Also, the abbot went on, he owned a pack of boar hounds that were sans pareil and ready for the fray. He was sure the noble lords would wish to see them in action.
“You can imagine it, sweetheart,” Rowley told Adelia, “nearly all the noble lords, and some not so noble, were on their feet in an instant, calling for their horses to be saddled, especially Lord Ivo and Sir Nicholas and, of course, the ubiquitous O’Donnell.” Rowley’s mouth went into the thin line it was beginning to adopt every time the Irishman was mentioned.
He went on: “I tried to restrain Father Adalburt because boar hunting is not for amateurs, but the idiot was squeaking with excitement and couldn’t be persuaded. Locusta—poor lad, he doesn’t get much chance to hunt what with having to act as route master all the time—he wanted to go. Even Father Guy was enthused and said he’d join in, at least to watch.”
The Bishop of Winchester had declined on the grounds of being too old and tired. Rowley, reluctantly had decided to accompany the hunt, mainly he said, to keep his eye on the idiots.
IN THE LITTLE stone lodge in the grounds of the Abbot of Saint Benoît’s house, huntsmen are arming themselves. For this is where the good abbot keeps his spears, lances, crossbows, bolts, arrows and yew bows, his stabbing andgralloching knives.
The men are excited and, as ever when boar is the quarry, a little nervous. Not so the hounds in the kennels next door; they are clamoring to be let out and do what they’ve been bred for.
Somebody chaffs Scarry for picking too slender a spear. “That’ll never get through a tusher’s hide.”
Scarry gives a naive smile. “Won’t it?” But he hefts its weight and takes it all the same.
ADELIA WAS ATTENDING to sick pilgrims in the abbey courtyard as the hunt set off, its blare of trumpets and horns competing with the shouts of the whipper-in, the deep belling of the hounds and the rallying cries of riders.
She was in bed asleep when it returned but, like everyone else, was woken by the long note of a horn emerging from the forest sounding the mort, the salute to a dead quarry.
Except that this time it was not announcing the death of an animal ...
It was raining. Monks, guests, and pilgrims gathered by the gates to watch the dripping hunt’s return. A weeping abbot walked beside a hastily assembled travois on which lay two bodies.
The corpse of Sir Nicholas Baicer was taken immediately to the Lady Chapel. Lord Ivo, bleeding horribly, was carried to the abbot’s room and laid on its bed.
The boar had indeed proved a worthy adversary; the dogs had found and bayed it; Lord Ivo and the abbot with their squires and huntsmen had dismounted ready for the kill.
But, though hounds were sinking their teeth into almost every part of it, the huge animal managed to charge and gore Lord Ivo in the groin, tossing him into the air, before the abbot’s sword went deep into its eye.
“Only then,” said the abbot, still crying, “didwe notice that Sir Nicholas was not with us, indeed had not been with us when we found the beast. Being moonless, the forest was so dark that I fear many of our following missed their way A search was instituted and at last we came upon Sir Nicholas, lifeless, being dragged by his horse, his poor foot still in its stirrup. Now God forgive me that this tragedy should come upon us ... one fine knight injured unto death, another already gone to Paradise and my best boarhound with him. Surely we are accursed.”
With Mansur and Dr. Arnulf giving instruction, Adelia and the abbey’s herbalist did what they could for Lord Ivo.
By general agreement, sphagnum moss was applied to his injuries to cleanse them and stem the blood. But, as Adelia could see, the tusks had gone in too far, his lordship was undoubtedly bleeding internally and to stitch the wounds together would merely cause more agony without extending a life that was inevitably coming to its end.
She hurried from the room to fetch poppy juice from her pack and found Rowley waiting for her outside. “Is Ivo dying?”
“Yes. All we can do is to relieve the pain.”
“How long?”
“I don’t know.” She was distressed.
“I’ll go in. God have mercy on a good friend and a fine soldier.”
