Grave Goods

by Ariana Franklin

  Concentrate. There was something here, some insight into why a pretty milkmaid had turned murderous.

  “The master?” Adelia asked, to get things clear. “You mean Abbot Sigward?”

  “Lord Sigward as he were then, abbot as is now. Me, I started off as his stable lad, do ee see, bound to his family like my father afore me and his father afore that. Good masters to us, all of ’em, so long as we did our jobs and served them proper. I got raised to chief stabler, and Hilda, she was made housekeeper.”

  “Did you always love her?” The question was an impertinence. Adelia was taking advantage of someone who was her helpless supplicant, but she was impelled to ask it; in the relationship between this man and his wife had to be a clue to what had gone on.

  He was puzzled, offended. If he hadn’t been begging for Adelia’s help, he would have walked away. “Fine worker, Hilda,” he said. It was the only answer he could give; love was a word restricted to the nobility and poets. He tried to smile. “Worth the wooing, she was. Took a bit of doing, mind. Her wouldn’t look at me for years.”

  “Because she loved the master?” She was probing deep, but somewhere under her scalpel was the source of infection.

  Godwyn was stung into indignation. “Never any uncleanness between em,” he said, “never. Half the time he didn’t know as she were there. Still don’t.”

  No, he didn’t; Adelia had seen that for herself. Abbot Sigward’s kindness to his former housekeeper was that of a master to a pet hound. “But you went on serving him?”

  Again, the man was puzzled. “He were my lord. Weren’t his fault, weren’t Hilda’s, weren’t mine. ’S how it was. Service, see. Good servant, good master, one loyal to t’other.”

  “I see.” But Adelia knew she didn’t see. She had been brought up outside the feudal system and would never fathom that binding between the classes, one ruling, one serving, in mutual acceptance, a tradition that spanned centuries, holding both in place, a system capable of dreadful abuse, yet at its best—as it had been in the household of Sigward before he left it to turn to God—a form of loving.

  “And his son,” she asked. “Did you love him?”

  Now she was causing pain. Godwyn’s teeth showed in an agonized grimace, and he tapped his clenched fist against them. But he was helpless; if the woman who stood before him was to save his wife, he had to submit to the turn of the screw.

  “Sorry for un,” he said. “Sad little thing he was. Like his ma had been afore she died. Frit of everything. I put un on his first pony and he were afraid then. Not like his pa. Not frit of nothing, the master weren’t. But the boy were”—Godwyn searched for a description—”more fond of flowers like, painting and books and such. Never squealed, though, you got to give un that. He’d puke every time the master took un hunting, but he had to go an’ he went, no murmur.”

  “As he had to go on crusade?” Why am I persisting with this? she wondered. But the volition for it seemed to come not just from within her but from behind her, as if the skeletons were urging her on.

  She’d gone too far. Godwyn’s eyes searched for an escape.

  Adelia reached for his hand. “I’ll speak for her, Godwyn. So will the bishop, I promise you that.” She could do no less for this imperfect, strangely wonderful man.

  The landlord nodded, then took off his cap and held it to his breast in a gesture of subservience that made her want to weep. “I’ll go ready the boat, then,” he said.

  She watched him walk away toward the landing stage, a stumpy, ordinary figure outlined against the pink and gold of a rising sun.

  She turned back. There wasn’t much time and she had to know now. Even so, she spent a second or two on her knees beside Guinevere’s catafalque before, whipping off the cloth, she lifted the top half of the skeleton away from the bottom half, exposing the hideous gap where the pelvic girdle should have been. Working quickly, she began fitting the bones from the box into the space.

  Some were badly splintered, but others had survived the onslaught almost untouched; the ball of the right femur, for example, went perfectly into the socket of the acetabulum.

  The spine had been severed so neatly that the three fused lower vertebrae attached themselves to the rest of the sacrum without any question that they belonged together.

  Adelia stood back from her work and stared at it. Undoubtedly, Guinevere had been made whole. The bones fit. This was the right pelvis in the right place at last.

