“Poaching?” He might never have heard the word before.
She nodded. “Poaching. But not in the forest. Not tomorrow.”
The lay brother stared at her, narrowing his eyes. “Here, I saw as there was soldiers at the inn. Goin’ after Wolf and his gang, are they?”
“I can’t say.” Perhaps she’d said too much; perhaps he was well enough in with the brigands to warn them. At least his brother had not told him that Wolf was dead.
The man looked relieved. “ ’Bout time that Wolf got his comeuppance. Proper terror, he’s been, God rot him.”
“And you’ll warn Will?”
He shrugged. “Daresay I might.”
She received no thanks for her trouble and expected none. Peter was as surly as his brother; they were like the fenmen she knew in East Anglia—gratitude was shown in actions, not words.
It must be something to do with living in marshes,
she thought.
“Here,” he said, when she would have walked away, “Will and the lads is summoned to the assize to answer for Eustace settin’ the fire—the which he didn’t. So you get that darky doctor of yourn to be there and tell the judges as how he didn’t do it.”
“Daresay I might,” she said.
U
NDER ESCORT,
Allie, Gyltha, and Mansur made a joyful return to the Pilgrim the next morning, bringing with them Rhys the bard.
On the way, they’d glimpsed Captain Bolt and at least forty king’s men, all fully armed, go galloping into the forest and heard the sound of distant clashes coming out of it. The purification had begun.
“Mansur said they were killing snakes,” Allie piped, “but snakes don’t scream, do they, Mama?”
Adelia hugged her. “I think those do.”
Gyltha said, coldly, “An’ while we’re about it, what’s all this Rowley’s been tellin’ us? Gettin’ rid of us like that, I’ve a good mind to tan your arse for you.”
“You do not do that again,” Mansur told Adelia quietly in his boy’s voice. “I am your protector or I am nothing.”
By tricking them into going to Wells, she had humiliated them, the Arab’s pride especially. Adelia tried explaining that Allie’s presence at the inn had made them all vulnerable in the same way that Emma and Roetger had been forced to obey Hilda because, with Pippy in her arms, the madwoman had threatened to cut his throat. “And I knew you wouldn’t go without me,” she pleaded. “You wouldn’t have,
would
you?”
Gyltha snorted.
She snorted again when Rhys was introduced to Emma and immediately fell in love.
“Did you hear my songs to you, lady?” he asked, sweeping off his cap. “Was they what called you back from that lonely peak of exile?”
Emma looked bewildered.
Adelia said, “It wasn’t a peak. No, they didn’t. And her affections are elsewhere.”
It was useless. Lady Emma was the lost white bird regained. Missing, she had been the subject of his laments, and now, here in the flesh, pale, thin, beautiful, she was perfection—a being so ethereal, so far above him, that he could safely be her troubadour of a passion never to be requited. Even as he moaned, he began tuning the harp.
“Look at him,” Gyltha said in disgust. “Happy as a pig in shit now he’s miserable.”
The well had its cover put in place so that the two reunited children wouldn’t fall down it while they played in the courtyard. The adults went indoors to sit around the dining table and listen to Adelia tell the full story of the past two days and nights.
Only Roetger was absent. He wasn’t making the recovery Adelia had hoped for him, too weak to leave his bed, with no interest in food nor anything else and embarrassed by the fact that either Adelia or Millie had to help him onto the pot—he refused to let Emma do it.
Here, like Mansur, was another who’d been humiliated by his inability to protect his lady. It gnawed at him. “What champion was I for her?” he asked Adelia at one point.
Emma wouldn’t have it. “I keep telling him. What could he
do
? That hag, that
Hilda,
kept a knife to Pippy’s throat; we had to obey
her. And his bravery when we were attacked on the road . . . you should have seen him. Injured, but fighting like a tiger. Pip and I would be dead if it weren’t for him. Oh, ’Delia, I don’t care what people think anymore, I want to marry him. Do you think the king will let me?”
“I’m sure he will.” In truth, she
wasn’t
sure. Emma was valuable property, and in the king’s gift to be wed how he commanded. Because Adelia’s last investigation had been successful, she had been able, as a reward, to persuade Henry not to marry Emma off against her will.
