“You ...” Father Guy pointed at the guards, “... take her up.”
“Not yet.” Rowley’s voice was sharp. “There’s an examination to be made before we move her, and prayers to be said.”
The chaplain hovered, casting venomous glances at Mansur, unwilling to leave a Christian corpse to a heretic. “Then let me fetch Doctor Arnulf.”
“If you wish it, and if he’s prepared to get himself out of bed, which I doubt. Now, Captain.” Rowley turned to Bolt. “If you would escort this young lady to the buttery and see she’s given some brandy And you two”—this was to the guards—“bring a litter.”
Before he went, Father Guy confronted Adelia. “I hear this poor woman quarreled with you recently, mistress.”
“Does that matter now?”
“I hope it does not, mistress, I hope it does not.”
Politely but firmly, Captain Bolt urged the chaplain toward the stairs to the hall, his other arm around the little laundress who went, still sobbing, still clutching the scrubbing board.
“Foul play?” Rowley asked when they’d gone.
“I’m not sure.”
“Then make sure, and be quick about it.”
Adelia wondered for a moment whether Boggart should leave, too, but, well, the girl was now part of the household and might as well be introduced to the work that it did.
“Prepare yourself Boggart,” she said. “I am going to try and find out exactly how this lady died.”
She went down on her knees by the corpse. She paused to make her supplication to the dead. Forgive me and permit your poor flesh to tell me what your voice cannot.
The jaw was showing early stages of rigor mortis. The red patch on the dead woman’s upper lip had definitely been caused by friction.
Moving swiftly, Adelia began opening Brune’s outer clothing, ignoring Boggart’s horrified intake of breath.
There was deep bruising on both of the upper arms. “Hmmm.”
“Well?” Rowley asked with impatience.
He also was ignored.
Both eyes were shut—probably had been closed by one of the people who’d gathered around the corpse; there was nothing more naked than the staring eyes of the dead.
Adelia forced up one eyelid, then the other. She was remembering two corpses, that of an old man, the other a child, which had been brought at different times to her foster father for examination, both of them with an abrasion similar to Brune’s on the upper lip—both unnatural deaths, as he had discovered.
Rowley and Mansur were talking quietly together, but she paid them no attention. Attempting to pull the woman’s bodice down, she found it too tightly laced at the back. She looked up at Boggart. “Help me turn her over.”
The maid shrank away. “Oh, mistress, it ain’t right what you’re doing.”
Adelia, her nerves always frayed when her concentration on a corpse was interrupted, lost her temper. “Ain’t right? It ain’t right what’s happened to this woman, and I need to find out why it did. She’s heavy Help me turn her over.”
Shocked—her mistress had never been cross with her before—Boggart did as she was told.
Parting the gray hair, Adelia found blood. After examining the wound, she undid the back of the bodice and pulled it open. Crisscrossed abrasions on the spine showed where the laces had been pressed into it. Hmmm. “Now we turn her over again,” she said.
With the body once more faceup, and with Boggart still whimpering, Adelia exposed Brune’s large white breasts. The chest was unmarked.
“In the name of God, hurry, will you?” Rowley was hissing. “They’ll be coming for her soon. What’s the verdict?”
Without haste, Adelia raised Brune’s skirt and spread the legs. No, the vaginal area had been untouched.
Slowly, she sat back on her heels. “I’m fairly sure she didn’t drown, Rowley I’d like to dissect the lungs of course ...”
“Oh, yes, necropsy would go down very well,” the bishop said between his teeth. “Of course you can’t dissect her. In the name of God, just tell me what happened.”
Adelia looked up. “I think she was smothered. Somebody hit her head from behind—Mansur, see if you can find a weapon—and then, when she staggered, pulled her down and knelt on her arms—see the bruising, there and there—while he held something over her mouth and nose, something rough ... you see where it rubbed against the upper lip?”
“This?” Mansur had found a coarse towel on the floor. One of the pegs that had held it up remained on the washing line, the other was still attached, as if the cloth had been snatched down.
