BETWEEN THE PARISHES OF Shepfold and Martlake in Somerset existed an area of no-man’s-land and a lot of ill feeling.
Just as the nearby towns of Glastonbury and Wells were constantly at odds, so did these two small villages dispute over whose pigs had a right to graze on the beech mast of the intervening forest, which stream was diverted to irrigate whose crops, whose goats trespassed over the boundary and ate whose laundry, etc., etc.
Today, Lammas Saturday, after a fine summer that had enabled the harvest to be brought in exceptionally early, the two sets of villagers, everybody who could walk and even some who couldn’t, faced each other across this strip of ground on which had been erected a dais to accommodate Lady Emma of Wolvercote (her manor was in Shepfold), her husband, and Sir Richard de Mayne (his manor was in Martlake), the two parish priests, an Arab doctor, his attendant, an elderly woman, and a ball the size of a good pumpkin consisting of tough leather stitched over a globe of withies stuffed with sawdust.
Father Ignatius (Shepfold) made the last of many appeals to prevent what was going to happen.
“My lady, Sir Richard, it is not too late to avert this evil and send all home… the sheriff has specifically banned…”
His protest fell on stony ground. Staring straight ahead, Sir Richard said: “If Shepfold is prepared to be humiliated yet again, who am I to disappoint it.”
Lady Emma, also refusing to turn her head, breathed heavily through her pretty nose. “This year it will be Martlake who is humiliated.” Master Roetger, the tall German leaning on a crutch beside her, gave her an approving and husbandly pat on the back.
Father Ignatius sighed. He was an educated and civilized man. Tomorrow, Sunday, he thought, these people will dress in their best to bring sheaves and fruit to church and give thanks to God for His infinite bounty as was right and proper. But always, by some hideous tradition peculiar only to them, on the day before Harvest Festival they revert to paganism and turn the eve of a Christian festival into something resembling the excesses of a Lupercalia. A madness.
Adelia Aguilar sighed with him and mentally ran through the medical equipment she’d brought with her-bandages, ointments, needles, sutures, splints.
It would be nice to think they weren’t going to be needed, but hope was outweighed by experience.
She looked up at the tall Arab eunuch standing beside her. He shrugged, helplessly. Sometimes England baffled them.
They’d traveled a long way together. Both of them born in Sicily, that melting pot of races; she, an abandoned baby, probably Greek, rescued and brought up by a Jewish doctor and his wife; he, later taken into the same, good household to be her attendant, once a lost boy with a beautiful voice whom the Latin Church had castrated so that he might retain it.
Circumstances-well, that damned King Henry II of England really-had plucked the two of them away from Sicily and dropped them down in his realm. And now, seven extraordinary years later, here they both were, on a bare piece of land in Somerset with two villages out to maim each other in what they called a game.
“I just don’t understand the English,” she said.
Gyltha, standing on the other side of her said, “Somerset folk ain’t proper English, bor.” Gyltha was a Cambridgeshire woman.
“Hmm.”
For God’s sake, she was a trained doctor, a specialist in autopsy, a medica of the Salerno School of Medicine in Sicily-probably the only foundation in Christendom to take women as students-and this is what I’ve come down to.
It wasn’t even that she could officially practice her craft. In England? Where the Church regarded a woman with medical knowledge as a witch?
Ostensibly Mansur had to be the one attending the wounded while she must seem to be carrying out his orders-a thin pretense but one that saved her from ecclesiastical punishment; also one to which, trusting them both, the two villages paid affectionate lip service.
The crowd was becoming restive. “For love of Mary, get on with it,” somebody called out, “afore us bloody melts.”
It was getting hot, early morning though it was. The sun that had ripened wheat and barley so beautifully was now slanting on yellow-white stubble in which rooks pecked up such corn as the gleaners had left them, brightening the forest beeches where some leaves were already showing autumn colors. On the balk strips, bees and butterflies were making free among trefoils and cornflowers.
Father Ignatius gave in and turned to his fellow priest, Father John. “To you the honor this year, sir, if honor it be.”
Father John, a Martlake man and therefore a lout, picked up the ball, raised it above his head, shouted: “God defend the right,” and threw it.
“That wasn’t straight,” Father Ignatius yelled. “You favored Martlake.”
“Bloody didn’t ”
“Bloody did.”
Nobody paid attention to the scuffling priests. The game had begun. Like great opposing waves, and with much the same noise, the two sides crashed together, their women and offspring skittering around the edges, screaming them on.
A Martlake boy emerged from the scrum, the ball at his twinkling feet, and began running with it in the direction of the Shepfold parish boundary, a mob of howling Shepfoldians at his back. Lady Emma, Sir Richard, and Master Roetger followed more sedately, while Adelia, Gyltha, and Mansur, carrying their medicaments, accompanied by Adelia’s six-year-old daughter and Emma’s four-year-old son, Lord Wolvercote, brought up the rear.
They paused at a safe distance to watch the scrimmage as the Martlake lad was brought down.
“There goes his nose,” Mansur remarked. “Is it not against the rules to kick in the face?”
“Better get the swabs out,” Gyltha said.
Adelia delved into her doctor’s bag. “What rules?” There were supposed to be some; no swearing, no spitting, no picking the ball up and carrying it, no gouging, no biting, no fisticuffs, no women nor children nor dogs to partake, but Adelia hadn’t seen any of them observed yet.
Gyltha was lecturing Adelia’s daughter. “You listen to me, dumpling, you get into a fight this time, an’ I’ll tan your little backside.”
“That’s right, Allie,” Adelia said. “No brawling. You and Pippy are not to take part, do you understand me?”
“Yes, Mama. Yes, Gyltha.”
By the time she’d dealt with the Martlake broken nose, children, ball, and contestants had disappeared. Distant howls were suggesting that the match was now in the forest. On its edge, Adelia’s old friends, Will and Alf, were lounging against a tree, waiting for her to come up.
“Go home,” she told them-they were Glastonbury men. “Don’t get involved, I won’t have enough bandages.”
“Just come to watch, like,” Will told her.
“Observers, we are,” Alf said.
She looked at them with suspicion; they’d been hanging around her a lot lately. But there was no time to inquire; screams from amongst the trees suggested that there were wounded. They followed her in.
A broken leg, two twisted ankles, a dislocated shoulder, and five scalp wounds later, the supply of injuries temporarily dried up. Mansur hoisted the protesting broken leg over his shoulder and set off to take it home to its mother. Gyltha was mopping up Allie. The noise had dwindled to isolated shouts. People were beating the undergrowth.
“What are they doing now, in the name of God?” Adelia asked.
“Lost the ball,” Will said, laconically
“Good.”
But her eye fell on a Martlake woman with a bulging midriff under her smock who was wending her way smartly along a nearby badger track. “Where are you going, Mistress Tyler?”
“Back home, in’t I? ‘Tis too much for I what with the baby due and all.”
For one thing, Mistress Tyler had shown no sign of pregnancy while in church on the previous Sunday For another, the badger track led in the direction of Shepfold. For a third, Lady Emma was Adelia’s good friend-so that, despite her pretension to neutrality, Adelia really wanted Shepfold to win. “You put that ball down,” she shouted. “You’re cheating.”
Mistress Tyler, holding tight to her protuberant and wobbling waistline, began to run.
Adelia, chasing after her, failed to hear the whoomph of an arrow burying itself in the tree beside which, a second before, she’d been standing.
Will and Alf looked at it, looked at each other, and then hurled themselves in the direction from which the flight had come.
It was useless; the marksman, having chosen a clear shot, had made it his only one before melting into a forest in which a hundred assassins could be hiding.
Returning to the tree, Will pulled the arrow out with some effort. “Look at that, Alf.”
“We got to tell her, Will.”
“We got to tell somebody” They had a high regard for Adelia, who had twice saved them from a desperate situation, but, though agonized for her safety, they’d also wanted to preserve her peace of mind.
They advanced to where she was tussling with Mistress Tyler. At that moment, the ball fell to the ground from under the Martlake woman’s skirt-and was spotted.
Before the two Glastonbury men could reach their heroine, she and her opponent had been overwhelmed by a pile of players. In trying to get her out, Will and Alf lost their temper and put their fists and boots at the disposal of the Shepfold team.
So did Adelia…
Some five minutes later, a familiar voice addressed her from its height on a magnificent horse: “Is that you?”
Muddy and panting, Adelia extricated herself to look up into the face of her lover and the father of her child. “I think so.”
“G’day, Bishop,” said Mistress Tyler, trying to restore order to her smock.
“And a good day to you, madam. Who’s winning?”
“Martlake,” Adelia told him, bitterly “They’re cheating.”
“Is that the ball?” Seated in his saddle, the Bishop of Saint Albans pointed to where a round object shedding pieces of bracken had flown up from a group of fighting players.
“Yes.”
“Thank God, I thought it was somebody’s head. Hold my horse.” Dismounting, flinging off his cloak and hat, Rowley waded in…
THAT NIGHT THERE was weeping and gnashing of teeth in the parish of Martlake while, three miles away in Shepfold, a limp piece of leather was carried high on a pole into the great barn of Wolvercote Manor with all the pomp of golden booty being brought back to Rome by a triumphant Caesar.
Outside, carcasses of pigs and sheep turned on spits and hogs-heads spouted the best ale to all who would partake of it. The lady of Wolvercote herself, limping slightly, deftly flipped pancake after pancake from the griddles into the hands of her villagers while her husband, who had used his oak crutch with effect during the match, poured cream onto them.
The bard, Rhys, another attachment to Lady Emma’s household, had abandoned his harp for a vielle and stood, sweating and bowing away, in the doorway so that parents and children danced to his tune in long lines around the victory fires. Beyond, in the shadow of trees, young bodies rolled in celebratory copulation.
Inside the barn, Adelia sternly regarded the Bishop of Saint Albans sitting beside her daughter-and his-on a hay bale, the resemblance between father and child enhanced by the black eye sported by each. “Look at you. I hope you’re both ashamed of yourselves.”
“We are,” Rowley said. “But at least we didn’t kick Mistress Tyler.”
“Did she?” Allie was charmed. “Did Mama kick Mistress Tyler?”
“Hard.”
“I’ll fetch some pancakes,” Adelia said, and then, over her shoulder: “She kicked me first.”
While she was gone, Will, holding a mug of ale, came up to ruffle Allie’s hair and doff his cap to her father. “I was wondering if as I could have a word, Bishop. Outside, like…”
Adelia took Allie back to bed through the weave of dancers, bidding good nights, throwing a kiss to Mansur who was executing his sword dance for Gyltha, the love of his life and Allie’s nurse.
For perhaps the first time in her life, she realized, she was content.
When, eight years ago, the King of England, who was troubled by a series of unexplained killings in his county of Cambridge, had sent to his friend, the King of Sicily, begging for a master in the art of death from the famed School of Medicine in Salerno, it was Vesuvia Adelia Rachel Ortese Aguilar who’d been chosen to go.
It had occurred neither to the Sicilian king nor to the school that they had made an odd choice; Adelia was the best they had.
However, her arrival in England, where women doctors were anathema, had caused consternation.
Only by the subterfuge of Mansur pretending to be the medical expert and she merely his assistant and translator had Adelia been able to do her job by solving the murders-and done it so well that King Henry II had refused to allow her to return to Sicily, keeping her as his own special investigator.
Damn the man. True, England had given her the happiness of friends, a lover, and a child, but Henry’s requirement of her had more than once put her in such danger that she’d been deprived of the tranquillity with which to enjoy them.
The Church had driven her and Allie, Mansur, and Gyltha from Cambridge, but Emma, out of gratitude for being allowed to marry as she pleased-a boon that Adelia had successfully begged the king to grant his rich young ward-had built her a house on the Wolvercote estate, thus giving her the first home of her own she’d ever had.
Gyltha and Mansur had settled down together-to everybody’s surprise but Adelia’s.
(In Sicily, it was not unusual for eunuchs to have a happy sexual relation with a woman-or another man, for that matter; castration didn’t necessarily mean impotence. In England, where eunuchs were a rarity, that fact was unknown; it was thought merely that Mansur had a peculiarly high voice, and that he and Gyltha were just… well, peculiar.)
And for the last two years, Henry II had not interrupted this idyll by asking Adelia to do anything for him, might perhaps-oh joy-have forgotten her.
Even her fraught relationship with Rowley-begun during an investigation, and before the king had insisted on elevating him to a bishopric-had settled into a sort of eccentric domesticity, despite his extended absences as he toured his diocese. Scandalous, of course, but nobody in this remote part of England seemed to mind it; certainly Father Ignatius and Father John, both of them living with the mothers of their children, had not seen fit to report it to Adelia’s great enemy, the Church. Nor was there a doctor for miles around to be jealous of her skill; she was free to be of use to suffering patients in this part of Somerset-and be beloved for it.
I have found peace, she thought.
She and Allie put the hens away for the night and released Eustace, Allie’s lurcher, from the confinement that had been necessary to keep him from joining in the football match. “We beat Martlake, we beat Martlake,” Allie chanted to him.
“And tomorrow we shall all be friends again,” Adelia said.
“Not with that bloody Tuke boy, I won’t. He poked me in the eye.”
“Allie.”
“Well…”
The door to their house was open-it usually was-but the creak of a floorboard inside brought back unpleasant memories and Adelia clutched her daughter’s shoulder to stop her from going in.
“It’s all right, Mama,” Allie said. “It’s Alf, I can smell him.”
So it was. Beating off Eustace’s enthusiastic welcome, the man said: “You ought to keep this old door o’ yours locked, missus. I saw a fox getting in.”
Considering that it was dark and that Alf had been in the barn a hundred yards away, Adelia marveled at his eyesight. “Is it still there?”
“Chased it out.” With that, Alf lurched off into the night.
Lighting a candle to escort her daughter upstairs to bed, Adelia asked: “Can you smell fox, Allie?”
There was a sniff. “No.”
“Hmm.” Allie’s nose was unerring; her father had remarked on it, saying that she could teach his hounds a thing or two. So, sitting beside her daughter, stroking her to sleep, Adelia wondered why Alf, most honest of men, had chosen to tell her a lie…
IN EMMA’S ROSE GARDEN, the Bishop of Saint Albans held the arrow Will had given to him so tightly that it snapped. “Who is it?”
“We ain’t rightly sure,” Will said. “Never got a glimpse of the bastard, but we reckon as maybe Scarry’s come back.”
“Scarry?”
Will shuffled awkwardly “Don’t know as if she ever told you, but her and us was all in the forest a year or two back when we was attacked. Fella called Wolf, nasty bit of work he were, he come at her and Alf. He‘d’ve done ’em both but, see, she had this sword and… well, she done him first.”
“She told me,” Rowley said, shortly. Jesus, how often he’d had to hold her shaking body to fend off the nightmares.
“Well, see, Scarry was there, he was Wolf’s lieutenant, like. Him and Wolf they was…”
“Lovers. She told me that, too.”
Will shifted again. “Yes, well, Scarry wouldn’t’ve taken kindly to her a-killin’ Wolf.”
“That was two years ago, man. If he were going to take his revenge, why leave it for two years?”
“Had to fly the county, maybe. The king, he weren’t best pleased at having outlaws in his forest. Cleaned it out proper, he did. Had‘em in bits hangin’ off the trees. We hoped as Scarry was one of ’em, but now we ain’t so sure acause if it ain’t Scarry, who is it? She’s well liked round here, our missus.”
“And he’s trying to kill her?”
“Don’t know so much about that. He’d a‘be wanting to frighten her to death first, that was more Scarry’s style. Me and Alf, we been watchin’ out for her, and we found an animal pit somebody dug along a path she takes often. Covered it was, but us filled un in. An’ then Godwyn, him as owns the Pilgrim and takes her out regular to Lazarus Island to tend the lepers, well, last week, his punt began to sink when they was halfway there and the both of ’em had to make their way back on foot across the marshes, the which is always chancy acause of the quicksand. Alf and me, we poled out later and raised that punt to look at her and found a neat hole in her bottom, like someone’d taken a gimlet to her. We reckon as whoever it was’d filled the hole with wax, like. And then there was…”
But the Bishop of Saint Albans had left him and was striding toward Adelia’s house.
Alf met him at the door. “’S all right, master, I checked the rooms afore she came. Ain’t nobody in there.”
“Thank you, Alf. I’ll take over now.” And he would, Christ’s blood he would. How many times did he have to rescue the wench before she saw reason?
The fear Rowley felt when Adelia was in danger always translated itself into fury against the woman herself. Why did she have to be what she was? (The fact that he might not have loved her if she hadn’t been was invariably set aside.)
Why, when they’d been free to marry, had she refused him? Her fault… a babble about her independence… an insistence that she would fail as wife to an ambitious man… her damned fault.
No, she’d had it her own way and Henry II had immediately pounced on him, insisting that he become a bishop-well, the king had needed one churchman to be on his side after the murder of Archbishop Becket-and he, in his resentment and agony, had acceded. He still blamed her for it.