When Adelia returned to the room, Rowley was holding Lord Ivo’s hand while the Bishop of Winchester prayed as he readied the oils in his chrismatory box preparatory to giving the last rites. The abbot, still in hunting clothes, Father Guy and Dr. Arnulf were discussing in low voices such of Saint Benoit’s relics as could help forward Lord Ivo’s soul to its immortal rest, while Mansur, apparently detached from the conversation, looked on with a concern unlike his usual impassivity
Candles in their holders at the head and foot of the bed cast upward shadows that distorted the faces of the men standing up, turning their eye sockets into those of skulls.
Only the dying man’s features were fully lit, and Adelia gritted her teeth at the thought of what agony he was in and with what courage he was bearing it. His eyes were shut, his lips compressed, but his hand gripped at Rowley’s like a raptor’s.
“Here, my lord,” she said, passing the phial to Mansur.
Dr. Arnulf was on them in a second. “And what is that?”
“Poppy juice. Lord Mansur has prescribed it for the pain.”
“Poppy juice?” This was Father Guy “It is the devil’s concoction. That dear man on the bed is being purified and redeemed by what he suffers. The agony of Christ endowed pain with his own touch of divinity. You, Arnulf, you are a clerk in minor orders as well as a doctor, you surely cannot agree to this. There are edicts from the Vatican....”
“Indeed I cannot,” Dr. Arnulf said firmly “The poppy mandragora, hemp seed, all are absent from my medicine chest.”
Adelia stared at them, trying to understand what she was hearing. “That man is in torment. You can’t, you can’t deny him relief.”
“Better torment of the body than the soul,” Father Guy told her.
The abbot joined them, still smelling of the wide outdoors and the blood, Lord Ivo’s blood, on the sleeves of his leather tunic. “My child, I have sent for the femur of Saint Stephen, the first martyr. We must pray that its application will aid this good knight through his martyrdom.”
“Help me,” Adelia said in Arabic.
Mansur acted. Snatching the phial from her hand, he showed it to Rowley who looked toward Adelia. She nodded.
While the Arab held Lord Ivo’s head up, Rowley administered the opiate: “Here, my dear friend.”
While Father Guy raved that the noble lord had not yet made his confession, a furious Arnulf pulled Adelia out of the room.
“You chit,” he hissed. “Do you and your master set yourselves up against the Holy Fathers, against practice as laid down by Blessed Mother Church?”
This was too much. She hissed back, “Since when would a true mother allow any son of hers to suffer as that poor man is suffering? Or any true doctor, either?”
“Do you question my authority?”
“Yes, I bloody well do.” She stamped off down the corridor.
IT TOOK ALL DAY for Lord Ivo to die. Joanna and the ladies-in-waiting spent it in the abbey church, praying for the soul that had departed and the one that was about to depart.
Adelia spent it in her room. Twice more, Mansur came in to have the phial refilled. Lord Ivo had gained consciousness long enough to make his confession and receive the last rites from the Bishop of Winchester.
Dr. Arnulf and Father Guy having washed their hands of the business, Mansur said, had left the sickroom.
“Good.” But she grimaced. “We haven’t made any friends today you and I.”
“Do we want friends such as those?”
“No. They call themselves Christians. When did Christ ever look on suffering without being moved to help it?”
“I do not think they are Christians, I think they are churchmen.”
When he’d gone, she turned back to the window. It had begun to rain hard. She could see a river not far away, the
heavy raindrops making discs in its surface. Under a dark gray sky, the forest beyond it appeared an indeterminate mass. It occurred to her that she knew the name of neither and felt the panic of an orphaned child taken away from everything it loved to be abandoned in a hostile landscape. The thought that Allie could be feeling the same bowed her down.
She longed for the comfort Gyltha would have given her. “We been through worse nor this, bor.”
And so they had, but not apart.
It was dark when Mansur returned to say that Lord Ivo was dead. He handed her a monk’s habit. “You are to put this on and join the bishop in the Lady Chapel.”
“Why?”
“He thinks there was something strange about Sir Nicholas’s death.”
The awfulness of the day was suddenly released by the ridiculous. How typical of Rowley; not a beckoning to a lovers’ tryst, but a command to waddle through a crowded abbey in disguise. To do what? Perform an autopsy?
