SEVEN

 

 

I THINK BROTHER PETER bought the animal for us at Street’s market,” Abbot Sigward said cautiously. “We shall ask him.” He called to the man who was still scything the top pasture, beckoning for him to come down.

“Our stables went up in the fire, you see,” he told Adelia. “All our horses burned to death.” He put a hand to his eyes as if shielding them from a sight too awful to remember. There was a general shudder from the other monks. “After that a mule was all we could afford.”

“Useless,” Hilda muttered. “He’s to blame. Them was Brother Aloysius’s last words. ‘Eustace, Eustace.’ Heard him myself as I was putting the salve on his poor burns.”

“They were not as distinct as that,” the abbot told her patiently. “May God bless him, but we cannot rely on the incoherence of a dying man.”

Nor, it seemed, on the word of an agitated woman and her four-year-old child. The monks thought Adelia was deluded. The abbot was trying to placate her; the others were impatient to hear the lord Mansur’s verdict on the bones.

But for her, Arthur and Guinevere could stay dead; it was the living she was concerned with now—God only grant that Emma and the others were living.

“A mule’s a mule,” Brother Aelwyn said waspishly. “Who can distinguish between the brutes?”

Not me, thought Adelia, who had difficulty telling a charger from a palfrey. But Allie can.

She’d taken her daughter up to the pasture with Mansur and Gyltha and listened as the child pointed out the marks that, to her, set a grumpy-looking quadruped apart from all other horseflesh—and had been convinced Emma and the others had been attacked, their goods taken and sold.

“We’ve got to find them,” Adelia said. “We’ve got to find them.”

She couldn’t rid herself of the feeling that they were somewhere near and in terrible need. The call of a blackbird was the voice of Emma pleading for her life; the faraway eeyah, eeyah shriek of a hen harrier quartering the marsh was the scream of young Pippy.

Coming back down, she’d challenged the monks emerging from holy offices, demanding to know where they’d acquired the beast.

It was possible, of course—as the abbot pointed out—that Emma had sold her mule train before settling down somewhere in the vicinity.

Adelia didn’t believe it. Her friend had certainly not settled down at Wolvercote Manor if the dowager Lady Wolvercote was to be believed. Also, the arrival of a grand lady like Emma in the neighborhood would surely have caused a stir among the locals, yet none of them—here in Glastonbury, at least—seemed to have heard of it.

“Brother Peter will know,” Abbot Sigward said, relieved to see the man approaching. “He’ll clear the matter up.”

Brother Peter was another shock. He wore the habit of a lay brother that showed him to be basically a monastic laborer, but his height, coloring, and features were those of the man Adelia had seen baking bread in the kitchen of Wolvercote Manor only yesterday.

After a moment, she knew he couldn’t be—the baker hadn’t had this one’s tonsure, though the hair was otherwise the same—but he was his twin, she was sure of that.

Interrogated, he became defensive. “What I done wrong now, then? I says to you, Abbot, as we needed summat to pull a plough and harrow. Get it, says you, but get it cheap.”

“So I did, so I did,” Abbot Sigward said. “Nobody is blaming you, my son. But where did you get it?”

“Street. Where else? There ain’t a market here no more. Bought him at Street. Picked that un acause he’s strong for all he’s got rain rot.”

“Seaweed,” Allie piped up. “That’s the thing for rain rot.”

“Oh, yes,” Brother Peter said sarcastically, regarding the child with the same truculence he was according everybody else. “I got a lot o’ time to poultice a mule’s rump with blasted seaweed, o’course I have.”

“But who sold it to you?” Adelia asked.

It was no good. A mule seller, a man who went from market to market and turned up at Street’s every couple of months. Brother Peter had bargained with him, bringing the animal’s price down to what the abbey could afford. “Didn’t know I had to ask its blasted ancestors, did I?”

“When was this?”

“Near a month ago,” Brother Peter said. “Saint Boniface Day. And now, if there ain’t no more questions, I got hay to cut.”

Abbot Sigward looked inquiringly at Adelia, who shook her head, and Brother Peter stumped off.

“A rough diamond, I’m afraid,” the abbot said, “but a good Christian and a hard worker.”

 

SHE WAS GOING to have to speak to the man alone. She was going to have to do a lot of things—and do them quietly. Innocence had departed from this sunny day. The abbey’s people, the gibbering Brother James, Aelwyn with his antagonism, the obese Titus, even Hilda, even the lovely abbot, had suddenly become sinister. She remembered Captain Bolt: “Something’s gone out of this place and something else has come in.”

Gathering herself, she said, “The lord Mansur requires more time before he can make any decision about the bones.” Then she bowed to the abbot and walked away.

 

AT FIRST she couldn’t eat her dinner, though Godwyn had stewed venison with wine and mushrooms until it fell off the bone.

Where to go for help? To the county sheriff? But would he give her concern for Emma any more credence than the monks had? Unlikely. Not until she had more evidence. He would take the line that Emma had a perfect right to have changed her mind about their rendezvous and sell her mules.

Rowley?

No. Please, God, don’t force me to that. We are severed, and it nearly killed me. Days can go by now—well, hours anyway—when I’m not thinking about him. He probably doesn’t think of me at all.

Blast the man, would it have hurt him at least to see Allie while we were in Wales?