They’d been thrown together on investigations since and found that neither could live without the other-too late for marriage, though, celibate as he was supposed to be, so they’d finished up in this illicit relationship which gave him no rights over either her or the child.
But this was the end of it. No more investigations for her, no more touching the sick, no more lepers-lepers, God Almighty. She must finish with it. And for the first time he had the means to see that she did.
Raging though he was, Rowley had enough sense to consider how he would break it to her and stopped in the doorway to consider.
The two Glastonbury lads were right; she should not be told that there was an assassin after her-but they were right for the wrong reason. Rowley knew his woman; an assassin wouldn’t scare her away from this country hole she’d dug herself into; she’d refuse to go. She’d spout her bloody duty to her bloody patients.
No, though he had an iron fist, he’d put a velvet glove on it, give her King Henry’s orders as if they were inducements…
But he was still very angry and he didn’t do it well. Going into her bedroom, he said: “Start packing. We’re leaving for Sarum in the morning.”
Adelia had prepared herself for something else. She was awaiting him in bed and, apart from a strip of lace over her dark blond hair, she was naked, bathed, and scented. Her lover was able to visit her so rarely that their encounters in bed were still rapturous. In fact, she’d been surprised to see him arrive on a Saturday; usually he was preparing for the next day’s service in some far-flung church or another.
In any case, he never shared her bed on Sundays-a ridiculous decision perhaps, and certainly hypocritical, but one which, knowing how it weighed on him to preach abstinence to his flock while not practicing it himself, Adelia was prepared to countenance… and, after all, it wasn’t midnight yet.
So, bewildered, she said: “What?”
“We’re leaving for Sarum in the morning. I came to tell you.”
“Oh, did you?” Not for love, then. “What for? And anyway, I can’t. I’ve got a patient over in Street who needs me.”
“We’re going.”
“Rowley, I am not.” She began to grope for her clothes; he was making her feel foolish without them.
“Captain Bolt is coming to escort us. The king wishes it.”
“Not again, oh God, not again.” Le roi le veult. For Adelia, the four most doom-laden words in any language; there was no appeal against them.
Drearily, she poked her head through her smock and looked at him. “What does he want this time?”
“He’s sending us to Sicily”
Ah, now that was different… “Sicily? Rowley, how wonderful. I shall see my parents. They can meet you and Allie.”
“Almeison will not be coming with us.”
“Of course she will, of course she will. I won’t leave her behind.”
“No. Henry’s keeping her here to make sure you come back to him.”
“But, Sicily… we could be away for a year or more. I can’t leave her that long.”
“She’ll be well looked after. She can have Gyltha with her, I’ve seen to that. They’ll be lodged with the queen at Sarum.” This was both suggestio falsi and suppressio veri on Rowley’s part. Henry Plantagenet would have been perfectly content for Allie to stay where she was, at Wolvercote in the care of Emma. It had been Rowley who’d begged him to allow the child to move in with Eleanor, and then got the queen to agree.
It was the only thing king and queen did agree on. Since Eleanor of Aquitaine had joined the rebellion-the failed rebellion-of the two older Plantagenet princes against their father, things had, to put it mildly, been strained between royal husband and wife.
Adelia put her finger on it. “Allie can’t stay with Eleanor, the queen’s in prison.”
“It’s a prison anyone would be happy to be in; she’s denied nothing.”
“Except freedom.” There was something terrible here; he was frightening her. Panic restricted her throat and she went to the open window to breathe.
When she’d got her voice under control, she turned around. “What is this, Rowley? If I have to go… if I must leave Allie, she can stay here with Gyltha and Mansur. She’s settled, she’s happy here, she has her animals… she has an affinity with animals.”
“My point exactly.”
“She has an instinct, a genius… Old Marly called her in the other day when his hens got ill; she cured Emma’s palfrey of the stifle when Cerdic couldn’t. What do you mean… ‘my point exactly’?”
“I mean I want my daughter to have the feminine arts that Eleanor can teach her. I want her to become a lady, not a misfit.”
“What you’re saying is that you don’t want her to grow up like me.”
In his fear and anger and love, that was what it came down to. Adelia escaped him, she always had; there must be something of his that wouldn’t get away
“No, I don’t, if you want to know. And she’s not going to. I have a responsibility for her.”
“Responsibility? You can’t even publicly acknowledge her.”
“That doesn’t mean I don’t care for her future. Look at you, look at what you wear…” Adelia was now fully clothed. “Peasant dress. She’s a beautiful child, why hide her light under that dowdy bushel? Half the time she goes about barefoot.”
It was true that Adelia was in homespun; she had agreed to become the bishop’s mistress but, when it came to it, she’d drawn the line at being his whore. Though he urged money on her, she wouldn’t take it and dressed herself out of her small earnings as a doctor. She hadn’t realized until now how much that irritated him.
This wasn’t about Allie, this was about her.
But she fought on the ground that he’d chosen, their daughter. “Education? And what sort of education would she get with Eleanor? Needlework? Strumming a lyre? Gossiping? Courtly blasted love?”
“She’d be a lady; I’m leaving her money; she can make a good marriage. I’ve already begun looking around for suitable husbands.”
“An arranged marriage?”
“Suitable, I said. And only if she’s willing.”
She stared at him. They had loved each other desperately and still did; she thought she knew him, thought he knew her-now it appeared they understood each other not at all.
She tried to explain. “Allie has a gift,” she said. “We couldn’t exist without animals, to plough, to ride, pull our carriages, feed us. If she can find cures for what makes them ill…”
“An animal doctor. What life is that for a woman, for God’s sake?”
The quarrel degenerated. When Mansur and Gyltha entered the house, it reverberated with the yells of two people verbally disemboweling each other.
“… I have a right to say how my household should behave…”
“… It’s not your household, you hypocrite. The Church is your household. When are you ever here?”
“I’m here now and tomorrow we go to Sarum and Allie comes, too… The king’s ordered it…”
“… You made him do that? You’d give her into slavery…?”
Gyltha hurried to Allie’s room in case the child should be listening. Eustace, the lurcher, lifted his shaggy head as she came in, but Allie was sleeping the sleep of the innocent and unknowing.
Gyltha sat by her bed just in case and glanced with despair at Mansur, shaking his head in the doorway
“… I’ll never forgive you. Never.”
“… Why? You want her to end up hilling a man like you did?”
If he’d been in his senses, Rowley would not have said it. When the outlaw called Wolf had tried to kill her and she’d been forced to kill him instead, it had hung a millstone around Adelia’s neck; time and again Rowley had reassured her that the monster was better dead; she had saved Alf’s life as well as her own, there was nothing else she could have done, but still it weighed on her that she, who was sworn to preserve life, had taken one.
After that the voices stopped.
Gyltha and Mansur heard the bishop clump down the stairs to make up a bed for himself on a settle. Distressed beyond measure, they went to bed themselves. There was nothing to be done now.
The last revelers in the barn went home. Emma and Roetger returned to the manor house, their servants scattered to their various sleeping places.
Silence descended on Wolvercote.
ON A WATER BUTT outside Adelia’s window where it has been crouching in shadow, a figure stretches its cloaked arms so that, for a second, it resembles a bat unfolding leather wings ready to fly. Noiselessly it jumps to the ground, overjoyed with what it has heard.
His God-and Scarry’s god is not the Christians’ God-has just granted him the boon of boons, as Scarry was sure He would, sooner or later. He has poured the elixir of opportunity into Scarry’s hands.
For Scarry’s hatred of the woman Adelia is infinite. During two years’ enforced exile from England, he has prayed to be shown the means of her destruction. Now, at last, the stink of his loathing has reached Satan’s nostrils and its incense has been rewarded.
Once, in a Somerset forest not too far from here, the woman killed Scarry’s joy, his life, his love, his mate, his Wolf. And Scarry has come back, with Wolf howling him on in his head, to rend her to pieces. How stupidly he has done it; how ineffectual. Arrows, pits, attempts to frighten her; she hasn’t even noticed; the two oafs who watch over her have seen to that.
Unworthy of an educated man, which is what Scarry is. A way of passing the time, really, until the true and only God should show him the way. Which he has, he has. Dominus illuminatio mea.
Wolf never killed a female until she was squirming in terror and pain-the only state in which Wolf, or he himself, could have sexual congress with the creatures. Timor mortis morte pejor.
“But now, Lord, in Your infinite wisdom, you have manifested to me all that I need to hear and see and learn that Your will and Wolf’s may triumph. The woman shall be reduced by slow torture, so much more satisfying, chop, chop, piece by piece, a capite ad calcem.”
At this point Scarry is out of the view of the house, and he twirls as the shimmering, hot night enfolds him.
How curious that she didn’t ask her lover why the king was sending her to Sicily.
But he, Scarry, knows. By a great coincidence-no, not coincidence but, manifestly, by the workings of the Horned God in whose hand he rests-Scarry is intimately cognizant of the journey the woman is about to take.
And will be going with her.
EMMA STOOD IN ADELIA’S room wincing as she watched her friend furiously bundle clothes into a saddlebag. “My dear, you can’t go in rags like those.”
“I don’t want to go at all,” Adelia shouted. “I’ll never forgive him, never.” A veil tore on a buckle as it was pushed in with the rest.
“But you do realize where you’re going?”
“Sicily, apparently. And without Allie.”
“And why you’re going?”
“God only knows, some scheme of Henry’s. I tell you, Em, if I could take Allie, I’d stay there and never come back. Holding a child hostage… that’s what they’re doing, king and bloody bishop. I’ll never…”
“You’ll be accompanying Joanna Plantagenet to her wedding, so Rowley says.” Seeing Adelia’s incomprehension, Emma blew out her cheeks. “Henry’s daughter? Marrying the King of Sicily? Lord, ‘Delia, even you must know that. We’re all being taxed for it, damn him.”
A king was entitled to tax his people to pay for his daughter’s wedding, but it didn’t make him popular.
Adelia, whose few accounts were handled by Mansur and who listened to her patients’ physical complaints rather than their excise grumbles, didn’t know it.
She paused for a moment. “Joanna? She’s just a baby”
“Ten, I believe.”
“Poor little devil.” The thought of another poor little devil to be groomed for a good marriage broke Adelia’s anger and she sat down on her bed, almost weeping. “I’ll not forgive him, Em, he’s taking her away from me, and me away from her. Putting her in prison. And it is a prison, in more ways than one. My little one, my little one.”
“Rowley has his reasons, I’m sure.” Emma knew what they were-she’d heard them from the bishop himself only a few minutes ago.
“Oh, yes, marvelous reasons. He wants Eleanor to turn her into a… a prinking doll, drain her of all initiative.”
Amused, Emma sat down beside her friend. She smoothed the silk of her gown over her swelling stomach. “My dear, whatever we think of a queen who fomented a rebellion against her king, we cannot accuse her of lacking initiative. Yet with it all, Eleanor keeps her femininity. She can teach Almeison a great deal.”
“What, for instance?”
“To keep her fingernails clean, for one thing. Courtesy, poetry, music. These things are not unimportant. I yield to nobody in my admiration for your daughter, but… I have to say it, ‘Delia… she is becoming farouche.”
“Farouche?”
“She spends too much time with animals. During the football game, she punched one of the Martlake boys so hard he lost a tooth. A baby tooth, I grant you, but…”
“He blacked her eye,” Adelia said, defensively
“Yes, but… my dear, you’re limiting her, don’t you see?” This was a lecture Emma had been meaning to make for some time; now she settled down to it. “It may be that when Allie’s older, she will want to marry well. The fact that she can deliver a punch is not recommended in politer families. Children must be prepared for their adult position. In a year or two, Pippywill have to leave me to become a page to the De Lucis and learn the skills of a knight. I shall miss him, miss him terribly, but it must be done if he is to take his place in society”
“It isn’t the same,” Adelia said. When young Lord Philip grew up, he would have the choice to explore his gifts, lead the life he wanted; his wife would have none.
Emma was fortunate in that this, her second marriage, was happy-her first had been enforced-but legally Roetger, as her husband, controlled the wealth she’d brought to it. Again legally, he could turn her out without a penny, was entitled to beat her-as long as he used only reasonable force-take her children away, and there would be nothing she could do about it. That Roetger wouldn’t do any of these things rested solely on the fact that he was a decent man.
And while Emma’s life of household management and entertaining suited her, it wouldn’t suit Adelia. Nor, she knew, would it suit her daughter.
“We’re helpless, we women,” she said, defeated.
Emma, who didn’t feel helpless at all, patted her. “It’s only for a year, then you can be reunited-Rowley has agreed to that.” She stood up, brisk. “Now there’s just time to furnish you decently for the journey. I’m going to pack some of my own clothes for you in a proper traveling box. My dear, you’ll be voyaging with a princess of England in the company of very important people. We don’t want to appear shabby, do we?”
So it was that at midday Adelia, looking elegant for once, and her daughter, considerably less so but with clean fingernails, rode out from Wolvercote Manor with an escort of Plantagenet soldiers, Gyltha, Mansur, and a lover to whom she still wasn’t speaking.
Emma, standing with Roetger at the great gates to wave her off, was beset by a sudden qualm. “Pray God in His mercy send them safe.”
In the lane outside, watching the departure, two Glastonbury men heard her prayer.
“Amen to that,” Will said, crossing himself.
SCARRY IS RIDING along the same road that Adelia Aguilar is taking at that moment, though well ahead of her. Unlike her, he is not heading for Sarum but for Southampton, where he will join the company that she, too, must join before they take ship for Normandy.
Scarry hates that company, as he has hated his father, his mother, the prior of his seminary, everybody who hated him in turn for not being an ordinary mortal and taught him to hide it under his brilliance. Once more, he must mop and mow and play the idiot. Once more, he will know the constriction of assumed piety.
But for the moment, he is smiling because he is passing the spot where he first encountered his Wolf. His Road to Damascus, this road between Glastonbury and Wells. Then he’d been going the other way, on a dreary pilgrimage with his prior and other dreary souls to worship Glastonbury’s saints. As always he was concealing his hatred like a shameful, tumescent pustule, while a worm nibbled his brain, and the voice in his head chanted other, profane words to the hymns they sang as they went.
Yes, my lord prior, no, my lord prior, let us kneel before each wayside shrine as we go, praising a Deity that undoubtedly exists but not in the form you say he does; a God who knows only how to condemn, whose loving word is a lie.
They had been benighted, the road longer than they’d reckoned; they’d been afraid of the dark forest around them and were reciting Psalm 91 to avert the terror by night, as if regurgitating falsehoods however beautiful, however reassuring, could protect the credulous. when had their God ever shown the mercy He promised?
Then, out of the dark trees had come the terror, not blackness but light in the form of capering, semi-naked men, outlaws bearing torches and swords, laughing as they robbed and killed.
In recollection, Scarry laughs with them. Some of his fellow pilgrims had got away but he’d stood still, bemused, not so much terrified as amazed by the killers’ liberation from the restraint that Christianity demanded.
Their leader-Wolf, my darling, my zest-had stuck his sword into the prior’s belly and, as he stripped the jeweled cross from the neck, had looked up, grinning, into Scarry’s eyes.
Recognition had leaped between them, two souls connected since long before the Great Pretender had been crucified, a lightning bolt that had burst the pustule and released Scarry from its pain.
The demand had been made. Scarry can no longer recall whether it issued from Wolf’s mouth or was spoken by this new God manifesting Himself in the mingled shrieks of mirth and terror of that moment.
Come with me and I shall set you free. What blasphemy, what a glorious overthrowing. What liberation.
And he, Scarry, had answered the call. With his eyes fixed on those of this wild and marvelous creature, he had lifted his knee and stamped his boot down hard into the face of his whimpering prior, silencing the old fool and his God forever.
Then he and Wolf had danced away, the others following with the booty, leaving the road for a scented, untracked forest where they could suck the honey from each other’s body, and where no law ran except their own, no rites but those due to the satanic leaf green, goatlike God they worshipped. Male maenads they had been, ad gloriam, horned beasts of a horned deity, rending living animals and humans into pieces, raping, robbing, unstopped, unstoppable, feared and unfettered, their psalms the shrieks of the dying, their altar a butcher’s block.
Until she came. She and the jackasses with her, searching for erstwhile, lost companions that had been rotting in the leaf mold of a glade where they’d been slung days before, once he and Wolf had finished with them.
He can see her in that glade now, can Scarry; innocuous, worthless, like all females, yet, like all females, inspiring the godlike, lustful, exultant rage that must be slaked on her flesh as he’d wished to slake his on his mother.
Mirabile visu. A fawn caught in the thicket.
“First me and then you, eh, Scarry?” Wolf had said lovingly.
“You and me, Wolf, you and me.” It was how it had always been.
And, while Scarry pranced and watched, Wolf advanced on the offering, telling her what had been done to those she’d come looking for; the entertainment they’d provided before they’d died, the rapture of their bleating. Is agnus, ea caedes est.
