That night Rhys, sitting late in the inn’s courtyard, began composing a new song. “I would walk the dew or a bitter desert to find you, O white phantom of my dreams…”
“Emma’s not a phantom,” Adelia interrupted, pausing to listen before going upstairs.
“Like Guinevere, she is,” Rhys said. “Nobody don’t know what happened to Arthur’s queen, either. There’s those say she was torn in pieces by wild horses for her adultery. Some think she disappeared into the mists of Avalon. White phantom, white owl, that’s what the name Guinevere do mean, see. Night spirit lost in the darkness.”
“Well, Emma definitely didn’t commit adultery,” said Adelia, and then thought how stupid she sounded. “Don’t be late back now. Promise.”
WHETHER IT WAS RHYS, the worry about Emma, or the skeletons, this was the night that the dreams began.
Adelia was not a dreamer usually, keeping herself so busy by day that in bed she slept the sleep of the just. But this night she found herself standing halfway up the Tor above Glastonbury Abbey, outside a cave.
It was misty. A bell hung on the branches of a hawthorn tree just beside the entrance. Unbidden, her hand reached out to the bell and touched it so that it rang.
She heard its toll echoing through the mist. A male voice came from deep inside the cave: “Is it day?”
Even in her dream, she knew from Rhys’s Arthurian songs that she must reply, “No, sleep on,” or she would awaken whatever or whoever was inside. But though she opened her mouth to give the answer, no sound came out. The mist swirled and darkened; someone was coming up the cave’s tunnel toward her.
She managed, “Emma? Is that you, Emma?”
But the same voice said, “I am Guinevere. Help me. I am hurt.”
There was a scraping sound, and Adelia knew that only the top half of the thing calling itself Guinevere was dragging itself along the tunnel toward her and knew, too, that she couldn’t bear to see it. She began backing into the mist, away from it, still hearing its moans as it slithered.
She woke up sweating.
“A true dream, was it?” Gyltha asked with interest the next morning. “Like Jacob and the Ladder?”
“No, it wasn’t like that. I just felt terror… and guilt. It was begging for help, whatever it was, and I ran away.”
Adelia gave no credit to dreams, but she was still immersed in the awful reproach that this one had wrapped around her. She wasn’t seeing something she should be seeing; she wasn’t acting on something that had been shown to her.
“The cheese, then,” Gyltha said firmly. “Shouldn’t eat cheese close to bedtime-gives you nightmares.”
“I didn’t eat any cheese. Oh, God, Gyltha, we’ve got to find Emma.”
“Doin’ our best, girl.”
It was a relief to go out into the sunshine and trudge across to the abbey so that she could begin work on the bones. Godwyn was taking Gyltha and Allie onto the Brue in his boat to find them bog moss with which to plaster Polycarp’s rump.
Rhys had been roused from his bed and pointed in the direction of Wells and Wolvercote Hall. He’d become suddenly fearful. “Dangerous road, that. Suppose brigands set on me and rob me?”
“Rob him of what?” Mansur had wanted to know; the bard had been wearing the same clothes since Wales, despite Gyltha’s pleas to let her launder them. Apart from his harp, which he kept in a dirty satchel, there was nothing about him to tempt the most optimistic thief.
Eventually, he was persuaded to go by the couple of pennies Adelia gave him to spend at Wells market.
Hilda insisted on accompanying the two investigators to the abbey, seeming intent on monitoring any conversation they might have with Abbot Sigward-“my dear abbot,” as she constantly referred to him.
Adelia wondered if Godwyn was jealous; Hilda glowed for the monk as she didn’t for anyone else, certainly not for her husband, to whom she was dictatorial-her raised voice in the kitchen could often be heard upstairs. Not that Godwyn seemed to mind; he appeared to be as devoted to his wife as she was to the abbot, perhaps because Hilda’s adoration, Adelia thought, wasn’t so much sexual as that of a worshipper at a holy shrine, feeding and protecting its frail flame.
The woman admitted as much. “He’s a saint, my dear abbot,” she said as, carrying another basket with food for him, she accompanied Adelia and Mansur across the empty market. “I was his housekeeper in the old days, young as I was, and nobody don’t know how deep that man’s goodness goes. God’d snatch him from us if so be as I didn’t look after him.”
“Was this before he became a monk?” Adelia asked.
Hilda was suddenly aggressive. “What you want to know for?”
Adelia shrugged; it had been a polite enough inquiry.
After a pause, as if unable to let another opportunity for praise go by, the landlady said abruptly, “He was rich in them days. A nobleman, rich as a king. And I kept house for him-oh, yes, I did. See that island out there…” She pointed toward a large hump in the distant marshes. “Owned that, he did, and thousands of acres all over England. Gave the lot away, so he did, bless him. Gave it to God and took his vow of poverty like the holy man he is.”
A Road to Damascus conversion? The abbot’s gentle face was that of a man whose soul had been purified by fire.
“Did he have family?”
Again, Hilda hesitated. Then she said shortly, “One son. Died on crusade.”
That would account for it, then. Adelia could imagine no worse thing than losing a child, a loss that would turn you either to God for help or away from Him.
“One of his islands is a leper colony now,” Hilda said, still pointing seaward. “That’s how good he is. Bought the Pilgrim for Godwyn and me, and gave an estate over to lepers. Lazarus Island, we call it. Godwyn do row him over so’s he can give them communion and take supplies.”
