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 everybody, 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.
Nevertheless, she was sorry to see Bolt go; she’d come to like him, impatient as he was, as well as his men.
She was touched to find that he’d already reconnoitered the abbey on her behalf and told its abbot to look out for her.
They all went out into the courtyard to wave the men off, leaving only Rhys still eating at the table.
“And when it’s time for you to go,” Bolt told Adelia, “the king says as you’re to send to Bishop Rowley in Wells for an escort to wherever you’re heading.”
When hell grows icicles,
she thought.
But she nodded.
“And make sure as you don’t go wandering alone, not even in daylight.”
“Oh, we shall be safe enough here, Captain.”
He swung himself into the saddle. Then, for such a down-to-earth
man, he said a surprising thing: “I ain’t so sure. That fire did more damage than we know, I reckon. Something’s gone out of this place and something else has come in.”
R
HYS ACCOMPANIED THEM
when they set off for the abbey. “Better pay my respects to Uncle Caradoc’s grave,” he said. Apparently, he was going to sing to it; he was bringing his harp.
Hilda came, too, carrying a heavy covered basket; so did Godwyn, though only as far as the short walk to the quayside, where a little way away from the quay a boathouse stood. The inn’s rowing boat was tied to a pier. He was going to fetch supplies.
“Don’t forget, now,” Hilda shouted after him, “venison if they’ve got it and a good ham. And bring back the girl.” To Adelia she said, “We’ll be needing some help now, and Millie’s a hard worker, even if she be half-witted… .”
She went on talking, describing the staff they’d had in the days when pilgrims flooded in, and the grandeur of some of their visitors. “Yes, Queen Eleanor’s own ladies-in-waiting, there not being any room for them in the abbey’s guesthouse; oh, yes, the Pilgrim’s known its share of the nobility… .”
Adelia barely listened. She was entranced by the view from the quayside of what lay beyond it. Here at her feet was the River Brue, wending its way like a shining blue piece of marquetry set into a watery, untidy, reed-filled expanse stretching to the horizon. Seagulls wheeled in air that had a touch of salt in it—somewhere in that immense distance was the Severn Estuary and, beyond that, the Celtic Sea, only just being kept at bay by this flat, indeterminate meeting of earth and sky.
Allie was bouncing with joy. “It’s like home, Mama.” She switched to Arabic: “Can we go fishing, Mansur? Can we?” Back at Waterbeach,
the two of them had provided the household’s fish meals. She returned to English: “And, look, there’s a man walking on stilts, like they do at home. Can I have some stilts, Mama? Can I?”
“No, you can’t, missie.” Hilda was suddenly severe. “Less’n you know the trackways, there’s bog out there as’ll suck you down and fill that little nose of yours with mud so’s you won’t ever breathe again.”
“No need to frighten the child,” Gyltha snapped, and Allie added, defiantly, “I’m not frightened. I’m a fenlander, I am.”
“Don’t care what you are,” Hilda told her. “Them’s the Avalon marshes and there’s bugaboos out there.”
They weren’t as beautiful as the fens, Adelia thought, being almost treeless, but she knew how her daughter felt; that solitary stilt walker, like an awkward heron against the skyline, was a reminder of home, where men and women used stilts to stride ancient paths hidden under peat and shallow water. Out there was not only an enormous cornucopia of fish and fowl and fuel but also endless entertainment—a pelican rising with a flapping trout in its beak, as one was doing at this moment, otters sliding down banks for the fun of it, darting dragonflies, beavers building a dam, time-wasting marvels that had kept her and Allie entranced for hours.
Hilda, probably rightly, for marshland
was
a dangerous place to the uninitiated, was still trying to scare Allie away from it. “There’s will-o’-the-wisps with lights to lure you into the mire at night… .” She flapped her arms. “Whoo-oo.”
“We call them jack-o’-lanterns,” Allie said, not being a child who frightened easily, “and Mama says they’re a national phenomenon.”
“Natural,” Adelia told her, “a natural phenomenon.” There were islands out there, little humps among the flatness like the curve of dolphins petrified in the act of diving. Godwyn’s boat was
heading for the nearest. She would have liked to inquire about them, but this was the king’s time she was wasting, after all. Any more of it and Gyltha’s growing irritation with Hilda would result in a quarrel.
She nudged Mansur. “Lead on, my lord.”
They turned left along the marketplace with its abandoned stalls and followed the abbey wall to the remains of a lichened gatehouse, now just another breach in the perimeter. Up a slope, past what might once have been a tithe barn …
And there it was.
“Mary, mother of God, look down on us,” Gyltha said quietly.
Adelia’s first thought was of how unmercifully the sun shone on a blackened and withered thing that shrank from the glare because it had once been beautiful.
It was still possible to see the former grace of an arch where only a half of it now stood; to mentally rebuild from those stumps of charred stone a long, elegant nave, a transept, a pillared cloister; to recognize the artistry of a master mason’s carving under the soot of a tumbled, broken capital; to replace the ground’s terrible scorch marks, like patches of disease, with the vast, upward sweep of a green hill that had once provided the backdrop to magnificence.
It would take years, decades, perhaps a century, to rebuild. Those who had tended this great church would live among its ruins and die without seeing the completion of what would replace them. Even to begin such a venture required a courage Adelia could not imagine—nor the faith.
“I am
so
sorry,” she said, and wondered at the inadequacy of saying it, and to whom she had said it.
The fire had spread downhill from the church, leaving the upper slopes of the hill untouched. Up there, two men—one in Benedictine black and the other in the undyed woolen habit of
a lay brother—were scything hay, watched over a paddock fence by a solitary mule, all of them forming a pleasing, bucolic miniature, like one on an illuminated manuscript, but throwing into relief the scene from hell that it was edging.
The monk straightened his back, saw them, threw down his scythe, and began running downhill, shouting and waving his arms. “Go back,” he was yelling, “we don’t need you. In the name of the Father, go away.”
Nearer, another monk strode energetically toward them from somewhere on their right in order to intercept the first. “James, Brother James,” he was calling out, “No. No, no, no. Let us remember our manners. If these are the king’s emissaries, they are our saviors.”
He reached them first, smiling. To Mansur, he said, “I give thanks to the king and to Almighty God for your coming. All the world knows of Arab skill in the sciences. I am Abbot Sigward.” He bent his head to each of the women as Adelia introduced herself, then Gyltha, then Allie—who got a special bow—and to Rhys. “Ladies, gentlemen, God’s blessings on you.”
Brother James came cantering up and went to his knees in the cinders. “Don’t let them in, my lord.” Long, nervous hands clutched at the skirt of the abbot’s scapular. “I beg you, send them away.”