She felt a familiar rush of fury and, with it, the accompanying, equally infuriating, recognition that it was unfounded. On several occasions he’d broken their agreement that they have nothing to do with each other by sending her money and a present for Allie on her saint’s day, but those had been so reminiscent of condescension to a kept woman and her bastard that—though she knew they were not—she’d sent them back.

Damn him anyway.

It was almost a relief to remember that there were still some days before he was due to arrive in Somerset so that, even if she needed his help, she couldn’t ask for it.

How to get evidence? How to get evidence?

There was no reason to suspect the monks—the mule had obviously been bought in good faith—yet an instinct she couldn’t account for was telling her to learn more about all of them.

Well, while she and Mansur were studying the skeletons, she was in a good position to do it. And she could set Gyltha on to Brother Peter… . Yes, that’s what she’d do; Gyltha could get stones to talk.

Most imperative, though, was to scour the neighborhood for information. She discounted herself; despite all she could do to get rid of it, she still spoke with a trace of a foreign accent—and the English distrusted foreigners.

Gyltha again? No, if people were disappearing in the vicinity, they weren’t going to include Gyltha or Allie.

The sound of slurping intruded itself on her attention. It was coming from the bottom of the table, where Rhys the bard was spooning venison stew into his mouth with an energy that spattered it onto his clothes.

Rhys.

Adelia picked up her own spoon and began to eat.

. . .

 

“A VANISHED LADY, IS IT?” Rhys said, his protuberant eyes becoming misty. “There’s a subject, now. O lost dove, you are a cause for tears, lifeless we are without you …”

“Stop him,” hissed Adelia.

Mansur grabbed the harp from the man’s hand just in time.

Adelia closed her eyes and then opened them. “We don’t want you to lament her, Rhys,” she said. “We want you to find her.”

For privacy, they had taken him to Allie’s and her bedroom, a large, elm-floored chamber with a little window overlooking the road.

Rhys rubbed his head where Mansur had slapped it. “A quest, is it?”

“Exactly.”

“How do I do that, then?”

“We told you, boy,” Gyltha said patiently, wiping stew off his shirt. “All you got to do is go round the local markets, singing your songs like a … what is it?”

“A jongleur,” Adelia said.

“Like one of them. Listen to the talk, let people talk to you. See, Lady Emma and her people disappeared round here somewheres. Dirty work, we reckon, but a party that large must’ve left a trace behind it—stands to reason as somebody knows something.”

“A bard, I am, the finest of the Beirdd yr Uchelwyr, not a bawling street musician,” Rhys said with dignity. “Haven’t I sung in the greatest halls in Christendom?”

Mansur expired with force. “Let me kill him.”

But Adelia was interested. “You get invited into houses?”

“I have sung the prowess of lords in Dinefwr, in Brycheiniog… .”

“Could you get invited into Wolvercote Hall?”

“Inhospitable lady, that one. Said we wasn’t to go back, didn’t she?”

“She did. But she didn’t see you with us. You’d just be an innocent traveling jongleur, as far as she’s concerned.”

“Maybe I could, then.”

“You must. It was where Lady Emma was heading. The dowager said she didn’t arrive, but I think the woman knows more than she’s telling; her servants are sure to have been a party to whatever it was.”

They began to describe the appearance of the missing. Rhys listened without comment to a description of the servants, the child, Master Roetger, but when he learned of Emma’s fair hair, her youth and beauty, and, especially, the wonderful voice that she had let fall silent, he was fired with a sudden passion.

“The lady has made a leap into my heart, like sun through glass,” he said, throwing his arms wide. “I am Fair Emma’s champion and defender from this day forth. I shall find her, and I shall feed the ravens with the corpses of her enemies.”

“Get on with it, then,” Gyltha said. “There’s a good lad.”

Suddenly she barged across the room, flinging open its door and peering around the narrow passage that served it and the adjacent chambers. “Nosy bloody woman,” she shouted into it.

“Was it Hilda listening?” Adelia asked, startled.

“Didn’t see her,” Gyltha admitted, closing the door. “Nobody there now, but some bugger set the floorboards a-creaking. Who else would it be? Wants to know too much of our business, she does.” Gyltha’s relationship with the landlady of the Pilgrim had not improved.

“Ghost, p’raps,” Rhys said. “Haunted, this place is. I feel it.”

“Nonsense,” Adelia said. She hated talk like that.

But there was no doubt that it was an inn of inexplicable noises: footfalls on dark, twisting staircases that nobody was climbing, a moan in a windless chimney, whispers from empty rooms. Had it been busy, as in the days before the fire, these things would not have been noticeable, but with only five guests, there was no doubt the Pilgrim could be eerie, especially at night.

The maidservant, Millie, a wraith of a girl, did not improve matters. She’d been born stone-deaf and went about her work so silently that in the shadows, one tumbled over her.

Her eyes radiated misery, and a pitying Adelia wondered what it was like to see incomprehensible mouths moving without hearing what came out of them. There must, she thought, be some method of communicating with the girl—and she had put finding out what it could be on her list of things to do.

That night Rhys, sitting late in the inn’s courtyard, began composing a new song. “I would walk the dew or a bitter desert to find you, O white phantom of my dreams… .”

“Emma’s not a phantom,” Adelia interrupted, pausing to listen before going upstairs.