  Also the wrong one.

  She measured, using the sword as a ruler by marking lines in the black patina of its blade; she considered the ilia, broken as they were, but still displaying unmistakable flanges. Without apology this time, she pushed Arthur’s cloth away and made more measurements, comparing his pubic arch with the one she’d taken from the box.

  Back to Guinevere.

  Eventually, she was sure; there could be no mistake. “So that’s what you’ve been trying to tell me,” she said gently.

  Guinevere was male.

  She covered the skeletons and sat down on the ground, resting her head against Arthur’s catafalque.

  Two men. Buried together. Both killed, one viciously maimed in his sexual parts. Twenty years ago.

  Nuances, sentences, dreams, clues from these past days that she should have taken notice of came fluttering into her mind, settling in it to form a recognizable mosaic.

  So that was the answer—love. Love could be the only connection between the living and the dead concentrated in that poor pattern of bones. Love in its many manifestations—destructive, sexual, beautiful, protective, possessive—was the link. It was love of a sort that had nearly killed Rowley and herself; in another form, it had brought the couple they called Arthur and Guinevere to their grave.

  The pity of it.

  Adelia went out, softly closing the door of the hut behind her.

  A warm, early sun was sucking moisture from the drenched ground in the form of a mist so that the great tors rose as if out of nothing to stand against a pellucid sky, a mist into which swallows vanished as they flicked down into it to catch insects and then reappeared.

  Whether or not Glastonbury was the omphalos Mansur had recognized, it was magical this morning, telling her that if Avalon was anywhere it was here, spell casting, able to raise an unquiet spirit that had haunted her, nagged her, into showing the truth about itself.

  This was the place for it, so easy to have common sense undermined by breathtaking natural geographical beauty.

  Adelia, practical scientist that she was, fought against its seduction. To believe that the Guinevere nightmares had come from outside rather than from unrecognized doubts that she’d had from the first, a formless guilt at assuming a skeleton was female because everybody said it was . . .

  “I won’t have it,” she said out loud. It was almost a snarl.

  But still she walked through the Glastonbury mist on invisible feet.

  SHE MADE FOR the landing place. It was quiet there except for the yelps of seagulls and the cheeps of marsh birds attending to their young among reeds and tussock sedge. The river had been energized by last night’s rainfall and flowed faster than she’d ever seen it, a dark blue ribbon winding around islands toward the sea. A little way along its right bank where the boathouse was, she could see Godwyn loading supplies into a boat, this time a large punt that was to take them to Lazarus, and the three castaways on it.

  And pray God we’re not too late.

  Adelia took off her ruined, water-distorted, ashy shoes and sat down so that her toes could reach into the river and send up flirting, rainbow splashes.

  Again, her surroundings insisted that all was right with the world, especially here—that Emma, Pippy, and Roetger must have survived in such a glorious landscape, that a great and ancient king could have chosen nowhere better for his last resting place.

  She wished she could believe it. How nice to discount human wickedness, to be able to fall in with the nature around her, to discount evidence and allow
that the mutilated bones in the hut were indeed those of Arthur and Guinevere, killed in a legendary battle in such an ancient past that its shrieks and blows had ameliorated into nothing more than the puff of a story-laden breeze.

  But those shrieks, those blows, had been less than a generation ago. She had a duty to the dead; she was who she was.

  She felt the little pier vibrate as somebody joined her on it. Beside her were the long, white, sandaled feet of Abbot Sigward.

  “We have been searching for you, my child. Will you come and take some food before we go?”

  She squinted up at him, shading her eyes. “How did your son die?” she asked.

  For a moment he was as still as death. She continued to look at him.

  “So you are Nemesis,” he said.

  She nodded.

  Then the abbot’s face changed, quite beautifully, as if the sun shining on it was reflected back by an inner light. “I have been awaiting that question for twenty years.” He stretched his arms sideways to embrace the view, like a cormorant holding out its wings to dry in the warmth. “See what a perfect day the Lord has chosen for it. He has even supplied a bishop for my confession.” He smiled down at her. “Stay there, my child, while I fetch the others.”

