It was useless. Lady Emma was the lost white bird regained. Missing, she had been the subject of his laments, and now, here in the flesh, pale, thin, beautiful, she was perfection—a being so ethereal, so far above him, that he could safely be her troubadour of a passion never to be requited. Even as he moaned, he began tuning the harp.
“Look at him,” Gyltha said in disgust. “Happy as a pig in shit now he’s miserable.”
The well had its cover put in place so that the two reunited children wouldn’t fall down it while they played in the courtyard. The adults went indoors to sit around the dining table and listen to Adelia tell the full story of the past two days and nights.
Only Roetger was absent. He wasn’t making the recovery Adelia had hoped for him, too weak to leave his bed, with no interest in food nor anything else and embarrassed by the fact that either Adelia or Millie had to help him onto the pot—he refused to let Emma do it.
Here, like Mansur, was another who’d been humiliated by his inability to protect his lady. It gnawed at him. “What champion was I for her?” he asked Adelia at one point.
Emma wouldn’t have it. “I keep telling him. What could he do? That hag, that Hilda, kept a knife to Pippy’s throat; we had to obey her. And his bravery when we were attacked on the road . . . you should have seen him. Injured, but fighting like a tiger. Pip and I would be dead if it weren’t for him. Oh, ’Delia, I don’t care what people think anymore, I want to marry him. Do you think the king will let me?”
“I’m sure he will.” In truth, she wasn’t sure. Emma was valuable property, and in the king’s gift to be wed how he commanded. Because Adelia’s last investigation had been successful, she had been able, as a reward, to persuade Henry not to marry Emma off against her will.
But that was when she’d been successful. . . .
It grieved the German particularly that he’d lost his sword, symbol of everything he’d once been, which Hilda had made him lay down and was now nowhere to be found. “She could not sell it,” he said. “It was too fine. No, she has thrown it away. Why not me, also? I am without use.”
Until now, Adelia had left Emma in ignorance of her mother-in-law’s attempt to have her killed, waiting for the poor girl to be stronger. Yet she had to be told, and when, round the table, that part of the tale was reached, she waited for the fury she herself felt.
Wolf and dowager, two murderers.
She was disappointed. Emma had, after all, suffered terribly: the attack on the road by Wolf and his brigands, the assumption that she had found safety when they reached the Pilgrim Inn being taken away by a madwoman, the tunnel, forced exile on a leper island . . . Her spirit had been wrecked.
Gyltha cried out in disbelief at the news. Mansur swore horribly in Arabic.
Emma just wept for her dead servants.
“Can it be proved?” Mansur asked.
“I don’t know.” Adelia hadn’t thought about that yet. “At the very least, the woman should be turned out of Wolvercote Manor, bag and baggage.”
Emma shook her head. “There’s nothing to be done. I’m not sending Roetger into another trial by combat. I’ll lose Wolvercote . . . God knows I wanted it for Pippy . . . but I’ll not see my man wounded again.”
“Bugger trial by combat,” Gyltha said. “That harpy’s got to hang.”
Emma continued to weep.
It wasn’t the moment to tell her that Roetger would never be able to fight again; his foot was now too badly damaged.
Adelia didn’t tell the champion, either, but his listlessness that evening as she tried to make him take food suggested that he guessed.
When Millie relieved her, Adelia went back to her own room and took the sword from the hill out of the chest where she kept it wrapped in a sheet. She sat on the bed to study it.
Mansur’s objection to taking it had evaporated when he’d learned the sword had saved Adelia’s life. “Thus Allah looked down from Paradise and saw you in need of a weapon. He gave you the warrior’s.”
That’s one explanation for grave robbing, she thought.
What she could hardly admit to herself, and certainly not to anybody else, was that, in one desperate moment in a forest, the sword had lived. It had killed for her protection as if the function for which it was made had suddenly energized it.
The trouble was that it had enjoyed it.
Or was it me? Did I enjoy it?
She knew she had not. Wolf had been a disease, had killed, would have killed Alf, killed her, would have gone on killing. Arbitrarily, the occasion and means to stop him had fallen to her. She, whose job it was to preserve life, regretted it and always would, but, as Rowley’d said, there was nothing else she could have done.