But that was when she’d been successful. . . .
It grieved the German particularly that he’d lost his sword, symbol of everything he’d once been, which Hilda had made him lay down and was now nowhere to be found. “She could not sell it,” he said. “It was too fine. No, she has thrown it away. Why not me, also? I am without use.”
Until now, Adelia had left Emma in ignorance of her mother-in-law’s attempt to have her killed, waiting for the poor girl to be stronger. Yet she had to be told, and when, round the table, that part of the tale was reached, she waited for the fury she herself felt.
Wolf and dowager, two murderers.
She was disappointed. Emma had, after all, suffered terribly: the attack on the road by Wolf and his brigands, the assumption that she had found safety when they reached the Pilgrim Inn being taken away by a madwoman, the tunnel, forced exile on a leper island . . . Her spirit had been wrecked.
Gyltha cried out in disbelief at the news. Mansur swore horribly in Arabic.
Emma just wept for her dead servants.
“Can it be proved?” Mansur asked.
“I don’t know.” Adelia hadn’t thought about that yet. “At the
very least, the woman should be turned out of Wolvercote Manor, bag and baggage.”
Emma shook her head. “There’s nothing to be done. I’m not sending Roetger into another trial by combat. I’ll lose Wolvercote . . . God knows I wanted it for Pippy . . . but I’ll not see my man wounded again.”
“Bugger trial by combat,” Gyltha said. “That harpy’s got to hang.”
Emma continued to weep.
It wasn’t the moment to tell her that Roetger would never be able to fight again; his foot was now too badly damaged.
Adelia didn’t tell the champion, either, but his listlessness that evening as she tried to make him take food suggested that he guessed.
When Millie relieved her, Adelia went back to her own room and took the sword from the hill out of the chest where she kept it wrapped in a sheet. She sat on the bed to study it.
Mansur’s objection to taking it had evaporated when he’d learned the sword had saved Adelia’s life. “Thus Allah looked down from Paradise and saw you in need of a weapon. He gave you the warrior’s.”
That’s one explanation for grave robbing,
she thought.
What she could hardly admit to herself, and certainly not to anybody else, was that, in one desperate moment in a forest, the sword had lived. It had killed for her protection as if the function for which it was made had suddenly energized it.
The trouble was that it had enjoyed it.
Or was it me? Did
I
enjoy it?
She knew she had not. Wolf had been a disease, had killed, would have killed Alf, killed
her,
would have gone on killing. Arbitrarily, the occasion and means to stop him had fallen to her. She,
whose job it was to preserve life, regretted it and always would, but, as Rowley’d said, there was nothing else she could have done.
The question was whether the sword now belonged to her. She felt that it did; its leap in her defense had passed ownership from the dead man in the cave to her living hand. Loathing weapons of destruction, this thing with its encrusted pommel as warty as Allie’s toad was the exception; she felt safer in its presence—not just safer,
bolder
—she could defy the world with it, challenge her enemies.
You dare not touch me now.
She thought,
And that is how wars begin.
Keep me,
the sword said.
Though you are a woman, you shall be a warrior defending all frail women.
Its voice was high and sweet, like Rhys’s harp.
And then she knew that this was Glastonbury magic; she was being entwined by legends, holy springs, dreams, ghosts, swords that came alive … all of them delusion. The Salerno masters who had trained Adelia in hard truth frowned down on her, ashamed.
She came to a decision.
You are an artifact,
she told the sword.
You belonged to a warrior who has no further use for you
—
but I am a doctor, and I have a patient who has.
The next morning, having told him its story, she gave the sword to Roetger.
“An ugly old thing,” she said, finding the words an effort, “but until you get a better one . . .”
He was intrigued by it, brightening more than she’d seen him since the rescue from Lazarus, as if she’d given him back his manhood. “So,” he said, caressing the blade. “Old-fashioned, but ugly, no. You shall see when it is again polished. I am grateful.”
Millie was sent to the kitchen for cleaning equipment, and
Adelia left her patient with his new medicine to go down to the parlor and write the report that the king had demanded. She couldn’t put it off any longer—the next day Captain Bolt was coming to collect it.
It was a list of disasters unlikely to put a sparkle in the royal blue eyes.
