The champion was her greatest worry; if Emma was thin, he was emaciated. Adelia hadn’t yet seen him put his injured foot to the ground and suspected he couldn’t. Worse, though he refused to complain, he was breathing with a difficulty that suggested he’d developed a constriction of the lungs. “Do hurry,” she begged Rowley.
“I’m going as fast as I can, woman,” he puffed. “I haven’t poled a punt since I was a boy.”
Actually, he did well. It seemed to Adelia that they had left and were returning on two different days but, when at last Glastonbury’s landing place was in sight, the sun was only just leaving its zenith.
Emma put up a fight when she saw that she was being taken to the Pilgrim. “Not there. We’re not going back there.”
“Yes, you are,” Adelia said. “Master Roetger can’t go on. Look at him.”
Emma looked, and her outburst dissipated into panic. “You’ve got to save him, ’Delia. He was our mainstay. Those brigands on the road would have killed us all if it hadn’t been for him. I can’t . . . oh, ’Delia, I can’t do without him.”
“Let’s put him into a bed and you won’t have to,” Adelia said, hoping that it was true. Getting her patients up the slope to the inn was hard enough, and it was a relief to see Millie at its door, shading her eyes as she looked in alarm from one to the other.
There was no time to answer questions even if the maidservant had been able to ask them, but Millie, intelligent girl that she was, realized that beds were needed and hurried upstairs to prepare them.
“And you,” Adelia told Godwyn. “I’m sorry, I’m very sorry, but these people must have food. And if you’ve got wine, warm it. Hurry.”
The man was still dazed, but being in accustomed surroundings seemed to rally him and he went off toward the kitchen, nodding.
Emma refused to take nourishment; she wanted only to sit by Roetger’s bedside and weep over him. Adelia hauled her back downstairs to the dining room, where Pippy was tucking into broth.
“Eat something,” she told her, “and I’ll organize a bath for you.”
A bath would be restorative; both Pippy and his mother needed one badly.
Come to that,
Adelia thought,
I could do with one myself
.
Hilda had boasted that the inn possessed a bath—“the nobility is set on it,” she’d said—but Adelia, not able to remember seeing one, went in search of it. She found an enormous tub lined with canvas in the barn, where, during the time that the Pilgrim lacked noble guests, it had been transferred so that Hilda could do her laundry in it.
Water was boiled, and Millie set to the task of carrying buckets of it across the courtyard.
“And you,” Adelia told Rowley, “will please give Roetger a bed bath. If I do it, he’ll be embarrassed.”
The bishop looked alarmed. “How do you do that?”
Sudden, sheer happiness filled her, making her laugh. He’d been so nearly dead, and now he wasn’t. She wanted to tell him how the tunnel had changed the perspective of everything she saw, that she’d accept him on any terms as long as he’d have her—and just keep breathing in and out.
However, this bustling house and time held no moment for romance. Later, when they were alone, she would give herself up to him. She must be arranged for it, beautiful.
A clean cloth, another bucket—this time filled with cool water to help bring down the patient’s fever—were carried upstairs and instructions given.
And by late afternoon, all that could be done was done. A clean mother and son were asleep in one room and a gray-faced champion was propped up on pillows next door looking no better than he had, and breathing worse.
Adelia put down the spoon of linctus she’d been trying to get him to take. “I don’t know, Rowley,” she said. “The crisis is coming and … I just don’t know.”
“I’d wait with you,” Rowley said, “but I must go to the abbey. The brothers have to be told.”
“An accident?”
“That’s what I’ll say. Why add to their agony, or anybody else’s? The king must know, of course, but Abbot Sigward will be mourned throughout England and beyond. No point in broadcasting that the man chose to go to hell.”
“Is that where he is?”
“Suicide is an offense against God,” the bishop told her shortly, and went out.
Was it? Or had it been the only free choice for a man who’d tried so hard for so long to exculpate an even greater sin?
And he’d taken Hilda with him; only Godwyn mourned her. Yet what would have become of her if he had not? At best, incarceration with other madwomen. Was that why he did it? Had the woman been in a condition to know it?
Lord, judgments are too hard, I can’t think about it now.
