By going against the advice of its commander and dragging her small force with her to Wormhold Tower, Eleanor had delayed its objective-which was to join up with the greater rebel army awaiting her at Oxford.
Now, with the weather worsening, Schwyz was frantic to get the queen to the meeting place-armies tended to disperse when kept idle too long, especially in the cold-and there was only one sure route that would take her there quickly: the river. The Thames ran more or less directly north to south through the seven or so miles of countryside that lay between Wormhold and Oxford.
Since the queen and her servants had ridden from their last encampment, accompanied by Schwyz and his men on foot, boats must be found. And had been. A few. Of a sort. Enough to transport the most important members of the royal party and a contingent of Schwyz’s men but not all of either. The lesser servants and most of the soldiers were going to have to journey to Oxford via the towpath-a considerably slower and more difficult journey than by boat. Also, to do so, they were going to have to use the horses and mules that the royal party had brought with them.
All this Adelia gathered as she emerged into the tower’s bottom room, where shouted commands and explanations were compounding chaos.
A soldier was pouring oil onto a great pile of broken furniture while servants, rushing around, screamed at him to wait before applying the flame as they removed chests, packing cases, and boxes that had been carried into the guardroom only hours before. Eleanor traveled heavy.
Schwyz was yelling at them to leave everything; neither those who were to be accommodated in the few boats nor those who would make the trek overland to Oxford could be allowed to carry baggage with them.
Either they didn’t hear him or he was ignored. He was being maddened further by Eleanor’s insistence that she could not proceed without this servant or that and, even when agreement was reached, by the favored ones’ refusal to stand still and be counted. Part of the trouble seemed to be that the Aquitanians doubted the honesty of their military allies; Eleanor’s personal maid shrieked that the royal wardrobe could not be entrusted to “sales mercenaries,” and a man declaring himself to be the sergeant cook was refusing to leave a single pan behind for the soldiers to steal. So outside the tower, soldiers struggled with frozen harnesses to ready the horses and mules, and the queen’s Aquitanians argued and ran back and forth to fetch more baggage, none of which could be accommodated.
There and then Adelia decided that whatever else happened, she herself would make for the towpath if she could-and quickly. Among this amount of disorganization, nobody would see her go and, with luck and the Lord’s good grace, she could walk to the nunnery.
First, though, she had to find Rowley, Jacques, and Walt.
She stood on the stairs looking for them in the confusion before her; they weren’t there, they must have been taken outside. What she did see, though, was a black shape that kept to the shadow of the walls as it made its way toward the stairs, jumping awkwardly like a frog because its feet were hobbled. The rope that had been put round its neck flapped as it came.
Adelia drew back into the dark of the staircase, and as the creature hopped up the first rise, caught it by its arm. “No,” she said.
The housekeeper’s hands and feet had been tied tightly enough to restrain a normal woman, but whoever had done it hadn’t reckoned with the abnormal: Dakers had hopped from wherever her guards had left her in order to try and join her mistress at the top of the tower.
And still would if she could. As Adelia grabbed her, Dakers threw her thin body to shake her off. Unseen by anyone else, the two women struggled.
“You’ll burn,” hissed Adelia. “For God’s sake, do you want to burn with her?”
“Yes-s-s.”
“I won’t let you.”
The housekeeper was the weaker of the two. Giving up, she turned to face Adelia. She had been roughly treated; her nose was bleeding, and one of her eyes was closed and puffy. “Let me go, let me go. I’ll be with her. I got to be with her.”
How insane. How sad. A soldier was readying the tower’s destruction; servants were oblivious to all but their own concerns. Nobody cared if the queen’s would-be assassin died in the flames, might even prefer it if she did.
They can’t do that. She’s mad. One of the reasons Adelia loved England was that if Dakers were brought to trial for her attempt on the queen’s life, no court in the country, seeing what she was, would sentence her to death. Eleanor herself had held to it. Restrain the woman with imprisonment, yes, but the reasonable, ancient dictum of “furiosus furore solum punitur” (the madness of the insane is punishment enough) meant that anyone who’d once possessed reason but by disease, grief, or other accident had lost the use of his or her understanding must be excused the guilt of his or her crime.
