Perhaps he was right; perhaps there was enough ugliness in the world without exposing people to more.
“Move over,” Rowley said. He began stripping off.
“For goodness sake,” she said, “this isn’t big enough for both of us.”
“Do you mean the tub or my manhood? In either case, the answer’s yes, it is.”
He was right. For a while the two of them forgot everything except each other, and the Pilgrim’s courtyard was treated to the sound of splashing and delighted feminine gurgles.
Later, in her bed, he said, “I’m not letting you loose again. Rescuing you from the holes you keep falling into is becoming boring.”
“I know, my love. I can’t live without you, either. Not anymore. The king can go hang; let him find some other mistress of the art of death. But what can we do?”
She’d been slaked with him, but this naked, energetic lover was also an anointed bishop, marriage forbidden to him, a man of God.
Her fault, of course. She had feared the restrictions of being a wife to an ambitious man would have sublimated her skills as a doctor and anatomist under rounds of household care and entertaining for which she was unfit and which, in the end, would have held him back, making them both unhappy.
And the thing was that ever since the day that Henry, pouncing on the opportunity to thrust a trusted man into a position of power in a hostile Church, had given him the post, he’d excelled in it. He was less judgmental, more truly Christian, than the prelates who terrified their flocks with threats of damnation while living lives just as sinful.
But by loving her, Rowley was aware of his own hypocrisy; he made light of it, but it dismayed him.
Now he was saying, “I’m going to set you and Allie up somewhere, a place where I can come and go without anybody knowing, a secret place like Henry found for his Rosamund.” He winked and nudged her. “Don’t fancy Lazarus Island, I suppose?”
She laughed, but afterward the two of them fell silent.
… come and go without anybody knowing, a secret place like Henry found for his Rosamund… secret… without anybody knowing.
A permanent arrangement: she a kept woman, Rowley experiencing guilt every time he opened his mouth to preach.
We’re not that sort of people, Adelia thought. Any honor either of us has will be gone. Both of us constantly aware he’s betraying his God, as he’s betraying Him now, snatching furtive moments together such as this like a couple of adulterers; it will tarnish us both. Could I bear it? Could he? Can we bear not to?
Then she considered the dead of these past days, the moment in the tunnel when she thought that this man had joined them.
“Yes,” she said.
Surprised, he came up on one elbow to look at her. “Really?”
“Yes. As long as Gyltha and Mansur come with us.”
“I’ll be away on circuit a good deal, you know that?”
“Do you want me or not?”
He kissed her hard and settled back comfortably. “If you’re a good girl, I’ll try and bring you a corpse or two to play with.”
A home, a father for Allie, security, love… I am tired of independence.
Yet even as she dwelled restfully and with pleasure on these things, she knew that some wisp of… What was it?… Virtue?… No, not virtue, she didn’t care about that… A constituent, like sea salt, that had been in her since she’d been born would no longer be hers.
CAPTAIN BOLT and an escort came to the inn the next morning to say that the traveling courts of the assize were arriving in the town of Wells and the bishop of Saint Albans was royally commanded to attend as one of their justices.
“The king’s been in Anjou, but he’ll be coming to England shortly,” the captain said-an announcement calculated to instill a frisson of fear in everyone who heard it, and invariably did. “And the lord Mansur’s to write a report for him about what’s been happenin’ here in Glastonbury-the skeletons and that.”
Henry wasn’t going to be pleased.
Aloud, Adelia said, “Then ask my lord Mansur to return, bringing parchment and ink with him-and my daughter and Gyltha.”
She would be losing Rowley but gaining those she loved as much.
Supping ale with his men in the sunny courtyard, Bolt added, “Don’t you be going near the forest tomorrow; we’re to clear it out. Henry ain’t pleased at the trouble disturbin’ the peace of the King’s Highway.” He scratched his head to remember the wording of his orders: “If the dispute between Wells and Glastonbury be not resolved by them, they shall expect the Crown to intervene. Le roi le veut. Yep, that’s it. We’re comin’ down on them forest brigands like terriers on a rats’ nest.”
That would settle the tithing’s fear of Scarry. She wondered how to get a message to them telling them to stay clear. The lay brother Peter, she thought-she’d send word to Will and the others through him.
She told Bolt about the attack on Emma’s cavalcade and the resultant graves in the forest, giving directions to their position as best she could. “Lady Emma will want the bodies taken up for decent burial.”
“We’ll see to it,” Bolt told her, and she knew he would.
She watched the soldiers ride off, taking her lover with them.
GRASS WAS GROWING through the abbey’s cinders. Valerian and wild honeysuckle sprouted from between fallen stones. Swallows disappeared into the niches of the nave’s one standing wall, fed their nesting young, and flew out again in the perpetual work of parenting.
Nature was singing of life, the monks in the ruined choir were singing of death, both of them doing it beautifully.
Kneeling beside the catafalques in the hut of withies, Adelia listened.