“Quite likely And there is blood in her eyes, typical of asphyxiation.”
“Murder, then,” Rowley said.
There was a squeak from Boggart.
“I’m afraid so.”
“Must have been a strong fellow, she’s a large lady”
“He hit her on the head first with something heavy and sharp, perhaps a sword pommel, something like that, and weakened her ...” Adelia looked up at Mansur, who shook his head; he’d found no weapon. “But, yes, he was strong—I doubt a woman could have done it. She struggled, poor thing, hence the mark on her lip where the cloth rubbed against it.”
She closed her eyes, imagining the scene, the frantic turning of the head, the poor, thrashing legs ... “And then he lifted her up to prop her over the tub with her head in the water, hoping we would think she’d tipped forward from a sudden apoplexy and drowned.”
“Damn,” Rowley said with force. “Well, put her clothes straight.”
“But the sheriff, somebody in authority must see these injuries first. What’s the procedure in Aquitaine?”
“The procedure is that this woman appears exactly as we found her. So do it.”
She didn’t understand why he was cross, nor why he and Mansur were looking at each other as if they knew something she didn’t. However, it wasn’t decent that the corpse should lie there exposed as it was; presumably the sheriff, a coroner, whoever it might be, could do the examination when it came to laying it out.
Between them, Adelia and Boggart made Brune respectable again.
The guards returned with a litter, lifted the corpse, and took it away with the bishop’s cloak laid over it.
Rowley didn’t go with them. Instead, he took Adelia’s chin in his hand and looked into her eyes. “She drowned, sweetheart. Brune drowned.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Is there any indication as to who killed her?”
Helplessly Adelia looked around. Apart from the towel the killer had dropped, nothing; wet footprints were all around the vat, but so many of them as to be useless. “No ... somebody ... a man most probably. We must start inquiries.”
“And how many men do you suppose are in this palace?”
Now she was becoming angry; he was frightening her. “More than have access to this undercroft. There can only be a few allowed down here.”
“You think so? Did you notice the steps down to this place? Entrance tucked away, virtually deserted at this time of night? Anybody not just servants, could sneak down here.”
“Someone might have seen him, Rowley We must ask.”
“No, we mustn’t.” He took her by the shoulders and shook her. “Do you know how long that would take? What it would entail?”
She was bewildered. “It doesn’t matter. I don’t want a delay either, but there’s a killer loose....”
“There isn’t. Is not. This is a case of drowning pure and simple, an accident.”
He stiffened; the sound of voices was coming from the stairs beyond the curtains of washing; officialdom was arriving. “Quick, get her out of here, Mansur. Explain it to her. I’ll stay Go with them, Boggart.”
Boggart and a still-bemused Adelia were dragged away to a dark corner and made to stand behind a sheet. Several people were blundering through the forest of washing toward Rowley and the lanterns. She heard the deep voice of the seneschal and then Lady Beatrix’s a
s the lady-in-waiting passed her: “Oh, I agree, absolutely frightful. Drowning herself, so careless of the woman. Joanna will be inconvenienced, there was nobody like Brune for getting stains out of embroidery. . . .”
And Lady Petronilla: “What is that smell?”
Adelia, who feared they’d scented Ward crouching at her feet, held her breath, but the ladies went past without seeing her. “Oh, my lord bishop, there you are. Is this where it happened? How terribly, terribly ghoulish.”
“We go,” Mansur whispered.
They went. Rowley had been right; the stairs led to a deserted passageway
Nobody was in Eleanor’s garden either, and it was there that Adelia refused to go any farther. “Are you going to alert the authorities or am I?”
Gently Mansur steered her to a bench and sat on it beside her. Boggart crouched nearby, holding on to Ward for comfort and looking nervously around at the bushes for murderers.
The Arab’s voice was a bat’s squeak in the darkness. “She insulted you. They will say you had her killed. Or made her kill herself.”
Adelia’s mouth fell open. “What are you talking about? I wasn’t here. The guards saw me come in. Captain Bolt . . .”