It was a ruling that agreed with everything Adelia believed in, and she wasn’t going to see it bypassed, even if Dakers herself was a willing accessory and preferred to die, burning, alongside Rosamund’s body. Life was sacred; nobody knew that better than a doctor who dealt with its absence.
The woman was pulling away from her again. Adelia tightened her grip, feeling a physical revulsion; she, who was never nauseated by corpses, was repelled by this living body she had to clutch so closely to her, by its thinness-it was like hugging a bundle of sticks-by its passion for death.
“Don’t you want to avenge her?” She said it because it was all she could think of to keep the woman still, but, after a minute, a measure of sanity came into the eyes glaring into hers.
The mouth stopped hissing. “Who did it?”
“I don’t know yet. I’ll tell you this much, it wasn’t the queen.”
Another hiss. Dakers didn’t believe her. “She paid so’s it could be done.”
“No.” Adelia added, “It wasn’t Bertha, either.”
“I know that.” Contemptuously.
There was a sudden, curious intimacy. Adelia felt herself sucked into whatever understanding the woman possessed, saw her own worth as an ally calculated, dismissed-and then retrieved. She was, after all, the only ally.
“I find things out. It’s what I do,” Adelia said, slackening her grip a little. Suppressing distaste, she added, “Come along with me and we’ll find things out together.”
Once more she was weighed, found wanting, weighed again, and adjudged as possibly useful.
Dakers nodded.
Adelia fumbled in her pocket for her knife and cut the rope round the housekeeper’s ankles and took the noose from round the neck over her head. She paused, unsure whether to free her hands as well. “You promise?”
The only good eye squinted at her. “You’ll find out?”
“I’ll try. It’s why the Bishop of Saint Albans brought me here.” Not very reassuring, she thought, considering that the Bishop of Saint Albans was leaving the place as a prisoner and Armageddon was about to break out.
Dakers held out her skinny wrists.
Schwyz had left the guardroom in order to gain control of the situation in the bailey outside. Some of the servants had gone with him; the few that remained were still gathering their goods and didn’t notice the two women sidling out.
There was equal confusion in the bailey. Adelia covered Dakers’s head with the hood of her cloak and then put up her own so that they would be just two more anonymous figures in the scurry.
A rising wind added to the noise as it whirled little showers of snowflakes that were slow to melt. Moonlight came and went like a guttering candle.
Disregarded, still clutching Dakers, Adelia moved through the chaos with Ward at her heels, looking for Rowley. She glimpsed him on the far side of the bailey, and it was a relief to see that Jacques and Walt were with him, all three roped together. Nearby, the Abbot of Eynsham was arguing over them with Schwyz, his voice dominating the noise made by the wind and bustle. “…I don’t care, you tyrant, I need to know what they know. They come with us.” Schwyz’s retort was whirled away, but Eynsham had won. The three prisoners were prodded toward the crowd at the gateway, where Eleanor was getting up on a horse.
Damn, damn it. She must talk to Rowley before they were separated. Whether she could do it unnoticed…and with a failed assassin in tow…yet she dared not let go of Dakers’s hand.
And Dakers was laughing, or, at least, a low cackle was emerging from the hood round her face. “What is it?” Adelia asked, and found that in taking her eyes off Rowley and the others she had lost sight of them. “Oh, be quiet.”
Agonized with indecision, she towed the woman toward the archway that led to the outer bailey and the entrance to the maze. The wind blew the servants’ cloaks open and closed as they milled about so that the golden lion of Aquitaine on their tabards flickered in the light of the torches. Soldiers, tidy in their padded jackets, tried to impose order, snatching unnecessary and weighty items away from clutching arms and restraining their owners from snatching them back. Only Eleanor was calm, controlling her horse with one hand and shielding her eyes with the other in order to watch what was being done, looking for something.
She saw Ward, like a small, black sheep against the snow, and pointed the animal out to Schwyz with a gloved finger as she gave an order. Schwyz looked round and pointed in his turn. “That one, Cross,” he shouted at one of his men. “Bring her. That one with the dog.”
