Henry sighed. “All right, then. Tell the executioner to brand an H on their foreheads and let ’em go. See if that satisfies His Holiness. The iron’s not to penetrate too deep, mind.”
“Yes, my lord.” Master Robert made a note. “I fear you will have to attend the branding; the cardinal will then at least be able to report to the Pope that you sanctioned the punishment by your presence.”
The king spat. “He’ll be lucky he doesn’t have to report that I shoved the iron up his arse… . Oh, very
well,
tell me when the executioner’s ready. Now then, who’s next?” He caught sight of the pig. “What’s that doing here?”
“I believe Mistress Hackthorn has a petition, my lord.”
“No, I ain’t.” The countrywoman raised her bulk off the bench, still holding the pig. “I come for to say thank you, I have. This here porker’s a present for you, King Henry, dear soul.”
“Is it?” Henry went up to her, intrigued. “What for?”
“My lad Triffin, master. Lord Kegworth, him as owns Gurney Manor, he said as our tenement was his. He said as my Triffin weren’t a freeman of it and took it away from un. The which was a lie, us holding that land since the time of King Harold… .”
Henry looked toward Master Robert.
“Ah, yes, my lord,” the clerk said, searching his notes. “A plea by a Master Hackthorn of Westbury that he was unjustly dispossessed of his land by Lord Kegworth. He purchased a writ of Novel Dissiesin, and the matter was put two days ago to a jury of his peers, who had knowledge of the case before the justices… .”
“Was it?” asked Henry, suddenly delighted. He looked at Mistress Hackthorn. “How much did the writ cost you?”
“Two shilling, master. The which ’twas worth it for them … what’s that they do call theyselves? A jury?”
“Twelve good men and true,” Henry said, nodding.
“An’ so they was, master. We’d a been homeless else. Saw the right of it, they did, an’ give the land back to us. For which we do be grateful and hope as you’ll accept this porker for our thanks, master, our sow havin’ farrowed nicely this spring so’s we got this un to spare.”
“God, I love the English,” Henry said. “Madam, I am honored.”
The pig was handed over and the king carried it into the receiving room, shouting “Next” over his shoulder.
“That’s you, mistress,” Master Robert told Adelia.
Captain Bolt bowed and went on his way, duty done.
Followed by Millie and Mansur, Adelia went in and leaned the basket against the wall next to the door. The clerk followed her, shutting the door behind them and hurrying to close the windows.
It was a lovely room, very large and sunlit, with a molded ceiling that took Adelia’s breath away. Tables, chairs, and chests were carved and polished so that they seemed to writhe with a life of their own, a jeweled astrolabe, bronzes … The bishop of Wells did himself well.
Henry had put his mark on it. Scrolls and parchments with hanging seals littered every surface. His favorite hawk sat on a perch, below which were its droppings; two muddy gazehounds lay stretched out before the enormous marble fireplace.
The king was richly dressed for once, but Adelia, knowing him, guessed he’d been out hunting at dawn.
He put the pig down. The two gazehounds raised their heads to look at it and then, at a word from their master, closed their eyes again.
There was a splatter as the pig made its contribution to the
bishop’s Persian rug. The smell of manure overpowered the scented potpourri in the bishop’s rose bowls.
Henry patted it fondly. “My sentiments exactly,” he told it.
“Mistress Adelia,” his clerk prompted him.
“I know who it is,” the king said nastily. There was the briefest of salaams to Mansur and an even briefer nod at Millie before he clicked his stubby fingers and Master Robert put the scroll that was Adelia’s report into them. “I saw the bishop of Saint Albans this morning, mistress—he’s looking very spry. Been giving him his oats, have you?”
Adelia compressed her lips; there would be worse to come. She’d lost the king money—the most heinous sin to be perpetrated against a man who needed to employ armies—but, Lord, he was offensive.
This is the last time I work for him,
she promised herself,
the very last time.
He waved the scroll at her. “I’ve a good mind to make you eat this. What I wanted when I sent you to Glastonbury was Arthur and Guinevere. What have I got? Two sodomites.”
“You asked for the truth, my lord,” Adelia told him. “You have it. What you do with it is your affair. They can be resurrected as Arthur and Guinevere, I suppose.” Henry wasn’t the only one who could be rude.
