“What . . . ?” She couldn’t get the words out. She tried again: “What did he look like?”
“Who?” The perfect had reverted to other matters.
“The man Aelith saw. What did he look like?”
Brother Pierre shrugged. “She did not say”
But she’d recognized him as one of their own.
Clutching her head, Adelia tried to reconstruct the events of the day when the dysentery had struck. Ulf had been taken ill on the road, others had started to fall, Locusta had gone looking for somewhere to take them ...
He’d come back with Sister Aelith, yes, that’s right; she remembered him and the little Cathar coming down the hill, the offer of the cowshed as a hospital. And then ... what happened then? There’d been a discussion, Dr. Arnulf saying it was the plague ... who else had been there in the road that Aelith had seen?
The perfect was becoming concerned for her: “Are you unwell, my child?”
Adelia got up and ran to where Ulf was sleeping. She shook him. “Who else was there?”
“Eh?”
“On the road, that day ... the dysentery ... when we first met Aelith ... who else was there?”
“What’re you talking about?”
Adelia told him.
Ulf took in a deep breath of satisfaction. “What did I say? Didn’t I say there’s been a snake in the grass all along?”
“But who is it?” She shook him. “Who was there that morning?”
The others were awake now.
“She wouldn’t have seen Joanna or the other ladies, they were ahead,” Mansur said.
“No, this was a man.”
Boggart chimed in. “There was Bishop Rowley . . .”
“We can discount him.”
“... Captain Bolt.”
“It wasn’t him. Who else? Bishop of Winchester, of course, but he’s unlikely . . .”
“Admiral O’Donnell.”
“Yes.”
“That pesky doctor . . .”
“Arnulf yes. Go on.”
“Them two chaplains, the silly one and the other. Never liked either of ’em.”
“Might it have been one of our patients?” Mansur suggested. “There were plenty of them.”
“God help us,” Adelia said, “I don’t know. I don’t know.”
“It was Scarry,” Ulf said. “Been him all along. Ain’t he clever? Murderin’ and poisoning everybody’s mind against you so that they was glad to abandon you to Aveyron, and us, too.”
She gave a moan and stumbled away from them. She felt ill.
She knew that she’d been afraid, and had been all along, to believe that a malignant being was after her; it put her at the center of everything, a protagonist in a Greek tragedy pursued by a revenging Fury.
It’s not me, it’s not me.
But it was her, she could see it now; she, and only she, had been the reason why so many had died in the pursuit. Blundering, stupid, deliberately blind, she might as well have been a Medea leaving the bodies of slaughtered children behind her.
Somebody had wanted to destroy her, had inflicted the persona of “witch” upon her so that the people she’d traveled with had been prepared to let her and four beloved people suffer at Aveyron.
Facing it now was like being slammed against a wall. I can’t think about it.
But this was where avoidance stopped. You have to think about it.
After a while she sat down and began to consider in the only way she was capable of—as a doctor diagnosing a sickness by its symptoms and history
When had it begun? The horse, oh yes, the horse. It had been poisoned.
What next? Brune, poor Brune. No, first there had been Sir Nicholas, whom she’d cursed and who’d been killed because of it.
The death of a horse, the theft of her cross, the murder of two innocent people, betrayal to the Cathar-hunting Aveyron and its result—not that, not that, but of course that—another murder, a woman dying in flames. Oh, God, she had led him to Ermengarde.
All this engineered by a mind so careful, so skilled in its cunning, so disordered that Adelia’s reasoning brain couldn’t encompass all that it had done, let alone why it had done it. Only that it was insane.
And then she thought: But it didn’t begin in Normandy ...
It had started in England, in that faraway happiness on Emma’s estate with Allie, with sane men and women and a football match. The poison had been there.
And then she thought again: But it didn’t begin there, either ...
Its beginning, for her, was in a Somerset forest, where two outlaws had pranced out from the trees; green-and-black, fantastical pagan bodies that had rustled with the leaves they wore, and she had killed one to save her own life and that of the men she was with, and earned the lasting hatred of the other.
