THE FIRST TWO KILLINGS appeared to be accidental- and one of them actually was.
The ladies of the party having retired to bed, the Abbot of Saint Benoit’s was sitting late at table with his male guests, and offering them the opportunity to go after boar in an hour or two’s time-boar hunting being best done at night when the male, most dangerous of quarries, leaves his sow and young ones in their lair to patrol the forest, snuffling his snout into the leaf mold and plowing the earth with his great tusks to sharpen them.
As Rowley explained to Adelia later, each man had feasted well but was not too drunk. Sir Nicholas had been watched carefully by his squire, who had seen to it that, when refilling his master’s wine cup, there’d been a good measure of water in it.
The abbot was talking of the grandfather of all boars that had been ruining his sown fields through the winter, not to mention killing two peasants. A worthy adversary at the height of his powers, God love him, the abbot had said. To prove it, he had his huntsman bring to the table such of the brute’s droppings as had been found so that the guests could assess them.
Also, the abbot went on, he owned a pack of boar hounds that were sans pareil and ready for the fray. He was sure the noble lords would wish to see them in action.
“You can imagine it, sweetheart,” Rowley told Adelia, “nearly all the noble lords, and some not so noble, were on their feet in an instant, calling for their horses to be saddled, especially Lord Ivo and Sir Nicholas and, of course, the ubiquitous O’Donnell.” Rowley’s mouth went into the thin line it was beginning to adopt every time the Irishman was mentioned.
He went on: “I tried to restrain Father Adalburt because boar hunting is not for amateurs, but the idiot was squeaking with excitement and couldn’t be persuaded. Locusta-poor lad, he doesn’t get much chance to hunt what with having to act as route master all the time-he wanted to go. Even Father Guy was enthused and said he’d join in, at least to watch.”
The Bishop of Winchester had declined on the grounds of being too old and tired. Rowley, reluctantly had decided to accompany the hunt, mainly he said, to keep his eye on the idiots.
IN THE LITTLE stone lodge in the grounds of the Abbot of Saint Benoît’s house, huntsmen are arming themselves. For this is where the good abbot keeps his spears, lances, crossbows, bolts, arrows and yew bows, his stabbing andgralloching knives.
The men are excited and, as ever when boar is the quarry, a little nervous. Not so the hounds in the kennels next door; they are clamoring to be let out and do what they’ve been bred for.
Somebody chaffs Scarry for picking too slender a spear. “That’ll never get through a tusher’s hide.”
Scarry gives a naive smile. “Won’t it?” But he hefts its weight and takes it all the same.
ADELIA WAS ATTENDING to sick pilgrims in the abbey courtyard as the hunt set off, its blare of trumpets and horns competing with the shouts of the whipper-in, the deep belling of the hounds and the rallying cries of riders.
She was in bed asleep when it returned but, like everyone else, was woken by the long note of a horn emerging from the forest sounding the mort, the salute to a dead quarry.
Except that this time it was not announcing the death of an animal…
It was raining. Monks, guests, and pilgrims gathered by the gates to watch the dripping hunt’s return. A weeping abbot walked beside a hastily assembled travois on which lay two bodies.
The corpse of Sir Nicholas Baicer was taken immediately to the Lady Chapel. Lord Ivo, bleeding horribly, was carried to the abbot’s room and laid on its bed.
The boar had indeed proved a worthy adversary; the dogs had found and bayed it; Lord Ivo and the abbot with their squires and huntsmen had dismounted ready for the kill.
But, though hounds were sinking their teeth into almost every part of it, the huge animal managed to charge and gore Lord Ivo in the groin, tossing him into the air, before the abbot’s sword went deep into its eye.
“Only then,” said the abbot, still crying, “didwe notice that Sir Nicholas was not with us, indeed had not been with us when we found the beast. Being moonless, the forest was so dark that I fear many of our following missed their way A search was instituted and at last we came upon Sir Nicholas, lifeless, being dragged by his horse, his poor foot still in its stirrup. Now God forgive me that this tragedy should come upon us… one fine knight injured unto death, another already gone to Paradise and my best boarhound with him. Surely we are accursed.”
With Mansur and Dr. Arnulf giving instruction, Adelia and the abbey’s herbalist did what they could for Lord Ivo.
By general agreement, sphagnum moss was applied to his injuries to cleanse them and stem the blood. But, as Adelia could see, the tusks had gone in too far, his lordship was undoubtedly bleeding internally and to stitch the wounds together would merely cause more agony without extending a life that was inevitably coming to its end.
She hurried from the room to fetch poppy juice from her pack and found Rowley waiting for her outside. “Is Ivo dying?”
“Yes. All we can do is to relieve the pain.”
“How long?”
“I don’t know.” She was distressed.
“I’ll go in. God have mercy on a good friend and a fine soldier.”
When Adelia returned to the room, Rowley was holding Lord Ivo’s hand while the Bishop of Winchester prayed as he readied the oils in his chrismatory box preparatory to giving the last rites. The abbot, still in hunting clothes, Father Guy and Dr. Arnulf were discussing in low voices such of Saint Benoit’s relics as could help forward Lord Ivo’s soul to its immortal rest, while Mansur, apparently detached from the conversation, looked on with a concern unlike his usual impassivity
Candles in their holders at the head and foot of the bed cast upward shadows that distorted the faces of the men standing up, turning their eye sockets into those of skulls.
Only the dying man’s features were fully lit, and Adelia gritted her teeth at the thought of what agony he was in and with what courage he was bearing it. His eyes were shut, his lips compressed, but his hand gripped at Rowley’s like a raptor’s.
“Here, my lord,” she said, passing the phial to Mansur.
Dr. Arnulf was on them in a second. “And what is that?”
“Poppy juice. Lord Mansur has prescribed it for the pain.”
“Poppy juice?” This was Father Guy “It is the devil’s concoction. That dear man on the bed is being purified and redeemed by what he suffers. The agony of Christ endowed pain with his own touch of divinity. You, Arnulf, you are a clerk in minor orders as well as a doctor, you surely cannot agree to this. There are edicts from the Vatican…”
“Indeed I cannot,” Dr. Arnulf said firmly “The poppy mandragora, hemp seed, all are absent from my medicine chest.”
Adelia stared at them, trying to understand what she was hearing. “That man is in torment. You can’t, you can’t deny him relief.”
“Better torment of the body than the soul,” Father Guy told her.
The abbot joined them, still smelling of the wide outdoors and the blood, Lord Ivo’s blood, on the sleeves of his leather tunic. “My child, I have sent for the femur of Saint Stephen, the first martyr. We must pray that its application will aid this good knight through his martyrdom.”
“Help me,” Adelia said in Arabic.
Mansur acted. Snatching the phial from her hand, he showed it to Rowley who looked toward Adelia. She nodded.
While the Arab held Lord Ivo’s head up, Rowley administered the opiate: “Here, my dear friend.”
While Father Guy raved that the noble lord had not yet made his confession, a furious Arnulf pulled Adelia out of the room.
“You chit,” he hissed. “Do you and your master set yourselves up against the Holy Fathers, against practice as laid down by Blessed Mother Church?”
This was too much. She hissed back, “Since when would a true mother allow any son of hers to suffer as that poor man is suffering? Or any true doctor, either?”
“Do you question my authority?”
“Yes, I bloody well do.” She stamped off down the corridor.
IT TOOK ALL DAY for Lord Ivo to die. Joanna and the ladies-in-waiting spent it in the abbey church, praying for the soul that had departed and the one that was about to depart.
Adelia spent it in her room. Twice more, Mansur came in to have the phial refilled. Lord Ivo had gained consciousness long enough to make his confession and receive the last rites from the Bishop of Winchester.
Dr. Arnulf and Father Guy having washed their hands of the business, Mansur said, had left the sickroom.
“Good.” But she grimaced. “We haven’t made any friends today you and I.”
“Do we want friends such as those?”
“No. They call themselves Christians. When did Christ ever look on suffering without being moved to help it?”
“I do not think they are Christians, I think they are churchmen.”
When he’d gone, she turned back to the window. It had begun to rain hard. She could see a river not far away, the heavy raindrops making discs in its surface. Under a dark gray sky, the forest beyond it appeared an indeterminate mass. It occurred to her that she knew the name of neither and felt the panic of an orphaned child taken away from everything it loved to be abandoned in a hostile landscape. The thought that Allie could be feeling the same bowed her down.
She longed for the comfort Gyltha would have given her. “We been through worse nor this, bor.”
And so they had, but not apart.
It was dark when Mansur returned to say that Lord Ivo was dead. He handed her a monk’s habit. “You are to put this on and join the bishop in the Lady Chapel.”
“Why?”
“He thinks there was something strange about Sir Nicholas’s death.”
The awfulness of the day was suddenly released by the ridiculous. How typical of Rowley; not a beckoning to a lovers’ tryst, but a command to waddle through a crowded abbey in disguise. To do what? Perform an autopsy?
She would go, of course. If she was caught, she could hardly be in worse odor with everybody than she was now. She would go because she was an iron filing drawn to that man’s magnet. She would go because… well, because it was a silly thing to do, and silliness just now was a blessing.
She took her veil and circlet off her hair and pulled on the habit, putting its cowl over her head until the hem dangled over her eyes. “Do I look like a monk?”
“You do. A short one.”
In fact, nobody noticed her. The abbey was in uproar: two important guests killed while under its aegis; people to be told, messages sent; funerals to be arranged; special services to be held; and, with it all, the holy hours to be kept. Monks scurried anxiously in from the rain and out again, cowls dripping, heads bent in an effort to keep their sandaled feet out of puddles. She could have made her way through them and been paid no attention if she’d been clashing two cymbals together as she went.
The Lady Chapel stood by itself an adjunct of the abbey’s church, and possibly its oldest building. The figure waiting for her was taller than its carved, chevroned porch.
“You took your time,” it said. He twisted the handle ring and flung one of the door’s leaves open with a crash.
Immediately Adelia smelled incense, beeswax, and death. Inside the only light came from two tall candles on stanchions at the head and base of the catafalque where Sir Nicholas lay Two monks knelt on either side.
The only sound in the silence was the plink-plink of rainwater seeping through a leak in the roof and into a bucket that was lost in the shadows.
Rowley said: “Thank you, brothers, you may leave. I’ll watch over my friend for a while.”
They were glad to go and rose at once. Rubbing their poor knees, they bowed to the corpse, the altar, then to the Bishop of Saint Albans before gliding out.
Rowley banged the door shut behind them and bolted it. “Now, then, come and look at this.”
The body had been wrapped in a silk winding sheet. Usually, the face was left exposed, but not this time. Adelia might have been looking down on an Egyptian mummy.
Together and with difficulty-Sir Nicholas had been a heavy man-she and Rowley labored to unwind it from its cocoon.
When at last the corpse was exposed, she saw why the face had been covered; there was a jagged gap where one of the eyes should have been.
“What happened?”
“Young Aubrey found him first and began calling the ‘Found.’ Jesus, it was a fiasco, that hunt. Raining, dark as the Pit, too many men scattered among too many sodding trees, not knowing where one another was, me trying to round them up.”
Rowley took off his cap to claw his fingers through his hair, and she saw that his face was pinched by tiredness and grief.
“Anyway,” he said, “I heard Aubreys horn and spurred toward it. The boy… he’d unhitched Nicholas’s foot from its stirrup and put the body on the ground. He was crying over it. There was this great splinter in poor old Nicholas’s eye, so we reckoned his horse had bolted and crashed him into a branch and that’s what killed him.”
“But you don’t think so now?”
“Well… there was Ivo, Nicholas, no time to think anything. But when I was sitting by Ivo, trying to make sense of it all, it came to me that if it was the branch splinter that killed Nicholas, there should have been a lot of blood-and there wasn’t. Dead men don’t bleed; you taught me that.”
“Something else killed him first?”
“That’s what you’re here for. And get on with it, they’ll be bringing Ivo here soon.”
Adelia pushed back her cowl. For a moment, as she always did, she knelt by the body asking its forgiveness for her handling of it. The soul that had occupied it was absolved; the dead were sinless-also they were her business.
Whoever had done the laying out of the corpse had made a rushed job of washing it; there were green smears on the skin where the knight’s clothes had been torn as he’d been dragged through grass. Stones and brambles had left long lacerations in the flesh.
“Give me more light.”
Hot wax dripped onto unfolded layers of the winding sheet as Rowley picked up one of the stanchions and held it nearer. From behind her, in the darkness, came the regular, musical drip of water into its bucket.
“Hmmm.”
“What?”
“This.” Her fingers had found a flap of torn, corrugated skin on the upper left back and, beneath it, a hole. This was what had bled-and profusely; the negligent layers-out had left crusts of blood around it.
“Here.” Adelia’s fingers investigated deeper. “Something’s embedded itself. I can feel wood.”
She looked up. “Rowley I think it’s a spear shaft, very thin but, yes, I’m sure it’s some sort of shaft, certainly a dart of some kind. It snapped off when he was dragged but this is what killed him; he was speared.”
His voice shocked the quiet. “Fucking poachers.” His fingers went through his hair again, and he said more gently: “Jesus God, such an end for a man like this.”
“What will you do?”
“Tell the abbot he’s a bloody disgrace, letting poachers roam his purlieus shooting anything that moves.” He went stamping around in the darkness, casting verbal damnation on villains who went out to kill other men’s game, describing in detail the unpretty end of this one if Rowley Picot got hold of him.
Adelia heard the bucket kicked to Kingdom Come and go rolling across the tiles. She’d been hoping to wash her hands in its water.
She let him rave. There was something particularly terrible about death by mistake, and it was difficult to see what else this could be… darkness, rain; a peasant-hungry perhaps-concealed and waiting in the undergrowth, listening for the sound of animal movement; hearing the rush of something big; then the expert and very lucky throw of a homemade spear…
Nor was it uncommon. Her knowledge of English history was uncertain, but hadn’t one of the Conqueror’s sons, what was his name, been accidentally killed in similar circumstances? In the New Forest, that had been. Rufus, that was it. William Rufus. A king, no less.
When Rowley had quieted, she asked: “Do you want me to get the spearhead out? I’d have to go for my knives.”
“No. Let’s give him back his decency” He came back to help her.
When the last wrap was in place, she stayed on her knees awhile longer.
She looked up to find Rowley staring at her and was suddenly aware that her hair was tumbled about her shoulders and that she was beautiful, because she always was beautiful in his eyes.
“God help me, girl,” he said, and his voice was raw, “but I’d tip this poor devil off his catafalque, throw you on it, and take you here and now. The hell with my immortal soul-and yours.”
“I’d let you,” she said.
But there wasn’t time; even now they could hear feet sloshing through rain and voices chanting: “… every tear from their eyes; Death will be no more…”
Rowley had the door unbolted in an instant, and the procession came in, carrying Lord Ivo on its shoulders. “… and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.”
Adelia covered her head and stood by the door to let the monks go by, then slipped away unnoticed.
THE ABBOT HAD a bad time of it. While his bailiffs rounded up for questioning every man on his estates capable of throwing a well-aimed spear, he had to consult with the two bishops as to what should be done with the corpses. Sent home or buried in situ?
In the end, their hearts were cut out and placed in lead-lined caskets for their squires and servants to take back to the families. A messenger went galloping to Henry Plantagenet to inform him that he had lost two of his most trusted men.
The interment of the rest of the flesh was conducted in pouring rain in the Saint Benoit graveyard, where Princess Joanna wept for her knights.
As Sir Nicholas was lowered into his grave, Father Guy and Dr. Arnulf looked toward where Adelia was standing. The chaplain was heard to say: “I hope that female is happy now, for was she not the one who cursed this good man?”
WHEN THE PROCESSION finally set off again, now reduced by twenty or so servants, the absence of Lord Ivo and Sir Nicholas was palpable. There was a sense of unease, less laughter. For all Sir Nicholas’s funny ways, he and Lord Ivo had radiated the stability and authority of their king and the lack made everyone else feel less safe.
The Bishop of Winchester was the most affected. He was noticeably more nervous than he had been; the Young King had failed the princess, and nowhere was tragedy come upon them. Echoing the words of his erstwhile host, he said: “Surely, we are accursed,” and confided to his intimates that he was beginning to believe that God was displeased with their enterprise.
This was passed along the line, where ill-wishers like Father Guy, the princess’s nurse, Edeva, and the head laundress, Brune, pointed out that of course God was displeased. Were they not sheltering in their company not only one of His avowed enemies, a Saracen, but his woman, who seemed to have the power to bring destruction on such men and animals who crossed her?
THE PROCESSION WAS now entering Aquitaine, the duchy named for its waters that had been Eleanor’s and which, after her marriage, had been passed to Henry Plantagenet, and which, since her imprisonment, was under the governorship of their second son, Duke Richard.
The weather cleared so that the sun shone, as if it could do no less for the daughter of the land’s beloved duchess.
Even the Bishop of Winchester cheered up. “We shall be safe now. The lionhearted duke meets us at Poitiers.”
There would be no lack of knights with Richard escorting his sister to Sicily he kept hundreds by him-not for the pretend war of tournaments, like his brother, but so that one day he could lead them to the real thing, crusade.
“Mad for it,” Rowley said of him, grimacing; he was no enthusiast for crusading, nor for Richard himself. “But first he’s got to pacify southern Aquitaine-and serve him right, he stirred it up in the first place. He thought its barons were being loyal to him when he led them against his father. In fact, of course, it was their chance to grab 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.”
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 Poitiers was proud and which, Adelia feared, might cause Mansur’s presence in the city to be regarded as an offense, especially among unsophisticates like the head laundress and Joanna’s nurse, who would lose no time in broadcasting it.
Unlike the Young King, Richard Plantagenet hadn’t rushed to meet his sister; he was not, as Adelia saw at a glance, an impulsive youth.
He stood at the doors of Eleanor’s palace like a colossus, taller than and as splendid as Young Henry but weightier, both physically and mentally and dressed in gold.
The brothers did not get on. They had combined in the revolt against their father, but when the three of them made peace and Henry II had ordered the elder to go and help Richard put down the Aquitanian rebels, the Young King had deserted the fight and gone off to take part in more tournaments.
Just looking at Richard now, Adelia knew that if it ever came to open war between them, the younger would win.
After bowed to Joanna and kissed her hand, his deep voice rang over the courtyard: “Here is my beloved sister, princess of my blood. Who befriends her is my friend; who harms her shall feel the might of my fist.”
Unnecessary, Adelia thought. Who would harm that child?
Joanna, however, gazed up at her brother in adoration as, with her fingertips on his, she was led into a hall as big and as impressive as any Adelia had ever seen.
The feast held in it that night also reflected Eleanor’s taste-it certainly wouldn’t have been Henry’s.
Every course was elaborate; not a boar head without its tusks and an apple in its mouth, not a peacock without its fanned tail, nor an oyster without its faux pearl-yet the food was of a freshness suggesting that everything had been alive or growing yesterday in this richest of all countrysides. Youthful knights far outnumbered the women guests, which, again, would have suited Eleanor, who liked male admiration, especially from the young.
Her son did, too, it seemed. Though the women he knew well, such as Lady Beatrix, Lady Petronilla, and Mistress Blanche, were being accorded the honor of sitting with him at the top table, as were the bishops of Winchester and Saint Albans, the handsome Locusta, whose lack of position and a title hardly merited it, was with them, and looking somewhat uncomfortable at being so singled out.
But then, Adelia thought, perhaps Richard wants to discuss with him the plans for the rest of their journey to Sicily.
Or was it that? When the duke addressed the ladies, which he did charmingly enough, his eyes were dull. When chaffing with his knights, or in conversation with Locusta, or accepting a dish from his kneeling page-a slim, beautiful lad-his whole face became refreshed.
Sitting in her unexalted place in the middle of one of the long tables below the dais, Adelia’s glance met her lover’s. She raised her eyebrows in interrogation.
He gave back the merest twitch of his head. I thínk so.
For a moment the intimacy of understanding between the two of them was so sweet she could think of nothing else. Again, she asked herself: Why didn’t I accept him when he offered? Fool, you fool, look at us now.
She got herself under control and turned her mind back toward Aquitaine’s princely duke. If she and Rowleywere right, how dreadful for the young man. In the world’s eyes, not just a sin but a crime; to be something nobody wanted him to be, not even himself. Perhaps, then, the frenetic need to save his soul and placate his disapproving God could only be assuaged by taking up His banner and killing His enemies.
His reception of Mansur had been as coldly courteous as it had been to her but, presumably not daring to offend his father, he had at least given the Arab a place at the feast as high as Dr. Arnulf’s.
On their way to their beds, Adelia heard Lady Petronilla say to the other ladies-in-waiting, “My dears, now we are home.”
IN THE CHILLY NIGHT, two men are walking and talking in the garden that was once Eleanor of Aquitaine’s. One of them has a massive shadow which sometimes blends into that of the other.
“The sword is mine by right,” he says. He keeps his voice low but it is deep with authority. “Who else am I but Arthur’s heir? Who else will use it to defend our sweet and gracíous Lord from His enemies?”
“I know where it is, and you shall have it by the time we reach Palermo, my lord,” says the other shadow. “For, indeed, you are its rightful owner. Without you, Christendom will be cast into darkness and the Holy Places lost forever. Your father refuses to raise it in their defense.”
“You will refer to him as the king.” For all Richard’s hatred of his father, anything that diminished Henry Plantagenet’s royalty diminished his own.
“The king of course,” says Scarry in apology. And then: “It is meet and right that you should have it, for if you could see the unworthiness of those to whom it has been entrusted, you would weep.”
He pauses because there is a sob from beside him; Richard the Lionheart is weeping. He cries easily; often he cries in church.
After a considerate wait, Scarry goes on: “To take it is to rescue it from another thousand years of oblivion.”
In the darkness, Scarry inclines his head a little, listening to the echo of his own words issue into the October air. That was rather fine; didn’t sound like theft at all.
He resumes: “When the time comes…” It is a euphemism for the death of Henry II; both men know it. “… when the time comes it shall be as if it were rediscovered. And this hand…” Another pause as the lesser shadow blends into the first while Scarry plops a kiss on the royal palm. “… and this hand, this blessed, blessed hand, may then raise Excalibur that heretics everywhere shall flee in confusion at the sight of it, back to the Pit from which they were raised.”
“Yes,” Richard says. “Yes. It is meet and proper that this should be so. It is not demeaning that is done for the greater glory of God.”
“It is not.” There is a cough of some delicacy as Scarry slides from the divine to the financial. “And… er… there have been expenses.”
“You will be paid as promised. On delivery. Now leave me.”
Bowing, Scarry leaves and, looking back, sees that the colossus has fallen to its knees and its clasped hands are raised high in supplication for… what? Absolution? Removal of the thorn that so torments its poor flesh?
“You’re praying to the wrong master, idiot,” Scarry says quietly, and disappears into the blackness from which he has come.
EVEN THOUGH it was cold at night, these October days in Aquitaine were warm, and Joanna dived into her old haunts, a child again, scuffling through the autumn leaves as she played ball and blind man’s buff with those of her own age, obviously as healthy as a ferret, leaving her doctors to their own devices.
There were creature comforts: enough bedrooms to give Adelia one of her own, to be shared only with Boggart and Ward-and, oh joy it had a garderobe in it. There was a ladies’ bathing place with a marbled, sunken bath twenty feet long. Every side table contained fruit and sweetmeats.
With it all, there was an alteration of sound. The Aquitanians amongst the wedding train had immediately reverted to their native tongue, the langue d’oc, so that the air of the palace echoed with it as if a breeze had wafted in from another, more exotic continent. It varied so much from the Norman French she was used to that Adelia, who soaked up languages like sand absorbs water, had difficulty with it at first but then, recalling her visits to the Occitan valleys of Italy, where the people spoke a patois version, was soon able to get her tongue round it and, when in church, to join the others in the Occitan version of the Paternoster-“Paíre de Cel, Paire nòstre, sanctificat lo teu Nom”-like a true Languedocienne.
However, the magic of the langue d’oc was not to be found in ecclesiastical chant but when it sang of love of woman. Draped over balustrades, leaning against statues, sighing, singing to their lutes and viols, were young nobles in whom Eleanor had inspired the tradition of courtly love. Any pretty noble lady would do; the thing was to adore her without hope of consummation.
Wherever they went, a flock of young men surrounded Lady Beatrix, Lady Petronilla, and Mistress Blanche like brightly colored birds around a spillage of corn.
Adelia, to her surprise, attracted a trouvère of her own, at least ten years younger than she was. She wondered if Sir Guillaume was too immature, too temporarily infatuated, or too stupid to realize that she was not of high birth and was in fact persona non grata amongst this newly arrived company or if, in this heady enchanted place, nobody had bothered to tell him.
As she wandered the herb gardens, replenishing what stock from it she could, it was not unpleasant to be followed about by a youth who swore to the strum of a viol that he was wasting away for love of her.
Rowley didn’t agree. He made a beeline for her. “And who’s that popinjay when he’s at home?”
Bless him, he can still be jealous. How satisfactory.
She said: “That’s Sir Guillaume de Chantonnay I think he sings rather well.”
“Really? I’ve heard more tuneful corncrakes.” He stalked off.
Practically the only person with whom Poitiers Palace did not agree was Father Guy He was outraged by the palace’s spiritual laxity in gambling. He loathed the singing that praised not God, but the female form. He saw damnation in the powder and paint, the low-cut dresses and trailing sleeves of the women-now ridiculously long-and in the short tunics that exposed the tightness of the hose over young men’s buttocks.
He said so, volubly, and was further outraged that his fellow chaplain seemed delighted by all he saw. “Will you imperil your hope of Paradise?” he yelled at Father Adalburt when he caught him sitting up late with some of Richard’s knights at a game of Hazard.
