THEY REINED IN their horses at a bridge outside the gates that led to Wolvercote Manor and stayed there for some minutes, looking beyond its lodge to the house.
Somerset had displayed richness of countryside and property from the moment they’d crossed its border but nothing, so far, quite as pleasing to the eye as this place in which Emma had said she intended to make her home. It was like coming upon Arcadia.
A rectangular house of yellow stone tucked among stables and barns and trees with the tower of a domestic church rising beyond jumbled roofs of tiny slates, its wide-mouthed, chevroned doorway and mullioned windows smiled out across a moat in which it was exactly reflected. Against the setting sun, pigeons exited and landed in the little arched entrances of a cote built in the shape of a pepper pot.
Whichever ancestral Norman built this, Adelia thought, had been a nicer person than its late owner-the unlamented Lord Wolvercote’s taste would have run to a spiky grandeur.
“Don’t know as I’d mind having that ol’ cottage if as they’d give it me,” Gyltha said.
Adelia agreed; usually, she didn’t care where she lived as long as it was clean and functional and safe, but the charm of Wolvercote inspired in her a sudden and unwonted envy of Emma for possessing it.
They had come here instead of going straight to Glastonbury, partly because the road from Wells, to which their route from Wales had led them first, practically passed the manor’s approach, but mostly because Adelia was impatient to see Emma and tell her of the happy coincidence that would make them neighbors for a while. Also, she wanted to check on Roetger’s heel. It was June now, and they’d said good-bye in May.
The sky remained cloudless, and in such fields as could be seen over fruiting hedges, brown-faced, sweating men and women were cutting hay, causing an itchy, sweet-smelling dust to join that sent up by horses’ hooves meeting the dried surface of the roads.
Anyway, it would be getting dark by the time the cavalcade could reach the Pilgrim Inn at Glastonbury, which, for all the luxury Henry Plantagenet claimed for it, could hardly provide the comfort to hot, dusty, hungry, and thirsty travelers that Emma would extend to them.
King Arthur, Adelia thought, could wait; he’d waited some six hundred years-another day here or there wouldn’t hurt him.
She nodded at Captain Bolt to lead the way over the bridge. So that she’d be safe on the journey, the king had given her a military escort of half a dozen men, which included a trumpeter to blow a fanfare announcing her coming wherever she went. She’d be arriving in style.
The gatekeeper of Wolvercote’s lodge was suitably impressed and, when Bolt ordered him to tell the lady of the house that the Lord Mansur, Mistress Adelia, and their train wished to be received, went scampering across the moat’s pretty little bridge with his instructions.
His manner on his return was constrained. Awkwardly, he announced, “My lady will be pleased to admit my lord Mansur and Mistress Adelia, but their escort must remain here.”
Odd, Adelia thought. Perhaps Emma was being careful and wanted to be sure that the soldiers were friendly.
The gatekeeper winced slightly as Adelia gestured to Gyltha, who had Allie bouncing in her horse’s pannier, to follow them; she wasn’t going to leave those two behind.
A steward with a wand of office bowed the four of them into a hall as pleasantly proportioned as the house’s exterior.
Here, sun came only in shafts through the high windows. The thick stone of the walls, which was so warm outside, cooled the air, giving the room the greenish tint of a rock pool. A lovely oak staircase and fireplace, the furniture, and the setts of a rush-free floor gleamed with the deep patina of a century’s careful polishing. Perhaps too many scarlet and silver Wolvercote battle flags, some of them tattered, hanging from the timber-and-plastered ceiling took away from the room’s peace, but, presumably, Emma hadn’t yet had time to get rid of them.
“My lady begs you to wait,” the steward said. “She is employed in the solar going over the accounts with her cellarer but will attend you shortly.”
Again, odd, very odd. The Emma of old would have come rushing downstairs to meet them. Surely she wasn’t still jealous?
Adelia gave Gyltha an interrogative look. Gyltha shrugged.
They were left alone. After about a quarter of an hour, the steward appeared with cups and a jug of cooled ale on a tray, begged them to refresh themselves, and left.
More minutes went by without Emma’s appearance, or anybody else’s. Allie employed her time by climbing on an oak settle and jumping off it. There was no sign that another child was in the house; the only sound was the swish of a blade as somebody outside was cutting the grass.
Adelia became cross; this was deliberate rudeness. She went to the stairs to go up them, but at that moment a door at the top opened. A man with an apron came hurrying down, a ledger under his arm, doffed his cap to Adelia, and went out.
