Grave Goods aka Relics of the Dead

TWELVE

A DELIA MADE THEM lift Rowley out first. It took the added help of brothers James and Aelwyn to do it; Brother Titus was fully occupied in restraining the howling, kicking Hilda.

When it was Adelia’s turn, she found herself rising through a wide hole and into the rubble of what had once been the house of Glastonbury ’s abbots, near the abbey’s landing stage.

The monks wanted to take them both to the Abbot’s kitchen immediately, but Adelia refused to let them move Rowley. She knelt beside him, begging him to come back from wherever he’d gone, until she saw air going easily in and out of his nostrils. He opened his eyes-they had sense in them-and said her name, at which point she sat back, allowing a prayer of such thankfulness to leave her as must have lanced upward through the ragged clouds that crossed and recrossed a pale, indifferent moon, up and up until it reached the God of mercy who had granted yet another resurrection.

Between them, Aelwyn and James supported Rowley across the charred grass to the kitchen, Titus carrying the still-shrieking Hilda after them. Adelia followed behind, leaning heavily on the abbot’s arm.

“No, no,” he said, as she tried to thank him. “You owe your lives to this good man.” He laid his hand on the shoulder of Godwyn, walking silently beside them. “We would never have known otherwise. Indeed, I had forgotten there was a tunnel. Built by one of my ancient predecessors, perhaps, in the time of the Danish invasions, and its hatch rusted these many years. It was when Godwyn found he couldn’t open it alone that he came running to us for help, did you not, my son?” When the landlord didn’t answer, he added, “I fear there are questions to answer, but we shall leave them until you and our good bishop are recovered.”

She was cold and couldn’t stop trembling. Her dripping skirt was chilly against her legs. Heat had gone with the storm, leaving cool air scenting a reviving countryside, and, her mind numbed, she could do nothing but breathe it in. Being freed from the danger she and Rowley had shared hadn’t lessened the intensity of its last moments; the people around her, even Hilda and her noise, were wraiths on the edges of it. Certainly there must be questions to answer, a thousand of them, but at the moment they fluttered like moths beyond her grasp.

Her body appreciated the warmth of the kitchen, but still the one solid thing in it was Rowley, who’d been seated in its only chair.

“Marsh cudweed,” she said, automatically. “Get him an infusion of marsh cudweed.” It stimulated the breathing system.

She heard him say, “Sod that. I’ll have brandy.” Such music to her ears that her wits came back and she began to be aware of other things. One of which was that their savior was the Pilgrim’s landlord.

Godwyn. A good thing.

It took some adjustment of thought; for a day or more, the man had capered in her mind as the personification of evil.

They were still having trouble with Hilda. Muttering prayers to deflect the curses the woman directed at them, brothers Titus and James were having to bind her waist with rope, attaching it to a hook in the wall, to stop her from launching an attack on her husband. Her cap had come off so that her hair stood around her head like a ginger-and-gray badger’s. Loops of spit hung from her bared teeth.

The abbot shook his head at her with real grief. “I fear she has gone mad, poor soul.”

“An affliction of women at a certain age, so I’m told,” Brother Aelwyn said, and his abbot nodded.

Godwyn stood in front of his wife, pleading. “I couldn’t, sweetheart, could I? For the sake of thy soul, I couldn’t let ee do it. Not to these two, and one of ’em a bishop, not to the others.”

Hilda spat at him.

“Others?” the abbot asked sharply.

“No-oo.” Hilda tossed herself forward and was jerked back by the rope. “Traitor, traitor, traitor.”

Others? Others? Again, it was a revelation for Adelia to remember that she and Rowley had gone into the tunnel expecting to find corpses-and had encountered none. The long grief for Emma and her child was replaced by a desperate hope. “Are they alive? Where are they?”

“Are we talking about the lady who went missing?” The abbot was bewildered.

“See, I couldn’t bear for them others to die-she’d have murder on her soul. And there was a little un with ’em,” Godwyn said, “but I couldn’t let ’em free or they’d have told on her. Well, I couldn’t, could I? ’S only acause she wouldn’t stop.” He turned back to his wife. “You wouldn’t stop, sweetheart. The bishop, this lady… it couldn’t go on, could it?” There were tears on his face.

