The manor was in flames. Its roof had already fallen in; some men with buckets were scurrying to and from the moat in an effort to save the outbuildings. In the air, pigeons wheeled unhappily, unable to land in the bonfire that had been their cote. A hay barn had gone up like tinder and revealed the church standing behind it, so far untouched.
There was nothing to be done. Buckets of water wouldn’t extinguish that inferno. The riders could only stay where they were and watch.
“The hag,” Roetger said. “She set a torch to it before she went.”
Adelia felt grief for a house that had been so lovely and so old. It had been like a seashell, allowing all to listen to hear the waves of its history. Now it was going and the waves would be silenced forever.
The men with buckets were standing back, giving up the battle.
“Dear, dear,” said Rhys. “Oh, there’s a pity, now. Such a pity.”
Emma said determinedly, “No, Rhys, it is not a pity at all.”
She turned to Roetger, smiling. “I would have torn it down in any case. I could never live where he’d lived. Nor her.”
“We will rebuild it,” Roetger said.
“Yes, new and twice as beautiful. Won’t we, Pippy? Everything new.”
After a while, taking Millie with her, Adelia left them and rode on toward Glastonbury.
There was definitely newness about. No corpses polluted the air today, because the trees that had held them were gone. Instead, a wide verge of timber-strewn grass ran between road and forest edge. Women were picking up fallen branches in their aprons and carrying them to their men to be chopped up for firewood. As Adelia and Millie went by, waving, they looked up and smiled.
At the top of the turning to Glastonbury high road, Adelia and Millie dismounted. Adelia bent down to pick up a fallen leaf and pressed it into Millie’s hand. “For Gyltha.” She enunciated it carefully, sticking it out her tongue at the “th.” It was a word Millie had learned by watching Adelia say it while patting Gyltha on the shoulder. Adelia hoped to teach her others. But how to indicate she wouldn’t be long? She pointed to the sun and moved her finger a fraction to the west, then blew a kiss to an imaginary child by her knee. “My love to Allie. Tell her I’ll be with her soon.”
Millie nodded and started off down the hill. At its bottom, Godwyn was sweeping dust out of the Pilgrim’s front door. He looked up, saw Millie coming toward him, and smiled for the first time since the marshes.
Good, Adelia thought. That will work out very well.
The abbey was silent, but there was life down the high street, where men were shifting the rubble that had been their houses, ready to rebuild them. Although he didn’t see her, she saw Alf expertly wielding an adze on a freshly cut beam.
Better than Noah, Adelia thought, and was happy.
Yes, there was newness in the air today.
Remounting, she rode on along the lane between the abbey wall and the foot of the Tor.
Up the hill, some men on horseback, their hands shading their eyes, were straining their necks to watch a peregrine falcon circling the sky. A hound barked, causing a cluster of pigeons to go flapping up into the air out of a copse of trees. The bird above them took on the shape of a bow notched with an arrow—and dived. The pigeons separated, and one of them, perhaps realizing its danger, flew low, but the falcon coming for it was a missile; talons out, it took the pigeon in midair with an impact that sheared off its head.
By the time Adelia reached the group, the falcon was back on its owner’s wrist, only its wicked little beak, shining like steel, visible under its plumed hood.
“Good day, my lord.”
With great care the falconer transferred the bird to its austringer’s gauntlet, then, telling his men to wait for him—“This lady and I have private business to transact”—joined Adelia and together they rode up the hill.
“You’ve a very nasty temper, you know,” said Henry Plantagenet. “You must learn to control it.”
Adelia was wondering what would become of her reputation in the royal household. “Yes, my lord. I’m sorry, my lord.”
“I hear Lady Wolvercote won her Morte d’Ancestor.”
“But has lost the house.” She told him of the dowager’s revenge.
“Ah,” the king said. He cheered up. “Well, more work for the law courts. Now then, where’s this cave?”
Adelia had some trouble finding it again. With Eustace gone to his grave and with the tithing rebuilding their lives, there was no sign of its occupancy; up here, one bushy outcrop with a spring looked like another. After a couple of false casts, however, she dismounted to pull aside the fronds that hid the entrance and the man who’d been waiting for them.
“Good day, Mansur,” Henry said.