The dimness of this cave with its filtered light was not unlike that of the glade where Wolf had skewered himself and Scarry had keened for him in Latin.
And this is where he has brought me; all the wayfrom there to here.
She heard a light snoring; the perfect had gone to sleep. The three men were talking quietly ...
“It was Scarry, I tell you. Been him all along. Only enemy she’s ever made.”
“What about the black-avised buzzard who stole the cross off us in the cowshed, was that Scarry?”
“Don’t bloody know what Scarry looks like, do I. Never saw the bugger.”
Excalibur. Another theft, not of a life this time, but of something Henry had entrusted to her, as he’d entrusted his daughter. Scarry had taken both so that she had failed in the one thing she prided herself on—her duty.
Mansur was kneeling in front of her. “I know you,” he said. “It has not been your fault.”
“No.” She raised her head, and her voice made everybody jump. “The BASTARD.”
AT THIS MOMENT, Scarry, too, raises his head as if a bugle call from far away had suddenly cleared it of its worms. Into the holes they have made has come knowledge.
“I know where she will be,” he says to Wolf
“Where?”
“Palermo. She will come to Palermo.”
“How do you know?”
“Because that was the assignment Henry gave her, to look after his daughter. I read her mind now, Wolf of mine; she is a dutiful woman, she will not want to fail her king.”
“And we will kill her there?”
“Yes, my dear.” Scarry’s smile is almost sane. “As the armies of Octavian and Mark Antony met on the battlefield of Philippi, so we shall meet her at Palermo.”
THE TAX INSPECTOR WENT, expressing strong dissatisfaction with the paucity of tithes he and his men were taking back to their bishop.
Young Master Pons, once more situated in the window of Caronne’s church, had watched them wend their way down the mountain, his bell beside him in case the thieving bastards should turn around and come back.
They did not; they disappeared as the sun was lifting from the cold earth beneath their horses’ feet.
It was the next day when he saw another figure leading a string of mules coming out of that same mist. His hand reached for the bell, and then drew it back.
He slid down the ladder and danced hopefully around the visitor—sometimes this man carried sweetmeats in his pack.
Together, they went up toward the castle.
Adelia was already in the kitchen so that she could use it before Thomassia came in to prepare breakfast for them all, boiling into a thick paste the gel dripping from the leaves of aloe vera that she’d cut into a basin. One of the Lizier sons had whispered in embarrassment to Mansur that he was suffering from “an itch” without defining in what area it was plaguing him. Mansur had passed on the message and Adelia, hoping that it was merely a genital rash and nothing worse, was compounding a soothing ointment for it.
“Time we go, lady,” a voice told her.
Adelia straightened her back. The goblin shape of the little Turk, Deniz, was standing in th
e doorway. She looked for the Irishman behind him, but Deniz shook his head. “Admiral at Saint Gilles still. We meet him later. You all come now. Pack. Quick.”
Although there wasn’t much for them to pack, the farewell to Caronne took time; it was difficult to express sufficiently their indebtedness and gratitude to so many people, and painful to leave them.
“We needn’t say good-bye yet,” Fabrisse said. “I’m coming with you as far as Salses. I hold a small château by knight’s fee off Raymond of Toulouse down there—or, rather, my lord of Caronne does. Deniz tells me the O’Donnell has procured my silk in Saint Gilles and his ship will deliver it to Salses before he sets off for Italy Na Roqua’s daughter-in-law will wet-nurse my lord until my return. In fact, we’ll take a couple of the Roqua men with us to carry back some salt, our supply is low.”
There was one very hard parting ... Adelia saw the grief of it in two faces.
Rankin was the last to join them. As he came slowly down the stairs, bagpipes under his arm, she faced him. “You’re not coming with us,” she said.
“What ye jabbering, woman? Indeed I am.”
“No. You’re going to stay here and marry Thomassia.”