Adelia found herself seized and hoisted onto a mule. She struggled, refusing to let go of Dakers’s hand.
The man called Cross took the line of least resistance; he lifted Dakers as well so that she clung on to Adelia’s back. “And bloody stay there,” he yelled at them. With one hand on the mule’s bridle and his body pinning Adelia’s leg, he took his charges through the archway and into the outer bailey, holding back until the rest of the cavalcade joined them.
Eleanor rode to the front, Eynsham just behind her. The open gates of the maze yawned like a black hole before them.
“Go straight through, Queen of my heart,” the abbot called to her joyfully. “Straight as my old daddy’s plow.”
“Straight?” The queen shouted back.
He spread his arms. “Didn’t you order I to learn the whore’s mysteries? Diddun I do it for ee?”
“There’s a direct way through?” Eleanor was laughing. “Abbot, my abbot. ‘And the crooked shall be made straight…’”
“‘…and the rough places plain,’” he finished for her. “That old Isaiah, he knew a thing or two. I am but his servant, and yours. Go, my queen, and the Lord’s path shall lead you through the whore’s thicket.”
Preceded by some of her men, one holding a lantern, Eleanor entered the maze, still laughing. The cavalcade followed her.
Behind them, Schwyz gave another order and a lit torch arched through the air onto the piled tinder in the guardroom…
The abbot was right; the way through the maze had been made straight. Alleys were direct passageways into the next. Blocking hedges revealed themselves as disguised, now open, doors.
Mystery had gone. The wind took away the maze’s silence; the hedges around them bent and shivered like ordinary storm-tossed avenues. Some insidious essence had been withdrawn; Adelia couldn’t be sorry. What she found extraordinary was that if the strange abbot who declared himself a devotee of the queen could be believed, Rosamund herself had shown him the secret of the way through.
“You know that man?” she asked over her shoulder. Flinching, she felt Dakers’s thin chest heave up and down against her back as the housekeeper began cackling again.
“Ain’t he the clever one.” It wasn’t so much a reply as Dakers’s commentary to herself. “Thinks he’s bested our wyrm, so he do, but that’s still got its fangs.” Perhaps it was part of her madness, Adelia thought, that there was no animosity in her voice toward a man who, self-confessed, had visited Rosamund in her tower in order to betray her to the queen.
They were through the maze within minutes. Swearing horribly at the mule, Cross urged it into a trot so that Adelia and Dakers were cruelly bumped up and down on its saddleless spine as it charged the hill.
The wind strengthened and drove snow before it in sporadic horizontal bursts that shut out the moon before letting it ride the sky again. As they crested the hill it slammed, shrieking, into their faces.
Adelia looked back and saw Rowley, Jacques, and Walt being prodded out of the maze by the spears of the men behind them.
There was a howl of triumph from Dakers; her head was turned to the tower-a black, erect, and unperturbed outline against the moon.
“That’s right, that’s right,” Dakers screamed, “our lord Satan did hear me, my darling. I’ll be back for ee, my dear. Wait for me.”
The tower wasn’t burning. It should have been a furnace by now, but despite broken furniture, oil, a draft, and a torch, the bonfire hadn’t caught. Something, some thing, had put out the fire.
Its door faced the wind, Adelia told herself. The wind carried snow and extinguished the flames.
But what couldn’t be extinguished was the image of Rosamund, diabolically preserved, waiting in that cold upper chamber for her servant to return to her…
It was a sad little flotilla at the river: rowing boats, punts, an old wherry, all found moored along the banks and commandeered by Schwyz’s soldiers. The only vessel of any substance was the barge that Mansur and Oswald and the Godstow men had brought upriver to collect Rosamund’s body. Adelia looked for Mansur and, when she didn’t see him, became frightened that the soldiers had killed him. These were crude men; they reminded her of the followers of Crusade armies passing through Salerno who’d been prepared to slaughter anybody with an appearance different from their own. There was a tall figure standing in the barge’s prow, but the man was cloaked and hooded like everybody else and the snow hindered identification. It could be Mansur, it could be a soldier.