Another figure emerged onto the landing above. “Yes?” asked a female voice.
Adelia gave a brief bow and introduced herself and her companions. “Since the lord Mansur speaks little English, I am his interpreter, mistress,” she said. “We are here to see Lady Wolvercote.”
“I am Lady Wolvercote.”
“Ah.” This was the mother-in-law, then-a somewhat younger, well-dressed, and very much more formidable figure than the doting grandmother who’d taken shape in Adelia’s optimistic mind. Emma herself must be out somewhere.
That the woman coming down the stairs was mother to the rebellious murderer Henry had hanged, there was no doubt. She was nearly as tall, with the same imperious, handsome features. Dark eyes exactly like those of the man who had once dubbed Adelia a witch looked down at her now, and with something of the same distaste.
Adelia remembered that though Emma had never met her husband’s mother, she’d been impressed by her Norman ancestry, which went back to long before the Conquest. “She’s descended from Rollo the Ganger,” Emma had said admiringly.
Adelia hadn’t seen what was wonderful about descent from a Viking who had harried and pillaged Normandy until it was surrendered to him, but Emma, being the child of a tradesman, though a rich one, set store by noble heredity and seemed to think it added value to young Pippy’s descent, especially as it came down to him via the female line and not by way of his hated father’s.
This woman set store by it, too. Her look made Adelia conscious of the clothing she herself had managed to acquire on the journey-certainly better than that of the Welsh chieftain’s wife but still of very ordinary quality. However, she said politely, “I address the dowager Lady Wolvercote, do I?”
“You do not. I am the Lady Wolvercote. There is no other.”
“I mean your daughter-in-law, lady.”
“My daughter-in-law died five years ago.”
That was partly true, of course; Wolvercote had been previously married before forcibly wedding Emma, though the wife had died without bearing him any children.
Oh, dear, was this woman, too, going to oppose Emma’s claim to the manor? God prevent there having to be another trial by combat.
“I mean Emma, Lady Wolvercote,” Adelia persisted.
“I know of no such person.”
Adelia tried to be patient; the woman still wore mourning for her son, though her black silk bliaut allowed a scarlet underdress to peep through at the neck and skirt, echoing the colors of the Wolvercote battle flags.
“She sent you a letter… a sweet letter, I saw it… from Aylesbury. To say she would be coming.”
Lady Wolvercote inclined her head. “A letter arrived a while ago from a creature claiming to be my son’s wife-some whore, no doubt, trying to extract money.”
“No,” Adelia said, quietly, “she was not. She was bringing your grandson to meet you.”
“Then she would have wasted her breath. I receive no bastards in this house.”
The woman used the words “whore” and “bastard” without anger, as if she was merely stating facts. At no point did her expression change to wrinkle the excellent skin of her pale face, nor did her bejeweled folded hands make any gesture; her voice was as level as if she was giving everyday instructions to a servant. It was like exchanging remarks with a speaking statue. When she turned her head to look at Allie, who was making another attempt on the settle, Gyltha hurried forward in rescue, as if afraid the gaze would petrify the child into stone.
“Are you telling me that you didn’t receive her?” Adelia asked. “When was this?”
“Am I not making myself clear?” Lady Wolvercote said. “There has been no encounter between me and the female you mention.”
“She didn’t come? Didn’t arrive at all?”
“I have said so.”
“Then where is she?”
“I do not know,” Lady Wolvercote said. “Nor do I care.” She went to a table and rang the small brass bell that stood on it.
Immediately, the steward was in the room. “My lady?”
“Take these people to the kitchen, John. See they receive the usual sustenance before they go. Also, you may carry food and ale to the creatures at the gate, but do not allow them inside-I will have none of the Plantagenet’s rabble in this house.”
She turned to go.
This was frightening. “But… but she must have turned up,” Adelia said in desperation. “She was on her way here. Where is she?”
The only answer was the brisk tap of Lady Wolvercote’s shoes on the risers of the staircase as she went up them.
As the door of the solar shut quietly behind its mistress, the steward stepped forward. “If you would come this way…”
“To the kitchen?” Gyltha shouted at him, as if she was above such places. “We ain’t coming to no bloody kitchen. You can stuff-”
Adelia put out a hand to stop the inevitable invective; though deeply disturbed, she was trying to keep her head. “We would be grateful for a supper before we go,” she told the steward meekly, “and so would our men.”