“But these worthy gentlemen asked me to join them,” Adalburt bleated.
“Of course they did, you fool. You keep losing.”
Adelia’s only regret was that she now had no contact with Ulf The pilgrims had been accommodated for the duration in a monastery just outside the city. However, it was nice to see more of Locusta, who, for now, could cease shuttling up and down between the voyagers and their nights’ stay
“You should try and rest more often,” she told him. “You were beginning to look quite peaky.”
Locusta grimaced. “It wasn’t rest I was after.” He looked to make sure he wasn’t overheard. “To be honest, mistress, there’s a lady in town whose acquaintance I was hoping to renew. She was very, um, hospitable to me when my uncle and I last passed through Poitiers, but the duke sees to it that I am kept in his company”
He looked round again. “Between you and me, practicing sword fights and tilting at the quintain all day is neither my idea of rest nor entertainment.”
Smiling, Adelia sympathized. “Perhaps my Lord Mansur should claim you tomorrow to show him the town’s pharmacists, and you could slip away.”
“Mistress,” Locusta said. “He would have my eternal gratitude.”
But it was Adelia who was to slip away…
The next day Captain Bolt took her to one side. “You’ll be wanting somewhere to prepare your medicines and tinctures, mistress. There’s a nice little house down on the River Clain would suit you.”
“Thank you, Captain, but I don’t need it.” The palace’s cook general had allowed her a space in one of his kitchens in return for her witch hazel potion to clear up his skin trouble.
“Yes, you do, mistress,” Bolt insisted.
“No, I…” She saw his eyes. “Ah, perhaps I do.”
It was a very small, somewhat crumbling house, very drafty and damp; its lower floor was essentially a boathouse and the blue-painted shutters to its upper rooms opened out onto a creaking, curlicued little balcony overlooking a quiet and deserted section of the river. At the back there was an outhouse that served as a kitchen.
To whom it belonged, Adelia never found out, but, for the purpose for which it was now intended, it was perfection-a boat could approach it unseen.
Nevertheless, it posed a quandary which, suddenly embarrassed and not explaining matters at all well, she raised with Mansur.
He went to the core of it immediately. “You wish to be alone there.”
“Well, yes. In any case, as Lord Mansur you are too lofty to stay anywhere else except the palace, and for you and I to share such lowly accommodation would cause talk. But I don’t like leaving you here by yourself. Duke Richard doesn’t welcome you, for one thing, and, for another, you’re not supposed to understand what anyone says.”
But, it appeared, the former easygoing dukes of Aquitaine had been more tolerant of other races and beliefs than the present one was, and had brought back with them Arabs, even Jews, from the East who’d proved to be useful servants and had since become an accepted part of its palace’s fabric, whether Richard liked it or not.
“There is a scholar in the library here, old Bahir,” Mansur said. “He will keep me company, we shall play chess together. He translates Arabic texts so that the duke may learn more of Muhammad’s faithful before he goes to kill them.”
Captain Bolt had already been instructed to take care of her security From among his men-a ragbag of nationalities that he’d formed into a cohesive force for Henry Plantagenet’s sole use-one was deputed to assist Boggart in carrying Adelia’s luggage and equipment down to the house and to act as sentry from a position in the boathouse.
“He’s reliable, Rankin is, and not a talker,” Bolt said, “that being just as well, for he’s a Scot and most of the time nobody can’t understand a word he utters.”
Adelia doubted if anyone in the palace would be aware that she and her chaperone-Boggart-had left the palace; nearly all Eleanor’s people had spent time with their queen in Poitiers at one point or another and were too busy carousing with old friends to notice the absence of a couple to whom they paid little attention anyway Even if they did, the brewing of potions was a plausible excuse.
As she and Boggart set about cleaning their new premises-a process it needed badly-they heard a viol being struck up, immediately followed by a mellifluous voice from the direction of the riverbank.
“Blast that boy” Adelia said. She went out onto the balcony and tried to wave Sir Guillaume away
He waved back.
Crossly she returned to her work. “So much for privacy Why doesn’t he alert every bell ringer in town while he’s about it.”
“Sings lovely though, don’t he,” Boggart said.
“I suppose he does.” She was disturbed; there had been somebody else out there; she’d glimpsed a tall, thin man staring at her balcony from across the river before he disappeared amongst the trees. It had looked, she couldn’t be sure, but it had looked like the O’Donnell.
Sir Guillaume went on serenading.
For you, lady, three birds sing on every bough,
Yet, you care nothing for my song… (dompna pois de me no’chal…)
The refrain ended abruptly. There was a squawk and a splash.
While Boggart ran to investigate, Adelia confronted a figure that had appeared in the doorway “What have you 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’Angély 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‘Angély, 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, in extremis, her husband might adopt a bastard as his heir, the woman had not only dismissed Boggart but made sure the girl wouldn’t even be in the country if she gave birth to a child-hence an appeal to her sister-in-law, Lady Petronilla, the woman about to set out for Normandy
Dear God, Adelia thought, into what depths female helplessness takes us. I hoped it might be summat else and I was ill. She wondered angrily what would have happened to Boggart if Petronilla hadn’t given the girl to her unsuspecting self. Abandoned the child in a foreign field, friendless?
“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 enormous well and where laundresses had every sort of equipment to do their work.
Here, the princess’s women had been able to catch up on the laundry that the sometimes primitive facilities of the various hostels they’d stayed at had denied them. (Brune had never let Locusta forget the monastery outside Alençon where the monks still used the river and cleaned their robes by beating them with stones.)
Sheets and clothing hanging from lines fastened from pillar to pillar obscured the way, and Captain Bolt had to brush them aside as he led Adelia and Boggart toward a corner where more lanterns showed a gathering of people standing in a circle near one of the enormous iron washing vats set above its brazier. Ward pattered after them, then stopped and slunk away.
Rowley was there, so was Father Guy, Mansur, two of the palace guards, and one of Brune’s young washerwomen, whose sobs were sending echoes hiccuping around the vault.
The head laundress, it appeared, would complain no longer.
“It was our turn to do the wash, the palace women’d done theirs,” the girl was saying, “and we’d done ours and we’d gone up for the night and she saw us to bed like she does, then she come back down to see all was right for the morning wash, like she does… did, oh God have mercy on her poor soul.”
“And?” Father Guy asked sharply
“So when she didn’t come up, I come down again to see why, and there she was with her poor head in the tub. Awful it was, master, awful.”
Brune’s body lay on the tiled floor, her soaked cap dislodged so that some of her hair dripped down an already dripping bodice. Her skirt was dry.
“Like this?” Rowley asked. He leaned over the edge of the vat, head down.
The girl nodded. She was clutching a scrubbing board to her chest like a shield. “I couldn’t get her up, master. Tried and tried, I did, but she were too weighty so I ran for help. And him there…” One of the guards nodded, “… he gets her up out of the tub but she were dead then, God have mercy, sweet Mary have mercy”
“Why is the vat full, child?” This was Father Guy, accusatory. “Do you not empty the water out at night?”
Apparently they did, then filled the vats again ready for the next day’s wash. “Very particular ’bout that, she was. Saves time in the morning, see, all we has to do then is light the fires. Oh, God have mercy, master, she didn’t… didn’t mean to drown herself did she? Say she won’t go to hell, will she, master?” The girl collapsed under the thought of her chief eternally damned for the sin of suicide. Adelia went to comfort her.
Father Guy tapped his long fingers together as he considered. “I see no reason to assume such a thing; she was a God-fearing woman, one of the few amongst us, I fear. Was she in any way distressed today? No? Then cause of death is clear-an accident. Do you not agree, my lord?”
“So it seems,” the Bishop of Saint Albans said. “What does the Lord Mansur think? He’s the doctor.”
Every eye looked toward Mansur, who spoke in Arabic. “What do you say?”
“I don’t like it,” Adelia said in the same tongue. There was a raw, red area on Brune’s upper lip. She lapsed into Norman French for the benefit of the chaplain. “The lord doctor wishes to examine her.”
Father Guy appealed to a higher authority. “Surely it is unnecessary for the Saracen to interfere, my lord bishop. It is obvious that this female had a turn, an apoplexy, something, as she bent over the tub, causing her to flop forward unconscious and drown. Let us inform the seneschal of the matter, ratio decidendi.”
Rowley made up his mind. “Get along and do it, then. And while you’re about it, Father, ready the palace priests for the poor dame’s funeral.”
“You…” Father Guy pointed at the guards, “… take her up.”
“Not yet.” Rowley’s voice was sharp. “There’s an examination to be made before we move her, and prayers to be said.”
The chaplain hovered, casting venomous glances at Mansur, unwilling to leave a Christian corpse to a heretic. “Then let me fetch Doctor Arnulf.”
“If you wish it, and if he’s prepared to get himself out of bed, which I doubt. Now, Captain.” Rowley turned to Bolt. “If you would escort this young lady to the buttery and see she’s given some brandy And you two”-this was to the guards-“bring a litter.”
Before he went, Father Guy confronted Adelia. “I hear this poor woman quarreled with you recently, mistress.”
“Does that matter now?”
“I hope it does not, mistress, I hope it does not.”
Politely but firmly, Captain Bolt urged the chaplain toward the stairs to the hall, his other arm around the little laundress who went, still sobbing, still clutching the scrubbing board.
“Foul play?” Rowley asked when they’d gone.
“I’m not sure.”
“Then make sure, and be quick about it.”
Adelia wondered for a moment whether Boggart should leave, too, but, well, the girl was now part of the household and might as well be introduced to the work that it did.
“Prepare yourself Boggart,” she said. “I am going to try and find out exactly how this lady died.”
She went down on her knees by the corpse. She paused to make her supplication to the dead. Forgive me and permit your poor flesh to tell me what your voice cannot.
The jaw was showing early stages of rigor mortis. The red patch on the dead woman’s upper lip had definitely been caused by friction.
Moving swiftly, Adelia began opening Brune’s outer clothing, ignoring Boggart’s horrified intake of breath.
There was deep bruising on both of the upper arms. “Hmmm.”
“Well?” Rowley asked with impatience.
He also was ignored.
Both eyes were shut-probably had been closed by one of the people who’d gathered around the corpse; there was nothing more naked than the staring eyes of the dead.
Adelia forced up one eyelid, then the other. She was remembering two corpses, that of an old man, the other a child, which had been brought at different times to her foster father for examination, both of them with an abrasion similar to Brune’s on the upper lip-both unnatural deaths, as he had discovered.
Rowley and Mansur were talking quietly together, but she paid them no attention. Attempting to pull the woman’s bodice down, she found it too tightly laced at the back. She looked up at Boggart. “Help me turn her over.”
The maid shrank away. “Oh, mistress, it ain’t right what you’re doing.”
Adelia, her nerves always frayed when her concentration on a corpse was interrupted, lost her temper. “Ain’t right? It ain’t right what’s happened to this woman, and I need to find out why it did. She’s heavy Help me turn her over.”
Shocked-her mistress had never been cross with her before-Boggart did as she was told.
Parting the gray hair, Adelia found blood. After examining the wound, she undid the back of the bodice and pulled it open. Crisscrossed abrasions on the spine showed where the laces had been pressed into it. Hmmm. “Now we turn her over again,” she said.
With the body once more faceup, and with Boggart still whimpering, Adelia exposed Brune’s large white breasts. The chest was unmarked.
“In the name of God, hurry, will you?” Rowley was hissing. “They’ll be coming for her soon. What’s the verdict?”
Without haste, Adelia raised Brune’s skirt and spread the legs. No, the vaginal area had been untouched.
Slowly, she sat back on her heels. “I’m fairly sure she didn’t drown, Rowley I’d like to dissect the lungs of course…”
“Oh, yes, necropsy would go down very well,” the bishop said between his teeth. “Of course you can’t dissect her. In the name of God, just tell me what happened.”
Adelia looked up. “I think she was smothered. Somebody hit her head from behind-Mansur, see if you can find a weapon-and then, when she staggered, pulled her down and knelt on her arms-see the bruising, there and there-while he held something over her mouth and nose, something rough… you see where it rubbed against the upper lip?”
“This?” Mansur had found a coarse towel on the floor. One of the pegs that had held it up remained on the washing line, the other was still attached, as if the cloth had been snatched down.
“Quite likely And there is blood in her eyes, typical of asphyxiation.”
“Murder, then,” Rowley said.
There was a squeak from Boggart.
“I’m afraid so.”
“Must have been a strong fellow, she’s a large lady”
“He hit her on the head first with something heavy and sharp, perhaps a sword pommel, something like that, and weakened her…” Adelia looked up at Mansur, who shook his head; he’d found no weapon. “But, yes, he was strong-I doubt a woman could have done it. She struggled, poor thing, hence the mark on her lip where the cloth rubbed against it.”
She closed her eyes, imagining the scene, the frantic turning of the head, the poor, thrashing legs… “And then he lifted her up to prop her over the tub with her head in the water, hoping we would think she’d tipped forward from a sudden apoplexy and drowned.”
“Damn,” Rowley said with force. “Well, put her clothes straight.”
“But the sheriff, somebody in authority must see these injuries first. What’s the procedure in Aquitaine?”
“The procedure is that this woman appears exactly as we found her. So do it.”
She didn’t understand why he was cross, nor why he and Mansur were looking at each other as if they knew something she didn’t. However, it wasn’t decent that the corpse should lie there exposed as it was; presumably the sheriff, a coroner, whoever it might be, could do the examination when it came to laying it out.
Between them, Adelia and Boggart made Brune respectable again.
The guards returned with a litter, lifted the corpse, and took it away with the bishop’s cloak laid over it.
Rowley didn’t go with them. Instead, he took Adelia’s chin in his hand and looked into her eyes. “She drowned, sweetheart. Brune drowned.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Is there any indication as to who killed her?”
Helplessly Adelia looked around. Apart from the towel the killer had dropped, nothing; wet footprints were all around the vat, but so many of them as to be useless. “No… somebody… a man most probably. We must start inquiries.”
“And how many men do you suppose are in this palace?”
Now she was becoming angry; he was frightening her. “More than have access to this undercroft. There can only be a few allowed down here.”
“You think so? Did you notice the steps down to this place? Entrance tucked away, virtually deserted at this time of night? Anybody not just servants, could sneak down here.”
“Someone might have seen him, Rowley We must ask.”
“No, we mustn’t.” He took her by the shoulders and shook her. “Do you know how long that would take? What it would entail?”
She was bewildered. “It doesn’t matter. I don’t want a delay either, but there’s a killer loose…”
“There isn’t. Is not. This is a case of drowning pure and simple, an accident.”
He stiffened; the sound of voices was coming from the stairs beyond the curtains of washing; officialdom was arriving. “Quick, get her out of here, Mansur. Explain it to her. I’ll stay Go with them, Boggart.”
Boggart and a still-bemused Adelia were dragged away to a dark corner and made to stand behind a sheet. Several people were blundering through the forest of washing toward Rowley and the lanterns. She heard the deep voice of the seneschal and then Lady Beatrix’s as the lady-in-waiting passed her: “Oh, I agree, absolutely frightful. Drowning herself, so careless of the woman. Joanna will be inconvenienced, there was nobody like Brune for getting stains out of embroidery…”
And Lady Petronilla: “What is that smell?”
Adelia, who feared they’d scented Ward crouching at her feet, held her breath, but the ladies went past without seeing her. “Oh, my lord bishop, there you are. Is this where it happened? How terribly, terribly ghoulish.”
“We go,” Mansur whispered.
They went. Rowley had been right; the stairs led to a deserted passageway
Nobody was in Eleanor’s garden either, and it was there that Adelia refused to go any farther. “Are you going to alert the authorities or am I?”
Gently Mansur steered her to a bench and sat on it beside her. Boggart crouched nearby, holding on to Ward for comfort and looking nervously around at the bushes for murderers.
The Arab’s voice was a bat’s squeak in the darkness. “She insulted you. They will say you had her killed. Or made her kill herself.”
Adelia’s mouth fell open. “What are you talking about? I wasn’t here. The guards saw me come in. Captain Bolt…”
Mansur went on as if she hadn’t spoken. “That you wished her dead, perhaps inspired her or someone else to see it done.” He took her hand. “We are strange to them, you and I. There has been misfortune on this journey; the Bishop of Winchester talks of little else. I can listen because they think I do not understand them and I hear disquiet. Three times now you have been angry, first with the horse Juno…”
“I wasn’t angry with her…”
“And then with the Sir Nicholas…”
“I wasn’t…”
“More recently with Brune.”
“She was angry with me.”
“And all three have died in circumstances that are odd. A horse eats poison, a knight is shot while hunting, a woman is drowned.”
“They can’t think I killed any one of them. Each time I was somewhere else.”
“You did not have to be there. You engineered it. Or I did. The horse, the knight, both were murdered. If this time, Brune’s death is deemed an accident, they may regard the fact that she offended us as a coincidence, but the Bishop Rowley does not want attention drawn to her killing. It will be bad enough as it is; there will be talk, superstition.”
“That’s nonsense. Why would we want her dead? For what reason?”
“Why would anyone want her dead? And therein lies the reason. Publicly, she offended only us.”
She was following his remote, high voice as if through a fog, unable to see which direction its meaning came from. “And how are we supposed to have made someone kill her for us? Or have her put her head in the tub from a distance?”
“Witchcraft.” It was said mildly as the Arab said all things mildly but, for Adelia, it was a blast of putrefaction into the night air. It felled her so that she put her arms over her head to shield herself just as the little laundress had held the scrubbing board between her and evil.
Witchcraft. Always, always, since she’d left Salerno, where they knew what she was, and what she did, and appreciated her for it, superstition had attached itself to her heels so that the skill she’d been granted to benefit mankind must be hidden by stratagems so wearying that she was sick of them.
But there was one thing it could not do. She brought her arms down and sat up.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Somebody killed Brune, they took away her life, her life, Mansur. Her body cried it out to me, her soul cries it. I cannot, I will not allow murder to be ignored.”
“She was not a nice woman,” Mansur said stolidly.
“She was murdered. She was alive. The span God allotted to her has been taken away Whether she was nice or not has nothing to do with it.”
“They will think that anyone who crosses us is cursed.”
“She was murdered.” Adelia got up. “I’m going to see the seneschal and tell him what happened.”
Mansur didn’t move. “No.” It was said quietly.
Adelia turned round to stare. “You can’t stop me.”
“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.”
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:
“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.”
The three rode together in silence for a while, the two mules occasionally having to be restrained from taking a bite out of Adelia’s palomino palfrey a little horse of gold-dusted hide with flaxen mane and tail, as if they resented its beauty Rowley had secretly bought it for her at Poitiers and, in memory of their time there in a dusty bed, had called it Sneeze.
The name had made Adelia laugh. Still did, despite herself. And it was a lovely day And Ulf, with his truculence, did so remind her of his grandmother, even to the slight, downy dark hair that had begun to show on his upper lip.
Cheered, she changed the subject. “I never told you how I found Excalibur, did I?”
“Ain’t seen you since.”
So she told him about the discovery of a little cave on Glastonbury Tor, the skeleton within it, and the unprepossessing weapon with its dull patina that her daughter had fished out of the cave’s pool. Of how she’d given it to Emma’s Roetger and how, when he’d cleaned it, they’d found the name Arturus set into its fuller. Of how Roetger, dear man, had given it back to her and, eventually she had given it to Henry the king.
But, inevitably under Ulf’s questioning, the story-she shouldn’t have started on it-led on to the darkness of a forest glade, and what had happened there.
“And all you and Mansur and Rowley are doing,” she finished, “is making me imagine vain things. The night before last I even thought I heard Scarry shouting out at a dice table, so you’ve got to stop…”
But Ulf had dug his heels into his mule’s side and was riding off toward the front of the column, the wooden cross bumping wildly on his saddle as he went.
Minutes later, two horses were beside hers, one bearing the Bishop of Saint Albans, the other Captain Bolt. Rowley was angry: “You heard Scarry’s voice and didn’t tell me?”
“I imagined a voice that sounded like Scarry’s,” Adelia told him. “Stop all this fuss.”
“And did you go to look, see if it was him?”
“Please, not that again. I don’t believe he was in Somerset and I certainly don’t believe he’s here. How could an outlaw insinuate himself into…”
Rowley turned to Bolt. “Did you hang all the cutthroats in that bloody forest, captain?”
“Thought as we did,” Bolt said. “Many as we could lay our hands on.”
“You see?” The bishop leaned over to take the reins of Adelia’s horse and halt it. “Will and Alf were probably right; Scarry could have escaped. What did he look like, this dice player?”
“I’ve no idea, I didn’t bother to go and see.”
“What did Scarry look like?”
“I don’t know that, either,” she shouted back. “He was… he and Wolf were out of a nightmare… dressed in leaves… it was dark… their faces were painted.”
“Think.”
She was reluctant. Shaking her head, she said: “Educated, I suppose, he spoke Latin.” The lament as the man had taken his dead lover in his arms rang in her brain once more: “Come back, my Lupus. Te amo! Te amo!”
Rowley nodded. “Educated. What else? What age? What height?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know.” The two men had been creatures emerging from a different age, as tall as trees. “This is silly Rowley he can’t be here. How could he be here?”
“Think, will you?”
She tried. “Well… oh yes, he was dark. I remember his arms, black hair… but that may just have been shadow.”
“Dark,” Rowley said bitterly. “Very helpful.” Nevertheless, he and Bolt and Ulf began listing the black-haired men in the company. Father Guy, Father Adalburt, knights, squires, servants who were swarthy Captain Bolt’s men, Bolt himself Rankin the Scot, young Locusta, the O’Donnell… it went on and on.
“And any one of them could have been at that dice game,” Rowley pointed out. “It’s an eclectic group.”
“Oh, go away,” Adelia told him. It was difficult enough believing that Scarry was the one who’d been after her in Somerset; impossible to think that a painted outlaw could have joined Joanna’s company and pursued her across the Channel, however good his Latin.
She refused to dwell on it.
FROM HALF A MILE down the column, it was possible to see that something was wrong, causing Adelia and Mansur to urge their horses into a canter that took them to its head, where Joanna and her principals were gathered about a figure that overtopped them all.
Duke Richard was in gleaming mail; under his arm he held a helmet encircled by a gold, ducal coronet. His face was set, exalted, and he was paying no attention to a distracted Captain Bolt and Bishop of Winchester.
Rowley detached himself from the group to approach Mansur and Adelia. “Richard’s leaving us,” he said bitterly, in Arabic.
“Where’s he going?”
“To war.”
“He can’t do that.”
“Actually, I think he has to. There’s a galloper just come with news. Angoulême is in revolt; the duke can’t allow that, though if you ask me it’s his fault the bloody place revolted in the first place.”
Angoulême. Angoulême. From what Adelia could remember of Locusta’s map, the county was due south of them. “We have to go back? Oh God, Rowley how long will a war hold us up?”
“We’re skirting round it. We can’t afford to lose more time, and the duke’s convinced he can defeat Vulgrin of Angoulême within days. He’s called for reinforcements.”
“And can he defeat him?”
“Oh, yes. He’s no favorite of mine, Richard, but he’s a superb general. If I were Count Vulgrin, I’d start running now.”
Adelia looked toward Joanna. “Poor love,” she said.
“Poor Locusta, he’s near tears. We’ll be departing from his precious route; he’ll have to arrange a new one, which, where we’re going, won’t be easy”
But Adelia’s sympathy was for a princess deserted by one brother and now another.
Joanna, however, appeared concerned but not alarmed.
She’s used to it, Adelia thought. The girl’s young life had been spent watching her parents put down rebellion somewhere or another in their empire; she had seen her mother and brothers rise up against her father. Her world was sown with Hydra’s teeth; for her, revolt and battle were the natural order of things. And so they are, except in England and Sicily.
The knights and their squires were leaving immediately An extempore service was held in a grove beneath the high, gaunt branches of a chestnut tree to bless and speed their war.
A troubled Bishop of Winchester stumbled in his office, but Duke Richard showed no sign of restlessness as his impatient father would have done; he drank in the prayers, praise, and blessings. God’s goodwill meant much to him.
As over two hundred throats said a last “Amen” that rumbled through the forest, he rose to his feet and strode over to Joanna, who was still kneeling. “I leave you in the care of the good Captain Bolt and the Lord’s keeping, royal sister. Our enemy shall be cast down, and you and I shall be reunited at Saint Gilles, if not before. May the saints look kindly down on us.”
He drew his sword and raised it high. “For Jesus.”
“For Jesus,” echoed his men.
He’s magnificent, Adelia thought, but his element is battle. God preserve us from him.
A knight in full mail rode up to her, his helmet with its nosepiece making his face unrecognizable from all the others around them. But the voice was familiar even though, for once, the lyrics it sang were ugly
Links of his hauberk hissed as Sir Guillaume dismounted, took off his helmet, and tucked it under his arm. “I go to war, lady but I leave my heart in your keeping. I beg a remembrance from you to be buried with me, should I die.”
oh, you young idiot. Adelia’s heart went out to him; his face shone with excitement. That he could be one of those in a ditch with a broken lance through his ribs wasn’t in his mind. He saw only glory-and a fortune. By taking hostages and loot, an untried knight could make himself rich in battle. If he survived.
“Ah, lady your gentle woman’s heart quails at the thought of war, as it should, yet how else may I be worthy of you but by showing my prowess in conflict? The neighing of mettlesome chargers, the clash of steel, the cry of battle… a remembrance, I beg.”
She gave him the last of Emma’s kerchiefs that she kept tucked in her belt-the others had gone for bandages. “God keep you, Sir Guillaume,” she said, and meant it; he was so young.
