done to Sir Guillaume?”
“Pushed him in the bloody river. That’ll dampen his ardor for him.” At her look of concern, Rowley said: “He’s all right, it’s shallow here, he’s just more wet than he was before. If that’s possible.”
Boggart peered in through the door, then led Ward away to join her in the outhouse.
Adelia said: “Poor Sir Guillaume.”
“Poor me. Renting this hovel is costing me a fortune. Now get your clothes off.”
She sighed. “Sir Guillaume puts it so much more nicely,” she said and stopped her lover’s mouth by kissing it before he could say what else Sir Guillaume could go and do.
The one bed in the one bedroom was dusty and made them sneeze, but sunshine on the river cast wobbling, fluid reflections on the ceiling so that they made love as if in a dream.
Now and then they found time to talk.
“I’m sorry for Richard,” she said.
“I’d be sorrier if he were sympathetic to other people’s sins. Seeing us now, he’d throw us into the Pit and think it another job well done for the Lord.”
“I wonder how Allie is.”
He sighed with her. “I do, too.” Then: “I’ll have to go back to my chaste bed for the nights. I’ve only got time to consort with loose women in the afternoons. Incidentally Father Adalburt is giving the sermon in the cathedral tonight. Will you come?”
“I certainly shall.”
Every now and then, the chaplains took turns to relieve the Bishop of Winchester of the duty of giving a sermon. Father Adalburt’s turn came round more rarely because both Father Guy and the bishop found his sermons embarrassing. Everybody else flocked to them.
Not for the first time, Adelia wondered if the man could be as stupid as he looked, but it didn’t stop her enjoying the entertainment he provided.
On this night, Father Adalburt surpassed himself. His subject was the miracle of holy relics. “While we have sojourned here in noble Poitou, I have taken the opportunity to visit Saint-Jean d’Angely wherein lies the sacred head of its patron, Saint John the Baptist.”
He beamed at his congregation. “How can this come about, you may askyourselves, for is not the head of that great prophet venerated in Antioch also? Thus I asked the prior of Saint-Jean d‘Angely, how can this be? And thus he answered me, taking the dear skull in his hands: ‘See you, O seeker after truth, that this is the head of Saint John when he was a young man; the skull at Antioch is his when he had grown into full maturity.’”
Adelia closed her eyes in bliss.
THERE WERE FOUR more days before journeying began again.
Though the two of them prayed for time like a couple condemned to the gallows, there were long hours when Rowley’s duties called him away Adelia spent them in the ramshackle outhouse with Boggart and Ward, pounding roots and seething herbs, waiting for him to come back.
It was during these occasions that a suspicion which had been growing in Adelia’s mind for some time ripened into certainty.
She, like all the other women accompanying Joanna, had experienced difficulty while traveling in how to deal with the problem of menstrual cloths-circumstances that sometimes necessitated frequent changing on the road, a process to be carried out in secrecy since men, most of them with no knowledge at all of how the female body functioned, must be kept in ignorance of the fact that women bled every month. There had to be stratagems involving visits into woodland, covered pails filled with cold water for soaking, and a good deal of feminine cursing.
In all of these contrivances, however, Boggart had taken no part.
It could be put off no longer. “When’s your baby due, Boggart?” Adelia asked, casually
A bowl in which the maid had been pounding the flowers and leaves of thyme to make an infusion for, ironically enough, Mistress Blanche’s period pains, dropped to the floor and broke.
So, almost, did Boggart. “Mistress, oh mistress, you sure it’s that? I wondered, I was so feared, I hoped it might be summat else and I was ill.”
Adelia smiled. “I’m fairly sure it’s a baby.”
“Before God, I didn’t mean it, what’m I going to do? Forgive me, mistress. Forgive me.”
“Basil,” Adelia said firmly. “Where did you put the basil tincture?” With one hand clasping the phial and a spoon, and another pushing Boggart before her, she took the girl into the house, sat her down, and made her swallow two spoonfuls of a concoction intended to lift the spirits, after which she herself took a place on the floor with her hands round her knees. “Now,” she said. “Tell me about it.”
There was nothing to forgive Boggart for. It was the old, old story of rape, or certainly coercion, by the lord of the manor-in this case Lord Kenilworth, to whose family Boggart had been sent as an orphaned child.
“He said I had to do it. Lie still, he said, and don’t scream or I’d lose my place and he’d send me out onto the roads.”
That, then, was why the girl had responded in such panic to Sir Nicholas’s overtures to her shoes; any male sexual advance was, to her, a remembrance of rape.
She’d been too frightened to tell a soul, but had lost her place anyway because Lady Kenilworth, passing by the stable room and alerted by her lord’s grunting, had looked in.
These things not only happened in the best households; they were expected. Lady Kenilworth, however, was in the vulnerable position of still being childless three years after her wedding and Lord Kenilworth was becoming impatient for a son.
Afraid for her marriage and that,
Dear God, Adelia thought, into what depths female helplessness takes us.
“When did it happen?” she asked. “When did he attack you?”
“Weren’t just once,” sobbed the poor Boggart, “but it begun Lady Day”
So the girl could have conceived any time from March, which might put her pregnancy into its seventh month, although the loose gowns she wore and the thinness of the rest of her body had concealed it until now.
Boggart went down on her knees, holding up her hands in supplication. “Don’t send me away mistress. Where’d I go? I can’t make out what these furriners is saying.”
Adelia stared at her. “Why would I do that?” She added, and it was true: “I like babies.” In many ways, she regretted that she and Rowley hadn’t had another child, awkward though it might have been. She patted her maid’s hand. “We’ll have this one together.”
At which Boggart totally collapsed and had to be sat in a chair until she believed it and was coherent again.
AS IT TURNED OUT, Rowley and Adelia were granted only three days.
Late on the evening of the third, the soldier Rankin appeared at the door of the outhouse where Adelia and Boggart, having finished bottling cough mixture, were preparing for bed. “Ye’retaegotothapalacenoo,” he said.
“Er?” Adelia was having difficulty with the man’s Scottish accent.
Boggart, who was better at it, interpreted. “I think he wants us to go to the palace.”
“Noo.”
“Now,” Boggart said.
With Ward at their heels, they reached the palace gates just before the guards closed them and were confronted by Captain Bolt carrying a lantern. He took Adelia’s arm. “Trouble in the laundry, mistress, we better get down to it. Lord Mansur’ll be needing you.” He added:
“M’lord bishop’s already there.”
He took them down to the undercroft, a huge, dark cavern in which pillars held up avaulted ceiling over an
