would have been one of the dowager’s most trusted servants and was unlikely to testify against her. The tithing’s knowledge was therefore hearsay. Anyway, disreputable as they were, their evidence would hardly stand up against that of a respected, well-connected, and rich Somerset aristocrat.
Adelia shook her head. “I doubt it.”
“So do I.”
“But it’s not fair.” It was the shriek Allie used when she was crossed. “My lord, she as good as murdered six people.”
Henry shrugged. “It may not be fair, but if I step in and evict her without evidence it would be something worse, it would be injustice. I must abide by the law of the land like everyone else or we revert to tyranny and from there into chaos. Law is my contract with my people.”
And what of the contract with me? Adelia thought. What of the dealings between individuals, promises, the return for loyal service, even a bloody thank-you?
And then she saw the king look toward Master Robert and wink.
The room skewed and fragmented. It was Wolf’s forest with the beast coming at her, it was the Pilgrim’s tunnel, and she was wading through it. She was watching two figures walk into the Avalon marshes…
“Goddamn you, Henry,” she screamed. “You send me into hell and I get nothing… nothing… I’ve seen terrible things, terrible, terrible things, I work for you… but never again; this is the last time I’m evicted from my fens… never again, never. I’m not your subject; you’re not my king… I’m tired and I’m poor and I want to go home.” She collapsed, weeping, into a chair to drum her heels on the floor like a thwarted child.
The silence in the room was awful.
He‚ll kill me, Adelia thought. I don’t care.
After a long while, reluctantly, she opened her eyes and met Mansur’s, full of concern. Millie was crouching beside her, holding her hand. The room’s silence was because Henry was no longer in it. Instead, a young man wearing the floppy cap of a lawyer was standing by the door.
The gazehounds were watching her. The pig farted in sympathy. Master Robert was pouring some wine from a silver jug into a silver cup. He crossed the room and gave it to her, supporting her hands while she drank it. He looked unperturbed, as if it were the norm for people to throw fits in the Plantagenet’s presence.
“The king has left to attend the branding of the heretics, mistress.”
“Has he?” she asked dully.
“It is not something he welcomes. I fear it put him into a teasing mood.”
“Yes.”
“But if you will follow Master Dickon here, he will take you to Lady Wolvercote. Master Dickon is the lawyer who represents her.”
Master Dickon took off his cap, twirling it in an elaborate and low bow. “You come along of me, miss. Hot, ain’t it? Do anybody down, this heat would.”
Mansur took Adelia’s arm with one hand and picked up the fishing basket with the other, and, with Millie behind them, they followed the lawyer past the petitioners and down the staircase.
“Do you really want to go home?” Mansur asked in Arabic.
While she’d been screaming, she had; she’d wanted safety, the calm of her foster parents’ house, and the discipline of the School of Medicine, where decisions were based on cold fact, where there was no moral quicksand, where the brain controlled emotion, where she would not risk her immortal soul by living in sin, where there was a king who left her alone.
“Do you?” she asked back, tiredly.
“I have thought of it,” he said, “but I have Gyltha.”
And so have I, Adelia thought. And you, who are my rock, and Allie, and a man I love and who loves me even though it imperils our chance of God’s grace.
Oh, but she was tired of feeling, the gift-or curse-that England had imposed on her. Whether it was better than no feeling at all, at this very moment she wasn’t sure.
“You did not give the king Excalibur,” Mansur said.
“He didn’t give me anything, either.”
Adelia’s experience of lawyers in Salerno had been of bearded old men who talked of digests, codices, and the Summa Azonis, the Roman law they’d learned at the great University of Bologna. Master Dickon was of a kind she hadn’t met before, homegrown, young, lacking breeding but not intelligence, and very unlawyerlike in that he wanted to impart knowledge rather than obscure it. The son of a Thames lighterman, he had been taught a good hand in a school run by his uncle, and had begun his working life as a mere scrivener in the Chancery, where his ability had come to the notice of the Chancellor himself, and was put to the study of English law.
All this was imparted over his shoulder in a London accent as he led the way down to the entrance hall.
“See, mistress, this is my first case of the Morte d’Ancestor writ, only third in the country far as I know.” He was almost bouncing with the excitement of it.
“Death of an ancestor?” asked Adelia, confused.
“You ain’t heard of it? Oh, mistress, you got to know about Morte d’Ancestor; magical Morte d’Ancestor is.” He looked around and saw a niche in which they could all stand while he explained the magical writ. He seemed unruffled by the presence of Mansur and included both him and Millie in his talk, using English on the presumption that they didn’t speak Latin. His admiration was for Henry Plantagenet, something Adelia had noticed before among native, lower-born Englishmen, who had a greater regard for their king than the Norman nobility, having benefited from his laws and, if they were intelligent, promotion to posts formerly reserved for sons of the nobility.
“Ooh, but he’s crafty is our King Henry,” Dickon said. “See, he’s not a lover of Roman law, and I ain’t, either-too much inquisition, too stuck with them old Byzantines, too many delays. What he’s doing, see, is using Anglo-Saxon law, what our great-granddads was accustomed to. He’s like a baker, if you understand me, using good English dough and trimmin’ it, kneadin’ it, reshapin’ it, and flourin’ it with a touch of genius. One of these days every court in the land’ll be using it.”
“And Morte dAncestor?” Adelia asked, not seeing where all this was going, nor sure she wanted to.