It made him crosser. “Not by me, mistress, not by me. I also have a regard for the truth. If I hadn’t, you could have stayed in the bloody fens where you belong. If they were sodomites, they’ll have to remain sodomites.”
He was right, of course; she shouldn’t misjudge him, but it was as if the mutual respect he and she had established over these last five years had vanished. The blue eyes looking at her through their almost invisible ginger lashes might have been regarding a stranger.
“Yes, my lord. I’m sorry, my lord.”
“You should be.” He thought a bit. “Mind you, when I’m dead I wager the abbey’ll resurrect them as Arthur and queen.”
He glanced back at the letter. “What’s all this about Abbot Sigward and quicksand?”
“Suicide, my lord. Out of remorse for the murder of his son—it’s all there. However, the bishop of Saint Albans has informed the monks that it was an accident.”
“A pity. I liked Sigward; he was on my side. God knows who they’ll want to elect now. You realize this is going to cost me? Where’s the money coming from to rebuild that blasted abbey now, eh?”
“I’m sorry, my lord.”
The king went on reading. “ ‘
I would wish that Godwyn, landlord of the Pilgrim, might suffer no more grief than he already has
… .’ God’s knees, woman, he was accomplice to his wife’s attempted murders… . You’ll be asking that Cain be let off for killing Abel next.”
“Even so, my lord, the man was instrumental in saving the life of Emma, Lady Wolvercote, and her child… .”
“Ah, yes, the rich young widow.” The king’s face, looking at her sideways, became that of a predator. “I’ve had some pleasing offers for her.”
Alarmed, Adelia said, “My lord, you promised me you would not sell her in marriage. She wishes to wed her champion, I beg you to allow—”
“That was before I got a sodomite instead of King Arthur.” He tapped the scroll. “We’ll see. In view of this, I may have to husband my resources. Now then, about the dowager Wolvercote… .
‘You, who prize justice above all things’
… yes, yes …
‘right this great wrong
… What do you want me to do about the woman? Throw her out of her manor?”
“It would be only just, my lord. She sent her own daughter-in-law and the others to their death… .” Adelia heard her voice become
shrill and tried to lower it. “Only the mercy of God and her champion’s good right arm saved Emma and her child… .”
“Can you prove it?”
Why
did he keep interrupting?
Prove it?
Adelia tried to think.
Wolf got a message from there saying as there’d be a rich lady and party a-leavin’ of Wolvercote
… Will’s words. The assassin who’d received the message was dead. The person who’d taken it would have been one of the dowager’s most trusted servants and was unlikely to testify against her. The tithing’s knowledge was therefore hearsay. Anyway, disreputable as they were, their evidence would hardly stand up against that of a respected, well-connected, and
rich
Somerset aristocrat.
Adelia shook her head. “I doubt it.”
“So do I.”
“But it’s not
fair.”
It was the shriek Allie used when she was crossed. “My lord, she as good as murdered six people.”
Henry shrugged. “It may not be fair, but if I step in and evict her without evidence it would be something worse, it would be injustice. I must abide by the law of the land like everyone else or we revert to tyranny and from there into chaos. Law is my contract with my people.”
And what of the contract with me?
Adelia thought.
What of the dealings between individuals, promises, the return for loyal service, even a bloody thank-you?
And then she saw the king look toward Master Robert and
wink.
The room skewed and fragmented. It was Wolf’s forest with the beast coming at her, it was the Pilgrim’s tunnel, and she was wading through it. She was watching two figures walk into the Avalon marshes… .
“Goddamn you, Henry,” she screamed. “You send me into hell
and I get nothing …
nothing
… I’ve seen terrible things, terrible,
terrible
things, I work for you … but never again; this is the last time I’m evicted from my fens … never again,
never.
I’m not your subject; you’re not my king… . I’m tired and I’m poor
and I want to go home.”
She collapsed, weeping, into a chair to drum her heels on the floor like a thwarted child.
The silence in the room was awful.
He‚ll kill me,
Adelia thought. I
don’t care.
After a long while, reluctantly, she opened her eyes and met Mansur’s, full of concern. Millie was crouching beside her, holding her hand. The room’s silence was because Henry was no longer in it. Instead, a young man wearing the floppy cap of a lawyer was standing by the door.