Then, unbelievably, a piece of iron had connected her and Wolf, not a penis but a sword she’d had hidden. It linked them, the hilt in her hand, its point in Wolf’s chest.
Now Scarry, as he rides, weeps and whispers what had been his cry as he’d gathered the coughing, bubbling, beloved body in his arms. “Te amo. Don’t leave me, my Lupus. Come back. Te amo! Te amo!” But Wolf died that night, and the Horned Being with him.
Later, she’d sent soldiers who’d cleared the forest and hung severed pieces of Wolf’s pack from its branches.
Not Scarry, though. Using the woodcraft Wolf had taught him, he’d slipped away, to track and hill her who’d expelled him from his Garden of Eden. But she’d been too well guarded.
Eventually, desolate, a lost lamb, he’d been forced to return to the fold of the Christian God who’d triumphed, pretending he’d escaped from the outlaws’ attack on the pilgrimage, so jarred by its savagery and the murder of the good prior that he’d become a hermit in the wilderness for a while, beseeching mercy for himself and the souls of the dead.
They’d believed him. They’d rewarded him for his piety. His high connections had given him responsibility in which he had acquitted himself.
For, see, Scarry is now a shade that can adapt itself to its surroundings, blending with the devout, his prayers more pure than any others, his rant against sin louder than a trumpet. He feigns a naivete that charms.
For two years he has played his enforced role as an innocent in the virtue of Christian life, suffering it, hating it. But horned Gods do not die, and neither do their Chosen Ones. These last days, in his return to the forest, Wolf has taken up residence in Scarry’s brain, reminding him of their glorious abandonment and of the woman who ended it. “Bring her down,” Wolf says. “Kill her in My Name. You have the means.”
“I have, beloved. I shall.”
IT HAD BEEN ARRANGED between bishop and king that they should meet at Sarum Castle, but, as Rowley’s party rode along one of the straight Roman tracks that led to its hilltop across a wilting Wiltshire Plain, they saw a rider galloping toward it on yet another, with more men on horses tearing after as if they were pursuing him before he could reach its safety.
His clothes were nondescript, and in the speed of his going, his short cloak was blown parallel to his horse’s back.
“Henry,” Rowley said with admiration and dug in his spurs to meet up with the King of England.
By the time Adelia and the others joined them, the two men had dismounted and were in conversation. Adelia saw no reason to interrupt them and stayed on her palfrey, but the king strode over, took its reins to lead her apart.
He didn’t greet her, he rarely did, as if there was a special relationship between them that found courtesy unnecessary; it had little to do with sexual attraction-though there was a breath of that-more with the sense of equality he extended to her. Which could be charming but which Adelia, chafing under it today, decided was spurious; he merely had a regard for those who proved useful to him.
As she always did when he called on her, she thought: I’m a Sicilian, I am not his subject. I can refuse to do what he wants.
And knew, again, that she was helpless; she was in England, he was its king and refused to give her a passport, thus imprisoning her in a country that had trapped her even further during the years she’d spent in it by winding tentacles of love and friendship around her.
He extended a calloused hand and helped her down from her horse. “I gather the good Bishop of Saint Albans hasn’t told you why you’re summoned.”
“No.” Damned if she was going to “my lord” him, being no more pleased with him than she was with Rowley
“Lovers’ quarrel?” Henry showed his ferocious little teeth; he delighted in her illicit relations with his favorite bishop.
Adelia said nothing.
He kept on walking so that they progressed farther and farther away from the group behind them. “You’re to accompany Princess Joanna to her wedding in Sicily.”
“If I can take my daughter with me, I shall be delighted,” she said. Get the rules established from the beginning. Then, because she couldn’t resist knowing, she said: “Why?”
“To keep an eye on her health, woman, why else? I’m investing a lot in this marriage. I want the child to arrive in Palermo not only safe but well.”
“The princess surely has her own medical adviser.”
Henry II snorted. “She’s got Eleanor’s. As I remember he’s the fat bastard who cut out the fistula on my arse when we were in Poitiers and turned it putrid. Couldn’t ride for days. Eleanor has no judgment when it comes to doctors; she’s never been ill in her life.”
“There must be better ones.”
“There’s you. Or rather, officially there’s Mansur. You two can play your usual game. Winchester will be leading the party, a saintly man, and a good bishop, but not broadminded enough to accept a female as a doctor.”
“He’s broadminded enough to accept an Arab?”
The king displayed his teeth again. “He balked a bit, but I told him. ‘You wait ’til you get to Sicily,’ I said. ‘You’ll be hobnobbing with Jews, Saracens, plus various other heretics-and all of them government officials. Get used to it,’ I said.”
Aha, she’d found the weakness in his plan. She said: “What you have overlooked, Henry, is that when I pose as Mansur’s assistant, most people take me for his mistress-and the Bishop of Winchester’s not likely to let a trollop near the princess.”
“Oh yes he will. I’ve preserved your virtue…” He paused. “… such as it is. I’ve told him that the Lord Mansur is a eunuch with a perfectly respectable female assistant who interprets for him. Our good bishop needn’t be made aware of the fact that Mansur speaks better English than he does. The poor old bugger blinked, but he knows eunuchs aren’t capable of pleasuring trollops-or any other woman come to that.”
“They are, actually,” Adelia said.
The king ignored her. She received a nudge in her ribs. “I’m even giving you and Mansur a nice fat purse of money to go with you.”
That was a novelty. Henry counted every coin.
When she didn’t respond, he said: “Thought of everything, haven’t I?”
“About my daughter…”
Apparently, he didn’t hear her. “There’s another matter I want you to keep an eye on… You remember a certain sword you found in a cave on Glastonbury Tor two years ago and gave to me?”
“Excalibur?”
“For God’s sake, woman. Hush, will you?” The king looked back, but the two of them had progressed out of earshot of the group behind them.
“Excalibur?” Adelia said more quietly.
“Yes, well, that’s proved another pain in the arse. I should never have put the damned thing on display The new Abbot of Glastonbury wants it back, Canterbury says it’s theirs, the Welsh are wittering for it, even the Holy Roman Empire is claiming it as a right, God knows why And the Pope wants me to go on crusade with it, as if waving it around will bring the bloody infidels to their knees saying sorry”
Despite herself Adelia was disarmed; he could always make her laugh and admire; only this Plantagenet could call the most famed sword in Christendom a pain in the arse.
So far he’d managed to resist papal attempts to make him join other rulers fighting in the Holy Land; he said he had enough trouble holding together an empire of which England was only a small part, the rest of it running from the border of Scotland to the Pyrenees.
He’d told her once: “Go on crusade and some bugger pinches your throne whilst your back’s turned.”
Adelia’s acquaintanceship with Excalibur had been equally fraught. Not realizing at the time that the skeleton she’d found in a little tomb deep in the rock of Glastonbury Tor was King Arthur’s-knowledge and proof had come later-nor that the sword lying nearby was his, she’d been holding the dirty, encrusted but still sharp weapon when she’d been attacked.
She’d raised it to defend herself-it had seemed to leap in her hand of its own accord-and Wolf, that would-be rapist and killer, had speared himself on it.
In the end, they’d left Arthur’s quiet bones undisturbed, but Excalibur she’d given to Henry, another king who, for all his faults, was bringing an enlightenment and order to his little realm of England which, apart from the Kingdom of Sicily, her home, existed nowhere else in the world.
The murder of Thomas à Becket, apparently at the king’s instigation, had cast a shadow over the Plantagenet’s reign but, in the opinion of some-including Adelia-that intransigent archbishop had deliberately sought martyrdom by opposing every reasonable reform Henry had tried to introduce for his people’s good. If anybody should inherit that symbol of the Arthurian legend, she’d thought at the time, it was Henry II.
Now he would give it away.
However, she saw that he was in difficulty, and said so.
“I hope you do,” he told her. “That artifact conveys power. It’s like the Holy Grail. Anybody who has it can claim to be the descendant of Arthur, defender of Christianity against the forces of darkness, and have thousands flocking to his banner.” He paused and for the first time in their acquaintance, Adelia saw him embarrassed. “There are… princes…” He took a breath. “Certain princes who’d like to get their hands on it, a contingency that would be… unwise.”
Princes? And then she thought: Dear God, he means his sons.
Young Henry had already made one attempt to overthrow his father and it was said that the younger boy, Richard, was even more ambitious for power than his brother.
The king became brisk. “Anyway, I’m sending it with Joanna to give to my future son-in-law and good luck to him. He’s an ally, bless him, and he’s fighting the same enemy as I am. He’ll need Excalibur…”
“What enemy?” She hadn’t heard that Sicily was at war with anyone.
He hesitated, then he said: “It’s a battle of wills, not arms. You’ll see when you get there.”
“Very well, my lord,” Adelia prompted. “But why is this my concern?”
“Because you’re taking it with you. Well, not you personally; I’m having it put inside a cross and given to someone else to carry.” Adelia got another royal nudge in the ribs. “I’m told you’ll be pleased by my choice of crucifer. He’s a surprise for you.”
“Thank you. But, again, how is that my concern?”
“You’re to use your wits, woman; you’ve got plenty of them. It’s going to be a hazardous enough journey with all the treasure I’m sending to William as dowry… God’s entrails, but this wedding is ruining me.” Henry winced in pain; he hated expending money. “However, politically, the one thing I cannot afford is that Excalibur should fall into the wrong hands on the way.”
“But if you’re disguising it…”
The king turned to look across the sun-drenched sweep of the plain to the sudden rise of ground on which stood the towers that imprisoned his wife. “The world is changing, mistress,” he said, and his voice was bleak. “The numbers of those I can trust are dwindling. Spies and ill-wishers gather to bring me down, some of them in my own household.” His energy came back. “I hope that the only ones who will know what the cross contains are you, Saint Albans, of course, Mansur, Captain Bolt, and the crucifer himself. Five of you. But we can’t rely on that.”
“My lord, I still don’t see…”
“Well, I do,” he said. “You have a nose, mistress; it can smell a rat in the privy better than any I know. Should there be anyone in Joanna’s train, anyone, with an untoward interest in what the crucifer is carrying, I want him sniffed out and reported to Bolt so that my good captain can string him up by his balls and find out who he’s working for.”
Adelia glanced sideways at him, curious and a little alarmed. This was Byzantine reasoning; the revolt of his wife and son was making him overly suspicious if the only one he could put his trust in was her disadvantaged self.
However, she might as well capitalize on obsession. “I shall keep a keen lookout, my lord, and who will suspect me if I am accompanied by my daughter…?”
“Oh, no, you don’t,” he said. “I’m keeping that child as an assurance…”
“A hostage,” she shouted at him.
“… an assurance that you’ll come back. She stays. You go. Do you understand?”
Le roi le veult. She floundered in helplessness, never resenting anyone so much; no wonder Eleanor and Young Henry had rebelled. He wasn’t her king, either; she was a Sicilian subject.
Perhaps he realized it, for he began wheedling. “Rowley has arranged for her to stay with Eleanor while you’re away, so think how the child will prosper; Eleanor has a way with girls.” He pointed to a small figure that had rambled off. “Is that her? Introduce me.”
Allie had found a dewpond and was kneeling in it, studying something on one of the rushes while the dog Eustace cavorted in its water.
“That’s a pretty butterfly, isn’t it?” Henry said. If Eleanor was good with girls, he was awkward.
Without looking up, Allie hushed him. “Not a butterfly. It’s a damselfly, a common blue,” she said, “eating a leafhopper.”
Oh dear. Retrieving her dripping child, Adelia thought defiantly: Well, how many little girls can identify insects?
And heard Emma’s reply: How many would want to?
IT WAS SAID that the giants who’d built Stonehenge had also raised the great circular earthwork on which Sarum stood. If so, they had commanded the River Avon in a panorama that spread for miles in every direction and which no enemy could approach without being seen.
To climb the opening that led steeply upward between high, stepped banks was not only to leave a world of grass for that of stone but to pass from one sort of air to another. Where, below, the women’s veils had drooped, up here, on the bridge waiting for the portcullis to be raised, they fluttered in a strong breeze. It was always windy at Sarum.
Though the cathedral rose higher than the castle, only the gargoyles on its roof and soldiers patrolling the ramparts had the advantage of a view; at ground level the surrounding walls blocked in the little city as if they held it captive.
Certainly the cathedral’s monks felt that they, like Queen Eleanor, were imprisoned. As the portcullis went up for the king, a number of them tried to rush under it to gain the bridge outside. They were held back, none too gently, by sentries.
A richly dressed, rock-faced official bowed to the king. “Welcome, my lord.”
“All well, Amesbury?”
“All well, my lord.” The castellan looked venomously toward the monks. “Except for them. They keep trying to get out.”
“Why shouldn’t they?”
Amesburywas taken aback. “Because… my lord, because they are against us, you. The cathedral favors the queen; they could be taking secret messages to her supporters, engineering her escape, anything.”
Henry strolled over to the most vociferous of the monks. “Where do you want to go?”
“The river.” The man waved a fishing rod. “It is Friday, we need fresh fish, the dear queen needs it. All that monster there allows us is dried herring.”
“Off you go, then.”
The monk stared for a moment, unbelieving, and then, with his companions, bolted for the bridge. Amesbury hissed with disapproval.
Engineering the queen’s escape would be a considerable feat, Adelia thought as she and the others followed Henry Plantagenet across a moat, under the shadow of portcullises, and through guarded gates until they reached the castle bailey and the heart of this tiny city Like all town centers, it contained a busy market but, again, Adelia felt suffocation; only the wind was free, managing to swoop over the palisade to rattle the calico covers of the stalls and send the Plantagenet pennant on the roof beating against its pole as if it hated it.
Eleanor met them on the steps to the keep. “My lord.”
“My lady”
King and queen gave each other the kiss of peace with apparent affection.
“Maudit.” Eleanor snapped her fingers at Amesbury “Refreshment for my guests.”
“Amesbury, madam,” the castellan pleaded. “I tell you, my name is Robert of Amesbury.”
“Really?” Eleanor looked interested. “I wonder why I keep thinking it’s Maudit.”
Adelia felt Mansur touch her arm. “Maudit?”
“It means accursed,” she muttered back.
“Ah.”
The queen and the Bishop of Saint Albans were long acquainted, but her greeting to him was coldly formal-he was the king’s man and always had been.
She was kinder toward Mansur: “My lord, I have instructed my daughter’s doctor to welcome your opinion. I have held a high regard for Arab medicine ever since I went on crusade with my former husband.”
The former husband had been the King of France-Eleanor, Duchess of Aquitaine, didn’t marry just anybody. Ostensibly, the dissolution of that marriage had been because she’d given Louis two daughters, not an heir, but Adelia privately thought that Eleanor had been too much of a handful for that pious and indecisive French monarch.
The queen waited until Adelia translated and Mansur had bowed, then turned to Adelia herself with warmth. “I recollect you very well from our time in Oxfordshire, Mistress Amelia. Together, we overcame demons, did we not? It is a comfort to me that you will be in attendance on my child for her journey. And this is to be my little ward whilst you are gone, is it?”
Allie, who’d been carefully instructed, behaved well and curtseyed as she should, though her mother could have wished her less wet and muddy.
Careful not to touchher, Eleanor smiled at the child before addressing the king. “Henry, our dress allowance will have to be raised.”
The queen looked better than on the last occasion Adelia had seen her when, disguised as a boy, she’d been trying to escape her husband’s soldiers; then male attire had accentuated her fifty-one years as opposed to Henry’s forty Despite having given birth to a total of ten children, she was once more elegant, slim, and poised. There was no complaint that she, consort to two kings, who’d ruled the great duchy of Aquitaine in her own right and traveled to the Holy Land with an entourage of Amazons, was facing a lifetime’s incarceration; she might have been welcoming them to one of her own palaces.
Adelia knew her to be an impulsive, erratic woman with none of her husband’s intellectual power-but what pride was here, and what stoicism.
The chilled white wine brought to the keep’s second-floor apartment was excellent, as were the accompanying little biscuits. A harper sat in one corner, singing a love song.
It was a fine room, to which Eleanor had contributed touches of color with Persian carpets, cushions, and Flemish tapestries, but candles had to counter the shade provided by the outside walls that kept the sun from its windows.
A pretty cage for an exotic bird, Adelia thought, but still a cage.
Her heart bled for her own nestling now to be confined in it-and for Gyltha, a woman who had lived her life under sweeping and untrammeled horizons as an eel-seller in Cambridgeshire’s fenland. In fact, if Gyltha had not agreed to stay here with the child, Adelia would have bolted with both of them but, when consulted, Gyltha had said: “Little’un’s too young to be lollopin’ round foreign parts, bor, and I’m too old. Reckon as the queen’ll have to put up with the two of us.”
Immensely comforted, Adelia had kissed her. “She’ll be lucky to have you.”
And, indeed, as it turned out, Eleanor’s staff had been so reduced that she welcomed Allie’s nurse as an addition to it.