The question was whether the sword now belonged to her. She felt that it did; its leap in her defense had passed ownership from the dead man in the cave to her living hand. Loathing weapons of destruction, this thing with its encrusted pommel as warty as Allie’s toad was the exception; she felt safer in its presence—not just safer, bolder—she could defy the world with it, challenge her enemies. You dare not touch me now.
She thought, And that is how wars begin.
Keep me, the sword said. Though you are a woman, you shall be a warrior defending all frail women.
Its voice was high and sweet, like Rhys’s harp.
And then she knew that this was Glastonbury magic; she was being entwined by legends, holy springs, dreams, ghosts, swords that came alive … all of them delusion. The Salerno masters who had trained Adelia in hard truth frowned down on her, ashamed.
She came to a decision. You are an artifact, she told the sword. You belonged to a warrior who has no further use for you—but I am a doctor, and I have a patient who has.
The next morning, having told him its story, she gave the sword to Roetger.
“An ugly old thing,” she said, finding the words an effort, “but until you get a better one . . .”
He was intrigued by it, brightening more than she’d seen him since the rescue from Lazarus, as if she’d given him back his manhood. “So,” he said, caressing the blade. “Old-fashioned, but ugly, no. You shall see when it is again polished. I am grateful.”
Millie was sent to the kitchen for cleaning equipment, and Adelia left her patient with his new medicine to go down to the parlor and write the report that the king had demanded. She couldn’t put it off any longer—the next day Captain Bolt was coming to collect it.
It was a list of disasters unlikely to put a sparkle in the royal blue eyes.
Arthur and Guinevere not Arthur and Guinevere but two male lovers. A favorite abbot both a killer and a suicide, taking a madwoman with him to a terrible death. The Glastonbury fire due to the carelessness of one of its own monks. A forest in which travelers on the King’s Highway lay slaughtered. One of his nobility, a Somerset dowager, a would-be murderess.
And above all, as far as Henry would read it—and rage—no proof that King Arthur was dead.
Sucking the end of her quill, Adelia wondered if the king’s sympathy would be evoked by her own brushes with death. It was unlikely—he was not a sympathetic man.
But this is the last time you employ me, Henry Plantagenet. Henceforth, I am to be a bishop’s mistress.
A mistress, she thought, still idling, a courtesan. Her mind dwelt on the few houris she’d seen being carried through the streets of Salerno, painted and veiled, trailing light silks and heavy perfume.
It made her smile.
Still, she thought, Rowley will have to decently clothe his indecent woman. Since, at the moment, both she and Emma were in garments that Millie had purchased for them from a seamstress in Street’s market, where, it had to be said, the standard of couture leaned more heavily on durability than style, the idea was not totally displeasing.
Again, though, she was aware of an essence that had been Vesuvia Adelia Rachel Ortese Aguilar leaching out of her. And again, she told herself it was a small price to pay for love.
F
rom the courtyard, the mellifluous voice of Rhys was being directed toward Emma’s window.
“Lay down your weapons, lady, or you kill me.
Let me not see that curling hair, those fine eyes
That spear the heart of all true men …”
Adelia sighed and returned to her report to the king.
Putting her two and only triumphs on the parchment showed them up as weak. What matter to Henry, lord of a great empire, that Eustace, a common drunkard, had been proved innocent of a crime? How much would he rejoice at Lady Emma and young Lord Wolvercote’s rescue when he hadn’t known they’d been abducted in the first place?
Oh, dear.
Gritting her teeth, Adelia dipped her quill into the inkpot and pressed on, returning to the matter that concerned her most at the moment—the dowager’s perfidy.
“You, who prize justice above all things, my dear lord, will know how to right the great wrong committed by this woman according to the wish of your most devoted servant, Adelia Aguilar.”
Then, in case one of the king’s unknowing clerks might read the letter to him, she scratched out her signature and replaced it with that of Mansur.