She tried reassuring herself with the fact that Schwyz and his men were mercenaries and more interested in utility than the slaughter of Saracens; they would surely see the need to keep alive every skilled boatman they had to take them to Oxford.
The chaos that had reigned in Wormhold’s bailey was now redoubled as Eleanor’s people fought to accompany their queen on the Godstow barge-the only one with a cabin. If there was someone managing the embarkation, he was overwhelmed.
The mercenary Cross, in charge of Adelia and Dakers, waited too long for orders; by the time he realized there weren’t going to be any, the barge was dangerously overladen with the queen’s servants and baggage. He and the two women were waved away from it.
Cursing, he hauled them both along to the next vessel in line and almost threw them into its stern. Ward made a leap and joined them.
It was a rowing boat. An open rowing boat tied by a hawser onto the stern of the Godstow barge. Adelia shrieked at the soldier, “You can’t put us here. We’ll freeze.” Exposed to the lacerating wind in this thing, they’d be dead long before they reached Oxford, two corpses as rigid as Rosamund’s.
The boat shuddered as three more people were forced into it by another guard, who clambered in after them. A voice deeper than Adelia’s and more used to carrying overrode the wind: “In the name of God, man, do you want to kill us? Get us under cover. Ask the queen, that lady there saved her life.” The Bishop of Saint Albans had joined her, and her protest. Still roped to Jacques and Walt and at a spear’s end, he nevertheless carried authority.
“I’m getting it, aren’t I?” Cross shouted back. “Shut your squalling. Sit there. In front of the women.”
Once everybody was settled to his satisfaction, he produced a large bundle that turned out to be an old sail and called to his companion, addressing him as Giorgio, to help him spread it.
Whatever their manners, he and his companion were efficient. The wind tried to whip the canvas away from them, but Dakers and Adelia were made to sit on one end of it before it was looped back and up, bringing it forward so that it covered them as well as the three prisoners and, finally, the two soldiers themselves, who took their seat in the prow. Their efforts had been self-preservation; they were coming, too. With deliberate significance, Giorgio placed a stabbing sword across his knees.
The sail was dirty and smelly, and rested heavily on the top of everybody’s head, not quite wide enough for its purpose, so that covering themselves fully against the slanting wind on one side left a gap on the other. Ice formed over it immediately, rendering it stiff but also making a protective layer. It was shelter of a sort.
The river was being whipped into a fury that slopped wavelets of icy water over the gunwales. Adelia heaved Ward onto her lap, covered him with her cloak, and put her feet up against Rowley’s back to keep them out of the wet-he was on the thwart immediately in front of her on the starboard side where the gap was. Jacques sat between him and Walt.
“Are you all right?” She had to shout against the shriek of the wind.
“Are you?” he asked.
“Splendid.”
The messenger was also trying to be brave. Adelia heard him say, “Boat trip-makes a nice change.”
“It’ll come out of your wages,” the bishop told him. Walt grunted.
There was no time for more. The two soldiers were yelling at them to bail “before this bloody scow goes under,” and were handing out receptacles with which to do it. The three prisoners were given proper bailers while two jugs were passed to the women. “And put your bloody backs to it.”
Adelia began bailing-if the boat sank beneath them, they’d be dead before they could scramble to the bank. As fast as she could, she chucked icy water out into the river. The river chucked it back.
Seen through the gap in the sail, the scudding snow was vaguely illuminated by the lamp on the stern of the barge ahead and the prow of whatever vessel was behind them, providing just enough light for Adelia to recognize the pitifully inadequate jug with which she was bailing. It was of silver and had lately stood on the tray on which a servant had brought food and drink to Eleanor in Rosamund’s chamber. The Aquitanians had been right; the mercenaries-the two in this boat, at any rate-were thieves.
Adelia experienced a sudden fury that centered on the stolen jug but had more to do with being cold, tired, wet, in extreme discomfort, and frightened for her life. She turned on Dakers, who was doing nothing. “Bail, blast you.”
The woman remained motionless, her head lolling. Probably dead, Adelia thought.