Mansur went on as if she hadn’t spoken. “That you wished her dead, perhaps inspired her or someone else to see it done.” He took her hand. “We are strange to them, you and I. There has been misfortune on this journey; the Bishop of Winchester talks of little else. I can listen because they think I do not understand them and I hear disquiet. Three times now you have been angry, first with the horse Juno ...”
“I wasn’t angry with her. . . .”
“And then with the Sir Nicholas . . .”
“I wasn’t . . .”
“More recently with Brune.”
“She was angry with me.”
“And all three have died in circumstances that are odd. A horse eats poison, a knight is shot while hunting, a woman is drowned.”
“They can’t think I killed any one of them. Each time I was somewhere else.”
“You did not have to be there. You engineered it. Or I did. The horse, the knight, both were murdered. If this time, Brune’s death is deemed an accident, they may regard the fact that she offended us as a coincidence, but the Bishop Rowley does not want attention drawn to her killing. It will be bad enough as it is; there will be talk, superstition.”
“That’s nonsense. Why would we want her dead? For what reason?”
“Why would anyone want her dead? And therein lies the reason. Publicly, she offended only us.”
She was following his remote, high voice as if through a fog, unable to see which direction its meaning came from. “And how are we supposed to have made someone kill her for us? Or have her put her head in the tub from a distance?”
“Witchcraft.” It was said mildly as the Arab said all things mildly but, for Adelia, it was a blast of putrefaction into the night air. It felled her so that she put her arms over her head to shield herself just as the little laundress had held the scrubbing board between her and evil.
Witchcraft. Always, always, since she’d left Salerno, where they knew what she was, and what she did, and appreciated her for it, superstition had attached itself to her heels so that the skill she’d been granted to benefit mankind must be hidden by stratagems so wearying that she was sick of them.
But there was one thing it could not do. She brought her arms down and sat up.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Somebody killed Brune, they took away her life, her life, Mansur. Her body cried it out to me, her soul cries it. I cannot, I will not allow murder to be ignored.”
“She was not a nice woman,” Mansur said stolidly.
“She was murdered. She was alive. The span God allotted to her has been taken away Whether she was nice or not has nothing to do with it.”
“They will think that anyone who crosses us is cursed.”
“She was murdered.” Adelia got up. “I’m going to see the seneschal and tell him what happened.”
Mansur didn’t move. “No.” It was said quietly.
Adelia turned round to stare. “You can’t stop me.”
“I shall say that you are mistaken. The woman drowned by accident. I am the doctor, Rowley is the bishop. We will speak against you.”
The betrayal took her breath away; this man had looked after and defended her all her life, he’d never refuted her. He would do that? Rowley would do it? She could stand on the highest tower in the palace to shout “Murder” and be deemed insane because Rowley and Mansur, the only authority she had, would deny it?
By submitting to the superstition that others would lay against her door, these two men, her two men, had joined themselves to the great enemy killing everything that was rational, allowing fallacy to win. It had won. Without them, her testimony would be the mere squawk of a madwoman and result in nothing but hubris.
She felt a terrible grief for Brune, for the science of reason that always lost to unreason.
Mansur, knowing her, said: “It is for my sake, too. A Saracen is always a witch. If Gyltha were here, she would say the same.”
She couldn’t bear his presence anymore and went away from him to weep and rage in the shadows, circling the garden like a lost soul.
Still on his bench, Mansur had begun talking in English to Boggart, talking endlessly, it seemed, explaining the fact of himself and her mistress, what they did, what they had done, and why.
The sound meant no more to Adelia than the stridulation of a cricket. She kept on walking. She had never felt lonelier.
After awhile, a hand touched her sleeve. “Let’s go up, mistress, you need your sleep.”
“Do you think I’m a witch, Boggart?”
“Well . . .” Boggart eyes were still swiveling from the information about Adelia’s history and profession that Mansur had given her, and she was incapable of being less than honest. “Maybe, mistress, but I reckon as you’re a white one.”