She was searching for sealing wax when Allie flung the door open, ablaze with excitement. “Come and see, Mama, come and see.”
Adelia followed her daughter into the courtyard, where Pippy was staring at something that had been tied to the wellhead by a bit of string around its neck.
“What’s that, in the name of God?”
“It’s a puppy.” Allie was ecstatic. “It’s mine.”
Whatever it was, it was the untidiest animal Adelia had ever seen; very young and wobbly on long, thin legs, with a rough coat and eyebrows that curled upward like an old man’s.
“Bad,” Mansur said, “a sight hound.”
“A lurcher,” Gyltha said. “An’ it’s forbidden. Verderers see that in the forest and they’ll lame un, take out the ball of its foot. Bring down deer, lurchers do; bring down anything.”
Allie put her arms round the animal’s neck. “They’re not going to lame Eustace,” she said. The dog licked her face.
“Who?”
“Some men came and gave it to me. They said his name was Eustace. Look at his lovely brown eyes, Mama, he’s very intelligent.”
Adelia thought how typical it was of Will and the tithing to bring her a present that was illegal. But the damage was done; Allie had given her heart to the thing.
“Well,” she said, weakly, “we’ll just have to keep Eustace out of the forest.”
HANDING OVER THE SCROLL to Captain Bolt the next morning, Adelia asked if the king had arrived in England.
“Not yet, mistress. Somewhere between here and Normandy, I reckon.” He waved the report. “Yet he’s so eager for this, we may have to send it by boat—he’ll be glad to get it.”
“No, captain,” Adelia said sadly, “he won’t.”
TWO DAYS LATER, Roetger hitched himself down the stairs, and Adelia was asked to attend to him and Emma in the dining room.
On the table in front of them lay the dead warrior’s sword in a wooden scabbard that Roetger had made for it.
He was animated, eager for Adelia to sit down. He remained standing, his back to the window, leaning on a crutch. He began explaining how he had gone about cleaning the sword.
“We take great care, do we not?” he said to Emma.
She nodded. The two of them used “we” and “us” a great deal now.
“Horsetail from the kitchen first,” he said. “Millie gave it.”
It was Adelia’s turn to nod. The plant was an invaluable pot scourer; dairymaids polished their milk pails with it.
“No good,” Roetger said, shaking his head. “So we try vinegar. No good.”
“Do you know what did it in the end?” Emma asked. She couldn’t wait; she was as excited as the German. “You’ll never guess. Godwyn’s apple-and-plum preserve.”
“Preserve?”
Emma seemed to have forgiven the landlord now that he’d restored the sword. “He won’t tell us what’s in it apart from apples and plums, but it was miraculous.”
“Apple-and-plum preserve?”
“A cleanser most excellent,” Roetger said.
“Ye-es,” Adelia said encouragingly. She could see little of the sword with the champion’s great frame blocking the light from the window.
Roetger went on at length about how each polishing had revealed more and more of what lay beneath the thick patina. “It is old, so old.”
He moved aside so that light shone on the pommel.
Adelia gasped. What had once been warts were now inset stones gleaming like the sun. “What are those jewels?”
“Topaz,” Emma said smugly.
Roetger nodded. “From my own Saxony, I think. It is the stone of strength.”
“And it can make its wearer invisible if he needs to be,” parroted Emma, “and it changes color in the presence of poison, doesn’t it, Roetger? And it can cure anything, including piles.”
Her champion frowned at her. “It has great power.”
“Ye-es,” Adelia said.
Still, Roetger didn’t take the sword out of its scabbard. He talked of tang, fuller, weight, balance, how the hilt was attached to the blade, the “lifestone” set into the hilt, edges so perfectly formed that they might have been fashioned with a file rather than hammered in a forge.
“This weapon a god makes,” he said. “Wayland the Smith himself, maybe.”
“What’s that little ring thing there, at the bottom of the hilt?”
“Ach now,” Roetger said in the tone Adelia’s foster father had used when she’d asked an intelligent question. “It is the oath ring, the ring of a great chieftain.”