Anger had afflicted Rowley as well. He was shouting at his captor to free their hands so he and Jacques and Walt could bail faster-they were being slowed by having to scoop the water up and out in awkward unison.
He was again told to shut his squalling, but after a minute Adelia felt the boat rock even more heavily and then heard the three men in front of her swearing. She gathered from their abuse that they’d been cut free of one another but the separate pieces of rope that bound each pair of wrists were still in place.
Still, the three could now bail quicker-and did. Adelia transferred her fury to Dakers for dying after all she, Adelia Aguilar, had done for her. “Sheer ingratitude,” she snapped, and grabbed the woman’s wrist. For the second time that night, she felt a weak pulse.
Leaning forward so that she nearly squashed the dog on her lap, she jerked Dakers’s feet out of the bilge and, to warm them, pushed one between the bodies of Rowley and Jacques and the other between Jacques and Walt.
“How long are we going to sit here?” she screamed over their heads at the soldiers. “God’s rib, when are we going to move?”
But the wind screamed louder than she could; the men didn’t hear her. Rowley, though, nodded his head in the direction of the gap.
She peered out at the whirling curtain of snow. They were moving, had been moving for some time, and had reached a bend in the river where a high bank of trees must have been sheltering them a little.
Whether the barge in front, to which they were attached, was being poled by men or pulled by a horse, she didn’t know-a dreadful task for either. It was probably being poled; they seemed to be going faster than walking pace. The wind at their backs and the flow of the river was helping them along, sometimes too much-the prow of their boat bumped into the stern of the barge, and the soldiers were having to take turns to struggle out from under the sail cover to fend off with an oar.
How far Oxford was she didn’t know, either, but at this rate of progress, Godstow could only be an hour or so away-and there, somehow, she must get ashore.
With this determined, Adelia felt calmer, a doctor again-and one with an ailing patient on her hands. Part of her extreme irritation had been because she was hungry. It came to her that Dakers was probably even hungrier than she was, faint from it-there’d been no sign of food in the Wormhold kitchen when they’d investigated it.
Adelia, though she might condemn the thieving mercenaries, hadn’t come empty-handed out of Rosamund’s chamber, either; there’d been food left on the queen’s tray, and hard times had taught her the value of foraging.
Well, Rosamund wasn’t going to eat it.
She delved into her pocket and brought out a lumpy napkin, unfolded it, broke off a large piece from the remains of Eleanor’s veal pie, and waved it under Dakers’s nose. The smell of it acted as a restorative; it was snatched from her fingers.
Making sure the soldiers couldn’t see her-she could barely see them in the darkness under the sail-she leaned forward again and slid the cheese she’d also filched between Jacques and Rowley until she felt the roped hand of one of them investigate it, grasp it, and squeeze her own hand in acknowledgment. There came a pause in the three men’s bailing, during which, she guessed, the cheese was being secretly portioned, causing the soldiers to shout at them again.
The remains of the veal pie she divided between herself and Ward.
After that there was little to be done but endure and bail. Every so often, the sail drooped so heavily between them that one of the men had to punch it from underneath in order to rid it of the snow weighting it.
The level of water slopping below her raised legs refused to go down, however much she threw over the side; each breath she expelled wetted the cloak muffling her mouth, freezing immediately so that her lips became raw. The sailcloth scraped against her head as she bent and came up again. But if she stopped, the cold would congeal the blood in her veins. Keep on bailing, stay alive, live to see Allie again.
Rowley’s elbow jerked into her knees. She went on bailing, lean, dip, toss, lean, dip, toss; she’d been doing it forever, would continue forever. Rowley had to nudge her again before she realized she could stop. There was no water coming in.
The wind had lessened. They were in a muffled silence, and light of a sort-was it day?-came through the window of the sail’s gap, beyond which snow was falling so thickly it confused the eye into giving the impression that the boat was progressing through air filled with swansdown.
The cold also coming in through the gap had numbed her right side and shoulder. She leaned forward and pressed against Rowley’s back to preserve some warmth for the two of them, pulling Dakers with her so that the housekeeper’s body was against Jacques’s.
Rowley turned his head slightly, and she felt his breath on her forehead. “Well?”
