A Murderous Procession (15 page)

“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.

bq.

bq.

I have seen my lady on her balcony

a feeding minnows in the Clain,

kindly, considerately,

but me she feedeth with

far lighter sustenance.

“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.

bq.

bq.

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’Angely 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’Angely, 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 Alencon 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.”