“In paradisum deducant te Angeli; in tuo adventu suscipiant te martyres…”
And when will they plead for you to be conducted into Paradise? she asked the skeletons. Will you also be received among the martyrs? Or will you return to your grave unknown and unmourned?
Perhaps, she thought, it doesn’t matter as long as you’re together.
In her untuneful voice, she sang to them in time to the monks’ voices. “May choirs of angels receive thee; may you have eternal rest.”
She got up and went out to stand in the shadow of the nave’s remaining wall.
After a while Brother Peter emerged, wiping his eyes. “Can’t stand no more of that; they’ll be at it all day.” He showed no surprise at finding her there. “What’d he do it for? What’d he do it for? Accident, the bishop says, but he knew them marshes. Hilda, too.”
Adelia shook her head in sympathy without answering; the man’s questions were rhetorical. “Brother Peter, I want you to warn Will and the others not to go poaching in the forest tomorrow.”
“Poaching?” He might never have heard the word before.
She nodded. “Poaching. But not in the forest. Not tomorrow.”
The lay brother stared at her, narrowing his eyes. “Here, I saw as there was soldiers at the inn. Goin’ after Wolf and his gang, are they?”
“I can’t say.” Perhaps she’d said too much; perhaps he was well enough in with the brigands to warn them. At least his brother had not told him that Wolf was dead.
The man looked relieved. “ ’Bout time that Wolf got his comeuppance. Proper terror, he’s been, God rot him.”
“And you’ll warn Will?”
He shrugged. “Daresay I might.”
She received no thanks for her trouble and expected none. Peter was as surly as his brother; they were like the fenmen she knew in East Anglia-gratitude was shown in actions, not words.
It must be something to do with living in marshes, she thought.
“Here,” he said, when she would have walked away, “Will and the lads is summoned to the assize to answer for Eustace settin’ the fire-the which he didn’t. So you get that darky doctor of yourn to be there and tell the judges as how he didn’t do it.”
“Daresay I might,” she said.
UNDER ESCORT, Allie, Gyltha, and Mansur made a joyful return to the Pilgrim the next morning, bringing with them Rhys the bard.
On the way, they’d glimpsed Captain Bolt and at least forty king’s men, all fully armed, go galloping into the forest and heard the sound of distant clashes coming out of it. The purification had begun.
“Mansur said they were killing snakes,” Allie piped, “but snakes don’t scream, do they, Mama?”
Adelia hugged her. “I think those do.”
Gyltha said, coldly, “An’ while we’re about it, what’s all this Rowley’s been tellin’ us? Gettin’ rid of us like that, I’ve a good mind to tan your arse for you.”
“You do not do that again,” Mansur told Adelia quietly in his boy’s voice. “I am your protector or I am nothing.”
By tricking them into going to Wells, she had humiliated them, the Arab’s pride especially. Adelia tried explaining that Allie’s presence at the inn had made them all vulnerable in the same way that Emma and Roetger had been forced to obey Hilda because, with Pippy in her arms, the madwoman had threatened to cut his throat. “And I knew you wouldn’t go without me,” she pleaded. “You wouldn’t have, would you?”
Gyltha snorted.
She snorted again when Rhys was introduced to Emma and immediately fell in love.
“Did you hear my songs to you, lady?” he asked, sweeping off his cap. “Was they what called you back from that lonely peak of exile?”
Emma looked bewildered.
Adelia said, “It wasn’t a peak. No, they didn’t. And her affections are elsewhere.”
It was useless. Lady Emma was the lost white bird regained. Missing, she had been the subject of his laments, and now, here in the flesh, pale, thin, beautiful, she was perfection-a being so ethereal, so far above him, that he could safely be her troubadour of a passion never to be requited. Even as he moaned, he began tuning the harp.
“Look at him,” Gyltha said in disgust. “Happy as a pig in shit now he’s miserable.”
The well had its cover put in place so that the two reunited children wouldn’t fall down it while they played in the courtyard. The adults went indoors to sit around the dining table and listen to Adelia tell the full story of the past two days and nights.
Only Roetger was absent. He wasn’t making the recovery Adelia had hoped for him, too weak to leave his bed, with no interest in food nor anything else and embarrassed by the fact that either Adelia or Millie had to help him onto the pot-he refused to let Emma do it.
Here, like Mansur, was another who’d been humiliated by his inability to protect his lady. It gnawed at him. “What champion was I for her?” he asked Adelia at one point.
Emma wouldn’t have it. “I keep telling him. What could he do? That hag, that Hilda, kept a knife to Pippy’s throat; we had to obey her. And his bravery when we were attacked on the road… you should have seen him. Injured, but fighting like a tiger. Pip and I would be dead if it weren’t for him. Oh, ’Delia, I don’t care what people think anymore, I want to marry him. Do you think the king will let me?”
“I’m sure he will.” In truth, she wasn’t sure. Emma was valuable property, and in the king’s gift to be wed how he commanded. Because Adelia’s last investigation had been successful, she had