“Where are they?”

“ Lazarus Island.”

“Lazarus?” The abbot was sharp with him. “You’ve kept three people on Lazarus for over a month? Impossible-the lepers would have told me.”

Godwyn hunched. “I said to ’ em as I wouldn’t be a-bringing you over again iffen they said anything. I’m shamed, master, but I was waiting to let things settle down like, for Hilda to get back to her right mind.” He looked at his wife again. “You wouldn’t, though, sweetheart, you got worse.”

Abbot Sigward shook his head and sat down.

“See,” Godwyn said, “them others was in a bad way, bein’ down in the tunnel so long. Very bad way they was, the big fella and the little boy ’specially, and the woman, she agreed to anythin’ to keep ’ em alive. I had to wait til the missus were out of the inn, see, before I could let ’ em up. I told ’em if they wanted to stay livin’, they must do like I said. So I rowed ’em across to Lazarus.” His shoulders drooped. “ ’S finished now, any old way. Couldn’t let it happen again, could I? She weren’t going to stop.”

Hilda spat at him again.

“Is finished, sweetheart,” Godwyn said, pleading with her once more. And then to the abbot, “They’ll let her off, won’t they, master? For being gone mad, they’ll let her off. You’ll tell em. ’Twas all for you. All as she’s done, ’twas ever for you.”

“Me?” Sigward stared at him.

“Just tell us if they’re alive,” Adelia prompted sharply. There wasn’t time for side issues. “Are they alive?”

“Didn’t know what else to do,” Godwyn said, still addressing the abbot. He jerked his head toward his wife. “They’d a-told on her otherwise. Been smugglin’ them supplies to Lazarus when I could.” His shoulders drooped. “It’s finished now, any road, God-a-mercy on both our souls.”

Lepers. They’d been marooned with lepers.

Adelia clutched at the abbot’s arm. “We’ve got to fetch them. Now. Please, we must go now.”

Though trying to keep up with events, Sigward was firm on this. “We can go nowhere in the dark. In the morning, my child; we’ll do what has to be done when dawn comes.”

Yes, dawn. It was night now, though she had a job to remember which night. She supposed it must be only this morning that she’d hidden and watched Gyltha, Allie, and Mansur set off for Wells, a matter of hours since the storm had sent the rain and darkness in which Millie had…

Millie.

Adelia clutched at the abbot again. “The girl Millie. Hilda attacked her…”

“Where did this happen?”

“At the inn. I saw her fall… I must see to her…”

“You will stay here.” Sigward had taken authority. “Brother James? To the inn, if you please.”

The monk bowed and went out into the night, taking with him the last of Adelia’s immediate responsibilities and leaving her limp.

She was guided to a bench at the table, felt the smooth clay of a beaker pressed against her mouth, and tasted brandy. She swallowed a little of it, laid her head on the board, listening to Hilda rave and Abbot Sigward asking questions that Rowley was answering… and went to sleep.

Even during the dream, she was irritated by it. Guinevere was an irrelevance now, and the sleeping Adelia didn’t want to be bothered with her, but the woman with a skull’s face came walking forward out of the mist. This time she had Arthur’s Excalibur in her hand; this time she spoke. “You are close now,” she said. “You are close to me. Come nearer.”

Crossly, Adelia woke up, not frightened-what dream could overtop the terror of reality?-merely resentful that her rest had been disturbed and left her with a nagging sense of a duty not done.

It was still dark outside, but the light of its fire showed that the kitchen was full of bodies-only the comfortable sound of snoring dispelled the impression that there’d been a massacre.

Opposite her, brothers James and Aelwyn slept, their cowled heads using the table as a pillow. Other figures, just discernible in the shadows, lay scattered around the floor on palliasses produced from somewhere. A hammock slung from two flitch hooks contained the bishop of Saint Albans. Adelia got up and hurried over to him, dislodging a cloak that someone had laid over her in the night.

Rowley’s color was good; so was his breathing. Without waking him, she smoothed his hair from his face before investigating the others on the floor.

