white, though this time she was veiled-in none of Adelia’s nightmares had she shown her face. She was alone; there was nobody to cut her in half. Birds accompanied her, fluttering like an extra cloak in a breeze. One of them landed on her shoulder, an owl, a barn owl, its big eyes and widow-peaked head directed toward Adelia. It turned and took a corner of Guinevere’s veil in its beak. Suddenly, Adelia knew that this wraith wasn’t Guinevere, it was Emma.
“No,” Adelia told it, “I don’t want to see.”
But the bird spread its wings and began to rise so that the veil in its beak rose with it…
Adelia woke herself up with her own shouts, frantically brushing flies off her skin where they’d been attracted by sweat. The bolstering straw was making the loft into a hothouse. And it was dark.
Dark? Had she slept through seventeen hours of daylight?
There was a hoist at the back of the loft, and she crawled toward it to push open its door and look out.
To the west, a monstrous cloud like a horizon-wide black, sagging blanket had obliterated the sun, if sun there still was. What it was bringing would be terrible; darts of lightning were coming out of it, stabbing the distant marshland.
Without the sun, it was impossible to know how long she’d been asleep. It might be evening by now-and Rowley had not come. Or had she missed him and, not finding her, had he gone away again?
A torn spider’s web hanging from the hoist’s door carried the image of what had been under Guinevere/Emma’s veil. Thunder midges dancing in the half-light outside formed the same shape, and she knew she was being haunted, hunted.
She backed away, scrambling down the ladder and into the courtyard.
And that was stupid. Hilda and Godwyn might have come back; they’d see her.
The inn was quiet, however. Nothing moved in the oppressive air. Weeds drooped, dying among the cobbles. Birds had deserted the sky, as if afraid of what was on its way. From the west came a long grumble of thunder.
She would have liked to draw a bucket of water so that she could drink and swill herself down with it, but the noise the chain would make daunted her and, instead, she crossed to the inn’s door and cautiously pushed it open, grimacing at the protest its hinges made.
Nobody came.
It was dark inside. All the heat in the world seemed to have concentrated here, like a pustule.
Why hadn’t Rowley come? Allie and Gyltha and Mansur hadn’t reached him, that was why. They were lying dead in the forest, Allie’s little hands crossed on her breast; she could see them.
Pull yourself together. Most likely the bishop was out when they got there, at some convocation or blessing other people’s babies, attending to God’s business, never hers, never hers. Or had just decided not to bother.
Be damned, then, she thought. I’ll begin the search without you.
It was unlikely that the kitchen would provide the evidence she looked for, so she left its rats undisturbed and went along the corridor that led to the parlor.
Some light from the kitchen hatch cast shadows on the room’s table. There was someone sitting in the great chair at the far end, with a bow on his head.
Adelia took in a sob of breath and looked again. It wasn’t a bow, it wasn’t a head; it was Allie’s birdcage, which someone had left balanced on the chair’s back. Going the length of the table, she took it up and cradled it for a moment before putting it down to begin a search of the room’s aumbries. Platters in one, pewter tankards in another, candlesticks and candles, a box of sharp eating knives. Nothing there, though it was difficult to see.
Back in the kitchen, stamping to scatter the rats, she blew on the embers of the fire and lit a candle. The flame intensified the shadows outside its range so that, going upstairs, she had to fight the impression that she was accompanied.
Godwyn and Hilda’s room was meaner than those of the guests. Wherever they’d gone, it was in the clothes they stood up in, because a small press contained neatly folded tunics, skirts, bodices, trousers, and several clean aprons, all dusted with pennyroyal against the moth.
Adelia started back from a human shape behind the door. It turned out to be two cloaks hanging on a hook. There was a ewer and bowl, both empty, with a saucer of soapwort by their side. A shelf held a razor, combs, and various jars, all of which Adelia opened without finding anything but medicaments. A bottle contained a bitter-smelling tincture of burdock, suggesting one or the other of its owners had digestive problems. Probably Godwyn, Adelia thought, remembering the landlord’s perpetual look of discomfort.
She got down on her knees to peer under the bed, finding only a pisspot. She tipped over a straw mattress and examined the struts on which it lay. She tapped every floorboard to see if one was hollow.
Nothing. An innocent room.
The communal chamber in which poorer guests were put to sleep side by side was swept and empty except for an enormous platform of a bed, now stripped of covering, and a giant chest containing the inn’s linens, which expelled a pleasant smell of the dried rosemary and sage scattered among the sheets.
The room she’d shared with Allie was next door, and Adelia went in, hoping against hope that Gyltha, in packing, had over-looked something that she could change into-what she was wearing had suffered in the forest.
Of course, there was nothing; Gyltha hadn’t left so much as a pin behind. However, the ewer still held water for washing…
A door along the landing bumped against its frame as if some-one had put it to. It was the door to Mansur and Gyltha’s room.
