They stood for a moment. From the hole that had once been a church’s nave, the monks were chanting, their disciplined voices chopping up the sweet, linear sound of Rhys’s song coming from farther away.
After a long moment, Mansur carefully lifted the cloth from the bigger of the two shapes. Adelia heard him take in a breath, and she took one herself.
Whoever these bones had belonged to, he’d been magnificent in life, nearly six and a half feet tall—a commanding height at any time, and one that during the Dark Ages would have inspired legend.
If he’d died in battle, it had been at the hand of a ferocious enemy; the skull was staved in, cracks radiating out from the hole like an egg tapped with a heavy spoon. Instant death. The ribs, the six ribs, had become flailed so that they had been broken and detached from the chest wall.
“Allah grant that he maimed his opponent before he went down,” Mansur said.
“We mustn’t, we must not, assume he was a warrior,” Adelia told him; she’d never known her friend to get carried away like this.
“What else could he have been?”
“Perhaps it was an accident.” It sounded inglorious, even unlikely, but she was determined not to jump to conclusions.
It seemed appropriate that a woman should uncover the smaller skeleton. Adelia lifted the cloth and then let it fall from her hands onto the floor, unheeded. “Oh, God, who did this?”
There was a hole in the skull similar to the man’s, but that was not all of it—this skeleton had been cut into two pieces, chopped twice, once just below the ischium and then at the hips, so that where the pelvis and sacrum should have been there was a gap. The entire pelvic structure, from the lower vertebrae to the top of the femur, was absent, as if whoever had done it had wanted to take revenge on femininity.
And they’d laid her out as if this was normal, as if it was natural that the tops of her legs should emerge directly from her spine.
Adelia’s voice rose into a screech. “Who did this? Who did this?”
“Things are done in a battle,” Mansur said sadly, “even to women.”
Perhaps they were. “But they didn’t mention it,” Adelia shouted. “Plenty of fuss about Arthur’s bloody ribs, but no word about this … this mutilation of Guinevere. Oh, she’s a mere woman, it doesn’t matter.”
And then she realized that she had named the skeletons, which she should not have done. If she was to do the job the king had set her, they had to remain unclassified until she had more to go on.
“Maybe the bones fell away before she was put into the coffin,” Mansur said.
“They were hacked off,” Adelia told him. “Look here.” She pointed to the splintered top of the femurs. “And here.” The lowest remaining vertebra had been cleaved in half.
Mansur tried to soothe her. “It would have been done after she was dead,” he said.
“How do you know? How can you possibly know that?”
And if it had been done postmortem, she thought, was it by some woman-hating monk? Were female reproductive organs too unclean to lie in ground reserved for holy men?
She felt a ferocious protection for the woman this had been; the skeleton was so … so dainty. Perfect little teeth grinned up at her, slender hand and finger bones lay quietly on the catafalque, as if the appalling infliction on the lower body no longer mattered.
Which it probably didn’t—not to her.
It mattered to Adelia.
At the sound of footsteps outside, she shot through the door, swearing in Arabic, ready to berate any damned monk in her path. But it was Gyltha and Allie waiting for her.
“Come and see this …” Adelia began, and then stopped. There was a look on Gyltha’s face.
“We been up there.” Gyltha jerked her head toward the upper pasture without taking her eyes off Adelia’s. “We went to see the mule.”
“Oh, yes?”
“An’ she started to cry.” Another jerk of the head, this time down at Allie. “Said she was sorry as how she’d been nasty to little Pippy, and why wouldn’t he come and see her.”
“Yes?”
“An’ I said, ‘We’ll find him, pigsy. Him and his mama’ve been held up on the road.’ And she said, ‘No, he’s here. That’s his pet mule.’ An’ I said, ‘Can’t be.’ And she said …”
Adelia crouched down to put herself on a level with her daughter. “Why do you think it’s Pippy’s mule, darling?”
“ ’Cos it is,” Allie said. Tears were still on her cheeks. “It’s Poly-carp. Pippy used to like him best of all because he could feed him and he didn’t bite like the others.”
“How do you know it’s Polycarp?”
“ ’Cos it is,” Allie said again. “He’s got a nick in his ear and a bit of rain rot on his rump—like a strawberry patch. Wilfred said they would put seaweed on it.” She cheered up. “Just near his arse.”
“You’re sure?”
“It’s Polycarp.” Allie was getting irritated with the interrogation.
Adelia looked up to meet Gyltha’s eyes.
“She ain’t never wrong when it comes to animals,” Gyltha said.
“No,” said Adelia slowly. “No, she isn’t. Oh, dear God.”
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.