A Murderous Procession aka The Assassin

“I shall say that you are mistaken. The woman drowned by accident. I am the doctor, Rowley is the bishop. We will speak against you.”

The betrayal took her breath away; this man had looked after and defended her all her life, he’d never refuted her. He would do that? Rowley would do it? She could stand on the highest tower in the palace to shout “Murder” and be deemed insane because Rowley and Mansur, the only authority she had, would deny it?

By submitting to the superstition that others would lay against her door, these two men, her two men, had joined themselves to the great enemy killing everything that was rational, allowing fallacy to win. It had won. Without them, her testimony would be the mere squawk of a madwoman and result in nothing but hubris.

She felt a terrible grief for Brune, for the science of reason that always lost to unreason.

Mansur, knowing her, said: “It is for my sake, too. A Saracen is always a witch. If Gyltha were here, she would say the same.”

She couldn’t bear his presence anymore and went away from him to weep and rage in the shadows, circling the garden like a lost soul.

Still on his bench, Mansur had begun talking in English to Boggart, talking endlessly, it seemed, explaining the fact of himself and her mistress, what they did, what they had done, and why.

The sound meant no more to Adelia than the stridulation of a cricket. She kept on walking. She had never felt lonelier.

After awhile, a hand touched her sleeve. “Let’s go up, mistress, you need your sleep.”

“Do you think I’m a witch, Boggart?”

“Well…” Boggart eyes were still swiveling from the information about Adelia’s history and profession that Mansur had given her, and she was incapable of being less than honest. “Maybe, mistress, but I reckon as you’re a white one.”

It was too late to go to the house by the river; the palace gates were shut for the night. Unnoticed, the two women returned to the great hall and the stairs that led to the ladies’ apartments.

In the gloom, squires and servants were setting out the pallet mattresses in the niches of the walls where they slept. By the light of a single flambeau stuck in a bracket in the center of the floor, a group of thirty or more knights and courtiers were drinking and playing dice.

As Adelia reached the top of the staircase and started toward her room, one of the players let out a whoop at a lucky roll. “Mirabile dictu,” he cried.

Adelia stopped still. They were the very words screamed with the very exultation in the very voice she’d once heard in a forest between Glastonbury and Wells when two of its outlaws, capering and dressed in leaves, had threatened to rape and tear her apart. Excalibur had killed one-no, she had killed one.

The other?

Boggart was at her side, concerned. “What is it, mistress?”

No, it couldn’t be. Captain Bolt and his men had subsequently cleared the forest, quartering every man jack in it and hanging the pieces from its trees.

“What is it, mistress?”

“I thought… A man called Scarry…” She pulled herself together. “But it wasn’t him, he’s dead.”

Eight

AT FIRST, it was a subdued train that left Poitiers to set out once more on its journey. For Joanna, her ladies- in-waiting, her knights, bishops, and servants, it was expulsion from the Garden of Eden, even though Richard and his knights were to accompany them the rest of the way to Sicily.

For Adelia, it was the most dreadful thing she had ever done. She wasn’t leaving Paradise; she was deserting the dead. At Brune’s funeral, everybody else had watched a coffin lowered into the palace’s graveyard; Adelia had seen only a woman being murdered over and over again; she’d cowered at the laundress’s shriek of “Betrayer” dinning into her ears. It overrode the voices of Mansur and Rowley when they tried to talk to her so that she barely heard them, or wanted to.

Nor had she noticed the looks, some frightened, some accusatory, directed at her and Mansur as they were left to stand by themselves at the funeral service.

But as, under a crystalline sky, the procession began following the Vienne, loveliest of rivers, gradually the general mood lifted. Otters slid into the waters, making V-shaped ripples as they swam. Herons stood still, elongated sculptures, waiting for the moment to spear an unsuspecting, sinuous trout. Overhead, squadrons of cranes flew south to their winter quarters, oblivious of the long train of people and animals lumbering along below them.

Not that lumber was the appropriate word. Duke Richard kept a brisk pace, and, on such a fine, dry day, the princess and ladies-in-waiting had abandoned their palanquin for horseback in order to ride with him, surrounded by a bright crowd of his knights with harness bells jingling, their songs, shouts, and laughter sending affronted, cawing rooks scattering from elms into the air.

Even the Bishop of Winchester was seen to smile as he bumped along on a horse too big for him.

Adelia, still cross with them, did not want to talk to the only two people, Mansur and Rowley who would have talked to her.

As usual, Sir Guillaume had urged his horse toward hers and was singing at her:

I am with my beautiful beneath the flowers,
until our sentry from the tower cries: “Lovers, get up!”
for I clearly see the sunrise and the day.

“Oh, shut up,” she told him and rode down the procession to ride alongside Ulf, a Gyltha substitute, the only person apart from God to whom she could unburden herself.

He wasn’t sympathetic. “They was right,” he said of Mansur and Rowley

“In the name of Heaven, boy, how were they right? They caused me to sin against everything I believe in; they cut out my tongue. They made me fail in my duty to the dead.”

Ulf was unshaken. “Seems to me your duty’s to the king and his daughter, see her safe. That’s what you took on, ain’t it?”

“I could have seen Joanna safe and still done what I ought.”

“No, you bloody couldn’t. There’s mutterings already. You got to be careful. Iffen you’d done your duty by that old besom, you’d’ve got more attention to yourself than you have already.” He frowned; he, like Mansur, heard things that Adelia didn’t. “You’re feared by some parties. There’s them as’d like to see you left behind, or worse. There’s some as is even blaming you for Young Henry not comin’ with us. Ain’t that right, Boggart?”

He was speaking English, and Boggart, from her mule, replied: “I’m afeared it is, mistress. There’s them as think you got powers.”

“Somebody’s got powers,” Ulf said. “I reckon as somebody round here’s got it in for you. Somebody poisoned that bloody horse deliberate, somebody done old Brune deliberate, all to make you look bad.” He had a sudden idea: “Here, suppose that’s why old Sir Nicholas got speared?”

“For God’s sake,” Adelia said wearily “You’re being stupid.”

“I ain’t so sure. You got a particular enemy amongst this lot? You done anyone wrong lately?”

“I deserted Brune.”