Mansur shuddered. “Allah commend the good man,” he said in Arabic. “I could not do that.”
Adelia commended him, too. She did not share Mansur’s horror for sufferers of a disease that her foster father had taught her was not as infectious as popular revulsion accorded it, though it was terrible enough in its slow and creeping death from the tips of the limbs to the whole body, but she could understand why the law was strict in segregating them in order to protect the healthy. For once, it was the Christian Church-an institution with which she was usually at odds-that she admired for its provision of leprosaria, refuges where patients received medical and spiritual help, even respect, since they were suffering for their sins while living and would, therefore, find quick redemption in heaven.
So Abbot Sigward was one of those who treated lepers generously, was he? Adelia found herself liking the man more and more.
For one thing, he was prepared to give Mansur and herself facility in their investigation that his fellow monks would have denied them.
“Against some opposition from my brothers, I have kept open the grave where we found the skeletons,” he said, greeting them. “Do you wish to examine it? And the coffin?”
“Let the dead rest, Father,” Hilda pleaded, interrupting. “Them’s Arthur’s and Guinevere’s bones, you know it. Let ’em rest in peace.”
The abbot patted her on the shoulder but kept his eyes on Adelia, who, after pretending to consult the Arab, said, “Dr. Mansur is grateful to you, my lord, and will be glad to look at those things in the goodness of time, but first he will concentrate on the skeletons.”
“And what can they tell him?”
Again, Adelia spoke to Mansur in Arabic, and again received a reply. “Not much, he fears,” she told Sigward honestly. “Putting a date to bones may be difficult.”
“Even to eliminating the possibility that they are not Arthur’s and Guinevere’s?” The abbot winked. “That is the doctor’s purpose, is it not? And the king’s?”
Adelia smiled back at him. “It’s a gamble, my lord.”
“Ah, gambling.” The abbot’s face creased into that of a tortured man. “Gambling was one of my sins when I was in the world, and still is, though pride was a greater-and one I pray that a merciful God will forgive me. By the way, there is no need to address me as ‘my lord’; I am a servant now.”
“He shines, that one,” Mansur said, watching Sigward walk away, gently propelling Hilda with him.
“He does,” Adelia agreed.
They went into the hut and stared at the two skeletons. The damage to that of the female reminded Adelia horribly of her nightmare.
“What do we do?” asked Mansur.
“I don’t know. If we could find out how old they are… perhaps comparing them to bones we know to be old would help.”
“The graveyard?”
“The graveyard.”
After peering to see if anyone was about, they crossed the ruined nave of the great church and scrambled over the tumbled stones of its southern wall, a part of which was tall enough to hide what lay on the other side.
Neither the fire nor, yet, Brother Peter’s scythe had touched the abbey’s burial place. The gravestones had the pleasant higgledy-piggledy untidiness of a country churchyard. Being in the full path of the early sun, butterflies were adding to the color of its wildflowers, and bees were at work among some bluebells growing in the shade of a young oak leaning over the small wall that marked the graveyard’s southern boundary.
What made the place different, what skewed its bucolic restfulness into something alien, were the pyramids. Adelia had thought that the word must refer to conical gravestones, but these were pyramids-much smaller versions of the ones her foster father had drawn during his visit to Egypt and shown to her, but still too large and belonging to a more savage environment and a hotter sun than this; they were un-English, disturbing.
They didn’t match, either-another attack on the eye. The tallest was more than twenty-five feet high, and stepped to its peak in five courses of stone; the other stood about eighteen feet, consisting of four stories. Each was covered in writing that Adelia couldn’t decipher-more like runes than script, messages from a darker age.
Between them stood another pyramid, this time a teetering mountain of earth that had been displaced from the yawning hole beside it.
Adelia went to the edge.
The pit was a rectangle, at least sixteen feet deep and wide enough to accommodate the steps cut into one of its sides. The monks had gone down a long way to find Arthur’s coffin.
“They must have dug like badgers,” Adelia said, peering into it. She stepped back quickly; the pit smelled of contaminated earth.
Mansur was already on his way down, examining the sides as he went. Bits of bone stuck out where the diggers had cut through the earth, showing that for one thousand years succeeding generations of dead monks had been buried on top of one another.
“Also, there is wood,” he called up. “Some were in coffins, some were wrapped in just a winding sheet, I think. What do you want?”
Suddenly, she didn’t want anything. “Mansur, we’re grave robbing.”
Her foster father, she knew, had bought dubiously acquired skeletons from dubious men in order to teach his students anatomy, but what was she advancing by desecrating these dead? Not science, not medical knowledge, merely a chance for an abbey to acquire riches and a king to get his dead Arthur.
“We shouldn’t do this,” she called down, and she heard Mansur spit in disgust at her vacillation.
He began climbing up again, but as he reached the top of the steps he held out his hand. On its palm was a small knobble of bone.
“It must be old because it was at the bottom,” he said. “A bit of a foot, I think. Use it.”
It was actually the distal phalanx of a second toe, and Adelia stared at it for some time, tapping her teeth in indecision before finally snatching it. “We can always stick it back on,” she said.
After all, if she could find a method for dating bones, it would be a contribution to the world’s knowledge.
