A Murderous Procession aka The Assassin

“Captain Bolt is coming to escort us. The king wishes it.”

“Not again, oh God, not again.” Le roi le veult. For Adelia, the four most doom-laden words in any language; there was no appeal against them.

Drearily, she poked her head through her smock and looked at him. “What does he want this time?”

“He’s sending us to Sicily”

Ah, now that was different… “Sicily? Rowley, how wonderful. I shall see my parents. They can meet you and Allie.”

“Almeison will not be coming with us.”

“Of course she will, of course she will. I won’t leave her behind.”

“No. Henry’s keeping her here to make sure you come back to him.”

“But, Sicily… we could be away for a year or more. I can’t leave her that long.”

“She’ll be well looked after. She can have Gyltha with her, I’ve seen to that. They’ll be lodged with the queen at Sarum.” This was both suggestio falsi and suppressio veri on Rowley’s part. Henry Plantagenet would have been perfectly content for Allie to stay where she was, at Wolvercote in the care of Emma. It had been Rowley who’d begged him to allow the child to move in with Eleanor, and then got the queen to agree.

It was the only thing king and queen did agree on. Since Eleanor of Aquitaine had joined the rebellion-the failed rebellion-of the two older Plantagenet princes against their father, things had, to put it mildly, been strained between royal husband and wife.

Adelia put her finger on it. “Allie can’t stay with Eleanor, the queen’s in prison.”

“It’s a prison anyone would be happy to be in; she’s denied nothing.”

“Except freedom.” There was something terrible here; he was frightening her. Panic restricted her throat and she went to the open window to breathe.

When she’d got her voice under control, she turned around. “What is this, Rowley? If I have to go… if I must leave Allie, she can stay here with Gyltha and Mansur. She’s settled, she’s happy here, she has her animals… she has an affinity with animals.”

“My point exactly.”

“She has an instinct, a genius… Old Marly called her in the other day when his hens got ill; she cured Emma’s palfrey of the stifle when Cerdic couldn’t. What do you mean… ‘my point exactly’?”

“I mean I want my daughter to have the feminine arts that Eleanor can teach her. I want her to become a lady, not a misfit.”

“What you’re saying is that you don’t want her to grow up like me.”

In his fear and anger and love, that was what it came down to. Adelia escaped him, she always had; there must be something of his that wouldn’t get away

“No, I don’t, if you want to know. And she’s not going to. I have a responsibility for her.”

“Responsibility? You can’t even publicly acknowledge her.”

“That doesn’t mean I don’t care for her future. Look at you, look at what you wear…” Adelia was now fully clothed. “Peasant dress. She’s a beautiful child, why hide her light under that dowdy bushel? Half the time she goes about barefoot.”

It was true that Adelia was in homespun; she had agreed to become the bishop’s mistress but, when it came to it, she’d drawn the line at being his whore. Though he urged money on her, she wouldn’t take it and dressed herself out of her small earnings as a doctor. She hadn’t realized until now how much that irritated him.

This wasn’t about Allie, this was about her.

But she fought on the ground that he’d chosen, their daughter. “Education? And what sort of education would she get with Eleanor? Needlework? Strumming a lyre? Gossiping? Courtly blasted love?”

“She’d be a lady; I’m leaving her money; she can make a good marriage. I’ve already begun looking around for suitable husbands.”

“An arranged marriage?”

“Suitable, I said. And only if she’s willing.”

She stared at him. They had loved each other desperately and still did; she thought she knew him, thought he knew her-now it appeared they understood each other not at all.

She tried to explain. “Allie has a gift,” she said. “We couldn’t exist without animals, to plough, to ride, pull our carriages, feed us. If she can find cures for what makes them ill…”

“An animal doctor. What life is that for a woman, for God’s sake?”

The quarrel degenerated. When Mansur and Gyltha entered the house, it reverberated with the yells of two people verbally disemboweling each other.

“… I have a right to say how my household should behave…”

“… It’s not your household, you hypocrite. The Church is your household. When are you ever here?”

“I’m here now and tomorrow we go to Sarum and Allie comes, too… The king’s ordered it…”

“… You made him do that? You’d give her into slavery…?”

Gyltha hurried to Allie’s room in case the child should be listening. Eustace, the lurcher, lifted his shaggy head as she came in, but Allie was sleeping the sleep of the innocent and unknowing.

Gyltha sat by her bed just in case and glanced with despair at Mansur, shaking his head in the doorway

“… I’ll never forgive you. Never.”

“… Why? You want her to end up hilling a man like you did?”

If he’d been in his senses, Rowley would not have said it. When the outlaw called Wolf had tried to kill her and she’d been forced to kill him instead, it had hung a millstone around Adelia’s neck; time and again Rowley had reassured her that the monster was better dead; she had saved Alf’s life as well as her own, there was nothing else she could have done, but still it weighed on her that she, who was sworn to preserve life, had taken one.

After that the voices stopped.

Gyltha and Mansur heard the bishop clump down the stairs to make up a bed for himself on a settle. Distressed beyond measure, they went to bed themselves. There was nothing to be done now.

The last revelers in the barn went home. Emma and Roetger returned to the manor house, their servants scattered to their various sleeping places.

Silence descended on Wolvercote.

ON A WATER BUTT outside Adelia’s window where it has been crouching in shadow, a figure stretches its cloaked arms so that, for a second, it resembles a bat unfolding leather wings ready to fly. Noiselessly it jumps to the ground, overjoyed with what it has heard.

His God-and Scarry’s god is not the Christians’ God-has just granted him the boon of boons, as Scarry was sure He would, sooner or later. He has poured the elixir of opportunity into Scarry’s hands.

For Scarry’s hatred of the woman Adelia is infinite. During two years’ enforced exile from England, he has prayed to be shown the means of her destruction. Now, at last, the stink of his loathing has reached Satan’s nostrils and its incense has been rewarded.

Once, in a Somerset forest not too far from here, the woman killed Scarry’s joy, his life, his love, his mate, his Wolf. And Scarry has come back, with Wolf howling him on in his head, to rend her to pieces. How stupidly he has done it; how ineffectual. Arrows, pits, attempts to frighten her; she hasn’t even noticed; the two oafs who watch over her have seen to that.

Unworthy of an educated man, which is what Scarry is. A way of passing the time, really, until the true and only God should show him the way. Which he has, he has. Dominus illuminatio mea.

Wolf never killed a female until she was squirming in terror and pain-the only state in which Wolf, or he himself, could have sexual congress with the creatures. Timor mortis morte pejor.

“But now, Lord, in Your infinite wisdom, you have manifested to me all that I need to hear and see and learn that Your will and Wolf’s may triumph. The woman shall be reduced by slow torture, so much more satisfying, chop, chop, piece by piece, a capite ad calcem.”

At this point Scarry is out of the view of the house, and he twirls as the shimmering, hot night enfolds him.

How curious that she didn’t ask her lover why the king was sending her to