She didn’t know anymore. Why hadn’t she?
“Nice little castle,” the breath said. “We could have brought her up together. You stitching away at your tapestry in the solar, me on the practice ground teaching her swordplay.”
It was meant to make her laugh and, oddly, it almost did, but beneath his courage she heard fury for a life missed.
My fault, she thought, my most grievous fault. What price independence when I could have chosen happiness, his, Allie’s, mine? Too high. “I wouldn’t do it again,” she said.
“Bit bloody late now.” Again, her skin felt his breath. “You’ve sent me to hell, you realize that? My soul is doomed. I’ve sinned at prime, at matins, at lauds; I’ve lifted the host to the Lord, and what I was lifting was your skinny body. I’d think, What do I see in her? But you were all I saw.” Another sigh. “I have offended against my sweet Lord. Saint Peter’s not likely to give me passage through the gate after that.”
“It won’t be hell for me if I’m with you,” she said, feeling for him with her arms. “We’ll fry on the griddle together.”
Voices speaking love into the darkness. Tiny flames guttering out.
It was becoming difficult to breathe.
After a while his head fell hard against her neck, and when she spoke to him again, he didn’t reply.
“No,” she begged him. “Wait for me. Don’t go without me.”
There was a deep grinding sound, and the lid above their heads lifted, slowly, as if a cautious cook was peering into a pan.
The foulness of the death chamber rushed upward—she felt its passing, like a wind—to be replaced by damp fresh air.
“God pray we’re in time,” somebody said.
Dizzily, still clutching Rowley’s body to her, she looked upward. The abbot of Glastonbury’s face was staring down on her, Godwyn’s beside it, both of them anxious.
Behind them, Hilda struggling. “Leave ’em,” she was screaming, “leave em.” Only Brother Titus’s large arms were holding the woman back from hindering the resurrection of the couple she’d condemned to death.
TWELVE
A DELIA MADE THEM lift Rowley out first. It took the added help of brothers James and Aelwyn to do it; Brother Titus was fully occupied in restraining the howling, kicking Hilda.
When it was Adelia’s turn, she found herself rising through a wide hole and into the rubble of what had once been the house of Glastonbury’s abbots, near the abbey’s landing stage.
The monks wanted to take them both to the Abbot’s kitchen immediately, but Adelia refused to let them move Rowley. She knelt beside him, begging him to come back from wherever he’d gone, until she saw air going easily in and out of his nostrils. He opened his eyes—they had sense in them—and said her name, at which point she sat back, allowing a prayer of such thankfulness to leave her as must have lanced upward through the ragged clouds that crossed and recrossed a pale, indifferent moon, up and up until it reached the God of mercy who had granted yet another resurrection.
Between them, Aelwyn and James supported Rowley across the charred grass to the kitchen, Titus carrying the still-shrieking Hilda after them. Adelia followed behind, leaning heavily on the abbot’s arm.
“No, no,” he said, as she tried to thank him. “You owe your lives to this good man.” He laid his hand on the shoulder of Godwyn, walking silently beside them. “We would never have known otherwise. Indeed, I had forgotten there was a tunnel. Built by one of my ancient predecessors, perhaps, in the time of the Danish invasions, and its hatch rusted these many years. It was when Godwyn found he couldn’t open it alone that he came running to us for help, did you not, my son?” When the landlord didn’t answer, he added, “I fear there are questions to answer, but we shall leave them until you and our good bishop are recovered.”
She was cold and couldn’t stop trembling. Her dripping skirt was chilly against her legs. Heat had gone with the storm, leaving cool air scenting a reviving countryside, and, her mind numbed, she could do nothing but breathe it in. Being freed from the danger she and Rowley had shared hadn’t lessened the intensity of its last moments; the people around her, even Hilda and her noise, were wraiths on the edges of it. Certainly there must be questions to answer, a thousand of them, but at the moment they fluttered like moths beyond her grasp.
Her body appreciated the warmth of the kitchen, but still the one solid thing in it was Rowley, who’d been seated in its only chair.
