FOUR

 

 

 

LOOK,” ALLIE SAID, pointing upward as they approached the castle. “Poppies. Lots of poppies. Big ones.”

Against the setting sun, the severed heads decorating Caerleon’s crenellations bore a resemblance to wildly petaled flowers.

“That damned savage,” Adelia said under her breath, and urged her horse forward up the incline so that they would reach the barbican more quickly and her daughter could be sheltered by its walls from the knowledge of what the “poppies” on the battlements were. “Barbarian. Pig. Just wait til I see the brute.”

She was so tired that anger with Henry Plantagenet was the only thing keeping her in the saddle. All of them except Allie, who could sleep in the pannier attached to a horse, were exhausted—and by a journey Adelia had been loath to make.

She’d refused to accompany the soldiers at first. “I am not going.” Twice now she had served the Plantagenet in her capacity of investigator into unexplained deaths, and each time had nearly lost her own life doing it.

Emma, bless her, their contretemps forgotten, had joined the protest.

“I cannot spare this lady, she is—” Emma remembered in time that the title of doctor should not be applied to her friend. “She is attendant to my physician, the lord Mansur here.”

“He comes, too.” The officer’s hand moved to his sword hilt as he said it, and Adelia knew he’d enforce his king’s order if he had to.

Adelia had panicked. “Not without my child. I am not leaving my child.” They’d have to drag her to Wales, she’d throw herself off her horse, she’d fight and scream at every step, she’d…

On that matter, however, the officer had been prepared to give way. “The king said as how you wouldn’t.”

“And I’m coming, too,” Gyltha said.

The officer had nodded wearily. “King said that an’ all.”

They’d barely been given time to say good-bye. Concerned, Emma said, “If you can get away, I shall be at our manor with my mother-in-law. Ask for the dowager Wolvercote.”

Adelia waved as one of the soldiers led her horse into a trot.

“Halfway between Wells and Glastonbury,” Emma shouted.

Adelia would have waved again, but she was now at a gallop and had to hold on with both hands.

The galloping proceeded, it seemed, for days. There was no planning for overnight stops such as Emma had made. When it was too dark to go on, they put up at whatever hostelry was available.

Their first night had been spent at a miserable tavern on the way to the Severn Estuary. It was little more than a shack where everyone slept together on one raised platform covered in straw. The next morning they were infested with fleas and Adelia found that, in their haste, the pack with her clean clothes in it had been left behind with Emma. The officer—his name was Bolt, which, Gyltha pointed out, “suits the bastard”—refused to divert to the local market where she could have purchased some sort of raiment. “Sorry, mistress. You’ll have to grin and bear it.”

“King’s orders, I suppose,” she said viciously. It was a phrase she was already sick of, and she knew she’d hear it a great deal more.

“ ’S right.” It wasn’t that the man was unkind, but his lord king had insisted on speed, a requirement that literally overrode all others.

On reaching the Severn they’d transferred to a boat and disembarked at Cardiff Castle on the Welsh coast, their destination, only to discover that Henry had moved on with his troops.

“Been another rebellion,” Bolt told them after making inquiries. “Young Geoffrey’s holding out at Caerleon ’gainst another Welsh attack. The king’s gone to relieve him.”

“We’ll have to wait here, then,” Adelia had said, relieved by the thought of a rest.

“No, mistress. We’d better get on.”

“Into a battle? You can’t take us into danger.”

Bolt was astonished by her lack of faith in Henry Plantagenet. “There won’t be no battle by the time we gets there. The king’ll have mopped up that load of bloody Taffies quicker’n sixpence.”

And so he had, if the heads on the battlements and the quiet, darkened countryside all around were anything to go by.

Having quelled the revolt, Henry was establishing the peace—not that there was any sign of it in barbican or bailey, both in a commotion as soldiers tried to pack up weaponry against a counterflow of clerks unpacking chests of documents, all this among braying mules, frightened, scattering hens and pigs, and a cracked voice from a high window shouting orders to those below. “Where are those bloody maps? I need more ink up here. For the love of God, will you bastards hurry.”

The place stank of urine and manure, nor did the smell improve as Adelia and the others were rushed up staircases and past arrow slits where archers had stood day and night repelling an encircling enemy.