She watched him hiss happily away to join his fellow knights, tying the fine linen around his arm as he went.
To AVOID RIDING into conflict, they turned southwest into what was, as far as poor Locusta was concerned, unscouted territory, a wilder countryside of more steeply wooded hills, deeper, faster-flowing rivers.
It was also lonelier.
Captain Bolt didn’t like it and redoubled his outriders. “Suppose that Anglim fella ain’t being chased eastwards. Suppose he doubles back. The princess’d make a fine hostage, let alone the treasure chests, and I ain’t got enough men to hold off an army”
His nervousness transferred itself down the line. Cooks rode with roasting spits in their hands, laundresses grasped washing sticks, the morose blacksmith held a fearsome hammer. Archers had their bows across their saddles, quivers ready on their backs, and Captain Bolt clustered more of his men around the princess’s palanquin and the treasure chests.
Ulf worried about the content of his cross and added a spear to his equipment from one of the armory mules. “Any bugger who tries to get you-know-what off of me is going to get what-for.”
“I think it was more in danger when we were with Richard,” Adelia assured him.
“Crusade?”
She nodded. There wasn’t a land on the continent that didn’t have its own version of the Arthurian legend; flourishing Excalibur, most powerful of mythical weapons, would endow Richard with a symbol of leadership over the different nationalities of Christian knights gathered in the Holy Land almost as potent as the Cross in the fight against the pure black Al-Uqaab flag of Muhammad.
Ulf spat. “Well, he ain’t getting it and nobody else, neither. The king and Prior Geoffrey said as I was to take it to Sicily and to Sicily it’s bloody well goin’.”
Locusta did his best, riding ahead, searching for a hospice in a countryside without signposts, sometimes finding one, sometimes not.
Twice, they had to spend the night in the open under the pavilions and tents they carried with them, making little towns of canvas, their fires and lanterns the only glimmer in the darkness, listening to the hoot of owls and the bark of foxes.
Villages were few, tiny and invariably perched high away from the road, which was as empty as if the few occupants of the land had seen what must still appear a formidable procession coming and had shut themselves away like flowers curling up at the approach of night.
For good reason. With the prospect of having to feed the company themselves, the train’s sumpters fell like wolves on such sheep as they saw, requisitioning them in the name of King Henry and carrying them off to be roasted.
Luckily, the weather blessed them; by day they rode under skies of clear, forget-me-not blue. There were still hazelnuts and late blackberries in the hedges, and men and women stopped to gather them as they passed before hurrying back to the procession, unnerved by a quiet in which only birds twittered.
They were now in the Massif Centrale. Riders had to dismount, and mule drivers bellowed obscenities in order to encourage their animals up ever-steeper hills and then rein them in down the other side.
It took time. It took time. Sometimes they made barely ten miles a day between stops. Adelia, nearly sobbing at the delays, thought constantly of Allie.
I don’t want to be here, I want to be with you.
AT THE RIVER LOT, they looked for the ferry that would take them over it. Except that there was no ferry
“What do you mean burned?” Locusta raved at the ferryman standing by what had once been a landing stage.
“I mean as Lord Angoulême set fire to it,” the man said wearily.
“Three days ago that was. So as to stop the duke chasin’ him over the river. No bloody thought for my living, neither of ’em.”
“Where can we find other boats?”
“Ain’t any Lord Angoulême burned them an’ all.”
So much was obvious; a great river that should have been dotted with waterborne traffic was empty to a sky that smelled of ash.
“Then, what are we to do?”
The ferryman didn’t care; his employment was gone and so was his livelihood until a new ferry could be constructed-“always supposin’ the buggers don’t come back and burn that.”
He spat and pointed his thumb downriver. “Lord Richard went thataway You better go east to find another crossing; ain’t been any fighting in that direction, far as I know. Make for Figères. Biggest town round here, Figères.”
“How far is it?”
“Two days’ ride.” He gave them directions.
“At least we’ll be going east,” Locusta said to the Bishop of Saint Albans, as they rode back to rejoin the procession. “We’ve been going too far west.”
“I know, but we daren’t risk taking the princess into a war.”
“Another night in the open,” Locusta groaned. “And no baths. My lord, I’d be eternally grateful if you would break the news to the ladies-in-waiting.”
“That’s your job,” Rowley told him. “I’m not that brave.”
THE ROUTE TO Figères meant taking a wide traverse through the mountains. Thus they came across the hilly little village of Sept-Glane…
It was a tiny hamlet, hardly worth razing to the ground, but its lord was Vulgrin of Angoulême, so Duke Richard, in passing, had made an example of it.
Nothing was left of cottages and cultivation except cinders. On its terraced pastures, dead animals were beginning to balloon. Its men had been taken away-for what purpose was unknown. Weeping women and children scrabbled for tubers in the blackened earth of their fields.
Rowley ordered a halt so that food and money could be distributed but he knew, as the victims knew, that Sept-Glane was dead.
IT WAS EARLY the next day after another night under canvas, that Ulf who’d been riding alongside Adelia, suddenly thrust his cross at her, got down from his mule, and ran toward a neighboring wood, clutching his stomach and vomiting.
Handing over the cross to Mansur, she dismounted and chased after him. The youth was squatting when she found him. “Get away” he groaned. “I’m dying.”
She hurried back to her horse for her medicine bag, passing other men and women running toward the trees on the same errand as Ulf.
By midafternoon the procession had been forced to halt as more and more of its people succumbed.
“You’ve got to find somewhere we can use as a hospital,” Adelia told Locusta. “And quickly”
“Around here?” The mountains on all sides, covered in the soft shrub that the natives called garrígue, were empty even of sheep.
Adelia pointed to a track that climbed to their right, eventually losing itself in distant trees from which issued a thin spiral of smoke. “Up there?”
She watched him put his horse at the hill, and then joined the emergency conference of bishops, doctors, chaplains, the Irishman, and Captain Bolt that had gathered in the middle of the stony road they’d been following.
Dr. Arnulf was shrill: “It is the plague. The princess must be got away immediately”
There was a squeak of alarm from Father Adalburt. “Plague?”
But Adelia had been asking questions amongst the servants, both sick and well. Yesterday it appeared, their ale had run dry and, while charity was being distributed in Sept- Glane’s fields, they had filled up a cask with water for themselves from one of Sept-Glane’s wells.
“My Lord Mansur doesn’t think it’s the plague,” Adelia said, carefully And explained, “Only those who drank the water are sick.”
There was a moment’s silence. Then: “Dear God,” Rowley said. “Richard poisoned Sept-Glane’s wells.”
“I’m afraid… Lord Mansur is afraid that he must have done.”
It was the standard practice of lords to deprive the enemy of fresh water during a war, an atrocity that visited more suffering on innocent villages caught up in it.
“It is the plague,” Dr. Arnulf insisted. “I shall accompany the princess and her household to Figères. I shall administer my specific against contagion to her…”
The Bishop of Winchester fell to his knees: “God, God, how have we offended thee that Thou sendest this misfortune upon us?”
“How many of our people are ill?” Rowley wanted to know.
“Thirty-four,” Adelia said, “but Lord Mansur believes there will be no more. The rest of us drank from different ale casks.” (The elite had its own and better brew.) “If we hadn’t, if we’d drunk the water, all of us would be showing signs of the flux by now. Luckily, the princess has been unaffected.”
“We cannot take that risk,” Dr. Arnulf said, hurriedly. “I must accompany her to safety”
“Let him go, Rowley” Adelia said swiftly in Arabic. “He’ll just be a hindrance.”
“You’re going with him, I can tell you that much.”
An expression that Gyltha and Mansur knew well settled on Adelia’s face, making it squarer and heavier, a this-far-and-no-farther look. “I am staying with my patients.” Every word emphasized; she had failed in her duty to Brune, she wasn’t deserting again.
Her lover recognized defeat.
Locusta joined them, gasping from haste and with a young woman riding pillion behind him. “Nuns up there… Two of them. This lady is Sister Aelith, she says…There’s an unused cowshed…” He helped her dismount.
Sister Aelith bobbed to the company shrinking back slightly at the sight of Mansur-Languedoc’s occupation by the Moslem army one thousand years before had left a folk memory in which the word Saracen was still synonymous with ruin.
“He’s a doctor,” Locusta told her impatiently “Tell them, tell them what you told me.”
Sister Aelith bobbed again. “My mother says she is sorry to hear of your trouble and offers our old cowshed for those who are ill-she is cleaning it now.”
“Anything, Rowley We must get these people where I can treat them.”
Decisions were made, swiftly-the condition of the sick was becoming more and more pitiable and dangerous.
The princess, her retinue, treasure carts, and every healthy servant were ordered to go on to Figères.
Dr. Arnulf couldn’t get them away fast enough.
Rowley was to help in getting the invalids to the cowshed and then maintain liaison between them and Figères for as long as the illness lasted. Locusta was sent ahead to warn the town of the princess’s coming.
To everybody’s surprise-and Adelia’s distaste-O’Donnell said he, too, would stay. “For sure Lord Mansur’ll be needing another pair of manly hands. He’ll get two, for Deniz will be with me.”
The sick were urged up the track to what was to be their hospital-a transfer subject to pitiable stops that left an unsavory trail behind them.
Against a slope stood a typical Angoulême cowshed, with a half wall on one side that left it open to the air. Redundancy had tumbled one end to the ground, though the rest looked sturdy enough. Outside was a dew pond.
By the time Adelia and her patients arrived, the hard-baked earth floor had been swept and a woman, clad in black like the younger nun, was busily stuffing straw into sacks to make palliasses.
She came forward. She was a small, upright woman whose astute dark eyes, though she was not old, shone out of the deeply creased face of one who had been too much out in the sun, like winkles set in ribbed sand.
Rowley bowed to her and explained who they were and their situation. “May we know to whom we are indebted, Mother…?”
“Sister,” she told him. Her voice was unexpectedly deep and had the heartiness of a vocal slap on the back. “We are all brothers and sisters in this world. I am Sister Ermengarde. This is my daughter, Aelith. You need help? Splendid, you have found it. We are itinerants but, by the Mercy, we are settled here for a while. Since we keep no cows, this shed is at your disposal. Also, I have sent word to nearby villages to requisition every chamber pot they have.”
Thank the Lord, a practical woman. But even in her relief for a second it flashed across Adelia’s mind that there was something strange about the two nuns. To judge from their black robes, theywere Benedictines, but they wore no scapulas and their veils were merely scarves tied round their heads like those of peasant women.
Presumably they had chosen the religious life but hadn’t yet been officially incorporated into an order by their bishop. Peculiar, though, that they were itinerant; nuns usually stayed where they were put.
There was something else odd about them, something missing… Dammit, what did it matter? They were godsent.
The immediate concern was to get the patients cleaned of their vomit and bloody diarrhea; they’d need swabbing down and their clothes burned before they took to their clean palliasses, a process that necessitated a privacy separating the men from the women; in Adelia’s experience, embarrassment weakened a patient’s chance of recovery.
“Blankets,” she said, “and plenty of them. My lord bishop, if you would ride after the baggage train and bring some back…”
Rowley was off in an instant.
“… and fires. Admiral, if you and Master Deniz could start collecting wood.” She bowed to the elder nun. “Sister, I speak for my Lord Mansur who is the doctor among us…” and expounded her needs.
Within minutes, Sister Ermengarde had fetched what sheets and blankets she had and buckets of water were being lugged down from the well of the hidden convent higher up the hill.
Captain Bolt caught at Adelia’s arm. “Me and my men have got to go with the princess and the treasure, mistress; they’re ill enough protected as it is…”
“Of course you do, of course you do.”
“… but I’m sore concerned at leaving you without a guard.”
She smiled at him and pointed around her at a landscape in which nothing moved but hawks circling the sky. “Who’s going to hurt us?”
“True enough. Nobody ain’t even likely to knowyou’re here. Still, I ain’t comfortable in my mind. This ain’t nice country; got something nasty in its bones, I reckon.”
“We’ll be all right, Captain.”
He nodded. “God bless you, and God deliver my Scotsman.” Rankin, too, was among the patients, one of the sickest.
“I’ll do my best.”
He kissed her hand. “You allus do.”
Rowley also, was agitated at leaving her, but with the Bishop of Winchester near a state of collapse at this latest manifestation of God’s displeasure, he was the only capable Church official left to the princess. “Somehow, I’ve got to find out where Richard is. And find out where we are. And send back to Poitiers in case it’s had any messages for us from King Henry.”
“Go,” Adelia told him. “There’s nothing you can do here, in any case. I have enough men.”
He looked, frowning, toward the O’Donnell, who had already got fires going. “That’s what worries me.”
At the back of the shed, shivering male patients were washed down by Mansur and Sister Ermengarde-nuns being accepted as sexless-while in front of it a similar service was performed for the equally shivering women by Adelia and Sister Aelith, then the patients were put to regain warmth by the fires.
“You keep away Boggart.” Adelia wasn’t having her maid and the baby subject to possible contagion.
Inside, the O’Donnell, having sent Deniz to unpack their mule, had slung up a ship’s sail from the cowshed’s rafters to act as a partition and was collecting the timbers that had fallen from the ruined end in order to replace them.
Catching Adelia’s look, he swept off his cap. “Lady I’m a sailor and an Irishman, I can do anything.”
“Tormentil,” Adelia said, turning to Sister Ermengarde. “We’re going to need tormentil and lots of it.”
Armed with trowels and baskets, the two of them, accompanied by Boggart and Ward, began digging like badgers in a nearby meadow for the rhizomes of a yellow-petaled herb which, when shredded, powdered, and mixed with water, would provide the only astringent likely to act against dysentery.
“It is what I myself would have recommended,” Sister Ermengarde said. “And you have some opium for the worst cases? Splendid, splendid.”
Opium. For a moment, Adelia stared at this Christian and then shook her warmly by the hand.
THE FERRYMAN’S DESCRIPTION of Figères as a town had been an exaggeration. Or perhaps the man hadn’t traveled much. It had a tiny priory, a granary and a water mill, some crumbling, corkscrew streets, and an equally crumbling, empty château above the river, and these, since they lay on the southernmost tip of Aquitaine and therefore constituted part of the lands of the King of England, had now been commandeered in his name. The Bishop of Saint Albans and Captain Bolt were in agreement that they would not take Princess Joanna farther until they could make contact with Duke Richard and be apprised of his situation. Their party, due to the absence of the sick, now numbered less than ninety people, too few to venture into disputed territory.
With this in mind, messengers were sent north, to Périgueux, to Poitiers, to civilization generally
All that could be done now was wait. The princess and her retinue were installed, though uncomfortably, in the château with the treasure chests, while Captain Bolt’s men, in tents, made a ring of canvas and steel around them.
The Bishop of Winchester and his chaplains and servants had to snuggle down in a priory whose prior and one monk eked out a living from the soil. Poor Prior James looked on as the royal sumpters examined its granary and barns, filled with the summer’s corn and hay and pronounced them able to feed the procession’s horseflesh for at least a fortnight.
For the first time in weeks, the work of administering to the princess and her train could be pursued in one place, so that Joanna and her nobles might pleasure themselves at leisure. She and her ladies cast their hawks upward at the myriad migrating geese flying overhead, the men went hunting or fishing in the Lot’s rich currents.
With all this to-ing and fro-ing it was possible for an individual to go missing for a day or more without comment…
SCARRY? HE ALSO has sent a message, a secret message carried by a well-bribed servant. A wonderful calm has descended on him as he sees the map of events that his Master has unrolled at his feet.
“Cathars,” he says. “O Great Being, thou hast provided Cathars for our purpose. They have been foretold, for who but You would have connived to put them in my way-and hers? It was Your hand that guided mine when I took her cross.”
For Scarry, though he has not traveled this remote area, knows its flavor. He knows that the Cathar heresy has begun creeping through it like tendrils of flame ready to burn it up and that the Church is afraid of its scorching.
He also knows, for they once met at a convocation at Canterbury, a Vatican-trained prelate who now, if Scarry’s memory is correct, serves the Bishopric ofAveyron, a diocese less than fifty miles away.
Scarry is not acquainted with the Bishop of Aveyron but he knows that man’s flavor, too, and it tastes much to Scarry’s liking. He is sure-for has it not been prearranged?-that his message to Father Gerhardt and his bishop will be received and acted upon with the enthusiasm belonging to all frightened, cruel, and self-serving men.
As for Excalibur, that lesser matter, it is as good as in Duke Richard’s hand already.
UP THE HILL, in the kitchen of the nun’s convent-little more than a cottage of milky gold stone surrounded by a large vegetable garden-young Sister Aelith and Boggart pounded rhizomes until their fingers bled. The dog Ward, having waited to be given food, had to go hunting for his own.
Down the hill ran a wooden gutter, constructed by the O’ Donnell and Deniz, bringing clean, cold water from a mountain stream.
Inside, the cowshed hospital echoed with cries. Dust-moted beams of light coming through its ramshackle roof fell on thirty-four prostrate men and women squirming in agony Bunches of lavender, peppermint, thyme, and rue hung from every available nail, and others were tucked into the nurses’ robes. Reed fans were needed to cool the fevered patients, all of whom had to be kept clean as well as being given constant drinks of tormentil infusion.
Filled chamber pots were hurried away washed, and brought back in an endless, exhausting chain.
Nurses fought for their patients’ lives; patients fought for their own-some harder than others.
The little laundress who had come across Brune’s body died quickly, as if the shock of that discovery had weakened her will. She was followed by the morose blacksmith who, of all the men-and men made up the majority of the sick-found the humiliation and powerlessness of his illness too much to bear.
Ulf, whose physical and mental constitution had been strengthened by his upbringing in the food-rich, dogged-minded fenlands of Cambridgeshire, bared his teeth like a tiger at the grim reaper hovering over him.
It was especially the older men with a background of poverty like the Scotsman Rankin before he’d become a mercenary under Captain Bolt, whose spirits wavered under the onslaught.
“Canna,” he said as Adelia, with one arm under his neck and the other holding a beaker to his lips, tried to force him to drink.
“Yes, you can.” She was learning to understand his speech. “And you’re going to. What will Captain Bolt do without you? What will I?”
At first, the sight of Mansur’s head with its kaffiyeh bent over them caused some sufferers to panic, but eventually his imperturbable calm soothed them and they clung to him in their pain. The Irishman, on the other hand, told jokes to the sick as he tended them and, though they grated on Adelia’s ear, they seemed to enchant both patients and nuns to the good of both.
It was a tug of war, and the strain for those pulling against Death on behalf of their patients tired them to the last fiber. Adelia and Sister Ermengarde rarely left the cowshed but took alternate rests on a hay bale when they dropped.
Rowley and a servant came every day from Figères, to bring bread and clean linen and so that those desperate to unburden themselves of their sins could do so to a bishop in case they went to their God unshriven.
Jacques the harness maker and Pepé, one of the cooks, died and were buried in graves that O’Donnell and Deniz hacked into the limestone of the hillside, but by the fifth day those who were going to survive were recovering including Rankin.
TWO MEN ARE meetíng by night at a quiet crossroads halfway between Figeres and the town of Aveyron. Their horses are tethered to a fallen walnut tree while they walk and talk, heeping their voices low even here, where there are only owls and foxes to hear them.
“All this can be delivered, ”Scarrysays, “for the Bishop of Saint Albans is Henry of England’s representative and he has been summoned to negotiate between all parties. What secret decisions are made amongst them I shall know of.”
Scarry is selling power, for knowledge of what goes on at the innermost conferences of the great is above rubies to those with ambition. And Scarry’s price is cheap, as he makes clear but insists on-fifty gold coins and the mere ruination of one particular soul.
“Unless that is done, your master can go whistle for news that will advantage him,” he says, pleasantly.
Father Gerhardt is aware that his master does not like whistling, nor will pass up an opportunity that may well prove golden, as well as delivering an old enemy into his hands.
“It shall be done,” Father Gerhardt tells Scarry. “And now, where is the bitch?”
Scarry tells him. Father Gerhardt’s bitch is not Scarry’s bitch. But since a burning always makes good entertainment, he will attend that of them both.
ROWLEY AND LOCUSTA brought visitors with them; Lady Petronilla and Mistress Blanche had come on behalf of Princess Joanna to inquire after the patients’ health.
Adelia looked up from spooning vegetable broth into the groom Martin’s mouth, to see what looked like two ravishing butterflies settling their wings outside the cowshed door-well outside.
Lady Petronilla stayed there, enumerating to the O’Donnell the gift of goodies the princess had sent. “Some girdle bread, fig and raisin custards-the Figères monks are masters of custards-oh, and some lavender oil to put on poorly heads.”
Damn, Adelia thought, I was hoping for some meat.
Blanche, however, ventured into the cowshed, a clove pomander held close to her elegant nose.
“There’s no plague here,” Adelia told her sharply
“It’s not a rose garden, either,” Blanche said equally sharply
It wasn’t, but it was clean and tidy. The rows of palliasses were now on boards with legs that kept them off the ground; there were fresh straw pillows for the patients to rest their heads on. Mangers that erstwhile cows had fed from were now lined with grasses and filled with dried herbs.
She resumed spooning broth into Martin’s mouth while the lady-in-waiting strolled along the beds, asking benign royal questions: “How long have you been a mule driver, my man. Really?” “I’ve seen you before, haven’t I? Hadwisa, of course. We’ll soon have you better, Hadwisa.”
She lingered, watching Adelia. “How many of our people have you lost?”
“We’ve saved thirty out of thirty-four, thank you very much.”
But it appeared that Mistress Blanche had not meant to be critical. “When the flux attacked one of my father’s castles, half the sufferers died.”
“Ah,” Adelia said, still put out. “I suppose he didn’t have a witch and a Saracen looking after them.”
Surprisingly, Mistress Blanche smiled. “Perhaps it would have been better if he had.”
Well, well, a compliment.
Adelia said: “The true saints are the two nuns who took us in. I would introduce you, but they’re returning some of the chamber pots we borrowed.”
“How tasteful. The princess shall be visiting you tomorrow, she can thank them then.”
When the two women had gone, attended by Locusta, Adelia waited until the bishop and his flock had finished their prayers, then asked him to bring strong beef broth with him tomorrow: “We haven’t been able to give the patients meat since we came; the sisters are vegetarians.”
Rowley nodded. “I was afraid they were.”
“Why? What’s wrong with that?”
“Come for a walk.”
Followed by Ward, they strolled down the hill together, Adelia glancing anxiously back in case one of her patients suffered a mishap in her absence. The sun was chilly. They sat down under the bare branches of a lonely fig tree.
Rowley took her hand. “Sweetheart, at last we’re in touch with the outside world. Our messenger met up with King Henry at Périgord. I’m being sent away I’ve got to go ahead. The trouble with Angouleme has stirred up the southern lords…”
He was leaving her. That was all she heard before the old, old misery took her in its jaws. He was going. Even such snatched moments as they’d had together were to be taken away
He went on talking, explaining the region’s constantly shifting and bloody history “We’re approaching the southernmost boundary of Henry’s empire,” he told her. “From here on we’ll be in dragon country.”
He spoke of the dragon lords who took any opportunity to ride to war and invade their neighbor, of alliances kept and broken, of counts, viscounts, princes, Alfonso of Aragon, Roger of Carcassonne, Raymond of Toulouse, D’Albi… the names drifted up into the branches above her, translating themselves into rapine and corpses.
“So there it is,” he said. “I have to make sure Joanna has safe conduct through to Saint Gilles. There’s to be an attempt at a peace conference at Carcassonne…”
“When are you going?” she asked.
“Tomorrow And…” His fists clenched. “I won’t be coming back.”
“Not coming back?”
He reached into his robe and brought out a parchment from which dangled a heavy red seal. “Read this.”
She began reading: “To our best beloved Rowley, Bishop of Saint Albans, greetings in the Lord from Henry, King of the English, Lord of Normandy and Aquitaine…” She skimmed through the titles; they could take forever. “Know that we have need of your esteemed service in Lombardy…”
She handed it back. “Just tell me.”
It was politics. It was to do with Emperor Barbarossa and the Lombardians, with popes, anti-popes, staying on good terms with some, undermining others.”
She stopped listening. Henry The king. Always his king. Above God, above everything: Henry Plantagenet.
“You do see, sweetheart,” he said desperately, “Henry can’t afford trouble in Northern Italy Diplomacy and guile are necessary” He looked at her and became angry. “Peace, mistress. Stopping people dying. I’ve got to go.”
“I know.”
In silence, they watched a robin hopping incautiously near their feet in a search for worms.
“Will we meet in Sicily?” she asked eventually
“No. I’ll be there for the wedding, I hope, but tomorrow you’re going straight back to England, you and Mansur. I’ve arranged with Captain Bolt…”
She sat up, making the robin flutter away “I am not. You know I want to go, but Henry entrusted Joanna’s health to me…”
“Yes, you bloody well are. There’s somebody in her household means you harm, and I’m not just talking about Father Guy You go tomorrow”
He could answer the call of his duty, but hers was of no account. By God, she’d been right not to marry him; he’d have stifled her.
He said: “And the sooner you get away from those women back there, the better.”
“I’ll have you know, those two nuns are better Christians than…”
“They’re not nuns,” he said. “They’re Cathars.”
Cathars.
She stopped shouting at him. Cathars. Another word that carried disturbance with it. A name hardly heard in England, nor in Sicily for that matter, but it brought a response of unease from somewhere in her memory. “Cathars? Aren’t they heretics?”
“Yes, they damn well are. I’d no idea their heresy had spread so far north. Of course they don’t eat meat; it’s forbidden them. Didn’t you notice neither of those women wears a cross? Which reminds me, I meant to replace yours-this is dangerous territory to be without one. There’s bishops around here would as soon put a Cathar on the fire as kindling.” He leaned back and regarded her without enthusiasm. “They’d throw you, if they saw you now. What the hell are you wearing?”
