Adelia waved as one of the soldiers led her horse into a trot.
“Halfway between Wells and Glastonbury,” Emma shouted.
Adelia would have waved again, but she was now at a gallop and had to hold on with both hands.
The galloping proceeded, it seemed, for days. There was no planning for overnight stops such as Emma had made. When it was too dark to go on, they put up at whatever hostelry was available.
Their first night had been spent at a miserable tavern on the way to the Severn Estuary. It was little more than a shack where everyone slept together on one raised platform covered in straw. The next morning they were infested with fleas and Adelia found that, in their haste, the pack with her clean clothes in it had been left behind with Emma. The officer—his name was Bolt, which, Gyltha pointed out, “suits the bastard”—refused to divert to the
local market where she could have purchased some sort of raiment. “Sorry, mistress. You’ll have to grin and bear it.”
“King’s orders, I suppose,” she said viciously. It was a phrase she was already sick of, and she knew she’d hear it a great deal more.
“ ’S right.” It wasn’t that the man was unkind, but his lord king had insisted on speed, a requirement that literally overrode all others.
On reaching the Severn they’d transferred to a boat and disembarked at Cardiff Castle on the Welsh coast, their destination, only to discover that Henry had moved on with his troops.
“Been another rebellion,” Bolt told them after making inquiries. “Young Geoffrey’s holding out at Caerleon ’gainst another Welsh attack. The king’s gone to relieve him.”
“We’ll have to wait here, then,” Adelia had said, relieved by the thought of a rest.
“No, mistress. We’d better get on.”
“Into a battle? You can’t take us into danger.”
Bolt was astonished by her lack of faith in Henry Plantagenet. “There won’t be no battle by the time we gets there. The king’ll have mopped up that load of bloody Taffies quicker’n sixpence.”
And so he had, if the heads on the battlements and the quiet, darkened countryside all around were anything to go by.
Having quelled the revolt, Henry was establishing the peace—not that there was any sign of it in barbican or bailey, both in a commotion as soldiers tried to pack up weaponry against a counterflow of clerks unpacking chests of documents, all this among braying mules, frightened, scattering hens and pigs, and a cracked voice from a high window shouting orders to those below. “Where are those bloody maps? I need more ink up here. For the love of God, will you bastards
hurry.”
The place stank of urine and manure, nor did the smell improve
as Adelia and the others were rushed up staircases and past arrow slits where archers had stood day and night repelling an encircling enemy.
The king was striding up and down a slightly less noisome though just as turbulent chamber, dictating the terms of two different treaties with two different and defeated rebel Welsh lords to two different scribes, occasionally shouting instructions out the window, while a fusty little man ran alongside him, trying to apply leeches to a bare and inflamed-looking royal arm. In a corner, a young man whom Adelia recognized as the king’s illegitimate son and general-in-chief, Geoffrey, was talking to several tired-looking insigniaed men in heavy fur mantles, presumably Welsh chieftains. Pages were laying out food on a table, kicking away sniffing hounds as they did it. A line of hawks on perches were screeching and flapping their wings. Incongruously, a limp-looking man in another corner was playing a small harp and singing to it, though what it was was impossible to hear.
Captain Bolt announced the newcomers in a shout that only just penetrated the noise: “The lord Mansur, Mistress Adelia, and …” He looked despairingly at Gyltha, who was holding Allie. “And company.”
Henry glanced up. “You took your damn time. Sit down somewhere until I’ve finished… .”
“No,” Adelia said clearly.
Everybody stopped what they were doing, except the harpist, who went on quietly singing to himself.
Past caring, itching with fleas and fury, Adelia told him, “The Lord Mansur and company require a bath and a rest. And they need them now.”
All eyes looked in her direction and then, in one slow movement,
were turned on the king. Henry’s temper when he was flouted was renowned—Thomas à Becket had died from it.
He blew out a breath. “Geoffrey.”
“Yes, my lord?”
“Is there a bath in the castle?”
“I don’t know, my lord.” The young man’s mouth twitched. “A bath wasn’t, er, part of our armory.”
“Better find one. And some beds.”
“And clean clothes,” Adelia said. “Women’s.”
The king sighed again. “Samite? Lace? Any particular size?”
Adelia ignored the sarcasm. “Clean will do,” she said.