The abbot lay on his side, one elegant hand around his chin, as if he was thinking, though his eyes were tight shut. Next to him squatted Brother Titus, snoring louder than anybody, his head cradled on his knees-a sleeping guardian of Hilda, who was stretched out nearby, the rope around her waist still attached to its hook. The woman’s eyelids were only half closed, and her teeth were bared, which, though she too was asleep, gave her the appearance of a chained, recumbent dog ready to snarl at any intruder.

Before Adelia had slept, Rowley, Sigward, and the other monks had been agreeing that Hilda was mad; it had settled everything for them-a neat, all-encompassing explanation that might save her from the gallows under the law that the insane, not being responsible for their actions, should escape execution. It had been male reasoning for the mysterious turbulence that they seemed to think affected women during the menopause. Last night, in the discussion that Adelia had been too tired to enter into, Rowley had been adamant that in her madness Hilda had felt impelled to protect Glastonbury from the Arthur and Guinevere skeletons being proved a fraud.

There was no cause to think otherwise; the woman was undoubtedly deranged. Equally without doubt, the Pilgrim’s-and the abbey’s-future depended on supplicants coming to the grave of King Arthur.

And yet, to Adelia now, it didn’t answer. It could only have been Hilda who’d tried to bury Mansur and herself-the woman had a positive propensity for entombing people. Such savagery argued a deeper, more urgent reason, if reason there was.

Adelia moved on to peer at the body nearest the door. Millie, thank God. The girl was breathing steadily. There was a plaster on her head, bound in place with linen. The sallow skin of her face was no paler than it always was. Another one, then, who, with luck, had taken no harm from the desperate night.

The only person missing was Godwyn.

Adelia went out to attend to nature. Rejecting what the gentry called the odeur de merde emanating from the trench latrine with its neatly holed plank that the monks had dug near their kitchen garden-so enriching for the vegetables-she found some convenient bushes, then went to the pump just outside the kitchen itself for a wash.

In the east, the sky was beginning to lighten. Somewhere a thrush was attempting its first song of the day.

It would be dawn soon, and if a merciful God could again extend His munificence and allow the three souls on Lazarus Island to be found alive and well, she, Vesuvia Adelia Rachel Ortese Aguilar, would be forever in His debt.

A figure netting trout from the stew by the light of a lantern gave a hail and came stalking toward her.

Brother Peter appeared friendlier than on their previous meetings. “Here,” he said, “that darky wizard’s a proper marvel, in’t he? Done a good job for”-he paused to wink-”you know who. Think he’d like some of me pumpkins? They’ve come on wonderful well with all this sun, if the storm ain’t ruined ’em.”

Yes, Adelia told him, sighing, the lord Mansur would be pleased to be rewarded with pumpkins for having saved Will and the tithing.

He lingered. “Heard as there was a right to-do last night. What were you and the bishop doin’ down that bloody hole?”

“Not enjoying ourselves, I can tell you that,” she said.

“Mad as May butter, that Hilda. Allus was. Never could reckon as how poor old Godwyn put up with her.”

Adelia had a thought. “Could you do me a favor, Brother Peter?”

They went to the site of the tunnel, its lid still lying on one side. Adelia couldn’t bear to look into the hole, but, on her instructions, the lay brother clambered down happily enough and emerged with the box and sword left on its steps. They were dry; the water hadn’t reached them-indeed, it had retreated. “What’s these doin’ down there?” he asked.

“Can I borrow your lantern?”

When he gave it to her, she merely thanked him and turned away before he could ask more questions.

…

THE BOX INTRIGUED ADELIA; to have been placed so deep in the tunnel suggested that its contents were of value. Or incriminating. Or both. Emma’s jewels, probably. In which case, what happiness-if Emma were still alive-to return them to someone who had been suffering all the privations of a castaway as an earnest that she was to be restored to her former life.

Then, like Pandora before her, Adelia thought, To hell, I just want to know what’s in the thing.

There was time to open it before the rescue began, and no need to wake the people in the kitchen before then, which she undoubtedly would if she went there-a noisy business if the box’s hasp continued to prove as obdurate as it had.

She took lantern, sword, and box to the only place where there was both privacy and a table.

Despite the poverty of their resting place and the drenching the storm had inflicted on the cloths that covered them, the forms of Arthur and Guinevere retained the dignity accorded to all the dead in silent immobility.

