He swung himself into the saddle. Then, for such a down-to-earth man, he said a surprising thing: “I ain’t so sure. That fire did more damage than we know, I reckon. Something’s gone out of this place and something else has come in.”
RHYS ACCOMPANIED THEM when they set off for the abbey. “Better pay my respects to Uncle Caradoc’s grave,” he said. Apparently, he was going to sing to it; he was bringing his harp.
Hilda came, too, carrying a heavy covered basket; so did Godwyn, though only as far as the short walk to the quayside, where a little way away from the quay a boathouse stood. The inn’s rowing boat was tied to a pier. He was going to fetch supplies.
“Don’t forget, now,” Hilda shouted after him, “venison if they’ve got it and a good ham. And bring back the girl.” To Adelia she said, “We’ll be needing some help now, and Millie’s a hard worker, even if she be half-witted…”
She went on talking, describing the staff they’d had in the days when pilgrims flooded in, and the grandeur of some of their visitors. “Yes, Queen Eleanor’s own ladies-in-waiting, there not being any room for them in the abbey’s guesthouse; oh, yes, the Pilgrim’s known its share of the nobility…”
Adelia barely listened. She was entranced by the view from the quayside of what lay beyond it. Here at her feet was the River Brue, wending its way like a shining blue piece of marquetry set into a watery, untidy, reed-filled expanse stretching to the horizon. Seagulls wheeled in air that had a touch of salt in it-somewhere in that immense distance was the Severn Estuary and, beyond that, the Celtic Sea, only just being kept at bay by this flat, indeterminate meeting of earth and sky.
Allie was bouncing with joy. “It’s like home, Mama.” She switched to Arabic: “Can we go fishing, Mansur? Can we?” Back at Waterbeach, the two of them had provided the household’s fish meals. She returned to English: “And, look, there’s a man walking on stilts, like they do at home. Can I have some stilts, Mama? Can I?”
“No, you can’t, missie.” Hilda was suddenly severe. “Less’n you know the trackways, there’s bog out there as’ll suck you down and fill that little nose of yours with mud so’s you won’t ever breathe again.”
“No need to frighten the child,” Gyltha snapped, and Allie added, defiantly, “I’m not frightened. I’m a fenlander, I am.”
“Don’t care what you are,” Hilda told her. “Them’s the Avalon marshes and there’s bugaboos out there.”
They weren’t as beautiful as the fens, Adelia thought, being almost treeless, but she knew how her daughter felt; that solitary stilt walker, like an awkward heron against the skyline, was a reminder of home, where men and women used stilts to stride ancient paths hidden under peat and shallow water. Out there was not only an enormous cornucopia of fish and fowl and fuel but also endless entertainment-a pelican rising with a flapping trout in its beak, as one was doing at this moment, otters sliding down banks for the fun of it, darting dragonflies, beavers building a dam, time- wasting marvels that had kept her and Allie entranced for hours.
Hilda, probably rightly, for marshland was a dangerous place to the uninitiated, was still trying to scare Allie away from it. “There’s will-o’-the-wisps with lights to lure you into the mire at night…” She flapped her arms. “Whoo-oo.”
“We call them jack-o’-lanterns,” Allie said, not being a child who frightened easily, “and Mama says they’re a national phenomenon.”
“Natural,” Adelia told her, “a natural phenomenon.” There were islands out there, little humps among the flatness like the curve of dolphins petrified in the act of diving. Godwyn’s boat was heading for the nearest. She would have liked to inquire about them, but this was the king’s time she was wasting, after all. Any more of it and Gyltha’s growing irritation with Hilda would result in a quarrel.
She nudged Mansur. “Lead on, my lord.”
They turned left along the marketplace with its abandoned stalls and followed the abbey wall to the remains of a lichened gatehouse, now just another breach in the perimeter. Up a slope, past what might once have been a tithe barn…
And there it was.
“Mary, mother of God, look down on us,” Gyltha said quietly.
Adelia’s first thought was of how unmercifully the sun shone on a blackened and withered thing that shrank from the glare because it had once been beautiful.
It was still possible to see the former grace of an arch where only a half of it now stood; to mentally rebuild from those stumps of charred stone a long, elegant nave, a transept, a pillared cloister; to recognize the artistry of a master mason’s carving under the soot of a tumbled, broken capital; to replace the ground’s terrible scorch marks, like patches of disease, with the vast, upward sweep of a green hill that had once provided the backdrop to magnificence.
It would take years, decades, perhaps a century, to rebuild. Those who had tended this great church would live among its ruins and die without seeing the completion of what would replace them. Even to begin such a venture required a courage Adelia could not imagine-nor the faith.
“I am so sorry,” she said, and wondered at the inadequacy of saying it, and to whom she had said it.
The fire had spread downhill from the church, leaving the upper slopes of the hill untouched. Up there, two men-one in Benedictine black and the other in the undyed woolen habit of a lay brother-were scything hay, watched over a paddock fence by a solitary mule, all of them forming a pleasing, bucolic miniature, like one on an illuminated manuscript, but throwing into relief the scene from hell that it was edging.
The monk straightened his back, saw them, threw down his scythe, and began running downhill, shouting and waving his arms. “Go back,” he was yelling, “we don’t need you. In the name of the Father, go away.”
Nearer, another monk strode energetically toward them from somewhere on their right in order to intercept the first. “James, Brother James,” he was calling out, “No. No, no, no. Let us remember our manners. If these are the king’s emissaries, they are our saviors.”
He reached them first, smiling. To Mansur, he said, “I give thanks to the king and to Almighty God for your coming. All the world knows of Arab skill in the sciences. I am Abbot Sigward.” He bent his head to each of the women as Adelia introduced herself, then Gyltha, then Allie-who got a special bow-and to Rhys. “Ladies, gentlemen, God’s blessings on you.”
