HOW IT WAS DONE, Adelia never knew, because while it was being done, she and Gyltha and Allie dozed on a pile of hay in an empty stable, but by the morning, with the help of Mansur and the soldiers, Landlord Godwyn and his wife had brought their dead inn to life.
Everybody had been allocated rooms with comfortable beds, clean blankets, and warm water for washing. There was even breakfast for all set out on the vast table in the guest’s parlor, a cavern of a room off the passage that led to the front door.
Hilda, the landlady, apologized for it. “Just porridge, cheese, and pickled eel, and a couple of coddled eggs each, for which I’m sorry, sirs and ladies, there being no suppliers in town anymore and six of our hens gone to the fox, God rot it, but later on, Godwyn’ll row over to Godney and fetch proper provisions.”
Since there was fresh, crusty bread to go with the meal, Godwyn, who did the cooking, had already managed to heat ovens, make dough, and let it rise before baking. Both he and his wife, Adelia thought, must have spent the early hours laboring like Trojans.
“I am sorry we alarmed Master Godwyn,” she said to Hilda.
“Very impressible in his humors, our Godwyn,” his wife said. “ ’Twas a shock, what with thinking you was robbers and us not expecting guests, there not having been any since the fire, and no one arriving after the king’s letter, the which we thought he’d forgotten and there was none to come…”
She was a thin, jolly, freckled woman of middle age, taller than her husband, talking all the time while she served the table, never still, regretting that the Pilgrim wasn’t up to its old standard, promising better.
The fire had emptied Glastonbury, she said. Most of the monks had already departed on missions around the country to raise money for the abbey’s rebuilding. As for the townspeople, some had left forever, others had scattered to find work locally until they could return to restore the homes and shops they’d lost.
“The which is a waste of time,” Hilda said briskly, “seeing as how there won’t be no trade until the pilgrims start a-coming again. The which”-and here she turned eager eyes on Mansur-“they will when they hear as King Arthur and his lady lies in our graveyard.”
Adelia sighed. Obviously, it had been impossible to keep the matter quiet in such a small, depleted community, but to have its only expectation resting on her shoulders would be a burden. She hoped she would not be forced to disappoint it; the courage Hilda was showing in adversity was admirable.
“Course, you know who done it, don’t you?” the landlady asked.
“Done what?” Bolt asked.
“Brought this calamity on us deliberate, lost us our living, killed our abbey, killed us.” For a moment, Hilda’s briskness went and her face withered as if all the juice had been sucked out of it, leaving it old and malignant. “Bishop of Wells,” she said.
“A bishop?” Captain Bolt choked over his porridge. “A bishop set the fire?”
“Not him personal, but at his orders,” Hilda told him. “What we want to know is, where’s that useless falconer? Oh, yes, the bishop may say as he was dismissed from Wells for being that he turned to drink, but they’d been close-nobody closer than a hunting bishop and his falconer, lessen it’s his huntsman. And where did that rascal come to, begging to be taken on after the bishop turned him out? To my dear abbot, that’s who. And what happened but three weeks after that? The fire. That’s what happened.” Hilda’s eyes compressed to stop tears from coming. “ Glastonbury ’s murdered and Wells flourishes, and no sign of Useless Eustace since. For why? Because the bishop’s spirited him away so’s he can’t be made to confess.”
Inevitably there would be a scapegoat, Adelia thought. When whole towns became a furnace, as they sometimes did, as this one had, it was either put down to God’s punishment of wickedness-and Glastonbury was regarded as too holy for that-or to arson. There had to be blame; it was too banal that such suffering was caused by the accidental fall of a lighted candle.
To divert a complaint that could carry on for a long time, and because anxiety for Emma gnawed at her, Adelia asked, “By any chance have you heard of a lady with a child and a wounded knight traveling in the vicinity? She was making for Wolvercote Manor but doesn’t seem to have arrived there.”
Hilda sat herself down at the table to think about it. “Lady and a wounded knight, you say?”