As the light began to go, Roetger broke into a sweat and his breathing became easier. Adelia sent up her gratitude for the endurance of the human body, made him comfortable, and went to fetch Millie to sit with the patient.
On the way, she took the girl into the parlor and to the table that had become their mutual slate board. “See,” she mouthed, tracing stick figures in its dust. “There’s the abbot, that’s meant to be his hat. And that’s poor Hilda.” She drew a wavy line over both heads. “And that’s the sea. Damn it, there must be some way of teaching you to read.”
Millie, glancing from Adelia’s face to the table with concern, pointed in the direction of the marshes and then toward the hatch that led to the kitchen where Godwyn sat weeping.
“Yes. She’s gone, Millie. No more beatings.”
The two women crossed themselves and, again, Adelia wondered whether or not Hilda had been willing to go into the quicksand with the man she worshipped and had been prepared to kill for.
God, she was sick of death; it was as if she herself generated it, infecting those she met. She wanted to be clean of it, she wanted life, she wanted Rowley, she wanted a
bath.
Once she’d lugged more hot water to the tub in the barn, and collected a candle, a towel, and some soapwort from the patch kept growing in the shade of the inn’s outer wall, she took one, luxuriating in sweet-smelling suds, letting her overtired brain rest on matters such as where to find clean clothes and whether she could flick a bubble as far as the hay fork hanging on the opposite wall.
The barn door crashed open, making her yelp, but it was Rowley. “Well, that’s done.”
Damn.
She’d wanted to be pretty for him, not squatted in an outsize wooden bucket with her hair tied on top of her head with string.
All at once embarrassed, she reached for a towel to cover what
she could and tried to be businesslike. “How did they receive the news?”
“Badly. But I told them it was an accident.”
“Did you tell them he killed Arthur and Guinevere?”
“Of course not. I just said they’d been proved to be the skeletons of two men, not how they died nor at whose hand. They’re going to re-bury them quietly.”
“And Hilda?”
“An accident, an accident.” Then, as if in answer to a protest she hadn’t made, he said, “For the Lord’s sake, Adelia, they’ve lost enough.”
She supposed they had: their abbey, their abbot. And the truth would cost the Church even more; it was the bishop of Saint Albans’s job to defend it, to weigh Sigward’s twenty years of penance and goodness against an appalling crime.
How she felt about that she didn’t know. It was her job to uncover the truth. She couldn’t control what men did with it.
Perhaps he was right; perhaps there was enough ugliness in the world without exposing people to more.
“Move over,” Rowley said. He began stripping off.
“For goodness sake,” she said, “this isn’t big enough for both of us.”
“Do you mean the tub or my manhood? In either case, the answer’s yes, it is.”
He was right. For a while the two of them forgot everything except each other, and the Pilgrim’s courtyard was treated to the sound of splashing and delighted feminine gurgles.
Later, in her bed, he said, “I’m not letting you loose again. Rescuing you from the holes you keep falling into is becoming boring.”
“I know, my love. I can’t live without you, either. Not anymore. The king can go hang; let him find some other mistress of the art of death. But what can we do?”
She’d been slaked with him, but this naked, energetic lover was also an anointed bishop, marriage forbidden to him, a man of God.
Her fault, of course. She had feared the restrictions of being a wife to an ambitious man would have sublimated her skills as a doctor and anatomist under rounds of household care and entertaining for which she was unfit and which, in the end, would have held him back, making them both unhappy.
And the thing was that ever since the day that Henry, pouncing on the opportunity to thrust a trusted man into a position of power in a hostile Church, had given him the post, he’d excelled in it. He was less judgmental, more truly Christian, than the prelates who terrified their flocks with threats of damnation while living lives just as sinful.
But by loving her, Rowley was aware of his own hypocrisy; he made light of it, but it dismayed him.
Now he was saying, “I’m going to set you and Allie up somewhere, a place where I can come and go without anybody knowing, a secret place like Henry found for his Rosamund.” He winked and nudged her. “Don’t fancy Lazarus Island, I suppose?”
She laughed, but afterward the two of them fell silent.
…
come and go without anybody knowing, a secret place like Henry found for his Rosamund … secret … without anybody knowing.