At the door she turned and addressed the little doctor: “And if you’re supposed to be treating that wound, get those leeches off it and put on some bog moss—there’s plenty of the bloody stuff in the valleys; we’ve been squelching through it for two days.”
T
HE BATH TURNED OUT
to be a washtub of enormous proportions, and the soldiers who hauled it up to the two rooms allocated to their guests at the top of a tower, along with great ewers of hot water, were out of breath and resentful when they got it there.
An inexorable Adelia sent them back down for soap and towels.
The beds, when they arrived, were rickety, but the straw and blankets that came with them were clean.
After a long night’s sleep, Adelia woke up feeling better, if chastened by the memory of her behavior toward a king whose empire stretched from the borders of Scotland to the Pyrenees. Apparently, though, it was even yet having its effect, for a polite knock on the door heralded the entrance of the emperor’s bastard son, Geoffrey, still amused.
He was carrying an armful of women’s clothing. “We, er, liberated these from one of the Welsh chieftain’s wives,” he said. “Don’t worry, she has others, though I’m afraid the lady favors rather more avoirdupois than you do, but it was that or a mail shirt.”
Adelia clutched her blanket more closely about her—last night she’d thrown everything she’d been wearing out the window. Luckily, Allie’s extra clothes had been included in Gyltha’s pack, along with Mansur’s, and were fit for them to wear. “I’m grateful, my lord.”
“Was the breakfast to your satisfaction? The cook’s Welsh as well.”
“Congratulate him for me,” she said. Skewered lamb, the tastiest she’d ever eaten, along with buttermilk and a form of cake called
bara brith
so rich that even Mansur hadn’t been able to finish all of it.
“Then when you’re dressed, my lord king would be happy to receive you and my lord Mansur. Only when you are ready, of course.” The young man went to the door and then turned back. “Oh, and one of our lads carved this for the little one.” He knelt to put his face on a level with Allie’s and handed her a wooden doll.
Allie curtsied nicely. “I’ll call him Poppy, like the ones on the roof.”
“Poppies?”
“She’s referring to the flowers decorating the battlements,” Adelia said, getting angry again. “The ones separated from their stalks.”
“Ah, yes.” The young man’s eyes were on Allie, but he spoke to Adelia. “You see, little one, they were already picked. The king doesn’t take the heads off poppies unless they’re dead.” As he turned to leave, and Allie began playing with her doll, he added,
“Hangs a few, of course, to encourage the others, but on the whole he’s magnanimous to his flowers.”
“Nice lad that,” Gyltha said, when Geoffrey had gone. She began unfolding the clothes he’d brought. “Gawd help us.”
With Mansur behind her, Adelia waded down the stairs in a skirt and bodice that had been pinned up and belted to enable her to keep them on. Since, at her age, it wasn’t respectable to go bareheaded, she also wore the Welshwoman’s headdress, an elaborate affair with something like curtaining on either side, which rested heavily on her ears.
Casually, to the page who was leading the way, she asked, “Is the bishop of Saint Albans in the castle?”
“He was, mistress, but he’s gone to Saint David’s to treat with the Welsh bishop.”
The king’s chamber had been cleared of chieftains and servants but retained the king, a scribe writing at the table, dogs, hawks, and the softly singing harpist. The page ushered them in, announced them, and then stood at attention with his back to the door.
Still dictating, Henry Plantagenet stumped up and down on legs that were becoming bandy from days of traveling his empire on horseback. As usual, he was dressed hardly better than one of his grooms, but, again as usual, he generated a power that sent out an almost palpable energy.
Mansur salaamed, and Henry nodded at him, then walked round Adelia, studying her swamping attire. “Can you hear me in there?”
“Yes, my lord. Thank you, my lord.”
“You’re a rude and graceless woman, you know.”
“Yes, my lord, I’m sorry, my lord.” She looked at the king’s arm
on which the soft, vividly pale-green flower heads of sphagnum moss were held in place by a bandage. “How’s your wound?”
“Better. Ready for some employment now?”
“I suppose so, my lord.”
“See that fellow there?” The king jerked a thumb at the harpist. “Name’s Rhys something-or-other. He’s a bard. Comes from an unpronounceable bloody hole on the coast.” He might have been introducing an interesting breed of hound. “Stand up, Rhys, and greet the lord Mansur and Mistress Aguilar.” To Adelia, he said, “He started this business, so he’s going to accompany you to Glastonbury.”
