. These are the King's Jews. They are Serfs of the Crown. Now be gone from here. What, would we have a Jewish martyr in every town of the realm?"
This drew a storm of protest and argument.
Lady Margaret at once grabbed his arm. "Uncle," she implored him. "A terrible evil has been done here. No, it is not the dastardly thing done to Little St. William or Little St. Hugh. But it is just as evil. Because we took the child with us into the church on Christmas Eve--."
"How many times must I hear this?" he answered her. "Day in and day out, we've been friends to these Jews and now we turn on them because a young girl leaves without a farewell to Gentile friends?"
The bell had stopped, but the street was choked with people, and it seemed to me that some even came over the rooftops.
"Go back to your homes," said the Sherriff. "The curfew's been rung. You are unlawful if you remain here!" His soldiers tried to bring their mounts a little closer in, but it wasn't easy.
Lady Margaret beckoned furiously for certain people to come forward, and at once two rather ragged individuals were produced, both of them reeking of drink. They wore the simple wool tunics and leggings of most of the men in the crowd, only their limbs were wrapped with rags, and both of them appeared dazed by the torchlight and the many people pushing and pulling at each other to see them.
"Why, these witnesses saw Meir and Fluria go into the woods with a sack," cried Lady Margaret. "They saw them by the great oak. My Lord Sherriff, and my beloved uncle, if the ground weren't frozen we would already have the child's body from where they buried it."
"But these men are drunkards," I said without thinking. "And if you don't have the body, how can you prove that there's been a murder?"
"That is exactly the case," said the Sherriff. "And here's a Dominican who isn't half mad to make a saint of someone who's beside a warm hearth right now in the city of Paris." He turned to me. "It's your brethren here who have stoked this fire. Make them come to their senses."
The Dominicans were plainly furious at this, but one other aspect of their demeanor struck me. They were sincere. They believed themselves quite obviously to be in the right.
Lady Margaret became frantic. "Uncle, don't you understand my guilt in this? I must pursue it. It was I, and Nell here, who brought the child to Mass and to see the Christmas pageants. We were the ones who explained the hymns to her, who answered her innocent questions--."
"For which her parents forgave her!" the Sherriff declared. "Who in the Jewry is more mild mannered than Meir, the scholar? Why, you, Fr. Antoine, you've studied Hebrew with him. How can you bring this charge?"
"Yes, I studied with him," said Fr. Antoine, "but I know him to be weak and under the rule of his wife. She after all was the apostate's mother--."
The crowd warmed to this loudly.
"Apostate!" cried the Sherriff. "You don't know that the young girl was an apostate! Too much is simply not known."
Clearly the crowd was beyond his control, and he realized it.
"But why are you so certain the child is dead?" I asked Fr. Antoine.
"She took sick on Christmas morn," he said. "That's why. Fr. Jerome here knows it. He's a physician as well as a priest. He attended her. They started to poison her even then. And she lay abed for a day in deepening agony, as the poison ate at her stomach, and now she's gone without a trace and these Jews have the effrontery to say her cousins took her to Paris. In this weather? Would you make such a journey?"
It seemed all who could hear had something to say on the outrage of this, but I let my voice carry as I spoke.
"Well, I've come here in this weather, haven't I?" I answered. "You cannot prove a murder with no evidence of it. That fact remains. Was not there a body of Little St. William? Was not there a victim in Little St. Hugh?"
Lady Margaret again reminded everyone that the ground around the oak was frozen.
The young girl cried bitterly, "I didn't mean any harm. She only wanted to hear the music. She loved the music. She loved the procession. She wanted to see the Babe laid in the Manger."
This brought fresh cries from the crowd all around.
"Why didn't we see her cousins who came to take her on this fanciful journey?" demanded Fr. Antoine of me, and of the Sherriff.
The Sherriff looked about himself uneasily. He raised his right hand and gave a signal to his men, and one of them rode off. He said to me under his breath, "I've sent for men to protect the entire Jewry."
"I demand," Lady Margaret interjected, "that Meir and Fluria answer. Why are all these wicked Jews locked in their houses? They know it's true."
Fr. Jerome spoke up immediately, "Wicked Jews? Meir and Fluria, and old Isaac, the doctor? These very people we've counted as our friends? And now they are all wicked?"
Fr. Antoine, the Dominican, shot back crossly, "So you owe them so much for your vestments, your chalices, your very priory," he said. "But they're not friends. They're moneylenders."
Once more the shouting started, but now the crowd was parting and an elderly man with streaming gray hair and a bent back made his way into the torchlight. His tunic and robes all but touched the snowy ground. On his shoes he wore fine gold buckles.
I saw at once the yellow taffeta patch fixed to his breast that meant he was a Jew. It was cut in the shape of the two tablets of the Ten Commandments, and I wondered, How in the world could anyone have ever seen that particular image as a "badge of shame"? But indeed they did and Jews throughout Europe had been compelled to wear it for many years. I knew and understood this.
Fr. Jerome told everyone sternly to make way for Isaac, son of Solomon, and the old man rather fearlessly took his place near to Lady Margaret and across from the door.
"How many of us," asked Fr. Jerome, "have come to Isaac for potions, for emetics? How many have been cured by his herbs and his knowledge? I've sought the man's knowledge and judgment. I know him to be a great physician. How dare you not listen to what he says now?"
The old man stood resolute and silent until all the shouting had died away. The white-robed priests of the cathedral had moved closer to him, to guard him. Finally the old man spoke in a deep and somewhat ragged voice.