have none of the Plantagenet’s rabble in this house.”
She turned to go.
This was frightening. “But… but she must have turned up,” Adelia said in desperation. “She was on her way here. Where is she?”
The only answer was the brisk tap of Lady Wolvercote’s shoes on the risers of the staircase as she went up them.
As the door of the solar shut quietly behind its mistress, the steward stepped forward. “If you would come this way…”
“To the kitchen?” Gyltha shouted at him, as if she was above such places. “We ain’t coming to no bloody kitchen. You can stuff-”
Adelia put out a hand to stop the inevitable invective; though deeply disturbed, she was trying to keep her head. “We would be grateful for a supper before we go,” she told the steward meekly, “and so would our men.”
As they followed the steward, Gyltha gave her a look worthy of the gorgon who’d just left them. “You toleratin’ this?”
“Yes. We may learn something.” The servants were likely to know what had happened. Refused entry, Emma would not have gone quietly; people must have heard the argument-that encounter between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law would have been a case of Greek meeting Greek, the only trouble being that the marble-faced Greek upstairs had the advantage of possession.
As they were led through the hall’s serving door and across a courtyard, Adelia asked Mansur quietly in Arabic, “What do you think happened?”
“A coldhearted bint that one, but why should she lie?”
That was what was so worrying: If Lady Wolvercote had thrown Emma out of her house, she would not, Adelia felt, have had any compunction in saying so. In which case, Emma had not reached Wolvercote Manor at all. It might be that she had delayed her visit for some reason-but for a month? Or, and this was the worst possible explanation, she and the others had been attacked somewhere on the road to Wells.
However shaming it was to be fed in the kitchen like a beggar, it would be an opportunity to ask questions, and Adelia was prepared to suffer humiliation if she could find out what had happened to her friends.
They crossed a courtyard to a square, pretty building in the same stone as the house and with an octagonal roof. The heat coming out of its open door was nearly enough to send its visitors teetering backward.
“Perhaps you would prefer to sit on the lawn and eat,” the steward suggested.
Gyltha said with energy that she would prefer to eat with the soldiers at the gate and marched off, pulling Allie along with her.
Adelia and Mansur braved the kitchen. A single aperture near the roof allowed more smoke out than light in, leaving two fires set into the walls to illuminate a scene like Vulcan’s forge. A man stripped to the waist, his skin gleaming with sweat, retrieved rounded loaves from an oven with the aid of an enormous spatula. Other figures were setting a table in the center of the room with a surprisingly dainty collation of carved chicken and ham, flaked trout, preserves, scones, butter, and honey.
A pewter jug held wine, another ale, but when Mansur shook his head at both and Adelia explained that alcohol was unacceptable to his religion, one of the servants was dispatched to fetch cooled barley water from a cellar.
Obviously, the immutable law of hospitality to travelers, however base, was one the descendant of Rollo the Ganger had trained her staff not to break. Which in itself was concerning because if Emma and her party had arrived on the Wolvercote threshold, the people in this kitchen would have known about it-and they didn’t.
Or they said they didn’t.
Adelia questioned them as a group and then individually. “Have you heard of or seen a lady traveling with attendants in the area? She is young and fair and has a two-year-old child with her. Did she come here?”
She was competing for their attention with Mansur, whose robe and kaffiyeh with its golden-roped agal around his head seemed to engross and almost frighten them, as if an angel or demon had sprung through the door. The brilliant whiteness of his clothes-how he kept them so clean while traveling, Adelia had never fathomed-was always noticeable, but in ports like Cambridge where the occasional Arab trader came and went, his appearance did not excite quite so much curiosity. Here in the depths of the country, they had never seen anything like him.
“A lady,” Adelia reiterated, “with a child. In a traveling cart. Horses, maids, grooms, a priest.”
For a moment, the man shoveling the loaves swiveled around to look at her and she went expectantly toward him, but he shook his head and turned back to his bread.
No, no, they had seen nobody like that. The boy turning a spit crossed his fingers while making his denial, and a maid was taken with hysterical giggles, but these responses Adelia, again, had to attribute to Mansur’s presence. She gave up.
She tried questioning the steward when he led the two of them to the gates. He shook his head. “No, mistress, we have received no one of that description.”
“I didn’t ask if she was received, I want to know if she came here.”
“No, mistress, I’m sorry.”
Yet there was something…
Captain Bolt and his men were sitting on the grass under the trees by the side of the lane, their horses casting long shadows against the setting sun. They had eaten and drunk well, but the captain was displeased; his mounts had barely been able to get enough water from the nearby stream, which the summer had reduced to a trickle. “Wouldn’t let us in through the gates to get to a trough. Somerset hospitality? I spit on it.”
He was unmoved by the fact that Emma and her party were missing.
“Couldn’t you send one of your lads into Wells?” Adelia pleaded. “They may be putting up at one of the inns there.”
“I reckon as that bitch has eaten ‘em,” Gyltha said, and met Adelia’s glare with “Well, I wouldn’t put it past her.”
“No, I couldn’t, mistress,” Bolt said. “You seen how many inns that town’s got? Going down High Street alone we must’ve passed dozens. I can’t spare a man or the time.”
As usual, he was in a rush; his orders were to deliver Adelia and company intact to Glastonbury, see them safely installed, and then return to the king as fast as possible. Looking for lost ladies was not in his brief.