“Good day, my lord.”
Inside, the elfin cave worked its magic and nobody spoke.
Looking around, the king crossed himself and climbed through the hole in the back wall that Mansur had made. After a while, Adelia joined him.
One king was kneeling in prayer by the prone skeleton of another. Green light coming through the split in the rock above shone on them both and the untroubled pool at their feet.
Adelia looked at the living man with tears in her eyes.
Will you, too, become a legend? No, the Church will see to that. Future generations living under the legacy you’ve given them will remember you only for the murder of Becket.
Eventually, Henry II stood up and cleared his throat as if he, too, had been crying. The sound echoed. “He’s not very big, is he?”
“He was a Celt, I suppose,” Adelia said. “One of the short, dark ones.”
“A warrior, though. Look at those wounds. At peace now, God rest him.”
“Yes.” But crowding into her mind came visions of the thousands of pilgrims, as they would come crowding into this cave in real life, of the tawdry relic stalls that would be set up outside alongside the money changers, those descendants of rapacious men whom Jesus had once turned out of Jerusalem’s Temple.
Henry sighed. “Requiscat in pace, Arturus.” He turned and clambered back through the hole.
Outside the cave, he reached for the reins of the horses drinking at the spring, then let them drop. He looked down, toward Glastonbury “You know,” he said, reflectively, “the Welsh aren’t being as obstreperous as they were, the bastards. They’re finding my laws have some advantages.”
“Are they?”
“Yes, they are.”
He took up the reins and dropped them once more. “And that one in there”—he nodded toward the cave—“he’s practically a dwarf. People’ll expect a giant; they’ll be disappointed.”
Adelia’s heart skipped a beat.
The King of England gave another sigh. “Mansur?”
“My lord?”
“Wall him up again; let him sleep on.”
“Wait.” Adelia went back into the cave and through the hole and retrieved the sword from the pool to which Mansur had returned it. Coming out again into the light, the weapon dazzled like a sunburst. She laid it across her palms and knelt. “My lord, here is Excalibur. It belongs to the greatest heart of the age, which makes it yours. You are the Once and Future King.”
The two of them walked their horses back down the hill, chatting.
From where he lay under the shadow of a juniper bush, a man known as Scarry watched them go. At least, he didn’t watch the king, because he didn’t know it was the king. He watched Adelia, and his eyes were those of a stoat waiting to kill—a stoat that spoke Latin.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I HAVE SET the story of the “finding” of Arthur and Guinevere’s grave at Glastonbury fourteen years earlier than the chroniclers who tell us it happened in 1190, but there is good reason to believe it wasn’t as late as they say, because the Glastonbury monks also “found” Excalibur—it was known as Caliburn then, but I’ve used the now-familiar name—and the sword was undoubtedly in the possession of Henry II before his death, whi
ch was in 1189.
Eventually, Henry sent Excalibur as a present to his friend and future son-in-law, the King of Sicily. When I asked John Julius Norwich, that fine historian of Norman Sicily, if he knew what happened to it after that, he said he didn’t. But, he told me, it is interesting that there is a strong tradition of the Arthurian legend in the area of Mount Etna.
Nobody knows what Excalibur looked like, of course, and my re-creation of it is based on the wisdom and writings of an old and dear friend, the late Ewart Oakeshott, who has been acknowledged on both sides of the Atlantic as the great authority on medieval weaponry.
That a sword from the age attributed to Arthur (circa the mid–sixth century) and earlier could survive intact is due to the fact that thousands of them have been preserved in peat bogs or river bottoms where they have been recovered. To quote Mr. Oakeshott’s Records of the Medieval Sword (The Boydell Press, 1991), “A sword falling into deep mud, free from stones or organic material that might trap oxygen or allow it to penetrate the close covering of mud, will initially become covered all over with a coating of rust, but as time passes the chemical interaction of this rust with the surrounding mud covers all the surface of the metal with a flint-hard coating of goethite which, once formed, prevents any further corrosion and so yields up to the archaeologist (or treasure hunter with his metal detector) a well-preserved weapon, sometimes in almost pristine condition. This coating or patina can be removed … by long and arduous work with abrasives.”