There was a sharp contrast between the two girls about to change places; Princess Joanna was a small facsimile of Eleanor in both dress and looks but without the lightning-bolt energy of either of her parents. Her little face was immobile. She kept close to a large, comfortable-looking woman in plain traveling dress, presumably her nurse.
There was a difference, too, in their leave-taking. Queen and princess kissed each other good-bye without emotion. Eleanor blessed her. “May your marriage be a happy one, my dear child, and may God and his sainted martyr Thomas à Becket have you in their keeping.”
This was a shaft at the king and Eleanor drove it home with a happy smile at her husband. “Saint Thomas is our daughter’s especial saint. She prays to him every night, do you not, my child?”
“Yes, madam.”
Adelia and Allie’s parting had to be equally short-the king wanted to reach Southampton next day. Adelia was nearly undone by her daughter’s stricken face; she’d tried to prepare the child during the journey to Sarum, but it was obvious that the reality had only now sunk in. Kneeling down so that they were on a level, she said: “Allie, I love you more than anything in the world. I wouldn’t be leaving you unless I had to. The queen has much to teach you but always remember that you are already splendid in my eyes.”
Oddly enough, it was Amesbury, with unexpected kindness, who saved them both from breaking down. Adelia had seen Rowley talking to him.
Lapsing into a Wiltshire accent, the castellan bent down toward Allie as she fought to keep her lips from quivering. “Do ee know what I got in the palace mews, my beauty?”
Allie shook her head.
“Kestrel. Fine young brancher and looking for a young lady as’ll train un to the fist.”
Allie held her breath. “I could do that, I help our austringer at home. I helped him mend a peregrine’s tail feather with an imping needle.”
“Did ee now? You’re the one, then.” The castellan/jailer looked at Adelia. “I’ve got a young un, six he is, a keen falconer. She could come out to fly the bird with him and me across the plain.”
Unable to speak her gratitude, Adelia grasped the man’s hand.
Nevertheless, it was terrible to turn around as she rode away and see that small figure with Gyltha at her side, waving from the ramparts. Mansur didn’t look back at all, but his silence suggested another parting that had been equally hard.
Rowley tried to engage her in encouraging conversation, but she wouldn’t speak to him.
S CARRY IS ALREADY at Southampton; he can move fast when he wants to, can Scarry. He’s wearing clerical dress today and is sitting in a back-street tavern near the Church of Saint Michael where, since it is a watering hole popular with the town’s clerics and their visitors, he passes unnoticed.
In any case, he looks unremarkable because he’s put on his bland face, the one he wears when he is involved in an act of betrayal. (Scarry has learned that to have no allegiance to kings or countries, or anyone but Wolf, can be profitable.)
Another man, not unlike him in dress, approaches the settle and table he has chosen in a dark corner of the tavern, says: “Good evening, master. Have you come far? May I join you?” His Latin has an accent from a country warmer than England. He calls for ale, a flagon for himself and one for Scarry, sits down, and taps his fingers on the table in a complicated rhythm.
Scarry taps back.
“We understand that Excalibur is on the move,” the man says, like someone commenting on the weather. “The king is sending it to Sicily with his daughter.”
Scarry inclines his head as if agreeing that it has indeed been a fine day.
“We want to… intercept it.”
There is a pause while a tapster slams two tankards on their table, slopping them both, wishes them health, and waits.
“And this for you, my man,” the agent says. “God bless you.” A copper coin is passed over, neither of too much value nor too little.
“The treasure chests will be heavily guarded,” Scarry says when the tapster goes.
“It won’t be in the chests. At least, we don’t think so. Too open to attack on the way. No, it’s to be carried separately. Find out by whom, and there’ll be a hundred gold pieces for you, twenty-five now and the rest on delivery.”
With a slight thump, a purse slides down the man’s sleeve and onto the table where it is instantly covered by his hand. Scarry puts out his own in an apparent pat of approbation and the switch is made.
“You understand? The sword is simply to disappear. It will not reappear until such time as its new owner is ready to unsheathe it. You will be contacted.”
Scarry nods amiably. His companion is one of Duke Richard’s agents; therefore, Scarry knows who, among the many people desirous of Excalibur, the new owner is to be. He doesn’t care much. What are earthly kings and dukes to him? Mere purveyors of money. He has his own king.
He isn’t even surprised that he is uniquely fitted to carry out the instruction; he is becoming used to his God’s bounty in making easy arrangement for him.
For, two years ago, when, in his agony at Wolf’s death, he was tracking the woman Aguilar, did he not see her coming down the Glastonbury Tor, reputed home of Arthur of Britain, with a man he now knows was the King of England?
Coiled in the long, warm grass, like an adder, he’d watched them.
The other man finishes his ale, stands, says loudly that he’s happy to have made Scarry’s acquaintance, and leaves.
Scarry doesn’t watch him go. He is smiling, remembering…
Chatting like old friends, they’d been that day, Adelia Aguilar and Henry Plantagenet.
And King Henry, who’d gone up the hill unarmed, had come down it with a sword in his hand…
HENRY II WAS SAVING money; only Joanna’s immediate court and servants would be sailing the Channel with her; the horses, grooms, cooks, laundresses, even some of the knights, soldiers, and others that were to form her marriage cavalcade overland were awaiting her in Normandy, the duchy Henry had inherited from William the Conqueror. It was cheaper than ferrying all of them over from England, though some of the treasure chests containing part of the dowry raised from the English would accompany her on the crossing.
He had, however, ordered Southampton Castle to lay on a farewell banquet for his daughter before she and the company caught the outbound tide. Even this, though, was less opulent than it might be-not so much because Henry had stinted, but because the castle servants and cooks knew, as did everyone else, that the king regarded time spent on eating course after course of food as time wasted.
Nevertheless, such dishes as were served at the great table in the castle’s hall that evening were simple by most banqueting standards but of fine quality So was the wine. From a gallery came the notes of viol and rebec as they accompanied a pure countertenor in song.
Halfway through, Henry Plantagenet stood up to raise his glass to Joanna.
“My lords, my ladies, gentlemen, may I commend to you this dutiful and excellent princess of England, Normandy, Anjou, Touraine, Aquitaine, Gascony, and Nantes who shall honor us and the Kingdom of Sicily by combining in her body these two great empires. May God be with her.”
Everybody rose. There was a shout: “To Joanna.”
The dutiful and excellent princess smiled her thanks.
The guests prepared to sit down again, ready to tuck into the spiced beef with oysters and battered egg dumplings that had arrived on the board.
But their king hadn’t finished with them; he was still on his feet; they must remain on theirs. “As you know, our most beloved Bishop of Winchester will be leading the journey to Sicily…”
He bowed to a small, round, richly dressed man who was breathing hard from what appeared to be agitation, but stopped shifting long enough to bow back.
“… and our well-beloved Bishop of Saint Albans with him.”
Rowley bowed.
“Most of you in this company are well and happily acquainted with each other,” Henry went on, “however, we have guests whom you have not yet encountered. I recommend to your friendship the Lord Mansur, who is highly versed in Arab medicine and will be assisting our good Doctor Arnulf in everything connected with my daughter’s health.”
Henry had eyes that flared when he was particularly intent. They flared now as they looked from the impassive face of the Arab to that of Eleanor’s Dr. Arnulf, who wasn’t taking this well.
But it was Father Guy, one of the Bishop of Winchester’s two chaplains, who stood up, quivering with outrage and courage. “If I do not mistake me, my lord, the man is a Saracen, a Saracen. Would you give your daughter’s well-being to one whose race is even now trampling the Holy Places?”
There was a general intake of breath, but Henry looked toward Mansur. “Lady Adelia, be so good as to ask my lord doctor if he has ever trampled a Holy Place.”
Adelia translated.
“Tell that son of a she-camel to go and commit adultery with a monkey,” Mansur said calmly, in Arabic.
Adelia turned back to the king and saw that, beside him, the Bishop of Albans, another Arabic speaker, was covering his mouth with his napkin.
“The lord doctor has never been to Jerusalem, my lord; he is Sicilian.”
It wasn’t quite true, but Henry didn’t want the truth. Anyway, since the age of eleven Mansur had been brought up in her foster father’s house in Salerno and was as Sicilian as she was.
“There you are, Father Guy,” the king said. He turned to Dr. Arnulf. And waited.
After a little difficulty, Dr. Arnulf managed a smile and a bow. “Of course, my lord. Delighted, my lord. The Lord Mansur shall be consulted on all medical matters.”
“Yes, he shall,” Henry said with emphasis. “Unfortunately, as you see, Lord Mansur speaks no tongue apart from his own, but in this regard, I have been most fortunate to procure the service of the Lady Adelia, longtime a friend to myself and the queen, who speaks Arabic and will be present to interpret between you all. She was born in Sicily, as was the Lord Mansur, and therefore both of them will be able to provide guidance, which I trust you to call on when you reach that country.”
Now it was the turn of Joanna’s ladies-in-waiting to be flayed. “Since we were able to reach Lady Adelia only at the last minute when, due to misfortune, she was without an attendant, I know that I can call on you, Lady Beatrix, Lady Petronilla, and Mistress Blanche, to share your maidservants with her and provide her with all affection and daily comfort in your power.”
He had given Adelia what status he could, but the stiff smiles and bows being accorded to her from across the table suggested that the three women who gave them weren’t going to clasp her to their bosom any more than Dr. Arnulf intended to be Jonathan to Mansur’s David.
“Also,” the king said, “may I present to you the man who will sail you down the Mediterranean when you reach it, the Lord O’Donnell of the Skerries, my admiral…”
Here was another stranger who’d been attracting glances of curiosity through dinner. With his black, curly hair tied in a plait and more showing at the open neck of his jerkin, the man didn’t look like an admiral; he looked like a pirate. He had curiously long eyes as if he could face forward yet still see to the side; they had rested on Mansur with interest and even longer on Adelia, making her uncomfortable.
The company welcomed Admiral O’Donnell and prepared to sit down at last. But…
“It is by God’s grace that the Lord O’Donnell was in this country on business,” continued the king, mercilessly. “We have not seen him these two years, yet in the past he and I have sailed through storms that would have foundered a lesser shipmaster. His fleet will be awaiting you at Saint Gilles, when you reach it, to sail you down the coast of Italy. And while on board, he shall be obeyed in all maritime matters.”
Good. Good. The man looked a fine rogue to be accompanying them overland, but if his ships were sound when they reached them… And now could they proceed with dinner?
No, they couldn’t.
“We owe our deep gratitude to our esteemed John, Bishop of Norwich, not only for his time and accomplishment in concluding the arrangements for our princess’s marriage with Sicily but in traveling the route that you will be taking and choosing the hostelries and monasteries to accommodate you on the way, an endeavor that has taken him no less than two years.”
Ah, their accommodation, yes, that was important. The company was pleased to toast the Bishop of Norwich. And now…
“Also,” Henry said-he was enjoying this-“his nephew, Master Locusta Scaresdale, who accompanied him. Though Bishop John is returning to his diocese, Master Locusta has consented to be your outrider, going ahead to inform your various hosts of your arrival. I commend him to you.”
Locusta? In Latin it meant lobster.
A dark-haired young man groaned. “William,” Adelia heard him whisper. “My name’s William.”
“Also,” the king said, “out of our charity and in the service of God, we have given our permission to certain devout pilgrims to the Holy Land that they may cross the Channel with you this evening and travel by land in the safety of my daughter’s train.”
Adelia’s mouth twitched. Henry loathed pilgrims; they were exempt from paying any tax for the pilgrimage’s duration and left a hole in his revenue.
The guests, however, nodded their heads at their monarch’s piety even as they looked longingly at the board…
“And, of course,” the king added, “they will be on board the ships that take you into the Mediterranean. I am sure they will be extended every Christian kindness.”
He took time with his head cocked on one side, seeming to wonder if there was more to say, reluctantly decided that there wasn’t, and at last waved his guests to their food.
It was too late; the beef was cold and the dumplings had shriveled.
Even after the meal, the king’s guests were expected to mingle amicably, which, under his gaze, they tried to do. Face after face appeared in front of Mansur and Adelia. Two of Henry’s knights, Sir Nicholas Baicer and Lord Ivo of Aldergate, were gravely courteous; both of them weighty, more diplomats than fighters, they seemed unsurprised at Henry’s choice of a Saracen doctor for his daughter-close servants of the Plantagenet eventually stopped being astonished at what he did.
Most of the other guests said polite things with a smile that didn’t stretch to the eyes; ladies-in-waiting, the pirate-admiral, clerics.
Father Guy didn’t bother to smile, though his colleague, Father Adalburt did-but he smiled at everything to the point of simplemindedness. He had never been out of England before, he told them.
“Is not this exciting? But how can you both be Sicilians when you are different colors?”
Adelia tried to explain the many cultures and races that the chaplain would encounter in Sicily “You will find it a very different country from this, Father.”
“Will I? But everybody there worships our Lord, I hope.”
Patiently, Adelia explained that there were as many forms of religion as there were races.
This upset him. “Ultima Thule,” he exclaimed. “And we take our dear princess there to marry? Salvam fac reginam, O Domine.”
As they watched him scurry away, the Bishop of Saint Albans came up, grinning. “I see on your faces the look of people who’ve been talking to Father Adalburt.”
“Where does such a buffoon come from?” Mansur asked in Arabic.
“Scar Fell, I believe. Somewhere in the Lake District, anyway.”
“And why?”
“The Bishop of Winchester is his godfather and employs him out of charity. The thing to do is regard him as a holy fool and enjoy him. I do.”
With meaning, Adelia said, “I am not enjoying anything.”
“Not forgiven me yet, then?”
“No.”
“You will. I’m too charming to withstand for long.” He winked at her and walked off to talk to Lord Ivo.
The trouble is you are, Adelia thought. He was in plain clothes today, which suited him better than a bishop’s regalia: thigh boots, swirling cloak, a peacock’s feather in his cap. Big, strong, she never knew if he towered among other men in fact, or only in her eyes. Though, in working for the Plantagenet, they’d been through hell together, he’d always been able to make her laugh.
But not this time. In any case, their meetings and conversation would be restricted from here on in; he could hardly be seen to single out a woman who was apparently nothing to him. Well, that suits me.
The friendliest reception given to the Arab and Adelia came from Bishop John of Norwich and his nephew; having sojourned in Sicily for so long, they were eager to exchange experiences with two of its natives.
They’d made maps of Joanna’s forthcoming route, which they were distributing, long thin scrolls of parchment like scarves on which were drawn each accommodating castle or hospice, the roads between them marked with the bridges, borders, and tolls to be encountered. Adelia and Mansur were asked for their approval.
Pleased to be consulted, the two Sicilians studied the map. “We’re not going via the Alps, then?” Adelia asked.
That was the most straightforward route. Coming to England, she’d traveled it in reverse, by boat from Salerno up the Italian coast to Genoa, through the Mont Cenis pass into France and thence to the Channel.
Now, she saw, they would be going overland via the extreme west, hugging the edge of the Atlantic, down through Aquitaine, to Saint Gilles on the Mediterranean coast, where they’d board ship for Sicily It would take longer and involve somewhat more time at sea-Adelia still remembered with discomfort the Mediterranean storm that had nearly capsized the boat taking her to Genoa; she didn’t like ocean voyages.
“We decided the route through Northern Italy would be a little too exciting for the princess, didn’t we, my lord bishop?” Locusta said.
His uncle smiled back at him. “We did indeed. The peace between the Lombards and Barbarossa is a little too fragile; we can’t allow Joanna into a war. From Saint Gilles you will travel by ship all the way to Sicily”
“I see. Then I think, my Lord Mansur thinks, that you have done excellently”
“Thank you.” The bishop looked at his nephew. “Let us hope it goes according to plan for you, eh, Locusta?”
The young man sighed. “Homo proponit, sed Deus disponit. We can only hope.”
Adelia smiled at the young man. “Locusta?”
“I was christened William, lady” He shook a finger in mock disapprobation at the bishop. “But it seems I emerged from the womb so angular and covered in black hair that my good uncle here nicknamed me for a lobster before it is boiled. Locusta I was and Locusta, I fear, I must remain.”
At the door, the Bishop of Winchester was agitatedly telling Admiral O’Donnell, “But they are the wrong sort of boats…”
Hearing disputation, Henry approached them. Adelia, about to leave the room, stopped to listen.
The bishop appealed to the king. “This person, my lord… I have been to the harbor… this person is taking us over the Channel in the wrong sort of boats.”
“Wrong sort of boats, O’Donnell?”
The seaman shrugged. He was very tall. “My lord, what’s wrong is the wind. If it fails to rise, my oarsmen will be rowing us across the Channel.” He looked down at the bishop. “The little fella here is complaining at the lack of castles…”
“Indeed, indeed,” the bishop said. “There should be castles, turrets on our boat, it is too plain. One at the front, one at the back, for defense against pirates…”
“I believe ‘fore and aft’ is the correct expression,” Henry said. “What pirates? Are you aware of any pirates in my Channel, O’Donnell?”