“Marsh cudweed,” she said, automatically. “Get him an infusion of marsh cudweed.” It stimulated the breathing system.
She heard him say, “Sod that. I’ll have brandy.” Such music to her ears that her wits came back and she began to be aware of other things. One of which was that their savior was the Pilgrim’s landlord.
Godwyn. A good thing.
It took some adjustment of thought; for a day or more, the man had capered in her mind as the personification of evil.
They were still having trouble with Hilda. Muttering prayers to deflect the curses the woman directed at them, brothers Titus and James were having to bind her waist with rope, attaching it to a hook in the wall, to stop her from launching an attack on her husband. Her cap had come off so that her hair stood around her head like a ginger-and-gray badger’s. Loops of spit hung from her bared teeth.
The abbot shook his head at her with real grief. “I fear she has gone mad, poor soul.”
“An affliction of women at a certain age, so I’m told,” Brother Aelwyn said, and his abbot nodded.
Godwyn stood in front of his wife, pleading. “I couldn’t, sweetheart, could I? For the sake of thy soul, I couldn’t let ee do it. Not to these two, and one of ’em a bishop, not to the others.”
Hilda spat at him.
“Others?” the abbot asked sharply.
“No-oo.” Hilda tossed herself forward and was jerked back by the rope. “Traitor, traitor, traitor.”
Others? Others? Again, it was a revelation for Adelia to remember that she and Rowley had gone into the tunnel expecting to find corpses—and had encountered none. The long grief for Emma and her child was replaced by a desperate hope. “Are they alive? Where are they?”
“Are we talking about the lady who went missing?” The abbot was bewildered.
“See, I couldn’t bear for them others to die—she’d have murder on her soul. And there was a little un with ’em,” Godwyn said, “but I couldn’t let ’em free or they’d have told on her. Well, I couldn’t, could I? ’S only acause she wouldn’t stop.” He turned back to his wife. “You wouldn’t stop, sweetheart. The bishop, this lady . . . it couldn’t go on, could it?” There were tears on his face.
“Where are they?”
“Lazarus Island.”
“Lazarus?” The abbot was sharp with him. “You’ve kept three people on Lazarus for over a month? Impossible—the lepers would have told me.”
Godwyn hunched. “I said to ’em as I wouldn’t be a-bringing you over again iffen they said anything. I’m shamed, master, but I was waiting to let things settle down like, for Hilda to get back to her right mind.” He looked at his wife again. “You wouldn’t, though, sweetheart, you got worse.”
Abbot Sigward shook his head and sat down.
“See,” Godwyn said, “them others was in a bad way, bein’ down in the tunnel so long. Very bad way they was, the big fella and the little boy ’specially, and the woman, she agreed to anythin’ to keep ’em alive. I had to wait til the missus were out of the inn, see, before I could let ’em up. I told ’em if they wanted to stay livin’, they must do like I said. So I rowed ’em across to Lazarus.” His shoulders drooped. “ ’S finished now, any old way. Couldn’t let it happen again, could I? She weren’t going to stop.”
Hilda spat at him again.
“Is finished, sweetheart,” Godwyn said, pleading with her once more. And then to the abbot, “They’ll let her off, won’t they, master? For being gone mad, they’ll let her off. You’ll tell em. ’Twas all for y
ou. All as she’s done, ’twas ever for you.”
“Me?” Sigward stared at him.
“Just tell us if they’re alive,” Adelia prompted sharply. There wasn’t time for side issues. “Are they alive?”
“Didn’t know what else to do,” Godwyn said, still addressing the abbot. He jerked his head toward his wife. “They’d a-told on her otherwise. Been smugglin’ them supplies to Lazarus when I could.” His shoulders drooped. “It’s finished now, any road, God-a-mercy on both our souls.”
Lepers. They’d been marooned with lepers.
Adelia clutched at the abbot’s arm. “We’ve got to fetch them. Now. Please, we must go now.”
Though trying to keep up with events, Sigward was firm on this. “We can go nowhere in the dark. In the morning, my child; we’ll do what has to be done when dawn comes.”
