Captain Bolt and his men were sitting on the grass under the trees by the side of the lane, their horses casting long shadows against the setting sun. They had eaten and drunk well, but the captain was displeased; his mounts had barely been able to get enough water from the nearby stream, which the summer had reduced to a trickle. “Wouldn’t let us in through the gates to get to a trough. Somerset hospitality? I spit on it.”
He was unmoved by the fact that Emma and her party were missing.
“Couldn’t you send one of your lads into Wells?” Adelia pleaded. “They may be putting up at one of the inns there.”
“I reckon as that bitch has eaten ‘em,” Gyltha said, and met Adelia’s glare with “Well, I wouldn’t put it past her.”
“No, I couldn’t, mistress,” Bolt said. “You seen how many inns that town’s got? Going down High Street alone we must’ve passed dozens. I can’t spare a man or the time.”
As usual, he was in a rush; his orders were to deliver Adelia and company intact to Glastonbury, see them safely installed, and then return to the king as fast as possible. Looking for lost ladies was not in his brief.
“You could send him,” he said, jerking a thumb to where Rhys the bard was sprawled in the shade of an oak, a flask of ale by his side, a chicken leg in one hand, the other rippling the strings of the harp held between his knees. “I can spare him.”
They all could. At first the Welshman’s playing and singing had sweetened the journey, but as Captain Bolt said of him with complaint, “He don’t do anything else.”
And it was true—as an aid in the tasks of traveling Rhys was useless. Asked to fetch or carry something, he invariably dropped it. Since most of his life had been spent on foot or bareback Welsh ponies, horses alarmed him to an extent that he wouldn’t or couldn’t tighten their girths or put a bit in their mouths, thus necessitating one of the soldiers to do it for him.
What he could do, amazingly, was attract women. Having eaten prodigiously of the supper provided by whatever inn they’d put up at, he managed to vanish and, before they could proceed in the morning, there had to be a search for him, which invariably ended in some female’s bedroom. It sent Captain Bolt mad. “How does he do it?”
Adelia didn’t know, either, but there was no denying that bucktoothed, vague, and none too clean though Rhys was, his music sent a maiden’s knees wobbling, along with her virginity.
Mansur despised him, perhaps because Gyltha, usually irritated by inefficiency, showed a sentimental forbearance of the man. “He’s worth it for that lovely voice,” she’d say, tenderly making sure his plate was fuller than anybody else’s.
Allie was his slave, as he was hers. The only night on which he hadn’t pursued his amours had been when the child, having eaten some unripe crab apples lying in an orchard, was taken with a nasty stomachache. He’d stayed by her bed, soothing her with a song celebrating the Arab star Almeisan, after which she was named.
Adelia was prepared to forgive him a great deal after that, though occasionally, when he’d once more reduced Captain Bolt to apoplexy, she wondered why on earth Henry had sent the bard with her.
“Because he wanted to get rid of him, that’s why,” was Bolt’s response. “Couldn’t give him back to the damned Welsh, could he?”
No, presumably, he couldn’t. Rhys’s fellow countrymen wouldn’t look kindly on a man who presented the English king with a dead Arthur.
However it was, there was no use sending him to look for Emma. Even if Wells locked up all its daughters, it was doubtful he could find his way back.
There was nothing for it at the moment but to go on to Glastonbury and hope to locate Emma through more inquiries.
It was a winding road leading them there, and as darkness fell, it was empty of traffic.
The law ordering that verges be cleared of trees by the length of a bow shot so that travelers were not vulnerable to a surprise attack had been ignored here. And ignored for some years—the cavalcade rode through avenues that branched overhead, hiding the moon.
Torches and lanterns were lit, swords were drawn, silence demanded, the mounts slowed to walking pace—it had been known for robbers to bring down cantering horses by putting a wire across the road. Gyltha and Adelia, with a sleeping, panniered Allie, found themselves hemmed in by their escorts as they rode—and were glad of it. Rhys nudged his horse between theirs; the only weapon he had was his harp.
