A Murderous Procession aka The Assassin

more land for themselves, and they see no reason to stop doing it now that Richard and Henry have come to terms.”

“It looks peaceful enough,” Adelia said, regarding the countryside with pleasure, “and so beautiful.”

“Mistress, it is not beautiful in Limoges or Taillebourg or Gascony,” said Locusta who, with Admiral O’Donnell and Deniz, had come alongside. “Duke Richard has subdued those at least and I saw what was left of them on my way through the country We will avoid them as we go-what was done is not fit for ladies’ eyes. Bella, horrida bella.”

“Savagery?” asked Rowley

“Atrocity”

Rowley nodded. “He has that about him. His father believes in treating with rebels once he’s defeated them- anything else is sowing dragon’s teeth-but I doubt Richard sees the sense of it; the boy has the touch of the butcher in him.”

“The lad’s yet young,” the O’Donnell said. “Didn’t we all have the butcher in us when we were young? Experto credite.”

What butchery had the O’Donnell committed in his youth? Adelia wondered.

Rowley spurred his horse forward, away from the group; the admiral was not to his taste. Ulf didn’t like the man either, but, as Locusta also rode off, Adelia was left with him.

“And where would the Lord Mansur be today?” he wanted to know.

“Occupied.”

In fact, Mansur had stayed behind with Boggart at their last overnight stop in order to teach the girl how to wash, dry, iron, and fold clothes. This should have been the job of the laundresses, who were given special dispensation by Winchester’s bishop to do their work on Sundays, the day when the column obeyed the Tenth Commandment to rest and stayed where it was. More and more often, however, Adelia’s washing and Mansur’s white robes were being returned to them still showing travel stains.

“Just carelessness,” Adelia had said, to pacify Mansur, though she didn’t think it was; Brune’s hostility to the Arab and even herself was becoming increasingly blatant.

She’d added, hastily: “We won’t say anything.” The chief laundress was daunting and so, when he was roused, was Mansur; a quarrel between them would not be pretty.

But even in the past, when they’d traveled with Gyltha, Mansur had always done his own laundry; he was particular about it. Now, as Lord Mansur, he could not be seen attending to anything so menial, and was therefore making this attempt to transfer his skills to the slow-learning Boggart and taking it amiss that the chief laundress, whose duty it was, forced him to do it.

While Adelia was at the back of the line with the pilgrims, attending to a case of foot rot, he came cantering up to her, Boggart riding pillion with one of Adelia’s cloaks under her arm.

Dismounting, Mansur took the cloak and shook it out in display “It is still stained. I told the ugly bint to use fuller’s earth on it. She has not.”

“Oh, dear.” Adelia put the pilgrim’s boot back on with the instruction to keep the area between his toes clean and, above all, dry

“I have reprimanded her.”

“In English? Now this is a tincture of myrrh and marigold. No, you don’t drink it, you apply it to the affected skin twice a day”

“I used sign language,” Mansur told her.

“Oh, dear.”

“It is time to complain of that fat camel to the bishop. She used sign language back. It was not polite.”

“Oh, dear.”

As they rode back up the line, Brune was waiting for them. She’d got down from her cart to stand in the middle of the road, red-faced, arms akimbo, with an expectant group of fellow servants round her.

“You, mistress,” she shouted at Adelia. “Yes, you. I got a bone to pick with you.” She turned dramatically to her audience while pointing at Adelia. “Know what she done? She only sends that big heathen to complain about her laundry, that’s what she done. Babbling away in that squeak of his, he was, shakin’ his black finger at me like I was dirt. Well, I ain’t putting up with it, not from them as don’t believe in our Lord Savior.”

It went on and on, an outpouring of righteousness that Adelia, taken aback, could see had been in preparation for some time. Brune was enjoying it.

Adelia’s friend Martin tried to intervene. “All right, missus, that’s enough…”

But the laundress was being carried away by her own oratory. Sweeping the groom aside, she raised her tirade’s volume to make sure that the growing crowd could hear her. “I’m on the side of our dear Jesus, I am, my lord, and them as is spitting on his blessed cross in the Holy Land can do their own laundry, even if I’m martyred for it.”

“What’s this now?” Attracted by the rumpus, Admiral O’Donnell had come up unnoticed.

Brune turned to him. “I maybe a common washerwoman, my lord, but Queen Eleanor used to say as my soul was as clean as my washing. ‘You speak out for the Lord, good Brune,’ she used to say…”

“Ah, you’re a fine doorful of a woman, Mistress Brune, but if it’s a saying you want, I’ll give you one of my old granny’s back in Ireland: ‘Spite never speaks well.”’

With that he picked the laundress up like a sack and threw her back in her cart. He dusted his hands and turned to the crowd: “And here’s another one for ye: ‘For what can be expected from a sow but a grunt?”’

IN THE ENSUING cheers and boos, for the head laundress is popular with some but not others, Scarry rides off, his head turned away to hide his gratitude for the fat plum that Lucifer has, again, dropped so lusciously into his palms.

“Your God go with you, Mistress Brune. May you rest in peace.”

Seven

ADELIA ALWAYS THOUGHT she would have got on well with Poitiers’s first bishop despite the eight centuries that separated them. An independent thinker, most literate and forbearing of early saints, he’d had a wife and daughter-those being the days when the priesthood had been allowed to marry.

Also, she thought, anybody who, on converting to Christianity, had chosen the baptismal name of Hilarius must have been fun to meet.

As she rode close behind the princess’s carriage, it was possible to believe that the city had never lost the good nature that Saint Hilarius, or Saint Hilaire as they called him now, had bequeathed it. Bells rang a welcome. The waving crowds lining the slopes of winding streets to see Joanna go past showed real joy at her return to her mother’s people. She was their princess. From the overhanging windows, dried rose petals and affection came scattering down on the girl familiar to Poitiers since she was a baby

They were to spend a week here and, desperate to hurry on to Sicily and get back though Adelia was, she couldn’t but be glad of it. Humans and animals were becoming irritable with fatigue; they needed a rest.

As they emerged onto the plateau on which stood the heart of Poitiers, she heard Joanna give the appreciative moan of someone who’d come home. White stone towers and frontages were pinkish ochre in an evening sun that was turning the water of the encircling rivers some 130 feet below into calm, willow-draped coils of amethyst.

Adelia felt a pang for the exiled, imprisoned woman whose favorite seat this had been and who’d so indelibly set her mark on it. For who but Eleanor could have had ordered the trees in the open spaces to still be so pretty in late autumn or set up playing fountains of nude figures that would have scandalized her first husband, the pious Louis? And, though the cathedral she and Henry had begun wasn’t finished, its frontage was already a miracle of carving that told the Bible story, and it must have been Eleanor’s influence that included in it a baby Jesus in what looked like his bath watched over by sheep.

Only a few miles away, in A.D. 732, Charles Martel, Duke of the Franks, had turned back the Islamic tide that was sweeping the Frankish kingdom and saved it from Moslem conquest-a turning point for Europe of which