As they followed the steward, Gyltha gave her a look worthy of the gorgon who’d just left them. “You toleratin’ this?”
“Yes. We may learn something.” The servants were likely to know what had happened. Refused entry, Emma would not have gone quietly; people must have heard the argument-that encounter between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law would have been a case of Greek meeting Greek, the only trouble being that the marble-faced Greek upstairs had the advantage of possession.
As they were led through the hall’s serving door and across a courtyard, Adelia asked Mansur quietly in Arabic, “What do you think happened?”
“A coldhearted bint that one, but why should she lie?”
That was what was so worrying: If Lady Wolvercote had thrown Emma out of her house, she would not, Adelia felt, have had any compunction in saying so. In which case, Emma had not reached Wolvercote Manor at all. It might be that she had delayed her visit for some reason-but for a month? Or, and this was the worst possible explanation, she and the others had been attacked somewhere on the road to Wells.
However shaming it was to be fed in the kitchen like a beggar, it would be an opportunity to ask questions, and Adelia was prepared to suffer humiliation if she could find out what had happened to her friends.
They crossed a courtyard to a square, pretty building in the same stone as the house and with an octagonal roof. The heat coming out of its open door was nearly enough to send its visitors teetering backward.
“Perhaps you would prefer to sit on the lawn and eat,” the steward suggested.
Gyltha said with energy that she would prefer to eat with the soldiers at the gate and marched off, pulling Allie along with her.
Adelia and Mansur braved the kitchen. A single aperture near the roof allowed more smoke out than light in, leaving two fires set into the walls to illuminate a scene like Vulcan’s forge. A man stripped to the waist, his skin gleaming with sweat, retrieved rounded loaves from an oven with the aid of an enormous spatula. Other figures were setting a table in the center of the room with a surprisingly dainty collation of carved chicken and ham, flaked trout, preserves, scones, butter, and honey.
A pewter jug held wine, another ale, but when Mansur shook his head at both and Adelia explained that alcohol was unacceptable to his religion, one of the servants was dispatched to fetch cooled barley water from a cellar.
Obviously, the immutable law of hospitality to travelers, however base, was one the descendant of Rollo the Ganger had trained her staff not to break. Which in itself was concerning because if Emma and her party had arrived on the Wolvercote threshold, the people in this kitchen would have known about it-and they didn’t.
Or they said they didn’t.
Adelia questioned them as a group and then individually. “Have you heard of or seen a lady traveling with attendants in the area? She is young and fair and has a two-year-old child with her. Did she come here?”
She was competing for their attention with Mansur, whose robe and kaffiyeh with its golden-roped agal around his head seemed to engross and almost frighten them, as if an angel or demon had sprung through the door. The brilliant whiteness of his clothes-how he kept them so clean while traveling, Adelia had never fathomed-was always noticeable, but in ports like Cambridge where the occasional Arab trader came and went, his appearance did not excite quite so much curiosity. Here in the depths of the country, they had never seen anything like him.
“A lady,” Adelia reiterated, “with a child. In a traveling cart. Horses, maids, grooms, a priest.”
For a moment, the man shoveling the loaves swiveled around to look at her and she went expectantly toward him, but he shook his head and turned back to his bread.
No, no, they had seen nobody like that. The boy turning a spit crossed his fingers while making his denial, and a maid was taken with hysterical giggles, but these responses Adelia, again, had to attribute to Mansur’s presence. She gave up.
She tried questioning the steward when he led the two of them to the gates. He shook his head. “No, mistress, we have received no one of that description.”
“I didn’t ask if she was received, I want to know if she came here.”
“No, mistress, I’m sorry.”
Yet there was something…
Captain Bolt and his men were sitting on the grass under the trees by the side of the lane, their horses casting long shadows against the setting sun. They had eaten and drunk well, but the captain was displeased; his mounts had barely been able to get enough water from the nearby stream, which the summer had reduced to a trickle. “Wouldn’t let us in through the gates to get to a trough. Somerset hospitality? I spit on it.”
He was unmoved by the fact that Emma and her party were missing.
“Couldn’t you send one of your lads into Wells?” Adelia pleaded. “They may be putting up at one of the inns there.”
“I reckon as that bitch has eaten ‘em,” Gyltha said, and met Adelia’s glare with “Well, I wouldn’t put it past her.”
“No, I couldn’t, mistress,” Bolt said. “You seen how many inns that town’s got? Going down High Street alone we must’ve passed dozens. I can’t spare a man or the time.”