Yes, dawn. It was night now, though she had a job to remember which night. She supposed it must be only this morning that she’d hidden and watched Gyltha, Allie, and Mansur set off for Wells, a matter of hours since the storm had sent the rain and darkness in which Millie had . . .
Millie.
Adelia clutched at the abbot again. “The girl Millie. Hilda attacked her. . . .”
“Where did this happen?”
“At the inn. I saw her fall. … I must see to her. . . .”
“You will stay here.” Sigward had taken authority. “Brother James? To the inn, if you please.”
The monk bowed and went out into the night, taking with him the last of Adelia’s immediate responsibilities and leaving her limp.
She was guided to a bench at the table, felt the smooth clay of a beaker pressed against her mouth, and tasted brandy. She swallowed a little of it, laid her head on the board, listening to Hilda rave and Abbot Sigward asking questions that Rowley was answering . . . and went to sleep.
Even during the dream, she was irritated by it. Guinevere was an irrelevance now, and the sleeping Adelia didn’t want to be bothered with her, but the woman with a skull’s face came walking forward out of the mist. This time she had Arthur’s Excalibur in her hand; this time she spoke. “You are close now,” she said. “You are close to me. Come nearer.”
Crossly, Adelia woke up, not frightened—what dream could overtop the terror of reality?—merely resentful that her rest had been disturbed and left her with a nagging sense of a duty not done.
It was still dark outside, but the light of its fire showed that the kitchen was full of bodies—only the comfortable sound of snoring dispelled the impression that there’d been a massacre.
Opposite her, brothers James and Aelwyn slept, their cowled heads using the table as a pillow. Other figures, just discernible in the shadows, lay scattered around the floor on palliasses produced from somewhere. A hammock slung from two flitch hooks contained the bishop of Saint Albans. Adelia got up and hurried over to him, dislodging a cloak that someone had laid over her in the night.
Rowley’s color was good; so was his breathing. Without waking him, she smoothed his hair from his face before investigating the others on the floor.
The abbot lay on his side, one elegant hand around his chin, as if he was thinking, though his eyes were tight shut. Next to him squatted Brother Titus, snoring louder than anybody, his head cradled on his knees—a sleeping guardian of Hilda, who was stretched out nearby, the rope around her waist still attached to its hook. The woman’s eyelids were only half closed, and her teeth were bared, which, though she too was asleep, gave her the appearance of a chained, recumbent dog ready to snarl at any intruder.
Before Adelia had slept, Rowley, Sigward, and the other monks had been agreeing that Hilda was mad; it had settled everything for them—a neat, all-encompassing explanation that might save her from the gallows under the law that the insane, not being responsible for their actions, should escape execution. It had been male reasoning for the mysterious turbulence that they seemed to think affected women during the menopause. Last night, in the discussion that Adelia had been too tired to enter into, Rowley had been adamant that in her madness Hilda had felt impelled to protect Glastonbury from the Arthur and Guinevere skeletons being proved a fraud.
There was no cause to think otherwise; the woman was undoubtedly deranged. Equally without doubt, the Pilgrim’s—and the abbey’s—future depended on supplicants coming to the grave of King Arthur.
And yet, to Adelia now, it didn’t answer. It could only have been Hilda who’d tried to bury Mansur and herself—the woman had a positive propensity for entombing people. Such savagery argued a deeper, more urgent reason, if reason there was.
Adelia moved on to peer at the body nearest the door. Millie, thank God. The girl was breathing steadily. There was a plaster on her head, bound in place with linen. The sallow skin of her face was no paler than it always was. Another one, then, who, with luck, had taken no harm from the desperate night.
The only person missing was Godwyn.
Adelia went out to attend to nature. Rejecting what the gentry called the odeur de merde emanating from the trench latrine with its neatly holed plank that the monks had dug near their kitchen garden—so enriching for the vegetables—she found some convenient bushes, then went to the pump just outside the kitchen itself for a wash.
In the east, the sky was beginning to lighten. Somewhere a thrush was attempting its first song of the day.
It would be dawn soon, and if a merciful God could again extend His munificence and allow the three souls on Lazarus Island to be found alive and well, she, Vesuvia Adelia Rachel Ortese Aguilar, would be forever in His debt.