“You see,” Emma chipped in, “Roetger says—he knows everything about the history of swords—he says that when one of a chieftain’s or king’s men took an oath of allegiance, he knelt and kissed that ring.”
Rhys the bard had sung of a sword. “One among them finest of all, A ring on the hilt, valor in the blade, and fear on the point …”
“Ye-es.”
“Look, then,” Roetger said. He laid aside his crutch to pick up the sword as if he must be straight to handle the thing. He asked Adelia to stand up. Flicking the sword free of its scabbard, he held it out to her.
It was a rebirth. Apart from where it had been nicked, the blade gleamed as if new from the smithy.
Rhys had sung: “Tempered in blood of many a battle, Never in fight did it fail the hand that drew it, Daring the perils of war, the rush of the foe, Not the first time, then, its edge ventured on valiant deeds.”
“But look, look,” Roetger insisted. “See the fuller.”
Adelia, who knew nothing of weaponry, supposed the fuller to be the grooved bit running down the blade. She went nearer and saw a design like curling water. “What’s that?” Letters had been etched into the pattern.
“Look closer,” Roetger said.
Adelia squinted. “Is that an A? … R, T …”
“Arturus,” the champion said.
There was silence.
A chill over her skin rose goose bumps along Adelia’s arms and up her back. She couldn’t speak.
Emma was bouncing in her chair, squeaking with joy like a child.
“Excalibur.” In his reverence, Roetger began to sob. “What else? Where else? Are we not in Avalon?”
“But . . .” Adelia stared from face to face. “But that means . . . the body on the hill . . .”
“Yes,” Roetger said simply.
Emma, too, was sobbing. “The once and future king,” she said.
Roetger flung up his hand so that the weapon in it glowed amber in the light. Then he held it out to Adelia on his palms. Tears still fell, but he was smiling. “Mansur says it was passed to you. I am not worthy; it belonged to a great heart, and to a great heart it must go.”
“He wants you to have it,” Emma said. “You have the greatest hea
rt we know.”
FOURTEEN
RIDING A SEDATE PALFREY and with Millie up behind her, Adelia trotted along the road to Wells at the head of a cavalcade.
In one of her horse’s saddlebags was a summons to appear at the Bishop’s Palace before King Henry of England. Sticking out of the other bag was a long, thin woven contraption, more usually used for carrying fishing rods, containing an object for which the monarchy and abbeys of Europe would give their eyeteeth—or certainly other people’s.
Captain Bolt, who’d come to the Pilgrim to fetch her and Mansur, had looked at it sideways, but she’d declined to tell him what was in it. “A surprise gift for the king,” she’d said, and had been ashamed to be saying it.
When Gyltha and Mansur had been called to the inn’s dining table to look on Excalibur and learn who it was that lay in the cell on the Tor, she had seen the flame in Roetger’s and Emma’s eyes leap into theirs like the reflection of a beacon on one hilltop sending its signal to the next.
After that, silence. Nobody had spoken of it, as if the knowledge was sufficient and would be cheapened by commentary.
Rhys, Celt that he was, had perhaps the greatest claim to know, but he’d not been told in case the wonder could not be encompassed even in song.
Adelia realized then that whoever Arthur and his sword had fought, or whatever they had fought for, didn’t matter; their legend was enough, encapsulating an ideal around which a nation could cohere. No religion on earth, no message of universal brotherhood, could fill people’s aching need for a hero who was peculiarly theirs. That Arthur had no grounding in verifiable history, as had the Franks’ Charlemagne or Spain’s El Cid or the Arabs’ Omar bin AlKhattab—“How can you enslave people when they were born free?”—was irrelevant; somewhere, somehow, his beacon had caught hold and its glimmer had survived centuries of otherwise impenetrable darkness.
A fairy tale, she’d thought with despair, yet I am the keeper of it. The oriflamme had been passed to her, whether she wanted it or not, believed in it or not.
And I am about to betray it.
For Adelia had favors to ask, and the sword in the fishing basket was to be the exchange—it was as well to have something to offer Henry Plantagenet as it was to possess a long spoon when treating with the devil—frequently the same thing.