Michael, the trumpeter, muttered, “Most dangerous bit o’ road in England this, so I heard.”
“Why?” Adelia whispered back.
“Wolf. Outlaw. They call him Wolf acause he’s a animal though he runs on two legs, and a pack with him. They say …”
But Captain Bolt hushed them. He was listening to the hundred rustles that came from among trunks turned ghastly by the glare of the torches, his sword twitching toward the reflected green of animals’ eyes that peered out at them from the undergrowth.
At one point, Adelia heard the sound of a cough from somewhere among the trees, but whether it came from a human throat or not she couldn’t tell.
Wolf.
Because she was tired and scared, she became angry. Bolt should have taken them back to sleep over at Wells so that they could have made this ride in the daytime. Damn the man for refusing another delay. Always wanting to gallop back to his damn king, damn him.
And damn that female back there. Had she sent Emma and little Pippy out into another such dangerous night? She’d said she hadn’t. Mansur didn’t think she had. But there’d been a sense of suffocation in that pretty house and in its kitchen, a truth being choked.
Oh, God, suppose the hag was keeping them imprisoned? Worse than imprisoned?
No, this was the thinking of fatigue.
But there’d been something… . She kept remembering the eyes of the man at the bread oven when he’d turned to look at her. Something …
Damn it, how long before they reached Glastonbury? It was supposed to be only a few miles from Wells, but there was no sign of habitation ahead.
The only indication that they’d reached it was the sudden clatter of their horses’ hooves on stone. No signpost, but there was a gap in the forest to their right. The men’s torches showed a steep, cobbled hill that leveled out at the bottom, where moonlight shone on water.
“That’s it,” Bolt said. “Must be. That’ll be the River Brue down there—comes right up to the abbey, I was told—but where is the abbey?”
Where, indeed? As one of the biggest, busiest, richest foundations in England, owning a good deal of Somerset and beyond, it should have shown some sign of activity even at this time of night, however much the fire had damaged it.
It wasn’t until they began to go down the hill that Adelia fully realized the extent of the catastrophe that had overwhelmed the place. On the left, they were following what had been the monastery’s great boundary wall, now a blackened, tumbled collection of stones with silence beyond it.
As pitiable—and nobody had mentioned this—flames had also leaped the wall to consume the little town that lay outside it. For on the right as they rode, torchlight fell on naked spars that had been the thatched shops and cottages belonging to laypeople serving both the abbey and the pilgrims who had come to worship at its shrines.
Here had once been a busy high street; now the smitch of ash hung acrid on its air; apart from the moon, there was no light anywhere, no activity, only silence. Adelia heard Captain Bolt say incredulously, making a sign of the cross, “God have mercy, it’s dead. Glastonbury’s dead.”
Toward the bottom of the hill, where it met the river to flatten into a wide, paved market square and quay, the abbey wall remained intact and so, opposite, did a three-story building—proximity to water and the fact that it was built of stone had preserved it to be all that was left of a thriving town. Again, there was no sign of occupation; the frontage, with its stout door leading out onto the street, was dark, but Captain Bolt’s lamp shone on a wide, high entrance arch to the
right and, above it, carved into the lintel, was the unmistakable figure of a man in a brimmed hat carrying a scrip.
They had found the Pilgrim Inn.
Wheeling to go under the arch, the cavalcade entered a large, deserted courtyard formed by outbuildings and, on the left, the inn itself—from which the light of a single candle shone through the boards of one of the windows’ shutters.
“God be thanked,” Captain Bolt said. He dismounted and began hammering on the Pilgrim’s side door.
Inside, a dog began barking. The candle above was snuffed out. There was a creak, as if somebody had opened the shutter the tiniest crack—other than that, nothing happened.
Adelia and Gyltha were lifted from the saddles, and their horses were led to drink along with the others at a trough standing by the head of a well. Two soldiers began investigating the stables and a barn.
“Open up there. Open in the name of the king.” Captain Bolt was losing his temper.
A quavering voice came from the window, just audible over the barking. “I’ll set the dogs on you. I warn ye, we’m armed in here.”