The king was striding up and down a slightly less noisome though just as turbulent chamber, dictating the terms of two different treaties with two different and defeated rebel Welsh lords to two different scribes, occasionally shouting instructions out the window, while a fusty little man ran alongside him, trying to apply leeches to a bare and inflamed-looking royal arm. In a corner, a young man whom Adelia recognized as the king’s illegitimate son and general-in-chief, Geoffrey, was talking to several tired-looking insigniaed men in heavy fur mantles, presumably Welsh chieftains. Pages were laying out food on a table, kicking away sniffing hounds as they did it. A line of hawks on perches were screeching and flapping their wings. Incongruously, a limp-looking man in another corner was playing a small harp and singing to it, though what it was was impossible to hear.

Captain Bolt announced the newcomers in a shout that only just penetrated the noise: “The lord Mansur, Mistress Adelia, and …” He looked despairingly at Gyltha, who was holding Allie. “And company.”

Henry glanced up. “You took your damn time. Sit down somewhere until I’ve finished… .”

“No,” Adelia said clearly.

Everybody stopped what they were doing, except the harpist, who went on quietly singing to himself.

Past caring, itching with fleas and fury, Adelia told him, “The Lord Mansur and company require a bath and a rest. And they need them now.”

All eyes looked in her direction and then, in one slow movement, were turned on the king. Henry’s temper when he was flouted was renowned—Thomas à Becket had died from it.

He blew out a breath. “Geoffrey.”

“Yes, my lord?”

“Is there a bath in the castle?”

“I don’t know, my lord.” The young man’s mouth twitched. “A bath wasn’t, er, part of our armory.”

“Better find one. And some beds.”

“And clean clothes,” Adelia said. “Women’s.”

The king sighed again. “Samite? Lace? Any particular size?”

Adelia ignored the sarcasm. “Clean will do,” she said.

At the door she turned and addressed the little doctor: “And if you’re supposed to be treating that wound, get those leeches off it and put on some bog moss—there’s plenty of the bloody stuff in the valleys; we’ve been squelching through it for two days.”

 

THE BATH TURNED OUT to be a washtub of enormous proportions, and the soldiers who hauled it up to the two rooms allocated to their guests at the top of a tower, along with great ewers of hot water, were out of breath and resentful when they got it there.

An inexorable Adelia sent them back down for soap and towels.

The beds, when they arrived, were rickety, but the straw and blankets that came with them were clean.

After a long night’s sleep, Adelia woke up feeling better, if chastened by the memory of her behavior toward a king whose empire stretched from the borders of Scotland to the Pyrenees. Apparently, though, it was even yet having its effect, for a polite knock on the door heralded the entrance of the emperor’s bastard son, Geoffrey, still amused.

He was carrying an armful of women’s clothing. “We, er, liberated these from one of the Welsh chieftain’s wives,” he said. “Don’t worry, she has others, though I’m afraid the lady favors rather more avoirdupois than you do, but it was that or a mail shirt.”

Adelia clutched her blanket more closely about her—last night she’d thrown everything she’d been wearing out the window. Luckily, Allie’s extra clothes had been included in Gyltha’s pack, along with Mansur’s, and were fit for them to wear. “I’m grateful, my lord.”

“Was the breakfast to your satisfaction? The cook’s Welsh as well.”

“Congratulate him for me,” she said. Skewered lamb, the tastiest she’d ever eaten, along with buttermilk and a form of cake called bara brith so rich that even Mansur hadn’t been able to finish all of it.

“Then when you’re dressed, my lord king would be happy to receive you and my lord Mansur. Only when you are ready, of course.” The young man went to the door and then turned back. “Oh, and one of our lads carved this for the little one.” He knelt to put his face on a level with Allie’s and handed her a wooden doll.

Allie curtsied nicely. “I’ll call him Poppy, like the ones on the roof.”

“Poppies?”

“She’s referring to the flowers decorating the battlements,” Adelia said, getting angry again. “The ones separated from their stalks.”

“Ah, yes.” The young man’s eyes were on Allie, but he spoke to Adelia. “You see, little one, they were already picked. The king doesn’t take the heads off poppies unless they’re dead.” As he turned to leave, and Allie began playing with her doll, he added, “Hangs a few, of course, to encourage the others, but on the whole he’s magnanimous to his flowers.”