“He’s a foreigner, a German.”
“No-o-o, can’t say as I have. I do hope as nothing has happened to your lady, for the roads ain’t safe anymore, what with men have lost their living and turned to robbery-and worse nor robbery, the which there’s travelers having their throats cut over there by Wells, like it wasn’t enough to lose their purses but their lives as well, poor things.”
“That road from Wells is a right disgrace,” Captain Bolt said through a mouthful of porridge. “Trees up to its edges, there’s bound to be robbers. Who’s to catch them in that forest? I wonder as the abbot don’t make it safer.”
Hilda turned on him. “Don’t you blame my dear abbot, don’t you dare. He’d make all safe for everybody, God bless him, but that’s Wells forest-well, the king’s really-but the bishop does his hunting in it and won’t have a twig touched in case it upsets the deer. Oh, if I was a swearing woman, I’d tell you things about the bishop of Wells…”
She proceeded to do so-at length.
The enmity of Glastonbury for Wells, and Wells for Glastonbury, was not just between their churchmen but, according to Hilda, had existed for years among the people of the two towns. Wells had always been jealous of its famous neighbor. “Them Wellsians ain’t Christians, and I’d be sorrier for them when they come to the Seat of Judgment if they didn’t deserve every flame in hell.”
The bishop of Saint Albans, Adelia thought, was going to have his work cut out when he came to make peace between the two.
Captain Bolt cut the diatribe short. Despite only a couple of hours’ sleep, he was taking his soldiers back to Wales immediately.
Adelia was amused to hear him quibbling over the bill for accommodating his men. “I’ll expect you to charge the king only half a night’s tariff, Mistress Hilda, that being all as we spent in our beds, seeing as how we had to set ’ em up. And we saw to our own stabling-you can’t expect the Exchequer to pay for comforts not provided.”
Like king, like captain, Adelia thought.
And then she thought, Damn Henry, he’s done it again.
There’d been a sharp exchange between her and the Plantagenet before she left him. “My lord, I am not going to Glastonbury penniless and with only a paper warrant. Suppose there’s an emergency necessitating cash?”
“Emergency? It’s a holiday I’m giving you, woman.”
In the end she’d managed to inveigle two silver pounds out of him, which-because he didn’t carry money-he’d had to borrow from a reluctant chamberlain. Now at least one of those pounds would have to go to a landlord who’d otherwise be forced to accommodate her on credit that his devastated inn could ill afford to extend-it took a long time before anybody received payment from tightfisted Henry’s equally tightfisted Exchequer.
Nevertheless, she was sorry to see Bolt go; she’d come to like him, impatient as he was, as well as his men.
She was touched to find that he’d already reconnoitered the abbey on her behalf and told its abbot to look out for her.
They all went out into the courtyard to wave the men off, leaving only Rhys still eating at the table.
“And when it’s time for you to go,” Bolt told Adelia, “the king says as you’re to send to Bishop Rowley in Wells for an escort to wherever you’re heading.”
When hell grows icicles, she thought.
But she nodded.
“And make sure as you don’t go wandering alone, not even in daylight.”
“Oh, we shall be safe enough here, Captain.”
He swung himself into the saddle. Then, for such a down-to-earth man, he said a surprising thing: “I ain’t so sure. That fire did more damage than we know, I reckon. Something’s gone out of this place and something else has come in.”
RHYS ACCOMPANIED THEM when they set off for the abbey. “Better pay my respects to Uncle Caradoc’s grave,” he said. Apparently, he was going to sing to it; he was bringing his harp.
Hilda came, too, carrying a heavy covered basket; so did Godwyn, though only as far as the short walk to the quayside, where a little way away from the quay a boathouse stood. The inn’s rowing boat was tied to a pier. He was going to fetch supplies.
