Rowley grew impatient. “Let’s sit here and examine the contents, shall we? Come on.”
Clutching the box, she followed him, like Eurydice hastening after Orpheus, remembering that, at the last, Eurydice had been condemned to stay in the Underworld, never to see daylight again.
It was taking too long; if there was an end to this bestial tunnel, Godwyn and Hilda had reached it first and entombed them in it as they had Emma, Pippy and Roetger.
“What is it?” In front of her, Rowley was cursing.
“I left my bloody sword in that bloody cellar. I put it down to pick up a bottle.”
“I’ve got mine.” She’d been tempted to throw it away; the damn thing attached to the string round her waist kept bumping against her legs.
“ Lot of good that bloody rusty thing is.”
It killed a man, she thought. God, don’t let me think about that now.
So far, at least, there was no sign that three prisoners had ever been down here. Had Millie tricked them? No. Or if she had, she’d suffered for it-the girl hadn’t feigned unconsciousness; there’d been no trickery there. She’d been felled by that madwoman like a sapling under the ax.
A madwoman. Up there. Shutting them in.
Adelia began to pray in time to her shuffling, splashing feet, “Almighty Lord, save us. Save us, O Almighty Lord, of Thy great mercy, save us,” to a God Who, for her, automatically encompassed the Judaism and Christianity of her foster parents and something of Mansur’s Allah.
It had come naturally to her as a child that the faith of three beloved worshippers must reach the same deity with the accord that they gave one another. She could do no less now as she stumbled and ached and sobbed for breath. Theology was beyond her; so, almost, was thought, only a plea for help that went lancing upward through the earth to the stars: “Save us.”
All light had diminished except for the lantern that dragged along the ground in Rowley’s hand ahead of her. Help was restricted to the edge of his cloak, where she clutched it. All at once, the image of his naked body in bed came to her so strongly that she was stabbed with lust and, if that was profanity at this desperate moment, she couldn’t help it because here, in extremis, it was too sweet to surrender. I have loved him, he has loved me, and that is something, dear God, it is something.
As if the thought had power, the ceiling began to rise so that her man could stand up straight, and she with him.
Now the tunnel was sloping upward, culminating in steps that led to a ceiling. Rowley took them at a run that pulled his cloak out of her grasp.
Adelia went up more heavily, realizing for the first time that her skirts were weighing her down. In the relief of reaching the tunnel’s end, the significance of the fact that, for the last few upward yards, she had been wading through ankle-deep water escaped her.
Above her, the lantern’s candle guttered. For a tremulous second she watched it flutter like a moth before it went out.
The darkness then was like no other. A moonless night always held some reflection that the eye could adjust to; this was the negation of light, an absence of everything. Adelia heard the useless echo of her whimper tremble into it as if it came from somebody else.
There was a scratching and tinny sound, followed by a blast of profanity from the bishop of Saint Albans. “What are you doing?” she screamed at him.
“There’s metal up here. A hatch or whatever it is, it’s metal. What do you think I’m doing? I’m trying to open the bastard.”
“Try feeling for a catch.”
“Oh, thank you, Doctor. I’ve done that. There isn’t one. Either the bugger’s locked in place or there’s some sort of cantilever on the other side that lifts it. I’m hitting it-somebody might hear us.”
Nobody would hear that. Adelia struggled to untangle the sword hanging from her waist and then held it up until it found Rowley’s boot. “Try this.”
She felt a fumbling hand take the weapon from her. There was a reverberating clang as metal hit against metal. That was better. But who was up there to hear? Only the couple who’d buried them-and they weren’t going to lift anything.
Adelia covered her ears as clang after clang made her head rock. Between every clash, Rowley shouted halloos and curses until she thought he’d go mad-or she would. Feeling each step with her hands, she climbed up until she touched his leg. “Let me try.”
He hauled her up beside him and she realized she was still clutching the box from the niche. She threw it down and raised her arms, encountering metal. She traced it with her fingertips-a shallow, inverted dome of iron. It was completely smooth, no protuberance that suggested a catch on this side of it.
“See?” Rowley gave her a push aside and resumed his assault. But that was it; she couldn’t see. Eyes were useless; there was only touch and hearing-and terror.
After an age of noise, she couldn’t bear it anymore. She reached out for his arm, found it, and held it. “Let’s go back to the cellar.”
The thought of a return battling through darkness… but there’d be space there, and comforting, normal things like barrels… it might be that Millie wasn’t dead and could let them out… something.
She said, remembering, “The hatch on the barrel chute was made of wood, perhaps we can hack our way up through it and shift whatever was on it.”
“Or at least drink ourselves to death.”
That he’d stopped howling and now sounded merely disgruntled was balm to her. She could bear up if he could, but only if he could.
