Adelia took in a sob of breath and looked again. It wasn’t a bow, it wasn’t a head; it was Allie’s birdcage, which someone had left balanced on the chair’s back. Going the length of the table, she took it up and cradled it for a moment before putting it down to begin a search of the room’s aumbries. Platters in one, pewter tankards in another, candlesticks and candles, a box of sharp eating knives. Nothing there, though it was difficult to see.
Back in the kitchen, stamping to scatter the rats, she blew on the embers of the fire and lit a candle. The flame intensified the shadows outside its range so that, going upstairs, she had to fight the impression that she was accompanied.
Godwyn and Hilda’s room was meaner than those of the guests. Wherever they’d gone, it was in the clothes they stood up in, because a small press contained neatly folded tunics, skirts, bodices, trousers, and several clean aprons, all dusted with pennyroyal against the moth.
Adelia started back from a human shape behind the door. It turned out to be two cloaks hanging on a hook. There was a ewer and bowl, both empty, with a saucer of soapwort by their side. A shelf held a razor, combs, and various jars, all of which Adelia opened without finding anything but medicaments. A bottle contained a bitter-smelling tincture of burdock, suggesting one or the other of its owners had digestive problems. Probably Godwyn, Adelia thought, remembering the landlord’s perpetual look of discomfort.
She got down on her knees to peer under the bed, finding only a pisspot. She tipped over a straw mattress and examined the struts on which it lay. She tapped every floorboard to see if one was hollow.
Nothing.
An innocent room.
The communal chamber in which poorer guests were put to sleep side by side was swept and empty except for an enormous platform of a bed, now stripped of covering, and a giant chest containing the inn’s linens, which expelled a pleasant smell of the dried rosemary and sage scattered among the sheets.
The room she’d shared with Allie was next door, and Adelia went in, hoping against hope that Gyltha, in packing, had over-looked something that she could change into—what she was wearing had suffered in the forest.
Of course, there was nothing; Gyltha hadn’t left so much as a pin behind. However, the ewer still held water for washing… .
A door along the landing bumped against its frame as if some-one had put it to. It was the door to Mansur and Gyltha’s room.
She went out to see. It couldn’t have been the wind; there was no wind.
Yes, there was; the storm was sending a slight breeze ahead of itself, soughing a draft of air through the corridor outside.
Adelia bolted back into her room and barred the door. Whatever was out there,
if
there was anything out there, she could face it better clean—or, happier still, cower in here and not face it at all.
Shaking, she stripped, scrubbing and sluicing herself with manic energy, saving some of the water for her hair, which she plaited—her head veil being too torn by forest branches to be worth putting on again.
There.
She’d be a fresher sacrifice if she were killed. But then, as she re-dressed, she thought,
Fool, you still hope that Rowley will come.
She drew back bolts and, candle in one hand, the other gripping the sword hanging from her string girdle, approached the door she’d heard closing. It wasn’t on the latch and trembled in a
draft that had become stronger. Raindrops began hitting the inn’s roof like pellets; somewhere an unsecured shutter startled to rattle.
“I warn you, I’m armed,” she shouted, and kicked the door open. At the same moment a rush of air along the passage from one window to another blew her candle out.
No. No, I’m not brave enough.
As she rushed for the stairs, the storm broke. Thunder cracked the sky in half. The inn’s front door was open, letting in rain. Lightning outlined the hooded figure advancing toward the bottom of the stairs, sleek and gleaming, its arms held wide like a scarecrow’s.
“I
WAS TRYING TO CATCH YOU
,” Rowley said. “I thought you were going to fall down.”
“I nearly did,” Adelia told him. She was still sitting on the stairs, her legs too weak from shock to stand. “Did Allie arrive all right?”
“And Gyltha. And Mansur. All apparently under the impression that you’d be waiting for them. I told them to stay and I’d come to see to it. Perhaps you’d be good enough to tell me what it is I have to see to.”
Both were having to shout over the noise of the storm; outside the still-open door, rain was hitting the courtyard cobbles as if a giant overhead was sluicing them with titanic buckets of water.
Rowley produced a flask and handed it to Adelia before taking off his leather cloak and hood to shake them outside, then shut the door.
“Bolt it,” Adelia told him.
