So exemplary had he been that his fellow monks had elected him as their abbot when the old one died.
He’d taken it as a sign that God was relenting to him and might relent further if he could advance Glastonbury’s holiness and prosperity.
“Which, by the Lord’s grace, I did,” Abbot Sigward said simply. “With every improvement, I became certain that I had gained forgiveness at last.” He shook his head. “But God’s memory is longer than that, and so, it seems, is a Welsh bard’s. When King Henry sent to tell us to dig between the pyramids, I thought,
Is this Nemesis at last? Well, I shall accept her.
But no, I was reprieved yet
again; the bodies were taken to be those of King Arthur and Guinevere. The Lord has allowed me to work even harder for Him, I thought. Perhaps the fire that consumed my abbey was His final punishment, and now, in allowing my son and his friend to be misrepresented, they and I can bring the pilgrims back to Glastonbury.”
Startled, Adelia took her eyes off the island ahead to glance at the abbot. He’d laughed, actually laughed.
“Our Lord has humor,” he said to Rowley, “do you know that? He sent the true Nemesis in the guise of a Saracen and a woman—representatives of a race and a sex that the old Sigward despised.”
Adelia turned away, grateful that the voice had stopped at last. The only sound now came from the calling of a flock of geese flying inland.
“… Deinde, ego te absolve a peccatis tuis in nomine Patris, et Fili, et Spiritus Sancti.”
Rowley was pronouncing the absolution in a voice she hardly recognized.
Sigward said, “And now this poor child here, I would wish her absolved from sins which sprang from mine. Come along now, Hilda, you will feel the better for it.” He might have been urging the woman at his knee to take some medicine and buck up.
Adelia heard Hilda’s voice mutter something and Rowley’s, forced, granting her forgiveness in the name of his God.
Lazarus was close now, and Adelia could see why it imprisoned those on it. The Brue was becoming sluggish, oozing between rises of sand that buttressed the higher ground of the island, each with a pool at its lowest point. Sphagnum moss, that wonderful bandage for septic wounds, grew in plenty like a mat.
But there was no health here. The mats quivered and stank of rotting vegetation; the quicksand beneath them slurped as if an old man was sucking his teeth.
And . . . “Oh, no, look,” Adelia said.
A stag was floundering in one of the mats. Its front hooves thrashed at the moss and the sand beneath it. The antlered head turned this way and that as it tried to raise its lower body from the morass. It was bellowing in distress.
“Help it, can’t we help it?”
The abbot looked to Godwyn.
“Can
we help it?”
The man shook his head. “No.”
“We can pull it free,” Adelia begged.
“Too heavy,” Godwyn said. “The sand … it sucks, like. Increases weight tenfold. Be like dragging a house. That’d take us with it.”
“It’ll suffocate.” It was unbearable to watch, to listen to.
“No,” Godwyn said again gently. “He’ll not go down further. He’s floating, and he’ll go on floating. ’Tis high tide today—we’re in the estuary now, see. Then he’ll drown, poor creature. ’Tis the easier death.”
Adelia didn’t think so. Neither did the stag. They could still hear it bellowing as they rounded the island and approached a long jetty.
Beyond was a compound no less neat than a country village, with houses of wattle and daub thatched with reed. There were gardens, and fields containing cattle and sheep, a little stone church with a bell tower. Whatever else he’d done, Abbot Sigward had made his lepers as comfortable as he could.
Somebody was ringing the church bell, and people were coming down to the landing stage, shouting a welcome to the abbot.
Rowley turned to Adelia. “They don’t look like lepers.”
At this distance, they probably didn’t, Adelia thought. Some would still be ambulatory and able to work; others would not be lepers at all but were condemned to spend their lives here because of their contact with the disease.
Whatever they were, neither Emma nor Roetger, nor Pippy, was among them. But there were children. Oh, God, there were children. . . .
“Children?” she heard Rowley ask.
“Indeed,” the abbot told him brightly. “The Church would have lepers lead lives of chastity, and I am not supposed to perform marriages, but I do. And baptisms. I have learned the value of human as well as godly love.”
