Nevertheless, guilt followed her back to the hut, and when, two hours later, Brother James surprised the two of them at work and stared at the mess they’d made as if they had committed an obscene act, Adelia blustered an innocence she didn’t feel. “We’ve said prayers… Abbot Sigward gave the doctor license… The king requires… ”
But apparently Brother James underwent periods of calm, and this was one of them. He merely looked sad. “May God forgive you for what you do,” he said.
“I hope He will.”
In fact, the bone had been useless. Adelia had shaved a sliver off it and an exactly similar slice off Arthur’s toe-neither had displayed an interior any different to the other.
She and Mansur had pounded each sliver to dust and put it in the bowl of the tiny scales she’d brought with her-proving only that they weighed the same. They’d poured parts of the two sets of dust into water, then vinegar, with no reaction from either. Both were the same age or, as she’d feared, there was no way of gaining a comparison.
“You see,” Brother James said, still lingering, still sad, “people need King Arthur, they need the dream of him. I need him.”
“Why?” Adelia asked. “Why do you need him?”
“He flew his banner in the battle against savagery,” Brother James said, “but he must come back to win the war. There is still savagery in this world. Nobody knows that better than I do.”
He wandered off.
“It is as good a reason as any,” said Mansur, watching him go. “All should battle against evil. Islam still fights under the Prophet’s flag, Allah cherish it.”
“It isn’t good enough,” Adelia said. “A dream isn’t enough. Hard truth is the only flag to fight under.”
“BROTHER JAMES?” Hilda said when they returned, dispirited, to dinner at the inn. “Pursued by demons he is, poor fellow, but my dear abbot has managed to cast most of ’em out of him.”
“What demons?”
Hilda didn’t know. “Come to the abbey afore the abbot and me had anything to do with it. Screaming, he was, so they say.”
Gyltha was more informative once Hilda had left the room. She and Allie had spent a productive morning being rowed around the marshes by Godwyn, and an even more productive afternoon talking to the lay brother Peter in the pasture where Polycarp the mule now sported a poultice of sphagnum moss on his rump.
Brother Peter’s Christianity, she reported, didn’t stretch to speaking kindly of his superior brethren.
“He don’t like any of ’em much,” Gyltha reported. “Says they don’t treat him right-all except the abbot. Says the abbot do give him respect.”
Brother James, according to the gospel of Brother Peter, was as mad as a ferret. “Story goes he came running to the abbey for sanctuary for cutting his cousin’s arm off in a quarrel.”
“Dear God.”
“So Peter says. And Brother Aelwyn is sour as crab apples, wicked tongue, nothing ever right for him. Got something in his past an’ all, but Peter don’t know what it is. And Brother Titus is a fat and lazy pig.”
Oh, dear. Even allowing that these were the strictures of a resentful, overworked fellow, such a comparatively small collection of men confined together under a severe discipline with its demand of chastity were bound to get on one another’s nerves.
Why did they do it? What drove them to accept it?
Everybody assumed that most nuns and monks submitted themselves to the holy rule because they’d heard a call from God, and perhaps some of them had, but, obviously, for others it was an escape from unendurable troubles in the outside world. Perhaps for Brother Titus its rigors were still easier than earning a living.
So Brother James had attacked his cousin, had he? Had he also taken an ax to Guinevere?
Rhys had not returned by nightfall, an absence making Mansur angry. “He is in some woman’s bed, useless philanderer.”
That reminded Adelia of something. “Did Brother Peter tell you anything about Useless Eustace that Hilda complains of?” she asked Gyltha. “Did he start the fire? Who is he?”
“Ah, I forgot him. Peter don’t think he done it, but the rest all blame Eustace for the fire. Even the abbot blames him, though he thinks it was an accident-but he would, wouldn’t he? Ain’t got a bad word for anybody, that man.”
“Is there any evidence this fellow started the fire? Didn’t the monks bring in the county sheriff?”
“They did, but they reckon the sheriff’s in the bishop of Wells’s pocket and that the bishop was mighty pleased Glastonbury burnt down-the two of them have always quarreled over land, hate each other-might even have paid Eustace to set the blaze.”
This was what Hilda had said. It was difficult for Adelia to believe.
“Well, see, Eustace was the bishop’s falconer,” Gyltha told her. “Lost his job on account of he drank, and came to Glastonbury begging his bread. The which he got, though even the abbot had to let him go after a bit-he kept raiding the crypt where they keep the communion wine. Went and lived wild in the hills after that, but they reckon he still got into the grounds o’ nights because the wine vat kept going down. An’ it was in the crypt where the fire started. An’ Brother Titus saw Eustace running from the crypt that night.”
Gyltha shook her head in wonder. “Terrible thing, in’t it? Deliberate or not, one man do bring down a great abbey and a good little town. And one of the monks died, you know. Trying to put out the flames in the crypt, he was, along of Brother Titus-but died of burns, poor soul.”
It was sad; it was horrifying. Adelia shook her head over it. “But what’s done is done. Emma is our priority now, and all this has nothing to do with her.”
“Dunno so much,” Gyltha said. “There’s summat shifty about that Brother Peter. He ain’t telling me all of it.”
…
THIS TIME ADELIA stood in a gleaming golden hall. Silver-clad knights held the fingertips of beautiful ladies and moved with grace to the tune of an unseen harpist. King Arthur saw her and approached, bending his crowned head in a greeting. He offered his hand. “Dance with me, mistress.” His voice was as big and handsome as his figure.