“Don’t forget, now,” Hilda shouted after him, “venison if they’ve got it and a good ham. And bring back the girl.” To Adelia she said, “We’ll be needing some help now, and Millie’s a hard worker, even if she be half-witted…”
She went on talking, describing the staff they’d had in the days when pilgrims flooded in, and the grandeur of some of their visitors. “Yes, Queen Eleanor’s own ladies-in-waiting, there not being any room for them in the abbey’s guesthouse; oh, yes, the Pilgrim’s known its share of the nobility…”
Adelia barely listened. She was entranced by the view from the quayside of what lay beyond it. Here at her feet was the River Brue, wending its way like a shining blue piece of marquetry set into a watery, untidy, reed-filled expanse stretching to the horizon. Seagulls wheeled in air that had a touch of salt in it-somewhere in that immense distance was the Severn Estuary and, beyond that, the Celtic Sea, only just being kept at bay by this flat, indeterminate meeting of earth and sky.
Allie was bouncing with joy. “It’s like home, Mama.” She switched to Arabic: “Can we go fishing, Mansur? Can we?” Back at Waterbeach, the two of them had provided the household’s fish meals. She returned to English: “And, look, there’s a man walking on stilts, like they do at home. Can I have some stilts, Mama? Can I?”
“No, you can’t, missie.” Hilda was suddenly severe. “Less’n you know the trackways, there’s bog out there as’ll suck you down and fill that little nose of yours with mud so’s you won’t ever breathe again.”
“No need to frighten the child,” Gyltha snapped, and Allie added, defiantly, “I’m not frightened. I’m a fenlander, I am.”
“Don’t care what you are,” Hilda told her. “Them’s the Avalon marshes and there’s bugaboos out there.”
They weren’t as beautiful as the fens, Adelia thought, being almost treeless, but she knew how her daughter felt; that solitary stilt walker, like an awkward heron against the skyline, was a reminder of home, where men and women used stilts to stride ancient paths hidden under peat and shallow water. Out there was not only an enormous cornucopia of fish and fowl and fuel but also endless entertainment-a pelican rising with a flapping trout in its beak, as one was doing at this moment, otters sliding down banks for the fun of it, darting dragonflies, beavers building a dam, time-wasting marvels that had kept her and Allie entranced for hours.
Hilda, probably rightly, for marshland was a dangerous place to the uninitiated, was still trying to scare Allie away from it. “There’s will-o’-the-wisps with lights to lure you into the mire at night…” She flapped her arms. “Whoo-oo.”
“We call them jack-o’-lanterns,” Allie said, not being a child who frightened easily, “and Mama says they’re a national phenomenon.”
“Natural,” Adelia told her, “a natural phenomenon.” There were islands out there, little humps among the flatness like the curve of dolphins petrified in the act of diving. Godwyn’s boat was heading for the nearest. She would have liked to inquire about them, but this was the king’s time she was wasting, after all. Any more of it and Gyltha’s growing irritation with Hilda would result in a quarrel.
She nudged Mansur. “Lead on, my lord.”
They turned left along the marketplace with its abandoned stalls and followed the abbey wall to the remains of a lichened gatehouse, now just another breach in the perimeter. Up a slope, past what might once have been a tithe barn…
And there it was.
“Mary, mother of God, look down on us,” Gyltha said quietly.
Adelia’s first thought was of how unmercifully the sun shone on a blackened and withered thing that shrank from the glare because it had once been beautiful.
It was still possible to see the former grace of an arch where only a half of it now stood; to mentally rebuild from those stumps of charred stone a long, elegant nave, a transept, a pillared cloister; to recognize the artistry of a master mason’s carving under the soot of a tumbled, broken capital; to replace the ground’s terrible scorch marks, like patches of disease, with the vast, upward sweep of a green hill that had once provided the backdrop to magnificence.
It would take years, decades, perhaps a century, to rebuild. Those who had tended this great church would live among its ruins and die without seeing the completion of what would replace them. Even to begin such a venture required a courage Adelia could not imagine-nor the faith.