“I am not, me lord. Didn’t you and I clear it of the bastards long ago? However, if the little fella wants castles, he can have castles, for they’re a marvelous way of capsizing a boat in a storm-but not on my fokking ships he doesn’t.”
Henry took the bishop by the elbow. “You see, my lord, Admiral O‘Donnell may be a foulmouthed, disrespectful, opinionated limb of Satan and, what’s worse, an Irishman, but at sea he’s Neptune and nobody knows the English seas better-nor the Mediterranean, come to that.” He turned back to O’Donnell. “Is that where you’ve been these last two years?”
There was a gleam of white teeth. “A mari usque ad mare. And in Christian company, sure enough. Enriching me soul ferrying crusaders to the Holy Land.”
“Enriching your pocket, you mean. God’s eyes, I should have been a bloody sailor. Well, let us go and see if we can whistle up a breeze.”
O’Donnell saw Adelia watching him and gave an elaborate bow.
So this man would be accompanying them overland on their journey to the Mediterranean, would he? She wished he wasn’t; he made her uncomfortable; she didn’t know why; there was something about him…
On the way out of the door, she was accosted by the princess’s ladies-in-waiting. They were young, beautiful, and exquisitely dressed-Adelia was glad she was in Emma’s pretty bliaut and cloak-and might have been sisters except that Mistress Blanche, as her name indicated, was fair, the other two dark. Suddenly friendly, they spoke as if of one mind, like triplets. “My dear,” trilled Lady Petronilla in an Aquitanian accent, “you have no maid with you? Such a misfortune. How did it happen?”
“Allow us to remedy that situation for you,” said Lady Beatrix, another one from Aquitaine to judge from her speech. “We can, can’t we, Blanche?”
“The moment the king mentioned your lack, it came to us.” Lady Petronilla snapped her fingers at a slight figure standing in the doorway “So fortunate that we have such a one who is surplus to our requirements. The girl was attached to the household of my sister-in-law, Lady Kenilworth, you know, who no longer has need of her.”
“We gift her to you,” Lady Beatrix said, barely suppressing a giggle.
The gift came forward, tripped over its overlong skirt, and fell down.
“English, I fear,” Mistress Blanche said in a stage whisper, “but we are sure she will suit you admirably”
“Thank you,” Adelia said, bewildered.
That was too much for them; they turned and walked away, their shoulders shaking.
Adelia helped her new maid to her feet. “What’s your name?”
“Boggart, ladyship, I’m Boggart.”
“Boggart? It can’t be your name.”
Here in England, a boggart was a clumsy and malicious household sprite that caused milk to sour, objects to disappear, and animals to go lame. This child, only fifteen if she was a day, looked innocent enough with her round, freckled face and wide blue eyes.
“I think so, ladyship,” Boggart said, cheerfully. “Never known no other.”
“But what were you christened?”
“Don’t know as I was, ladyship.”
Oh, dear. Adelia regarded her new acquisition; the girl was clean but her small hands were those of an unlikely lady’s maid, being calloused and with grime in the wrinkles of the knuckles that no scrubbing could remove. Yet a lady’s maid was required on this journey, if only to provide Adelia with necessary status. “Well, um, Boggart, are you willing to enter my service?”
“Eh?” From the girl’s look of incomprehension, it seemed she was puzzled by being given an option. “What’d I have to do?”
“Lord, I don’t know.” Adelia, never having had a lady’s maid as such, was flummoxed; Gyltha had run her household with a rod of iron and such efficiency that Adelia’s requirements had been seen to almost without her noticing. What did ladies’ maids do?
“I could clean your boots,” Boggart said, eagerly. “I’m a wonderful boot cleaner.”
Adelia sighed. The Aquitanian ladies had given her a pig in a poke. They’d wanted rid of this child; the wonder was why they’d brought her along in the first place. But the sudden hope in the poor little thing’s eyes made rejection of her unthinkable.
“I belong to you now, then, do I, ladyship?”
“You don’t belong to anybody. I’m asking you if you’d like to enter my employment.”
Again the look of incomprehension. Nobody had told Boggart that slavery had been abolished in his lands by William the Conqueror, that she was not a parcel to be passed from hand to hand. “I’m a wonderful boot cleaner,” she repeated.
Adelia gave another sigh. “I suppose that’ll do to start with.”
With Boggart trailing behind her like a puppy, she followed the rest of the guests out onto the ramparts.
Southampton had become a major port, trading good English wool with Normandy in return for wine, and today its harbor was busy with ships coming in and those waiting to go out once there was wind.
The Bishop of Winchester, still complaining to the king, was pointing out the two vessels allocated for the princess’s crossing; one for Joanna herself and her court, the other for the lesser mortals attached to it.
Adelia rather sympathized with the frightened little bishop; to her inexperienced eye the two boats, though freshly and brightly painted, were lower slung, with one bank of oars, two masts, and less ornamentation, than the becastled vessels she’d been in before. Only a limp royal Plantagenet pennant showed which was the princess’s flagship.
O‘Donnell was insisting that the company spend the night aboard. “Me Turkish friend here thinks he scents a sou’westerly breeze on the way, do you not, Deniz?”
He referred to a squat, strong-smelling goblin of a man in wide sailcloth trousers and a waistcoat that showed bare, brown arms with muscles like iron balls.
Deniz grunted.
“Denise?” Adelia whispered to Mansur. They were strange names she was encountering today.
“Deniz. In Turkish it means ‘the sea,’” Mansur told her.
The O’Donnell’s eyes slid in their direction. “Indeed it does, master,” he said. “For it’s the sea I fished him out of, and there’s nobody understands it better.”
He speaks Arabic as well as Latin, Adelia thought. We must be careful.
“And the breeze’ll come up tonight,” he was saying, still looking at her and Mansur, “so we can catch the tide at dawn, and I’ll not be missing it in the kerfuffle of getting all the fine ladies and gentlemen to their berths that early.”
It was kerfuffle enough as it was. Horses were kicking at being led down into the hold. Shouting dockers loaded chests of treasure and clothes, followed anxiously by the ladies-in-waiting holding up their skirts. Priests and clerks teetered on gangways and argued with the sailors about which boat should take them.
All very well, Adelia thought, but where is our protection? The treasure they were carrying with them en route would surely attract robbers; women, servants, and clerics were unlikely to be able to fend them off.
Then, in the distance, she saw the tall figure of Captain Bolt briskly ushering his men aboard the second ship-and was comforted. She and the good captain had made each other’s acquaintance during one of her previous investigations. As well as showing himself to be an excellent soldier devoted to his king, he’d been kind to her. He was the one who, at Henry’s command, had cleared the Somerset forest of the late Wolf’s remaining outlaws, and, afterward, had the bodies of those she’d so desperately searched for disinterred and given Christian burial.
Disengaging Boggart from a hawser she’d fallen over and managed to become entangled in kept Mansur and Adelia momentarily delayed on the quayside.
Again, the Bishop of Saint Albans casually strolled over to them. “Who is this?”
Adelia finished brushing Boggart down. “It’s my new lady’s maid.”
“Good God.” He turned to Mansur. “My dear doctor, is that box yours?” He pointed to a large packing case waiting with others at the end of the quay to be loaded.
“No, my lord.”
“Really? I thought it might contain your medicaments. Perhaps you should make sure.” He bowed briefly to Adelia and returned to the group of clergy.
“What was that about?” Adelia snapped, looking to Mansur. Their box of medicaments had already been taken aboard.
“Let us see. Tell that clumsy female to stay where she is.”
“Stay here,” Adelia told Boggart.
Together she and the Arab went to investigate, encountering an odor that was at once strong and familiar to Adelia’s nostrils. “It’s Ward,” she said, clutching Mansur’s arm.
“The dog? How can it be?”
“I’d know that smell anywhere.” She hurried to the packing case. Behind it, hidden from the quay’s hubbub, stood a young man holding a piece of string to which was attached a small, unsavory-looking dog. Both were happy to see her but, while the animal bounced its welcome, the youth kept his face straight and his East Anglian speech lugubrious.
“Ain’t supposed to be seen with you two, am I? Disregarded, that’s what I gotta be, so Prior said.”
Adelia collapsed on him. “Ulf, oh Ulf. It’s you. What are you doing here? I am so pleased to see you. Oh, Ulf.”
Gyltha’s grandson had grown since they’d first encountered each other in the Cambridgeshire fens. The truculent, ill-favored child he’d been then, one she’d come to love-and had saved from a terrible abductor-was now considerably cleaner except for the light stubble on his chin. His unruly hair was hidden by the wide-brimmed hat of a pilgrim, but like most fenmen, he still pretended to a gritty dispassion.
“Get off,” he said, wriggling out of Adelia’s clutch. He nodded at Mansur, who nodded back; neither face showing pleasure at the meeting, though their eyes were glad.
“And Ward, too.” Adelia cupped her hands round her dog’s face, careful to wipe them on her kerchief afterward. “What are you both doing here?”
“Me, on the king’s orders. I’m incognito, I am. And that there stinker’s here a-cause the prior a-reckoned as you’d need him.”
Adelia smiled. “I’m in no danger this time.” Prior Geoffrey of Cambridge, her first friend in England, always worried for her safety had given her Ward’s predecessor, an equally smelly hound, so that, should she be at risk, she could always be traced by its scent.
As it had turned out afterward, the dog had indeed saved her life and lost its own in doing it. When, to her regret, she’d been forced to move from Cambridge, Ward had been one of the friends she’d had to leave behind.
“Prior don’t think so,” Ulf told her, “‘That girl’s born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward.’ That’s what he said. ‘You take that odiferous bugger to her and tell her to keep him close,’ he said. And that’s what I’m a-doing.”
“But what’s all this about the king’s orders?”
Ulf tutted at her ignorance. His gaze directed itself deliberately on a large, plain wooden cross leaning beside him against the packing case. “Cos o’ that.”
Adelia looked at it for a minute before it came to her. “My God,” she said. “You’re the crucifer. So the king consulted Prior Geoffrey-how wise of him.”
“He don’t have to heft it,” Ulf said with feeling. “That’s heavy, that old bit o’ wood, considering it’s hollow and what’s inside it don’t weigh too much. Story is I’m a-taking my grandpappys cross to Jerusalem to put on the Holy Sepulchre so’s to account for Grandpappys sins.” He grinned.
She smiled fondly back. His grandfather had sinned. Prior Geoffrey, leader of Saint Augustine’s in Cambridge, where Ulf was now learning law, had, as a young priest, formed a happy but illicit relationship with the equally young Gyltha, a liaison that, in the second generation, had produced this wonderful grandson.
The subterfuge was clever. It was quite usual for those who couldn’t go on crusade themselves to send something of their own by proxy to the Holy Land. Henry, that crafty, crafty king, obviously with Rowleys help, had remembered his friendship with the prior, and the two of them had worked out this plan for Excalibur’s secret journey. Who would expect such a stripling to be carrying inside his cross the sword that all Christendom would kill to lay its hands on?
“And when we gets to Sicily,” Ulf said, looking round to make sure nobody could hear, “old Rowley is to crack open the wood and give you-know-what to you-know-who. Pity as you can’t see it now, bor. That’s a sword and a bit, I can tell you. That’s got magic, that has.”
“I’ve seen it,” Adelia said. Magical or not, she didn’t want to see it again.
Ulf handed the dog’s lead to Adelia and heaved the cross onto his shoulder. “I better get aboard, and you remember as I’m incognito. Us holy pilgrims don’t have nothing to do with you gentry.” He peered out, found the coast clear, and went off pretending to stagger as he went.
Adelia untied the string from Ward’s collar and replaced it with her kerchief, which looked slightly better. Neither of her new acquisitions today was going to improve her standing in the princess’s train, but she was so glad of them. And even if she and Mansur could not be seen talking to Ulf, they would at least have one loving companion on their travels-two, if you counted Ward. The boy-she supposed she must now think of him as a young man-had the solidity and common sense of his grandmother; they would be taking something of Gyltha with them.
In any case, would the coming year be so bad?
The disgusting phrase she’d heard men use about rape-“Lie back and enjoy it”-came to her mind. Yes, she was being used, forced to accede to a demand against her will. On the other hand, Allie was as safe as she could be and had Gyltha to look after her, while she herself was about to set out on a journey she’d been wanting to make for years and in a style that, apart from the inevitable dangers of all travel, was as safe as possible under the circumstances.
Adelia took in a breath of air in which the seagulls were gliding for the pleasure of it. She touched Mansur’s hand. “Oh well…” she said.
He inclined his head; he knew what she meant, he always did. He was another who was going home.
NIGHT HAS FALLEN on the harbor. It is hot, uncomfortable, and crowded in the cabins of the royal vessels as they wait for the wind that will come with the dawn tide, but the passengers are tired so that, one by one, their lanterns-no naked flame is allowed on board-are extinguished. Except for their riding lights, the ships are mere shapes, like two dragons in the darkness…
No, one lantern is still burning. One man prefers the deck to his cabin and has wedged himself against a hatch so that he can commune with his Messiah in peace-or as much peace as the Messiah gives him,
“We have been introduced, beloved.” Scarry’s mouth moves but no sound comes from it. “I managed to abide her, for so I must. Even close to, she is no beauty-except for the smile, which she gave once, and then… well, I confess it: suum cuique pulchrum. The skin is dark blond like that of a Greek. You would have enjoyed chewing on it.
“Her eyes, which are brown, show an insult to all men. I am anyone’s match, they say, I have knowledge. What presumption, what challenge.
“I have employed a minion to search her luggage. There is no sign of Excalibur, but of a certainty she knows where it is. To whom else would the king have entrusted it but her, who led him to it?
“Keep your temper, my joy, my love, as I do. We have time, we have a thousand miles. We shall have the sword, and she shall be brought down. But slowly, piece by piece, a pedibus usque ad caput, chop, chop, until the wits go.
“For you, Wolf. On your altar. To you who were the equal of a god.”
A STRONG BREEZE came up, as the little Turk had said it would.
The Bishop of Winchester performed the usual ceremony, committing the boats and everyone in them to the mercy of God. To his concern, however, the admiral performed a ceremony of his own. Standing on the prow of his flagship, he raised his arms and spoke to his waiting crews in Irish, his voice traveling easily from ship to ship: “Amach daoibh a chlann an righ.”
Adelia asked one of the oarsmen what he’d said and was told,
“It’s the words Eva the witch says to the Children of Lir when she turns them into swans: ”Out with you on the water, ye children of the king.”
“Isn’t that a curse?” It was certainly pagan.
“Maybe, maybe, but swans do float and keep a-floatin’. And it’s with us sailors, d’ye see, that we’d rather have a curse from himself than a blessing from the Pope.”
Whatever it was, the oarsmen were able to take their ease while the vessels proceeded smartly over the Channel under sail, heeling slightly with the wind a-beam.
WORD ISSUED FROM Joanna’s deck cabin. The princess was seasick. Dr. Arnulf, looking none too well himself was being called to her side.
“And we attend, too,” Adelia told Mansur firmly. “Not that I know of anything to help seasickness, but if he goes, we go.”
The precedent that Arnulf was not Joanna’s only appointed doctor must be set.
The royal cabin was crowded, dark, and smelled of vomit. The sufferer was hidden in a cluster of people who hung onto beams and, occasionally, one another to keep upright. From the midst of anxious ladies-in-waiting and maids, the new arrivals heard the voice of Dr. Arnulf: “The bile is blackish, the princess should be bled at once. Fetch me my leeches.”
“Ginger.” This was Joanna’s nurse, Edeva. “Ginger’s good.”
“Surely…” It was the Bishop of Winchester’s turn. “… a bone of Saint Erasmus attached to her stomach would be more efficacious; I think we have one in the ossuary we brought with us, haven’t we, Father Guy?”
Which of the saints was Erasmus? Adelia had a vague remembrance of Somerset herdsmen invoking him to cure cattle pest; presumably he turned his spiritual hand to maritime upsets as well.
Father Guy pushed past her without greeting, hurrying to get his box of bones. His colleague, Father Adalburt, Adelia noticed, was also here, using an aspergillum to sprinkle holy water on anyone he could reach which, because of the crowd around her and the ship’s brisk motion, did not include the princess.
“The nurse speaks well,” Mansur said quietly in Arabic. “Ginger is good, but the child also needs fresh air.”
Adelia was taken aback; it was rare for Mansur to prescribe, but he probably knew more about mal de mer than she did; in his sad youth among the monks who’d castrated him he’d been sent on the long voyage to sing in Byzantium.
She raised her voice. “The Lord Mansur wishes to see his patient.”
There was a reluctant movement that gave them both passage through to where Joanna lay shivering and uncomplaining, her pointed little face livid under a swinging lantern-an object that, Adelia thought, couldn’t be helping matters. The girl looked up at Mansur without interest, raised herself and was sick into a bowl.