In the book, I have Roetger bringing definition back to Excalibur with a pickled preserve—not as mad as it sounds. Once, steering me round his private collection, Mr. Oakeshott showed me an incredibly ancient and marvelous sword dug up from a Kentish bog that he’d restored to a condition its Viking master would have recognized. He’d tried cleaning off its patina first with lemon, then with vinegar, to no avail. “Do you know what did it in the end?” he asked. “A bottle of Worcestershire sauce.” Which, as far as I’m concerned, pace its manufacturers, is runny preserves.
The Arthurian legend accreted stories over the centuries, which is why I have been scrupulous not to mention the Holy Grail or Lancelot and his affair with Guinevere—all later additions to the story.
Where I have used artistic license is in changing the date of the great fire that destroyed Glastonbury Abbey in 1184 to the time of my story—again, eight years earlier.
After the fire, appeals for funds were sent out and the monks of Glastonbury traveled Europe in a money-raising campaign—there’s nothing new under the sun, not even advertising.
Incidentally, since the pyramids between which “Arthur’s grave” was found no longer exist, I’ve taken their description from the writings of the twelfth-century annalist William of Malmesbury, who saw them when he visited Glastonbury.
And the skeletons of two babies were found in the monks’ graveyard. How they got there can only be speculation.
What does still exist is a tunnel leading from a cellar in Glastonbury’s fourteenth-century George and Pilgrim’s Hotel (I’ve put my twelfth-century Pilgrim’s Inn on the same site on the assumption that there was always a hostelry there) to somewhere in the abbey grounds—we don’t know exactly where, because it is blocked halfway through under the High Street and hasn’t been excavated.
I should point out that there was no bishop of Saint Albans in the twelfth century, although there is now, so mine is a fictional predecessor. However, the dispute between the abbey of Glastonbury and the bishopric of Wells is a historical fact; the two were at daggers drawn for centuries.
Also, in those days, the title of doctor was reserved for masters of philosophy, et cetera, and not for medical men, but, again, I’ve used the anachronism in the interest of clarity.
The use of trial by battle to prove a property dispute had an extraordinarily long life, though it began to die out when Henry II’s judicial reforms were introduced. The last known instance of it is thought to have taken place during the monarchy of Elizabeth I. It wasn’t abolished from the statute books until the eighteenth century in the reign of George III.
As to the introduction into my story of Brother Peter, there is some dispute over whether the Benedictine monks—which is what the brethren of Glastonbury were—used lay brothers to relieve them of laboring work, but I am assured that in some cases they did.
In modern times there has been speculation that leprosy, so rife in the Middle Ages, was not leprosy at all, but that other disfiguring diseases were mistaken for it. This is now mainly being disproved by the new ability to test the bones found in the graveyards of ancient lazar houses, where it has been discovered in some cases that seventy percent of the dead suffered from the leprous condition proper.
In the matter of the writ Morte d’Ancestor, the twelve men hearing the case were technically not jurors as we would understand them now; they were an “assize,” men cognizant of the facts concerned. But again, for simplification, I have called them a jury.
I am occasionally criticized for letting my characters use modern language, but in twelfth-century England the common people spoke a form of English even less comprehensible than Chaucer’s in the fourteenth; the nobility spoke Norman French, and the clergy spoke Latin. Since people then sounded contemporary to one another, and since I hate the use of what I call “gadzooks” in historical novels to denote a past age, I insist on making those people sound modern to the reader.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I OWE KNOWLEDGE of such Welsh words as I’ve used to Mr. Alan Jones of Datchworth, who was so kind as to instruct me in what he calls “the language of Paradise.” Thank you, Alan.
As ever, I’m grateful to the wonderfully efficient team at Putnam and especially my editor, Rachel Kahan. I just wish sometimes that she and my equally marvelous agent, Helen Heller, didn’t persist with their advice being right in every single instance.
The London Library, that great reservoir of knowledge, stops me from making more historical mistakes than I do.
And I don’t know what I’d accomplish without the help that my daughter, Emma, gives me in coping with secretarial and financial matters, or without Barry, my husband, abandoning his own work to accompany me on research trips.
Table of Contents
COVER
TITLE
COPYRIGHT
DEDICATION
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
AUTHOR’S NOTE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Grave Goods Page 30