“Like Guinevere, she is,” Rhys said. “Nobody don’t know what happened to Arthur’s queen, either. There’s those say she was torn in pieces by wild horses for her adultery. Some think she disappeared into the mists of Avalon. White phantom, white owl, that’s what the name Guinevere do mean, see. Night spirit lost in the darkness.”

“Well, Emma definitely didn’t commit adultery,” said Adelia, and then thought how stupid she sounded. “Don’t be late back now. Promise.”

 

WHETHER IT WAS RHYS, the worry about Emma, or the skeletons, this was the night that the dreams began.

Adelia was not a dreamer usually, keeping herself so busy by day that in bed she slept the sleep of the just. But this night she found herself standing halfway up the Tor above Glastonbury Abbey, outside a cave.

It was misty. A bell hung on the branches of a hawthorn tree just beside the entrance. Unbidden, her hand reached out to the bell and touched it so that it rang.

She heard its toll echoing through the mist. A male voice came from deep inside the cave: “Is it day?”

Even in her dream, she knew from Rhys’s Arthurian songs that she must reply, “No, sleep on,” or she would awaken whatever or whoever was inside. But though she opened her mouth to give the answer, no sound came out. The mist swirled and darkened; someone was coming up the cave’s tunnel toward her.

She managed, “Emma? Is that you, Emma?”

But the same voice said, “I am Guinevere. Help me. I am hurt.”

There was a scraping sound, and Adelia knew that only the top half of the thing calling itself Guinevere was dragging itself along the tunnel toward her and knew, too, that she couldn’t bear to see it. She began backing into the mist, away from it, still hearing its moans as it slithered.

She woke up sweating.

“A true dream, was it?” Gyltha asked with interest the next morning. “Like Jacob and the Ladder?”

“No, it wasn’t like that. I just felt terror … and guilt. It was begging for help, whatever it was, and I ran away.”

Adelia gave no credit to dreams, but she was still immersed in the awful reproach that this one had wrapped around her. She wasn’t seeing something she should be seeing; she wasn’t acting on something that had been shown to her.

“The cheese, then,” Gyltha said firmly. “Shouldn’t eat cheese close to bedtime—gives you nightmares.”

“I didn’t eat any cheese. Oh, God, Gyltha, we’ve got to find Emma.”

“Doin’ our best, girl.”

It was a relief to go out into the sunshine and trudge across to the abbey so that she could begin work on the bones. Godwyn was taking Gyltha and Allie onto the Brue in his boat to find them bog moss with which to plaster Polycarp’s rump.

Rhys had been roused from his bed and pointed in the direction of Wells and Wolvercote Hall. He’d become suddenly fearful. “Dangerous road, that. Suppose brigands set on me and rob me?”

“Rob him of what?” Mansur had wanted to know; the bard had been wearing the same clothes since Wales, despite Gyltha’s pleas to let her launder them. Apart from his harp, which he kept in a dirty satchel, there was nothing about him to tempt the most optimistic thief.

Eventually, he was persuaded to go by the couple of pennies Adelia gave him to spend at Wells market.

Hilda insisted on accompanying the two investigators to the abbey, seeming intent on monitoring any conversation they might have with Abbot Sigward—“my dear abbot,” as she constantly referred to him.

Adelia wondered if Godwyn was jealous; Hilda glowed for the monk as she didn’t for anyone else, certainly not for her husband, to whom she was dictatorial—her raised voice in the kitchen could often be heard upstairs. Not that Godwyn seemed to mind; he appeared to be as devoted to his wife as she was to the abbot, perhaps because Hilda’s adoration, Adelia thought, wasn’t so much sexual as that of a worshipper at a holy shrine, feeding and protecting its frail flame.

The woman admitted as much. “He’s a saint, my dear abbot,” she said as, carrying another basket with food for him, she accompanied Adelia and Mansur across the empty market. “I was his housekeeper in the old days, young as I was, and nobody don’t know how deep that man’s goodness goes. God’d snatch him from us if so be as I didn’t look after him.”

“Was this before he became a monk?” Adelia asked.

Hilda was suddenly aggressive. “What you want to know for?”

Adelia shrugged; it had been a polite enough inquiry.

After a pause, as if unable to let another opportunity for praise go by, the landlady said abruptly, “He was rich in them days. A nobleman, rich as a king. And I kept house for him—oh, yes, I did. See that island out there …” She pointed toward a large hump in the distant marshes. “Owned that, he did, and thousands of acres all over England. Gave the lot away, so he did, bless him. Gave it to God and took his vow of poverty like the holy man he is.”

A Road to Damascus conversion? The abbot’s gentle face was that of a man whose soul had been purified by fire.

“Did he have family?”

Again, Hilda hesitated. Then she said shortly, “One son. Died on crusade.”

That would account for it, then. Adelia could imagine no worse thing than losing a child, a loss that would turn you either to God for help or away from Him.

“One of his islands is a leper colony now,” Hilda said, still pointing seaward. “That’s how good he is. Bought the Pilgrim for Godwyn and me, and gave an estate over to lepers. Lazarus Island, we call it. Godwyn do row him over so’s he can give them communion and take supplies.”

Mansur shuddered. “Allah commend the good man,” he said in Arabic. “I could not do that.”