“So much for him comin’ yere,” her nurse said, vengefully “Don’t do no good at all, do he? Bloody Saracen.”
“Tell them,” Mansur said. “Some powdered ginger, wrap her up warm, and take her on deck.”
Adelia told them. Obviously, the child would mend once she was on land, but this wasn’t about seasickness, it was a test to see whether or not she herself could do her job should the princess ever become truly ill. Would they listen to Mansur?
They didn’t. Fortunately for the princess, it was discovered that Dr. Arnulf’s leeches had been wrongly stowed in the other ship.
However, a saintly knuckle was bound to Joanna’s midriff and ginger administered, but only on the nurse’s say-so. Disregarded, Adelia and Mansur left the cabin.
Adelia lurched over to the ship’s side. “Damn, damn, dammit.”
“Trouble?” The Bishop of Saint Albans was behind her.
She didn’t look round. “They’re not taking any notice of us.”
“We’ll see about that.”
A minute later, she heard his voice coming from the princess’s cabin; the name of the king was mentioned several times.
“He will right things for us,” Mansur said.
“He does everything right,” Adelia said bitterly, “except parting me from my daughter.”
“It will not hurt her.” For the first time Mansur showed that he, too, thought Allie had been allowed to run wild. “Nor could he permit you to stay with Lady Emma. You were at risk.”
“Eh?”
He told her everything. Of the danger she’d been in while in Somerset from an unknown assailant, of Rowley desperate concern.
Because she’d been unaware, she had difficulty in believing him. Or Will and Alf, for that matter; good men but not the most reliable of sources.
Anyway, in Mansur’s rippling Arabic it sounded like a tale from One Thousand and One Nights… a demon attempting to kill her, two faithful fellahin looking out for her…
“But who? Why?” She had no enemies.
“The Will and the Alf believed it to be the wolf man’s beloved…” Here Mansur spat into the sea. “… the one called Slurry? Sparry?”
“Scarry?” She hadn’t spoken the name in two years; she remembered the Latin lament that had shaken the trees as he’d cradled the dead Wolf in his arms. Te amo. Te amo.
“Oh, that’s nonsense. The man’s dead. If you remember, Captain Bolt cleared the forest.” And without mercy. Bits of the outlaws had hung from trees for days.
“The bishop does not think so. He believed the Will and the Alf.”
“Why didn’t Rowley tell me?”
Mansur shrugged. “He only told me on the way to Sarum.”
“But why didn’t he tell me?”
“You would not speak to him. Perhaps it is better in any case that you did not know until we reached Normandy, you might not have left.”
“Of course I wouldn’t have left.” Always supposing there was a maniac after her… “He wouldn’t hurt Allie, would he?”
The Arab looked down at her. “Why should he do that? You imagine vain things. Allie is safe enough in Sarum, where her father has put her.”
Logic had little application to fear, but Adelia tried to apply it because, at one level, she knew her friend was right.
“Now you will forgive the bishop,” Mansur said.
In the sense that Rowley had placed their daughter in the charge of Queen Eleanor against the wishes of herself, nothing had changed. But if there were an assassin roaming Somerset-and Adelia still had trouble believing it-Allie was safely out of his way
What was explained was Rowley’s anger that night; he’d always shown fury when he was frightened for her. Stupid man, she thought, as her own anger drained away.
Which left the dilemma that when they could have been friendly together, she had refused. Now that she would, they had no opportunity to; she dare not compromise him, nor could he compromise himself.
“Oh, damnation,” she said, wearily
A shivering princess emerged on deck, wrapped round by a thick cloak and her nurse’s arm, to be helped to windward-presumably because it was the farthest side from Mansur and Adelia.
At that another voice took command. “No, no, the little one will be better to leeward, d‘ye see,” Admiral O’Donnell said. “Over this side what comes up tends to fly back in your face.”
Joanna was helped across the deck and her hands placed about a cleat. “Hang onto that, mavourneen, and fix your dear eyes on the horizon. Is that better now?”
Wanly, the princess nodded that it was.
“But maybe,” the O‘Donnell said, sliding his eyes toward Adelia, “we should dispense with the little dog.”
Adelia glanced down at her feet where Ward, looking as wan as the princess, had put his head on her shoes and was exuding a smell that competed against the freshness of wind and sea.
There had already been complaints about him from the ladies-in-waiting with whom Adelia had shared the night-“He’ll give our little dogs fleas.” “Our little dogs are perfumed.”-and she’d been compelled to shut him outside on deck where, tied to a stanchion, he’d whined away the hours at being parted from the mistress with whom he’d only just been reunited.
Shrugging, she turned away, Ward staggering after her on unsteady legs.
So the battle of the doctors had been won-with Rowley’s help.
Adelia wondered if the royal nurse, obviously a powerful figure in Joanna’s life, would prove an ally now that Mansur’s advice had triumphed.
It appeared that she would not. Across the width of the deck, Edeva, her substantial Irish figure looming over her charge, could be heard stating in a loud mutter that “darkies” would only lay hands on “my darling” over her dead body
AT THE MOUTH of the Orne, a galloper was sent ahead to Caen while the two ships stopped to pretty themselves. Sails were taken down, the salt of the Channel cleansed from woodwork, gilding was polished, bunting was spread, musicians readied their instruments, oarsmen settled into their benches. The company arrayed itself on deck. A recovered Joanna, dressed in white and gold, was placed on a raised throne and the sun shone on her.
Father Adalburt was expressing his surprise at Normandy’s similarity to England. “Look, look,” he kept saying, “fields and… and reeds. And there… wading birds just like those at home. Who would have thought it? Dear Lord, how wondrous are Thy works.”
Slowly, with oars dimpling the water in unison, and to the sound of flute and tabors, they began to glide down the river from which the Norman warships of William the Conqueror had set out for England more than a hundred years before.
On the banks, reed cutters dropped their scythes to watch, and herdsmen left their cows, calling to their wives and children to come and see these unearthly swans go by
As the ships entered the harbor, the musicians on board changed their instruments to trumpets and blew a fanfare that was answered by a line of tabarded heralds on the quay.
Dressed in its best, Caen’s entire nobility had turned out to greet its Plantagenet princess.
It might have saved itself the trouble; Joanna had no eyes for anyone but the young man robed in peacock colors in the forefront of the crowd. Showing animation for the first time, she bounced, squeaking with pleasure. “Henry!”
Crowned eight years ago when his father had feared for the succession, the Young King was glorious, resembling his mother in his beauty and his father not at all.
And kind, Adelia thought, as Joanna ran across the lowered gang-plank to be picked up and whirled around in her brother’s arms, both of them abandoning royal dignity Here was someone showing more care for the girl than the parents who had let her go so easily.
And charming. Everybody on board the royal boat, from bishop to oarsmen, was thanked for his sister’s safe arrival in Normandy. He was gracious to Mansur… “My lord, your fame in medicine precedes you.” To Adelia he said: “Mistress, we are honored by a lady so knowledgeable in Arabic. Have you spoken it long?”
By the time Adelia had risen from her deep bow and was ready to reply, he had passed on to the next recipient of his attention. She didn’t mind; it had been nice of him to distinguish her by asking. But she was left with an impression of lightness, an easiness without depth. A fine prince, maybe, but not a king. A symbol, not an administrator.
There was the trouble, she thought. When he was this boy’s age, Henry Plantagenet had fought for and won the throne of England and already given it a stability that was the envy of monarchs everywhere.
Young Henry, on the other hand, had been passed an easy crown without responsibility, because he himself either had none or wasn’t ready for it, leaving him with the trappings of kingship and no means to apply them, a situation that, egged on by Eleanor, had caused resentment and, eventually, rebellion.
Father and son had since exchanged the kiss of peace-but at a price. According to Rowley, Young Henry’s return to the fold had been bought with the enormous stipend of a hundred pounds of Angevin money a day Which, from the look of it, he was spending. His retinue as they progressed toward the Abbaye-aux-Hommes and its church of Saint Étienne for a service to greet Joanna included at least fifty noisy young knights complete with squires, all gorgeously dressed and mounted. To the disapproval of the staid Sir Nicholas Baicer and Lord Ivo, they chattered and laughed throughout the ceremony so that it was difficult to distinguish the words of the mass. Nor did their Young King attempt to quiet them.
Adelia, however, was encouraged; with an escort as large as this, she thought, the safety of the journey to Sicily was ensured.
She said so to Captain Bolt as she emerged from the church to find him and a troop of his men waiting outside, ready to escort her and the ladies of the party from the Abbaye-aux-Hommes to the Abbaye-aux-Dames, where they would spend the night, Caen being unique in having two great convents, one for men, one for women, standing on either side of the city; the first built by William the Conqueror and the second by his wife, Matilda, both in expiation of their sin of marrying each other against the law of consanguinity-they’d been cousins.
“Them,” Captain Bolt responded with all the contempt of a professional soldier for men who paid for the land they held of the king by a knightly service that allowed them to go home after thirty days. “No discipline. See how they behaved in church? Shocking it was.”
WARD SPENT THE NIGHT somewhere in the bowels of the nunnery with Boggart. Dog and maid had become delighted with each other, Boggart because, for the first time in her life she had something, however smelly, on which to lavish affection, and Ward because Boggart, though lacking skill as a lady’s attendant, was a marvel at stealing food from kitchens with which to feed him.
That’s one problem solved, then, Adelia thought, as she climbed wearily into the large bed already containing Lady Beatrix, Lady Petronilla, and Mistress Blanche. Dear Lord, keep Allie safe and don’t let her be missing me as much as I’m missing her.
THE MORNING BROUGHT its own problem, a larger one.
The ladies of the party had risen early to be escorted across Caen to the Abbaye-aux-Hommes, where they were now gathered in its courtyard waiting for the great journey to Sicily to properly begin.
And waited.
Loud and angry voices could be heard coming from inside the monastery, the Bishop of Saint Albans’s louder and angrier than anyone’s.
At last he emerged, flanked by Lord Ivo and Sir Nicholas Baicer, both looking nearly as thunderous as he did. He bowed to Joanna. “My lady, I must inform you that the Young King has gone to Falaise. For a tournament, apparently And all his knights with him. He begs you to expect his return in a few days.”
What the princess replied was inaudible, but Adelia heard Lady Priscilla exclaim, “A tournament, how I adore tournaments. Oh, that he might have taken us with him.”
A few days? It might not matter to that young woman how long the journey took-she had no child waiting for her to come back.
As for the Young King… it was known that he was addicted to tournaments, but this was irresponsibility; what an abrogation of duty.
Adelia had been present at a tournament once during a visit to Emma’s Normandy manor near Calais and, for her, that had been one tournament too many. They were called entertainments, two teams of knights hacking away at each other in what was supposed to be a mock battle, but during the melee at Calais four young men had been killed and fifteen others permanently maimed.
The attraction for the victors was in holding the defeated to ransom, along with their armor and horses-a way of earning so much money that as many as several hundred eager knights would take part, not only wasting precious lives but trampling peasants’ crops for miles around. Henry in his wisdom had banned them from England but here, it seemed, under the nominal rule of the Young King, they were still legal.
She saw Captain Bolt talking with Rowley and, when he’d finished, went up to him. “What can be done?”
“Nothing.” Bolt was tight-lipped with fury. “We wait.”
They waited for four days, during which Caen’s welcome to the princess and her large company began to drain away-like its resources.
On the fifth day a messenger was sent to Falaise to ask the Young King when he was expecting to return.
Again, Adelia approached Captain Bolt. “What’s happened?”
“The messenger had to go on to Rouen. That young b…” Bolt took in a long breath. “… the Young King’s heard as there’s another big tournament there and he’s off to fight in it.”
“Rouen’s, what, eighty miles away What are we going to do?”
“I dunno, mistress. The bishops and Sir Nicholas and Lord Ivo are in conference about it.”
Master Locusta, it appeared, was frantic that his arrangements with the castles and monasteries scheduled to receive them on the way would be put out. “I’ve no wish to speak ill of the Young King, but really…”
“I think you’re justified in speaking ill of the Young King this time,” an impatient Adelia told him.
The conference lasted another day On the seventh, it came to a decision. Another messenger was sent to the Young King at Rouen to tell him that Princess Joanna and her train were finding it necessary to set off for Aquitaine immediately in the expectation that her brother and his train would catch up with her en route.
So the next morning the citizens of Caen lined the road to the southern gate to cheer and wave off the marriage cavalcade, partly to honor it and partly in relief that it was going. After all, it numbered nearly one hundred and fifty people who, with their animals, the city had been forced to accommodate and feed at its own expense.
Riding with Mansur near the head of the column, Adelia glanced back at the long, long line following behind her, and was encouraged; nobles, clerks, musicians and squires, personal servants, laundresses, grooms, luggage, and treasure, all were accommodated in carts or on mule- and horseback, a luxury that required nobody to walk, thereby speeding the journey
As the procession reached the countryside and began passing through isolated little villages, their inhabitants came out to marvel at something to be seen once in a lifetime; the golden princess and ladies in their gilded palanquin, riders cloaked in crimson cloth or silk, horses in their rainbow caparisons, the shine of armor-like a jeweled dragon come glittering out of the age of myth to prance its way along the muddy high streets.
Captain Bolt’s practiced eye, however, saw it differently Pausing beside Adelia as he rode up and down the line to make sure his soldiers kept their posts along it, he cursed Young Henry and his lack of duty
“Aren’t we better off without him?” she asked.
“Maybe. But my men’ve got a princess with a mort of treasure to guard and, if so be it comes to an attack, we’re mightily overstretched.”
“THE JOURNEY BEGINS to be unlucky for them; Young Henry has deserted us. That great fool, the Bishop of Winchester, complains of it, mala tempora currunt, yet I see in it our Great Master’s hand. We are being shown the way, Lupus mine. Send us more misfortune, O deo certe, that I may contrive to have the blame for it heaped on the head of the woman we are to bring down.”
IT WAS ADELIA’S CONTENTION from personal experience that riding sidesaddle was bad for the back. Not a good horsewoman, she also thought it dangerous to be hanging on at a twisted angle should one’s mount shy or bolt. Yet riding astride was denounced everywhere as unladylike, a style for peasants, especially by the exalted company in which she now found herself.
If King Henry’s strictures to the three ladies-in-waiting had been properly observed, she should have traveled in the de luxe cushioned cart in which they and Joanna passed the journey by teasing their perfumed lapdogs, playing cards, and watching the scenery they could see through its gilded and ornamented bars. Adelia’s only experience in it, however, was her last.
It wasn’t that the little princess herself was unfriendly merely withdrawn. Lady Beatrix, Lady Petronilla, and Mistress Blanche, on the other hand, had a curve to their lips as they questioned her about her “Saracen friend.” (“Do tell us, dear-is his skin naturally that color or is it against his religion to wash?”) And inquired after her new maid. (“We hope so much that the Boggart is proving satisfactory, how nice that she’s taken to your interesting little dog.”)
After a morning of it, Adelia reverted to the sidesaddle on the palfrey allotted to her. It was a pretty but very hard wooden sambue, a contraption resembling a three-sided box with a pommel that allowed her right leg to curve gracefully over her left, both of her boots fitting above each other into stirrups of disparate heights. At an amble the posture it demanded was uncomfortable; trotting was torture.
Bumping along on it beside Mansur, Adelia found her mind dwelling with admiration on the Empress Matilda, Henry I I’s mother, who had ignored opprobrium by riding astride during her war with her cousin, Stephen, for England’s throne. “The Plantagenets would never have won if she’d had to go sidesaddle,” she grumbled in Arabic.
“It gives elegance to a woman,” Mansur said, approvingly
“It gives her curvature of the damned spine.”
“And modesty”
That was it, she supposed. Men didn’t like women to have their legs apart unless they were in bed; yet how much more fittingly the female frame had been designed to ride astride than that of the male, with its protruding dangly bits.
She groaned. “A thousand miles of modesty, I’ll never survive it.”
“Then return to the royal cart.”
“With those three harpies? I’m hardly welcome there.”
At least this way, she didn’t have to restrain herself from punching ladies of the nobility in the mouth. Also, she could ride farther back in the procession among the lesser members of the household and occasionally give advice on their health problems, ostensibly through Mansur’s pronouncements.
Their arrival at the great Benedictine abbey of Mont-Saint-Michel was to set the tone for what, Locusta hoped, would be their reception at every stop on the journey He had gone ahead with a servant to alert the abbot of their coming and then returned to lead them on. “Thank God the tide’s out,” he said, as they approached the island causeway. “It took all my mathematics to time our coming exactly. I was afraid our delay would miss us another eight hours.”
“Let us hope the tide stays out,” the O’Donnell said. “For I’m told it comes in with the rush of a galloping horse.”
In fact, water was beginning to swirl around wheels and hooves as they crossed to the strange mount on which monks had been laboring for one thousand years to complete an edifice that the Archangel Michael had instructed their first bishop to build.