She went out to see. It couldn’t have been the wind; there was no wind.
Yes, there was; the storm was sending a slight breeze ahead of itself, soughing a draft of air through the corridor outside.
Adelia bolted back into her room and barred the door. Whatever was out there, if there was anything out there, she could face it better clean-or, happier still, cower in here and not face it at all.
Shaking, she stripped, scrubbing and sluicing herself with manic energy, saving some of the water for her hair, which she plaited-her head veil being too torn by forest branches to be worth putting on again.
There. She’d be a fresher sacrifice if she were killed. But then, as she re-dressed, she thought, Fool, you still hope that Rowley will come.
She drew back bolts and, candle in one hand, the other gripping the sword hanging from her string girdle, approached the door she’d heard closing. It wasn’t on the latch and trembled in a draft that had become stronger. Raindrops began hitting the inn’s roof like pellets; somewhere an unsecured shutter startled to rattle.
“I warn you, I’m armed,” she shouted, and kicked the door open. At the same moment a rush of air along the passage from one window to another blew her candle out.
No. No, I’m not brave enough.
As she rushed for the stairs, the storm broke. Thunder cracked the sky in half. The inn’s front door was open, letting in rain. Lightning outlined the hooded figure advancing toward the bottom of the stairs, sleek and gleaming, its arms held wide like a scarecrow’s.
“I WAS TRYING TO CATCH YOU,” Rowley said. “I thought you were going to fall down.”
“I nearly did,” Adelia told him. She was still sitting on the stairs, her legs too weak from shock to stand. “Did Allie arrive all right?”
“And Gyltha. And Mansur. All apparently under the impression that you’d be waiting for them. I told them to stay and I’d come to see to it. Perhaps you’d be good enough to tell me what it is I have to see to.”
Both were having to shout over the noise of the storm; outside the still-open door, rain was hitting the courtyard cobbles as if a giant overhead was sluicing them with titanic buckets of water.
Rowley produced a flask and handed it to Adelia before taking off his leather cloak and hood to shake them outside, then shut the door.
“Bolt it,” Adelia told him.
He raised an eyebrow but did as she said.
She took a swig of his brandy. It caused her to cough, but it made her feel better; she could cope with anything now that he was here.
He picked up a lantern and they went into the parlor, each carefully choosing a seat on either side of the table. He became benign. “Well, my child?”
Don’t call me that, she thought. But she was too glad of him to start the old confrontation. She told him of her excursion into the forest and what lay buried there, of what had happened. “You see… oh, Rowley, I’ve killed a man.”
“Good.”
She shook her head in misery. “Don’t admire me for it.”
“Why not? What else could you do? He was about to spear this Alf of yours before raping you…” He reverted to being bishop-like again. “Do you wish me to hear your confession, my child?”
“No, I don’t,” she snarled at him. “I’m telling you as a friend.” She showed him the sword. “It seemed to act by itself.”
“Where did you find that old thing, in the name of God?”
“Never mind.” There were other things to get to. She told him what she knew of Wolf’s attack on the road, of the dowager Wolvercote’s part in it, and what she suspected had happened to Emma, Pippy and Roetger after their escape.
She had to speak loudly to overcome the lash of rain outside, wincing as lightning lit up cracks in the shutters, stopping altogether during rolls of thunder.
“It’s a matter of shapes, you see,” she said. “Representation. Last seen, those three in the cart were galloping for their lives in this direction. I believe they saw the inn here, the only building on the road, and made for its shelter.”
“They could have, I suppose,” the bishop said doubtfully.
Again, she suppressed irritation. Damn it, didn’t he believe her? Couldn’t he see, as she did, that poor trio hammering on the Pilgrim’s door, begging to be let in?
Going doggedly on, she said, “Hilda and Godwyn had been told by the king’s messenger to receive three guests: a foreign gentleman who would be investigating the skeletons in the abbey churchyard, a lady, and her child. And there they were, on the doorstep, Master Roetger, a foreigner; Emma; and Pippy Fitting the expected shapes exactly.”
“So?”
“So…” Adelia drew a deep breath. “I think they murdered them.”
“What?”
“Murdered them. The circumstances were perfect; the three arrived without protection, nobody knowing they had arrived…”
“No protection, woman? Emma had a master swordsman with her.”
“She also had a child. I’m not saying they were killed where they stood. Probably they were invited in, made welcome, comforted. But you only need a child to make you vulnerable.” Angrily, she wiped tears from her eyes. It had happened to her during an investigation when Allie was still a baby; she’d gone quietly to what had nearly been her death because a killer had threatened to kill her daughter if she did not.
She said, “At some point Godwyn merely had to grab hold of Pippy and wave a knife. Emma and Roetger would have had to do what they were told. It was why I wanted Allie away from here. It only takes someone with a weapon.”
“Why on earth should anybody do that?”