On her bottom, investigating with her feet, she managed to hump herself down the steps. When she heard Rowley join her, she spread her arms so that she could feel the rough texture of the tunnel wall on either side and began to wade down the incline they had come up.
And she was wading. Water surrounded her knees. She went on. It was up to her waist.
Stupidly, she wondered if she’d started down a wrong branch of the tunnel into some massive drain. But there’d been no branching off…
Somebody said, “There’s water coming in, Rowley.”
Somebody else said, “So there is, my love. We’d better go back.”
She felt a hand against her face work its way down to her shoulder, guiding her backward until they reached the steps, then helping her up to the landing at the top.
She clung onto him. “Where’s the water coming from? What’s happening?”
“I’ll tell you what’s happening…” And from the sound of his voice, Adelia envisaged him spitting the words from between his teeth. “Our noble landlord has opened the chute in the cellar. Taken the fucking hatch off. This is floodwater.”
“Floodwater?”
“In case you didn’t notice, it was raining outside. Still is, presumably. It’s coming down that bloody chute. It’s filled the cellar and now it’s flooding the sodding tunnel.”
“But… that would take hours.”
“Sweetheart, we’ve been down here for hours.”
In her mind’s eye, Adelia saw the hills around. Glastonbury Sheeting rain, unable to soak into the drought-baked, rock-hard earth, would be funneling down their sides into the High Street like rivers in full spate. The Pilgrim’s courtyard had already been an overflowing sink when she’d last seen it. With the plug hole of the barrel hatch removed, water would be pouring down the chute…
“One thing,” Rowley’s voice said. “It’ll ruin the bastard’s ale.”
“Will it reach us up here?”
Her answer was another ear-wounding clang. He was bashing the sword hilt against the iron hood again.
A stupid question; how could he know? It would depend on whether the rain stopped in time. And then, she thought, whether it does or not, we’re dead. They were in a diminishing space formed by brick, iron, and rising water, all of them impermeable. The air would go bad. In Salerno, she’d once worked on a corpse her foster father had bought for her to practice on, that of a man who’d fallen into a large, empty wine vat, his flailing arm catching its lid and bringing it down on top of him.
“Asphyxiation,” she’d said, finishing the examination.
“Correct,” he’d said. “It is what happens when people are enclosed like that.”
“I know,” she’d said, “but why? It was an enormous vat, why couldn’t he go on breathing? What causes people to asphyxiate in confined spaces?”
“Air hunger,” he’d said. “Our breathing uses it up or poisons it, I don’t know how.”
They would die, like the man in the vat.
“Allie.” Again, it was a cry of agony that seemed to come from somebody else.
The clanging stopped and was replaced by Rowley’s voice: “She’ll be provided for. I’ve made a will.”
“Allie.” A document couldn’t pick a child up or kiss a scratch better or cure the need for a mother who wasn’t there.
Another clang, the last, and she was rocked as he miscalculated where she sat and his body thumped against her before it found its place at her side. “Goddamn you, woman.” Hot breath fanned her ear. “This is your fault. Why in hell didn’t you marry me?”
She didn’t know anymore. Why hadn’t she?
“Nice little castle,” the breath said. “We could have brought her up together. You stitching away at your tapestry in the solar, me on the practice ground teaching her swordplay.”
It was meant to make her laugh and, oddly, it almost did, but beneath his courage she heard fury for a life missed.
My fault, she thought, my most grievous fault. What price independence when I could have chosen happiness, his, Allie’s, mine? Too high. “I wouldn’t do it again,” she said.
“Bit bloody late now.” Again, her skin felt his breath. “You’ve sent me to hell, you realize that? My soul is doomed. I’ve sinned at prime, at matins, at lauds; I’ve lifted the host to the Lord, and what I was lifting was your skinny body. I’d think, What do I see in her? But you were all I saw.” Another sigh. “I have offended against my sweet Lord. Saint Peter’s not likely to give me passage through the gate after that.”
“It won’t be hell for me if I’m with you,” she said, feeling for him with her arms. “We’ll fry on the griddle together.”
Voices speaking love into the darkness. Tiny flames guttering out.
It was becoming difficult to breathe.
After a while his head fell hard against her neck, and when she spoke to him again, he didn’t reply.
“No,” she begged him. “Wait for me. Don’t go without me.”
There was a deep grinding sound, and the lid above their heads lifted, slowly, as if a cautious cook was peering into a pan.
The foulness of the death chamber rushed upward-she felt its passing, like a wind-to be replaced by damp fresh air.
“God pray we’re in time,” somebody said.
Dizzily, still clutching Rowley’s body to her, she looked upward. The abbot of Glastonbury ’s face was staring down on her, Godwyn’s beside it, both of them anxious.
Behind them, Hilda struggling. “Leave ’em,” she was screaming, “leave em.” Only Brother Titus’s large arms were holding the woman back from hindering the resurrection of the couple she’d condemned to death.