Adelia commended him, too. She did not share Mansur’s horror for sufferers of a disease that her foster father had taught her was not as infectious as popular revulsion accorded it, though it was terrible enough in its slow and creeping death from the tips of the limbs to the whole body, but she could understand why the law was strict in segregating them in order to protect the healthy. For once, it was the Christian Church—an institution with which she was usually at odds—that she admired for its provision of leprosaria, refuges where patients received medical and spiritual help, even respect, since they were suffering for their sins while living and would, therefore, find quick redemption in heaven.

So Abbot Sigward was one of those who treated lepers generously, was he? Adelia found herself liking the man more and more.

For one thing, he was prepared to give Mansur and herself facility in their investigation that his fellow monks would have denied them.

“Against some opposition from my brothers, I have kept open the grave where we found the skeletons,” he said, greeting them. “Do you wish to examine it? And the coffin?”

“Let the dead rest, Father,” Hilda pleaded, interrupting. “Them’s Arthur’s and Guinevere’s bones, you know it. Let ’em rest in peace.”

The abbot patted her on the shoulder but kept his eyes on Adelia, who, after pretending to consult the Arab, said, “Dr. Mansur is grateful to you, my lord, and will be glad to look at those things in the goodness of time, but first he will concentrate on the skeletons.”

“And what can they tell him?”

Again, Adelia spoke to Mansur in Arabic, and again received a reply. “Not much, he fears,” she told Sigward honestly. “Putting a date to bones may be difficult.”

“Even to eliminating the possibility that they are not Arthur’s and Guinevere’s?” The abbot winked. “That is the doctor’s purpose, is it not? And the king’s?”

Adelia smiled back at him. “It’s a gamble, my lord.”

“Ah, gambling.” The abbot’s face creased into that of a tortured man. “Gambling was one of my sins when I was in the world, and still is, though pride was a greater—and one I pray that a merciful God will forgive me. By the way, there is no need to address me as ‘my lord’; I am a servant now.”

“He shines, that one,” Mansur said, watching Sigward walk away, gently propelling Hilda with him.

“He does,” Adelia agreed.

They went into the hut and stared at the two skeletons. The damage to that of the female reminded Adelia horribly of her nightmare.

“What do we do?” asked Mansur.

“I don’t know. If we could find out how old they are … perhaps comparing them to bones we know to be old would help.”

“The graveyard?”

“The graveyard.”

After peering to see if anyone was about, they crossed the ruined nave of the great church and scrambled over the tumbled stones of its southern wall, a part of which was tall enough to hide what lay on the other side.

Neither the fire nor, yet, Brother Peter’s scythe had touched the abbey’s burial place. The gravestones had the pleasant higgledy-piggledy untidiness of a country churchyard. Being in the full path of the early sun, butterflies were adding to the color of its wildflowers, and bees were at work among some bluebells growing in the shade of a young oak leaning over the small wall that marked the graveyard’s southern boundary.

What made the place different, what skewed its bucolic restfulness into something alien, were the pyramids. Adelia had thought that the word must refer to conical gravestones, but these were pyramids—much smaller versions of the ones her foster father had drawn during his visit to Egypt and shown to her, but still too large and belonging to a more savage environment and a hotter sun than this; they were un-English, disturbing.

They didn’t match, either—another attack on the eye. The tallest was more than twenty-five feet high, and stepped to its peak in five courses of stone; the other stood about eighteen feet, consisting of four stories. Each was covered in writing that Adelia couldn’t decipher—more like runes than script, messages from a darker age.

Between them stood another pyramid, this time a teetering mountain of earth that had been displaced from the yawning hole beside it.

Adelia went to the edge.

The pit was a rectangle, at least sixteen feet deep and wide enough to accommodate the steps cut into one of its sides. The monks had gone down a long way to find Arthur’s coffin.

“They must have dug like badgers,” Adelia said, peering into it. She stepped back quickly; the pit smelled of contaminated earth.

Mansur was already on his way down, examining the sides as he went. Bits of bone stuck out where the diggers had cut through the earth, showing that for one thousand years succeeding generations of dead monks had been buried on top of one another.

“Also, there is wood,” he called up. “Some were in coffins, some were wrapped in just a winding sheet, I think. What do you want?”

Suddenly, she didn’t want anything. “Mansur, we’re grave robbing.”

Her foster father, she knew, had bought dubiously acquired skeletons from dubious men in order to teach his students anatomy, but what was she advancing by desecrating these dead? Not science, not medical knowledge, merely a chance for an abbey to acquire riches and a king to get his dead Arthur.

“We shouldn’t do this,” she called down, and she heard Mansur spit in disgust at her vacillation.

He began climbing up again, but as he reached the top of the steps he held out his hand. On its palm was a small knobble of bone.

“It must be old because it was at the bottom,” he said. “A bit of a foot, I think. Use it.”

It was actually the distal phalanx of a second toe, and Adelia stared at it for some time, tapping her teeth in indecision before finally snatching it. “We can always stick it back on,” she said.

After all, if she could find a method for dating bones, it would be a contribution to the world’s knowledge.

Nevertheless, guilt followed her back to the hut, and when, two hours later, Brother James surprised the two of them at work and stared at the mess they’d made as if they had committed an obscene act, Adelia blustered an innocence she didn’t feel. “We’ve said prayers… . Abbot Sigward gave the doctor license … The king requires … ”

But apparently Brother James underwent periods of calm, and this was one of them. He merely looked sad. “May God forgive you for what you do,” he said.

“I hope He will.”