Adelia shifted higher to peer over his shoulder. Despite the fall in the wind, the swollen river was running faster than ever and putting the rowing boat in danger of crashing into the barge or veering against a bank.
One of the soldiers-she thought it was Cross, the younger of the two-was fending off, having abandoned the shelter of the sail so that it drooped over his companion, who was hunched over the prow thwart, exhausted or asleep, or both.
There was no movement, either, from Walt or Jacques. Dakers was still slumped against Jacques’s back.
Adelia nosed Rowley’s hood away from his ear and put her lips against it: “They’re going to raise Eleanor’s standard at Oxford. They think the Midlands will rise up and join her rebellion.”
“How many men? At Oxford, how many men?”
“A thousand, I think.”
“Did I see Eynsham back there?”
“Yes. Who is he?”
“Bastard. Clever. Got the ear of the Pope. Don’t trust him.”
“Schwyz?” she asked.
“Bastard mercenary. First-class soldier.”
“Somebody called Wolvercote is in charge of the army at Oxford.”
“A bastard.”
That disposed of the main players, then. She rested her face against his cheek in momentary contentment.
“Got your knife?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Cut this bloody rope.” He jiggled his bound hands.
She took another look at the soldier crouching the prow; his eyes were closed.
“Come on.” Rowley’s mouth barely moved. “I’ll be getting off in a minute.” They might have been journeying luxuriously together and he’d remembered a prior destination to hers.
“No.” She put her arms round him.
“Don’t,” he said. “I’ve got to find Henry. Warn him.”
“No.” In this blizzard, nobody would find anybody. He’d die. The fen people told tales about this sort of snowstorm, of unwary cottagers, having ventured out in it to lock up their poultry or bring in the cow, unable find their way back through a freezing, whirling thickness that took away sight and sense of direction so that they ended up stiff and dead only yards from their own front doors. “No,” she said again.
“Cut this bloody rope.”
The soldier in the prow stirred and muttered. “What you doing?”
They waited until he settled again.
“Do you want me to go with my hands tied?” Rowley breathed.
Christ God, how she loathed him. And loathed Henry Plantagenet. The king, always the king if it costs my life, yours, our child’s, all happiness.
She delved into her pocket, gripped the knife, and seriously considered sticking it into his leg. He couldn’t then go wandering about in a circle and end up as a mound of ice in some field.
“I hate you,” she told him. Tears were freezing on her eyelashes.
“I know. Cut the bloody rope.”
Holding the knife, she slid her right arm farther around him, all the time watching the man in the prow, wondering why she didn’t alert him so that Rowley would be restrained…
She couldn’t. She didn’t know what fate Eleanor intended for her prisoner or, even it was a benign one, what Eynsham or Schwyz might do.
Her fingers found his hands and walked their way to the rope round his wrists. She began cutting, carefully-the knife was so sharp that a wrong move could open one of his veins.
One strand severed, another. As she worked, she hissed bile. “Your leman, am I? No use to you, am I? I hope you freeze in hell-and Henry with you.”
The last strand went, and she felt him flex his hands to get their circulation back.
He turned his head so that he could kiss her. His chin scraped her cheek.
“No use at all,” he said, “except to make the sun come up.”
And he was gone.
Jacques took charge. Adelia heard him put a sob into his voice, telling the furious Cross that the collision with the bank had caused the bishop to fall overboard.
She heard the mercenary’s reply: “He’s dead meat, then.”
Jacques burst into a loud wail but smoothly took Ward off Adelia’s lap, shifted her so that she sat between him and Walt with the sleeping Dakers resting on her back, and returned the dog to its place under her cloak.
She was barely aware of the change. Except to make the sun come up.
I’ll make the sun come up if I see him again. I’ll kill him. Dear Lord, keep him safe.
The snow stopped, and the heavy clouds that carried it rolled away westward. The sun came out and Cross rolled back the sail, thinking there was warmth to be had.
Adelia took no notice of that, either, until Walt nudged her. “What’s up with he, mistress?”
She raised her head. The two mercenaries were sitting on the prow thwart opposite. The one called Cross was trying to rouse his companion. “Come on, Giorgio, upsy-daisy. Weren’t your fault we lost the bloody bishop. Come on, now.”