“Nice lad that,” Gyltha said, when Geoffrey had gone. She began unfolding the clothes he’d brought. “Gawd help us.”

With Mansur behind her, Adelia waded down the stairs in a skirt and bodice that had been pinned up and belted to enable her to keep them on. Since, at her age, it wasn’t respectable to go bareheaded, she also wore the Welshwoman’s headdress, an elaborate affair with something like curtaining on either side, which rested heavily on her ears.

Casually, to the page who was leading the way, she asked, “Is the bishop of Saint Albans in the castle?”

“He was, mistress, but he’s gone to Saint David’s to treat with the Welsh bishop.”

The king’s chamber had been cleared of chieftains and servants but retained the king, a scribe writing at the table, dogs, hawks, and the softly singing harpist. The page ushered them in, announced them, and then stood at attention with his back to the door.

Still dictating, Henry Plantagenet stumped up and down on legs that were becoming bandy from days of traveling his empire on horseback. As usual, he was dressed hardly better than one of his grooms, but, again as usual, he generated a power that sent out an almost palpable energy.

Mansur salaamed, and Henry nodded at him, then walked round Adelia, studying her swamping attire. “Can you hear me in there?”

“Yes, my lord. Thank you, my lord.”

“You’re a rude and graceless woman, you know.”

“Yes, my lord, I’m sorry, my lord.” She looked at the king’s arm on which the soft, vividly pale-green flower heads of sphagnum moss were held in place by a bandage. “How’s your wound?”

“Better. Ready for some employment now?”

“I suppose so, my lord.”

“See that fellow there?” The king jerked a thumb at the harpist. “Name’s Rhys something-or-other. He’s a bard. Comes from an unpronounceable bloody hole on the coast.” He might have been introducing an interesting breed of hound. “Stand up, Rhys, and greet the lord Mansur and Mistress Aguilar.” To Adelia, he said, “He started this business, so he’s going to accompany you to Glastonbury.”

Rhys rose and bowed vaguely in Adelia and Mansur’s direction.

“Glastonbury?” Adelia was shrill. “My lord, I was already going to Glastonbury, or at least nearby. Lady Emma of Wolvercote and I were on our way to Wells. You could have sent a messenger and saved yourself trouble.”

And me God knows how many bone-shaking miles, she thought. What business?

“Master Rhys is going to tell you a story, aren’t you, Rhys?” Henry said, his attention still on the bard as if about to make him do a trick for the visitors. “And in the name of God, don’t sing it.” To Adelia and Mansur, he said, “The bugger keeps singing.”

“About Uncle Caradoc, is it?” Rhys asked.

“Of course it is, you clown. What else are you here for? Tell them.”

The bard stepped forward. A thin, droop-shouldered man with protruding teeth, he put Adelia in mind of an elongated rabbit. Despite the king’s injunction, his hand kept straying to his harp before he remembered and took it away again. Even so, his speaking voice, which belied his looks by being a pleasing tenor, had a lilt that was very nearly song, though the scribe at the table was unmoved by it and the bard’s tale was told against the scratching of a quill, as well as the sound of soldierly activity coming through the open window from the bailey below.

So, in semi-song, Adelia and Mansur were taken back twenty years ago to when Rhys had been an adolescent at Glastonbury Abbey. “Never suited to the monastic life, me,” he said. “No opportunity for true poetry.”

He told them of the earthquake that had struck the Somerset Levels in which Glastonbury stood. “Terrible, terrible it was, like the last trump trembling the heavens… .” A hiss from the king moved him on. “And my good uncle Caradoc, dying he was, had a waking dream …”

“A vision,” the king said.

“Three hooded lords, see, bearing a coffin to the graveyard and burying it.”

“Between the two pyramids,” the king prompted.

“Two pyramids there are in the Glastonbury graveyard, very ancient, and Uncle Caradoc, he says to me, ‘Look, bach, look down there in the fissure. They are showing me where Arthur takes his long rest, and by God’s grace I have been witness to it. Now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace.’ And He did, for beautiful, beautiful was my uncle Caradoc’s ending. …”

“God rest him,” Henry said, “and get on with it.”