Like their houses, the people waiting for them on the landing stage were well accoutred though, differing from ordinary villagers, they were mostly dressed in uniform black with wide-brimmed hats not unlike a pilgrim’s. As the punt drew in and Godwyn tied up, carefully locking its hawser to a bollard, they crowded forward to help Abbot Sigward out, embracing him, kissing his hands, talking, some trying to pull him toward their houses to bless the sick that lay inside.
Anxious and distressed though she was, the scientist within Adelia saw the early signs on some of them: thinness from loss of appetite, twisted hands, blotches and eruptions on their faces, but even these were energized out of leprosy’s inevitable lassitude by the coming of the abbot.
If it hadn’t been for Emma, she’d have liked to question and examine. What was leprosy? Was it passed down from parent to child? Why did some catch it and others did not? Which conditions encouraged it, and which didn’t?
As it was . . . “Where are my friends?” she asked Godwyn sharply.
Rowley was grimacing at the sight of the people above him and scrambled ashore reluctantly to join Godwyn and Adelia on the landing stage, taking care to keep away from the crowd around Sigward.
Hilda remained kneeling on the floor of the punt, her head on the thwart the abbot had sat on, her eyes open and staring at nothing. “Back in a minute, sweetheart,” her husband told her. She didn’t move.
Leaving the abbot to the lepers, Rowley and Adelia followed Godwyn along the dirt track through the hamlet—except that now any resemblance to a normal village was gone. The people propped up against their doorways in the sun were not gossiping or weaving or tending to their children; they were being eaten alive, the disease chewing their flesh like a rat gnawing at a corpse. They had the dreadful similarity to one another that advanced leprosy gave to their faces, turning them lion-like.
The loss of feeling in their extremities, so that some had accidentally burned themselves or suffered cuts without knowing it, contributed to the absence of fingers and toes that necrosis had caused to drop off. One blind, bare-legged old man was unaware that a seagull was pecking at the stump of his foot.
Adelia shooed it off and, stooping, covered his legs with a flap of the blanket he sat on. Rowley pulled her away. “For God’s sake, don’t touch him. You can’t do anything.” He hurried her on.
Everything in Adelia screamed for her to do
something,
but she knew from what her foster father had told her of the disease that while opium could relieve pain in the early stages, these sufferers were beyond that; they must die slowly, inch by inch. Nothing was spared them, not even the stink from their rotting flesh.
“The firstborn of death.”
Rowley was quoting from the Book of Job.
Little wonder the Church maintained that these people would not go to hell when they died; they were in it while they lived. From one of the cottages came a mumbled cry for water, whether from a man or a woman it was impossible to tell. A little girl came
out with a pail and went running to a pump. That would do no good, either; the thirst at the end was inextinguishable.
They were beyond the village now, with a view of the far-off sea. The tide was coming in, refreshing the marshes and the air as if it wanted to wipe their memory of what they’d seen and smelled.
Let there be one good thing in this world,
Adelia thought.
Let Emma and Pippy be alive. Roetger, too.
“Where
are
they?”
Godwyn pointed ahead to where a grove of low trees sheltered a shepherd’s hut. “Didn’t want ’em near the lepers, did I?” he said.
Adelia broke into a run, scattering sheep as she went. Thank God, thank God, a thin filament of smoke was rising from a cooking fire.
There was a stream and a small, dirty child in rags building a dam across it with twigs. Adelia jumped the stream and scooped him up as she ran, covering him with kisses.
A scarecrow of a woman appeared at the door of the hut, shading her eyes, then dropped to her knees like a puppet whose strings were suddenly cut.
Adelia scooped her up, too, nearly squashing Pippy in the process. “It’s all right now, Em, my dear, my
dear
girl. It’s going to be all right.”
O
F THE THREE CASTAWAYS,
Roetger was in the worst condition, emaciated and with a fever. “He’s been so brave, ’Delia,” Emma said, crying. “We would have died without him.”
He had to be supported on the journey back to the landing stage, using a crutch under one shoulder and Rowley on the other side. Godwyn offered to help, but Emma spat at him. “Don’t you come near, don’t you come
near
us.”
“Godwyn saved your lives,” Adelia told her gently.
“I don’t care. Keep him away.”