In fact, the bone had been useless. Adelia had shaved a sliver off it and an exactly similar slice off Arthur’s toe—neither had displayed an interior any different to the other.

She and Mansur had pounded each sliver to dust and put it in the bowl of the tiny scales she’d brought with her—proving only that they weighed the same. They’d poured parts of the two sets of dust into water, then vinegar, with no reaction from either. Both were the same age or, as she’d feared, there was no way of gaining a comparison.

“You see,” Brother James said, still lingering, still sad, “people need King Arthur, they need the dream of him. I need him.”

“Why?” Adelia asked. “Why do you need him?”

“He flew his banner in the battle against savagery,” Brother James said, “but he must come back to win the war. There is still savagery in this world. Nobody knows that better than I do.”

He wandered off.

“It is as good a reason as any,” said Mansur, watching him go. “All should battle against evil. Islam still fights under the Prophet’s flag, Allah cherish it.”

“It isn’t good enough,” Adelia said. “A dream isn’t enough. Hard truth is the only flag to fight under.”

 

“BROTHER JAMES?” Hilda said when they returned, dispirited, to dinner at the inn. “Pursued by demons he is, poor fellow, but my dear abbot has managed to cast most of ’em out of him.”

“What demons?”

Hilda didn’t know. “Come to the abbey afore the abbot and me had anything to do with it. Screaming, he was, so they say.”

Gyltha was more informative once Hilda had left the room. She and Allie had spent a productive morning being rowed around the marshes by Godwyn, and an even more productive afternoon talking to the lay brother Peter in the pasture where Polycarp the mule now sported a poultice of sphagnum moss on his rump.

Brother Peter’s Christianity, she reported, didn’t stretch to speaking kindly of his superior brethren.

“He don’t like any of ’em much,” Gyltha reported. “Says they don’t treat him right—all except the abbot. Says the abbot do give him respect.”

Brother James, according to the gospel of Brother Peter, was as mad as a ferret. “Story goes he came running to the abbey for sanctuary for cutting his cousin’s arm off in a quarrel.”

“Dear God.”

“So Peter says. And Brother Aelwyn is sour as crab apples, wicked tongue, nothing ever right for him. Got something in his past an’ all, but Peter don’t know what it is. And Brother Titus is a fat and lazy pig.”

Oh, dear. Even allowing that these were the strictures of a resentful, overworked fellow, such a comparatively small collection of men confined together under a severe discipline with its demand of chastity were bound to get on one another’s nerves.

Why did they do it? What drove them to accept it?

Everybody assumed that most nuns and monks submitted themselves to the holy rule because they’d heard a call from God, and perhaps some of them had, but, obviously, for others it was an escape from unendurable troubles in the outside world. Perhaps for Brother Titus its rigors were still easier than earning a living.

So Brother James had attacked his cousin, had he? Had he also taken an ax to Guinevere?

Rhys had not returned by nightfall, an absence making Mansur angry. “He is in some woman’s bed, useless philanderer.”

That reminded Adelia of something. “Did Brother Peter tell you anything about Useless Eustace that Hilda complains of?” she asked Gyltha. “Did he start the fire? Who is he?”

“Ah, I forgot him. Peter don’t think he done it, but the rest all blame Eustace for the fire. Even the abbot blames him, though he thinks it was an accident—but he would, wouldn’t he? Ain’t got a bad word for anybody, that man.”

“Is there any evidence this fellow started the fire? Didn’t the monks bring in the county sheriff?”

“They did, but they reckon the sheriff’s in the bishop of Wells’s pocket and that the bishop was mighty pleased Glastonbury burnt down—the two of them have always quarreled over land, hate each other—might even have paid Eustace to set the blaze.”

This was what Hilda had said. It was difficult for Adelia to believe.

“Well, see, Eustace was the bishop’s falconer,” Gyltha told her. “Lost his job on account of he drank, and came to Glastonbury begging his bread. The which he got, though even the abbot had to let him go after a bit—he kept raiding the crypt where they keep the communion wine. Went and lived wild in the hills after that, but they reckon he still got into the grounds o’ nights because the wine vat kept going down. An’ it was in the crypt where the fire started. An’ Brother Titus saw Eustace running from the crypt that night.”

Gyltha shook her head in wonder. “Terrible thing, in’t it? Deliberate or not, one man do bring down a great abbey and a good little town. And one of the monks died, you know. Trying to put out the flames in the crypt, he was, along of Brother Titus—but died of burns, poor soul.”

It was sad; it was horrifying. Adelia shook her head over it. “But what’s done is done. Emma is our priority now, and all this has nothing to do with her.”

“Dunno so much,” Gyltha said. “There’s summat shifty about that Brother Peter. He ain’t telling me all of it.”

 

. . .

 

THIS TIME ADELIA stood in a gleaming golden hall. Silver-clad knights held the fingertips of beautiful ladies and moved with grace to the tune of an unseen harpist. King Arthur saw her and approached, bending his crowned head in a greeting. He offered his hand. “Dance with me, mistress.” His voice was as big and handsome as his figure.

“I can’t dance in a dream,” Adelia told him.

“There’s stupid you are,” Arthur said.