“I am so sorry,” she said, and wondered at the inadequacy of saying it, and to whom she had said it.
The fire had spread downhill from the church, leaving the upper slopes of the hill untouched. Up there, two men-one in Benedictine black and the other in the undyed woolen habit of a lay brother-were scything hay, watched over a paddock fence by a solitary mule, all of them forming a pleasing, bucolic miniature, like one on an illuminated manuscript, but throwing into relief the scene from hell that it was edging.
The monk straightened his back, saw them, threw down his scythe, and began running downhill, shouting and waving his arms. “Go back,” he was yelling, “we don’t need you. In the name of the Father, go away.”
Nearer, another monk strode energetically toward them from somewhere on their right in order to intercept the first. “James, Brother James,” he was calling out, “No. No, no, no. Let us remember our manners. If these are the king’s emissaries, they are our saviors.”
He reached them first, smiling. To Mansur, he said, “I give thanks to the king and to Almighty God for your coming. All the world knows of Arab skill in the sciences. I am Abbot Sigward.” He bent his head to each of the women as Adelia introduced herself, then Gyltha, then Allie-who got a special bow-and to Rhys. “Ladies, gentlemen, God’s blessings on you.”
Brother James came cantering up and went to his knees in the cinders. “Don’t let them in, my lord.” Long, nervous hands clutched at the skirt of the abbot’s scapular. “I beg you, send them away.”
“Why?” Abbot Sigward said. “For one thing, I am ready for whatever our good Hilda has in that basket.”
With one hand on Brother James’s trembling shoulder, he led them to the building he’d come out of. It was the only one left standing in the enormous acreage of the abbey’s grounds-a lovely sculpted square of ashlar stone turned a warm yellow by the sun, with a tiled, conical roof rising to an elaborate chimney.
“Once the Abbot’s kitchen,” he said, ushering them in, “now our residence.”
Three quarters of England ’s population would have been glad of it as a residence, Adelia thought. She wouldn’t have minded it herself. It was spacious and cool and functional, though the mason who’d built it hadn’t been able to resist lavishly sculpting stone leaves and fruit into the ceiling’s eight ribs, which curved to meet in a central airhole.
Steps in a corner, where a bucket stood, led down to a dark glint of water. Another corner accommodated vats. A cat was curled up in a pen that also contained a goat. The fireplace beneath the airhole was empty.
Two monks, each with a pestle cupped in one arm, stood by a plain deal table, pounding herbs. One was fat, the other thin.
They glanced up at the visitors, their eyes guarded as they looked from Mansur to Adelia and Gyltha, to Allie, and finally to Rhys.
“Oh, dear God,” said the thin one. “He’s back.”
Rhys bobbed. “ ’Allo, Brother Aelwyn. You remember me, then?”
“Oh, yes,” Brother Aelwyn said.
There were introductions all round. The fat monk was Brother Titus, and his attention, once he’d nodded to them, was on the contents of Hilda’s basket as she began laying them on the table, especially the leather bottle of ale.
“You see,” Abbot Sigward said to Mansur, “we laid a penance on ourselves by sending Brother Patrick, who was our kitchener, to the abbeys in Normandy so that he might beg them for rebuilding money-he has the gift of charm, has Patrick, and an interest in cuisine that will match theirs. Consequently, we are left barely able to cook our own meals. All but one of our lay brothers have departed to find employment elsewhere…”
“Deserted, you mean,” Brother Aelwyn said viciously. “The rats ran away. They think God’s curse is on us.”
“I’m afraid they do,” the abbot said, “and perhaps it is, but at least we are blessed by our sister Hilda’s sustenance.” He smiled at the Pilgrim’s landlady and then at Mansur. “And by your presence, my lord.”
He looked more closely up at the Arab, who remained staring stolidly down at him, unspeaking. To Adelia he said, “Do I gather that the sage does not speak English?”