“You could send him,” he said, jerking a thumb to where Rhys the bard was sprawled in the shade of an oak, a flask of ale by his side, a chicken leg in one hand, the other rippling the strings of the harp held between his knees. “I can spare him.”
They all could. At first the Welshman’s playing and singing had sweetened the journey, but as Captain Bolt said of him with complaint, “He don’t do anything else.”
And it was true-as an aid in the tasks of traveling Rhys was useless. Asked to fetch or carry something, he invariably dropped it. Since most of his life had been spent on foot or bareback Welsh ponies, horses alarmed him to an extent that he wouldn’t or couldn’t tighten their girths or put a bit in their mouths, thus necessitating one of the soldiers to do it for him.
What he could do, amazingly, was attract women. Having eaten prodigiously of the supper provided by whatever inn they’d put up at, he managed to vanish and, before they could proceed in the morning, there had to be a search for him, which invariably ended in some female’s bedroom. It sent Captain Bolt mad. “How does he do it?”
Adelia didn’t know, either, but there was no denying that bucktoothed, vague, and none too clean though Rhys was, his music sent a maiden’s knees wobbling, along with her virginity.
Mansur despised him, perhaps because Gyltha, usually irritated by inefficiency, showed a sentimental forbearance of the man. “He’s worth it for that lovely voice,” she’d say, tenderly making sure his plate was fuller than anybody else’s.
Allie was his slave, as he was hers. The only night on which he hadn’t pursued his amours had been when the child, having eaten some unripe crab apples lying in an orchard, was taken with a nasty stomachache. He’d stayed by her bed, soothing her with a song celebrating the Arab star Almeisan, after which she was named.
Adelia was prepared to forgive him a great deal after that, though occasionally, when he’d once more reduced Captain Bolt to apoplexy, she wondered why on earth Henry had sent the bard with her.
“Because he wanted to get rid of him, that’s why,” was Bolt’s response. “Couldn’t give him back to the damned Welsh, could he?”
No, presumably, he couldn’t. Rhys’s fellow countrymen wouldn’t look kindly on a man who presented the English king with a dead Arthur.
However it was, there was no use sending him to look for Emma. Even if Wells locked up all its daughters, it was doubtful he could find his way back.
There was nothing for it at the moment but to go on to Glastonbury and hope to locate Emma through more inquiries.
It was a winding road leading them there, and as darkness fell, it was empty of traffic.
The law ordering that verges be cleared of trees by the length of a bow shot so that travelers were not vulnerable to a surprise attack had been ignored here. And ignored for some years-the cavalcade rode through avenues that branched overhead, hiding the moon.
Torches and lanterns were lit, swords were drawn, silence demanded, the mounts slowed to walking pace-it had been known for robbers to bring down cantering horses by putting a wire across the road. Gyltha and Adelia, with a sleeping, panniered Allie, found themselves hemmed in by their escorts as they rode-and were glad of it. Rhys nudged his horse between theirs; the only weapon he had was his harp.
Michael, the trumpeter, muttered, “Most dangerous bit o’ road in England this, so I heard.”
“Why?” Adelia whispered back.
“Wolf. Outlaw. They call him Wolf acause he’s a animal though he runs on two legs, and a pack with him. They say…”
But Captain Bolt hushed them. He was listening to the hundred rustles that came from among trunks turned ghastly by the glare of the torches, his sword twitching toward the reflected green of animals’ eyes that peered out at them from the undergrowth.
At one point, Adelia heard the sound of a cough from somewhere among the trees, but whether it came from a human throat or not she couldn’t tell.
Wolf.
Because she was tired and scared, she became angry. Bolt should have taken them back to sleep over at Wells so that they could have made this ride in the daytime. Damn the man for refusing another delay. Always wanting to gallop back to his damn king, damn him.
And damn that female back there. Had she sent Emma and little Pippy out into another such dangerous night? She’d said she hadn’t. Mansur didn’t think she had. But there’d been a sense of suffocation in that pretty house and in its kitchen, a truth being choked.
Oh, God, suppose the hag was keeping them imprisoned? Worse than imprisoned?
No, this was the thinking of fatigue.
But there’d been something… She kept remembering the eyes of the man at the bread oven when he’d turned to look at her. Something…
Damn it, how long before they reached Glastonbury? It was supposed to be only a few miles from Wells, but there was no sign of habitation ahead.
The only indication that they’d reached it was the sudden clatter of their horses’ hooves on stone. No signpost, but there was a gap in the forest to their right. The men’s torches showed a steep, cobbled hill that leveled out at the bottom, where moonlight shone on water.
“That’s it,” Bolt said. “Must be. That’ll be the River Brue down there-comes right up to the abbey, I was told-but where is the abbey?”
Where, indeed? As one of the biggest, busiest, richest foundations in England, owning a good deal of Somerset and beyond, it should have shown some sign of activity even at this time of night, however much the fire had damaged it.
It wasn’t until they began to go down the hill that Adelia fully realized the extent of the catastrophe that had overwhelmed the place. On the left, they were following what had been the monastery’s great boundary wall, now a blackened, tumbled collection of stones with silence beyond it.
As pitiable-and nobody had mentioned this-flames had also leaped the wall to consume the little town that lay outside it. For on the right as they rode, torchlight fell on naked spars that had been