It was disturbed as Adelia, apologizing to them, shoved the covering away from Arthur’s feet and placed the lantern between them before committing the same indignity on Guinevere by positioning the box between hers.

She left the door open to add what natural light there was to that of the lantern.

It was a noisy business. Inserting the sword tip under the hasp was difficult and caused much scratching and, on Adelia’s part, much swearing under her puffing breath.

At last the hasp yielded its grip on the prong. Adelia put the sword down and lifted the box’s lid.

Not jewels. Bones. Pelvic bones.

Behind her, somebody coughed.

Adelia swung round like someone guilty, hiding the box with her body.

Godwyn stood in the doorway. Godwyn the good thing, to whom she owed her life and Rowley’s and, perhaps, Emma’s. Godwyn the bad thing, who had permitted an uncontrollable wife to try to silence those who’d incommoded her. Godwyn, who had done nothing to stop Millie being beaten.

“What do you want?” she snapped. She was being interrupted on the brink of discovery, and she did not want him to see the box; it might be his, but its contents most certainly were not.

Anyway, there was a terrible patience to the man, which made her nerves twang. He didn’t move, face impassive; only his eyes showed the resignation of an ox awaiting the fall of the poleax.

“You’ll speak for her, lady, won’t ee?” he said. “The bishop do think high of you; you’ll tell him as she ain’t in charge of what she does. Iffen she’s taken to court, a word from his lordship to the judges… make a mort of difference that would…”

Adelia shook her head, not in negation but to clear it. After all, she supposed she had a duty to listen to this man who had given back the lives that the woman he was pleading for had tried to take away.

He continued to talk, had probably been pacing half the night preparing his speech of mitigation.

“Iffen you’d a seen her when she were a girl, hair like fire, full of chatter as a cricket… She were a sight then, my Hilda. Come as milkmaid to the master’s cows when she were eleven year old…”

Concentrate. There was something here, some insight into why a pretty milkmaid had turned murderous.

“The master?” Adelia asked, to get things clear. “You mean Abbot Sigward?”

“Lord Sigward as he were then, abbot as is now. Me, I started off as his stable lad, do ee see, bound to his family like my father afore me and his father afore that. Good masters to us, all of ’em, so long as we did our jobs and served them proper. I got raised to chief stabler, and Hilda, she was made housekeeper.”

“Did you always love her?” The question was an impertinence. Adelia was taking advantage of someone who was her helpless supplicant, but she was impelled to ask it; in the relationship between this man and his wife had to be a clue to what had gone on.

He was puzzled, offended. If he hadn’t been begging for Adelia’s help, he would have walked away. “Fine worker, Hilda,” he said. It was the only answer he could give; love was a word restricted to the nobility and poets. He tried to smile. “Worth the wooing, she was. Took a bit of doing, mind. Her wouldn’t look at me for years.”

“Because she loved the master?” She was probing deep, but somewhere under her scalpel was the source of infection.

Godwyn was stung into indignation. “Never any uncleanness between em,” he said, “never. Half the time he didn’t know as she were there. Still don’t.”

No, he didn’t; Adelia had seen that for herself. Abbot Sigward’s kindness to his former housekeeper was that of a master to a pet hound. “But you went on serving him?”

Again, the man was puzzled. “He were my lord. Weren’t his fault, weren’t Hilda’s, weren’t mine. ’S how it was. Service, see. Good servant, good master, one loyal to t’other.”

“I see.” But Adelia knew she didn’t see. She had been brought up outside the feudal system and would never fathom that binding between the classes, one ruling, one serving, in mutual acceptance, a tradition that spanned centuries, holding both in place, a system capable of dreadful abuse, yet at its best-as it had been in the household of Sigward before he left it to turn to God-a form of loving.

“And his son,” she asked. “Did you love him?”

Now she was causing pain. Godwyn’s teeth showed in an agonized grimace, and he tapped his clenched fist against them. But he was helpless; if the woman who stood before him was to save his wife, he had to submit to the turn of the screw.