“He’s dead,” Adelia told him. The man’s boots were fixed in the solidified bilge water. Just another frozen corpse to add to the night’s list.
“Can’t be. Can’t be. I kept him in the warm, well, warm as I could.” Cross’s bad-tempered face was agonized.
Lord, this death is important to this man. It should be important to me.
For the look of the thing, Adelia stretched so that her hand rested against the dead man’s neck where a pulse should be. He was rigid. She shook her head. He’d been considerably older than his friend.
Jacques and Walt genuflected. She took the living soldier’s hand in one of hers. “I’m sorry, Master Cross.” She spoke the end words: “May God have mercy on his soul.”
“He was bloody sitting here, keeping warm, I thought.”
“I know. You did your best for him.”
“Why ain’t you lot dead, then?” Anger was returning. “You was sitting same as him.”
Useless to say that they had been bailing and therefore moving, just as Cross himself, who, even though exposed to the wind, had been active in preventing collision. And poor Giorgio had been alone, with no human warmth next to him.
“I’m sorry,” she said again. “He was old, the cold was too much for him.”
Cross said, “Taught me soldiering, he did. We been through three campaigns together. Sicilian, he was.”
“So am I.”
“Oh.”
“Don’t move him,” she said sharply.
Cross was trying to gather the body up so as to lay it along the thwart. Like Rosamund’s, its rigor would persist until it encountered heat-there was none in this sun-and the sight of it on its back with knees and hands curved like a dog’s was not one its friend would want to see.
Walt said, “By Gor, ain’t that Godstow by there?”
Allie.
She realized that she was surrounded by a glittering, diamond-hard landscape that she had to shade her eyes to look at. Trees had been upended, their roots like ghastly, desperate, twiggy fingers frozen in the act of appeal. For the rest, the countryside appeared flattened by the monstrous weight of snow fallen on it so that what had been dips in the ground were merely smooth shallows among the rises they interspersed. Straight threads of smoke rising against a cornflower-blue sky showed that the lumps scattered on the rise above the bank were half-buried houses.
There was a small, humped bridge in the distance, white as marble; she and Rowley had stood on it one night in another century. Beyond that-she had to squeeze her eyes nearly shut to see-many threads of smoke and, where the bridge ended, a wood and the suggestion of gates.
She was opposite the village of Wolvercote. Over there, though she couldn’t see it, stood the nunnery of Godstow. Where Allie was.
Adelia stood, slipped, and rocked the boat in her scramble to get up again. “Put us ashore,” she told Cross, but he didn’t seem to hear her. Walt and Jacques pulled her down.
The galloper said, “No good, mistress, even supposing…”
“Look at the bank, mistress,” Walt told her.
She looked at it-a small cliff where flat pasture should have been. Farther in, what appeared to be enormous frozen bushes were, in fact, the spread branches of mature oak trees standing in drifts that must be-Adelia estimated-fifteen feet or more deep.
“We’d never get through,” Jacques was saying.
She pleaded, begged, while knowing it was true; perhaps when the inhabitants disinterred themselves, they would dig tunnels through the snow to reach the river, but until then, or until it thawed, she was separated from the convent as if by a mountain barrier. She would have to sit in this boat and be swept away past Allie, only God knowing how or when, or if, she could get back to her.
They’d passed the village now. They were nearly at the bridge that crossed the tributary serving the mill. The Thames was widening into the great sweep that would take it around the convent’s meadows.
And something was happening to it…
The barge had slowed. Its sides were too high to see what was occurring on its deck, but there was activity and a lot of swearing.
“What’s the matter?”
Walt picked up one of the bailers, dipped it over the side, brought it back, and stirred his finger in it. “Look at this.”
They looked. The cupped water was gray and granulated, as if somebody had poured salt into it. “What is it?”
“It’s ice,” Walt said softly. “It’s bloody ice.” He looked around. “Must be shallower here. It’s ice, that’s what it is. The river’s freezing up.”