He raised an eyebrow but did as she said.
She took a swig of his brandy. It caused her to cough, but it made her feel better; she could cope with anything now that he was here.
He picked up a lantern and they went into the parlor, each carefully choosing a seat on either side of the table. He became benign. “Well, my child?”
Don’t call me that,
she thought. But she was too glad of him to start the old confrontation. She told him of her excursion into the forest and what lay buried there, of what had happened. “You see … oh, Rowley, I’ve killed a man.”
“Good.”
She shook her head in misery. “Don’t admire me for it.”
“Why not? What else could you do? He was about to spear this Alf of yours before raping you… .” He reverted to being bishop-like again. “Do you wish me to hear your confession, my child?”
“No, I don’t,” she snarled at him. “I’m telling you as a friend.” She showed him the sword. “It seemed to act by itself.”
“Where did you find that old thing, in the name of God?”
“Never mind.” There were other things to get to. She told him what she knew of Wolf’s attack on the road, of the dowager Wolvercote’s part in it, and what she suspected had happened to Emma, Pippy and Roetger after their escape.
She had to speak loudly to overcome the lash of rain outside, wincing as lightning lit up cracks in the shutters, stopping altogether during rolls of thunder.
“It’s a matter of shapes, you see,” she said. “Representation. Last seen, those three in the cart were galloping for their lives in this direction. I believe they saw the inn here, the only building on the road, and made for its shelter.”
“They could have, I suppose,” the bishop said doubtfully.
Again, she suppressed irritation. Damn it, didn’t he believe
her? Couldn’t he see, as she did, that poor trio hammering on the Pilgrim’s door, begging to be let in?
Going doggedly on, she said, “Hilda and Godwyn had been told by the king’s messenger to receive three guests: a foreign gentleman who would be investigating the skeletons in the abbey churchyard, a lady, and her child. And there they were, on the doorstep, Master Roetger, a foreigner; Emma; and Pippy Fitting the expected shapes exactly.”
“So?”
“So …” Adelia drew a deep breath. “I think they murdered them.”
“What?”
“Murdered them. The circumstances were perfect; the three arrived without protection, nobody knowing they
had
arrived . . .”
“No protection, woman? Emma had a master swordsman with her.”
“She also had a child. I’m not saying they were killed where they stood. Probably they were invited in, made welcome, comforted. But you only need a child to make you vulnerable.” Angrily, she wiped tears from her eyes. It had happened to her during an investigation when Allie was still a baby; she’d gone quietly to what had nearly been her death because a killer had threatened to kill her daughter if she did not.
She said, “At some point Godwyn merely had to grab hold of Pippy and wave a knife. Emma and Roetger would have had to do what they were told. It was why I wanted Allie away from here. It only takes someone with a weapon.”
“Why on earth should anybody do that?”
“It’s something to do with the abbey skeletons. If they’re disproved as Arthur’s and Guinevere’s, the economy of the abbey will suffer. So will the Pilgrim’s.”
“So three people had their throats cut? You’re fantasizing, my girl. Godwyn’s a common landlord, for God’s sake. A weedy little man. Innkeepers don’t go round murdering their guests. Not deliberately, anyway, though I’ve eaten some meals . . .”
Adelia gritted her teeth. “A weedy little man who fainted when Mansur, Allie, and I arrived at his inn; he knew he’d killed the wrong people.” She leaned forward. “Rowley, I
know
he did. What’s Emma’s mule doing up in the abbey pasture? Hilda, Godwyn, they sold her goods once she was dead—horses, cart, clothes, jewels. That’s what I was about when you arrived, searching for something, anything, that still belongs to her.”
He teetered his chair back. The lantern on the table between the two of them threw an upward light on his face, emphasizing its bones, leaving the sockets of his eyes dark. He’d always been a big, well-fleshed man—his first years as bishop had rendered him almost plump; too many clerical feasts and dinners—but he was thinner now than she’d ever seen him. It suited him. But, blast him, he was complacent, a know-it-all. Power did that, she supposed. Too much “Yes, my lord bishop,” “No, my lord bishop.”
“And have you found it?” he asked, sure of the answer.
“No.”
“There you are, then.”