A permanent arrangement: she a kept woman, Rowley experiencing guilt every time he opened his mouth to preach.
We’re not that sort of people,
Adelia thought.
Any honor either of us has will be gone. Both of us constantly aware he’s betraying his God, as he’s betraying Him now, snatching furtive moments together such as this like a couple of adulterers; it will tarnish us both. Could I bear it? Could he? Can we bear not to?
Then she considered the dead of these past days, the moment in the tunnel when she thought that this man had joined them.
“Yes,” she said.
Surprised, he came up on one elbow to look at her. “Really?”
“Yes. As long as Gyltha and Mansur come with us.”
“I’ll be away on circuit a good deal, you know that?”
“Do you want me or not?”
He kissed her hard and settled back comfortably. “If you’re a good girl, I’ll try and bring you a corpse or two to play with.”
A home, a father for Allie, security, love . . .
I am tired of independence.
Yet even as she dwelled restfully and with pleasure on these things, she knew that some wisp of … What was it? … Virtue? . . . No, not virtue, she didn’t care about that. … A constituent, like sea salt, that had been in her since she’d been born would no longer be hers.
C
APTAIN BOLT
and an escort came to the inn the next morning to say that the traveling courts of the assize were arriving in the town of Wells and the bishop of Saint Albans was royally commanded to attend as one of their justices.
“The king’s been in Anjou, but he’ll be coming to England shortly,” the captain said—an announcement calculated to instill a frisson of fear in everyone who heard it, and invariably did. “And the lord Mansur’s to write a report for him about what’s been happenin’ here in Glastonbury—the skeletons and that.”
Henry wasn’t going to be pleased.
Aloud, Adelia said, “Then ask my lord Mansur to return, bringing parchment and ink with him—and my daughter and Gyltha.”
She would be losing Rowley but gaining those she loved as much.
Supping ale with his men in the sunny courtyard, Bolt added, “Don’t you be going near the forest tomorrow; we’re to clear it out. Henry ain’t pleased at the trouble disturbin’ the peace of the King’s Highway.” He scratched his head to remember the wording of his orders:
“If the dispute between Wells and Glastonbury be not resolved by them, they shall expect the Crown to intervene. Le roi le veut.
Yep, that’s it. We’re comin’ down on them forest brigands like terriers on a rats’ nest.”
That would settle the tithing’s fear of Scarry. She wondered how to get a message to them telling them to stay clear.
The lay brother Peter,
she thought—she’d send word to Will and the others through him.
She told Bolt about the attack on Emma’s cavalcade and the resultant graves in the forest, giving directions to their position as best she could. “Lady Emma will want the bodies taken up for decent burial.”
“We’ll see to it,” Bolt told her, and she knew he would.
She watched the soldiers ride off, taking her lover with them.
G
RASS WAS GROWING
through the abbey’s cinders. Valerian and wild honeysuckle sprouted from between fallen stones. Swallows disappeared into the niches of the nave’s one standing wall, fed their nesting young, and flew out again in the perpetual work of parenting.
Nature was singing of life, the monks in the ruined choir were singing of death, both of them doing it beautifully.
Kneeling beside the catafalques in the hut of withies, Adelia listened.
“In paradisum deducant te Angeli; in tuo adventu suscipiant te martyres …”
And when will they plead for you to be conducted into Paradise?
she asked the skeletons.
Will you also be received among the martyrs? Or will you return to your grave unknown and unmourned?
Perhaps,
she thought,
it doesn’t matter as long as you’re together.
In her untuneful voice, she sang to them in time to the monks’ voices. “May choirs of angels receive thee; may you have eternal rest.”
She got up and went out to stand in the shadow of the nave’s remaining wall.
After a while Brother Peter emerged, wiping his eyes. “Can’t stand no more of that; they’ll be at it all day.” He showed no surprise at finding her there. “What’d he do it for? What’d he
do
it for? Accident, the bishop says, but he knew them marshes. Hilda, too.”
Adelia shook her head in sympathy without answering; the man’s questions were rhetorical. “Brother Peter, I want you to warn Will and the others not to go poaching in the forest tomorrow.”