She would go, of course. If she was caught, she could hardly be in worse odor with everybody than she was now. She would go because she was an iron filing drawn to that man’s magnet. She would go because ... well, because it was a silly thing to do, and silliness just now was a blessing.
She took her veil and circlet off her hair and pulled on the habit, putting its cowl over her head until the hem dangled over her eyes. “Do I look like a monk?”
“You do. A short one.”
In fact, nobody noticed her. The abbey was in uproar: two important guests killed while under its aegis; people to be told, messages sent; funerals to be arranged; special services to be held; and, with it all, the holy hours to be kept. Monks scurried anxiously in from the rain and out again, cowls dripping, heads bent in an effort to keep their sandaled feet out of puddles. She could have made her way through them and been paid no attention if she’d been clashing two cymbals together as she went.
The Lady Chapel stood by itself an adjunct of the abbey’s church, and possibly its oldest building. The figure waiting for her was taller than its carved, chevroned porch.
“You took your time,” it said. He twisted the handle ring and flung one of the door’s leaves open with a crash.
Immediately Adelia smelled incense, beeswax, and death. Inside the only light came from two tall candles on stanchions at the head and base of the catafalque where Sir Nicholas lay Two monks knelt on either side.
The only sound in the silence was the plink-plink of rainwater seeping through a leak in the roof and into a bucket that was lost in the shadows.
Rowley said: “Thank you, brothers, you may leave. I’ll watch over my friend for a while.”
They were glad to go and rose at once. Rubbing their poor knees, they bowed to the corpse, the altar, then to the Bishop of Saint Albans before gliding out.
Rowley banged the door shut behind them and bolted it. “Now, then, come and look at this.”
The body had been wrapped in a silk winding sheet. Usually, the face was left exposed, but not this time. Adelia might have been looking down on an Egyptian mummy.
Together and with difficulty—Sir Nicholas had been a heavy man—she and Rowley labored to unwind it from its cocoon.
When at last the corpse was exposed, she saw why the face had been covered; there was a jagged gap where one of the eyes should have been.
“What happened?”
“Young Aubrey found him first and began calling the ‘Found.’ Jesus, it was a fiasco, that hunt. Raining, dark as the Pit, too many men scattered among too many sodding trees, not knowing where one another was, me trying to round them up.”
Rowley took off his cap to claw his fingers through his hair, and she saw that his face was pinched by tiredness and grief.
“Anyway,” he said, “I heard Aubreys horn and spurred toward it. The boy ... he’d unhitched Nicholas’s foot from its stirrup and put the body on the ground. He was crying over it. There was this great splinter in poor old Nicholas’s eye, so we reckoned his horse had bolted and crashed him into a branch and that’s what killed him.”
“But you don’t think so now?”
“Well ... there was Ivo, Nicholas, no time to think anything. But when I was sitting by Ivo, trying to make sense of it all, it came to me that if it was the branch splinter that killed Nicholas, there should have been a lot of blood—and there wasn’t. Dead men don’t bleed; you taught me that.”
“Something else killed him first?”
“That’s what you’re here for. And get on with it, they’ll be bringing Ivo here soon.”
Adelia pushed back her cowl. For a moment, as she always did, she knelt by the body asking its forgiveness for her handling of it. The soul that had occupied it was absolved; the dead were sinless—also they were her business.
Whoever had done the laying out of the corpse had made a rushed job of washing it; there were green smears on the skin where the knight’s clothes had been torn as he’d been dragged through grass. Stones and brambles had left long lacerations in the flesh.
“Give me more light.”
Hot wax dripped onto unfolded layers of the winding sheet as Rowley picked up one of the stanchions and held it nearer. From behind her, in the darkness, came the regular, musical drip of water into its bucket.
“Hmmm.”
“What?”
“This.” Her fingers had found a flap of torn, corrugated skin on the upper left back and, beneath it, a hole. This was what had bled—and profusely; the negligent layers-out had left crusts of blood around it.