A light came into the Scotsman’s eyes. “I’ll not deny ... but it’ll never be said of Rankin of the Highlands he was a dairty deserter.”
“It’s not desertion.” She’d brought enough trouble on him. “You have been a rock to us. We love you, but we’ll be safe now and Thomassia needs you. This is where you belong.”
“Ay, she’s said she’s willin’, the canty wee girl, and I’ve become rare fond of this clachan, but . . .”
Adelia kissed him. “There you are, then.”
Standing on the ramparts of the castle with Thomassia beside him holding the Count of Caronne, he played a wailing lament on his pipes to the little party as it went trickling down the mountainside like a tear on a giant’s cheek.
THREE
Twelve
“WHAT IS IT?”
“There’s a light out at sea. Flashing.”
Adelia got out of bed and joined Fabrisse at the slit window in the upper room of the Château de Salses’s keep where it looked out on the Mediterranean. “Must be from a ship,” she said helpfully
“Of course from a ship,” Fabrisse said. “The question is, whose?”
It could be the O’Donnell, who so far hadn’t turned up. It could be friendly smugglers. It could be a less friendly force ready to invade the Count of Toulouse’s territory It could be decidedly hostile pirates intent on pillage and rape.
If it was either of the last two, the Château de Salses was not equipped to hold them off. In fact, Adelia thought, it couldn’t have held off a couple of determined winkle pickers.
The Château de Salses, originally a fortress, was even more dilapidated than the Château de Caronne. Beautiful from a distance, Adelia had to grant it that. As she and the others had ridden down the hills toward it on that first day, it had looked like a large crenellated pink cake against the chill blue water lapping its seaward wall.
On closer inspection, defensive walls of the same dusty pink sandstone crumbled into the moat around them, bridges sagged, while a weedy bailey contained a tall keep/watchtower with an unsafe interior circling staircase, and some reed-thatched stables and working quarters.
“I can’t afford to keep it up,” Fabrisse had said cheerfully, if obviously, “even though it provides most of my income. We’re nearly on the border of Spain here and out of the way, so it’s useful for smuggling, though not enough.” Feeling she hadn’t done it justice, she added: “But at some point B.C., Hannibal brought his army through here on his way to Italy.”
Perhaps the elephants trampled it, Adelia thought. There didn’t seem to have been much renovation since.
“They’re signaling,” she said now, watching the light appear and disappear at erratic intervals.
“Question is, who to?” One never knew who skulked in the lonely hills behind them.
Leaving Boggart to sleep on, they lit a taper, wrapped themselves in cloaks, and went cautiously down the staircase, trying to avoid its missing steps, to the bailey
Deniz, who’d been keeping watch, was in muttered conversation with Johan on the seawall.
And that was another thing; at the Château de Salses there had been no sign of the knight whose service in war to Count Raymond of Toulouse, when called on, was the fee Fabrisse should pay for holding the castle. (Knowing Fabrisse, Adelia suspected that she gave her rent to Count Raymond in other ways.)
What it had instead was a flock of goats, and an elderly man with shrewd eyes and a clutch of grandsons whom Fabrisse had introduced as “my bookkeeper, Johan”—a euphemism, as it turned out, for the manager of her smuggling trade.
“Who is it, Deniz?” Fabrisse called softly
“She the Saint Patrick.”
The O’Donnell’s flagship. That was a relief. It was also a summons they had all been awaiting for some days.
“I shall be losing you tomorrow,” Fabrisse told Adelia sadly “He’ll have made arrangements to send you all back to England.”
“No,” Adelia said. “We’re going with him to Palermo.”
Ever since she’d been surprised by the terrible indignation that had come over her in the cave at Caronne, she had regained certainty.
How dare he, how dare he, I won’t HAVE it. She’d been hired by Henry Plantagenet to do a job; so far Scarry had made her fail in her obligation, but she would see it through to its end if he killed her for it—or she killed him, which she was now perfectly prepared to do.