“Aelith lent Boggart and me some of their robes. One felt the cowshed was not the place for Emma’s satins. Rowley, we’ve been trying to save lives. Ermengarde, Aelith, they’re good women; they’ve worked like mules. If Christianity isn’t about tending the sick, what is it about?”
“It’s not about Cathars calling us the Church of Satan, and refusing to pay their bloody tithes because they say we’re all corrupted by riches.”
A diamond flash of the bishop’s seal ring on his finger as he gestured made Adelia’s lips twitch; he saw it and tucked his hands into the folds of his excellent robe, like a boy whose fingers had been raiding a jam pot.
“Well…” he said. “Well, the point is… the point is that, now it’s turned out not to be the plague, Joanna, like a good little princess, has decided to come and pay a royal visit to her faithful servants. When she does, she’ll bring Winchester with her to give his blessing to the sick and he’ll bring the chaplains. For Christ’s sake, imagine what Father Guy will do when he realizes that you and the others have been sojourning with a couple of heretics who reject the Trinity… God’s eyes, Adelia, they believe in reincarnation. Reincarnation… I ask you.”
She got to her feet; the last thing she must do was bring trouble on two women who’d been so kind. “Tell Joanna she needn’t visit. Most of the patients should be ready to travel this afternoon if you send us some carts. The Irishman can go with them. I’ll come along with the rest tomorrow”
“And then set out for England?” he insisted. When she hesitated, he said: “I’ve spoken to Mansur. He agrees.”
In which case he’d manacled her, just as he had at Poitiers. Without Mansur she had no standing. “Damn you,” she said.
“Good.” He took up the letter again; he had the look he wore when he was about to disarm her. “So now, I’ll read you Henry’s postscript. “And to my daughter’s lady Arabic speaker, her kings greetings. She is to know that a certain child at Sarum progresses well under the care of the queen and a dragon of the name of Gyltha with whom she is acquainted.”
“Oh.” Adelia sat down. “Oh. She’s well. They’re both well.”
“Less than a month ago.” He was pleased with himself. “Henry’s messengers travel fast.”
She began pummeling him in her joy. “You couldn’t have read that first, could you? To hell with Barbarossa and Lombards and popes, the most important thing in it was about our daughter.”
He caught her hands and imprisoned them in his. “You’ll miss me until I get back to England,” he said.
“No, I won’t.”
“You will. You adore me.”
And the trouble was that she would, and did.
CARTS WERE SENT, and by evening the cowshed hospital was cleared of all patients except Ulf and Rankin who, Adelia felt, could do with another night’s rest.
She went down to the road to watch the little procession wind its way toward the mountains that hid Figères. In the light of the torches they carried, she could see hands that she’d held when they were suffering waving to her. She waved back and saw the O’Donnell sweep off his cap in salute.
The Irishman had been curiously reluctant to go. “I’m not happy we should be leaving you behind, mistress. Master Ulf’s been telling me there’s a mysterious killer been stalking you like a fox after a chicken.”
“Has he indeed?” She’d have a word with Ulf. “The fox exists more in that lad’s imagination than real life. But we’ll be leaving ourselves tomorrow. And I understand that you’re needed at Figères right away”
“So my lord Saint Albans tells me.”
“Then you must go.” (From the first, Rowley had looked with a jaundiced eye on what he called the admiral’s wish to soothe the fevered brow of Adelia’s patients. “Wants you to soothe his fevered prick, more like,” he’d said.)
If the summons to Figères was Rowley’s ruse to prevent the O’Donnell spending one more night in her company, she was relieved by it; helpful as he’d been, the Irishman still made her feel uncomfortable; his eyes were too long, and they watched her too much.
“Will you not at least keep Deniz by you?” he’d asked.
“No.” She’d been sharper than she meant to be. “I have Mansur and Ulf and Rankin.” Then, because in truth she didn’t know what she’d have done without him and his Turk, she said: “We are eternally grateful to you both.”
He spread his hands. “Ipsa quidem pretium virtus sibi, mistress. Virtue is its own reward.”
He wasn’t cast down by her refusal; he went off singing. Even when the carts had disappeared into the twilight, she could still hear his voice:
But they couldn’t keep time on the cold earthen floor
So to humor the music, they danced on the door.
Walking back up the track, she stopped at the cowshed to make sure that Ulf and Rankin were warm enough by the fire that Mansur had built for them, then went on up to the nuns’ cottage.
In telling her about Cathar belief, Rowley had expected her to be as indignant as he was. He was, in his way, a very orthodox Catholic, which, she supposed, a bishop had to be.
She’d found the Cathar faith strange, certainly, but then she found some of the precepts held by the established Church to be as strange. The Trinity, for example; she’d never been able to get her mind to encompass that precept. It was in the Cathars’ favor that they rejected it.
To Cathars, it appeared, the material world was the devil’s creation. The soul had to be liberated from it by living a pure life so that, when the body died, it could be returned to the light of Heaven which was its proper destination.
Since God wouldn’t have sent his son to live bodily amongst evil, Christ had been a spirit and, therefore, could not have suffered crucifixion-hence their refusal to recognize or wear the cross.
“And they recognize women priests as well as male,” Rowley’d said, shaking his head. “Parfaits, they call them. Perfect, God give me strength.”
“Tut-tut,” she’d said. “Women priests. Enough to make the angels weep.”
“Enough to make me weep. And take that look off your face.” Reaching the cottage now, she saw that Sister Ermengarde was speaking to someone who was only a shape in the orchard, so she sat down on a bench by the front door to wait for her.
Boggart was sitting in the open doorway, using the light from the room behind her to practice stitching, using a threaded bone needle on a scrap of cloth given her by Ermengarde, who’d been horrified to learn that the girl couldn’t sew.
“The bishop’s making plans to send you, me, and Mansur home tomorrow,” Adelia told her. “Will you be glad to see England again?”
Boggart’s response was immediate. “He won’t get me again, will he?”
Who? Oh, poor child, the rapist. “No, he damn well won’t. If nothing else, we’re under the protection of the king now. If that man so much as looks in your direction, which he won’t, Henry will cut off his whatsits and fry them with parsley.”
“ ‘At’s good,” Boggart said in relief. “Been a rare thing, though, ain’t it, traveling with royalty an’ seeing all these wonders? Still, it’ll be nice to meet up with your Allie.”
“Yes, yes it will.”
From up here it was possible to see a faded violet flush behind the western mountains still left by the sun’s departure, but it was cold and she was glad of her cloak
Ermengarde joined her on the bench. “That was a friend of ours come to warn us. Aelith and I must leave this place tomorrow. The word is that the Church is hunting for us. Splendid. It means we’ve frightened the devils. Of course, you and yours are welcome to stay on here as long as you like.”
“I know we are.” Adelia put out her hand to touch Ermengarde’s. “But we’re ready to go now. I’m leaving for England myself tomorrow. I’m sorry you have trouble.”
It was as if the two women knew each other well, but, actually, it was almost the first time they’d been able to sit together and converse about something other than their patients.
From behind them in the cottage came the sibilant, feminine sounds of sweeping and scurrying as Aelith, now free from the hours of nursing, got ready to leave it.
Like the stars, the full scent of the late autumn night was emerging. Ward, with his head on Adelia’s foot, and a nearby tethered goat added their own flavor to it.
“We expect nothing but trouble from a world created by Satan, nor from that Roman Church of wolves,” Ermengarde said.
The large voice of the little woman boomed its heresy into a dusk speckled with flittering bats.
Adelia flinched. If they should hear her. There was nobody to hear; yet the feeling persisted that somewhere out there, in the mountains, the vast monolith of the Church was listening. “This ain’t nice country,” Captain Bolt had said, “got something nasty in its bones.”
“Where will you go?” she asked.
“North. We’ve done well here. Adelia, you should see us in dispute with priests in the town squares-it is splendid; their blasphemy and corruption are shown up for what they are. Now we must go north to tell the people of the true faith, of the divine spark that is trapped in their mortal bodies until it should be reunited with Heaven.”
The true faith, thought Adelia. They all claimed it: Christian, Roman, Greek Orthodox, Jew, Moslem, Cathar, every one of them assured that the right way to worship God belonged only to them.
Now it was Ermengarde’s hand that reached out to Adelia’s. “The flame burns strongly in you, my child. I see it. How splendid it would be if you joined us, to become a parfait.”
Adelia coughed. Rowley had said that to become a “perfect,” she would not only have to abandon meat and live a life of poverty, she would have to become chaste.
“Too difficult?” asked Sister Ermengarde.
If this woman had seen her and Rowley saying good-bye to each other under the fig tree, she wouldn’t ask. “I’m afraid I love a man.”
“More than God?”
“Yes.”
Ermengarde sighed in pity “Once Aelith was born, my husband and I found that our love had turned to the spiritual. He, too, is a parfait now.” She became brisk again. “Well, you must just make sure you starve yourself of the sins of the flesh on your deathbed. We call it the endura. Without it you will be condemned to be born again in another human body, or even as an animal, until your soul is pure enough to enter Heaven. That is why we abstain from meat in our meals-you never know who you’ll be eating.”
Adelia laughed. “I’m going to miss you, Ermengarde.”
“And I you… Doctor.”
“Oh, dear. Has it been that obvious?”
“It is in everything you do. ‘Neither do men light a candle and put it under a bushel.’ So the Sermon on the Mount instructs us. Jesus used the word men in the sense of all humanity, of course, for men and women are equal in the sight of God.” Sister Ermengarde harrumphed. “Catch the Pope in Rome agreeing to that.”
Ward growled. He’d stood up, his fur raised in a ridge along his back. His snout was pointing down the hill to where the flames of the fire outside the cowshed seemed to have multiplied and were streaming back and forth, occasionally disappearing and appearing, as if from a rush of activity. A lot of shouting started up down there.
“What is it?”
Adelia got to her feet and squinted down the hill. Against the light of the fires, she could just make out the shapes of men wearing helmets. Oh, God, Richard’s war has spread to here.
Whoever the men were, they were coming up the hill. Now she could hear what they were shouting: “Heretics,” they yelled. And, “Burn.”
For a second, Ermengarde was still. “They’ve come for us.” Then she whipped around, shouting. “Aelith. Out the back. Run, I’ll hold them off.”
She gave Adelia a push before grabbing at Boggart’s hand in an effort to raise her up. “Run, both of you. Run.”
Unwieldy from pregnancy, Boggart was struggling to rise. As Adelia went to help her, the men closed in; she was enveloped in a smell of sweat and iron. Even in her terror, she knew it was the Cathars they’d come for, not her, and that Aelith, at least, must get away.
Ermengarde had slammed the cottage door shut and was shrieking and struggling to keep it closed. Adelia joined her where she clung onto the latch. “Leave her alone, leave her alone.”
She felt her collarbone break as one of the men tried to wrench her away, but she still held on.
The two women gave Aelith just enough time to clamber out of the back window and escape into the woods. But they couldn’t save themselves-or Boggart.
BOTH COWSHED AND COTTAGE were put to the flame. “Like you fucking Cathars when we get where we’re going,” the leader of their captors assured them.
“We are not Cathars,” Adelia told him, struggling for calm, aware that she and Boggart had their hair bound up like any Cathar women and were wearing the black robes Aelith had lent them.
If she was distancing herself from Ermengarde, she was sorry, but so be it; she was only telling the truth, and there were the others to think of.
She said: “We are the servants of King Henry Plantagenet, and he’ll be mightily displeased if we’re harmed.”
“You’re fucking Cathars, that’s what you are,” he’d said, and spat. “And where we’re going ain’t Plantagenet land.”
At that point there’d been no sign of Mansur nor Ulf nor Rankin, and she was in terror in case they’d been killed. Then some more men came up the hill, and from their midst she heard the multilingual oaths of Mansur’s Arabic, Rankin’s Gaelic, and the good fenland English of Ulf-the latter cursing his captors and demanding in God’s name that his wooden cross be returned to him.
The captives’ hands were bound with ropes, each of which was tied to a saddle of a captor’s mule.
It was difficult to tell how many soldiers there had been during the assault because their leader immediately sent some of them off to pursue Aelith. Of the seven who were left when the others rode away, the torchlight showed rough, country faces and tunics bearing what looked like an ecclesiastical blazon. They addressed their leader, who, like them, spoke with a strong Occitan accent as Arnaud.
Adelia asked again and again where they were to be taken and why, but received no more reply than did Ulf’s threats that Henry II would spill their captors’ guts when they got there-the men didn’t understand them anyway
Arnaud gave a signal, the ropes around the prisoners’ hands tightened as the mules moved forward, and the march began.
The mountains were too rough even for mules to go at anything except walking pace, but every pull on the rope sent pain through Adelia’s broken collarbone. Also, she’d lost a shoe in the struggle and her right foot was being pierced by thorns.
An occasional reassuring whiff told her that Ward was sticking, unnoticed, to her heels. Yet who was there to follow the scent? Rowley had gone to Carcassonne.
“Are we going to Carcassonne?” she asked.
Nobody answered her; Arnaud had ordered silence.
Betrayed. Somebody had told the authorities where Ermengarde and Aelith were staying. It could have been anybody, a peasant looking for reward, a Cathar hater. And he or she had entangled the rest of them in the betrayal.
Whoever the mercenaries were, they knew these mountains well; they followed wide tracks mostly, but now and then diverged from them so that the prisoners’ legs were torn by prickly brush that sent up the smell of thyme and fennel as they went.
The sound of hoofbeats announced the arrival of the men who’d gone hunting the escapee. “Lost her,” Arnaud was told. Ermengarde uttered a shout of triumph and was hit across the mouth for it.
Progress became harder when the mercenaries threw away their spent torches and proceeded by moonlight.
Through it all, and despite more punches because she wouldn’t keep quiet, Ermengarde sent up long and confident Cathar prayers.
Adelia’s eyes were on Boggart, tied to the mule beside hers. When the going became too rough and the girl fell, Adelia shouted at its rider: “Damn you, mind that lady, she’s expecting a baby” To her surprise, the man dismounted and heaved Boggart onto the mule in his stead. Arnaud, who was in the lead, didn’t notice.
It was impossible to calculate in which direction they were going or even to keep track of time; everything reduced to the necessity not to stumble, to stay on one’s feet, not to surrender to thirst and fear.
When would it be day? When would this stop?
Suddenly Arnaud shouted that he was going ahead “to tell ’em we’re coming” and kicked his mule into a trot to disappear down a wide track into the darkness. After he’d gone, the man who’d shown care for Boggart proved his humanity once more by ordering a halt so that the captives could be given a drink. The water was warm and stale and the leather on the flasks it came in smelled foul but, oh, it was beautiful.
The march began again.
At last the mountains ahead became jagged shapes against a dim reflection of a dawn still down over the horizon. They funneled down on three sides of what was, so much as could be seen of it, a sizable town.
Figères? No. Rowley had said that Figères was little more than a village.
A hope reared that it was Carcassonne, one of Languedoc’s major cities, where Rowley was going. And yet she’d had the idea that Carcassonne was built on a plain.
She heard Ermengarde say, “Aveyron,” as if something had been extinguished in her, and one of the men laughed.
It was just waking up as they reached its outskirts. A woman emerging from one of the houses to empty a chamber pot shouted at her family to come and see. Shutters were flung back; questions, dogs, and children accompanied the prisoners up a winding, cobbled track toward a square formed by buildings of considerable size. Adelia glimpsed a tall tower and cupolas like graceful saucepan lids outlined against the rising sun.
Up and up into a square, where Boggart was lifted from her mule and the ropes binding the prisoners’ hands were replaced by manacles. They were ushered into a magnificent, arcaded hall, a where a line of liveried servants carrying food dishes into a room on the right paused to stare at the prisoners and were commanded to be about their business by a tap from the staff of a heavily robed steward. A line of people in a gallery above their heads goggled down at them.
In the middle of the hall, a man in the cassock of a priest sat at a table, a scribe beside him. There was an oath and a scuffle and, looking back, Adelia saw that one of the riders had taken Ward by the scruff of his neck and thrown him outside the doors that were then closed against him.
Ermengarde had recovered her courage. Pushed in front of the table, she addressed the priest politely in Latin: “Ave, Gerhardt,” and then, louder, in Occitan: “Ara roda l’abelha.” (“That bee is buzzing round again.”)
There was a laugh, quickly suppressed, that caused an echo making it impossible to tell where it had come from.
“Father Gerhardt to you, bitch,” the priest said in Latin.
“My father is in heaven. Are we to dispute again? Splendid.”
Father Gerhardt addressed his scribe. “Ermengarde of Montauban, a self-confessed Cathar. Write it down.” He raised his head. “Or have you repented, woman?”
“I repent of nothing.”
“You are charged with preaching heresy throughout this region in defiance of the edicts issued by His Holiness Pope Alexander the Third. The punishment is death by burning.”
“I do not recognize such edicts, nor your Satanic Pope. I have preached only true Christianity”
“We have the statements of witnesses.” Father Gerhardt pointed at a roll on his table.”
“Splendid.”
Stop it, stop it, Adelia wanted to shout at her. The statement of an ignorant man as he’d set fire to Ermengarde’s cottage-Like you fuching Cathars-she’d taken to be the threat of a bully; now it was being translated into something else. Here, they were enclosed in the efficiency of a powerful machine, in front of them was a man about serious business, a stone-faced man whose eyes-the only mobile thing about him-had flames in them.
They can’t, she thought. Not us. Henry’s anger would be terrible-don’t they know that? They must know.
But around her were the indifferent mountains of a landscape where the Plantagenet writ did not run. She’d wandered into somebody else’s story, not hers. It was a mistake, she was going to die by mistake. She willed Ermengarde to cower, plead, whisper repentance, instead of shouting for her own execution-and theirs.
One by one they were made to stand before their inquisitor and told to give their names, place of birth, and occupation.
Their explanations were cut short: “You are Cathars, you were found consorting with Cathars.”
For all that she was shaking, Adelia tried for indignation when her turn came. “It is disgraceful that we are treated like this. Who are you? Where is this place?”
“You are in the palace of the Bishop of Aveyron.” The priest had the thin, protuberant features of a dog and an expression that suggested he would be better for going muzzled.
“Then inform your bishop that we are under the protection of the Bishop of Winchester, who is with Princess Joanna at Figères, and the Bishop of Saint Albans of England, whom you can find at Carcassonne. We are servants of Henry Plantagenet, and we have been traveling with his daughter until…”
“You are Cathars, you were found consorting with Cathars.” It was a mantra.
Mansur’s questioning was briefest of all: who he was or what he was doing in Languedoc was of no interest-his color and robes were those of a self-confessed, if different, heretic; he could burn with the rest.
WHEN HE’D FINISHED his interrogation, Father Gerhardt took up his papers, left the hall for the palace’s dining room, and passed through it to the breakfast room, where a table winked with crystal glass and gold plate.
Above, a flat ceiling glowed with Bible scenes painted by a master; below, the morning robe of the man at the table was no less inspired with autumn color and the skill of embroideresses.
The Bishop of Aveyron, a plump man with clever eyes, took one more honeyed fig, wiped his fingers on the linen napkin tucked into his neck, and looked up. “So the information was exact?”
“In every detail, my lord. I doubt we’d have found her hideout without it. Unfortunately, she managed to delay the men’s entry long enough for the daughter to escape. I’ve ordered a hunt for her.”
His bishop waved a hand in dismissal. “Do we care about the daughter? Ermengarde is the one we wanted.”
“And now we have her.”
For a moment these two very different men shared the same, searing memory-a black-clad woman standing in the town square making fools of them both: “Leave me alone, old men. Abandon either your luxury or your preaching.”
The townspeople had laughed at them. Them.
“Also,” said Father Gerhardt, “we have written proof against her. Our men searched the hovel before setting fire to it. There was a gospel written in the langue d’oc.”
The bishop shook his head sadly: “Gerhardt, Gerhardt, is there no end to Cathar evil? Where should we poor Latinate clergy be if the common herd were able to listen to the holy word in their own language?” He stretched out his hand to take one of the soft, white rolls nestling in a basket that his steward had just put in front of him. “You and I would have to go begging our bread.”
Gerhardt was put out; he never knew when his bishop was joking.
“A joke,” the bishop explained, seeing him puzzled. That was the trouble with priests who brought their zeal straight from the Vatican, no humor.
“Yes, my lord. And the foreigners captured with Ermengarde? Our bargain with the informant was to ensure that they suffer the same punishment, but I have to tell you”-Gerhardt said this with reluctance-“they persist in their story that they are all servants of Henry Plantagenet.”
“And they are? Tell me again.”
Father Gerhardt consulted his list. “A youth purporting to be a pilgrim-the cross he carried was of interest to our informant, if you remember, and as it was of no account our men let him have it. A female servant who is pregnant…”
The bishop stopped using his butter knife in order to wave it. “Pregnancy does not absolve her. Root and branch, Gerhardt, root and branch. Remember that.”
“Yes, my lord. Then there is a mercenary speaking a language nobody can understand. Also a Saracen, and a woman who interprets for him.” Gerhardt looked up. “She is the woman our informant is eager to have destroyed-if the others die with her, so be it. Surely no Christian king would inflict wharf rats like that on his daughter?”
The bishop shrugged. “I wouldn’t put it past this one from what I’ve heard, not Henry Yes, I have no doubt they are who they say they are.”
Father Gerhardt was taken aback, not so much by fact, but that his bishop was making no bones about it. “Yet do we need to worry about his opinion?” he asked. “A priest killer?”
“Ah, but a priest killer who’s done penance for Becket and been accepted back into the fold.” The bishop poured himself another glass of wine while he considered. “I wonder. Can we afford to offend the King of England?”
“If we don’t, we lose a spy who can take us into the center of the king’s web. Moreover”-a flash of Father Gerhardt’s canines showed his happiness at imparting a nugget he’d been hugging-“my lord, I can tell you that the Bishop of Winchester and others in the princess’s party complain that the Saracen and his woman are witches. They say the two have brought bad luck on them. They would not be unhappy to lose them.”
“Witches, eh?” The bishop liked that.
“Yes, my lord. Apparently, the Saracen’s woman has fed a love potion to the other bishop, Rowley of Saint Albans, so that he lusts after her and will hear no word against her.”
“I thought she was supposed to be plain.”
“She is, my lord, which only emphasizes the strength of her magic.”
“A Jezebel,” mused the bishop. “‘And Jezebel was cast down, and the dogs did eat her, and no more of her was found than the skull, and the feet, and the palms of her hands.’ A gratifying image, I’ve always found. So wholesale, don’t you think?”
“Indeed, my lord.” Gerhardt refused to be diverted. “Nor does this harlot wear a cross. Both she and the maid are dressed as Cathars. In any case, they’ve spent time with Ermengarde and so will have been infected.”
The bishop smiled. He was fond of the principle of post hoc ergo propter hoc. So useful.
Father Gerhardt raised flailing arms in appeal to Heaven. “When, O Lord, when wilt thou grant us full crusade against this cancer?”
Whenindeed, the bishop thought. Increasingly severe anti-Cathar edicts had been issued by the Vatican for over thirty years without, so far, calling for a crusade against the heretics. Yet crusade was the only option, as the bishop knew; the infection was becoming a plague.
A new order was needed. A man to raise the Holy Cross against the Cathars in the teeth of the Pope, begin God’s righteous slaughter.
Lying in his bed at night, the Bishop of Aveyron sweated into his silk sheets. If it was successful it would take him high, perhaps to the throne of Rome itself. Failure…?
Tapping his teeth, the bishop looked up at the depiction of the Garden of Eden on his ceiling. He was particularly fond of it; the artist had let himself go as far as Eve’s naked body was concerned. “This informant, we’re certain of him, are we?” he asked.
“A valuable man, my lord. As I said, he is privy to what passes between the English bishops and their king; he will be in Sicily when Saint Albans arrives after negotiating with Barbarossa and the Lombards. What are a witch and a ragbag of nonentities to set against that?”
But the Bishop of Aveyron’s careful mind had made itself up; he hadn’t got where he was today by being rash.
“Nevertheless, we must be sure. The Plantagenet is soft toward heretics, yet his arm is long and on the end of it there is a hammer. There is no need to anger him at this stage. Feelers, Gerhardt, we shall put out feelers; nothing too definite on either side. All we need to know from the princess’s officials is: If we have found some heretics wandering in the hills and consequently disposed of them, shall they be missed? Will that fit the situation?”
“From what I gather, the answer will be no, my lord.”
“I gather that, too. But hold off until we get it. As for our ‘perfect,’ you may proceed as planned.” He smiled again; this time his priest knew he wasn’t joking. “Bring the town in to witness it.”
“Where do you want the prisoners lodged, my lord? The dungeons?”
The bishop tapped his teeth. “No, let them have a view of what they may expect. Clear out the tower room and put them up there for now. Set trustworthy guards, mind. Sometimes I think the contagion has infected my own palace.”
When Gerhardt had gone, his lord poured himself another glass of the vintage from his vineyard near Carcassonne and sipped it while he engineered a new vision of Ermengarde, his black-clad tauntress, this time tied to a stake with faggots laid around her feet.
He saw himself thrusting a torch into the wood like a penis into her parts and sighed because, alas, that pleasure must be left to the executioner. One day, though, yes, yes, one day, the flames he’d light would consume them all… men, women, and children.
This really was most excellent wine.
AND SCARRY? He’s been very busy.
