Again, she saw Eustace, helpless, flames licking through the grass toward his face, desperately sawing with his knife through his own gristle and bone to get free, tearing the flesh of his little finger away from the tooth of the trap that had nicked the edge of its proximal phalanx.
She watched him wrap the dreadful injury in moss and grass and blunder his way up the hill to die of blood loss or poisoning, praying to God or perhaps to Arthur for a relief that never came.
“Poor old Useless,” Alf said quietly.
“An’ you’ll clear him for us?” Will asked.
“Yes,” Adelia told him, “I shall tell the bishop of Saint Albans, and he will tell the sheriff.”
She bent over the trap, mentally going over its evidence once
more, clearing away the weeds in order that the position of the burned finger bones could be seen more clearly.
Mansur shouted.
She turned round, alarmed.
The tithing had gone. Where the men had been seconds ago, there were merely burned stones and the rise of a hillside. It was as if the sun had melted them away.
“Come back, come
back,”
Adelia yelled. “You haven’t told me about Emma.” But her scream raised nothing but a flight of warblers from the undergrowth.
The only thing to show that the tithing had ever been present was the harp nestling in Rhys’s arms.
R
OWLEY WAS SO ANGRY
he could barely talk to her. And Adelia was so tired that despite a nap after having been put to bed by a solicitous and relieved Gyltha on her return to the Pilgrim, she resented his attitude. Would he have preferred it if she’d been raped and murdered?
But no, her crime, it seemed, was in ignoring the hunting calls of his search and not throwing herself in front of his horse in gratitude at being rescued.
“I didn’t
need
rescuing,” she protested. “I was in no danger.”
“Kidnapped by a load of cutthroats to view a skeleton is your idea of an outing, is it?”
“They were not cutthroats, they were Eustace’s frankpledge. We happened to meet in the road last night, they asked if I would accompany them to the cave where they had found him—and I went.”
“As one does,” Rowley said.
“I hoped they might have news of Emma.”
“Ah, yes, your disappearing friend. Then, of course, you had to go.”
She ignored his sarcasm. “Did you inquire for her?”
“Thank you, yes, I wasted more time yesterday questioning the
sheriff’s reeve on your behalf. I had him called to the Bishop’s Palace.” Momentarily, Rowley’s irritation was diverted to something else. “By God, there’s incompetence here; robbery on that road is frequent, apparently. ‘Wait until Henry hears of it,’ I told the little bastard. ’The king will have your sheriff’s bollocks. He doesn’t like travelers being assaulted on his highways… .’”
“Emma?” Adelia reminded him.
“There has been no report of such a cavalcade as hers being attacked, nor any likelihood that it could have vanished without trace—the scum that inhabit that forest only batten on parties of two or three. I told you, she’s gone elsewhere, no need to worry about her.”
Certainly,
he
didn’t. He turned on Mansur, speaking in Arabic. “And
your
disappearance? I suppose these rogues asked
you
equally politely to go with them?”
Mansur nodded. His eyes were half shut from fatigue—he’d had less sleep than Adelia.
It was the answer they had agreed on between them as, without bothering to talk to the monks, the two of them had helped each other back from the abbey wall to the inn.
The temptation to inform on Will the baker and the others because they hadn’t honored their agreement to give what information they held about Emma was great—
very
great—but Adelia and Mansur had sworn not to betray them, and oaths must be kept.
Reluctant to accompany him back to the abbey, Adelia told Rowley of the proofs of Eustace’s innocence awaiting him by the wall. While he was gone, she went upstairs to wash, put on clean clothes, and be lectured all over again by Gyltha, who punished her for a night of anxiety by brushing her hair with force. “We was
worried. Well, Allie wasn’t—I told her you’d been called out to physic somebody.”
Adelia smiled down at her daughter. “Where did she get that?” The child was sitting on the floor regarding with intense concentration a birdcage in which fluttered a chaffinch.
“Millie. It come flying in when she was cleanin’. She found the cage from some’eres and gave it to the little ’un. That girl ain’t as daft as she looks.”
“No.” The deaf and dumb were universally regarded as half-witted—and treated as such. But, Adelia thought, there’s perception there; Millie notices things.