They hadn’t labored in vain. From a distance the top of the mount gave the impression that it had been set with enormous candles that had dripped wax into contorted and beautiful shapes.
It had been a hot day. August was going out with all the heat it could muster. The climb up the escalier street was hard on beasts and humans who’d already had a long and sweaty journey of it, but the prospect of rest in the cool of the lovely building above them spurred them on, as did the dizzying glimpses of the bay with a breeze coming off it, and the Normandy coast under the rise of a harvest moon.
Abbot and clergy waited to greet them; there would always be a crowd of clergy, and introductions and, invariably, a service of thanksgiving for Joanna’s safe arrival, then a banquet under vaulted ceilings and toasts, before the poor little princess and her yawning following were accommodated in their beds. Next morning she had to see the graceful cloisters, the gilded statue of Saint Michael, kneel before precious relics, until the time came to remount and set off again.
It was to be the pattern.
We’ll proceed by inches, Adelia thought in despair. Allie, oh Allie.
AT THE END of the fourth day’s journey, while Mansur was helping her to dismount-a clumsy business at the best of times-her horse made a sudden movement and Adelia’s right foot became entangled in its stirrup; Mansur staggered under her unexpected weight, and for a moment she was sent topsy-turvy with her veil dragging in the dust.
Lady Beatrix, Lady Petronilla, and Mistress Blanche stepped down the little ladder attached to their cart and clustered about her with delighted sympathy. “Are you all right, you poor soul? My dear, how embarrassing.”
It was. For an instant, before Mansur helped her up again, a small crowd of men, including Captain Bolt, Father Adalburt, Admiral O’Donnell, and the Bishop of Saint Albans, were treated to the sight of Adelia’s white thighs and a burst of good fenland invective against horse riding in general and sidesaddles in particular.
Next morning, limping out to the stable yard for another day’s suffering, she found Captain Bolt putting a different saddle on her palfrey. It was a small affair and cushioned in red leather, high at the rear in order to support the rider’s back.
He interrupted her explosions of gratitude. “Been made for a boy, I fear, mistress. You’ll have to go astride.”
“I don’t care. Where did you get it from?”
“Weren’t me. We passed a saddlery away back and somebody…” He lowered his voice; Bolt was an old friend of the bishop’s and Adelia’s, and aware of their situation. “… somebody found this as had been ordered for a young lord as’d never come for it. So he bought it for you.”
Rowley Oh, God bless him.
Tightening the cinch, the captain said: “And I’ll spread it about as Queen Eleanor herself did sometimes ride astride. I know as she did; that time she escaped from the king and I had to chase her to bring her back-God help us, I had trouble a-catching her.”
“Thank you. And please thank the somebody.”
Bolt heaved her up onto the palfrey “I was to say as it’s to stop you breaking your neck as well as the Third Commandment.” He shook his head in admiration. “Gor, lady, you can’t half swear when it comes to it.”
AT THE NEXT MONASTERY there was a kerfuffle in the middle of the night; a woman screamed, men’s voices were raised, there was movement in the inner courtyard. The sounds incorporated themselves into part of a dream Adelia was having and, being exhausted from that day’s journey, she didn’t wake up but, like the three ladies-in-waiting with whom she shared a bed, merely groaned and stirred in her sleep.
Yet it was obvious next morning that something had occurred; Lady Beatrix, Lady Petronilla, and Mistress Blanche in their cart were to be seen in conversation more earnest than was usual with them while, all down the line, there was a frisson of talk, head-shaking, and, among some of the men, laughter.
“Do you know what’s happened?” Adelia asked Mansur. Thinking the Arab did not understand them, people were looser with their talk in his presence than hers.
“It has something to do with the Sir Nicholas Baicer and shoes, but I can gather no more than that.”
“Shoes?”
Isolated as she was from the general gossip, Adelia appealed to Captain Bolt as he rode past her on one of his checks up and down the procession.
He was uninformative, even defensive. “Nothing for you to worry about, missus. He’s a fine soldier, Sir Nicholas, I’ve served with him.”
She, too, liked what she knew of the man and Lord Ivo. Both knights were courteous whenever their paths crossed hers; they paid attention to all well-being, not just that of the higher echelons, Lord Ivo with gravitas while Sir Nicholas had a more hail-fellow-well-met approach and would talk to anybody about his family in England and Normandy with as much affection as he did about his hounds. Both men were lovers of the chase; indeed, one would occasionally veer away from the procession with his dogs and other enthusiastic hunters to pursue a stag through a forest, but always leaving the other by the princess’s side. Like Captain Bolt, they inspired a confidence that, militarily, everybody was in safe hands.
Boggart who, being Adelia’s maid, was still as persona non grata in this closely knit traveling community as she was, could gather little more than her mistress, except that it was “summat to do with Sir Nicholas and shoes.”
And with that, since there was no opportunity to talk to Rowley on anything but a passing and polite level, Adelia had to be content.
IT HAPPENED WHEN they were passing through the Bocage, that woody and rich farming area of southwest Normandy where cows grazed knee-deep in grass behind high hedges dotted like sprigged muslin with rose hips and light green hazelnuts.
Adelia, who’d been riding high and comfortably on her new saddle, had her attention diverted from lichened cottages and tiny, towerless churches by her horse. The horse had been acting bizarrelyfor the last two days, staggering occasionally and yawning. Now, the palfrey kept stopping to rub her head against any fence post they passed.
“I think Juno’s ill,” she said.
Mansur beckoned to the nearest groom, who came up.
Adelia dismounted so that the man could examine the mare. “Is she tired? Have I been riding her too hard?”
“Not you, mistress-you ain’t but a puff of wind on her back.” His name was Martin, and he liked Adelia, who’d successfully treated a toe damaged when a horse had stepped on it. He walked around the mare, running his hands down flanks that had been becoming thinner, then took her head between his hands.
“Hello, hello, what’s this here?” He pointed to the bare patches around the eyes and nostrils where the skin appeared inflamed.
Adelia peered with him. “It looks like sunburn. How can that be?” She’d never heard of a horse getting sunburned.
“It do look like sunburn,” Martin said, and called for the head groom. “Here, Master Tom, what d’you make of this?”
There was a good deal of head scratching by both men, more questioning of Adelia about the horse’s behavior, more examination during which the animal remained listless.
“You thinking what I’m thinking, Master Tom?” Martin asked.
The head groom sucked his teeth. “Ragwort.”
“That’s what I reckon.”
Master Tom turned on Adelia. “You been letting this poor beast graze on the verges while you been on her back?”
“No, well, not much. Not where there’s ragwort.” She knew the plant; the ubiquitous bright yellow weed had to be avoided by humans and, it seemed, by horses as well. “I certainly wouldn’t have let her eat it if I’d seen it.”
“Well, some bugger’s been givin’ it to her-and lots of it over a fair old time for her to get into this state. She was fit as a flea when we left Caen.”
“In her feed at night, you reckon?” Martin asked.
“Could be, could be,” Master Tom said. “She’d not likely’ve touched it while it was growing…”
“But that loses its taste when it’s dried,” Martin finished for him.
“Still and all, what bastard would do that to a horse?”
“What can be done for her?” Adelia begged. Inattentive as she was to the equine world generally, she and the mare had gone this far on the journey together and it was painful to see the animal in such distress. Allie would know what to do, she thought.
Master Tom shrugged. “Nothing. Not with ragwort poison. Put her out of her misery. Nothin’ else to do.”
Juno was led into woodland and her life ended by a quick and expert slash across the throat. The Bishop of Saint Albans immediately began an inquiry-as it turned out, an unsuccessful inquiry-to find out who was responsible for what must have been systematic poisoning of the horse in its nightly stable over the course of several days, something that inevitably pointed to a person belonging to the princess’s train.
“The poor beast,” Lady Petronilla said loudly to Adelia across the dinner table that evening. “You must feel dreadful now that you were so cross with her when you tumbled off her the other day.”
“I was cross with myself, not the horse.”
It was no use pointing out, as Captain Bolt and Rowley did, that Mistress Adelia invariably handed over her horse to the grooms to stable when the cavalcade reached its destination for the night, and was thereby absolved from feeding it ragwort. The company was left with the impression that she had cursed her horse and that, alone among all the other horses, it had subsequently died.
As SCARRY TELLS Wolf that night: “it begins.”
ADELIA WAS FINALLY vouchsafed an explanation of the “Sir Nicholas and the shoes” mystery when there was another disturbance at night, this time at the Abbey of Saint-Sauveur de Redon on the approach to Aquitaine, the duchy that had once belonged to Queen Eleanor and had passed to Henry Plantagenet on their marriage.
Again, she and the ladies-in-waiting, in their sleep, heard an alarmed feminine shout and male activity coming from somewhere beyond their room.
On this occasion, however, they were roused by their door crashing open and Lady Petronilla’s maid, Marie, rushing through it, whimpering.
“In the name of God, Marie,” said Lady Beatrix, querulously “What is it?” She glanced at the hours candle on the bedside table to see that only half its length had burned down. “It’s the middle of the blasted night.”
“He done it to me this time, m’lady,” Marie sobbed. “Terrible frit he gave me. And look what he done.” She lifted her leg to display the fact that one of her feet was without its shoe.
“Who did? And where have you been?” (The maids slept on palliasses in the same room as their mistresses.)
“There was this noise in the passage outside, m‘lady, and I got up to open it, thinking as one of the dogs had got shut out, and there weren’t nothing there so I went down the passage a bit, and, oh m’lady, it weren’t a dog at all, it were Sir Nicholas.”
“Oh, dear,” said Lady Petronilla. “Well, never mind. And you, mistress, stay here, it’s nothing for you to concern yourself with.”
But Adelia had already wrapped herself in a cloak and gone outside to see what was to be seen, leaving Boggart, whom the Last Trump could not have disturbed, to sleep on.
The Bishop of Saint Albans was outside the door, watching a strange procession wending its way toward a turret stair that led down to the men’s guest quarters.
Two men-at-arms, one of them Captain Bolt, were supporting a staggering Sir Nicholas Baicer while, in front of them, the knight’s squire, Aubrey, was walking backward holding what looked like Marie’s shoe in front of his master’s nose as another man might tempt a dog into following him with a biscuit.
Adelia shut the bedroom door quietly behind her so that the ladies-in-waiting should not hear and turned to her lover. “Well?”
“It’s young Aubrey’s fault, he’s supposed to measure how much Nicholas drinks at our feasts.” Rowley was finding the occasion amusing.
“What has he done?”
It appeared that there was a fine line, only a cup or two of wine, to be drawn between a pleasantly tipsy Sir Nicholas and a Sir Nicholas who was overtaken by a lust that directed itself at feminine feet.
“Any woman,” explained Rowley, still amused, “as long as she has such extremities on the end of her legs, is in danger of having a drink-sodden Sir Nicholas throwing himself at her boots and applying his tongue to their leather.”
“And that’s what happened to Marie?”
“So it seems. He must have outmaneuvered his squire. Last time it was one of the laundresses.” He caught sight of Adelia’s face. “No harm done. He’ll snuggle down in bed with the maid’s shoe and be off to sleep like a lamb. He won’t remember in the morning.”
“No harm done? The girl was frightened.”
“Nonsense. It’s one way of getting her boots clean. Now, then…” Rowley pulled Adelia toward him. “… since you’re here…”
But if he intended an embrace, it was preempted by the Bishop of Winchester in his nightcap coming up the stairs to see what the fuss was about.
Rowleybowed to Adelia, said a polite “God’s blessing on you, lady,” and took himself and his fellow bishop off to their beds.
The male attitude toward Sir Nicholas’s lapses pertained even among the ladies-in-waiting. Adelia, returning to the bedroom, heard Lady Petronilla lecturing her maid. “You must remember that all wellborn men have their eccentricities, Marie. We have to overlook them.”
There was sleepy agreement from Lady Beatrix. “And, after all, Sir Nicholas’s ancestors did fight alongside William the Conqueror in subduing the English.”
Leaving a trail of well-liched feminine boots in their wake, no doubt. Adelia shook her head before laying it and the rest of herself alongside Lady Petronilla and going wonderingly back to sleep.
The next morning, apparently unaware of the night before, Sir Nicholas was his usual jovial self, whilst Aubrey the squire attended on Marie the maid with an apology, her missing shoe, and a silver piece from a supply of monies with which he’d been entrusted for such eventualities.
THE MONASTERIES AND PRIORIES they stayed at every night blended into one-the same welcome from the abbot/prior, the service, a feast, everybody taking care to show pleasure at entertaining their king’s daughter. All of them were rich, mostly very rich; providing for so many people during such a stay could cost nearly as much as a year’s income, though all of it would undoubtedly be passed on in extra tithes to their feudal underlings.
At first, while in Upper Normandy, the marriage cavalcade had kept to a disciplined and carefully planned procession. Outriders at the front, the princess’s palanquin next, flanked by Sir Nicholas Baicer and Lord Ivo splendid in mail and helmets, alongside squires, bishops, and their chaplains plus a platoon of Captain Bolt’s men, followed by more soldiers around the treasure-carrying mules with their stout iron boxes, then the higher servants, then the sumpter wagons, and, finally, the pilgrims.
But now, as day followed day without any untoward happenings, there was a relaxation. Pressing deeper into fine hunting country, more people, even some of the servants, gave way to the passion of the chase and followed either Lord Ivo or Sir Nicholas into the forests.
Captain Bolt might frown and forbid his men to follow them, but a general complaisance had overtaken the rest which, since the Bishop of Winchester smiled at it, he was powerless to halt.
Father Adalburt, a new convert, joined in the hunts on his rouncey but frequently got lost and, more than once, had to be searched for and kindly led back to the road.
Time and again, while Adelia itched with impatience, the entire cavalcade stopped in order to watch Princess Joanna fly her hawk and applaud its kill.
Inevitably, gradually, among the lesser servants, friendships were formed and enmities broke out, so that the procession thinned in some places and gained bulges in others, as if an otherwise smooth snake had swallowed, and was digesting, its lunch.
There was always a crowd surrounding the musicians, while the cart containing the master blacksmith and his equipment was left to travel alone, he being surly to every living thing except horses.
Bantering, flirting soldiers gathered around the laundresses’ and maids’ section. Even Captain Bolt permitted this as long as the patrols were kept up, the treasure carts guarded, and the rear protected. Most of his men were mercenaries, he said, and had to find feminine comfort where they could.
The chief laundress, however, a large woman with warts and an evangelical approach to religion-she affected to shrink back in holy indignation and mutter her prayers if Mansur was in the offing-swiped the men away and made sure of her charges’ chastity by accompanying them into the woods during the stops for calls of nature.
An Englishwoman by the name of Brune, she’d been doing Eleanor’s laundry for many years and had become a close friend of Joanna’s nurse-a length of service and royal connection that gave her a good opinion of herself. “My girls shall keep their virginity for the good Lord’s sake,” she was heard to say unctuously to an approving Father Guy. “Like I kept mine.”
“As if,” Captain Bolt said, “anybody’d try to take it off her.”
At night, Mansur and Adelia joined Dr. Arnulf in the princess’s room to make the regular assessment of her health by checking the royal pulse and examining phials of the royal urine. By day, however, they rode farther down the line, away from the leading party, where Ward could trot along at their horses’ heels without both him and Adelia attracting taunts from the ladies-in-waiting, nor the Arab having to endure the viciousness of the Saracen-hating chaplain, Father Guy
Their new position at least made them popular with such of the rank and file who felt unwell or had sustained minor injuries and found Dr. Arnulf too lofty to attend to them.
“Cap’n Bolt said I was to come to the darkie doctor,” James the wheelwright told Adelia as she splinted his crushed finger. “That other’n, he don’t care for the poor. Bugger wanted a fee.”
For Adelia the greatest happiness of being farther down the cavalcade was that, from time to time, Rowley could pause beside her as he rode up and down the line to see that all was well; precious, stolen moments for them both as he chatted ostensibly to Mansur in Arabic.
When he could spare the time, Locusta rode with them, apparently preferring their company to that of any other, and talking about Sicily
So did Ulf Other pilgrims were making friends among the royal servants and leaving the group to talk to them. Why shouldn’t he?
So, too, when he wasn’t hunting, did Father Adalburt, which was a surprise-and a not-unalloyed pleasure. The man was a fool. Because he spoke Latin and English, the latter being his native tongue, and was rarely in the company of those who couldn’t, he showed astonishment when foreigners didn’t understand him. He insisted on speaking to Mansur in a slow shout and being bewildered when he received no reply
Every new thing amazed him. On passing a plantation of cork trees and requesting to know what they were, he refuted the answer with: “But there are no corks,” as if expecting the branches to be laden with fully formed bottle tops.
“Why does the donkey not keep alongside his bishop?” Mansur asked, irritated. “Why does he plague us?”
Probably, Adelia thought, because the Bishop of Winchester was happy to get rid of him. Adalburt was amiable enough, his mouth always lolling in a smile, but how he had achieved his position was difficult to see.