“Oh-ho,” said Fabrisse, looking at her. “We have stopped being frightened.”
“No, but I have stopped running.”
Oddly enough, it had been overhearing Rankin call her pursuer “the black-avised buzzard” that had raised her spirit. She’d forever cherish the phrase for taking the demonic out of her demon. It had turned hooves into human feet. Whether she could unmask and disable the buzzard, she didn’t know, but by God, she would try. After all, madmen had their own vulnerability
She and the others had gone over and over their time with Joanna for any clues to Scarry’s identity; who’d had the opportunity; who’d been where and when to do what he’d been able to do. As Ulf had said: “Who was it in that company kept buggering off?”
Practically everybody on what had turned out to be an erratic and rambling journey, that was the trouble.
Well, who had a mind that could influence other people’s into making Adelia seem a curse they were glad to offload onto a bonfire?
Who indeed?
They had scoured their impressions and memories until they could practically work out Scarry’s shoe size, but putting a face to him eluded them.
Eventually... “Ain’t got no further, have we?” Ulf had said, in defeat.
But Adelia, looking out over the Mediterranean, with Fabrisse beside her, was aware that they had. Scarry was like the light she could see flickering out at sea, a promise that he was somewhere in the darkness with the sword he had stolen. How she knew it, she wasn’t sure, but she knew for certain that he was going to Palermo, that she would meet him there—and defeat him.
She heard Deniz’s voice come down to them from the seawall. “Somebody rowing ashore.”
“Now?”
It was an overcast, moonless night, and at this point the land petered out into minuscule islands like scattered, tufty sponges that provided a better, almost unnavigable, defense against nighttime seaborne invasion than the castle walls.
“Signal ‘stand by and show light.’” Deniz came down from the walkway. “He brings goods.”
“Patricio, Don Patricio. My silk, hurrah.” Fabrisse hurried off to prepare food for her visitor.
Adelia waited while Deniz lit a lantern and flashed a signal to the invisible vessel out at sea, then accompanied him through the castle postern to the beach beyond.
Behind them, they could hear Johan ca
lling for his eldest grandson to come and help prepare the mules that would carry the landed contraband into the keep, but on this side the only sound was the waves soughing softly against the shore. Adelia hadn’t stopped to put on her shoes, and the sand was cold against her feet. The ship had ceased signaling now, leaving Deniz’s lantern a solitary gleam in the blackness.
“It’s not just the countess’s silk, is it?” Adelia asked Deniz. She’d seen his face in the lamplight.
The Turk shook his head. “He signals ‘trouble.’”
Adelia ran back the way she’d come in order to rouse Mansur and Ulf and put on her shoes. Trouble. God dammit, was there ever anything else?
It was a chilly wait; the northern Mediterranean could be very cold in winter. The men warmed their hands at the lanterns they’d brought. Adelia stamped about in an effort to keep warm and tried to work out the date. It would be what ... early January?
More than four months since she’d said good-bye to Allie. If the O’Donnell’s arrival this night meant another delay she’d ... she’d kill somebody.
Fabrisse turned up with another lantern.
Ulf looked up; his young ears had heard something. Another second, and theyd all caught the creak of oars straining in rowlocks. Deniz waded out into the water, holding his light high.
Mansur and Ulf went to help him drag the rowing boat in. When they came back, they were supporting someone between them ... a woman....
“Blanche?” Adelia shook her head to get her eyes in working order. “Mistress Blanche?”
The lady-in-waiting fell on her. “You’ve got to help her. Mother of God, she’s so ill. Help her. She’s dying.”
“Who?”
But now the O’Donnell was coming ashore, squelching through the water.
He was carrying something in his arms.
It wasn’t Fabrisse’s silk, it was Princess Joanna, and he was echoing Blanche. “Help her,” he said to Adelia. “I think she’s dying.”
THERE WAS A scramble to clear the bottom room of the keep and lay Joanna on the table at which soldiers had dined in the days when the room had been a guardhouse. Lanterns were hung.