As usual, he was in a rush; his orders were to deliver Adelia and company intact to Glastonbury, see them safely installed, and then return to the king as fast as possible. Looking for lost ladies was not in his brief.
“You could send him,” he said, jerking a thumb to where Rhys the bard was sprawled in the shade of an oak, a flask of ale by his side, a chicken leg in one hand, the other rippling the strings of the harp held between his knees. “I can spare him.”
They all could. At first the Welshman’s playing and singing had sweetened the journey, but as Captain Bolt said of him with complaint, “He don’t do anything else.”
And it was true-as an aid in the tasks of traveling Rhys was useless. Asked to fetch or carry something, he invariably dropped it. Since most of his life had been spent on foot or bareback Welsh ponies, horses alarmed him to an extent that he wouldn’t or couldn’t tighten their girths or put a bit in their mouths, thus necessitating one of the soldiers to do it for him.
What he could do, amazingly, was attract women. Having eaten prodigiously of the supper provided by whatever inn they’d put up at, he managed to vanish and, before they could proceed in the morning, there had to be a search for him, which invariably ended in some female’s bedroom. It sent Captain Bolt mad. “How does he do it?”
Adelia didn’t know, either, but there was no denying that bucktoothed, vague, and none too clean though Rhys was, his music sent a maiden’s knees wobbling, along with her virginity.
Mansur despised him, perhaps because Gyltha, usually irritated by inefficiency, showed a sentimental forbearance of the man. “He’s worth it for that lovely voice,” she’d say, tenderly making sure his plate was fuller than anybody else’s.
Allie was his slave, as he was hers. The only night on which he hadn’t pursued his amours had been when the child, having eaten some unripe crab apples lying in an orchard, was taken with a nasty stomachache. He’d stayed by her bed, soothing her with a song celebrating the Arab star Almeisan, after which she was named.
Adelia was prepared to forgive him a great deal after that, though occasionally, when he’d once more reduced Captain Bolt to apoplexy, she wondered why on earth Henry had sent the bard with her.
“Because he wanted to get rid of him, that’s why,” was Bolt’s response. “Couldn’t give him back to the damned Welsh, could he?”
No, presumably, he couldn’t. Rhys’s fellow countrymen wouldn’t look kindly on a man who presented the English king with a dead Arthur.
However it was, there was no use sending him to look for Emma. Even if Wells locked up all its daughters, it was doubtful he could find his way back.
There was nothing for it at the moment but to go on to Glastonbury and hope to locate Emma through more inquiries.
It was a winding road leading them there, and as darkness fell, it was empty of traffic.
The law ordering that verges be cleared of trees by the length of a bow shot so that travelers were not vulnerable to a surprise attack had been ignored here. And ignored for some years-the cavalcade rode through avenues that branched overhead, hiding the moon.
Torches and lanterns were lit, swords were drawn, silence demanded, the mounts slowed to walking pace-it had been known for robbers to bring down cantering horses by putting a wire across the road. Gyltha and Adelia, with a sleeping, panniered Allie, found themselves hemmed in by their escorts as they rode-and were glad of it. Rhys nudged his horse between theirs; the only weapon he had was his harp.
Michael, the trumpeter, muttered, “Most dangerous bit o’ road in England this, so I heard.”
“Why?” Adelia whispered back.
“Wolf. Outlaw. They call him Wolf acause he’s a animal though he runs on two legs, and a pack with him. They say…”
But Captain Bolt hushed them. He was listening to the hundred rustles that came from among trunks turned ghastly by the glare of the torches, his sword twitching toward the reflected green of animals’ eyes that peered out at them from the undergrowth.
At one point, Adelia heard the sound of a cough from somewhere among the trees, but whether it came from a human throat or not she couldn’t tell.
Wolf.
Because she was tired and scared, she became angry. Bolt should have taken them back to sleep over at Wells so that they could have made this ride in the daytime. Damn the man for refusing another delay. Always wanting to gallop back to his damn king, damn him.
And damn that female back there. Had she sent Emma and little Pippy out into another such dangerous night? She’d said she hadn’t. Mansur didn’t think she had. But there’d been a sense of suffocation in that pretty house and in its kitchen, a truth being choked.
Oh, God, suppose the hag was keeping them imprisoned? Worse than imprisoned?
No, this was the thinking of fatigue.
