“Well, of course they did—just after, otherwise the coffin would have been burned like everything else, wouldn’t it?”
“I see.”
Henry squinted at her. “Are you suggesting it’s a fraud?”
“No, no.” Nevertheless, she thought, it was a remarkably happy find for an abbey that had just lost everything else that would attract revenue.
“I’m glad to hear it. Abbot Sigward is an honorable man. He doesn’t actually claim it’s Arthur in that bloody coffin, but who else can it be? Haven’t you read Geoffrey of Monmouth?”
She had not, hadn’t needed to; she’d heard most of his book. In the forty years since Geoffrey’s
History of the Kings of Britain
had been written, it had gained unstoppable popularity. Apparently recording the descent of Britain’s kings over two thousand years and giving them an ancestry from the Trojans, those literate enough to read its Latin had passed on its stories to those who could not, wonderful stories of adventure and love and war and magic and religion—and most wonderful of all was the tale of King Arthur, who had stood against the pagan Saxon invaders and created a Golden Age of chivalry somewhere in the mist of Britain’s Dark Ages.
Arthur had caught the country’s imagination and still did. Tales of his prowess, his knights and battles, his marriage to Guinevere, her sexual treachery, were told by professional and amateur storytellers in palaces, on manors, in marketplaces, and around cottage fires.
At each inn Adelia had stayed in on her journey with Emma, somebody had been prepared to entertain the guests with one Arthurian legend or another, sometimes with embroidery that even Geoffrey of Monmouth wouldn’t have recognized. More than that, nearly every town and village they’d passed through laid claim
to a shred of the legend, boasting of a local Arthur’s well, Arthur’s chair, Arthur’s table, Arthur’s mount, Arthur’s hill, Arthur’s quoit, Arthur’s hunting seat, Arthur’s kitchen.…
His fame had even spread to the continent—Adelia could remember her foster mother in Salerno telling her about Arthur’s exploits on Vesuvius. The stories appealed to women like no others; Emma adored them. “Don’t you just
love
the bit where Uther Pendragon steps out of the darkness at Tintagel and seduces Ygraine?” she’d said.
“Well, yes, but isn’t the account that he’s taken on the appearance of her husband somewhat implausible?” Adelia had asked.
She’d been charged with lacking romance in her soul. “I suppose
you
prefer reading about boring things, like people’s innards,” Emma had said with some truth.
Prior Geoffrey, on the other hand, loathed the book and departed from his usual respect for the dead by heaping opprobrium on the late Geoffrey of Monmouth. “Called himself a historian?” he would say. “The man had no more idea of history than a carrot. He made it up.”
It infuriated the good prior that some, especially the females, among his flock paid more attention to Geoffrey’s
History
than to the Bible.
“Oh, yes, they remember the story of Arthur killing some giant who’d been slaking his lust on a fainting maiden, but quiz them on what the Parable of the Sower is about and they can’t answer. Giants, I
ask
you. Geoffrey of Monmouth a great historian? Great liar, more like.”
Yet here, Adelia thought, was Henry Plantagenet, most rational of men, giving credence to fairy stories and visions.
He had to have an ulterior motive.
Waiting to discover what it was, she was taken by the arm and
led to the window so that she could look across the pleasant, though sadly churned up, valley of the River Usk.
“Looks quiet, doesn’t it?” the king said. “But two days ago I had to carve my way through besieging Welsh lines a hundred thick to relieve young Geoffrey. And do you know whose name the bastards were shouting as we struck them down?”
“King Arthur’s?”
Henry nodded. “Arthur’s. The Welsh are supposed to be a Christian race, but their pagan little minds hold Arthur as a more immediate Messiah than Jesus, God rot them. They claim him as their own. He’s the one who will rescue them from what they see as the Norman yoke. And I’m not a Norman yoke, Adelia. For one thing, I’m an Angevin, and for another, I’m a bloody good peace-bringing, justice-giving king, if they’d only realize it.”
She nodded. For all Henry’s sins, that was what he was.
He turned away from her in order to look over his scribe’s writing and point out a correction. “Four 1’s in Llewellyn, Robert.”