Brother James came cantering up and went to his knees in the cinders. “Don’t let them in, my lord.” Long, nervous hands clutched at the skirt of the abbot’s scapular. “I beg you, send them away.”
“Why?” Abbot Sigward said. “For one thing, I am ready for whatever our good Hilda has in that basket.”
With one hand on Brother James’s trembling shoulder, he led them to the building he’d come out of. It was the only one left standing in the enormous acreage of the abbey’s grounds-a lovely sculpted square of ashlar stone turned a warm yellow by the sun, with a tiled, conical roof rising to an elaborate chimney.
“Once the Abbot’s kitchen,” he said, ushering them in, “now our residence.”
Three quarters of England ’s population would have been glad of it as a residence, Adelia thought. She wouldn’t have minded it herself. It was spacious and cool and functional, though the mason who’d built it hadn’t been able to resist lavishly sculpting stone leaves and fruit into the ceiling’s eight ribs, which curved to meet in a central airhole.
Steps in a corner, where a bucket stood, led down to a dark glint of water. Another corner accommodated vats. A cat was curled up in a pen that also contained a goat. The fireplace beneath the airhole was empty.
Two monks, each with a pestle cupped in one arm, stood by a plain deal table, pounding herbs. One was fat, the other thin.
They glanced up at the visitors, their eyes guarded as they looked from Mansur to Adelia and Gyltha, to Allie, and finally to Rhys.
“Oh, dear God,” said the thin one. “He’s back.”
Rhys bobbed. “ ’Allo, Brother Aelwyn. You remember me, then?”
“Oh, yes,” Brother Aelwyn said.
There were introductions all round. The fat monk was Brother Titus, and his attention, once he’d nodded to them, was on the contents of Hilda’s basket as she began laying them on the table, especially the leather bottle of ale.
“You see,” Abbot Sigward said to Mansur, “we laid a penance on ourselves by sending Brother Patrick, who was our kitchener, to the abbeys in Normandy so that he might beg them for rebuilding money-he has the gift of charm, has Patrick, and an interest in cuisine that will match theirs. Consequently, we are left barely able to cook our own meals. All but one of our lay brothers have departed to find employment elsewhere…”
“Deserted, you mean,” Brother Aelwyn said viciously. “The rats ran away. They think God’s curse is on us.”
“I’m afraid they do,” the abbot said, “and perhaps it is, but at least we are blessed by our sister Hilda’s sustenance.” He smiled at the Pilgrim’s landlady and then at Mansur. “And by your presence, my lord.”
He looked more closely up at the Arab, who remained staring stolidly down at him, unspeaking. To Adelia he said, “Do I gather that the sage does not speak English?”
“I am afraid I must be the doctor’s interpreter and assistant,” Adelia said, using the ploy that had served the two of them well. It was a relief to find Abbot Sigward happy to accept the pronouncements of a Saracen, but she knew that such tolerance would not be extended to her. Prior Geoffrey, bless him, was the one churchman prepared to recognize her skill, but even he only because it had saved his life.
She asked if they had any knowledge of a lady missing with her companions.
They had not. None of them had left the abbey since the fire. “We are the guardians of the few holy relics we managed to save from its burning, you see,” the abbot said, adding, “I am sorry for your anxiety; these are concerning times.”
“Don’t worry about that now, Father,” Hilda told him. “See, I’ve brought ham cured just as you like it, and my quince preserve.” She was noticeably proprietorial toward the abbot, brushing dust off his shoulder, filling a plate for him, producing a napkin that she tried to push into his hand. Nobody else had existed for her since he’d appeared on the scene.
“Any sign of that useless devil as Wells set on us, Father?” she asked.
Indulgently, the abbot fended off the napkin. “We mustn’t assume that Eustace is our arsonist, my dear, nor that the bishop of Wells intended him to be so, though our belief lies in that direction and we have had to tell the sheriff so. But no, so far we have not discovered him.”
“Course he did it,” Hilda argued. “Brother Aloysius said so afore he died, didn’t he? Saw him a-coming from the crypt as it flamed, didn’t he?”
“He said something.”
“He shall burn in hell if he did not in life,” Brother Aelwyn said, “and who else but that satanic bishop would rejoice to see Glastonbury a bonfire? Of course it was Eustace.”
To the still-fussing Hilda, the abbot said, “My dear, it would be discourteous to eat while our guests do not, and I can see that they are eager to be about the king’s business.”
He led the way out of the kitchen. Everybody followed-Brother Titus reluctantly, and covering up the food on the table to keep it from the flies until he should return.
As they headed toward the ruined church, tension rose. The animosity toward Mansur was palpable. Brothers Titus and Aelwyn became even more sullen. Hysterically, Brother James begged his superior not to submit sacred Christian bones to the touch of a Saracen.
Hilda, especially, was on edge. “Them’s Arthur’s and Guinevere’s bones, everybody knows it,” she said over and over, as if by reiteration she could make them so.
Only Abbot Sigward kept his poise. They hadn’t known what to do with the skeletons, he said. “They deserve better housing than our kitchen, so we have built a temporary hut of withies for them on the site of the Lady Chapel, where we trust Saint Mary will watch over them.”
“Should have been two huts for decency,” Brother Aelwyn said.
“My dear, we’ve had this out,” his abbot told him wearily. “This couple have been lying side-by-side all this time; I won’t separate them now.” Suddenly, he winked. “After all, if legend is right, Arthur and Guinevere were respectably married.”
He stopped short of the site, gave Rhys permission to visit the graveyard, then bent down to talk to Allie. “It is time for you to go and play, little one,” he told her. “Old bones are not for the young.”