“So are we out here,” the captain yelled. “Open this door before I take a bloody ram to it.”
Somewhat late in the day, Michael the trumpeter remembered his office and blew a call that sent stately notes echoing around the walls, though their only effect was to set the dog barking again and startle a barn owl into clattering flight from its perch in the stables.
“All right, then,” Captain Bolt said, looking around. “Find something to break this bloody door down.”
At that the door opened an inch and the same voice asked, “Who are you?”
“Who are you?”
“Godwyn, sir. Landlord of this inn.”
“We’re king’s men,” the captain told him. He snapped his fingers at Adelia, who began searching through her saddlebag for the royal warrant. “You’ve received an order from King Henry saying as he was billeting guests on you, and don’t say as you didn’t, acause the messenger came back to say he’d delivered it.”
The door opened wider, allowing Bolt’s lamp to illuminate a short, rotund, barefoot man in his nightshirt, holding back a single slavering dog by its collar. “That was a month ago,” he said. “No guests has come. No guests.” He was trembling.
“They have now.” The captain took the warrant from Adelia’s hand and waved it under the man’s nose. “The lord Mansur—he’s that Saracen gentleman over there, like it says on this scroll. Come to”—Bolt shifted his lantern so that he could read the writing on the warrant—“‘make inquiry into the recent findings at Glastonbury Abbey by permission of Henry, King of England, and his right beloved Abbot Sigward.’ This lady here’s Mistress Adelia, as is also mentioned, and likewise her companion, Mistress Gyltha, and there’s … Hello, what’s wrong with him, then?”
Godwyn the landlord had fainted.
SIX
HOW IT WAS DONE, Adelia never knew, because while it was being done, she and Gyltha and Allie dozed on a pile of hay in an empty stable, but by the morning, with the help of Mansur and the soldiers, Landlord Godwyn and his wife had brought their dead inn to life.
Everybody had been allocated rooms with comfortable beds, clean blankets, and warm water for washing. There was even breakfast for all set out on the vast table in the guest’s parlor, a cavern of a room off the passage that led to the front door.
Hilda, the landlady, apologized for it. “Just porridge, cheese, and pickled eel, and a couple of coddled eggs each, for which I’m sorry, sirs and ladies, there being no suppliers in town anymore and six of our hens gone to the fox, God rot it, but later on, Godwyn’ll row over to Godney and fetch proper provisions.”
Since there was fresh, crusty bread to go with the meal, Godwyn, who did the cooking, had already managed to heat ovens, make dough, and let it rise before baking. Both he and his wife, Adelia thought, must have spent the early hours laboring like Trojans.
“I am sorry we alarmed Master Godwyn,” she said to Hilda.
“Very impressible in his humors, our Godwyn,” his wife said. “ ’Twas a shock, what with thinking you was robbers and us not expecting guests, there not having been any since the fire, and no one arriving after the king’s letter, the which we thought he’d forgotten and there was none to come… .”
She was a thin, jolly, freckled woman of middle age, taller than her husband, talking all the time while she served the table, never still, regretting that the Pilgrim wasn’t up to its old standard, promising better.
The fire had emptied Glastonbury, she said. Most of the monks had already departed on missions around the country to raise money for the abbey’s rebuilding. As for the townspeople, some had left forever, others had scattered to find work locally until they could return to restore the homes and shops they’d lost.
“The which is a waste of time,” Hilda said briskly, “seeing as how there won’t be no trade until the pilgrims start a-coming again. The which”—and here she turned eager eyes on Mansur—“they will when they hear as King Arthur and his lady lies in our graveyard.”
Adelia sighed. Obviously, it had been impossible to keep the matter quiet in such a small, depleted community, but to have its only expectation resting on her shoulders would be a burden. She hoped she would not be forced to disappoint it; the courage Hilda was showing in adversity was admirable.
“Course, you know who done it, don’t you?” the landlady asked.
“Done what?” Bolt asked.
“Brought this calamity on us deliberate, lost us our living, killed our abbey, killed us.” For a moment, Hilda’s briskness went and her face withered as if all the juice had been sucked out of it, leaving it old and malignant. “Bishop of Wells,” she said.