Then, as if in disgust with himself for doing it, he shook his fists in the direction of the ceiling. “Why do I have to bother with spelling their damn names, eh? I’ve more important things to do. I’ve got trouble in Aquitaine, Louis of France is being his usual pain in the arse, the sodding Scots need driving back over the border… and where am I? Stuck in a bloody bog, trying to stop rebellion spreading through the entire Welsh nation.” He struck the table, making the scribe’s inkwell jump and spill. “I haven’t got
time
to put out every little fire the belief in a living Arthur lights among the Celts.
Which it does.”
He glared at Adelia as if she’d refute it. “The bloody Bretons are already threatening revolt. It’ll be the sodding Cornish next. Damn all Celts.”
“Ah,” Adelia said. Light had dawned, hence the coffin at Glastonbury. “You need Arthur to be dead.”
“Exactly.” Henry’s anger left him and he became persuasive. “And that’s where you come in. You’re my clever little mistress in the art of death. Prove those bones are King Arthur’s beyond resurrection and I’ll double what I pay you.”
“You don’t pay me,” Adelia said wearily.
“Don’t I? Are you sure? Well, this time you’ll have a warrant enabling you and your company to receive every assistance and sustenance for as long as you require—expenses to be sent to the Exchequer.”
As Adelia opened her mouth, the king’s forefinger wagged it shut. “Yes, I know,” he said. “Nobody’s going to accept the findings of a woman, but I’ve seen to it. Glastonbury’s been told that I’m sending them an expert in skeletons, my own Lord Mansur”—Henry bowed to the tall Arab, who salaamed back—“to authenticate the bones of King Arthur and Queen Guinevere, if indeed those are what they are. The monks won’t like having a Saracen and a female on their sacred ground, but they can damn well put up with it.
And
I’ve sent ahead to the best inn in Glastonbury to accommodate Lord Mansur, his female assistant and interpreter, her child, and a nurse,
in luxury,
for as long as the investigation lasts. At my expense.” The king was pleased with himself. “What do you say to that?”
Adelia summoned up her courage. “I don’t think it can be done, my lord.”
“Why not?”
“Skeletons are merely… skeletons. I doubt it’s possible to say how old they are.” She steeled herself. “Unless there’s some other identification in that coffin, I cannot name those bones as Arthur’s and Guinevere’s. I’m sorry.”
The room seemed to hunch in anticipation of the king’s fury—
in the past, when crossed, he’d been known to roll on the floor, biting its rushes.
But he was older now, and the anger that had caused the death of Thomas à Becket was contained—for today, at least. He nodded quietly. “I was afraid of that,” he said. “Then we’ll try another tactic. You’ll go to Glastonbury and make sure no living person can say that those bones are
not
Arthur’s.”
She was puzzled. “I don’t understand you, my lord.”
“Yes, you do. If Glastonbury broadcasts news of this wondrous discovery, I don’t want some bugger popping up to say it’s their Uncle Cedric and Aunt Priscilla in that bloody coffin. You’re to find out whether anybody can refute the abbey’s claim.”
“How can I possibly do that?”
“I don’t know, do I?” The king was exasperated. “That’s why I’m employing you, for God’s sake. You’ve got a nose for it; you can detect a puzzle like a hound sniffing the scent of boar—and solve it. I’ve seen you do it. You’re a tracker. What I want you to do is ensure there
isn’t
any scent, that there’s no boar hiding in the undergrowth.”
Now she understood. “You mean that as long as nobody can say those skeletons are
not
Arthur’s and Guinevere’s, they will be
declared
as Arthur’s and Guinevere’s, whether they are or aren’t?”
Henry took her arm again and returned her to the window. Outside, soldiers were filling the trenches dug by the castle’s besiegers; one of them was whistling as he worked. A thrush in a rowan tree was whistling back. From a fast-running stream came the jeweled flash of a diving kingfisher.
The king’s voice was gentle. “You haven’t ever visited Glastonbury, have you, Adelia?”
“No.”
“Then wait until you do. Of all abbeys, here or abroad, it is the holiest and most sacred; its very air is hallowed by a worship that goes back to the beginnings of Christianity and possibly beyond—it tingles with mystery. If Avalon is anywhere, it is there. If Arthur is anywhere, he is there. It has a vibration that sends you to your knees.” The king paused, his eyes on the river. “And it’s been kind to me. Abbot Sigward was one of the few churchmen not calling for my head after… the business at Canterbury.”
