A Murderous Procession aka The Assassin

hard wooden sambue, a contraption resembling a three-sided box with a pommel that allowed her right leg to curve gracefully over her left, both of her boots fitting above each other into stirrups of disparate heights. At an amble the posture it demanded was uncomfortable; trotting was torture.

Bumping along on it beside Mansur, Adelia found her mind dwelling with admiration on the Empress Matilda, Henry I I’s mother, who had ignored opprobrium by riding astride during her war with her cousin, Stephen, for England’s throne. “The Plantagenets would never have won if she’d had to go sidesaddle,” she grumbled in Arabic.

“It gives elegance to a woman,” Mansur said, approvingly

“It gives her curvature of the damned spine.”

“And modesty”

That was it, she supposed. Men didn’t like women to have their legs apart unless they were in bed; yet how much more fittingly the female frame had been designed to ride astride than that of the male, with its protruding dangly bits.

She groaned. “A thousand miles of modesty, I’ll never survive it.”

“Then return to the royal cart.”

“With those three harpies? I’m hardly welcome there.”

At least this way, she didn’t have to restrain herself from punching ladies of the nobility in the mouth. Also, she could ride farther back in the procession among the lesser members of the household and occasionally give advice on their health problems, ostensibly through Mansur’s pronouncements.

Their arrival at the great Benedictine abbey of Mont-Saint-Michel was to set the tone for what, Locusta hoped, would be their reception at every stop on the journey He had gone ahead with a servant to alert the abbot of their coming and then returned to lead them on. “Thank God the tide’s out,” he said, as they approached the island causeway. “It took all my mathematics to time our coming exactly. I was afraid our delay would miss us another eight hours.”

“Let us hope the tide stays out,” the O’Donnell said. “For I’m told it comes in with the rush of a galloping horse.”

In fact, water was beginning to swirl around wheels and hooves as they crossed to the strange mount on which monks had been laboring for one thousand years to complete an edifice that the Archangel Michael had instructed their first bishop to build.

They hadn’t labored in vain. From a distance the top of the mount gave the impression that it had been set with enormous candles that had dripped wax into contorted and beautiful shapes.

It had been a hot day. August was going out with all the heat it could muster. The climb up the escalier street was hard on beasts and humans who’d already had a long and sweaty journey of it, but the prospect of rest in the cool of the lovely building above them spurred them on, as did the dizzying glimpses of the bay with a breeze coming off it, and the Normandy coast under the rise of a harvest moon.

Abbot and clergy waited to greet them; there would always be a crowd of clergy, and introductions and, invariably, a service of thanksgiving for Joanna’s safe arrival, then a banquet under vaulted ceilings and toasts, before the poor little princess and her yawning following were accommodated in their beds. Next morning she had to see the graceful cloisters, the gilded statue of Saint Michael, kneel before precious relics, until the time came to remount and set off again.

It was to be the pattern.

We’ll proceed by inches, Adelia thought in despair. Allie, oh Allie.

AT THE END of the fourth day’s journey, while Mansur was helping her to dismount-a clumsy business at the best of times-her horse made a sudden movement and Adelia’s right foot became entangled in its stirrup; Mansur staggered under her unexpected weight, and for a moment she was sent topsy-turvy with her veil dragging in the dust.

Lady Beatrix, Lady Petronilla, and Mistress Blanche stepped down the little ladder attached to their cart and clustered about her with delighted sympathy. “Are you all right, you poor soul? My dear, how embarrassing.”

It was. For an instant, before Mansur helped her up again, a small crowd of men, including Captain Bolt, Father Adalburt, Admiral O’Donnell, and the Bishop of Saint Albans, were treated to the sight of Adelia’s white thighs and a burst of good fenland invective against horse riding in general and sidesaddles in particular.

Next morning, limping out to the stable yard for another day’s suffering, she found Captain Bolt putting a different saddle on her palfrey. It was a small affair and cushioned in red leather, high at the rear in order to support the rider’s back.

He interrupted her explosions of gratitude. “Been made for a boy, I fear, mistress. You’ll have to go astride.”

“I don’t care. Where did you get it from?”

“Weren’t me. We passed a saddlery away back and somebody…” He lowered his voice; Bolt was an old friend of the bishop’s and Adelia’s, and aware of their situation. “… somebody found this as had been ordered for a young lord as’d never come for it. So he bought it for you.”

Rowley Oh, God bless him.

Tightening the cinch, the captain said: “And I’ll spread it about as Queen Eleanor herself did sometimes ride astride. I know as she did; that time she escaped from the king and I had to chase her to bring her back-God help us, I had trouble a-catching her.”

“Thank you. And please thank the somebody.”

Bolt heaved her up onto the palfrey “I was to say as it’s to stop you breaking your neck as well as the Third Commandment.” He shook his head in admiration. “Gor, lady, you can’t half swear when it comes to it.”

AT THE NEXT MONASTERY there was a kerfuffle in the middle of the night; a woman screamed, men’s voices were raised, there was movement in the inner courtyard. The sounds incorporated themselves into part of a dream Adelia was having and, being exhausted from that day’s journey, she didn’t wake up but, like the three ladies-in-waiting with whom she shared a bed, merely groaned and stirred in her sleep.

Yet it was obvious next morning that something had occurred; Lady Beatrix, Lady Petronilla, and Mistress Blanche in their cart were to be seen in conversation more earnest than was usual with them while, all down the line, there was a frisson of talk, head-shaking, and, among some of the men, laughter.

“Do you know what’s happened?” Adelia asked Mansur. Thinking the Arab did not understand them, people were looser with their talk in his presence than hers.

“It has something to do with the Sir Nicholas Baicer and shoes, but I can gather no more than that.”

“Shoes?”

Isolated as she was from the general gossip, Adelia appealed to Captain Bolt as he rode past her on one of his checks up and down the procession.

He was uninformative, even defensive. “Nothing for you to worry about, missus. He’s a fine soldier, Sir Nicholas, I’ve served with him.”

She, too, liked what she knew of the man and Lord Ivo. Both knights were courteous whenever their paths crossed hers; they paid attention to all well-being, not just that of the higher echelons, Lord Ivo with gravitas while Sir Nicholas had a more hail-fellow-well-met approach and would talk to anybody about his family in England and Normandy with as much affection as he did about his hounds. Both men were lovers of the chase; indeed, one would occasionally veer away from the procession with his dogs and other enthusiastic hunters to pursue a stag through a forest, but always leaving the other by the princess’s side. Like Captain Bolt, they inspired a confidence that, militarily, everybody was in safe hands.

Boggart who, being Adelia’s maid, was still as persona non grata in this closely knit traveling community as she was, could gather little more than her mistress, except that it was “summat to do with Sir Nicholas and shoes.”

And with that, since there was no opportunity to talk to Rowley on anything but a passing and polite level, Adelia had to be content.