“I am afraid I must be the doctor’s interpreter and assistant,” Adelia said, using the ploy that had served the two of them well. It was a relief to find Abbot Sigward happy to accept the pronouncements of a Saracen, but she knew that such tolerance would not be extended to her. Prior Geoffrey, bless him, was the one churchman prepared to recognize her skill, but even he only because it had saved his life.
She asked if they had any knowledge of a lady missing with her companions.
They had not. None of them had left the abbey since the fire. “We are the guardians of the few holy relics we managed to save from its burning, you see,” the abbot said, adding, “I am sorry for your anxiety; these are concerning times.”
“Don’t worry about that now, Father,” Hilda told him. “See, I’ve brought ham cured just as you like it, and my quince preserve.” She was noticeably proprietorial toward the abbot, brushing dust off his shoulder, filling a plate for him, producing a napkin that she tried to push into his hand. Nobody else had existed for her since he’d appeared on the scene.
“Any sign of that useless devil as Wells set on us, Father?” she asked.
Indulgently, the abbot fended off the napkin. “We mustn’t assume that Eustace is our arsonist, my dear, nor that the bishop of Wells intended him to be so, though our belief lies in that direction and we have had to tell the sheriff so. But no, so far we have not discovered him.”
“Course he did it,” Hilda argued. “Brother Aloysius said so afore he died, didn’t he? Saw him a-coming from the crypt as it flamed, didn’t he?”
“He said something.”
“He shall burn in hell if he did not in life,” Brother Aelwyn said, “and who else but that satanic bishop would rejoice to see Glastonbury a bonfire? Of course it was Eustace.”
To the still-fussing Hilda, the abbot said, “My dear, it would be discourteous to eat while our guests do not, and I can see that they are eager to be about the king’s business.”
He led the way out of the kitchen. Everybody followed-Brother Titus reluctantly, and covering up the food on the table to keep it from the flies until he should return.
As they headed toward the ruined church, tension rose. The animosity toward Mansur was palpable. Brothers Titus and Aelwyn became even more sullen. Hysterically, Brother James begged his superior not to submit sacred Christian bones to the touch of a Saracen.
Hilda, especially, was on edge. “Them’s Arthur’s and Guinevere’s bones, everybody knows it,” she said over and over, as if by reiteration she could make them so.
Only Abbot Sigward kept his poise. They hadn’t known what to do with the skeletons, he said. “They deserve better housing than our kitchen, so we have built a temporary hut of withies for them on the site of the Lady Chapel, where we trust Saint Mary will watch over them.”
“Should have been two huts for decency,” Brother Aelwyn said.
“My dear, we’ve had this out,” his abbot told him wearily. “This couple have been lying side-by-side all this time; I won’t separate them now.” Suddenly, he winked. “After all, if legend is right, Arthur and Guinevere were respectably married.”
He stopped short of the site, gave Rhys permission to visit the graveyard, then bent down to talk to Allie. “It is time for you to go and play, little one,” he told her. “Old bones are not for the young.”
Allie opened her mouth to explain her experience with bones, but Gyltha, giving her a sharp nudge, said, “We’ll explore, shall us? See what we can find?” And to the abbot, “The child likes animals.”
“There’s a nice horsey up in the paddock,” Sigward said kindly.
“It’s a mule,” Allie said, but allowed herself to be led away.
“Explain, my lord,” Brother James was urging the abbot. “Tell this Saracen of Arthur’s abnormality not granted to ordinary men.” He turned to Adelia for the first time. “Tell your master, woman. Tell him that Arthur has six ribs, a grace given by Our Lord only to heroes.”
Oh, dear, Adelia thought, that old fable. She said, “I think, sir, my Lord Mansur would instruct you that women and men have exactly the same number of ribs-six pairs, always six. The only way of telling a female skeleton from the male is by the pelvic bones.”
