splashes of incoming tide.
Rowley turned on one of the men nearby. “Can we go after them?”
“Dursn’t,” the man said-he was crying. “Quicksand. God have mercy on ’em.”
Nothing to do but watch. The bell went on tolling. The two figures were up to their knees in water, but still the abbot surged forward, almost carrying the woman flopped against him.
As if something had suddenly clamped their legs, they became still and then, slowly, began to sink until only their shoulders showed above the rising, rippling tide. The abbot hoisted the woman so that her head was level with his and for a minute or two-it seemed forever-that’s how they stayed.
At the last, the abbot’s arm came up to be outlined against a speedwell-blue sky, and they heard his voice echoing over the water.
“Lord Jesus, Son of God, have mercy on us.”
THIRTEEN
GODWYN HAD to be prevented from following his wife, as if he could still drag her back. After a long, screaming struggle, he collapsed into inertia and drooped in the hands of his captors, his eyes never leaving the spot on the water where Hilda and the abbot had disappeared.
Everybody was in shock, the lepers bewildered. “But he were happy,” one of the men kept saying to Rowley of Abbot Sigward. “Give us Communion and blessed us. Saintly as ever, he was. Why’d he do that for?”
A woman moaned. “What we goin’ to do now? What’ll us do without un?”
“It was an accident,” Rowley told them, making Adelia start. “An accident. He, er, took the woman for a walk; she’d been upset. He forgot there was quicksand out there.”
It was a ludicrous explanation, but Rowley kept on giving it and, because it was the kindest, the lepers repeated it to themselves as they wept for their saint, preferring it to the evidence of their own eyes.
That’s what he’ll say when we get back, Adelia thought, and perhaps he’s right.
She grieved for Godwyn, grieved for the two souls who had gone to such an end, grieved for the lepers, but her care had to be for the three castaways who needed it as soon as possible. Long before it was decent, she was urging them into the punt, but it was some time before the bishop of Saint Albans could be persuaded to leave the distressed people on the quay; he had a priestly duty to the bereaved, and promises to make that they would not be abandoned.
Godwyn was heaved down into the boat. He sank onto the place his wife had occupied and stayed there, silent and helpless. It was the bishop of Saint Albans who poled them all back to Glastonbury.
With Adelia’s arm around her, Emma fell asleep where she sat, as if, having held up for her son’s and Roetger’s sake until now, she could pass the responsibility on to somebody else and rest at last. She was horribly thin; she and Roetger had seen to it that Pippy was fed as well as possible on the meager supplies Godwyn had smuggled to them on his trips. That, however, had meant going with-out themselves. The lepers, apparently, had been kind and offered to bring them food, but Emma had refused to accept anything from their hands and screamed at them to keep away.
Apart from being extremely dirty, young Lord Wolvercote was in comparatively good fettle; Adelia had clutched him to her so that he shouldn’t see the tragedy as it occurred and, though he’d been upset by the screams, his youth kept him from dwelling on it. His only fear was that they were taking him back to the Pilgrim to be locked into its tunnel. “Don’t want to go to the black place,” he said. “That nasty woman frightened Mama.”
“No more tunnels for you, young man. The nasty woman’s gone,” Rowley told him, but he glanced inquiringly at Adelia.
She grimaced in return. “It has to be the inn,” she said in Latin. “They’re none of them fit to travel any farther. Roetger certainly isn’t.”
The champion was her greatest worry; if Emma was thin, he was emaciated. Adelia hadn’t yet seen him put his injured foot to the ground and suspected he couldn’t. Worse, though he refused to complain, he was breathing with a difficulty that suggested he’d developed a constriction of the lungs. “Do hurry,” she begged Rowley.
“I’m going as fast as I can, woman,” he puffed. “I haven’t poled a punt since I was a boy.”
Actually, he did well. It seemed to Adelia that they had left and were returning on two different days but, when at last Glastonbury’s landing place was in sight, the sun was only just leaving its zenith.
Emma put up a fight when she saw that she was being taken to the Pilgrim. “Not there. We’re not going back there.”
“Yes, you are,” Adelia said. “Master Roetger can’t go on. Look at him.”
Emma looked, and her outburst dissipated into panic. “You’ve got to save him, ’Delia. He was our mainstay. Those brigands on the road would have killed us all if it hadn’t been for him. I can’t… oh, ’Delia, I can’t do without him.”
“Let’s put him into a bed and you won’t have to,” Adelia said, hoping that it was true. Getting her patients up the slope to the inn was hard enough, and it was a relief to see Millie at its door, shading her eyes as she looked in alarm from one to the other.
There was no time to answer questions even if the maidservant had been able to ask them, but Millie, intelligent girl that she was, realized that beds were needed and hurried upstairs to prepare them.
“And you,” Adelia told Godwyn. “I’m sorry, I’m very sorry, but these people must have food. And if you’ve got wine, warm it. Hurry.”