“Next time as you go off without saying, you leave me a message saying as you’re well,” Gyltha said, still brushing hard.
“Oh, I’m sorry,
ow,
I didn’t have my slatebook and chalk with me.”
“Couldn’t have ’ciphered it even if as you had.” Gyltha regarded reading and writing as exercises reserved for the effete. “A twig or summat’ll do. Just so’s I know it’s you.”
“I told you, they abducted me. There wasn’t
time… .
” There still wasn’t; Rowley’s voice was echoing up the stairs, demanding her immediate presence in the parlor. “Lord, I’m not dressed yet.”
“Put this on.” Gyltha had been spending her evenings cutting out and stitching a swath of green silk acquired on the journey from Wales.
Adelia regarded the resultant pretty tunic. “You just want me to look nice for
him.
The old brown one will do.”
“Wear it.” When Gyltha was implacable, Adelia gave in.
The two women plus Allie and her birdcage—Adelia was damned if she was going to be without her daughter’s company again—descended the stairs.
Abbot Sigward, it appeared, had returned from Lazarus Island, and Rowley had brought him and brothers Aelwyn, James, and Titus back to the inn for a conference.
Now the four monks sat silently together along one side of the Pilgrim’s dining table, their black robes and hooded heads making a matte contrast to everybody else’s brighter reflection in the board’s high polish—Adelia’s green, particularly.
Hilda, ready to give her opinion, leaned across the hatch, which, like those in a monastery refectory, gave on to the kitchen. Behind her, the clatter of pans and an appetizing smell suggested that Godwyn was preparing food.
Only two of the inn’s people were missing. Rhys was upstairs asleep, still clutching his harp. Millie had been sent by her mistress to sweep the courtyard.
Allie was put on the floor, studying the bird in the cage, talking to it, tempting it with various tidbits to see which it liked best, her soft, inviting chirruping providing a background to the harsh tone of the man who was her father.
Rowley, still in hunting clothes yet very much a bishop, was in command. “We’re agreed, then. The sheriff shall be told that the man, Eustace, is to be exonerated.” When there was no reply, he pressed the point. “My lord abbot?”
There was a sigh from beneath Abbot Sigward’s cowl. “Yes, yes. That must be done. The fire was an accident.”
“I suspect it always was,” Rowley said. “But caused by whom?”
Abbot Sigward made to get up. “That is a matter for discussion in the privacy of our chapter.”
“No, it isn’t.” The bishop of Saint Albans hadn’t finished. “A man was wrongly suspected, his frankpledge falsely arraigned, and only the efforts of my lord Mansur here proved their innocence.
A monk died in the flames. A town burned as well as an abbey. Therefore, this is also a civil matter, and those of us here who have been closely concerned have a right to hear it.”
He knows,
Adelia thought.
He knows who it was.
He’s been talking to the lay brother, listening to Hilda.
God help us, I think I know now.
From over the hatch Hilda said defiantly, “An old trap don’t prove nothing. That was Useless Eustace caused the fire. Di’n’t Brother Aloysius tell us when he was killed trying to put out the flames, poor soul?”
“So you say.”
Hilda bridled. “Heard him with my own ears, I did, for wasn’t I putting salve on his poor burns? ’Eustace, Eustace,’ he was saying. His last words, the dear.”
“Brother Peter was there, too, and he informs me that the words were not so distinct.” The bishop’s voice was quiet.
“Well, ‘Eu … Eu,’ then,” Hilda said. “But Useless was who he meant.”
“Are you sure it wasn’t ’You … You …’?
And who was he looking at when he said it?”
In the silence, there was only the murmurings from the child on the floor: “Pretty bird, white stripe, pretty dickie.”
The last rays of the evening sun coming through the window shone on the long-fingered, blue-veined hands of the abbot clasped tightly on the table—the hands of a tense old man. His face, like those of the other monks, was invisible under his cowl.
At a glance from Adelia, Gyltha leaned down to pick up Allie and her birdcage. “That pretty dickie do need some air,” she said, and carried them both outside.
In the room the silence went on, inflating like a bubble to the point where it must burst.
Brother Titus broke it with a scream. “Stop it.
Stop it.
It was me.
He was looking at me. Sweet Mary, Mother of God,
it was me.