“A bishop?” Captain Bolt choked over his porridge. “A bishop set the fire?”
“Not him personal, but at his orders,” Hilda told him. “What we want to know is, where’s that useless falconer? Oh, yes, the bishop may say as he was dismissed from Wells for being that he turned to drink, but they’d been close—nobody closer than a hunting bishop and his falconer, lessen it’s his huntsman. And where did that rascal come to, begging to be taken on after the bishop turned him out? To my dear abbot, that’s who. And what happened but three weeks after that? The fire. That’s what happened.” Hilda’s eyes compressed to stop tears from coming. “Glastonbury’s murdered and Wells flourishes, and no sign of Useless Eustace since. For why? Because the bishop’s spirited him away so’s he can’t be made to confess.”
Inevitably there would be a scapegoat, Adelia thought. When whole towns became a furnace, as they sometimes did, as this one had, it was either put down to God’s punishment of wickedness—and Glastonbury was regarded as too holy for that—or to arson. There had to be blame; it was too banal that such suffering was caused by the accidental fall of a lighted candle.
To divert a complaint that could carry on for a long time, and because anxiety for Emma gnawed at her, Adelia asked, “By any chance have you heard of a lady with a child and a wounded knight traveling in the vicinity? She was making for Wolvercote Manor but doesn’t seem to have arrived there.”
Hilda sat herself down at the table to think about it. “Lady and a wounded knight, you say?”
“He’s a foreigner, a German.”
“No-o-o, can’t say as I have. I do hope as nothing has happened to your lady, for the roads ain’t safe anymore, what with men have lost their living and turned to robbery—and worse nor robbery, the which there’s travelers having their throats cut over there by Wells, like it wasn’t enough to lose their purses but their lives as well, poor things.”
“That road from Wells is a right disgrace,” Captain Bolt said through a mouthful of porridge. “Trees up to its edges, there’s bound to be robbers. Who’s to catch them in that forest? I wonder as the abbot don’t make it safer.”
Hilda turned on him. “Don’t you blame my dear abbot, don’t you dare. He’d make all safe for e
verybody, God bless him, but that’s Wells forest—well, the king’s really—but the bishop does his hunting in it and won’t have a twig touched in case it upsets the deer. Oh, if I was a swearing woman, I’d tell you things about the bishop of Wells… .”
She proceeded to do so—at length.
The enmity of Glastonbury for Wells, and Wells for Glastonbury, was not just between their churchmen but, according to Hilda, had existed for years among the people of the two towns. Wells had always been jealous of its famous neighbor. “Them Wellsians ain’t Christians, and I’d be sorrier for them when they come to the Seat of Judgment if they didn’t deserve every flame in hell.”
The bishop of Saint Albans, Adelia thought, was going to have his work cut out when he came to make peace between the two.
Captain Bolt cut the diatribe short. Despite only a couple of hours’ sleep, he was taking his soldiers back to Wales immediately.
Adelia was amused to hear him quibbling over the bill for accommodating his men. “I’ll expect you to charge the king only half a night’s tariff, Mistress Hilda, that being all as we spent in our beds, seeing as how we had to set ’em up. And we saw to our own stabling—you can’t expect the Exchequer to pay for comforts not provided.”
Like king, like captain, Adelia thought.
And then she thought, Damn Henry, he’s done it again.
There’d been a sharp exchange between her and the Plantagenet before she left him. “My lord, I am not going to Glastonbury penniless and with only a paper warrant. Suppose there’s an emergency necessitating cash?”
“Emergency? It’s a holiday I’m giving you, woman.”
In the end she’d managed to inveigle two silver pounds out of him, which—because he didn’t carry money—he’d had to borrow from a reluctant chamberlain. Now at least one of those pounds would have to go to a landlord who’d otherwise be forced to accommodate her on credit that his devastated inn could ill afford to extend—it took a long time before anybody received payment from tightfisted Henry’s equally tightfisted Exchequer.