“Instruct me?” Brother James’s voice was high and became higher. “Instruct me? I take my instruction from the Word in Genesis: ‘So the Lord God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep; and while he was sleeping, he took one of the man’s ribs and closed up the place with flesh. Then the Lord God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and brought her to the man.’ Adam had but five ribs, and so have all men, except those given a special dispensation by God, as Arthur has been.”
Don’t they ever feel their own chests? Adelia wondered. Why don’t they count the damn things?
It was something she’d met over and over. Whoever had written Genesis was no anatomist.
Damn it, she thought, how can we make our investigation with an audience that’s not only on tenterhooks but ignorant as well?
Abbot Sigward solved that for her. “Come along, my sons,” he said, “it is time for sext. And Hilda, dear soul, if you would finish grinding the wood bryony, for Brother James’s stiffness of the joints causes him suffering…”
Within a minute, everybody had gone-Hilda eager to fulfill a request by the abbot.
Adelia and Mansur stood alone outside the hut of withies, a large, fresh, sweet-smelling hump in the charred rectangle that had once been a soaring monument to the Virgin.
Mansur bowed his head. Adelia knelt, as she always did, asking the dead beyond the door to forgive her for handling their remains. “Permit your flesh and bone to tell me what your voices cannot.”
When she stood up, Mansur said, “Can you sense it?”
“Sense what?”
They spoke in Arabic; it was safer for them, should they be overheard.
“We are on holy ground. This place is an omphalos.”
She couldn’t have been more surprised if he’d said it was Mecca. Mansur was not a man to show fervor; she had never known him to be awestruck before, and certainly not by anything Christian. His face was as impassive as ever, but that he should say he was finding in Glastonbury the same mystery that the ancient Greeks had attributed to the navel of their world in Delphi ’s dark cave was extraordinary.
She sniffed the air and looked around her. Was she missing something? Henry Plantagenet, another man difficult to impress, had mentioned much the same thing.
If he and Mansur were right, she should be receiving a vibration from the air, a tingling in her body from standing on one of the world’s sacred centers, a place where the division between man and God was thinner than anywhere else.
Geographically, it was striking, she’d give it that-extraordinary sudden hills rearing up out of the plain as if to protect the abbey’s back, the flats of salt marsh in front giving it a tang of the sea. Undoubtedly, there was a natural magnetism that had pulled people to worship a presence here long before Christ had set foot on his native heath.
She couldn’t feel it. The sun shone hot on her head; birds twittered as they colonized the poor ruins. The scents of June were overcoming the stink of ash. Wildflowers were beginning to push through devastated ground. She was grateful to God for such blessings. But mystery? Not for her, to whom all mystery must have an explanation.
And she was sorry for it; perhaps the lack was in her, an inability to succumb to the divine. I just don’t feel it.
She smiled up at Mansur, envious of an exhilaration that left her untouched. “Are you ready?” she asked him.
“I am ready.”
They went in together.
Light dappled through the loose weave of the hut’s roof onto two catafalques formed by piers of blackened tiles built to hold up two long pieces of stone like altars. Between them was a long coffin shaped like a canoe, its lid on the ground by its side.
Heavy cloths covered both sets of remains, and somebody had put pots of buttercups at the head of each, a shining yellow donation from the living to the dead that brought tears to Adelia’s eyes. Here was a shrine; she was reluctant to disturb its peace.
They stood for a moment. From the hole that had once been a church’s nave, the monks were chanting, their disciplined voices chopping up the sweet, linear sound of Rhys’s song coming from farther away.
After a long moment, Mansur carefully lifted the cloth from the bigger of the two shapes. Adelia heard him take in a breath, and she took one herself.
Whoever these bones had belonged to, he’d been magnificent in life, nearly six and a half feet tall-a commanding height at any time, and one that during the Dark Ages would have inspired legend.
If he’d died in battle, it had been at the hand of a ferocious enemy; the skull was staved in, cracks radiating out from the hole like an egg tapped with a heavy spoon. Instant death. The ribs, the six ribs, had become flailed so that they had been broken and detached from the chest wall.