As he promised, he led the heretic hunters to the cowshed. He saw Mansur, Rankin, and Ulf go down fighting. He watched the capture of the women up the hill. Then he began looking for something.He found it-lying in one of the mangers where Ulf had left it. A rough, wooden cross.
Now, back at Figères, he is levering out some of the nails that hold together a rough-looking cross. He is doing it quietly, so that no sound escapes from the spartan monk’s cell in which he is lodged.
He takes off the crosspiece and applies an eye to the resultant space. What he sees, packed carefully in horsehair, is a sword pommel gleaming with amethysts. Incautiously, he neighs with satisfaction.
There is a call from the cell next door: “Are you unwell, brother? I heard you cry out.”
“I am well, brother, I thank you. I was carried away by the glory of my God.”
“Amen to that. Good night, brother.”
In reinserting the nails by hammering them with his fist so as to make no more noise, he tears his hands, a fact that he only notices because he can smell the blood.
He doesn’t feel pain much anymore, does Scarry. On the other hand, his sense of smell has become excellent, returning him to his days in the forest with Wolf, when they could sniff their quarry through all other conflicting scents, hunt it down, play with it before they killed, and then dance in its split paunch, animal or human.
He puts his bloody hand up to his nose, just to make sure it is there.
With luck and opportunity, he should soon be savoring the odor of a woman’s burning flesh.
ADELIA HAD HER FOOT in Boggart’s lap and was hoping very hard that it hadn’t become infected by the thorns the girl was teasing out of it.
Ulf was pacing up and down, up and down, getting on everybody’s nerves. “There was some other bugger in the cowshed when they got us. He was looking for something while the bastards were tyin’ us up. I reckon it was my cross.”
“We know,” Mansur said wearily. “The one comfort is that he will be unaware of what’s inside it.”
Ulf turned on him. “But he did. I keep telling you, he asked for it particular. He knew. And he wasn’t one of them who took us over the mountains, he disappeared once they’d got us down.”
“Didn’t you recognize his voice?”
“No, kept his bloody cloak over his bloody mouth, didn’t he.”
“Leave it, laddie,” Rankin told him. “There’s nae thing we can do about it. For now, let’s save our breath to cool our parritch.”
What parritch was, Adelia had no idea, but she was grateful to him; the Scotsman was proving as firm a rock as Mansur.
A grizzled man with a face like a battered turnip. The march over the hills must have been hard for him who’d been so ill, harder for him than Ulf, who had youth on his side. All the way, he’d muttered strange and incomprehensible oaths to himself and his eyes under their curled, upsweeping gray brows suggested that, if his hands were free, his captors would be dispossessed of certain limbs, but, and this was strangely comforting to Adelia, he showed lack of surprise at the situation in which he found himself. Maybe life in the Scottish Highlands combining with that as one of King Henry’s mercenaries had weathered him against anything it could come up with.
When, just now, she’d felt obliged to apologize for it, he’d patted her hand and said: “Aye well, as we say back hame, a misty morning may yet become a guid clear day”
Ulf continued to chafe and pace. “There was something about him. Never saw his face, but the way he moved… I swear I’d seen the cut of him before. Jesus Christ, where was it?”
It was a rhetorical question and one he’d put so many times that nobody bothered with it. He gave up and turned his attention to the turret room’s two unglazed windows. “Both big enough for us all to get out, despite the mullions,” he said, “iffen we had some rope.”
They didn’t have any rope, and one window overlooked the square some dizzying hundred feet below, while the drop from the other one was at least fifty feet onto some palace roofs.
Now he was looking out at the square and adding a commentary to the sound of hammering and sawing that the others could hear perfectly well.
“Building a bloody dais,” he said bitterly “That’s so the nobs won’t miss anything, I suppose. Gawd, they’re putting canvas over the top, ‘case the bastards get rained on. Why’n’t they hang out some bloody bunting while they’re about it?”
The boy was torturing himself-and them-for losing Excalibur. Adelia waited until Boggart had bound her foot with a piece of cloth torn from her petticoat, and then hopped over to where he was standing. She put her arm round his shoulders. “We’re all tired, let’s get some sleep.”
“Only one stake so far,” he said.
She looked out with him; the stake stood in the center of the square, commanding it like a maypole. The piles of wood around its base formed a platform. Five other stakes were stacked ominously against one of the walls.
“Not us, then,” Ulf said. “Not yet.”
“It won’t be. We told them who we were. They’ll have sent word to Princess Joanna or Rowley-I told them he was at Carcassonne. The name of King Henry must carry some weight, even here.”
“Where’ve they put Ermengarde?”
“I don’t know.” The Cathar had been taken away immediately after questioning.
“What treacherous bastard gave away where she was?”
Adelia didn’t know that either.
“I liked her,” Ulf said.
“We all did.” Were talking of her in the past, she thought.
“You reckon as Aelith got away?”
“I think so. Dear God, I hope so.”
“What’d them women do to earn this? Apart from acting like Christians?”
“I don’t know.”
Eventually, Ulf was persuaded to lie down with the others on the floor.
It was cold up here. The five of them hadn’t even been provided with straw, let alone beds. There’d been no food, nor drink, either. The one convenience was a bucket that had been thrown in after them.
However, after that long and terrible march, the imperative was sleep; Mansur, Rankin, and Boggart were already succumbing to it. Watching Ulf’s dour young face relax, Adelia, agonized, thought of his grandmother and what she would say if she saw him now. And Boggart with the new life inside her… And Allie, always Allie. Are you asleep, little one? Don’t miss me. Be happy.
How had they all come to this?
Ever prepared to assume guilt, Adelia went over the circumstances that had led them here… back, back to accepting Henry Plantagenet’s commission in the first place… but she hadn’t accepted it, he’d forced her into it… back to the education and foster parents who had made her into a person ill-starred and at odds with everything the world demanded of womanhood… back to being born at all into such a world.
Boggart’s ministrations had eased her foot, but Adelia’s shoulder was hurting.
She untied the cord from about her waist and made it into a sling in which to rest her arm. Then, wrapping her cloak around her against the cold, she shuffled to find a comfortable position on the boards of the floor, and lay down, using Boggart’s now-ample rump as a pillow…
She was in a classroom back in the Salerno medical school and a high, pedantic voice from someone she couldn’t see was lecturing on the subject of burning at the stake.
“Better for the victim if the wood is piled high up to his or her armpits, thus providing a quick death from the inhalation of smoke…”
It was a relief to be woken up by the grind of a turning key in the lock of the door. The only light in the room was from the star-sprinkled sky outside the window. Two of the men who’d dragged them over the mountains came in. One had a spear at the ready; the other-he was the one who’d been kind to Boggart and given them water-carried a tray on which were five bowls, some stale rye bread, and a container of surprisingly good lamb stew.
“Ask ’em when they’re going to let us go, the bastards,” Ulf told Adelia.
She repeated the question, without its embellishment.
“Only way you’re getting out is in flames,” the spear carrier said.
But the kindly one said: “When we gets word.”
“What’s your name?” Adelia asked him.
“Don’t tell’em, Raymond,” the spear carrier said. “Ah, shit.”
After the guards were gone, there was discussion in the darkness about what Raymond’s “when we gets word” meant.
“It means they’ve sent to get confirmation of who we are,” Adelia said firmly. “Or they’re contacting Rowley We’ll be out of here in no time.”
Appetite satisfied, still tired, the prisoners settled down to sleep again.
“If, on the other hand,” the dream lecturer persisted, “the faggots are merely laid at the victim’s feet, he or she will suffer maximum pain until he or she dies of shock and blood loss…”
“No.” Adelia sat up. The lecturer’s voice had been her own. Digging her nails into her palms so that she shouldn’t hear it again, she stayed awake for the rest of the night.
IN THE MORNING, their hands were tied and their feet put into irons before they were led down the turret’s winding staircase and into the open air, where gray clouds were being blown fast across the sky.
Men-at-arms stood at each entrance to the square; townspeople were being ushered into it by others who made sure that dogs and goats did not wander in with them. Some of them had baskets on their arms as if they’d been interrupted in their marketing.
The prisoners were led to the dais and made to clamber up on it so that they could both see and be seen, though the men and women funneling in only glanced at them briefly, then looked away, almost without interest, almost as if tied and manacled beings were the usual people in the usual place.
Boggart was on one side of Mansur, Adelia on the other with Rankin next to her and Ulf next to him. Behind them was scaffolding where the frontage of an ancient church was being rebuilt with stonework that was already a marvel of carving.
Ahead and higher than the church stood the bishop’s palace, modern and pristine, with glazed windows in rounded arches, and the sculptures of its portal telling the story of Jesus’s life.
It was a beautiful square. With a stake at its center.
Adelia thought she could hear Ward barking somewhere and wondered where he could get food and if he would find water.
She wondered whether Allie was being allowed to fly her kestrel; she wondered if little Sister Aelith had got away; she wondered where Rowley was now.
Her mind kept to these things, away from the here and now, which was a charade that would end with the stake and its woodpile remaining untouched and everybody being sent home. Human beings did not burn one another, not in these times; it was a threat from another age always held over the heads of heretics, Jews, witches, and other nonconformers but never actually performed now, not now, dear Lord, not now.
The abnormality of everything rushed at her, causing panic. Beyond these roofs and turrets was a pitiless landscape that was too high and too jagged. This square was full of people who were nothing to her, as she was less than nothing to them.
No, she told herself it won’t happen. Those churchmen over there on the bedraped dais opposite were commanded not to shed blood. Ergo, they wouldn’t, couldn’t let it shrivel in burning flesh. And the stake with its platform of bundled wood was there, there, in the center, and she wouldn’t witness it because it wasn’t happening… and she could hear Ward’s bark again and she would die if somebody didn’t help him and keep him and Allie from being lonely which, of course, somebody would because there was kindness in this world, there had to be kindness or there was neither health nor purpose in it…
The press of townspeople was now so large that the prisoners could look down on the caps of the men and the intricate weave of the women’s wide, straw hats just below them. There was none of the excitement with which crowds so often attended an execution; these people were sullen. Cathars or not, they didn’t want this.
A woman below Adelia spoke to the one next to her. “Ermengarde.” It was as if the word said everything that was to be said.
“I know,” her neighbor said.
“How’ll she bear the pain?”
“Let us pray God will take it on Himself.”
There was a clash of spears; men-at-arms were saluting the Bishop of Aveyron as he came out of his palace, wonderful in cope and miter. He had a dais of his own and was assisted onto it.
Adelia closed her eyes as he began speaking. It was a fine voice, rich in tone and sorrow, and the moment Adelia heard it she knew Ermengarde was going to die today
“My dear friends, you are assembled here as good people and good Christians to witness what must be done for the sake of all our souls…”
There was a sudden yell of “Persecution”-a man’s shout, brave and clear. Immediately, there was a tramp of boots as men-at-arms parted the crowd to try and find its owner. God bless him, Adelia thought, whoever he is. We are never quite alone.
“Persecution?” queried the lovely voice. “But not every persecution is blameworthy; rather it is reasonable for us to persecute heretics, just as Christ physically persecuted those whom He drove out of the Temple. To kill wicked men and women in order to save their souls for the sake of correction and justice is to serve God. And so we must do today.”
More tramping boots; they were bringing Ermengarde into the square. A phalanx of monks began chanting.
Adelia opened her eyes. The Cathar looked so small. She was bareheaded and the wind whipped her gray hair around her face. She was uttering her own battle cry, bless her, oh, bless her. It rose above the wind and the chanting monks: “‘Beware the false prophets who come to you in the guise of lambs wherein lurk voracious wolves.’ So says the gospel of Matthew. Their God is of the Old Testament, ignorant, cruel, bloodthirsty, and unjust…”
There was a crack, and she was silenced.
A murmur like a breeze ruffling corn ran through the crowd, and the bishop shouted over it: “You hear, good people? This woman’s blasphemy is proved out of her own throat.”
Adelia forced herself to keep looking; to hide one’s face from courage like this was to betray it; she was a witness.
Tiny and dowdy against the tapestry of the clergy, surrounded by men-at-arms, Ermengarde strode on bare feet toward the stake like a bride on her wedding day. She was led by a priest walking backward and holding a jeweled cross in front of her. There was blood on her mouth.
Boggart began to pant. Ulf and Rankin were swearing.
Adelia looked across at the churchmen, amazed. Are you blind? Don’t you see the bare feet, the simplicity, the loneliness? This is the Via Dolorosa.
Ermengarde was lifted onto her platform and tied to its stake. They were standing her on the pyre, not within it. One of her feet dislodged a faggot and a man-at-arms took time to replace it neatly
The chanting came louder. A bible was offered but Ermengarde turned her face away from it, one side of her damaged mouth moving in prayer.
A man in a hood that covered his face came forward holding a lit torch. He looked at the bishop, who nodded and dipped his plump, steepled hands.
There was a whoomph; they’d poured oil on the wood.
Adelia pushed her face into Mansur’s sleeve. She heard the crackle of flames and spitting wood that she’d heard a thousand times in comfortable kitchens where fire cooked meat on a spit. Her remorseless anatomist’s brain followed the sequence of burning feet, calves, thighs, hands, torso, and no death, no death until the conflagration reached the breath of the mouth and extinguished it.
Nor did God take the pain upon Himself. Long before the end, Ermengarde was screaming.
PERHAPS, HAVING SHOWN his five prisoners the end that awaited them, the Bishop of Aveyron was now concerned in case they dislodged the mullions on their turret windows and threw themselves out. Perhaps he felt the morality of a bishop demanded that he should not keep men and women confined together. Whatever the reason, a few hours after Ermengarde’s ashes were chucked onto a midden, Adelia, Boggart, Rankin, Mansur, and Ulf were transferred from the palace’s highest point to its lowest and then separated, male from female.
With their feet free but hands still tied, they were led down the circular stairs of the turret, across the great hall and the stares of its people, to where another staircase skewered itself deep into the earth, past an underground guardroom and down again, to a blind tunnel of a dungeon and the row of cells lining its walls.
Every push, every jerk on Adelia’s arms stabbed at her damaged shoulder-the cord she’d made into a sling had been tossed away by the guard who’d tied her hands. She hardly noticed it; the pain was inconsequential compared to the agony she’d witnessed.
Their hands finally released, she and Boggart were pushed into one cell, Rankin, Ulf, and Mansur into that next door, and the keys turned on them.
If they’d wanted to, they could have conversed by putting their faces to the small barred apertures in the doors and shouting to one another, but they didn’t. None of them had spoken since they’d been taken from the square.
Slumped on the stone floor, holding tightly to Boggart’s hand, Adelia knew that she should break the silence, say something to put heart into them all, but was incapable of doing it. She was unraveled; the only thread holding to sanity was the thought that Rowley would come for them. But even when he did, none of them would ever be free of a scar that flames and screams had branded on their memory-we have seen a human being burned alive. Like the others, she was past anger, past prayer; she was reduced to an enervating astonishment at the hideousness Man was capable of-and even that flickered only occasionally in a stupor ending in helpless sleep.
Rowley didn’t come for them that day Nor the next.
FATHER GERHARDT RODE to Figères, taking with him greetings, perfume, wine, foie gras wrapped in fig leaves, and cheeses of the region from the Bishop of Aveyron to the King of England’s illustrious daughter.
Since the hour was too late to disturb the princess up at the château, the Bishop of Winchester, Father Guy, Father Adalburt, and Dr. Arnulf received him-with embarrassment-in the priory’s little refectory, where they had been sitting late at supper. (The prior had gone to bed; he had weeds to hoe in the morning.)
“I fear you find us benighted, Father,” the bishop told him. “As you see, we have been dogged by misfortune on this leg of our journey. I am ashamed that we cannot receive you with better state.”
“Not at all, not at all.” Father Gerhardt pretended not to notice the spade somebody had left standing in a corner, nor the remains of a plain, bucolic meal still on the table, nor that the man standing behind the Bishop of Winchester’s chair was the only servant in a room lit not by good beeswax candles but tapers made of rushes.
Nevertheless, notice them he did; Scarry’s information was proving exact so far.
Accepting a glass of wine, Father Gerhardt studied faces.
He looked briefly into the eyes of Father Adalburt, who smiled foolishly back at him; he saw that Winchester’s bishop was a tired old man; and that the two who would be his allies were Father Guy and Dr. Arnulf Yes, just as he’d been told.
“My lord, I bring a letter from my lord of Aveyron.” He bowed and handed it over. “And now, with your permission, I would be grateful for a night’s bed-it has been a long ride.”
(“Give them the letter, then leave them alone to read it,” his bishop had told him. “They will betray more easily if they are not watched by an outsider.”)
That set the cat among the pigeons. A bed? Oh, Lord, a bed. The good bishop was already doubling up in his with the prior, while the two chaplains and Dr. Arnulf were sharing the only other.
“Perhaps Captain Bolt can provide one,” Father Guy suggested. He addressed the servant sharply: “Peter, escort the good Father up to the château. And then come back and clear this table of its detritus, it is a disgrace.”
When the door had closed, he picked up the letter. “Shall I read this to you, my lord?”
“Read away My old eyes fail me in this light.”
“From the Bishop of Aveyron to his brother in the Lord, Bishop of Winchester, a heartfelt and respectful welcome. This poor region is honored by the presence of a noble princess and her religious advisers whose reputation for holiness and wisdom has come before them…”
“How kind,” said the Bishop of Winchester, wiping his eyes, “Isn’t that kind of Aveyron.”
More than half the scroll was taken up with compliments, an invitation to grace Aveyron palace, more compliments.
The Bishop of Winchester’s head began to nod. Father Adalburt started chalking notes for a sermon on his slate.
Not until the end did the letter reach its nub…
“My lord, you will know, in your wisdom, that the foul heresy of Catharism has been spreading throughout this country, and that some of us fight its contagion that it may not infect all Christendom. Accordingly, I must bring to your lordship’s attention that, in this great struggle, the Lord has allowed to fall into my hand five such heretics found wandering the hills…”
Father Guy’s voice paused for a moment, then he read on.
“Normally, it would be the work of a moment to mete the punishment inflicted on all who preach false doctrine on these wretches-two women in Cathar dress and three men-were it not that they make some claim to be connected with Princess Joanna’s court. I assume this to be the impudence expected of those who spread evil falsehood, yet I feel obliged to bring the matter to your lordship’s attention. Should you, my dear brother, as I expect, refute this claim, I shall act as I act against all who threaten blessed Mother Church. I await your word to be returned by the hand of my good and faithful chaplain, Father Gerhardt.
“In the meantime, that God pour His blessing on you is the dearest wish of your servant, Philippe of Aveyron.”
(“They will know, as I know, that these are their people,” Aveyron had said. “But if I am to satisfy our informant, while at the same time avoid bringing the Plantagenet’s wrath on my head, it is they who, like Pontius Pilate, must wash their hands and permit the execution. And I want it in writing.”)
Father Guy’s hands took care in rolling up the scroll, his eyes avoiding those of Dr. Arnulf sitting very upright in his chair
Something, some thing, a fetid eagerness, came into the little room, deepening its shadows; it hung in the dusty rafters out of sight, watchful, timorous, obscene.
THE CELLS STANK and were dark, containing only a bucket. There were no windows; the faintest gleam touched the tunnel outside where it filtered thinly round the circular stair from the torches in the guardroom above.
They were beetles in blackness; they crouched beneath the weight of the palace’s mountainous boot in case it descended and crushed them. What if there was a fire? Who would care if insects locked in at the bottom of the pile couldn’t get out?
The only thing that stopped Adelia becoming a whirling, screaming ball of panic was Boggart, who, she knew, had to be in the same state yet was fighting it because she was. They were like two playing cards propping each other up; if one went so would the other. Presumably to judge from their silence, the three other prisoners were doing the same.
Yet there were noises; the tunnel had its own creaks and whimpers. Ulf broke the silence: “Anybody else down here?” But the shout sent up diminishing, skipping reverberations of “anybody else… anybody else…” like answers from the dead, and he didn’t do it again. Certainly no living voice replied.
Food was presaged by the sound of clanking. Each of the two guards who came to feed them had a chatelaine chained to his belt such as were usually worn by ladies to attach useful feminine things like scissors, thimble and needle cases, keys to store cupboards, etc. The guards had only keys, massive keys.
The women’s door was unlocked first. One of the guards shoved in a tray while the other stood back, spear at the ready to repel any rushed escape. The door was locked again. Adelia and Boggart heard the procedure repeated next door, then listened to the rattle of keys as the guards climbed the stairs to their post.
Darkness.
“CATHARS? WHY WOULD Cathars be connected with the princess?” The Bishop of Winchester was having trouble catching up.
“They are not, of course,” said Father Guy, soothingly “It is their ploy to escape punishment. As my lord Aveyron says, all heretics are liars. These are nothing to do with us.”
“It is strange, though,” the bishop continued. “Is it possible… could it be that… how many of our people stayed behind in that nuns’ hospital at the last?”
“Oooh,” Dr. Arnulf said casually “Seven? Eight?”
“Not five, then?”
“And remember, my lord,” pointed out Father Guy, “the Bishop of Saint Albans said before he left for Carcassonne that he would be sending the Saracen and his female back to England. It is safe to assume that they have already gone.”
“Taking the others with them, one supposes,” Dr. Arnulf said.
“Also, they would be taking the direct route back to England; they cannot have wandered so far off it as to encroach on Aveyron territory.”
“Nor would they be dressed as Cathars.”
The chaplain and doctor were topping each other, and doing it well, though they avoided each other’s eyes like secret lovers. Father Adalburt watched them, smiling his vacant smile.
The Saracen, thought the Bishop of Winchester wearily. The Saracen and his woman-what was her name? They had blighted with ill luck a journey already hard enough for an old man; he was dreading its recommencement. “I wish the Bishop of Saint Albans were here,” he said. “He would know, but, alas, we shan’t have his company now until we reach Sicily.”
Father Guy in no way regretted my lord of Saint Albans’s absence. “My lord, why should we concern ourselves over a faraway group of unbelievers?”
Dr. Arnulf didn’t regret it, either. “Totally unnecessary.”
They kept quiet while their bishop mused. He was roused by the return of Peter, who began clearing the table; like most of the servants, the man was wearing the Plantagenet leopards on his tunic.
Plantagenet. The word jolted the bishop out of his reverie. Troublesome and unlucky as the Saracen and his woman had proved to be, King Henry had stressed their importance. Perhaps all pains should be taken to ensure that they were safe-the king’s toes, if stepped on, could deliver a devastating kick.
“Should we not send someone back to Aveyron… to see if there has been some unfortunate mistake… ensure that the bishop’s prisoners do not include our people?”
Father Guy put out a hand to quell a hiss from Dr. Arnulf. “My lord, if I may say so, that would be an error reflecting badly on yourself. It would indicate to this foreign bishop that you have allowed Princess Joanna’s train to be riddled with heretics, or why else should you even inquire for these?”
“Oh, dear, yes. No, we mustn’t do that.”
“I don’t see why your lordship is even troubling yourself with the matter,” Dr. Arnulf said. “The bishop’s prisoners are dressed as Cathars, therefore they must be Cathars.”
The old man sighed. “Very well, then, I suppose we must send a letter to Aveyron tomorrow disclaiming any knowledge of these people.”
Doctor and chaplain took in a breath and then dispelled it.
The thing that Aveyron’s letter had brought into the room’s shadows grew in size, vibrating slightly
Father Guy said swiftly: “Allow me to pen it, my lord. Best it were done right away If you will retire, I’ll bring the letter to your room for your signature.”
“Thank you, my son.” My lord of Winchester raised himself from his chair, making gratefully for his bed, a tired man made more tired by the uneasy feeling that something had got away from him.
As the door closed behind him, Father Guy’s eyes at last met those of Dr. Arnulf.
The doctor nodded. “Write the letter, then,” he said.
OUTSIDE ONE OF the tents surrounding the château, Admiral O’Donnell was playing chess with Locusta by the light of a fire.
“Ah, Peter,” he called as the servant passed him. “Who’s our visitor? The one with a look that would perish the Danes?”
“Brought a message from the Bishop of Aveyron, my lord.”
“Did he, now?” The Irishman moved his queen. “And what was the letter about?”
Peter told him.
“Cathars,” said the O‘Donnell, nodding. “Bad cess to ’em.”
“Checkmate.” Locusta grinned. “You’re off your game tonight, my lord.”
“To you the glory.” He stretched and yawned. “And me for me bed. Good night, gentlemen.”
SINCE LIFE, even in despair, had to be lived, the prisoners made the best of it.
They established their own routine. Every morning-if it was morning-they took turns to press their faces to the doors’ bars and talk to one another. This was harder on Adelia and Boggart than the men since, to reach the aperture, both women had to stand on tiptoe, a stance that couldn’t be maintained for too long.
Then, at Adelia’s insistence, they all took exercise by walking twenty times round the walls of the cells. These were of stone and extensive, something their occupants were forced to establish by pace and feel. Rankin, during one of his conversations with Adelia through their door bars, shouted: “For what wud a man o’ God want wi’ sic space for his paiks, lessen he’s a black-avised, messan-dog o’ a limmer?”
Which, interpreted, was a good question. Had the bishops of Aveyron who’d built this place so distrusted their flock that they envisaged incarcerating the hundreds these cells could hold? Was the present incumbent expecting to fill them with Cathars?
In the afternoon-if it was afternoon-they kept up their spirits by singing or reciting, each taking it in turn to stand near the door so that his or her voice could reach the others. In the case of Adelia this was a penance, for her as well as everybody else; she had the singing voice of an off-key crow and restricted herself to chanting nursery rhymes her childhood English nurse had taught her in Sicily
Ulf’s voice was little better so he chose to recount tales of Hereward the Wake and the fight that fenland hero had put up against William the Conqueror. Mansur’s high, clear treble sent songs of the Tigris-Euphrates marshland into which he’d been born ringing down the tunnel. Boggart sang pretty ballads she’d picked up from marketplace minstrels. Rankin, in a tuneful and deep bass, rendered incomprehensible but heart-stirring airs from the Highlands and bewailed the fact that he hadn’t his peeps with which he could have kept up their spirits even further.