“Because he’s the bishop’s bloody cousin, or something,” Ulf, who’d done some research, said bitterly. “Been living as an anchorite for two years Scarfell Pike way, seemingly, and got a reputation for holiness. Told me he preached to the sheep. If he bored them as much as he does me, I’m sorry for’em.”
LOCUSTA AND HIS uncle had carefully chosen only accommodations capable of providing the enormous stabling and grazing necessary for the company and its horseflesh, good food, beds a-plenty without fleas-even baths. Establishments that didn’t have the latter reckoned without Mesdames Beatrix, Petronilla, and Blanche…
The Abbot of Redon, a somewhat smaller establishment than the retinue was used to, looked hopelessly into three beautiful, formidable faces. “But in this house, my daughters, we do not take baths except at Easter and Christmas, as advised by Saint Benedict-even then it is in the river.”
The three looked for a withering moment toward the hapless Locusta. No baths?
He wrung his hands. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, ladies. But to go on farther, or to have stopped earlier…”
The ladies didn’t care about the difficulties of calculating a route.
“The river, though,” Father Adalburt interposed brightly “Is it not an example of God’s bounty that He sent a river to flow past every great town that Man has built?”
The ladies didn’t care about God’s bounty, either. They turned back to the abbot.
“All very commendable, my lord,” Lady Petronilla said, “but our princess is not Saint Benedict. She is a lady of the blood royal.”
“From Aquitaine,” Lady Beatrix pointed out. “And she has traveled through dust all day.” She forbore to mention that, as well as dust, sweat was ruinous to robes that took a phalanx of embroideresses a year to adorn.
“Washing tubs will do,” compromised Mistress Blanche. “My lord, you surely have washing tubs in your laundry?”
The poor man supposed that he had.
“Good,” said Lady Petronilla. “Then please have all of them carried to our room. With lots of hot water.”
Lady Beatrix patted the abbot’s hand kindly: “We provide our own soap and towels.”
In a steam-filled upper room-the abbot’s was the only one large enough-Adelia watched the indistinct forms of maids come and go like ghostly water sprites as she rested her body in warm suds. It had been an unusually long journey of forty miles from their last stop to this.
From the dining room below rose the sound of tipsy men still at table singing a rousing chorus of the immemorial drinking song “Gaudeamus igitur.” She could hear Rowleys voice among them. This was Calvados country; the abbey made it from its own apples and served it in place of ale, despite what the ascetic Saint Benedict would have said.
“Oh, dear,” said Lady Beatrix through the scented vapor. “Sir Nicholas… Isn’t Calvados very alcoholic?”
“Very,” Blanche said. “We can only hope…”
Everybody in the room hoped with her.
From her tub in the middle of the mist, a wet princess changed the subject. “Are you sure God will not condemn us for too much bathing?” (The abbot had taken his revenge during his homily at supper by stressing the sin of vanity among women.)
“Definitely not, my lady,” came Lady Petronilla’s answer, stoutly “Cleanliness is a godly attribute.”
“So Mama says. But in his holiness Saint Thomas never bathed at all once he became Archbishop of Canterbury. They say he was crawling with lice when they undressed his dear body.”
“That’s saints,” said Petronilla firmly “It does not apply to ladies of gentle birth.”
“But when we visited the shrine of the Blessed Sylvia, we were told that the only part of her she ever washed were her fingers.”
“I’m sure she had her reasons, dear.” This was Beatrix. “But the good Lord likes his queens to be clean.” There was a soapy pause. “Along with their ladies-in-waiting.”
Seated in her tub at the end of the row, Adelia grinned. These were acerbic women and no friends to her, but at this moment, with the ache of her limbs being soothed away, she blessed them. She had begun to see that, in their way, they were admirable, clustering protectively round their princess, jealous for her comfort-and their own, of course-entertaining her on the long, long marches with songs-each played a musical instrument-riddles and stories, always exquisitely turned out, their hair perfectly braided under circlets and floating veils, skin like silk on their slim figures, bodices low-cut to show alabaster cleavage.
Men who saw them floundered, later remembering a dream of beauty that would not come again.
It was, she supposed, what Rowley wanted for Allie. But what sort of existence was it? Was veneer enough? Only Petronilla could read, an exercise she confined to books of manners; all three were ignorant of history, except that of their ancestry, and none of them had any conception of life outside court. They talked dreamily of what noble husbands they could expect to be gifted to, as if their marriages were to be a lottery, which, presumably, they would be.
Adelia would have welcomed a peace pact in which to get to know each of them better, but, regarding her as an intruder, they banded together so that their circle formed a fence against her in which their individuality was more or less lost.
Sighing, Adelia called through the scented steam for Boggart to bring her a towel, then winced as a crash indicated that an unguent bottle had been dislodged from the tub’s edge-the girl was trying, bless her, but trying. “You can get into the water now, Boggart.”
“Oh, yes, mistress. I’m getting used to that. And Ward’s got powerful dirty today, I was wondering if I should take un in with me.”
From among the vapors came a concerted chorus of “Please.”
Dried and wrapped in one of Emma’s cloaks, Adelia went out onto the landing, pausing in order to pick up her necklet with its cross from a table where the ladies had left their jewelry so that it should not get tarnished.
She couldn’t find it.
Taking a flambeau from its holder on the wall, she held it over the table so that she could see better and searched again among the pile of glittering rings, brooches, and earrings belonging to the other women.
“Damn them,” she said. “Damn them.” The necklet was her only ornament, worn in remembrance of her childhood nurse, Margaret, who’d given her the original-a simple thing with a plain silver cross that she’d loved, but had put in the coffin of a murdered girl who’d greatly admired it, though, as soon as she could, she’d paid for another to be made exactly like the first.
To make sure, Adelia waited until a dripping Boggart and Ward emerged from the room of baths. “You didn’t pick up my cross for any reason, did you, Boggart?”
“No, mistress.”
“No, I didn’t think you did. Damn them, those bitch… those blasted females have taken it to spite me.”
Boggart considered. “Don’t think as they can have, mistress. It was there when they all went in. I saw it. Ain’t nobody left to come outside since.”
In bed that night, Adelia lay awake for a while wondering who in the abbey was a thief, and why, out of all the jewelry on the table, he-or she-had stolen the one of least monetary value.
Well, with Allie waiting for her, time was of the essence and to make a fuss would only delay the morning’s start while a search was made and people questioned, as well as make her even less popular than she was.
Yawning, she decided she would just have to employ another silversmith when she reached Sicily
But the night was not over…
This time the screams came from the gardens overlooked by the monastery’s guesthouse windows.
This time they were terrible.
This time they were Boggart’s.
There was a resentful mutter of “Sir Nicholas slipped his leash again” from one of the other women as Adelia ran for a cloak. Downstairs, she tugged back the bolts on the door and hurled herself into the garden.
In the middle of the lawn, Sir Nicholas’s substantial and palpitating body was humped over Boggart’s feet. His hands gripped her ankles so that moonlight threw the shadow of the girl’s and man’s figures onto the grass in the shape of a monstrous crochet, except for where a small dog tugged at the seat of the man’s robe.
It would have been the scene of comedy if Boggart’s mouth hadn’t been contorted into a white O of horror and the screams pumping from it weren’t those of a soul in remembered torment.
Adelia joined Ward in tugging at Sir Nicholas’s robe-just as uselessly; the knight was fixed and oblivious. She tried kicking him. “Leave her alone, curse you,” she yelled, “Curse you, you horrid old man, leave her alone.”
Later, she was to recall the sound of laughter coming from the guesthouse windows, but she knew then, and afterward, that this wasn’t ridiculous; something terrible was happening.
She threw herself on the man and reached round his face for his eyes, digging her fingers into them. Even then, he shook his head like a bull so that her nails merely scraped the skin of his cheeks. But somebody was lifting her and Ward to one side while somebody else with more strength than she had was dragging the great bulk away from Boggart’s feet and throwing it onto its back on the grass.
She had a glimpse of the knight’s face, unrecognizably loose and vacant, before his squire and another man hefted him to his feet and carried him away
Rowley was trying to comfort Boggart. “There, there, my dear. No need to be frightened; he has these turns, they don’t mean anything. No harm done.” She flinched away from him as he tried to touch her.
“Ask her if there’s harm done,” Adelia spat at him. She picked up the shivering Ward and put him in Boggart’s arms. Then, with her hand on the girl’s shoulder, she urged her toward a stone bench in the shadow of an arbor.
Rowley followed, at a loss. “Can I do anything?”
“No,” Adelia told him. “We’re going to sit here quietly for a while.”
He sat with them, next to Adelia, while on the other side Boggart gasped at something they couldn’t see. The girl was holding Ward so tightly that the tremors wracking her body were making him shake with her.
On the far side of the lawn, most of the shutters of the guesthouse were closing; entertainment over.
“Well, at least he left both her shoes this time,” Rowley said, trying for lightness.
Adelia looked down at Boggart’s shoes. She’d bought them for her in Caen, with another pair and some riding boots, to replace the hulking, hobnailed clogs-a man’s, and far too big for her-that she’d been wearing in Southampton. The girl had clutched the new shoes as she was clutching Ward now, and for along time couldn’t be persuaded to wear them in case they were sullied. Eventually, Adelia had taken the clogs and thrown them away
These were sullied now; the little ribbons that laced the sides had been mouthed so that they trailed limp and wet.
“Why does he do it?” Adelia asked. “What possible… why?”
“I don’t know.” Rowley paused. “She’s been attacked before, hasn’t she?”
“I think so.”
“I’m sorry.” He patted Adelia’s hand and stood up. “She won’t want me around, then.”
“No.”
For a moment, watching him walk reluctantly away, Adelia was overcome by her fortune in being loved by him. He was a man with failings, as all men had failings-as she was an imperfect woman-but his humanity concealed no clefts in which lay hidden monsters like that of Sir Nicholas; it went clean to the core.
We must both do better by Allie, she thought, she needs the two of us. We must do it together.
Boggart, staring straight ahead, began talking. “My fault,” she was saying. “This un…” She clutched Ward harder. “His poor little belly were upset by summat so I reckoned to walk him… My silly fault. I thought as he was a kindly gent’man. I smiled at him. Silly to make a fuss, no harm done, my fault…”
“Boggart,” Adelia said. She put out a hand to the girl’s face, to turn it toward hers. “You listen to me. This was not your fault. It’s happened to others. Sir Nicholas is one of those men that has a demon caged inside him. Drink lets it loose. He attacked you, but it could have been anybody, any woman at all. It could have been me. You’re no more at fault than… than a tree hit by lightning.”
“Ain’t I?”
“No.”
“Tha’s good, then.” She sounded doubtful.
“Boggart. Something happened to you. Before this, I mean. Do you want to talk about it?”
“I’m all right, mistress. Really I am.”
“No, you’re not. It might help if you told me.”
If Boggart was going to, the moment went. Somebody was approaching them from across the garden; Mistress Blanche was walking carefully, so as not to spill a mug in her hand.
She said: “I thought the child might need a pick-me-up. The kitchener gave me some milk. I’ve put some brandy in it.”
Adelia had to untwine Boggart’s hands from Ward’s fur and, even then, hold the mug to her lips.
In her perfect enunciation, the lady-in-waiting said: “It’s never nice, this sort of thing, but men are strange cattle. After all, he did her no harm. One just has to get over it.”
Adelia looked up sharply, but the woman had taken thought and trouble for Boggart. There was humanity here, too; even fellow feeling.
“She’s blaming herself I suppose,” Mistress Blanche said.
“Yes.”
“One always does. Tell her not to.”
It was an admission so unexpected and revealing, such an unbending, that Adelia instinctively put out her hand.
Mistress Blanche didn’t take it; there were to be no all-women-together confessions. “I was concerned for the girl,” she said. “And so should you be. She’s getting cold.”
Together, they got Boggart to her feet and took her back to the guesthouse.
FROM A WINDOW Scarry has been watching them, laughing a little.
He has been holding a silver necklet with a cross in his hand. Now he drops it carefully down a crack between two uneven floorboards.
WHEN ADELIA TOLD ROWLEY about the loss of her necklet, he was concerned. “I don’t like you not to be wearing a cross.”
“Why?”
“Every other woman has one; it singles you out.”
Adelia shrugged. “I’m singled out already.”
For a moment he looked into her eyes. “You are for me,” he said.
When Ulf heard of the theft, he, too, became thoughtful.
“Funny that,” he said. “Lord Ivo’s squire told me as how somebody’s been rummagin’ in the luggage packs. Nothing taken, though.”
“Why, do you think?”
“Lookin’ for this, p’raps.” Ulf patted the wooden cross poking out from his mule’s saddlebag.
“That cannot be,” Mansur said. “If a thief is after the sword, he would search for it in the treasure chests, not luggage.”
“Would he, though, would he? Iffen he’s clever, he’d reckon as how the king’d know them chests’d be the first to be raided in an attack and he’d reckon old Henry would’ve hidden you-know-what somewhere else.”
Ulf’s childhood had introduced him to the criminal mind, but this was too subtle for Adelia: “If it’s the same thief and if he took my necklace instead of the ladies’ diamonds, he’s not as clever as all that.”
Their conversation was interrupted by Admiral O’Donnell coming up on his magnificent bay, accompanied by Deniz on a donkey. When those two men weren’t taking the rare opportunity, for seamen, of joining Sir Nicholas and Lord Ivo in a hunt, they spent a good deal of the time riding alongside Mansur.
Deniz said never a word, but his master persisted in asking the Arab about his native customs, telling stories of Ireland and seafaring to Adelia, and questioning Ulf about the Cambridgeshire fenlands. In fact, Ulf particularly seemed to intrigue him.
“Now isn’t that the interesting young man,” said O’Donnell, watching Ulf ride away to join his group. “A friend of yours?”
“As are all the pilgrims, I hope,” Adelia returned.
“Not your usual pilgrim, though, wouldn’t you say?”
“Is he not?” Adelia said, feigning boredom. “What’s different about him?”
“Ah, well, I can’t put me finger on it exactly… a certain lack of holy zeal, maybe. I’d say he lacks the sense of mysterium tremendum that most of them have, would you not agree?”
“I think he suspects Ulf of not being a real pilgrim,” Adelia told Mansur grimly, after the Irishman had gone. “Why can’t the blasted man leave us alone? I’m beginning to wonder if he’s looking for Excalibur.”
“It is for you that he joins us, I think,” Mansur said.
“Nonsense, he’s prying.”
The Arab shrugged. “We have given nothing away.”
But Adelia was left with the feeling that, somehow, they had.
“Lupus, MEO CARO, I have found Excalibur, I thinh. Henry gave it to his creature and she, with wily subterfuge, has it concealed, arte perire sua. The stinking cur that is always with her leaps on the youthful pilgrim with a rapture he shows to no one else except her Saracen and her maladroit maid. They are connected. Also the boy is never without the rough cross he carries. Does it rattle if shaken, I wonder? I believe it does.
Richard shall have it and make us rich as he promised. Let him create havoc with it, let him use it to kill his father, for that is what he secretly wishes. Our main purpose lies elsewhere.
PROGRESS SLOWED WHEN they joined the broad highway leading toward Aquitaine, for this was the main westerly route to the Pyrenees and the road was crowded with pilgrims on their way to, or coming back from, the great shrine of Saint James at Compostela.
Here was holy zeal a-plenty; the air thrummed with it as well as with a hundred different languages and the smell of unwashed bodies tinged by mugwort, a specific against weariness that most of the pilgrims had tucked into their hats or shoes. Those returning from Spain, limping from their long march, despite the mugwort, wore the apostle’s token of a cockleshell and a look of exaltation. Villagers came out from their houses to beg their blessing or kiss the hands that had touched the sacred tomb.
The ones still on their way to Compostela were mostly rowdier, yelling hallelujahs, praising the Lord that their sins would soon be forgiven, some scourging themselves, some dancing, some clearly demented, some barefoot.
One tatterdemalion group surrounded Joanna’s cart, shouting at her to come with them for the good of her soul. Captain Bolt’s men would have dispersed them with the flat of their swords, but the princess showed her mettle by standing up and throwing coins into the crowd.
“I have made the pilgrimage, good people, and been blessed accordingly Take these alms and may God speed you.”
It was the ones pushing handcarts containing their sick relatives in the expectation that Saint James would cure them who concerned Adelia, and she went among them with her medical bag to try to treat them. In most cases she was waved away: “Thank you kindly, but Saint James’ll mend us when we get to him.”
“Leave them,” Mansur advised. “There are too many of them.”
There were, but she couldn’t bear to abandon them, and he had to force her back on her horse or she would have been left behind.
ATTHE NEXT MONASTERY, Scarry watches his victim from a high window.
“There she goes to the courtyard to subsume herself in the pilgrims’ gangrenous flesh. And her lustful bishop with her, ostensibly to give comfort and alms, but in truth to be by her side.
“Yes, I hear you, beloved. We approach Aquitaine. It is time for the killing to begin.”