  He strode off toward the kitchen, then stopped to turn around.

  “I killed him,” he said.

  LATER, WHEN ADELIA looked back on the journey to Lazarus, it was the incongruity of it that never failed to jolt her. It should have been made in darkness, or at least cast a shadow that withered everything they passed. Instead, as Godwyn smoothly poled the punt containing Sigward, Adelia, Rowley, and Hilda along, the sun shone on them as if on a jolly outing.

  At one point, the abbot even paused in his confession and uncovered a basket that had been put up for him by Brother Titus before they left, exposing a jug of mead and cakes of oatmeal and honey, and passing them around. “Eat, drink,” he urged them.

  He was exalted. Sitting on the punt’s middle thwart, facing the bishop of Saint Albans, he unburdened himself of his sin almost joyously, sometimes in Latin, sometimes in English, as if fearing that Adelia, his nemesis, sitting in the stern behind Rowley, would not understand him.

  Hilda—he’d insisted she should accompany them—crouched in the bottom of the punt, quiet now, her head on his knee like an exhausted dog’s.

  His story—and it was as much story as confession—was of a cleaving. Of a young man hacked in two. Of an earthquake that had not only opened rifts in the ground but had separated the Sigward, lord of great estates, from the Sigward who’d become a lowly monk of Glastonbury Abbey and then its abbot.

  He spoke of them as two different people. “Lord Sigward was a man assured of his righteousness,” he said. “He gave to the poor, he built churches and oratories so that God should be reminded of his virtue. He ruled his little kingdom justly with a Bible in his hands, knowing he obeyed its precepts. He bathed in the admiration of his neighbors. His servants had cause to love him. . . .” Absentmindedly, Abbot Sigward patted Hilda’s shoulder. “At least those he kept by him, for he was quick to punish and rid himself of the ones who did not.”

  Wishing she didn’t have to listen, Adelia kept her eyes on the river, trailing her fingers and watching their wake in the water. A moorhen hurried her chicks away from the ripple.

  “Lord Sigward chose his wife carefully, but she was a disappointment; he did not understand why she was afraid of him. She bore him a son, and she died doing it. No matter, Lord Sigward had his heir and held a great feast so that he could boast of him to Somerset’s nobility. But the boy, too, was a disappointment; he was weak, like his mother. He cowered when his father spoke to him; he failed in the tiltyard, he was an inept huntsman. Like some clerk, he preferred books to pursuing the manly arts.”

  Adelia glanced at Rowley’s rigid back; he’d averted his face from the man opposite him, as he would have done in the privacy of a confessional. There had been no moment to warn him before they set off. When the abbot, crossing himself, had spoken the formula—“Hear and bless me, Father, for I have greatly sinned”—she’d seen her lover draw away as if in protest.

  He always hated hearing confessions. “Who am I to pronounce on sin?” Like Thomas à Becket before him, he’d been appointed by his king, not the Church, and had been made a priest literally overnight—ordained one day, installed into the bishop’s chair the next.

  The punt surged and slowed as Godwyn dug its pole effortlessly into the riverbed and lifted it again, his face without expression. The words issuing from the mouth of the man who’d been his master might have been no more than the chirp of the buntings hidden in the reeds.

  “When the boy was sixteen, it seemed necessary to Lord Sigward that he should regain the admiration of the county and get credit with Almighty God by sending his son on crusade. He fitted him out lavishly with weapons, equipment, gave him a fine destrier to ride . . . which was too big for him.” For the first time the abbot’s voice had faltered, then, with an indrawn breath, it regained its rhythm. “A farewell feast for the county to wish the son well and praise the father who, though wallowing in his pride, also resented the boy’s obvious happiness in leaving him.”

  A dragonfly skimmed the water and landed on the punt’s gunwale like an iridescent jewel before taking off again.