It was too late to go to the house by the river; the palace gates were shut for the night. Unnoticed, the two women returned to the great hall and the stairs that led to the ladies’ apartments.
In the gloom, squires and servants were setting out the pallet mattresses in the niches of the walls where they slept. By the light of a single flambeau stuck in a bracket in the center of the floor, a group of thirty or more knights and courtiers were drinking and playing dice.
As Adelia reached the top of the staircase and started toward her room, one of the players let out a whoop at a lucky roll. “Mirabile dictu,” he cried.
Adelia stopped still. They were the very words screamed with the very exultation in the very voice she’d once heard in a forest between Glastonbury and Wells when two of its outlaws, capering and dressed in leaves, had threatened to rape and tear her apart. Excalibur had killed one—no, she had killed one.
The other?
Boggart was at her side, concerned. “What is it, mistress?”
No, it couldn’t be. Captain Bolt and his men had subsequently cleared the forest, quartering every man jack in it and hanging the pieces from its trees.
“What is it, mistress?”
“I thought . . . A man called Scarry ...” She pulled herself together. “But it wasn’t him, he’s dead.”
Eight
AT FIRST, it was a subdued train that left Poitiers to set out once more on its journey. For Joanna, her ladies-in-waiting, her knights, bishops, and servants, it was expulsion from the Garden of Eden, even though Richard and his knights were to accompany them the rest of the way to Sicily.
For Adelia, it was the most dreadful thing she had ever done. She wasn’t leaving Paradise; she was deserting the dead. At Brune’s funeral, everybody else had watched a coffin lowered into the palace’s graveyard; Adelia had seen only a woman being murdered over and over again; she’d cowered at the laundress’s shriek of “Betrayer” dinning into her ears. It overrode the voices of Mansur and Rowley when they tried to
talk to her so that she barely heard them, or wanted to.
Nor had she noticed the looks, some frightened, some accusatory, directed at her and Mansur as they were left to stand by themselves at the funeral service.
But as, under a crystalline sky, the procession began following the Vienne, loveliest of rivers, gradually the general mood lifted. Otters slid into the waters, making V-shaped ripples as they swam. Herons stood still, elongated sculptures, waiting for the moment to spear an unsuspecting, sinuous trout. Overhead, squadrons of cranes flew south to their winter quarters, oblivious of the long train of people and animals lumbering along below them.
Not that lumber was the appropriate word. Duke Richard kept a brisk pace, and, on such a fine, dry day, the princess and ladies-in-waiting had abandoned their palanquin for horseback in order to ride with him, surrounded by a bright crowd of his knights with harness bells jingling, their songs, shouts, and laughter sending affronted, cawing rooks scattering from elms into the air.
Even the Bishop of Winchester was seen to smile as he bumped along on a horse too big for him.
Adelia, still cross with them, did not want to talk to the only two people, Mansur and Rowley who would have talked to her.
As usual, Sir Guillaume had urged his horse toward hers and was singing at her:
I am with my beautiful beneath the flowers,
until our sentry from the tower cries: “Lovers, get up!”
for I clearly see the sunrise and the day.
“Oh, shut up,” she told him and rode down the procession to ride alongside Ulf, a Gyltha substitute, the only person apart from God to whom she could unburden herself.
He wasn’t sympathetic. “They was right,” he said of Mansur and Rowley
“In the name of Heaven, boy, how were they right? They caused me to sin against everything I believe in; they cut out my tongue. They made me fail in my duty to the dead.”
Ulf was unshaken. “Seems to me your duty’s to the king and his daughter, see her safe. That’s what you took on, ain’t it?”
“I could have seen Joanna safe and still done what I ought.”
“No, you bloody couldn’t. There’s mutterings already. You got to be careful. Iffen you’d done your duty by that old besom, you’d’ve got more attention to yourself than you have already.” He frowned; he, like Mansur, heard things that Adelia didn’t. “You’re feared by some parties. There’s them as’d like to see you left behind, or worse. There’s some as is even blaming you for Young Henry not comin’ with us. Ain’t that right, Boggart?”