He never spoke the name of the man who’d been his friend but who, having been appointed Archbishop of Canterbury, had turned against him, opposing every reasonable reform he’d tried to make, and whose murder had brought Christendom’s vilification on his head and been the excuse for his jealous wife and his even more jealous eldest son to rise against him.
It had sullied his name forever, and he knew it; history would remember him as the king who’d martyred Saint Thomas à Becket.
Not for the first time, Adelia was aware of the depth of suffering that underlay this Plantagenet’s energetic exterior—it was like being reminded that beyond a briskly choppy inlet was a turbulent ocean. His remorse at calling for Becket’s death, that it was his knights who, with their own reasons for hating the archbishop, had ridden off to Canterbury and spilled the man’s brains onto the floor of the cathedral, had been terrible—and the Church had made sure he displayed every ounce of it in public. His penance had been to walk barefoot to Canterbury and present his naked back to its monks to be whipped.
“And whip him they did,” Prior Geoffrey, who’d been present, had told Adelia. “With enjoyment. Their scourges bit deep into his flesh, so that those of us who witnessed it were amazed he did
not cry out. He stayed silent, though he will bear the stripes on his back forever.”
By humiliating himself, the king had saved England from a worse punishment, appeasing an angry Pope Gregory, who had otherwise threatened to lay the country under interdict: a closure of its churches, a refusal to bless marriages, christen babies, hear confessions, anoint the sick and dying—in effect, the excommunication of an entire nation.
Yes, Adelia thought with pity, Henry Plantagenet had paid for his temper so that his people didn’t have to.
He became brisk. “In turn, I must be kind to Glastonbury—it’s got to be rebuilt. When I can spare him, I’ll send Ralph Fitz-Stephen—he’s my chamberlain—to see what needs a-doing. It’ll be costly, you can swear to that; God knows how much I’ll have to spend. Unless…”
“Unless the pilgrims go flooding back in their thousands to visit Arthur’s tomb,” Adelia said, and smiled. Oh, he was a canny king.
“Exactly.”
She thought about it. Almost Henry was asking the impossible—but not quite. While she would not be able to date the skeletons, the coffin was another matter. “When was Arthur supposed to have lived?” she asked.
The king turned to the table. “When was it, Robert?”
The scribe laid down his pen and pursed his lips. “The Welsh cleric Nennius tells us in
Historia Brittonum
that Arthur’s last battle was at Mons Badonicus, where he single-handedly slew nine hundred and sixty men. Saint Gildas, who, as we know, lies in Glastonbury Abbey, informs us that this battle took place in the year of his birth, which, we believe, was either in the Year of Our Lord
494 or 506, though the
Annales Cambriae
places it somewhat later, while the …”
“All right,
all right.”
The king turned back to Adelia. “Somewhere early in the sixth century—do you want the day of the month?”
“Hmm.”
A coffin found sixteen feet deep in the earth would likely be very ancient. “Does Glastonbury earth consist of peat?”
“How in hell would I know?”
The scribe intervened. “I believe it may, my lord. It is surrounded by marshland, which would indicate…”
“It’s peat,” the king said. “What’s that got to do with the price of fish?”
Nothing, but it did have to do with the preservation of wood. In the Cambridgeshire fens, which were all of peat, a piece of bog oak would occasionally surface in an area where no oaks grew. According to fenland belief, the number of rings apparent in the wood of the trunk when it was cut indicated the years during which the tree had stood when it was growing. By that system of accounting, some pieces had proved so old as to have flourished in the long distant past.
“Is the coffin of oak, do you know?”
“No, I
don’t.”
The king was becoming impatient.
If it was, and if her fenlanders were right, she might be able to gain a rough,
very
rough, idea of when the coffin had been interred, perhaps as long ago as Arthur’s time—and therefore beyond anybody’s knowledge as to whom it contained.
She considered. The king was assigning her a task that, for once, had no risk to it and would enable her, Mansur, Allie, and Gyltha to be sustained until she could decide what to do with the rest of her life.
Actually, Adelia was intrigued, not so much by the search for
an ancient and mystical king—though that, too—but as to why a woman had been put to rest in a monastic graveyard.
“Very well,” she said. “I will try and ensure that the skeletons are old enough to be beyond identification, but further than that I cannot go. I will not say they are Arthur’s and Guinevere’s, because I doubt if anybody can. I won’t lie for you, Henry.”