“I can’t dance in a dream,” Adelia told him.
“There’s stupid you are,” Arthur said.
He turned away from her and walked to the throne at the end of the hall where his queen was sitting. He bowed and Guinevere got up, put her hand into the king’s, and joined him on the floor. Her dress was of pure white feathers that fluttered as she moved. Whichever way she and Arthur turned, her face was hidden from Adelia, who saw only that a red stain was beginning to sully the feathers at the back of the queen’s waist. Soon blood was dripping in pools onto the floor, but she danced on…
“Stop it, stop it,” Adelia shouted, and was grateful to be woken up.
There’d been a noise.
Still shaking, Adelia lit a candle, wrapped herself in a shawl, checked that Allie was safely asleep, and went out onto the landing.
It was a hot night, and a grilled window above the stairs had been left unshuttered to provide a draft.
Her toe stubbed against something soft. Looking down, she saw the maid Millie curled up on a mat on the floor, her big eyes staring up in terror.
Adelia had been frightened as well, and her “What are you doing here?” was sharper than she meant it to be, until she realized the poor child couldn’t hear it anyway, and realized, too, that she’d disturbed the girl’s sleep.
“Don’t they give you a bed?” she asked uselessly. Servants as low-graded as Millie had to bed down wherever they could, mostly in the kitchen, but on a night like this the Pilgrim’s kitchen would still be intolerably hot from the cooking fires over which Godwyn sweated, its windows closed against robbers. Millie had sought out the only coolness she could find-and even that was forbidden by the injunction that, unless she was cleaning them, she should not be seen near the guests’ rooms.
“We’ll have to do better than this, won’t we?” Adelia gestured for the girl to come into her own room, where there was an extra truckle bed and another open window. She put her two hands against her cheek, indicating sleep, but Millie refused to move, her eyes more frightened than ever. It wasn’t allowed.
“Lord’s sake,” Adelia said crossly. She went to her bed, snatched up a pillow and a discarded quilt, took them to the landing, and arranged them on the floor. Even then, the girl had to be persuaded and, eventually, pulled onto them.
There were still sounds from the courtyard as if some animal was barging blindly around it, but when Adelia started to descend the staircase, Millie put out a hand to stop her, violently shaking her head.
“You don’t want me to go?” Adelia asked her. What awful thing went on in the Pilgrim at night that this sad creature didn’t want her to see?
Whatever it was, it would be better than returning to the haunting of a dream. Adelia gave a nod of what she hoped was reassurance and continued down the stairs. After all, robbers wouldn’t be calling attention to themselves this loudly.
Godwyn was crouching, listening, by the inn’s side door when Adelia reached it. “Who’s out there?” she asked him.
“Don’t know, mistress, and I don’t want to.”
They both heard a bleat as something bumped against the other side of the door.
“Sheep?” Godwyn said. “Where’s bloody sheep come from?”
Then she knew. “Open the door,” she said. “It’s Rhys.”
Godwyn was unpersuaded, so she had to pull back the bolts herself and was sent backward as the door flew inward with the pressure of the bard’s body falling against it.
“Oh, Lord, he’s hurt.” He’d been set on by the robbers on that dangerous road, pummeled, knifed, and it was her fault-she shouldn’t have sent him out on it.
Godwyn sniffed at the squirming bundle at his feet. “He ain’t hurt, mistress, he’s drunk.”
And so he was. That he’d managed to stumble his way home directionless and unnoticed by predators was witness to a God who smiled on the inebriated.
Godwyn was sent back to bed, and for the next hour Adelia supported the bard as she made him walk on tottering legs round and round the courtyard’s wellhead, twice pushing him toward a pile of straw onto which he could vomit, filling a beaker from water in the well’s bucket and making him drink it every time he opened his mouth to try and sing.
Eventually, both of them exhausted, she guided him into the barn and sat him on a hay bale to get out of him what information she could.
He seemed most proud of having returned at all. “Not to be late back, you said,” he told her, “I remembered. So back, back I came and yere I am. Robbers, yach, I spit on them; they don’t frighten Rhys ap Griffudd ap Owein ap Gwilym. I flew, like Hermes the messenger, patron of poets.” He’d also crawled. The knees of his robe had been worn through and, like his hands, were stuck with horse manure-the least unpleasant smell about him.
Actually, he’d done very well when, finally, Adelia managed to piece together an incoherent story. He’d inveigled himself into not only the servants’ hall of Wolvercote Manor but also the affections of its gatekeeper’s daughter, who had succumbed to his mysterious charm and with whom he had later passed a pleasing and energetic hour in a field haystack-“Lovely girl, Maggie, oh, lovely she was, very loving.”
“But did she tell you anything?”
“She did, oh, yes.”
What the gatekeeper’s daughter had told him in the haystack was that a month or more ago, a lady with an entourage had appeared at Wolvercote Manor’s lodge gates late at night, expecting to be let in and claiming that she was Lady Wolvercote come to visit.
“But the gatekeeper, he didn’t know her, so he called his Lady Wolvercote to the gates and there was a quarrel, though Maggie didn’t hear all of it, see, because her Lady Wolvercote sent her dada up to the house to get men-at-arms to bar entrance to that Lady Wolvercote.”
“Emma did go there, I knew it, I knew it. But what happened then?”
“Ah, well, there’s a mystery. See, Maggie said her dada seemed shamed for days after because of something that happened when our poor Emma was sent away.”
“Ashamed? Oh, dear God, the men-at-arms didn’t kill her?”