He turned away from her and walked to the throne at the end of the hall where his queen was sitting. He bowed and Guinevere got up, put her hand into the king’s, and joined him on the floor. Her dress was of pure white feathers that fluttered as she moved. Whichever way she and Arthur turned, her face was hidden from Adelia, who saw only that a red stain was beginning to sully the feathers at the back of the queen’s waist. Soon blood was dripping in pools onto the floor, but she danced on… .

“Stop it, stop it,” Adelia shouted, and was grateful to be woken up.

There’d been a noise.

Still shaking, Adelia lit a candle, wrapped herself in a shawl, checked that Allie was safely asleep, and went out onto the landing.

It was a hot night, and a grilled window above the stairs had been left unshuttered to provide a draft.

Her toe stubbed against something soft. Looking down, she saw the maid Millie curled up on a mat on the floor, her big eyes staring up in terror.

Adelia had been frightened as well, and her “What are you doing here?” was sharper than she meant it to be, until she realized the poor child couldn’t hear it anyway, and realized, too, that she’d disturbed the girl’s sleep.

“Don’t they give you a bed?” she asked uselessly. Servants as low-graded as Millie had to bed down wherever they could, mostly in the kitchen, but on a night like this the Pilgrim’s kitchen would still be intolerably hot from the cooking fires over which Godwyn sweated, its windows closed against robbers. Millie had sought out the only coolness she could find—and even that was forbidden by the injunction that, unless she was cleaning them, she should not be seen near the guests’ rooms.

“We’ll have to do better than this, won’t we?” Adelia gestured for the girl to come into her own room, where there was an extra truckle bed and another open window. She put her two hands against her cheek, indicating sleep, but Millie refused to move, her eyes more frightened than ever. It wasn’t allowed.

“Lord’s sake,” Adelia said crossly. She went to her bed, snatched up a pillow and a discarded quilt, took them to the landing, and arranged them on the floor. Even then, the girl had to be persuaded and, eventually, pulled onto them.

There were still sounds from the courtyard as if some animal was barging blindly around it, but when Adelia started to descend the staircase, Millie put out a hand to stop her, violently shaking her head.

“You don’t want me to go?” Adelia asked her. What awful thing went on in the Pilgrim at night that this sad creature didn’t want her to see?

Whatever it was, it would be better than returning to the haunting of a dream. Adelia gave a nod of what she hoped was reassurance and continued down the stairs. After all, robbers wouldn’t be calling attention to themselves this loudly.

Godwyn was crouching, listening, by the inn’s side door when Adelia reached it. “Who’s out there?” she asked him.

“Don’t know, mistress, and I don’t want to.”

They both heard a bleat as something bumped against the other side of the door.

“Sheep?” Godwyn said. “Where’s bloody sheep come from?”

Then she knew. “Open the door,” she said. “It’s Rhys.”

Godwyn was unpersuaded, so she had to pull back the bolts herself and was sent backward as the door flew inward with the pressure of the bard’s body falling against it.

“Oh, Lord, he’s hurt.” He’d been set on by the robbers on that dangerous road, pummeled, knifed, and it was her fault—she shouldn’t have sent him out on it.

Godwyn sniffed at the squirming bundle at his feet. “He ain’t hurt, mistress, he’s drunk.”

And so he was. That he’d managed to stumble his way home directionless and unnoticed by predators was witness to a God who smiled on the inebriated.

Godwyn was sent back to bed, and for the next hour Adelia supported the bard as she made him walk on tottering legs round and round the courtyard’s wellhead, twice pushing him toward a pile of straw onto which he could vomit, filling a beaker from water in the well’s bucket and making him drink it every time he opened his mouth to try and sing.

Eventually, both of them exhausted, she guided him into the barn and sat him on a hay bale to get out of him what information she could.

He seemed most proud of having returned at all. “Not to be late back, you said,” he told her, “I remembered. So back, back I came and yere I am. Robbers, yach, I spit on them; they don’t frighten Rhys ap Griffudd ap Owein ap Gwilym. I flew, like Hermes the messenger, patron of poets.” He’d also crawled. The knees of his robe had been worn through and, like his hands, were stuck with horse manure—the least unpleasant smell about him.

Actually, he’d done very well when, finally, Adelia managed to piece together an incoherent story. He’d inveigled himself into not only the servants’ hall of Wolvercote Manor but also the affections of its gatekeeper’s daughter, who had succumbed to his mysterious charm and with whom he had later passed a pleasing and energetic hour in a field haystack—“Lovely girl, Maggie, oh, lovely she was, very loving.”

“But did she tell you anything?”

“She did, oh, yes.”

What the gatekeeper’s daughter had told him in the haystack was that a month or more ago, a lady with an entourage had appeared at Wolvercote Manor’s lodge gates late at night, expecting to be let in and claiming that she was Lady Wolvercote come to visit.

“But the gatekeeper, he didn’t know her, so he called his Lady Wolvercote to the gates and there was a quarrel, though Maggie didn’t hear all of it, see, because her Lady Wolvercote sent her dada up to the house to get men-at-arms to bar entrance to that Lady Wolvercote.”

“Emma did go there, I knew it, I knew it. But what happened then?”

“Ah, well, there’s a mystery. See, Maggie said her dada seemed shamed for days after because of something that happened when our poor Emma was sent away.”

“Ashamed? Oh, dear God, the men-at-arms didn’t kill her?”

“No, no, don’t think so. What would they have done with the corpses? No corpses at Wolvercote, see. Maggie would’ve known.”