The man was still dazed, but being in accustomed surroundings seemed to rally him and he went off toward the kitchen, nodding.
Emma refused to take nourishment; she wanted only to sit by Roetger’s bedside and weep over him. Adelia hauled her back downstairs to the dining room, where Pippy was tucking into broth.
“Eat something,” she told her, “and I’ll organize a bath for you.”
A bath would be restorative; both Pippy and his mother needed one badly. Come to that, Adelia thought, I could do with one myself.
Hilda had boasted that the inn possessed a bath-“the nobility is set on it,” she’d said-but Adelia, not able to remember seeing one, went in search of it. She found an enormous tub lined with canvas in the barn, where, during the time that the Pilgrim lacked noble guests, it had been transferred so that Hilda could do her laundry in it.
Water was boiled, and Millie set to the task of carrying buckets of it across the courtyard.
“And you,” Adelia told Rowley, “will please give Roetger a bed bath. If I do it, he’ll be embarrassed.”
The bishop looked alarmed. “How do you do that?”
Sudden, sheer happiness filled her, making her laugh. He’d been so nearly dead, and now he wasn’t. She wanted to tell him how the tunnel had changed the perspective of everything she saw, that she’d accept him on any terms as long as he’d have her-and just keep breathing in and out.
However, this bustling house and time held no moment for romance. Later, when they were alone, she would give herself up to him. She must be arranged for it, beautiful.
A clean cloth, another bucket-this time filled with cool water to help bring down the patient’s fever-were carried upstairs and instructions given.
And by late afternoon, all that could be done was done. A clean mother and son were asleep in one room and a gray-faced champion was propped up on pillows next door looking no better than he had, and breathing worse.
Adelia put down the spoon of linctus she’d been trying to get him to take. “I don’t know, Rowley,” she said. “The crisis is coming and… I just don’t know.”
“I’d wait with you,” Rowley said, “but I must go to the abbey. The brothers have to be told.”
“An accident?”
“That’s what I’ll say. Why add to their agony, or anybody else’s? The king must know, of course, but Abbot Sigward will be mourned throughout England and beyond. No point in broadcasting that the man chose to go to hell.”
“Is that where he is?”
“Suicide is an offense against God,” the bishop told her shortly, and went out.
Was it? Or had it been the only free choice for a man who’d tried so hard for so long to exculpate an even greater sin?
And he’d taken Hilda with him; only Godwyn mourned her. Yet what would have become of her if he had not? At best, incarceration with other madwomen. Was that why he did it? Had the woman been in a condition to know it?
Lord, judgments are too hard, I can’t think about it now.
As the light began to go, Roetger broke into a sweat and his breathing became easier. Adelia sent up her gratitude for the endurance of the human body, made him comfortable, and went to fetch Millie to sit with the patient.
On the way, she took the girl into the parlor and to the table that had become their mutual slate board. “See,” she mouthed, tracing stick figures in its dust. “There’s the abbot, that’s meant to be his hat. And that’s poor Hilda.” She drew a wavy line over both heads. “And that’s the sea. Damn it, there must be some way of teaching you to read.”
Millie, glancing from Adelia’s face to the table with concern, pointed in the direction of the marshes and then toward the hatch that led to the kitchen where Godwyn sat weeping.
“Yes. She’s gone, Millie. No more beatings.”
The two women crossed themselves and, again, Adelia wondered whether or not Hilda had been willing to go into the quicksand with the man she worshipped and had been prepared to kill for.
God, she was sick of death; it was as if she herself generated it, infecting those she met. She wanted to be clean of it, she wanted life, she wanted Rowley, she wanted a bath.
Once she’d lugged more hot water to the tub in the barn, and collected a candle, a towel, and some soapwort from the patch kept growing in the shade of the inn’s outer wall, she took one, luxuriating in sweet-smelling suds, letting her overtired brain rest on matters such as where to find clean clothes and whether she could flick a bubble as far as the hay fork hanging on the opposite wall.
The barn door crashed open, making her yelp, but it was Rowley. “Well, that’s done.”
Damn. She’d wanted to be pretty for him, not squatted in an outsize wooden bucket with her hair tied on top of her head with string.
All at once embarrassed, she reached for a towel to cover what she could and tried to be businesslike. “How did they receive the news?”
“Badly. But I told them it was an accident.”
“Did you tell them he killed Arthur and Guinevere?”
“Of course not. I just said they’d been proved to be the skeletons of two men, not how they died nor at whose hand. They’re going to re-bury them quietly.”
“And Hilda?”
“An accident, an accident.” Then, as if in answer to a protest she hadn’t made, he said, “For the Lord’s sake, Adelia, they’ve lost enough.”
She supposed they had: their abbey, their abbot. And the truth would cost the Church even more; it was the bishop of Saint Albans’s job to defend it, to weigh Sigward’s twenty years of penance and goodness against an appalling crime.
How she felt about that she didn’t know. It was her job to uncover the truth. She couldn’t control what men did with it.