“Er, ‘peeps’?”
“Bagpipes,” came the gloomy explanation in Ulf’s voice. “We been spared them at least.”
This was their defiance: no hymns, never hymns; in this place they would not give voice to the God worshipped by the Bishop of Aveyron.
But they became more and more tired; their scraps of food were leftovers from the palace kitchens and, always supposing the cook hadn’t spat in them, were of good quality but too meager to be sustaining. Adelia, her shoulder aching badly, berated the guards on behalf of Boggart who, as she pointed out, should be eating for two, but the rations weren’t increased so she went without herself.
And still Rowley didn’t come for them.
Eventually, they stopped singing; emaciation does not lend itself to song. Mostly they sat quietly Even Adelia had given up pointing out that the length of their incarceration proved that Aveyron was waiting for word from Figères before he took any action-there had been time for it to come many times over.
It was Ulf, next door, who tired her even more. His youth gave him the energy to be furious at what, he had now contrived to believe, was treachery to Adelia, not Ermengarde, a theory he kept putting forward to her through the bars of his cell.
“They was after you,” he insisted.
“They were after Ermengarde,” she said wearily “They just happened to capture us with her and thought we were Cathars.”
“Oh, I grant you the bastards were after Ermengarde, but who told them where she was knowíng we were with her and they’d take us for Cathars? Eh? Tell me that. She and Aelith had been refugin’ in that cottage for months, why did the bastards come for her when we were there? Eh? Too much of a coincidence if you ask me.”
There was a simpler explanation and Adelia had pressed her face closer to the bars of her door so that she could voice it quietly because it was too awful to be spoken out loud.
“Ulf, it was us. Rowley and Locusta were riding back and forth to the cowshed every day. Two well-dressed men like that-they were bound to attract the attention of people on the road. They made somebody curious; perhaps he crept up the hill to find out where they were going, saw the Cathar women, spread the word. God forgive us, it was us. We led Aveyron’s men to her…” She couldn’t finish.
But Ulf equated their misfortune to others that had marred Adelia’s progress on the journey: the death of the horse that had thrown her, the murder of Brune who had railed against her. “I tell you, some bugger was out to bring you down. You, not her.”
Hunger and her aching collarbone brought on a terrible irritation. “Well, they’ve done it, haven’t they?” she shouted. “And all of you with me.” She heard her voice rippling along the tunnel, carrying defeat with it, and tried to make amends: “But Rowley will come, I know it.”
She no longer knew it, and after that she gave up saying so.
THE RATTLE OF KEYS coming down the steps from the guardroom brought the prisoners’ bodies to attention and slaver to their mouths, but bewilderment to their minds. Had another twenty-four hours gone by? It wasn’t time for their meal yet.
Though light came into the tunnel, their doors remained locked. Hauling herself up so that she could look through the bars, Adelia saw Father Gerhardt standing outside Mansur, Ulf, and Rankin’s cell. There was a scroll in his hands, and his teeth were showing in the glare of torchlight held for him by one of the guards. “Can all of you hear me?”
Nobody answered; they could hear him.
He began reading. “Hereby is notification from our good and saintly Bishop of Aveyron that the five Cathars in his custody have been found guilty of the most foul sin of heresy. Whereof it has been witnessed that they did congregate in a hut in the hills to perform wicked acts, the devil manifesting himself to them in the shape of a black dog, the Cathars prostrating themselves before it and performing lewd dances…”
There was uproar from the men’s cell; Mansur was shouting in Arabic, Rankin in Gaelic. Above them both rose Ulf’s voice: “Witnessed? Who witnessed that? Give us his name, you bastard.”
“… after which each applied his and her lips to the creature’s rear end in a kiss and did begin copulating with one another…”
“Dog?” asked Boggart, trying to hear. “Only dog we got was Ward.”
Adelia shook her head. Inevitably a dog. Or a goat. Sometimes a cat or toad. And always the osculum infame, the obscene kiss. It was the age-old accusation made against Jews, supposed witches, heretics; never varying except in small detail. God, how tired she was.
Ulf was continuing to demand the name of their accuser. “You bastard, we ain’t even had a trial.”
Stop it, she thought. Darling boy, save your breath. Were not under Henry Plantagenet’s justice now. No trial here, no defense, just sentence.
Father Gerhardt went steadily on, his rising staccato drowning Ulf’s shouts like a hammer. “In accord with which acts, it has been agreed that such wickedness has proved these heretics barred from the mercy of Christ and that their bodies must suffer the penalty of burning that their souls might appear before God’s great Judgment Seat in some part purified cf theír great sins. The sentence to be carried out at twelve noon tomorrow.”
The priest rolled up the scroll and signaled to the guards to light him back to the steps.
Ulf’s voice became a scream. “In the name o’ God, send to Carcassonne, ask the Bishop of Saint Albans. We ain’t Cathars, he’ll tell you.”
“Your bishop is no longer at Carcassonne; he has gone down into Italy”
“Send to Figères, then.”
The priest paused and turned. His smile, if it was a smile, widened. “We have sent,” he said, “and received a reply They don’t know you.”
Adelia let go of the bars and slid down to the floor. A small hand felt for hers in the darkness. There was a whisper. “Burn us? They going to burn us?”
She was dumb.
“Cut me,” Boggart said urgently. “You got to cut me.”
Adelia held her close. “Shhh.”
“Get the baby out. Don’t let ’em burn my baby Cut my belly open, get the baby out. Pull it. You can do that.”
“Sweetheart, I can’t. I can’t. Almighty God help us, I can’t do anything.”
“IT IS DONE, Wolf, my love. The long plan, all our wiles and stratagems have borne their fruit. She’ll die screaming. And, yes, we shall be there, you and I. We will creep away to watch her burn, sniff the smell of roasting pig, see her pork form a rich crackling before she crumbles to cinders. Quae vide, my Lupus. See what I have achieved in your name and be proud of me.”
BOGGART WAS QUIET NOW. They were all quiet. Adelia’s cell was full of Allie and music. She watched her child dance, the little hands waving.
The notes became discordant, changing into the rattle of keys.
God, they’re here. Allie. Not yet, not yet. Jesus, I’m so afraid.
They were opening the men’s door. A kerfuffle-bless them, they won’t go without a fight. Me, too. I’ll run on their spears. God be with me in this, the hour of my death.
She was so deaf and blind with terror that she didn’t hear her own cell door opening, nor see the light as it shone on where she crouched, clutching Boggart in her arms.
And then Mansur was in front of her, holding out his hand. Yes, my dear, I’ll go with you. Just stay close, promise to stay close.
Ulf and Rankin, they were all there. And, behind them, somebody else, telling her something… about shoes?
“Take them off,” he was saying. “Tuck them in your belt. Is the woman sensible? And the Boggart’s. Quiet as mice, now.”
She’d heard the voice before, seen the man; couldn’t put a name to him. But now here was Ulf’s face, alight and eager. “Come on, missus, ups-a-daisy.” He leaned down and snatched off her shoe, the only one she had.
They were out in the tunnel, following a torch held by the strange familiar man.
Up the stairs to the guardroom, where a figure in Aveyron uniform was lying on the noor-his throat cut.
The man put the torch he was holding into a wall sconce and left it there, so that its light shone wetly on the blood of the guard he’d killed.
Up again, into the palace hall. Darkish, lit by a single flambeau; bodies lying in the shadows of the niches. Dead, too?
No, asleep. Servants. She could hear snores. It was night, then. The floor seemed to spread for miles, like a lake, before it reached the outer doors leading to the square; impossible to cross without waking the sleepers.
She was gathering herself now, terror replaced by another comprising wild fear and hope as their bare feet hurried soundlessly over the tiles, following the man… it was the Irishman. The O’Donnell was helping them escape. Rowley had sent him to get them out of here.
But he wasn’t getting them out. Instead of heading for the main doors, the man was taking them toward the entrance to the tower in which they’d first been imprisoned. Its door was open. He stood beside it, waving them to start the ascent ahead of him. We’ve been up there, she thought. There’s no way out that way. I don’t trust him, I don’t trust him.
She could hardly stand and argue; one of the sleeping bodies against the nearer wall was muttering and stirring. Mansur, Ulf, and Rankin were already at the foot of the tower steps, looking back to make sure she and Boggart were following. Quickly pushing Boggart into the turret, Adelia went in after her, the Irishman at her back. As he closed the door behind them, its hinges squeaked-and her nerves with them, so that she stood still, frozen, waiting for discovery. Instead she got a shove and a hissed: “Mother of God, will you move?”
With the door shut, they were in blackness. Up, then, up the winding thread of steps, feeling their way, up past doors leading to store cupboards, some of them open, others shut, none of them apparently occupied. Adelia gave a fractious whisper over her shoulder: “Why are we going up, not out?”
“This is out. Get on.”
It cost her, it cost all the prisoners, weak as they were, to keep climbing. Sobbing for breath, Boggart was beginning to lumber and Adelia had to reach up until, with her one good arm, she located the girl’s backside and she could push.
An unencumbered moon shone into the top room; better still, night air came in through the windows smelling of fields and distance; their laboring lungs sucked it in.
Boggart sank down on the floor, exhausted, but the Irishman pulled her to her feet. “Not yet, missus. Now we go down.”
The mullion of the window overlooking the rear roofs of the palace had ropes tied round it in complicated knotting; a grappling hook by which they’d been thrown up in order to catch round it was on the floor.
“Who goes first?” the O’Donnell said. “Easy as kiss-me-hand and the good Deniz down there ready to catch you.”
He looked toward Adelia. She shook her head at him; if it was as easy as kiss-me-hand, then Boggart must have the first chance of escape. But the maid shrank back, frightened, and Adelia wasn’t going without her. Probably, she thought, I’m not going at all, not with this bloody shoulder.
“I’ll go,” came Ulf’s voice.
Was that Ulf, that stick of a boy with hollow eyes and cheeks? Was the bearded scarecrow Rankin?
The others watched as the Irishman put a loop round the boy’s left foot and made sure his hands were firmly grasping another length of rope. “I’ll ease you down, lad. Just keep hold.” He leaned out of the window and, cupping his own hands, hooted like an owl.
There was an answering hoot from far below. “Off you go now, as my old granny said when she kicked the peddler over the cliff.”
Leaning out, Adelia saw the moonlight touching Ulf’s tow-colored hair and the white of his knuckles around the rope as he went down with the O’Donnell above paying it out, using the mullion as a fulcrum. The black depth below rushed up at her so that she flinched back before forcing herself to lean out again.
Ulf had stopped, he was stuck; he was struggling with a shadowy figure.
“They’ve got him.”
“Who has?” The O’Donnell stuck his head through the window. “No, that’s Deniz. Your boy’s just made the first of the descents, that’s all.”
There were two? Yes, of course, this was the window at the back of the turret, but after the roofs below it lay another drop of at least fifty feet. Again, Adelia felt the helpless irritation of hunger and fear. This was overelaborate and dangerous; Boggart wouldn’t be able to do it; she didn’t think she could. “Why couldn’t we go out through the doors?”
O’Donnell raised an eyebrow. “Well now, I don’t think the guards outside would’ve liked it. They’ll not be as sleepy as the lad downstairs.”
Whom he’d killed.
Outside an owl hooted.
“He’s down,” the Irishman said, pulling the rope back up. “Next.”
Rankin went, breathing hard. After an age, the owl hooted again.
Mansur was next; he didn’t want to go before the women, but Boggart was panicking and Adelia wouldn’t leave her. As the Arab clambered out into the moonlight, Adelia saw that his robe was filthy he who’d always been immaculate.
We stink, she thought, all of us. Except him. From what could be seen in the moonlight, O’Donnell looked neat and contained; he was insouciant, as if unloading cargo from one of his boats, whistling quietly to himself when he took the strain, his muscles stretched against his shirt which, she knew, was splashed at the front with the blood of the guard downstairs.
Mansur’s descent seemed to take longer than Rankin’s, which had taken longer than Ulf’s. Over the noise of her own breathing, Adelia listened desperately for an outbreak of shouts from outside or from the base of the turret when it was discovered that their cells were empty… They couldn’t be so lucky; this was a big palace, heavily populated baby…
“Now, then, ladies.”
“I can’t,” Boggart said. “The baby…”
“Just the thing for him,” the Irishman told her firmly “Dandling in the air? He’ll love it. Come on now.”
Between them, he and Adelia persuaded Boggart to put her foot in the loop. Getting her squeezed through the window’s frame and its mullion was more difficult-Adelia gritted her teeth at the thought of what the constriction might be doing to the fetus in that extended belly-but at last the girl was out. Her agonized face went down into the darkness.
When the owl hoot came, O’Donnell hauled in the rope again. “Come on, missus.”
Adelia gritted her teeth. “My collarbone is broken.”
“Which side?” There was no sympathy
“The right.”
“Hold on with your left hand, then.”
Her foot was put into a loop, an extra swath of rope wound around her body and tied with another complicated knot.
“Don’t look down,” the Irishman said. “Keep your eyes on me.”
She didn’t; she looked firmly at the stones that went sliding just beyond her nose.
Actually, with her good hand clinging onto the rope, her left foot braced against her own weight, and her right pushing herself away from the turret wall, the descent wasn’t as horrendous as she’d thought.
When at last her feet touched tiles, she was enveloped in a strong smell of sweat as the waiting Turkish squire released her from the harness and put his little hands to his mouth to give a final hoot. Her rope went snaking upward.
She was on a flat roof of some building. At last she saw what they were about; on this side the turret towered over a building that formed part of the palace’s rear wall and the wall gave onto wasteland that, in turn, gave way to a hill.
Above her, the O’Donnell slid down easily with the grappling hook under his arm. He gave it to Deniz and shook his head at the rope still dangling from the window. “It’s a sad thing to leave all that fine hemp. Ah, well, maybe the good bishop’ll hang himself with it.”
Taking her left arm, he hurried her over the roof to where a rope ladder was tied to a stanchion. “Can you manage, missus?”
She didn’t know if she could; there’d be fifty feet or more to go. Peeping over the edge, she could see only blackness.
As she hesitated, he got onto the rope ladder himself, curving his body outward so that it could form a cradle for her own. “Manage now?”
“Yes.”
It was still difficult; the ladder swung outward and from side to side and she could only hold on with her left hand, but with the fear of falling negated by the Irishman’s arms forming a protective circle, she managed it. Deniz slid down after them in one movement.
They were outside the palace-out. In the shadow of its retaining wall what seemed to be a large company was shifting about nervously: two horses, two hounds, the laden mule that had always carried O’Donnell’s equipment, Mansur, Boggart, Rankin, Ulf-and the recumbent body of a man.
Instinctively Adelia bent over it. O‘Donnell nudged her with his boot. “Sentry. Leave him.” He looked toward the others and spoke in Arabic. “Get ’em mounted, Deniz.” Turning back, he handed Adelia the shoe she’d lost outside Ermengarde’s cottage. “You’ll be needing this.”
From somewhere in the depths of the palace, an alarm bell began clanging. The empty cells had been discovered.
Already, the darkness of the fields ahead of them was beginning to lighten. Deniz and the O‘Donnell were shoving Boggart onto one of the horses, Mansur was commanding her to move. “’Delia, now.”
Unable to help herself, Adelia touched the recumbent sentry’s neck. He was dead. As her hand withdrew, something squirmed toward her and licked it.
It was Ward.
She gathered him up, hugging his thin, dirty body to her own, before she was dragged away and, still clutching her dog, was thrown up on the horse carrying Boggart. Ulf scrambled up behind her. Rankin and Mansur were already on the other mount.
Then they were off, hounds, horses, mule, the O’Donnell and Deniz loping beside them with reins in their hands.
Not fast enough, she thought. The bare hill ahead was brightening by the second; they would be as obvious on it as a cluster of running deer, but not as speedy. She heard the Irishman puffing at Deniz: “They’ll… look to the square first. Minute or two… before they think of the tower.”
A minute or two. A minute or two to cover acres of open ground. Not enough. She could hear shouting coming from the palace, orders being given, the bell clanging and clanging.
They were reaching the top of the hill, disturbed larks rising up, fluttering and twittering as if to warn Aveyron that the heretics were loose. Were over it. Into trees. No slowing down. Lord, dear Lord, forgive my sins. Don’t let us burn, don’t let us burn. Have mercy on us.
They snaked through woods, they splashed along streams to throw off the scenting hounds yelping in the distance behind them; they jolted up gradients of scree that gave way with loud rattling beneath cantering hooves and the running men’s feet. No stopping, no stopping. Except once when, under the shelter of a mountain’s overhang, they watched a file of mounted men on the skyline encouraging their dogs to search, O’Donnell and Deniz with their hands clasped round the muzzles of their own two hounds to stop answering yelps.
Off again, under a bleak sun that stared accusingly down at them, into the shade. No stopping, no stopping, up and down a landscape that reared around them to make progress more difficult. On until, whether they died in flames or not, they must stop, but were forbidden by the Irishman’s insistent: “Not yet. We’re not away yet.”
“We must,” Adelia whispered. “The baby” God knew if that child could bear any more of this-certainly Boggart couldn’t; the girl was only semiconscious.
“Not yet. We’re not away yet.”
Thirst. A scrabble in a mountain stream to scoop water into their mouths and let the horses and mule nuzzle it. Off again, bumping, holding on, O’Donnell and Deniz tirelessly dragging at horses that began to stumble.
Darkness, chill. The sound of dripping water. A cave. They were all inside. A stop-please God the last.
“This’ll do,” the O’Donnell said.
IT WAS A WONDERFUL CAVE, once the escapees were fit enough to appreciate it-a process that took time, rest, food, and plenty of water from the clear, cold lake that lay within it.
The floor was of blackish earth embedded with big, round pebbles, and, though the entrance to it was narrow, the walls rose to something near cathedral height so that voices were returned in an echo that recalled to Adelia the tunnel outside their cells.
“A land of caves, the Languedoc,” the O’Donnell told them, “as riddled with holes as a weeviled cheese.”
But how, she wondered, had he known about this one? There was little opportunity to ask him; as they recovered, Mansur, Rankin, and Ulf were full of questions…
“Well now, that five Cathars were claiming to have acquaintance with Princess Joanna struck me as strange when Peter-you remember Peter who usually served us when we dined? When he told me about Aveyron’s letter, I wanted to make sure it wasn’t the five of you, unlike some who didn’t care. I left word at Figères that I was going ahead to Saint Gilles to arrange shipping. Instead, Deniz and me went to the cowshed to find it burned down, and the Ermengarde’s cottage with it. Well, a nod is as good as a wink to a blind man, my old granny used to say.”
“But how did you find us?”
“It was the odiferous mongrel,” the O’Donnell said. “What we did find, lying near the cottage, was one of her ladyship’s shoes. A good deal of time we’d have wasted but for that. Her scent would have faded after all this time but that dog’s could survive a sea gale, and his head was forever on her feet. I gave the shoe to my hounds to sniff, and right enough, didn’t it lead us straight over the mountains? And there was our little stinker whining to get in through the Aveyron palace gates. Thank him nicely, now.”
Adelia rubbed her cheek against the head of the dog in her arms. The mongrel had been much wasted by his vigil outside the palace, barely able to walk-he’d had to be put up on the mule amongst its packages during the escape. Though he was recovering now that he was being regularly fed, his mistress could hardly bear to let him go; as both of them were almost as filthy as each other, she could indulge in petting him as he deserved.
However, it was the Irishman the rest of them thanked with every grateful protestation they could think of. He and Deniz had scouted the palace, made their plan, used their rope craft-“Never venture forth without plenty of rope and a good mule to carry it”-to get in, and out.
“But how did you know where in the palace we were?” Ulf asked.
Affecting to preen, the man put his thumbs under his shirt collar. “We put up at an inn, Deniz and me, two innocent pilgrims on their way to the shrine at Rocamadour, and careless with their money. ”Isn’t this the grandest town with the grandest palace you’ve ever seen, Deniz?” “Sure and it is, master-I wonder what it’s like inside?”
He put his hands down. “We didn’t need even that stratagem. The town was still talking about Ermengarde, God rest her soul, and anticipating the burnings to come-without much enthusiasm, I may say. Not a popular man, Bishop of Aveyron. There was much discussion about whether you were in his cells-they’re not popular, either, I can tell you-or in the tower. By the time it had finished, we knew every mouse hole in the place.”
Who are you? Adelia wondered. The fleeting reference to Ermengarde and burning had been made easily and it was as if his account of their rescue might have been a mere exploit carried out on a whim. Yet to do what he had done argued a ferocity of purpose to free them, which their previous acquaintance hardly merited. He had saved their lives at considerable risk to his own.
She asked what was, to her, the question: “Was it the Bishop of Saint Albans who sent you after us? Where is he?”
“In Italy, lady.” O’Donnell’s long eyes slid toward her. “Went straight on to Lombardy, as ordered by King Henry He’ll be joining up with us in Palermo, when he’s spared.”
Ulf said: “So he doesn’t even know…?”
“About your abduction? No. Still thinking you’re on your way to England. And nobody likely to tell him different”-the eyes slid again-“though I’m sure, if they had, the dear man would have been posthaste over here to box Aveyron’s ears for him and get you out.”
Ulf was asking why the Bishop of Winchester hadn’t done it, why they’d been abandoned… Something like that; Adelia had stopped listening.
She got up and wandered over to the lake at the rear of the cave, took off her shoes-one of them was worn through now; both of them disgusting-to walk into its shallow, icy water.
The king, first and foremost. Never her. I could have died. This hideous resentment might be unfair-Rowley hadn’t even known of her danger-but she felt it, God, she felt it.
I could have died-and that I didn’t, nor the others, has been due to a virtual stranger.
She stood still so long that the ripples she’d brought to the surface of the water to become still and, dim though the light was, reflect her image in it.
A mess was what she saw; hair like a bramble bush-what had happened to the scarf Ermengarde had lent her?-and beneath it a face distorted with dirt and despair.
“Cheer up, now.” The Irishman stood at the edge of the lake, watching her. “We’ll have you to Palermo in a wink.”
Not Palermo. I want to go home to Allíe. Her eyes still on the water, she said: “I don’t know why you did what you did, but I thank you. For all of us, from the depths of my heart, I thank you.”
He turned away “You’ll be needing a new pair of shoes,” he said.
WOLF IS BARKING inside Scarry’s head. “How did they escape? where did she go?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know. Stop it, my love, you’re hurting me.”
It’s the worms; they twist and squirm through holes in his brain so that he can’t think for pain.
“You promised.”
“Cathars must have rescued her.”
“Find her. Destroy her. I am you and you are me, forever. Homo homini lupus.”
“I shall, I shall. wíll you give me peace, when I do?”
“Oh, yes, then we shall both have peace.”
But the worms keep up their squígglíng, for all that Scarry can do in trying to take his head off and let them out.
DENIZ MADE HER SHOES. The burden his mule carried was a cornucopia from which the little Turk produced a huge needle, oiled thread, canvas, and a piece of leather.
While he was at work, the ex-prisoners did their best to become clean.
With the men standing dutifully outside the cave entrance, eyes averted, the two women stripped and used the lake as a washtub for themselves and their clothes. Adelia tried to persuade Boggart to immerse herself completely, as she was doing, but the girl stayed on the edge with Ward, laving herself and pleading her pregnancy. “Be a shock to the baby, missus.”
Perhaps she was right; the water was very cold, but, to Adelia, its bite was almost baptismal, taking away stain not only from her body but, in part, from her soul.
Whatever it was, she emerged tingling with a new determination. I’m alive and, God dammit, I’ll stay alive. I’m goíng to get back to Allie.
The mule’s pack did not include soap, so laundering was less successful; even scrubbed and dried in the sun, the ex-prisoners’ clothes were poor excuses for garments. The O’Donnell’s sash, which he gave to Adelia to make a sling for her arm, looked positively resplendent against the rest of her once she was dressed.
He also produced an old cloak and hood so that Mansur’s ruin of a headdress-which the Arab insisted on still wearing-would be covered.
“So much the better for those who see us,” he said, when they were all inspected. “Tagrag pilgrims trying to find their way to Compostela and not so much as a cross in their pockets to keep the devil from dancing, as my old granny used to say.”
He wouldn’t let them stay in the cave longer than two days. “For if I’m aware of this one, maybe so are our pursuers.”
How was he aware of this one? Ulf, who’d spent a lot of time deep in conversation with O’Donnell and to whom Adelia posed the question, grinned and said: “He’s in the smuggling business, missus, ain’t you got that yet? There’s more goes into these caves than escaped prisoners.”
A man of diverse activities, then-fleet owner, transporter of crusaders, smuggler, killer, savior… He bewildered Adelia. Despite what she owed him, she still found herself uncomfortable in his company. The others didn’t; to them he was an angel only lacking the wings.
Mansur, who knew her too well, said softly: “He had to quiet those guards, ’Delia. There was no other way than by a knife.”
“I know,” she said. “I just wish…”
She was leaving too many dead behind her.
Ulf inquired of the Irishman the details of what had taken place at Figères and, after listening, came storming over to where Adelia was resting.
“Did you hear that? Hear that? They denied us. Bloody Judas Iscariots, the lot of ’em. Sent a message to Aveyron saying we was none of theirs. None of theirs.” He was almost dancing with rage. “Now will you believe me? There’s someone doing dirty work somewhere.”