“But something happened. What was it?”

Rhys shifted; he was beginning to wilt. “Well, see, Maggie and me, we were interrupted then.”

In fact, at that point, Wolvercote’s hayward had been seen crossing the field in which the haystack stood and, since the hayward was affianced to young Maggie, the girl had advised Rhys to make a swift withdrawal—in more senses than one. Which he had, going back, fortunately unseen, to the hall’s kitchen, where he’d again entertained the dowager Lady Wolvercote’s servants, this time with some of his bawdier songs, his appreciative audience lubricating his voice with pints of the dowager’s ale until he’d been turfed out into the night by the dowager’s steward, a man lacking any appreciation of music, especially when it reached his bedroom window and woke him up.

How Rhys had managed the six miles back, he couldn’t remember, partly because the loving and redoubtable Maggie had given him another blackjack of ale to help him on his way.

“And you learned nothing more?”

Rhys shook his head.

“I see.” Then she said, “What about the baker? The man I saw in the kitchen? Did you manage to talk to him?”

“Wasn’t there. Itinerant, he is. Only got called in last time because the kitchen baker was sick, see. Goes round the markets with his bread usually. Due at Wells market tomorrow, Maggie said.”

“Today,” Adelia said, firmly. “He’ll be there today. It’s gone midnight.”

The bard’s large eyes fixed on her and then begged for mercy. “Oh, take pity, mistress, you wouldn’t …?”

“Yes, I would. You’ll be singing at Wells market nice and early this morning and talking to itinerant bakers.” She patted his shoulder. “I’m truly grateful to you, Master Rhys. The king shall hear of your efforts.”

If the praise was meant to invigorate the Welshman, it failed.

 

WHEN MANSUR AND ADELIA set off for the abbey the next day with Gyltha and Allie in tow—Polycarp’s poultice needed changing—they found themselves perspiring before they’d walked a yard.

From being pleasantly warm, the sun was sending out an aggressive heat that, with no cloud in the sky, threatened to become prolonged, wakening the fear of parched crops and thirsty, dying cattle, and sending Adelia back to the inn to fetch the widebrimmed rush hats she’d bought for herself, Gyltha, and Allie on the journey from Wales.

It was obvious that the only way left now to give an age to the skeletons was by attempting to date the coffin they’d been buried in, and, somewhat late, she’d remembered that she should have asked Rhys a question. It had come to her in the otherwise blessedly dreamless sleep into which she’d relapsed on regaining her bed and which, thinking of other matters, she had forgotten on waking.

The bard had already left for Wells market, moaning and protesting, but it might be that either Godwyn or Hilda could give her an answer.

Adelia poked her head round the Pilgrim’s kitchen door, apologizing for her intrusion. “I think Master Rhys once mentioned that there was an earthquake here many years ago and it opened up a fissure in the abbey graveyard. Would either of you remember that?”

It was not a good time. The kitchen had retained the previous day’s heat and, though its shutters were closed against the sun, flies had found their way in to settle on the surfaces of boards and hanging meat.

Godwyn didn’t bother to turn round. Even in the gloom, Hilda’s face could be seen to be red as she put down her flyswatter to glare at Adelia. “How’d we know? We wasn’t here then.”

“Of course you weren’t, of course you weren’t. Silly of me. Er, don’t bother to light a fire. It’s too hot. We’ll be happy to have cold cuts tonight.”

“That’s what you was going to get,” Hilda said. And considering the temperature, she couldn’t be blamed for saying it nastily.

Rejoining the others and handing out hats, Adelia suggested to Gyltha that her question about the fissure was one that could be put to Brother Peter if he was still around.

“Who’d be fishing in a graveyard?” Gyltha wanted to know.

“It’s a hole, Gyltha. The earthquake moves the ground so that it slits open. I’m sure Rhys mentioned a fissure when he was telling us and King Henry about his uncle Caradoc’s vision, at least I think I’m sure.”

When they reached the abbey grounds, they found the monks, their hands folded under their scapulars, emerging from the Abbot’s kitchen on their way to sing terce.

Mansur and Adelia joined them, and Adelia put her question to the abbot.

“In the name of God,” Brother Aelwyn said furiously, appealing to his superior, “are we to be pestered even on our way to holy offices?”

“Answer her, Aelwyn,” his abbot told him.

The monk turned to Adelia. “Yes, a fissure was opened by the earthquake, what of it?”

“Twenty years ago?”

“That was when the earthquake occurred, the day after Saint Stephen’s Day, to be exact, if it’s any business of yours, mistress.”

“Between the pyramids, was it?”

“Yes.”

“And how deep was it?”

“Deep, deep, woman. We didn’t bother to measure it, we had other things on our mind. Deep. It closed itself the next day, in any case.”

“Were you here, then?” Adelia persisted.

She had exhausted Brother Aelwyn’s small store of patience, and it was Brother James who answered excitedly, “We were all here then, were we not, my brothers? Oh, no, Abbot, you weren’t, were you? You came to us later. I thought the Last Hour was on us, God have mercy.” Tears came to his eyes as he looked round the blackened hill. “And now it has.”

Abbot Sigward put his arm round James’s shoulders. “With the Lord’s grace, Glastonbury will rise again, my son. Let us go to our prayers.” He nodded at Adelia, and led his flock toward the ruined church.

Gyltha and Allie headed up the hill.