“Allah grant that he maimed his opponent before he went down,” Mansur said.
“We mustn’t, we must not, assume he was a warrior,” Adelia told him; she’d never known her friend to get carried away like this.
“What else could he have been?”
“Perhaps it was an accident.” It sounded inglorious, even unlikely, but she was determined not to jump to conclusions.
It seemed appropriate that a woman should uncover the smaller skeleton. Adelia lifted the cloth and then let it fall from her hands onto the floor, unheeded. “Oh, God, who did this?”
There was a hole in the skull similar to the man’s, but that was not all of it-this skeleton had been cut into two pieces, chopped twice, once just below the ischium and then at the hips, so that where the pelvis and sacrum should have been there was a gap. The entire pelvic structure, from the lower vertebrae to the top of the femur, was absent, as if whoever had done it had wanted to take revenge on femininity.
And they’d laid her out as if this was normal, as if it was natural that the tops of her legs should emerge directly from her spine.
Adelia’s voice rose into a screech. “Who did this? Who did this?”
“Things are done in a battle,” Mansur said sadly, “even to women.”
Perhaps they were. “But they didn’t mention it,” Adelia shouted. “Plenty of fuss about Arthur’s bloody ribs, but no word about this… this mutilation of Guinevere. Oh, she’s a mere woman, it doesn’t matter.”
And then she realized that she had named the skeletons, which she should not have done. If she was to do the job the king had set her, they had to remain unclassified until she had more to go on.
“Maybe the bones fell away before she was put into the coffin,” Mansur said.
“They were hacked off,” Adelia told him. “Look here.” She pointed to the splintered top of the femurs. “And here.” The lowest remaining vertebra had been cleaved in half.
Mansur tried to soothe her. “It would have been done after she was dead,” he said.
“How do you know? How can you possibly know that?”
And if it had been done postmortem, she thought, was it by some woman-hating monk? Were female reproductive organs too unclean to lie in ground reserved for holy men?
She felt a ferocious protection for the woman this had been; the skeleton was so… so dainty. Perfect little teeth grinned up at her, slender hand and finger bones lay quietly on the catafalque, as if the appalling infliction on the lower body no longer mattered.
Which it probably didn’t-not to her.
It mattered to Adelia.
At the sound of footsteps outside, she shot through the door, swearing in Arabic, ready to berate any damned monk in her path. But it was Gyltha and Allie waiting for her.
“Come and see this…” Adelia began, and then stopped. There was a look on Gyltha’s face.
“We been up there.” Gyltha jerked her head toward the upper pasture without taking her eyes off Adelia’s. “We went to see the mule.”
“Oh, yes?”
“An’ she started to cry.” Another jerk of the head, this time down at Allie. “Said she was sorry as how she’d been nasty to little Pippy, and why wouldn’t he come and see her.”
“Yes?”
“An’ I said, ‘We’ll find him, pigsy. Him and his mama’ve been held up on the road.’ And she said, ‘No, he’s here. That’s his pet mule.’ An’ I said, ‘Can’t be.’ And she said…”
Adelia crouched down to put herself on a level with her daughter. “Why do you think it’s Pippy’s mule, darling?”
“ ’Cos it is,” Allie said. Tears were still on her cheeks. “It’s Poly-carp. Pippy used to like him best of all because he could feed him and he didn’t bite like the others.”
“How do you know it’s Polycarp?”
“ ’Cos it is,” Allie said again. “He’s got a nick in his ear and a bit of rain rot on his rump-like a strawberry patch. Wilfred said they would put seaweed on it.” She cheered up. “Just near his arse.”
“You’re sure?”
“It’s Polycarp.” Allie was getting irritated with the interrogation.
Adelia looked up to meet Gyltha’s eyes.
“She ain’t never wrong when it comes to animals,” Gyltha said.
“No,” said Adelia slowly. “No, she isn’t. Oh, dear God.”