A figure netting trout from the stew by the light of a lantern gave a hail and came stalking toward her.
Brother Peter appeared friendlier than on their previous meetings. “Here,” he said, “that darky wizard’s a proper marvel, in’t he? Done a good job for”—he paused to wink—”you know who. Think he’d like some of me pumpkins? They’ve come on wonderful well with all this sun, if the storm ain’t ruined ’em.”
Yes, Adelia told him, sighing, the lord Mansur would be pleased to be rewarded with pumpkins for having saved Will and the tithing.
He lingered. “Heard as there was a right to-do last night. What were you and the bishop doin’ down that bloody hole?”
“Not enjoying ourselves, I can tell you that,” she said.
“Mad as May butter, that Hilda. Allus was. Never could reckon as how poor old Godwyn put up with her.”
Adelia had a thought. “Could you do me a favor, Brother Peter?”
They went to the site of the tunnel, its lid still lying on one side. Adelia couldn’t bear to look into the hole, but, on her instructions, the lay brother clambered down happily enough and emerged with the box and sword left on its steps. They were dry; the water hadn’t reached them—indeed, it had retreated. “What’s these doin’ down there?” he asked.
“Can I borrow your lantern?”
When he gave it to her, she merely thanked him and turned away before he could ask more questions.
. . .
THE BOX INTRIGUED ADELIA; to have been placed so deep in the tunnel suggested that its contents were of value. Or incriminating. Or both. Emma’s jewels, probably. In which case, what happiness—if Emma were still alive—to return them to someone who had been suffering all the privations of a castaway as an earnest that she was to be restored to her former life.
Then, like Pandora before her, Adelia thought, To hell, I just want to know what’s in the thing.
There was time to open it before the rescue began, and no need to wake the people in the kitchen before then, which she undoubtedly would if she went there—a noisy business if the box’s hasp continued to prove as obdurate as it had.
She took lantern, sword, and box to the only place where there was both privacy and a table.
Despite the poverty of their resting place and the drenching the storm had inflicted on the cloths that covered them, the forms of Arthur and Guinevere retained the dignity accorde
d to all the dead in silent immobility.
It was disturbed as Adelia, apologizing to them, shoved the covering away from Arthur’s feet and placed the lantern between them before committing the same indignity on Guinevere by positioning the box between hers.
She left the door open to add what natural light there was to that of the lantern.
It was a noisy business. Inserting the sword tip under the hasp was difficult and caused much scratching and, on Adelia’s part, much swearing under her puffing breath.
At last the hasp yielded its grip on the prong. Adelia put the sword down and lifted the box’s lid.
Not jewels. Bones. Pelvic bones.
Behind her, somebody coughed.
Adelia swung round like someone guilty, hiding the box with her body.
Godwyn stood in the doorway. Godwyn the good thing, to whom she owed her life and Rowley’s and, perhaps, Emma’s. Godwyn the bad thing, who had permitted an uncontrollable wife to try to silence those who’d incommoded her. Godwyn, who had done nothing to stop Millie being beaten.
“What do you want?” she snapped. She was being interrupted on the brink of discovery, and she did not want him to see the box; it might be his, but its contents most certainly were not.
Anyway, there was a terrible patience to the man, which made her nerves twang. He didn’t move, face impassive; only his eyes showed the resignation of an ox awaiting the fall of the poleax.
“You’ll speak for her, lady, won’t ee?” he said. “The bishop do think high of you; you’ll tell him as she ain’t in charge of what she does. Iffen she’s taken to court, a word from his lordship to the judges . . . make a mort of difference that would …”
Adelia shook her head, not in negation but to clear it. After all, she supposed she had a duty to listen to this man who had given back the lives that the woman he was pleading for had tried to take away.
He continued to talk, had probably been pacing half the night preparing his speech of mitigation.
“Iffen you’d a seen her when she were a girl, hair like fire, full of chatter as a cricket . . . She were a sight then, my Hilda. Come as milkmaid to the master’s cows when she were eleven year old . . .”
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