What the landlord
was
able to do was steer them around the village so that they could approach the punt from another side and avoid the sights of the main street. They were taking a track that led past the backs of cottages when a scream came from the direction of the landing stage.
More shouts. Godwyn began running. Hampered as they were—Adelia was still carrying Pippy—they couldn’t keep up with him.
The bell in the church began ringing slow, single tolls that marked a death.
Now they could see the punt. It was empty. Godwyn was on the landing stage, struggling in the arms of two men holding him back. He was howling and crying.
Bewildered, Adelia looked to where people were pointing in distress.
Rowley said, “Sweet Mary save us.”
The tall figure of Abbot Sigward, reduced by distance, was striding out into the marsh. He had his arm around Hilda, who was clinging to him as he encouraged her along. Their feet sent up splashes of incoming tide.
Rowley turned on one of the men nearby. “Can we go after them?”
“Dursn’t,” the man said—he was crying. “Quicksand. God have mercy on ’em.”
Nothing to do but watch. The bell went on tolling. The two figures were up to their knees in water, but still the abbot surged forward, almost carrying the woman flopped against him.
As if something had suddenly clamped their legs, they became still and then, slowly, began to sink until only their shoulders showed above the rising, rippling tide. The abbot hoisted the
woman so that her head was level with his and for a minute or two—it seemed forever—that’s how they stayed.
At the last, the abbot’s arm came up to be outlined against a speedwell-blue sky, and they heard his voice echoing over the water.
“Lord Jesus, Son of God, have mercy on us.”
G
ODWYN HAD
to be prevented from following his wife, as if he could still drag her back. After a long, screaming struggle, he collapsed into inertia and drooped in the hands of his captors, his eyes never leaving the spot on the water where Hilda and the abbot had disappeared.
Everybody was in shock, the lepers bewildered. “But he were
happy,”
one of the men kept saying to Rowley of Abbot Sigward. “Give us Communion and blessed us. Saintly as ever, he was. Why’d he do that for?”
A woman moaned. “What we goin’ to do now? What’ll us do without un?”
“It was an accident,” Rowley told them, making Adelia start. “An accident. He, er, took the woman for a walk; she’d been upset. He forgot there was quicksand out there.”
It was a ludicrous explanation, but Rowley kept on giving it and, because it was the kindest, the lepers repeated it to themselves as they wept for their saint, preferring it to the evidence of their own eyes.
That’s what he’ll say when we get back,
Adelia thought,
and perhaps he’s right.
She grieved for Godwyn, grieved for the two souls who had gone to such an end, grieved for the lepers, but her care had to be for the three castaways who needed it as soon as possible. Long before it was decent, she was urging them into the punt, but it was some time before the bishop of Saint Albans could be persuaded to leave the distressed people on the quay; he had a priestly duty to the bereaved, and promises to make that they would not be abandoned.
Godwyn was heaved down into the boat. He sank onto the place his wife had occupied and stayed there, silent and helpless. It was the bishop of Saint Albans who poled them all back to Glastonbury.
With Adelia’s arm around her, Emma fell asleep where she sat, as if, having held up for her son’s and Roetger’s sake until now, she could pass the responsibility on to somebody else and rest at last. She was horribly thin; she and Roetger had seen to it that Pippy was fed as well as possible on the meager supplies Godwyn had smuggled to them on his trips. That, however, had meant going with-out themselves. The lepers, apparently, had been kind and offered to bring them food, but Emma had refused to accept anything from their hands and screamed at them to keep away.
Apart from being extremely dirty, young Lord Wolvercote was in comparatively good fettle; Adelia had clutched him to her so that he shouldn’t see the tragedy as it occurred and, though he’d been upset by the screams, his youth kept him from dwelling on it. His only fear was that they were taking him back to the Pilgrim to be locked into its tunnel. “Don’t want to go to the black place,” he said. “That nasty woman frightened Mama.”
“No more tunnels for you, young man. The nasty woman’s gone,” Rowley told him, but he glanced inquiringly at Adelia.
She grimaced in return. “It has to be the inn,” she said in Latin.
“They’re none of them fit to travel any farther. Roetger certainly isn’t.”