But there’d been something… She kept remembering the eyes of the man at the bread oven when he’d turned to look at her. Something…
Damn it, how long before they reached Glastonbury? It was supposed to be only a few miles from Wells, but there was no sign of habitation ahead.
The only indication that they’d reached it was the sudden clatter of their horses’ hooves on stone. No signpost, but there was a gap in the forest to their right. The men’s torches showed a steep, cobbled hill that leveled out at the bottom, where moonlight shone on water.
“That’s it,” Bolt said. “Must be. That’ll be the River Brue down there-comes right up to the abbey, I was told-but where is the abbey?”
Where, indeed? As one of the biggest, busiest, richest foundations in England, owning a good deal of Somerset and beyond, it should have shown some sign of activity even at this time of night, however much the fire had damaged it.
It wasn’t until they began to go down the hill that Adelia fully realized the extent of the catastrophe that had overwhelmed the place. On the left, they were following what had been the monastery’s great boundary wall, now a blackened, tumbled collection of stones with silence beyond it.
As pitiable-and nobody had mentioned this-flames had also leaped the wall to consume the little town that lay outside it. For on the right as they rode, torchlight fell on naked spars that had been the thatched shops and cottages belonging to laypeople serving both the abbey and the pilgrims who had come to worship at its shrines.
Here had once been a busy high street; now the smitch of ash hung acrid on its air; apart from the moon, there was no light anywhere, no activity, only silence. Adelia heard Captain Bolt say incredulously, making a sign of the cross, “God have mercy, it’s dead. Glastonbury ’s dead.”
Toward the bottom of the hill, where it met the river to flatten into a wide, paved market square and quay, the abbey wall remained intact and so, opposite, did a three-story building-proximity to water and the fact that it was built of stone had preserved it to be all that was left of a thriving town. Again, there was no sign of occupation; the frontage, with its stout door leading out onto the street, was dark, but Captain Bolt’s lamp shone on a wide, high entrance arch to the right and, above it, carved into the lintel, was the unmistakable figure of a man in a brimmed hat carrying a scrip.
They had found the Pilgrim Inn.
Wheeling to go under the arch, the cavalcade entered a large, deserted courtyard formed by outbuildings and, on the left, the inn itself-from which the light of a single candle shone through the boards of one of the windows’ shutters.
“God be thanked,” Captain Bolt said. He dismounted and began hammering on the Pilgrim’s side door.
Inside, a dog began barking. The candle above was snuffed out. There was a creak, as if somebody had opened the shutter the tiniest crack-other than that, nothing happened.
Adelia and Gyltha were lifted from the saddles, and their horses were led to drink along with the others at a trough standing by the head of a well. Two soldiers began investigating the stables and a barn.
“Open up there. Open in the name of the king.” Captain Bolt was losing his temper.
A quavering voice came from the window, just audible over the barking. “I’ll set the dogs on you. I warn ye, we’m armed in here.”
“So are we out here,” the captain yelled. “Open this door before I take a bloody ram to it.”
Somewhat late in the day, Michael the trumpeter remembered his office and blew a call that sent stately notes echoing around the walls, though their only effect was to set the dog barking again and startle a barn owl into clattering flight from its perch in the stables.
“All right, then,” Captain Bolt said, looking around. “Find something to break this bloody door down.”
At that the door opened an inch and the same voice asked, “Who are you?”
“Who are you?”
“Godwyn, sir. Landlord of this inn.”
“We’re king’s men,” the captain told him. He snapped his fingers at Adelia, who began searching through her saddlebag for the royal warrant. “You’ve received an order from King Henry saying as he was billeting guests on you, and don’t say as you didn’t, acause the messenger came back to say he’d delivered it.”
The door opened wider, allowing Bolt’s lamp to illuminate a short, rotund, barefoot man in his nightshirt, holding back a single slavering dog by its collar. “That was a month ago,” he said. “No guests has come. No guests.” He was trembling.
“They have now.” The captain took the warrant from Adelia’s hand and waved it under the man’s nose. “The lord Mansur-he’s that Saracen gentleman over there, like it says on this scroll. Come to”-Bolt shifted his lantern so that he could read the writing on the warrant-“‘make inquiry into the recent findings at Glastonbury Abbey by permission of Henry, King of England, and his right beloved Abbot Sigward.’ This lady here’s Mistress Adelia, as is also mentioned, and likewise her companion, Mistress Gyltha, and there’s… Hello, what’s wrong with him, then?”
Godwyn the landlord had fainted.