“They should have made sure, I suppose, but it’s understandable. They assumed Mansur and Boggart and I were on our way back to England. They couldn’t have expected…”
“Understandable? They near as a button got us all burned-and it was deliberate.”
“No,” she said firmly, “whatever it was, it wasn’t deliberate.”
The boy’s shoulders sagged. He gave a despairing glance in the direction of the others and left her alone.
On the second night they set off again, going by moonlight. Adelia would have preferred them to be able to rest up longer-for Boggart’s sake, if not her own-but O’Donnell insisted that Aveyron’s men might be searching every cave in the area.
“Our good bishop’ll not be lightly robbed of his human torches. He’s mounting a crusade all his own-setting an example to the Pope.”
“Where are we going?”
“A long way A village I know, not too far from the coast.”
Though they weren’t being dragged this time, and could take turns riding, the going was as heavy as it had been when tied to their captors’ ropes. The moonlight deceived them into taking false steps and the mountains became steeper.
Until she got used to them, Adelia found Deniz’s shoes difficult to walk in. Whilst the miracles of invention-a shaped sole of leather to which sailcloth was stitched and then tied up round the ankle so that her feet looked like two perambulating plum puddings-were serving her well, they were less than supple.
By day, they stayed under the cover of trees somewhere near a stream. Mansur, Ulf, and Rankin took turns keeping watch, while the Irishman, Deniz, and the hounds went hunting, and the women gathered wood and searched for late herbs with which to flavor a game stew. After this, they slept the sun down from the sky before starting afresh.
Eventually, the O’Donnell decided they were beyond Aveyron’s reach and could start traveling by day. “Time I ventured into civilization and got us more horses.”
“Civilization.” Adelia savored the word. “I can get us some new clothes.” And then remembered she had no money; her purse had been in Ermengarde’s cottage, along with her medical pack.
“I’m going alone,” he said. “Quicker. As for clothes, I’ll see what I can do, though I doubt the country market I’ve in mind will provide much in the way of fashion.”
“Thank you,” she said tersely She’d never been dependent on a man, even on Rowley, and she hating that she was dependent on this one who had done so much for her already.
He rode off the next morning, taking the other mount with him, and didn’t come back until evening, riding a shaggy black pony with six others like it on a leading rein behind him. “Mérens stock,” he said of them, “nothing stronger for mountain going.” He’d also bought sacks of oats for horse feed, two shapeless, heavy woolen smocks for Adelia and Boggart-“all I could find”-and some equally thick cloaks, as shaggy as the ponies, for all of them. “We’ll be needing these. It’s going to be cold.”
It was. During the day they were kept warm by their cloaks and the steam rising from their laboring ponies, but by evening it was near to freezing. At least they were at liberty now to build roaring fires at night, for there was nobody to see them.
Adelia had not believed that there could be such a vast stretch of uninhabited country. Occasionally, in the distance, they spotted a shepherd and heard the tiny wail of a flute as he piped to his flock, but that was all.
The landscape became dramatic, plunging into deserted, isolated valleys before rearing toward the sky in chaotic formations of crags that grew out of the close-fitting grass that covered them like the top of a man’s bald head emerging from a fringe of hair. There were tarns, still little lakes trapped in a mountain scoop that reflected clouds and sky and circling eagles.
There was no stopping, except to let the ponies graze, and no roads, though it seemed as if they followed some track that now and then revealed itself in worn, close-set stones, and Adelia wondered if some ancient people had built themselves a way that led to the coast.
They became hardened, surprisingly fit, even Ward. Rankin especially was a man reborn, whistling and singing songs from the Highlands of which this country reminded him. “It suits me well,” he’d say. “Ay, it suits me well. A drap of usquebaugh and I’d call the king my uncle.”
“Some rotgut they drink in Scotland, so he says,” Ulf explained to Adelia. “Made from peat water, Gawd help us.”
Adelia’s worry was for Boggart who, when it was time to rest the ponies by dismounting and leading them, had developed the slight waddle of a woman in late pregnancy
The Irishman noticed it. “When’s the baby due?” he asked when the two of them were walking together alongside Ulf.
“I don’t know, she doesn’t know, either. Could be this month, could be next.” Adelia realized she’d lost track of time. “What’s the date?”
He pushed back his cap and ran his fingers through his hair, calculating. “Must be Saint Cecilia’s Day as near as dammit.”
Nearly the end of November. And going south, farther and farther away from Allie. She panicked: “Why can’t we use a decent, fast road? Why do we have to stick to these bloody mountains?”
He shrugged. “For one thing, your ladyship, there’s only one road round here and that leads to Toulouse, which, I may tell you, we’re bypassing because if Princess Joanna’s procession has left Figères, which it will have by now, that’s where it will be passing through and I’ve no wish to bump into it. For another, where we’re going is ín the mountains, and the track we’re on is as quick a way to get to it as any.”
“What does it matter if we bump into the others? Why can’t we rejoin the procession?”
“Acause,” Ulf intervened, patiently, “you got an enemy in the undergrowth and until he’s flushed out we ain’t taking no more risks, are we, Admiral?”
“He’s right, lady,” O’Donnell said. “There’s been too many nasty coincidences, so Master Ulf’s been telling me, and a good run is better than a bad stand, as my old granny used to say. In the name of God, what are you doing, woman…?”
Adelia had fallen over again. “Lying down with my face in the grass,” she hissed. “What are you doing?”
She saw a flash of his white teeth as he extended a hand to help her up, but suddenly she’d had enough. She was lost in this limbo on top of the world; they were all lost; they would wander it forever, die in it.
Hammering her fists on the ground, she gave way to a temper tantrum. “I don’t know where we are. I don’t know where we’re going. I don’t want to be here. I hate this bloody country it’s cruel and I hate it. I hate everything. I want my daughter, oh God, what am I doing in this place? I want to go home.”
It was Mansur who lifted her up and led her away He sat her on a rock, knelt down, wiping her face with his sleeve, and chastising her.
“You are rude to him. None of us want to be here, yet we are in the merciful hand of Allah who sent this man to us. Without him, we would have followed Ermengarde to the fire.”
She leaned forward so that she could bury her face in the rough, strong-smelling wool of his cloak. “I want to go home, Mansur.”
“I know.” He let her cry herself out, patting and soothing her like she patted and soothed Ward when he was frightened.
At last she raised her head. Over the Arab’s shoulder, she could see Rankin staring at the sky as if it was of absorbing interest. Deniz had taken feeding bags from the mule’s pack so that the ponies could have some oats. The O’Donnell was watching him, chewing on a piece of grass.
Boggart and Ulf were staring after her in alarm, and she thought how good they were; apart from Ulf’s lament for Excalibur, there’d been no whining from either of them. They made her ashamed.
Still sniveling she said: “I’m sorry.”
He patted her again. “If you break, we all break.”
Wearily, she kissed him and stood up. “I’m not broken, just a bit creased.”
She walked over to the O’Donnell. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It won’t happen again.”
He took the piece of grass out of his mouth. “I’ll get you home,” he said quietly “but first I fulfill my obligation to Henry and his daughter, for that’s my duty.”
“I understand.”
“Now here’s the plan. I lodge the five of you in this village I know whilst Deniz and I go on to Saint Gilles. My ships are there, but my captains’ll not sail without I tell them to.”
She nodded.
He went on: “If Joanna’s arrived, I launch her and her party off to Palermo. If she’s not there yet, I give my captains their sailing orders for when she does come. Either way, I’ll be back for you. How’ll that be?”
The sky was all at once brighter; somewhere a chaffinch was trilling as it did in England; the world had righted itself.
She smiled at him. “I am ashamed,” she said.
“No need.” Abruptly, he got up and went to help Deniz with the ponies.
“Ain’t he a marvel, missus?” Boggart whispered.
“Yes,” Adelia said, and meant it. Suddenly she grinned. “But if he mentions his old granny again I’m going to kill him.”
THE CASTLE OF CARONNE gave the impression that a dragon had landed on a jagged mountaintop, had fancied its effect against the limitless sky, furled its wings, and turned to stone. Then, as if the dragon could afford it protection, a village had snuggled itself into the forest just below, forming a horseshoe of houses edged with fields so steep that the sheep and goats grazing on them appeared lopsided. At the very bottom was a little church.
Away in the long way distance but still visible were the Pyrenees, the snow-topped range of mountains over which lay Spain.
“That’s where we’re going?” Adelia asked the O’Donnell. “That castle?”
“That’s where we’re going. You’ll be safe there. Even Cathars are safe there.”
She nodded. A stronghold. But it had become embedded in her that Cathars were safe nowhere, and this prominence was visible for miles. She saw the all-encompassing eye of the Cathar-hating Church swiveling toward it, marking it, watching its victims as they crawled up to it-and wrinkling in a foreboding wink.
Perhaps it was strongly defended.
It didn’t help that they arrived at dawn, reminding the five ex-prisoners of their entry into Aveyron; the village’s cocks crowing, shutters opening, people calling to one another to come out and see.
But this time the calls turned to welcome. “Don Patricio. Look, it’s Don Patricio.” Children, shouting the name, ran ahead as the Irishman, waving to his admirers, led his little cavalcade up the main street, and up again over chasm-crossing bridges, through mossy, crumbling archways until they reached half-open doors and the dim interior of the castle’s hall.
“It’s Don Patricio. Don Patricio.”
In response to the children’s noise, a woman whose bare breasts were concealed only by her long and beautiful dark hair came out of an upper room to lean over a balcony and smile at the Irishman. “Is it you, Patrick? Where’s my silk?”
“Not this trip, my lady Where’s your husband?”
From the language both were using-an individualistic and just understandable version of Occitan-Adelia realized that they were amongst Catalans, who populated both sides of the Pyrenees as well as the mountains themselves. These were a people who regarded themselves as a separate nation from the French, Spanish, or Plantagenet kingdoms-disliking the French most of all.
“Dead last Michaelmas, alas,” the woman said.
Widowhood didn’t seem to be overburdening her with grief-a young man was emerging from the room behind her, hastily buttoning himself into a priest’s cassock.
O’Donnell called: “Come down, then, Fabrisse. I have some refugees for you.”
While she went back to fetch some covering, the priest sidled quickly down the stairs, his hand flicking embarrassed blessings toward the newcomers before he disappeared through the entrance.
The woman came down in a more leisurely fashion, making the most of it, her superb legs showing through the gap of the cloak she’d wrapped herself in.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the Countess of Caronne,” said O’Donnell.
“The Dowager Countess,” she corrected. “And any friends of Don Patricio’s are welcome here. You’ll forgive the count himself not making an appearance. At the moment he’s asleep in his cradle.”
She had a lovely, dangerous face; high cheekbones; dark, slanted, amused eyes that studied each of her ragged guests while the introductions were made, raising her eyebrows at the unprepossessing dog they had brought with them, taking in Boggart’s pregnancy with approval, dwelling particularly on Adelia.
“You have luggage?” she asked and was told they had not. “Then we must see what we can do in the way of clothes-they will have to be of hemp, unfortunately, this man”-she bared little white teeth at the Irishman in a snarl-“having neglected to bring what I ordered. But breakfast first.” She let out a screech. “Thomassia.”
There was an answering screech from somewhere to the left. “What?”
“Breakfast for seven, two of them to be taken up to the solar…” Her eyelashes fluttered at the O’Donnell. “… where you can tell me all about it.”
They’re lovers, Adelia thought, and felt a curious sense of relief, though she wasn’t sure why Adding the title of “philanderer” to the man’s many facets placed him for her; putting him in a category that was recognizable, an adventurer with, quite probably, a woman in every port-this sort of woman; lovely, careless with her favors.
I can be easy with him now.
Breakfast was generous; goat’s cheese, goat’s milk, ham, sausage, smoked trout, fresh bread fetched from the village with a strong olive oil to dip it into, herb-flavored wine, some preserved figs that had been picked from a tree that rambled around and into the kitchen’s window slit, all of it served by Thomassia, a stubby young woman, whose nonstop instructions in a Catalan patois made her sound bad-tempered but which, from the way in which she kept nudging her guests’ arms toward their wooden plates, seemed to be urges to keep them eating. Ward, a type of dog she’d not seen before-who had?-made her laugh and was thrown scraps until he could eat no more.
Thomassia was especially solicitous toward Mansur, frequently extending her hand to him. “S endeví-ína, s endeví-ína, el contacontes.”
“What does the bint want of me?”
“I think,” Adelia said. “I think she’s asking you to tell her fortune.”
Mansur was offended. “I am no cup reader.”
“I’ll tell the lassie her fortune.” Rankin leaned over the table to grab Thomassia’s hand. Even while cramming food into his mouth, he hadn’t taken his eyes off her. “Tell her she’s a wee angel, so she is, and all this feast lacks is parritch. Tell her she’s destined for a fine husband.”
Adelia did her best. “What’s parritch?” she muttered at Ulf.
“A mess of cracked oats. He made me eat some once. Never again.”
Finally replete, they were returned to the hall and saw what, because they’d been so grateful for its immediate protection, they’d missed at first-a poverty that had not been reflected in their meal. The furniture was sparse and worn, some of it battered. The stones of the floor showed grass growing through cracks. Other cracks in the walls had either been roughly repaired or not repaired at all, letting in long bars of sunlight.
It occurred to them that the stables they’d passed on their way in had been empty, nor had there been any sign of servants other than Thomassia.
Hardly what was to be expected of a comital palace.
Adelia remembered Henry Plantagenet’s contempt for countries which, as this one did here, maintained a system of partible inheritance, by which land and property were divided equally between heirs.
In England, under Henry II, Norman law insisted instead on primogeniture, whereby the eldest legitimate son inherited everything. “Primogeniture forces younger brothers to go out and work for their bloody living,” the king had told her. “It leaves estates intact, keeps a proper aristocratic structure, it means alord is alord.” He’d added what was of more importance to him: “And he’s easier to tax.”
Dividing property, subdividing it for the next generation, then for the next ad infinitum, meant, he’d said, “that some poor sod ends up with a title, a few fields, and not so much as a clout to wipe his arse on.”
Presumably, the baby Count of Caronne asleep in his cradle upstairs was such a one.
So we’re vulnerable, Adelia thought, because these mountain people in their poverty are vulnerable.
There could be no protection for the Cathars here, not even the Catholics who tolerated them; no true asylum here from the rich, omnipotent enemy that surrounded them. They might think themselves secure, but Adelia knew they were not.
IN THE ROOM UPSTAIRS, where the arms of Caronne were carved into one of its thick stone walls, the Countess of Caronne sat on her rumpled bed, listening, her eyes watching the O’Donnell where he stood at the window looking out over its colossal view as he told his tale.
When he’d finished, she said: “That was a risk you took rescuing her, Patrick.”
He didn’t turn round. “That was a risk I took rescuing them all.”
“Her.”
He gave a grunt that was half a laugh. “So obvious?”
“To me, yes.”
He slammed his fist on a sill two feet thick. “Why? Will you tell me that? Why? Of all the women… she’s nothing to look at, stubborn as a Munster heifer, and all she can see is her fokking bishop.”
The countess shrugged her white shoulders. “It happens. Not to me, Blessed Mother be thanked, but it happens.”
“I never thought it.” He went and sat beside her on the bed. “Look after her for me, Fabrisse. Deniz and I will have to leave tomorrow.”
“I will.”
He gave her a kiss. “She’s a useful doctor, should you be ill. There’s thirty of Joanna’s household wouldn’t be alive today if she hadn’t dragged them back from their coffins. And a smile on her to light up the sun.”
“I said I will look after her.”
“I am sorry about your husband.”
She shrugged, sliding a patched work shift over her magnificent body. “He was old.”
“Will you marry again?”
“I may have to; it depends who offers.”
“Meanwhile…”
“Meanwhile.”
They smiled at each other. As she leaned down to search for her clogs, he tweaked her backside for old times’ sake. “You’re still the most beautiful woman I ever saw,” he said
“I know.” She gave him a push to the door. “Silk,” she reminded him. “The price has just gone up; it must be orfrois, with spun silver in the weft. And a jointed knight puppet for Raymond when he’s older, and a cloak for Thomassia, English wool is preferable, and a new skillet, and we have run out of cumin…”
Still enumerating, she accompanied him down the stairs, his arm round her shoulders.
BY THE TIME Adelia had finished milking her third goat of the morning, Thomassia and the Dowager Countess had done ten each.
A cold wind was blowing through the goat pens-a wind of some sort was always blowing up here-but, wrapped in her cloak, she had been warmed by the activity She sat back on her haunches, her shoulder aching only slightly-it was getting better. So, she thought, was her prowess at milking. The other two women had been surprised when she’d approached the first set of goat teats with a scientific interest that had turned out in practice to be totally inept.
“You’ve never milked anything?”
“It wasn’t on my school’s curriculum.”
That she had attended a school, let alone a medical school, also amazed them; the countess could sign her name; Thomassia wasn’t able even to do that.
Adelia would have kept her education from them, but it appeared that the talkative Irishman had made it known. She became worried that they might broadcast it. “I’ve had to learn that, outside Sicily the terms female doctor and witch are synonymous.”
“No, no,” Fabrisse said easily “Nobody will betray you. We have no truck with authority here.”
Caronne, it appeared, was a stopping place on a secret route to the Catalans in the Pyrenees, receiving and passing on visitors whom the Church would not only have abhorred, but imprisoned-or worse. Adelia and her friends were merely part of a succession of smugglers, Cathar perfects, wandering Moslem soothsayers, and other oddities to whom Caronne had provided refuge; its own position being too anomalous for betrayal. When the Bishop of Carcassonne’s tax gatherer rode up the mountain on his tithe-collecting visit-he was expected any day, so a lookout had been posted-there would be a rush of villagers herding as many of their taxable sheep and as much of their grain into the deep recesses of the forest as possible, hoping that their absence wouldn’t arouse his suspicion that too few herds and sacks remained.
This, despite the fact that not handing over the bishop’s portion would, according to the Church, send their souls to hell.
Neither did Fabrisse, a Catholic devoted to the Virgin Mary, see any reason to believe in the rightness of the men who ruled her faith and distorted its precepts. Many of her friends in the village were Cathars and, though she deplored the fact that her own Church was everywhere in the region losing ground to Catharism, she would no more have betrayed them than she would have thrown her beloved baby son over her castle ramparts. All were locked together into a united front of shared poverty
“The count used to say he owed nothing to a tax inspector who rode up here on a fine horse with a retinue of inspectors more richly dressed than he was. Jesus told us to render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s, but he did not anticipate that His own Church would itself become Caesar.”
It was a view that suffused the entire village. When Adelia and Fabrisse were passing through its square one evening on their way to take a fennel chest rub to the countess’s elderly Cathar friend, Na Roqua, Adelia heard the gathering of men sitting under the shade of an elm tree discussing the carnelages tax which would soon be due.
“Why should we have to pay over so many of our lambs to the bishop?” one of them asked; obviously an annual and rhetorical question.
“Don’t let’s pay anything” another voice said. “Let’s kill the bishop instead.”
Listening to the rueful laughter, Fabrisse said to Adelia: “You hear? You are safe here. You must not fear.”
She’s so easy, God protect her. But I saw Ermengarde burn; she didn’t. She’s right, though, I must stop being frightened, I’m tired of being frightened.
Even so, she couldn’t help asking whether the village priest would keep silent. “Won’t he tell his bishop about us, about you, the Cathars?”
“Him?” The Dowager Countess’s perfect eyebrows rose in a comic arch. The priest’s carnal sins ensured both his silence and collaboration, his services to Caronne’s lonely women not being restricted to the masses he performed in church.
Adelia was becoming very fond of the Dowager Countess; indeed, had never met anyone quite like her. There was a high honesty to her that prevented Adelia categorizing her as a loose woman; it was all one with the woman’s disregard for the rules men made.
She made no bones about the fact that, husbandless just now, she had physical needs; why not cater to them? She took the young priest from the little church to her bed rather as other people took a hot brick on which to warm their feet. (Adelia wondered if, when Fabrisse went to confession, he absolved her of a sin they had committed together.)
“Besides,” Fabrisse went on, “you are the Irishman’s friends, and therefore honored guests. Your safety is of utmost importance to us.”
“You all trust him that much?” Adelia couldn’t help asking.
“Of course. Don’t you?”
“Yes, yes, I do. It’s just that… he risked his life for us, and I still don’t see why he should have.”
Fabrisse’s eyes rested on her face for a moment. “Don’t you?” she said again. “Then, in that, I cannot help you.”
IN CARONNE, EVERYBODY, noble or peasant, worked with his hands. Fabrisse might be the countess, but she didn’t find it demeaning to fetch water from her well in jars balanced on her head as the other women did, nor chop her own firewood, nor do her own laundry in the stream below the castle. She and Thomassia were mistress and servant but both joined in the gathering on Na Roqua’s roof balcony of an evening with several of the other village women to spin or comb one another’s hair with a nit comb-a sign of friendship-whilst they gossiped.
Adelia gathered that the women had a rougher time of it than their menfolk, working just as hard for less reward, any objection being overridden or even met with the occasional blow. They didn’t complain of it, being used to it, but it was apparent that they flowered once they were widowed-and mostly Caronne women lived longer than the men.
Na Roqua, Fabrisse’s friend, for instance, and her neighbor, Na Lizier, had set up their own businesses since their husbands died and now ruled their sons and grandchildren like the matriarchs they had both become.
BY DAY, BOGGART and Adelia helped Fabrisse and Thomassia with their chores and began the endless preparations for Christmas, which, whether their views coincided on the birth of Jesus or not, Cathars and Catholics celebrated at a feast for the whole village in the castle hall.
Mansur, Ulf, and Rankin spent their time assisting the village shepherds with their flocks-a purely male occupation-or used their skills to try to mend some of the castle’s dilapidation.
Taking part in these things restored to the ex-prisoners a good deal of what the Bishop of Aveyron had taken away. Rankin, especially, was most at home. “Like the Highlands wi’out the bloody rain” was how he described it, though it was beginning to be apparent that, for him, part of Caronne’s attraction lay in his growing friendship with Thomassia.
Were being absorbed, Adelia thought. This marvelous, peculiar place is taking us into its heart. She was taking it into hers, but there was no sign of the O’Donnell coming to take the five of them away, and at any time the snow might come, to cut them off from the outside world.
At night, thinking of Allie, she wondered how long this idyll would last, or how long she wanted it to.
ON CHRISTMAS EVE MORNING, the women were preparing for the next day’s feast in a kitchen festooned with the hanging corpses of hens, ducks, and geese waiting to be put on their spits, when Mansur appeared in the doorway “There is trouble in the village.”
Adelia dropped the hand mill with which she’d been grinding chestnuts for the torte aux marrons, Caronne’s version of Christmas pudding.
Her eyes met Boggart’s in the same terror. They’ve come for us. Then, with Thomassia, Fabrisse, her baby son tied to her back, and Ward at their heels, they pelted outside and heard the screaming coming from down the mountain.
Not again, God, please not again.
It sounded like slaughter. It wasn’t; when they got there, it was Na Roqua standing on the flat roof of her house, yelling at Na Lizier, who was standing on hers and shrieking back insults across the narrow alley that divided their two houses.
Just two women quarrelíng. Thank you, Lord, thank you.
A crowd had collected to watch so that Fabrisse had to elbow her way through it. “Sancta Maria, what is happening here?”
“Stand back,” Na Roqua screeched at her. “Don’t go into that alley. Just see what lies within it.”
The thin morning sun hadn’t yet reached the passageway and Fabrisse had to peer to see what her old friend was pointing at. Adelia peered with her and managed to make out the body of a large male goat lying on the baked earth with its head twisted at an unnatural angle.
“She has killed him,” howled Na Roqua. “The jealous bitch enticed him onto her roof and threw him off.”
“I wouldn’t entice him into hell,” Na Lizier screamed back. “Which is where he belongs. I never touched the brute.”
“Oh yes you did. Look, look, there are no hoofprints in the alley. Did he fall into it from the sky, then? You pushed him.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Blessed Mother,” Fabrisse whispered. “It’s Auguste.”
Adelia had already encountered Auguste-there was a goat-toothed tear in the sleeve of her new hemp gown to prove it. The ram was Na Roqua’s pride and joy, but a pest to everybody else, roaming at will, eating whatever it could reach, and trying to copulate with anything that had a corresponding hole. (It was no coincidence that Auguste was the Christian name of the Bishop of Carcassonne.) That he hadn’t come to a sticky end before this was because the village was even more frightened of Na Roqua than it was of the goat.
It did look like murder. Na Roqua was right, there appeared to be no hoofprints in the alley; Auguste certainly hadn’t wandered into it. Adelia tried to keep her face straight. “Such a relief,” she whispered back. “I thought it was something dreadful.”
There was no amusement on the countess’s face; it was pale. “This is dreadful. Not only will it ruin Christmas, it will start a feud that could last for years.”
“A goat?”
“These are my people, ‘Delia. I know them and I tell you that a rift between the Roquas and the Liziers…”
It had already begun. Amongst the onlookers, a Lizier grandson had made an unfavorable comment on Na Roqua and was being berated for it by one of her sons.
“You must do something” Fabrisse said.
“Me?”
“Yes, yes. You are the famous doctor. Ulf says you solve mysteries, solve this one.”
With narrowed eyes, Adelia glared toward the edge of the crowd where Ulf stood with Mansur, Rankin, and Ward, all of them watching the growing row with interest.
“And solve it so that nobody is to blame,” Fabrisse hissed. She stepped forward and raised her voice to a pitch that cut through an increasing pandemonium. “Listen to me. Listen to me.”