“Here.” Adelia’s fingers investigated deeper. “Something’s embedded itself. I can feel wood.”
She looked up. “Rowley I think it’s a spear shaft, very thin but, yes, I’m sure it’s some sort of shaft, certainly a dart of some kind. It snapped off when he was dragged but this is what killed him; he was speared.”
His voice shocked the quiet. “Fucking poachers.” His fingers went through his hair again, and he said more gently: “Jesus God, such an end for a man like this.”
“What will you do?”
“Tell the abbot he’s a bloody disgrace, letting poachers roam his purlieus shooting anything that moves.” He went stamping around in the darkness, casting verbal damnation on villains who went out to kill other men’s game, describing in detail the unpretty end of this one if Rowley Picot got hold of him.
Adelia heard the bucket kicked to Kingdom Come and go rolling across the tiles. She’d been hoping to wash her hands in its water.
She let him rave. There was something particularly terrible about death by mistake, and it was difficult to see what else this could be ... darkness, rain; a peasant—hungry perhaps—concealed and waiting in the undergrowth, listening for the sound of animal movement; hearing the rush of something big; then the expert and very lucky throw of a homemade spear ...
Nor was it uncommon. Her knowledge of English history was uncertain, but hadn’t one of the Conqueror’s sons, what was his name, been accidentally killed in similar circumstances? In the New Forest, that had been. Rufus, that was it. William Rufus. A king, no less.
When Rowley had quieted, she asked: “Do you want me to get the spearhead out? I’d have to go for my knives.”
“No. Let’s give him back his decency” He came back to help her.
When the last wrap was in place, she stayed on her knees awhile longer.
She looked up to find Rowley staring at her and was suddenly aware that her hair was tumbled about her shoulders and that she was beautiful, because she always was beautiful in his eyes.
“God help me, girl,” he said, and his voice was raw, “but I’d tip this poor devil off his catafalque, throw you on it, and take you here and now. The hell with my immortal soul—and yours.”
“I’d let you,” she said.
But there wasn’t time; even now they could hear feet sloshing through rain and voices chanting: “... every tear from their eyes; Death will be no more ...”
Rowley had the door unbolted in an ins
tant, and the procession came in, carrying Lord Ivo on its shoulders. “... and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.”
Adelia covered her head and stood by the door to let the monks go by, then slipped away unnoticed.
THE ABBOT HAD a bad time of it. While his bailiffs rounded up for questioning every man on his estates capable of throwing a well-aimed spear, he had to consult with the two bishops as to what should be done with the corpses. Sent home or buried in situ?
In the end, their hearts were cut out and placed in lead-lined caskets for their squires and servants to take back to the families. A messenger went galloping to Henry Plantagenet to inform him that he had lost two of his most trusted men.
The interment of the rest of the flesh was conducted in pouring rain in the Saint Benoit graveyard, where Princess Joanna wept for her knights.
As Sir Nicholas was lowered into his grave, Father Guy and Dr. Arnulf looked toward where Adelia was standing. The chaplain was heard to say: “I hope that female is happy now, for was she not the one who cursed this good man?”
WHEN THE PROCESSION finally set off again, now reduced by twenty or so servants, the absence of Lord Ivo and Sir Nicholas was palpable. There was a sense of unease, less laughter. For all Sir Nicholas’s funny ways, he and Lord Ivo had radiated the stability and authority of their king and the lack made everyone else feel less safe.
The Bishop of Winchester was the most affected. He was noticeably more nervous than he had been; the Young King had failed the princess, and nowhere was tragedy come upon them. Echoing the words of his erstwhile host, he said: “Surely, we are accursed,” and confided to his intimates that he was beginning to believe that God was displeased with their enterprise.
This was passed along the line, where ill-wishers like Father Guy, the princess’s nurse, Edeva, and the head laundress, Brune, pointed out that of course God was displeased. Were they not sheltering in their company not only one of His avowed enemies, a Saracen, but his woman, who seemed to have the power to bring destruction on such men and animals who crossed her?