“And the next morning we buried that good old uncle of mine, but no sign of another coffin, only disturbed earth all over the graveyard—result of the earthquake, see. Terrible, terrible, that earthquake, like the last days.…”

Tapping his foot, the king said, “But you didn’t pass on what Uncle Caradoc had seen, did you?”

“No, oh, no.”

“We had to beat it out of him,” Henry said, looking at Adelia. “He’s been keeping it secret for twenty years. Only person he told was his mother.” He turned back to Rhys. “And why did you keep it a secret?”

“Well, there.” Rhys’s large, vague eyes became sly. “There’s some would believe…”

“And you’re one of them, you little bastard,” the king interrupted.

“…believe as it couldn’t have been the burial of King Arthur that my uncle Caradoc saw.”

“And why couldn’t it?”

“Well,” Rhys said, still sly, “there’s some credit that Arthur’s only sleeping, see. In a crystal cave at Ynis-Witrin, the Isle of Glass. Avalon.”

“Which is Glastonbury,” Henry said briskly. He gestured to the page at the door. “Take him down to the kitchen and feed him again.” To Adelia he said, “The bugger’s always hungry.” As the page ushered Rhys out, he shouted after him, “And don’t sing.”

When the door closed, the king said, “Well?”

“Yes, my lord,” said Adelia. “But well what?”

“I’ll tell you well what. He informed us of all this when we were at Cardiff—we’ve been dragging him round with us ever since—and right away I sent to Glastonbury’s abbot and told him to set his monks digging between the two pyramids in the graveyard and find that coffin.”

Adelia frowned. “So you think it was a real vision, my lord?”

“Of course it was real. The monks have found the thing.” Henry waved a parchment at her, setting its large seal swinging. “This is a letter from Abbot Sigward, informing me they’ve dug up a coffin sixteen foot down, exactly between the pyramids. Two skeletons in it, one big, one small, Arthur and Guinevere, God bless her. Two for the price of one.”

Adelia nodded carefully. “They dug it up after the fire, did they?”

“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.”

“Or to me?”

She smiled at him. “Never that.”

“I know,” he said. “One of the few.” If Henry Plantagenet hadn’t been who he was, Adelia might have suspected that the sudden blur in the royal blue eyes came from tears.

He rallied. She was given a royal kiss on the cheek and a royal slap on the back. Robert the scribe was set to writing a warrant investing “my best beloved Lord Mansur and his interpreter, Mistress Adelia Aguilar” with almost enough power to raise an army and invade France.

But as always when he thought he was being overgenerous to her, the king made her pay for it.

“By the way,” he said, dangerously casual. “Glastonbury and the bishopric of Wells have always been at daggers drawn—and now Glastonbury is saying that Wells bribed some poacher to set the fire. If I don’t intervene, the Pope will—and I’m not putting up with an interfering Vatican. Bloody prelates, more trouble than they’re worth. I’m sending a peacemaker down to get both of the buggers to kneel to me and promise to be good.” The blue eyes became wicked. “Guess who the peacemaker’s going to be. Go on, guess.”

“The bishop of Saint Albans,” she said dully.

“The very same.” Henry, who had no more chastity than a tomcat, reveled in his favorite bishop’s sexual dilemma.

Don’t, she thought. Leave us alone; we have come to terms. Rowley must serve God, I must serve medicine, and the two are incompatible.

Not getting a rise out of her, Henry persisted. “I expect you’ll meet.”

“No, my lord,” she said, “we won’t.”

“Still keeping to his oath of chastity, is he?”

She didn’t answer, and he had to let her go.

On the way back up the staircase, she realized that neither she nor the king had consulted Mansur on an investigation in which, to all intents and purposes, he was to play the leading part. Not that there had been any choice in the matter—the king was the king.

“What is your opinion, my dear friend?”

“You answered wisely,” he said. “Truth is the salt of mankind; we cannot proffer sand.”

“I don’t intend to. But about the vision… ?”

“There are true visions,” Mansur said. “Did not Khadija, the Pure One, may the peace and blessings of Allah be upon her, see an angel guarding the Prophet with its wings?”

“Did she?”

Then who was Adelia to doubt the testimony of a monk from Glastonbury and Mohammed’s first wife?