  “Four years went by without a word. Other fathers received news of their offspring from those returning from the Holy Land, sometimes that they were alive and well, sometimes that they were dead. The Lord Sigward, however, heard nothing and began to think that his boy, too, had died, perhaps in the battle for the fortress of Ascalon, where so many Christian knights were slaughtered during its recapture from the Saracen. If so, it would be an excuse for him to hold another feast, this time a valedictory one—what honor to Lord Sigward that his child had given his life in the attempt to return the Holy Land to God.”

  Adelia watched a kingfisher that had been perching on an alder twig suddenly turn into a rainbowed arrow as it dived into the water, coming up with a frog in its beak.

  It was getting hot. Abbot Sigward threw back his cowl to let the air play on his tonsured head. The exaltation was still with him, but his fingers were showing white where he clasped them in his lap—he was coming to the crux.

  Adelia tried to distance the clear voice ringing over the marshes into that of just another storyteller in a market. Twenty years ago, she told herself. They have been dead these twenty years. This man is not the same man who kitted them.

  But he was.

  It had been the evening before the Feast of Saint Stephen 1154, the abbot said, a blustery night.

  Christmas festivities were over. Lord Sigward, being the kindly master he was, had already allowed his servants to set off on their annual visit to the villages they came from.

  “Apart from Hilda”—the abbot patted the head of the woman crouching beside him—“who refused to leave him, and Godwyn”—he smiled up at the man poling the punt—“who refused to leave her, there was no one in the house.”

  So Lord Sigward was dining alone in his hall when Godwyn, acting as a doorkeeper, heard a loud knocking and went to answer it. Two young men were ushered in, and Lord Sigward found himself being embraced by his son, whose dripping rain cloak put wet marks on the silk of his father’s robe. Laughing and exclaiming, the boy introduced his magnificently tall friend. “We have been on the road from Outremer for three months, Father, and we are very, very hungry.”

  Immediately, Lord Sigward felt anger; if his son had sent word ahead, he could have invited his neighbors to welcome the boy as a hero. He kept his patience, however, and called for Hilda to bring food and drink.

  As he watched the young men eat, he became angrier.

  “He should have been pleased,” the abbot said. “His son had become the man he’d wished him to be. The years in the Holy Land had given the boy belief in himself. He looked Lord Sigward in the eye. He was no longer afraid; he was Lord Sigward’s
equal—and Lord Sigward resented it.”

  Also, there was a sweetness in the son’s smile when it was directed at the friend that was missing when he addressed the father.

  Both youths had pale, cruciform patches on their tunics where the crusader’s cross had been stripped off. When Lord Sigward inquired why this was so, he was able to find justification for his anger with the two of them. “They denigrated the sanctity of crusade, they poured scorn on the holy purpose of driving the Saracen from the land Jesus had walked on. They had seen too much death, they said; Islam was merely being inflamed. What purpose in killing Muslim men, women, and children if each corpse added a hundred living people to the number hating Christianity? Was that following the teaching of Our Lord?”

  Too furious to speak, Lord Sigward had left the hall and retired to his chamber. He couldn’t sleep for thinking of the shame his son’s impiety would cast on his name. In the middle of the night, he got up and went to the boy’s room to argue with him.

  “He found his son and the friend in bed together,” the abbot said. “They were naked and performing a homosexual act.”

  Hubris had descended on Lord Sigward then. Quietly, he closed the door on the two lovers and went to fetch an ax.

  The abbot said, “He . . . No, I must not think of myself in the third person. . . . Me. I was that butcher. With the ax in my hand, I burst in on those two boys and hacked them to death where they lay in each other’s arms. I struck and struck and went on striking long after both were dead.”

  The river was beginning to straggle through reeds now, and the punt nudged aside yellow water lilies as it went. Sandpipers called from the banks, a descant to the implacable human voice.

  “I considered myself justified. Had I not followed the Lord’s action against Sodom and Gomorrah? Did not Leviticus say that a man who lies with a man as with a woman has committed a detestable act and should surely be put to death?”