“Ah, Morte dAncestor.” In Master Dickon’s mouth it was an incantation. “It’s the latest of the king’s writs. He’s given us the writ of Right and Praecipe and Novel Dissiesin and now”-he saw Adelia’s mystification-“see, they’re all ways of bypassing the other courts and giving a plaintiff the right to royal justice, not in the lords’ or the sheriffs’ or the manors’ but straight to the king’s. A law available to everybody, see. You purchase a writ that suits your case.”
“How much did the writ cost you?” the king had asked Mistress Hackthorn.
In her disenchantment, Adelia asked, “So you have to buy justice?” How typical of Henry, she thought.
Master Dickon frowned. “On a sliding scale, what you can afford, like. But it ain’t so much a matter of buying justice as purchasing the king’s aid in getting it quick. Using the old way, decisions can take years. Now, in the case of Lord Wolvercote versus the dowager Lady Wolvercote, your Lady Wolvercote’s purchased Morte d’Ancestor for her lad. Well, I advised her o’course, her being a woman and Lord Wolvercote being a minor.”
“She did?” Adelia had heard nothing from Emma and Roetger since their departure for Wells; now here they were-Emma, at any rate-with a case, a writ, and a lawyer. “Not a trial by battle?”
“Mistress.” Dickon was pained. “That’s Dark Ages, that is. I don’t take on trials by battle, too chancy. This is a writ.”
A stripling with a clerk’s cap flapping about his ears was tugging at Master Dickon’s sleeve. “They’re a-coming, master.”
“Oops, oops. Better hurry. Judges are coming in.”
At a smart pace, they were made to follow the stripling, Adelia wondering if the boy’s mother knew her child was a lawyer’s clerk.
The case of Lord Philip of Wolvercote versus the dowager Lady Wolvercote, being of considerable local interest, had attracted nearly as large a crowd as a trial by battle; an usher had to clear the way through to what, in its way, was another arena. A scalloped awning sheltered the high dais of the judges at that moment taking their seats. On the grass before them, several yards apart but facing each other, had been set two ornamented chairs. Pippy, having bowed to the judges, was in one, his short legs dangling. In the other sat his grandmother.
A hand grasped Adelia’s arm. “I didn’t want to tell you until it was decided; it was to be a nice surprise if we won. And it’s been such a rush. But I’m so glad you’re here.” Emma’s eyes never left her son. “Look at him, he’s behaving beautifully. Isn’t he sweet?”
He was. But if this was a battle of sorts, the child looking happily around was outclassed by the woman opposite him; the dowager had all the dignity. With her pale, immobile face set round by its black wimple, she might have been a statue of contrasting marble. She also had more lawyers standing beside her, men who looked like lawyers in contrast to Master Dickon, now taking his place beside Pippy.
A voice spoke from the dais in the flat, thin timber of age that nevertheless traveled to the spectators and beyond. “Sheriff, has Philip of Wolvercote given you security for prosecuting his claim?”
“That’s Richard De Luci,” Emma breathed. “The Chief Justiciar himself. Oh, dear, this is so weighty. Should I be putting Pippy through it?”
The sheriff of Somerset, a florid, harassed-looking man in robes as scalloped as the awning over his separate bench, stood up. “He has, my lord.”
“And have you summoned by good summoners twelve free and lawful men from the neighborhood of Wolvercote Manor ready to declare on oath whether Lord Ralph of Wolvercote, father of the aforesaid Philip, was seized of his fee of the aforesaid manor on the day he died?”
“I have, my lord.” The sheriff waved toward a box nearby into which twelve men had been crammed like milk churns into a cart.
“Who speaks for them?”
One of the men extricated himself sufficiently to stand up. “I do, my lord. Richard de Mayne, knight, holding twelve virgates in the parish of Martlake. My land marches with Wolvercote’s on the north.”
“Have you and the others viewed the manor in this case?” The Chief Justiciar of England, like his voice, was thin. His head, which resembled a snake’s, moved slowly in the direction of his questions, giving the impression that it would strike at a lie like an adder at a frog.
“We have, my lord, and of our own knowledge we can say that Lord Wolvercote was receiving the rents and services. He died elsewhere, but we are in accord that he owned the manor at the time and that after his death his mother took possession of it, having previously occupied a dower house in the parish of Shepton.”
“That’s one answered,” Emma said. At Adelia’s look, she explained. “Two questions. Morte d’Ancestor asks just two questions… I can’t stand this, I swear I’m going to faint.”
Suddenly a new voice, a contralto, floated across the field, as unimpassioned as De Luci’s but considerably more beautiful. “My son was unlawfully hanged for treason by the king you serve.”
The Justiciar’s head turned by inches toward the dowager’s chair. “My understanding is that your son was hanged for murder, madam, not treason. However, that matter is not in question here. Nor, as a woman, are you permitted to speak in this court. Address your remarks through your counselor.”
The intervention had caused a flurry among the lawyers surrounding the dowager’s chair, the eldest among them speaking urgently into her ear. He put a warning hand on her shoulder, but, with one white finger, the dowager flicked it away.
The Chief Justiciar hadn’t finished. “Master Thomas, your client has been summoned three times to attend before us, and only now has she appeared.”
“I do not recognize the authority of this court.” Again, the dowager’s voice rang out.
This time Master Thomas’s hand clamped on the woman’s shoulder and would not be removed. “My lord, my client begs your mercy. The procedure is new to her, as indeed it is to us all. Her age confuses her.”
There was a murmur of sympathy from the crowd; liked or not, the dowager was a woman of Somerset, a county that regarded even the adjoining Devonshire as a foreign land. “What you at?” somebody cried out, “comin’ down from Lunnon to bully that poor old soul.”
De Luci ignored the shout. “And now, Sir Richard…”