Adelia stood up. They could sit here all night while she kept advancing her theory and he kept refuting it. Well,
she
at least wasn’t going to. “Come on, you can help me look.” She took up the lantern.
Sighing heavily, he followed her.
It was only as they went up the stairs that she remembered the door to Mansur and Gyltha’s room. “Somebody might be in there,” she said, pointing. She could be brave now.
“A murderous landlord?” Dramatically, he drew his sword. “Let me at him. I’ll run the varlet through.”
She held the lantern so that they could both see as she went in behind him. An almost simultaneous crack of lightning and thunder made them crouch—and sent a figure scuttling under the bed. They heard it moan.
Adelia drooped with relief. “Millie, it’s me. Don’t be frightened, it’s me. This gentleman’s a friend.” Then she remembered. What use of verbal reassurance to a girl who couldn’t hear it?
Signing to Rowley to sheathe his sword, she went forward, letting the lantern shine on Millie’s terrified face.
They took the girl downstairs to the parlor. Rowley administered brandy. “She can’t hear the thunder, you say?”
“I don’t think so. But she’s frightened of something, poor child. She knows. . . .” Gently, Adelia cupped the girl’s face in her hands, mouthing words. “Millie, what . . . happened … to the lady . . . who came here . . . with her little boy? Oh, this is hopeless.” She turned to the table and drew three figures in its light layer of dust with her finger—a large one with a sword in its hand, that of a woman, and, finally, that of a child.
“These three, Millie,” she begged, pointing. “They came here. What happened to them?”
“She won’t tell you even if she could,” Rowley said. “She’ll protect her employers.”
“I don’t think so, they beat her. Oh, look . . .”
For comprehension had come into Millie’s eyes. She was nodding, her finger tracing a line under Adelia’s drawing, standing up, beckoning. They followed her to the back door, where she drew the bolts, cowered for a moment at the swamping rain, and ran for the stables. Adelia and Rowley ran after her.
The storm had covered the sound of Rowley’s arrival. Before he’d done anything, he’d stabled and attended to his horse, now kicking in its stall, scared by the thunder.
Rowley went to its head and soothed it. “All right, old boy, all right, it’s only noise,” but his eyes were on Millie, who had gone to a woodpile by the door and was throwing logs aside to reach something underneath.
Nodding emphatically, she dragged a curved, broken section of wood from others that were similar and watched Adelia as she handed it to her.
“What is it?” Rowley asked.
It was an elaborately fretted piece of oak. “A bit of the hoop from Emma’s cart,” Adelia said. “It held up the canvas. It’s all here. They smashed it up for firewood.”
Dont weep,
she told herself.
You knew.
But despite everything, she had hoped to be wrong.
“For Jesus’ sake, why?” Rowley was becoming convinced. “Why would they kill them?”
“For gain. Dear Heaven, Rowley, that little boy. Emma loved him so much.”
Millie was still looking up, curving her right hand over three extended fingers of the other to make sure she understood. Three people in a covered cart.
Adelia nodded and shaped the question “Where are they?”
There was ferocity in Millie’s face. What had been done was wrong,
wrong;
now she could expose it. She got up, dragging Adelia back to the inn. Rowley followed, splashing through ankle-high water. If anything, the rain was intensifying; the courtyard’s drain couldn’t cope with it.
Millie made for the kitchen. She pointed to a large vat in one corner and then began tugging at it. It was too heavy for her.
Rowley put down the lantern and went to help. The vat moved, but its bottom hoop caught on something and they had to tip and roll it before it was free of the obstruction.
Underneath was a handle set into one of the kitchen’s flagstones.
“Shit,” Rowley said.
Millie held up three fingers again, her teeth bared as if in despair, then pointed. “God help them,” Adelia said, quietly. “They’re down there.” As lightning flashed again, so did hope. “Lift it, quick, quick. They might still be alive, prisoners.”
It was a heavy slab. With effort, Rowley hoisted it up and slid it to one side. A dank smell mixed with that of liquor came rushing out of the hole—but not the stink of corruption Adelia had been dreading.
Rowley knelt. “Halloo, there. Emma?
Halloo
.” He turned his head sideways, but there was only the beat of rain and a crack of thunder that shook the kitchen walls. “There are steps here,” he said.