The gazehounds were watching her. The pig farted in sympathy. Master Robert was pouring some wine from a silver jug into a silver cup. He crossed the room and gave it to her, supporting her hands while she drank it. He looked unperturbed, as if it were the norm for people to throw fits in the Plantagenet’s presence.
“The king has left to attend the branding of the heretics, mistress.”
“Has he?” she asked dully.
“It is not something he welcomes. I fear it put him into a teasing mood.”
“Yes.”
“But if you will follow Master Dickon here, he will take you to Lady Wolvercote. Master Dickon is the lawyer who represents her.”
Master Dickon took off his cap, twirling it in an elaborate and low bow. “You come along of me, miss. Hot, ain’t it? Do anybody down, this heat would.”
Mansur took Adelia’s arm with one hand and picked up the fishing basket with the other, and, with Millie behind them,
they followed the lawyer past the petitioners and down the staircase.
“Do you really want to go home?” Mansur asked in Arabic.
While she’d been screaming, she had; she’d wanted safety, the calm of her foster parents’ house, and the discipline of the School of Medicine, where decisions were based on cold fact, where there was no moral quicksand, where the brain controlled emotion, where she would not risk her immortal soul by living in sin, where there was a king who left her alone.
“Do you?” she asked back, tiredly.
“I have thought of it,” he said, “but I have Gyltha.”
And so have I,
Adelia thought.
And you, who are my rock, and Allie, and a man I love and who loves me even though it imperils our chance of God’s grace.
Oh, but she was tired
of feeling,
the gift—or curse—that England had imposed on her. Whether it was better than no feeling at all, at this very moment she wasn’t sure.
“You did not give the king Excalibur,” Mansur said.
“He didn’t give me anything, either.”
Adelia’s experience of lawyers in Salerno had been of bearded old men who talked of digests, codices, and the Summa Azonis, the Roman law they’d learned at the great University of Bologna. Master Dickon was of a kind she hadn’t met before, homegrown, young, lacking breeding but not intelligence, and very unlawyerlike in that he wanted to impart knowledge rather than obscure it. The son of a Thames lighterman, he had been taught a good hand in a school run by his uncle, and had begun his working life as a mere scrivener in the Chancery, where his ability had come to the notice of the Chancellor himself, and was put to the study of English law.
All this was imparted over his shoulder in a London accent as he led the way down to the entrance hall.
“See, mistress, this is my first case of the Morte d’Ancestor writ, only third in the country far as I know.” He was almost bouncing with the excitement of it.
“Death of an ancestor?” asked Adelia, confused.
“You ain’t heard of it? Oh, mistress, you got to know about Morte d’Ancestor; magical Morte d’Ancestor is.” He looked around and saw a niche in which they could all stand while he explained the magical writ. He seemed unruffled by the presence of Mansur and included both him and Millie in his talk, using English on the presumption that they didn’t speak Latin. His admiration was for Henry Plantagenet, something Adelia had noticed before among native, lower-born Englishmen, who had a greater regard for their king than the Norman nobility, having benefited from his laws and, if they were intelligent, promotion to posts formerly reserved for sons of the nobility.
“Ooh, but he’s crafty is our King Henry,” Dickon said. “See, he’s not a lover of Roman law, and I ain’t, either—too much inquisition, too stuck with them old Byzantines, too many delays. What he’s doing, see, is using Anglo-Saxon law, what our great-granddads was accustomed to. He’s like a baker, if you understand me, using good English dough and trimmin’ it, kneadin’ it, reshapin’ it, and flourin’ it with a touch of genius. One of these days every court in the land’ll be using it.”
“And Morte dAncestor?” Adelia asked, not seeing where all this was going, nor sure she wanted to.
“Ah, Morte dAncestor.” In Master Dickon’s mouth it was an incantation. “It’s the latest of the king’s writs. He’s given us the writ of Right and Praecipe and Novel Dissiesin and now”—he saw Adelia’s mystification—“see, they’re all ways of bypassing the other courts and giving a plaintiff the right to royal justice, not in
the lords’ or the sheriffs’ or the manors’ but straight to the king’s. A law available to everybody, see. You purchase a writ that suits your case.”
“How much did the writ cost you?”
the king had asked Mistress Hackthorn.