Arthur and Guinevere
not
Arthur and Guinevere but two male lovers. A favorite abbot both a killer and a suicide, taking a madwoman with him to a terrible death. The Glastonbury fire due to the carelessness of one of its own monks. A forest in which travelers on the King’s Highway lay slaughtered. One of his nobility, a Somerset dowager, a would-be murderess.
And above all, as far as Henry would read it—and rage—no proof that King Arthur was dead.
Sucking the end of her quill, Adelia wondered if the king’s sympathy would be evoked by her own brushes with death. It was unlikely—he was not a sympathetic man.
But this is the last time you employ me, Henry Plantagenet. Henceforth, I am to be a bishop’s mistress.
A mistress,
she thought, still idling,
a courtesan.
Her mind dwelt on the few houris she’d seen being carried through the streets of Salerno, painted and veiled, trailing light silks and heavy perfume.
It made her smile.
Still, she thought, Rowley will have to decently clothe his indecent woman. Since, at the moment, both she and Emma were in garments that Millie had purchased for them from a seamstress in Street’s market, where, it had to be said, the standard of couture leaned more heavily on durability than style, the idea was not totally displeasing.
Again, though, she was aware of an essence that had been
Vesuvia Adelia Rachel Ortese Aguilar leaching out of her. And again, she told herself it was a small price to pay for love.
From the courtyard, the mellifluous voice of Rhys was being directed toward Emma’s window.
“Lay down your weapons, lady, or you kill me.
Let me not see that curling hair, those fine eyes
That spear the heart of all true men …”
Adelia sighed and returned to her report to the king.
Putting her two and only triumphs on the parchment showed them up as weak. What matter to Henry, lord of a great empire, that Eustace, a common drunkard, had been proved innocent of a crime? How much would he rejoice at Lady Emma and young Lord Wolvercote’s rescue when he hadn’t known they’d been abducted in the first place?
Oh, dear.
Gritting her teeth, Adelia dipped her quill into the inkpot and pressed on, returning to the matter that concerned her most at the moment—the dowager’s perfidy.
“You, who prize justice above all things, my dear lord, will know how to right the great wrong committed by this woman according to the wish of your most devoted servant, Adelia Aguilar.”
Then, in case one of the king’s unknowing clerks might read the letter to him, she scratched out her signature and replaced it with that of Mansur.
She was searching for sealing wax when Allie flung the door open, ablaze with excitement. “Come and see, Mama, come and see.”
Adelia followed her daughter into the courtyard, where Pippy was staring at something that had been tied to the wellhead by a bit of string around its neck.
“What’s that, in the name of God?”
“It’s a puppy.” Allie was ecstatic. “It’s mine.”
Whatever it was, it was the untidiest animal Adelia had ever seen; very young and wobbly on long, thin legs, with a rough coat and eyebrows that curled upward like an old man’s.
“Bad,” Mansur said, “a sight hound.”
“A lurcher,” Gyltha said. “An’ it’s forbidden. Verderers see that in the forest and they’ll lame un, take out the ball of its foot. Bring down deer, lurchers do; bring down anything.”
Allie put her arms round the animal’s neck. “They’re not going to lame Eustace,” she said. The dog licked her face.
“Who?”
“Some men came and gave it to me. They said his name was Eustace. Look at his lovely brown eyes, Mama, he’s very intelligent.”
Adelia thought how typical it was of Will and the tithing to bring her a present that was illegal. But the damage was done; Allie had given her heart to the thing.
“Well,” she said, weakly, “we’ll just have to keep Eustace out of the forest.”
H
ANDING OVER THE SCROLL
to Captain Bolt the next morning, Adelia asked if the king had arrived in England.
“Not yet, mistress. Somewhere between here and Normandy, I reckon.” He waved the report. “Yet he’s so eager for this, we may have to send it by boat—he’ll be glad to get it.”
“No, captain,” Adelia said sadly, “he won’t.”
T
WO DAYS LATER,
Roetger hitched himself down the stairs, and Adelia was asked to attend to him and Emma in the dining room.
On the table in front of them lay the dead warrior’s sword in a wooden scabbard that Roetger had made for it.