There was immediate quiet; the Dowager Countess might dress in tatters but she was Caronne’s authority.
Holding Adelia’s sleeve and displaying her like a landed fish, she shouted: “Here is someone who can solve this puzzle. This lady is a mistress of the art of death. Don Patricio told me. He said that the dead speak to her.”
More silence. At last, one of the Roqua sons said: “You mean, Auguste will tell her what happened?”
“Yes,” said Fabrisse.
“For God’s sake…” Adelia muttered.
“I don’t care,” Fabrisse muttered back.
“But I don’t know about goats.”
“I don’t care. It is why the Virgin sent you to us.”
That was why, was it? It was ridiculous; Na Roqua and her family were Cathars; Na Lizier and hers, Catholic. Two faiths could live side by side without quarreling, while the death of a damned goat could start a vendetta. Yet Fabrisse, who knew these people better than she did, was truly concerned that it would.
oh, Lord, what to do? I suppose I owe it to this woman, to this village, to keep the peace. Somehow.
But a goat?
However, Adelia was Adelia; if there was a truth to find, she had to find it, no matter what came later. Death was her business. For the first time in a long time, she must practice her profession.
Breaking away from Fabrisse’s retaining arm, she strode toward Na Roqua’s house and opened its low door, to be afflicted by a strong stink of goat-when Auguste had not been pursuing his wanderings, he’d shared accommodation with his mistress.
The windows were shuttered against the cold, as they were in all Caronne’s houses, so that, when they were at home, its people lived in a semi-darkness lit only by a fire.
Adelia examined the lintel of the front door, then opened the shutters in order to look at the floor of the room into which it led. She climbed the stairs, studying each step as she went. Into the upper room, then up again to the roof, where the gaze of Na Roqua and the crowd below fell upon her with embarrassing expectation.
She returned downstairs, this time into what was usually the kitchen but here had been transformed into a place from which Na Roqua, having no use for a kitchen thanks to being supplied with food by her daughters-in-law, ran her wool-carding trade.
One side of the room was packed with sheep’s wool and smelled strongly of its lanolin, although, sniffing hard, Adelia caught another whiff of goat. A set of shelves held a carding wheel and combs, a few of which had fallen on the floor.
She spent so long considering the place that, when she finally emerged outside, the crowd was getting restless. “Auguste can’t tell her much in there,” somebody pointed out, to a growl of agreement.
“For sweet Mary, it’s the animal you’re supposed to be examining” Fabrisse told her quietly, and then, shouting to the crowd: “Be quiet. She is listening to Auguste, she follows his last steps.”
Adelia ignored them all. She crossed the entrance to the alley to go next door into Na Lizier’s house.
Impossible to tell anything from the front doorstep, too many feet had passed over it. The stairs, though-only Na Lizier had climbed them today to judge from the thick shape of her boots in their dust. No, oh dear, here were the smaller prints of a hoofed animal.
Na Lizier had lied.
But, ah, this was interesting; the hoofprints showed signs of dragging the higher up the stairs they went, occasionally overlaid by the tread of shoes. By the time they reached the roof, they had been obliterated as if badly swept by a duster. Had Na Lizier poisoned or tried to strangle poor Auguste and the goat had hauled himself up to the roof to get away from her? Or to sniff fresh air?
Hmm.
Emerging into daylight once more, Adelia gave a clear order: “Take the body to the castle. There I will listen to what Auguste has to say.”
She felt a fool and a fraud, but for her own satisfaction she was going to perform an autopsy on the damned goat-though God knows how I’ll find anything. And she’d need privacy for it; Na Roqua was unlikely to regard the butchery of her pet as “listening.” Also, the castle hall possessed a large stone table.
It might have been the funeral of a hero. Under the stern eye of Na Roqua, Auguste was laid reverently on a blanket and four Roqua men, taking a corner each, carried him shoulder-high up the tiers of the village street, the Lizier family reluctantly following behind.
In the hall, Adelia turned to Ulf, Rankin, and Mansur. “Light some candles and get these people out of here. You stay, I may need you.”
Na Roqua wanted to stay, too, but was persuaded by Fabrisse that the mystery to be performed could only be attended by those who were in tune with the soul of the corpse.
“But I have always been in tune with Auguste,” Na Roqua complained.
“Has he spoken to you since he died? No. He will only talk to a mistress of the art of death. In private.”
“You’re staying,” Na Roqua pointed out.
“It’s my damned castle. Now go.”
Thomassia was sent out with the old woman to console her during the wait.
Once candles had been lit and the doors shut, Rankin and Ulf heaved the body onto the table while Boggart was sent to the kitchen to find the sharpest knife it had.
Tentatively, Adelia felt Auguste’s neck and then the rest of him. Rigor mortis hadn’t set in yet, which meant, always supposing rigor obeyed the same law in goats as in humans, the beast hadn’t been dead long.
Anyway, since according to Na Roqua he’d been alive when she went to bed, whatever had happened to him had taken place at some time during the night.
It would be interesting to see whether the fall had killed him or he’d been dead before he hit the alley. She was beginning to suspect the latter.
The three men were entertaining themselves with making up reasons for the goat’s demise that would satisfy Na Roqua and not implicate Na Lizier.
“A massive eagle picked him up and let him fall into the alley”
“A self-respecting eagle wouldn’t touch him. No, he farted himself up into the air and dropped in.”
Adelia ignored them. She took the knife from Boggart, wondering where to start.
Ulf grinned. “Goats, eh? How the mighty are fallen.”
“Shut up,” she told him. “Your chatter got me into this. Now, then, you men each take a leg… that’s right, and turn him onto his back.”
With Rankin holding up the goat’s extensive and flea-ridden beard, she began the incision at a point just below the chin.
She hadn’t even got as far as the wattle when she found out how Auguste had died. Something had blocked his throat.
Drawing the object out, she put it on the table near a candle.
“What in hell is that?”
“I don’t know, it looks like sheep’s wool.” She used the knife to stir the mass apart. There was chewed wood in it, and some nail-like pins.
“Na Lizier did kill him, then,” Mansur said. “She choked the brute.”
“Hmm.” Adelia put the knife down and began pacing, fitting together what she had learned from inspecting the two houses with this latest discovery.
“Well?” Fabrisse demanded at last. “What do we tell those two old women that won’t start a war?”
Adelia made up her mind. “The truth. They are both to blame.”
Once the incision had been neatly sewn up and the beard combed down over it, Na Roqua, Na Lizier, and the rest of the village were allowed into the hall.
“Auguste tells me that what happened was this,” Adelia said clearly. “You, Na Roqua, left the door to your carding room open last night… ”
“No, I didn’t,” Na Roqua shouted. “I never do.”
“You did last night, so Auguste says.”
The old woman sulked. “Well, I may have done.”
“And Auguste found his way in and began eating your sheep’s wool…”
“That wouldn’t kill him,” a Roqua son pointed out. “Auguste could eat anything.”
“He also ate at least one of the carding combs,” Adelia continued firmly “Its pointed pins stuck the ball of wool into his throat so that he couldn’t swallow it. In his distress he found his way out into the night air and then he stumbled into Na Lizier’s house-your door wasn’t on the latch, was it?”
Na Lizier shrugged. Nobody in Caronne bothered to secure their doors-who was there to secure them against?
“Again, gasping for air, he made his way up the stairs to the roof. The exertion drove the comb’s pins more firmly into his poor throat, blocking it up with the wool, so that, by the time he gained the roof he was dying. Auguste tells me that Na Lizier found him there dead when she got up this morning and, frightened that Na Roqua would suspect her of murdering him-as you did, Na Roqua-pitched his body into the alley He doesn’t blame you for that, Na Lizier, any more than he blames you, Na Roqua, for carelessly leaving the carding room door open. He wishes you both to be the friends you always were.”
Some of it was speculation, but some of it deduction; it was the best she could do.
There was silence in the hall, except for an onset of grizzling from the Count of Caronne, still tied to his mother’s back and wanting his next feed.
The suspense was awful.
Na Roqua’s walking stick rapped on the stone floor as she made her way over to where Na Lizier stood. “I am sorry,” she said.
“And I am sorry.”
The two old women embraced.
Under the wave of cheering, Fabrisse put her arm around Adelia. “Our savior,” she said.
Auguste was picked up once more by the Roqua sons and taken away for honorable burial.
Following them out, Na Roqua paused to stare into Adelia’s face. “Did Auguste happen to tell you whose body his soul will inhabit now?”
“Er, no. I’m afraid he didn’t.”
Na Roqua sighed. “You should have asked him.”
Solving the riddle of Auguste’s death had been an incident of little moment compared to other investigations Adelia had successfully pursued, but for the health of Caronne it had been important, and at the Christmas Eve feast that night, she was the heroine.
Grateful Roqua and Lizier men presented her and the other ex-prisoners with beautifully wrought sheepskin coats; she had to raise her beaker and drink in reply to the dozens of toasts that were made to her; a wreath of bay leaves was put on her head; and, finally, after three hours of eating, and leaning somewhat heavily on Mansur’s arm-the Arab, banned by his religion from alcohol, being the only sober person around-was put on a chair on a platform in the bailey to watch the village dance around the enormous bonfire that Ulf and Rankin had built for the purpose.
It wasn’t possible for the visitors to join in; the tapping, leaping steps of the dancers-men revolving around the fire, women and children forming little prancing rings of their own on the edges-were too complicated for the uninitiated to join in.
Music was being provided by panpipes, but all of a sudden there was a blast of sound as Prades, the local blacksmith, blew down a pipe he was holding into a fearsome-looking contraption that looked like nothing so much as an enormous pig’s bladder with some of its tubes still attached. The resultant wail was so loud that it could have been heard ten miles away Adelia found herself flinching. They’ll hear. They’ll come. She pulled herself together. This sound belongs to these mountains; why should anyone come?
“Oh, bloody hell,” Ulf said. “It’s the bagpipes.”
Rankin who’d been lolling on the platform, drunkenly nuzzling Thomassia’s cheek, was all at once on his feet. “D’ye ken that? By all that’s holy, it’s the peeps. The peeps. I’ve come home.” He aimed himself toward Prades like a thirsty man toward a fountain, clutching at the man’s arm, begging.
“He’s not, is he?” Ulf moaned. “Yes, he bloody is. He’s going to get himself some peeps. We’re doomed.”
And for the first time in a long time, Adelia laughed.
THE SNOW THAT Adelia dreaded might stop the O‘Donnell coming for them did not arrive, but neither did the O’Donnell. Instead a Cathar perfect arrived to spread his faith in the village.
“Oh, God,” Adelia said, when she heard. “He’ll put you in danger.” The “you” was becoming as important to her as the “us.”
“Will you stop it?” Fabrisse said wearily. “We have posted lookouts for strangers. Brother Pierre is known to us, a good man. He is at Na Roqua’s if you want to go and hear him.”
Adelia consulted the others.
“We should go,” Mansur said. “He may have news of Sister Aelith.” The thought of the hunted, motherless girl disturbed them all.
They didn’t see the perfect, not that day; they were precluded by the number of bodies crammed into Na Roqua’s house, and by those sitting outside it, listening to Brother Pierre’s voice issuing through the windows. He was reading from the Cathar bible in the Catalan patois the villagers could understand, speaking Christ’s words in their own language rather than in the Latin spouted by the priests.
Adelia knew by now that, if Caronne’s villagers were illiterate, they were at least masters of debate, especially on theological matters, and that questions and answers would extend deep into the night.
Leaving the others to listen, she walked back to the castle, followed by Ward, and braved the cold wind for a while on its bridge to look toward the ice-capped peaks of the Pyrenees.
They were a climate gauge; they played Grandmother’s Footsteps; sometimes, as now, their clarity augured a fine day; when they jumped forward, so near that they seemed only a mile or so away, they foretold bad weather. She had come to love them, imagining them as a refuge where misfits like herself could live free on those tree-crammed, bear-haunted, wildlife-infested slopes. I could settle there, she thought. Allie and Gyltha and Mansur and Boggart and Ulf and I, we could be safe. Henry Plantagenet couldn’t find me and send me on any more missions ever again.
A voice in her head asked: And Rowley?
Suddenly she wanted him very, very badly He can come, too.
There was a nudge on her ankles; Ward was getting cold. She patted his head, and they went together into the castle.
“Were you never tempted to become a Cathar?” Adelia asked of Fabrisse, who was putting the Count of Caronne into his cradle.
“No.” Fabrisse bent down to kiss the count’s cheek. “When this one was born, he was ill, so ill. We didn’t think we would save him. That paifaít back there, he came to me and said I shouldn’t feed my child, to allow him to suffer the Cathar endura and let him die. He would administer the consolamentum, he said, so as to ensure that little Raymond would be an angel of God in Heaven. But I would not do it. How could I withhold my milk from my own flesh and blood? We fought for him, Thomassia and I, and he lived.”
It was in accord with what Sister Ermengarde had said. Adelia shook her head in amazement at the way every established religion she knew of, even this one, tried to pervert simple, human love out of its natural course.
HALFWAY THROUGH THE next morning, little Bérenger Pons, who’d been sitting, shivering, in the church’s high window, watching the track that led eventually to Carcassonne, snatched up the hand-bell that lay beside him and began clanging it even as he scrambled down his ladder. Still ringing, he ran up the village street, shouting at the top of his squeaky voice: “The bayle. The bayle is coming.”
Immediately, women emerged from their houses and hurried to the communal barn that stored the grain sacks. Men dropped what they were doing in the fields and ran to the sheep pens. Na Roqua came out of her doorway, pulling with her the Cathar perfect who’d spent the night in her downstairs room. As if he were a horse, she gave him a slap on his rump to set him galloping toward the castle.
In the castle itself, Fabrisse pushed the priest out of her bed and rushed out to look down on young Bérenger as he arrived in the hall still gasping his message. “How long before he gets here?”
“Thirty paternosters, maybe thirty-two.” Having no clocks, Caronne people didn’t reckon time in minutes.
“Good boy. Thomassia.” She rushed to raise the rest of her household. “Quick, quick. The bishop’s tax inspector is coming. Follow Thomassia.”
Scrambling into their clothes as they went, Adelia, Boggart, Mansur, Rankin, and Ulf made their way down to the hall, Fabrisse’s priest with them.
Thomassia was already there, heading out of the entrance, waving her arms to spur the fugitives into a run. There was a momentary constriction at the end of the bridge as they were joined by the Cathar perfect while the Christian priest, still buttoning himself up, pushed past him to gallop down the hill toward his church. Then they were on a path that wound round the back of the castle and headed down toward the forest. On other tracks, they could see shepherds urging their flocks in the same direction, their huge white-coated Pyrenean dogs snapping at the animals’ heels to make them go faster.
Adelia picked Ward up-the shepherd dogs terrified him-and kept running. Ulf, Rankin, and Mansur brought up the rear, helping a lumbering Boggart to keep going.
The forest enfolded them, but Thomassia, holding her chest with the effort, kept on, eventually veering away from the track to wade through dead bracken until she came to a full stop facing an outcrop of rock draped with overhanging ivy. She pulled the thick fronds aside to reveal a cave and ushered them in. “Stay.”
Backing out, she arranged the ivy so that it recovered the entrance.
In the dimness, the deep voice of the Cathar perfect said: “She will return to the castle, brushing out our tracks as she goes. A good woman, Thomassia.”
Of them all, he was the least out of breath; he’d run with an easy lope, thin brown legs showing beneath the robe he’d tucked up into his belt. Stooping to try and get rid of the stitch in her side, Adelia gasped: “I suppose you’re used to this.”
“It has not been unknown.” He sounded amused. He gave a bow.
Adelia introduced herself and the others.
“What’s them people who live in caves. Troglodytes. That’s what we’re becoming,” Ulf grumbled. “Bloody troglodytes. Well, I suppose it gives us a day off work.”
It was a point and, like the peasants they were turning into, he and Rankin, Mansur, and Boggart used the time to doze.
Adelia, the only one with reasonable Catalan at her command, felt that she should be entertaining the perfect with conversation, but kept quiet, hoping the man wouldn’t raise a matter she dreaded.
He did. “You were at Aveyron with Ermengarde when she died,” he said.
“Yes.”
He surprised her. “I saw you. I was there also, a witness, hidden in the crowd. I sent up prayers for her soul, not that she needed them, the good, good woman. And I prayed for you and yours. I rejoice in your escape.”
Adelia said shortly: “You were brave to be there.” She changed the subject. “Have you any news of Sister Aelith?”
“We have sent her into the Pyrenees until she has recovered her courage to come back and resume her mission.”
“I hope she doesn’t.”
“She will. She is her mother’s daughter. She, too, was at Aveyron.”
“Oh, my God, tell me she wasn’t watching.”
“No. She stayed in one of our friends’ houses near the palace gates, but she wished to be in the vicinity, as close to her mother as possible.”
Adelia nodded. She could understand that.
Brother Pierre continued to talk.
“I’m sorry” Adelia roused herself from thoughts of the girl’s agony. “I didn’t catch that.”
“I said there was another one of Princess Joanna’s party there; Aelith saw him when he was going through the palace gates. Another witness to pray for Ermengarde, perhaps.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Someone she had seen with you, when you and the people who were sick arrived at her and Ermengarde’s cottage in the hills. I think that was what she said.”
“No,” Adelia said, “there wouldn’t have been anyone else we knew.”
“Oh, yes,” Brother Pierre said. “Aelith recognized him.”
Adelia felt the blood drain from around her mouth. Somebody they knew had watched Ermengarde burn. Somebody had seen them in chains-and had not reported back, had done nothing about it.
“What…?” She couldn’t get the words out. She tried again: “What did he look like?”
“Who?” The perfect had reverted to other matters.
“The man Aelith saw. What did he look like?”
Brother Pierre shrugged. “She did not say”
But she’d recognized him as one of their own.
Clutching her head, Adelia tried to reconstruct the events of the day when the dysentery had struck. Ulf had been taken ill on the road, others had started to fall, Locusta had gone looking for somewhere to take them…
He’d come back with Sister Aelith, yes, that’s right; she remembered him and the little Cathar coming down the hill, the offer of the cowshed as a hospital. And then… what happened then? There’d been a discussion, Dr. Arnulf saying it was the plague… who else had been there in the road that Aelith had seen?
The perfect was becoming concerned for her: “Are you unwell, my child?”
Adelia got up and ran to where Ulf was sleeping. She shook him. “Who else was there?”
“Eh?”
“On the road, that day… the dysentery… when we first met Aelith… who else was there?”
“What’re you talking about?”
Adelia told him.
Ulf took in a deep breath of satisfaction. “What did I say? Didn’t I say there’s been a snake in the grass all along?”
“But who is it?” She shook him. “Who was there that morning?”
The others were awake now.
“She wouldn’t have seen Joanna or the other ladies, they were ahead,” Mansur said.
“No, this was a man.”
Boggart chimed in. “There was Bishop Rowley…”
“We can discount him.”
“… Captain Bolt.”
“It wasn’t him. Who else? Bishop of Winchester, of course, but he’s unlikely…”
“Admiral O’Donnell.”
“Yes.”
“That pesky doctor…”
“Arnulf yes. Go on.”
“Them two chaplains, the silly one and the other. Never liked either of ’em.”
“Might it have been one of our patients?” Mansur suggested. “There were plenty of them.”
“God help us,” Adelia said, “I don’t know. I don’t know.”
“It was Scarry,” Ulf said. “Been him all along. Ain’t he clever? Murderin’ and poisoning everybody’s mind against you so that they was glad to abandon you to Aveyron, and us, too.”
She gave a moan and stumbled away from them. She felt ill.
She knew that she’d been afraid, and had been all along, to believe that a malignant being was after her; it put her at the center of everything, a protagonist in a Greek tragedy pursued by a revenging Fury.
It’s not me, it’s not me.
But it was her, she could see it now; she, and only she, had been the reason why so many had died in the pursuit. Blundering, stupid, deliberately blind, she might as well have been a Medea leaving the bodies of slaughtered children behind her.
Somebody had wanted to destroy her, had inflicted the persona of “witch” upon her so that the people she’d traveled with had been prepared to let her and four beloved people suffer at Aveyron.
Facing it now was like being slammed against a wall. I can’t think about it.
But this was where avoidance stopped. You have to think about it.
After a while she sat down and began to consider in the only way she was capable of-as a doctor diagnosing a sickness by its symptoms and history
When had it begun? The horse, oh yes, the horse. It had been poisoned.
What next? Brune, poor Brune. No, first there had been Sir Nicholas, whom she’d cursed and who’d been killed because of it.
The death of a horse, the theft of her cross, the murder of two innocent people, betrayal to the Cathar-hunting Aveyron and its result-not that, not that, but of course that-another murder, a woman dying in flames. Oh, God, she had led him to Ermengarde.
All this engineered by a mind so careful, so skilled in its cunning, so disordered that Adelia’s reasoning brain couldn’t encompass all that it had done, let alone why it had done it. Only that it was insane.
And then she thought: But it didn’t begin in Normandy…
It had started in England, in that faraway happiness on Emma’s estate with Allie, with sane men and women and a football match. The poison had been there.
And then she thought again: But it didn’t begin there, either…
Its beginning, for her, was in a Somerset forest, where two outlaws had pranced out from the trees; green-and-black, fantastical pagan bodies that had rustled with the leaves they wore, and she had killed one to save her own life and that of the men she was with, and earned the lasting hatred of the other.
The dimness of this cave with its filtered light was not unlike that of the glade where Wolf had skewered himself and Scarry had keened for him in Latin.
And this is where he has brought me; all the wayfrom there to here.
She heard a light snoring; the perfect had gone to sleep. The three men were talking quietly…
“It was Scarry, I tell you. Been him all along. Only enemy she’s ever made.”
“What about the black-avised buzzard who stole the cross off us in the cowshed, was that Scarry?”
“Don’t bloody know what Scarry looks like, do I. Never saw the bugger.”
Excalibur. Another theft, not of a life this time, but of something Henry had entrusted to her, as he’d entrusted his daughter. Scarry had taken both so that she had failed in the one thing she prided herself on-her duty.
Mansur was kneeling in front of her. “I know you,” he said. “It has not been your fault.”
“No.” She raised her head, and her voice made everybody jump. “The BASTARD.”
AT THIS MOMENT, Scarry, too, raises his head as if a bugle call from far away had suddenly cleared it of its worms. Into the holes they have made has come knowledge.
“I know where she will be,” he says to Wolf
“Where?”
“Palermo. She will come to Palermo.”
“How do you know?”
“Because that was the assignment Henry gave her, to look after his daughter. I read her mind now, Wolf of mine; she is a dutiful woman, she will not want to fail her king.”
“And we will kill her there?”
“Yes, my dear.” Scarry’s smile is almost sane. “As the armies of Octavian and Mark Antony met on the battlefield of Philippi, so we shall meet her at Palermo.”
THE TAX INSPECTOR WENT, expressing strong dissatisfaction with the paucity of tithes he and his men were taking back to their bishop.
Young Master Pons, once more situated in the window of Caronne’s church, had watched them wend their way down the mountain, his bell beside him in case the thieving bastards should turn around and come back.
They did not; they disappeared as the sun was lifting from the cold earth beneath their horses’ feet.
It was the next day when he saw another figure leading a string of mules coming out of that same mist. His hand reached for the bell, and then drew it back.
He slid down the ladder and danced hopefully around the visitor-sometimes this man carried sweetmeats in his pack.
Together, they went up toward the castle.
Adelia was already in the kitchen so that she could use it before Thomassia came in to prepare breakfast for them all, boiling into a thick paste the gel dripping from the leaves of aloe vera that she’d cut into a basin. One of the Lizier sons had whispered in embarrassment to Mansur that he was suffering from “an itch” without defining in what area it was plaguing him. Mansur had passed on the message and Adelia, hoping that it was merely a genital rash and nothing worse, was compounding a soothing ointment for it.
“Time we go, lady,” a voice told her.
Adelia straightened her back. The goblin shape of the little Turk, Deniz, was standing in the doorway. She looked for the Irishman behind him, but Deniz shook his head. “Admiral at Saint Gilles still. We meet him later. You all come now. Pack. Quick.”
Although there wasn’t much for them to pack, the farewell to Caronne took time; it was difficult to express sufficiently their indebtedness and gratitude to so many people, and painful to leave them.
“We needn’t say good-bye yet,” Fabrisse said. “I’m coming with you as far as Salses. I hold a small château by knight’s fee off Raymond of Toulouse down there-or, rather, my lord of Caronne does. Deniz tells me the O’Donnell has procured my silk in Saint Gilles and his ship will deliver it to Salses before he sets off for Italy Na Roqua’s daughter-in-law will wet-nurse my lord until my return. In fact, we’ll take a couple of the Roqua men with us to carry back some salt, our supply is low.”
There was one very hard parting… Adelia saw the grief of it in two faces.
Rankin was the last to join them. As he came slowly down the stairs, bagpipes under his arm, she faced him. “You’re not coming with us,” she said.
“What ye jabbering, woman? Indeed I am.”
“No. You’re going to stay here and marry Thomassia.”
A light came into the Scotsman’s eyes. “I’ll not deny… but it’ll never be said of Rankin of the Highlands he was a dairty deserter.”
“It’s not desertion.” She’d brought enough trouble on him. “You have been a rock to us. We love you, but we’ll be safe now and Thomassia needs you. This is where you belong.”
“Ay, she’s said she’s willin’, the canty wee girl, and I’ve become rare fond of this clachan, but…”
Adelia kissed him. “There you are, then.”
Standing on the ramparts of the castle with Thomassia beside him holding the Count of Caronne, he played a wailing lament on his pipes to the little party as it went trickling down the mountainside like a tear on a giant’s cheek.