I’d been at the wine in the crypt, I was drunk.” He began banging his head on the table.
The other monks didn’t move.
“And you left a candle burning?” Rowley was remorseless.
“It fell over. It caught the screen. I didn’t notice… .” He turned to the abbot. He had blood on his forehead where it had hit the wood. “Dear God … how to be forgiven … All this time … I’ve been in hell with the devil… . I have scourged myself til the blood ran. I wanted … but it was too massive, everything gone … Aloysius … I couldn’t believe … I couldn’t … Father, forgive me.”
He buried his head into the abbot’s shoulder, blubbering like an enormous naughty toddler seeking its mother.
And Sigward cradled him like a mother. “I know, my son, I know.”
Yes,
thought Adelia suddenly.
You did, didn’t you?
She got up and left the room. Mansur followed her out; this was business for the Christian Church.
They went into the courtyard, where Allie was dithering over her birdcage. “Shall I, Gyltha, shall I?”
“Up to you,” Gyltha told her.
Allie took a deep breath. “I think I will, then.” She untied the cage’s wicker door and opened it. The chaffinch fluttered out, perched on the wellhead for a moment, and then flew off.
“That’s better, isn’t it?” Allie asked, the tears falling.
Adelia grabbed her and kissed her. “I love you, Almeisan. So much.”
After a while, they heard the inn’s front door open and the shuffle of Titus’s feet as his brother monks helped him home.
Rowley came stamping out into the courtyard. “Well, that’s that.”
“Is it? What will you do about it?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. Nothing, probably. It was an accident, what’s done is done.
Quieta non movere.”
So sleeping dogs are to be left to lie, are they?
Adelia thought. She said, “The abbot knew.”
“Suspected, perhaps.”
“And said nothing.”
He flared up. “In the name of God, Adelia, what would you have me do? You’ve just seen a man destroyed. Isn’t that enough?”
Yes, she had, and was sorry for it, but other men were being allowed to carry a blame of which they were guiltless.
Kindly old Abbot Sigward … she would never feel the same for him again.
“Mother Church is all that stands between us and the devil,” the bishop of Saint Albans said. “If she loses respect, we are all damned.”
He turned to look at his daughter. “And what are you crying for?” The residue of his anger at other people gave the question irritability rather than the concern he probably felt.
Adelia rose immediately to stand between them. “She’s crying because she let her bird go.”
“Why? I thought she favored the thing.”
“She did, but she couldn’t bear to see it caged. She wanted it to be free.”
“Oh, God, she’s going to grow up like you.” He untied his horse’s reins from the rail, mounted, and rode off.
And that,
thought Adelia,
is the crux of everything wrong between us.
Indoors, she was met by Hilda. The landlady’s face was vicious. “See what you done to my dear abbot? You and that darky happy now?”
Adelia’d had enough. From the very first, the protestations by this woman that Eustace was responsible for the fire had been because, in her heart of hearts, she’d known he wasn’t. “Your dear abbot deserved it,” she hissed back and, ushering Gyltha and Allie before her, went upstairs to bed … and dreamed.
This time the queen was being walled up in a cave by unseen hands so that the layers of stones rose one upon the other, as if by themselves, while the woman behind them pleaded with Adelia to stop them until the last stone went into place and her voice was silenced.
Adelia woke up saying, “All right, all right, I’m coming to you.”
She took Mansur, Gyltha, and Allie with her. Making sure that nobody watched them, they toiled up the Tor from the burrow under the abbey wall and followed the trail of bruised grass and snapped twigs left by the descent down it the day before. Gyltha carried provisions, Mansur an iron bar and a lantern, Adelia a knife stolen from the inn’s kitchen, and Allie a frog and various beetles she picked up on the way.
Despite the trail, it would have been easy to miss the cave with its curtaining of branches if it hadn’t been for a pile of mule manure hardening in the sun outside it.
The removal of the withy screen caused Gyltha to hold her nose and protest at the stink. “Me and you’ll stay outside, miss,” she told Allie, but Adelia felt this was too hard; what child could resist a secret cave? Besides, Eustace’s bones had been reunited and covered with a patched cloak belonging to Ollie, the most silent member of the tithing.