“What is this about a fissure?” Mansur asked.

“We’ll have to see,” Adelia said.

She ushered him into the hut and pointed at the coffin lying between the two covered catafalques. “Look at that. It’s in fairly good condition still, but they had to dig sixteen feet down to find it, in which case it must be very old, as old as anything in the pit. Yet it hasn’t crumbled. You said there were other coffins down there, and I want to compare this one with those. I think we might be able to get a rough, very rough, dating from the state of the wood.”

“And if this one turns out to be newer than the others?”

Adelia grinned at him. “Then it could only have been put sixteen feet down when the fissure opened, twenty years ago.”

“And is therefore not Arthur’s.”

“No.”

Mansur sucked his teeth. “That will not please the monks—nor the king.”

And all at once, Adelia didn’t want to find out how old this coffin was, nor to deny the title of Arthur and Guinevere to those poor bones.

This was not merely a matter of forensics; it had become massive; it crushed her. A great abbey’s future, those faithful men singing out there, the rebuilding of an entire town, the welfare of an inn, the dream of so many—these expectations rested with her decision.

Oh, God, don’t put this on me. I don’t want to be hope’s executioner.

But she was Vesuvia Adelia Rachel Ortese Aguilar, medica of the Salerno School, and if she was not a seeker after truth, she was nothing.

She gritted her teeth and said, “Let’s get to it.”

There was no point in sawing a piece off the coffin until she had wood to compare it with. The two of them left the hut and dodged between the tumbled stone of the church as they crossed the once-great nave where, in what had been the choir, the monks were chanting Psalm 119.

 

“My soul melteth for heaviness; strengthen thou me according to thy word.
Remove from me the way of lying and grant me thy law in graciousness.”

 

Adelia couldn’t look at them.

The huge section of wall that still stood between the church and its graveyard lessened the sound of the monks’ voices, replacing it with the hum of bees. Perhaps because she was expecting them now, the two pyramids and the mountain of earth between them looked less monstrous than they had.

Mansur began unwinding a rope that had been round his waist, concealed by his robe. “I asked the man Godwyn for it,” he said. “I suspect those steps into the pit, they are beginning to crumble.”

Adelia smiled at him. He’d brought it because he knew that this time she would insist on going down the hole with him.

Gyltha and Allie were returning from the hill. “Too hot, bor,” Gyltha said. “I’m taking madam home afore she frizzles.”

“How’s Polycarp?” Adelia asked Allie.

Her daughter was red-cheeked with heat and pleasure. “Better. Even Brother Peter said he thought he was better, though he didn’t like saying it, did he, Gyltha? Rude man, but he likes Polycarp.”

“And I asked the miserable bugg …” Gyltha said, then, remembering Allie’s presence, started again; “I asked un about the fissure. He were only a lad then, but he reckons the hole was sixteen, seventeen foot deep afore it closed up.”

She looked suspiciously at Mansur, who was tying his rope around one of the pyramids, and then at the mound of earth that was casting a shadow over the pit beside it. “You two ain’t thinking of going down that damn great hole, I hope. Nasty places, holes. Them’s where demons come from.”

“Oh, get on home. Mansur’s made sure we’ll be safe.” Lovingly, Adelia watched them go, one tall, one short, like two ill-assorted walking mushrooms in their wide hats.

Mansur threw the free end of the rope down the pit, but even now he wanted her to stay at the top. “It is not enjoyable down there.”

“You managed, so I can.” She wanted to see for herself and, once he had climbed down, she followed him.

The steps down the side of the pit were beginning to crumble, but they had been well cut and, as long as she went down backward, holding on to the rope, feeling for the next with first one foot and then the other, they bore her weight well enough.

The great mound of displaced earth above took away most of the light. The smell of soil was overlaid by a less pleasurable reek. Bits of bone showed white-gray against the pit’s sides; wood was smudges of brown.

She was descending into the past, through centuries, passing the level in which lay the remains of Glastonbury’s great abbots. Down, down, past the bones of men who’d served the formidable Saint Dunstan. Another stratum and she had reached the resting place of monks who’d defied invasions by the Vikings and saved the literacy of Christianity from their raids.

 

“There, God leading them, they found an old church built, as ’twas said, by the hands of Christ’s disciples, and prepared by God Himself for the salvation of souls, which church the Heavenly Builder Himself showed to be consecrated by many miraculous deeds, and many mysteries of healing.”

 

So William of Malmesbury, the historian, had written.

And now, as Adelia’s feet touched the bottom of the pit, who knew whether she was now standing in the entombment of those early disciples themselves, one of them Joseph of Arimathea, whose hands had lifted the body of Jesus from the Cross.

She was shivering.

Mansur’s voice came through the gloom. “Can you see anything of a coffin?”

They were facing away from each other, far enough not to be touching, but the smell of the herbs that the Arab kept his robes in offset the reek in which the two of them stood, and she was glad he was there.

“I think I can,” she said. There was just enough light to see a slight difference in the blackness of earth in front of her. She put out her hand and felt a protrusion that was harder than the soil around it, though, as she pulled it out, only a small section came away from whatever it had been attached to. “Can you see any more? It would be as well to have more than one piece.”

Lord, this was a terrible place to be.

To comfort herself that there was still fresh air and life above them, she looked upward—and saw the light of day blotted out as earth came sweeping down the pit to bury them.