Adelia stared at it, then up at Walt, then back to the river. She sat down suddenly and gave thanks for a miracle as wonderful as any in the Bible; liquid was turning solid, one element changing into another. They would have to stop. They could walk ashore and, many as they were, they could dig their way through to the convent.
She looked back to count the boats behind them.
There were no boats. As far as the eye could see, the river was empty, graying along this stretch but gaining a blueness as it twisted away into a dazzling, silent distance.
Blinking, she searched for a sight of the contingent that should have been accompanying them along the towpath.
But there was no towpath-of course there wasn’t. Instead, where it had been, was a wavy, continuous bank of frozen snow, taller than two men in some places, with its side edge formed by wind and water as neatly as if some titanic pastry cook with a knife had sheared off the ragged bits of icing round the top of a cake.
For a second, because her mind was directed only at reaching her daughter, Adelia thought, It doesn’t matter, there are enough of us to dig a path…
And then, “Dear Lord, where are they?” she said. “All those people?”
The sun went on shining beautifully, unfairly, pitilessly, on an empty river where, perhaps, in its upper reaches men and women sat in their boats as unmoving as Giorgio sat in this one, where, perhaps, corpses rolled in sparkling water.
And what of the riders? Where were they, God help them? Where was Rowley?
The answering silence was terrible because it was the only answer. It trapped the oaths and grunts of effort from the barge as if in a bell jar, so that they echoed back in an otherwise soundless air.
The men on board it labored on, plunging poles through the shallow, thickening water until they found purchase on the river bottom and could push the barge another yard, another…
After a while, the bell jar filled with sounds like the cracks of whips-they were encountering surface sheet ice and having to break through it.
They inched past the point of the river where it divided and a stream turned off toward the mill and the bridge. There was no noise from the millrace, where a fall of water hung in shining stillness.
And, oh, God Almighty save our souls, in all this wonder, somebody had used the bridge as a gibbet; two glistening, distorted figures hung from it by the neck-Adelia, looking up, glimpsed two dead faces looking quizzically sideways and down at her, saw two pairs of pointing feet, as if their owners had been frozen in a neat little dancing jump.
Nobody else seemed to notice, or care. Walt and Jacques were using the oars to pole the rowing boat along so that it didn’t drag on the barge. Dakers sat next to her now, her hood over her face; somebody had placed the sail around the two of them to keep them warm.
They inched past the bridge and into an even wider bend where the Thames ran along a Godstow meadow-which, astonishingly, still was a meadow. Some freak of the wind had scoured it of snow so that a great expanse of frosted grass and earth provided the only color in a white world.
And here the barge stopped because the ice had become too thick to proceed farther. It didn’t matter, it didn’t matter-there was a scar leading down the rise from the convent to the shore and, at the bottom of it, convent men with shovels were shouting and waving, and everybody in the two boats was shouting and waving back as if it were they who were marooned and had glimpsed a rescuing sail coming toward them…
Only then did Adelia realize that she had been sustained through the night on borrowed energy and it was now being debited out of her body so quickly that she was close to the languor that comes with death. It had been a very near thing.
They had to disembark onto ice and cross it to reach land. Ward’s paws slipped and he went down, sliding, until he could scrabble resentfully up again. An arm went round Adelia’s waist to help her along and she looked up into the face of Mansur. “Allah is merciful,” he said.
“Somebody is,” she said. “I was so frightened for you. Mansur, we’ve lost Rowley.”
Half-carried, she stumbled across the ice beside him and then across the flattened grass of the meadow.
Among the small crowd ahead, she glimpsed Eleanor’s upright figure before it disappeared into the tunnel that led up to the convent gates, a steep, thin pathway with walls twice head height on either side. It had been dug to take Rosamund’s coffin; instead, it received a litter made out of oars and wrapped around with sailcloth, under which rested the contorted body of a mercenary soldier.
A beautiful tunnel, though. At its top stood an elderly woman, her studied impassivity displaying her relief. “You took your time.”
As Adelia fell, babbling, into her arms, Gyltha said, “A’course she’s well. Fat and fit as a flea. Think as I can’t look after her? Gor dang, girl, you only left her yesterday.”