Rhys rose and bowed vaguely in Adelia and Mansur’s direction.
“Glastonbury?” Adelia was shrill. “My lord, I was already
going
to Glastonbury, or at least nearby. Lady Emma of Wolvercote and I were on our way to Wells. You could have sent a messenger and saved yourself trouble.”
And me God knows how many bone-shaking miles
, she thought.
What business?
“Master Rhys is going to tell you a story, aren’t you, Rhys?” Henry said, his attention still on the bard as if about to make him do a trick for the visitors. “And in the name of God, don’t
sing
it.” To Adelia and Mansur, he said, “The bugger keeps
singing.”
“About Uncle Caradoc, is it?” Rhys asked.
“Of course it is, you clown. What else are you here for? Tell them.”
The bard stepped forward. A thin, droop-shouldered man with protruding teeth, he put Adelia in mind of an elongated rabbit. Despite the king’s injunction, his hand kept straying to his harp before he remembered and took it away again. Even so, his speaking voice, which belied his looks by being a pleasing tenor, had a lilt that was very nearly song, though the scribe at the table was unmoved by it and the bard’s tale was told against the scratching
of a quill, as well as the sound of soldierly activity coming through the open window from the bailey below.
So, in semi-song, Adelia and Mansur were taken back twenty years ago to when Rhys had been an adolescent at Glastonbury Abbey. “Never suited to the monastic life, me,” he said. “No opportunity for true poetry.”
He told them of the earthquake that had struck the Somerset Levels in which Glastonbury stood. “Terrible, terrible it was, like the last trump trembling the heavens… .” A hiss from the king moved him on. “And my good uncle Caradoc, dying he was, had a waking dream …”
“A vision,” the king said.
“Three hooded lords, see, bearing a coffin to the graveyard and burying it.”
“Between the two pyramids,” the king prompted.
“Two pyramids there are in the Glastonbury graveyard, very ancient, and Uncle Caradoc, he says to me, ‘Look, bach, look down there in the fissure. They are showing me where Arthur takes his long rest, and by God’s grace I have been witness to it. Now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace.’ And He did, for beautiful,
beautiful
was my uncle Caradoc’s ending. …”
“God rest him,” Henry said, “and get on with it.”
“And the next morning we buried that good old uncle of mine, but no sign of another coffin, only disturbed earth all over the graveyard—result of the earthquake, see. Terrible, terrible, that earthquake, like the last days.…”
Tapping his foot, the king said, “But you didn’t pass on what Uncle Caradoc had seen, did you?”
“No, oh, no.”
“We had to beat it out of him,” Henry said, looking at Adelia. “He’s been keeping it secret for twenty years. Only person he told
was his mother.” He turned back to Rhys. “And
why
did you keep it a secret?”
“Well, there.” Rhys’s large, vague eyes became sly. “There’s some would believe…”
“And you’re one of them, you little bastard,” the king interrupted.
“…believe as it couldn’t have been the burial of King Arthur that my uncle Caradoc saw.”
“And why couldn’t it?”
“Well,” Rhys said, still sly, “there’s some credit that Arthur’s only sleeping, see. In a crystal cave at Ynis-Witrin, the Isle of Glass. Avalon.”
“Which is Glastonbury,” Henry said briskly. He gestured to the page at the door. “Take him down to the kitchen and feed him again.” To Adelia he said, “The bugger’s always hungry.” As the page ushered Rhys out, he shouted after him, “And don’t
sing.”
When the door closed, the king said, “Well?”
“Yes, my lord,” said Adelia. “But well what?”
“I’ll tell you well what. He informed us of all this when we were at Cardiff—we’ve been dragging him round with us ever since—and right away I sent to Glastonbury’s abbot and told him to set his monks digging between the two pyramids in the graveyard and find that coffin.”
Adelia frowned. “So you think it was a real vision, my lord?”
“Of course it was real. The monks have found the thing.” Henry waved a parchment at her, setting its large seal swinging. “This is a letter from Abbot Sigward, informing me they’ve dug up a coffin sixteen foot down, exactly between the pyramids. Two skeletons in it, one big, one small, Arthur
and
Guinevere, God bless her. Two for the price of one.”
Adelia nodded carefully. “They dug it up
after
the fire, did they?”