“Sorry for un,” he said. “Sad little thing he was. Like his ma had been afore she died. Frit of everything. I put un on his first pony and he were afraid then. Not like his pa. Not frit of nothing, the master weren’t. But the boy were”-Godwyn searched for a description-”more fond of flowers like, painting and books and such. Never squealed, though, you got to give un that. He’d puke every time the master took un hunting, but he had to go an’ he went, no murmur.”

“As he had to go on crusade?” Why am I persisting with this? she wondered. But the volition for it seemed to come not just from within her but from behind her, as if the skeletons were urging her on.

She’d gone too far. Godwyn’s eyes searched for an escape.

Adelia reached for his hand. “I’ll speak for her, Godwyn. So will the bishop, I promise you that.” She could do no less for this imperfect, strangely wonderful man.

The landlord nodded, then took off his cap and held it to his breast in a gesture of subservience that made her want to weep. “I’ll go ready the boat, then,” he said.

She watched him walk away toward the landing stage, a stumpy, ordinary figure outlined against the pink and gold of a rising sun.

She turned back. There wasn’t much time and she had to know now. Even so, she spent a second or two on her knees beside Guinevere’s catafalque before, whipping off the cloth, she lifted the top half of the skeleton away from the bottom half, exposing the hideous gap where the pelvic girdle should have been. Working quickly, she began fitting the bones from the box into the space.

Some were badly splintered, but others had survived the onslaught almost untouched; the ball of the right femur, for example, went perfectly into the socket of the acetabulum.

The spine had been severed so neatly that the three fused lower vertebrae attached themselves to the rest of the sacrum without any question that they belonged together.

Adelia stood back from her work and stared at it. Undoubtedly, Guinevere had been made whole. The bones fit. This was the right pelvis in the right place at last.

Also the wrong one.

She measured, using the sword as a ruler by marking lines in the black patina of its blade; she considered the ilia, broken as they were, but still displaying unmistakable flanges. Without apology this time, she pushed Arthur’s cloth away and made more measurements, comparing his pubic arch with the one she’d taken from the box.

Back to Guinevere.

Eventually, she was sure; there could be no mistake. “So that’s what you’ve been trying to tell me,” she said gently.

Guinevere was male.

She covered the skeletons and sat down on the ground, resting her head against Arthur’s catafalque.

Two men. Buried together. Both killed, one viciously maimed in his sexual parts. Twenty years ago.

Nuances, sentences, dreams, clues from these past days that she should have taken notice of came fluttering into her mind, settling in it to form a recognizable mosaic.

So that was the answer-love. Love could be the only connection between the living and the dead concentrated in that poor pattern of bones. Love in its many manifestations-destructive, sexual, beautiful, protective, possessive-was the link. It was love of a sort that had nearly killed Rowley and herself; in another form, it had brought the couple they called Arthur and Guinevere to their grave.

The pity of it.

Adelia went out, softly closing the door of the hut behind her.

A warm, early sun was sucking moisture from the drenched ground in the form of a mist so that the great tors rose as if out of nothing to stand against a pellucid sky, a mist into which swallows vanished as they flicked down into it to catch insects and then reappeared.

Whether or not Glastonbury was the omphalos Mansur had recognized, it was magical this morning, telling her that if Avalon was anywhere it was here, spell casting, able to raise an unquiet spirit that had haunted her, nagged her, into showing the truth about itself.

This was the place for it, so easy to have common sense undermined by breathtaking natural geographical beauty.

Adelia, practical scientist that she was, fought against its seduction. To believe that the Guinevere nightmares had come from outside rather than from unrecognized doubts that she’d had from the first, a formless guilt at assuming a skeleton was female because everybody said it was…

“I won’t have it,” she said out loud. It was almost a snarl.

But still she walked through the Glastonbury mist on invisible feet.

SHE MADE FOR the landing place. It was quiet there except for the yelps of seagulls and the cheeps of marsh birds attending to their young among reeds and tussock sedge. The river had been energized by last night’s rainfall and flowed faster than she’d ever seen it, a dark blue ribbon winding around islands toward the sea. A little way along its right bank where the boathouse was, she could see Godwyn loading supplies into a boat, this time a large punt that was to take them to Lazarus, and the three castaways on it.

And pray God we’re not too late.

Adelia took off her ruined, water-distorted, ashy shoes and sat down so that her toes could reach into the river and send up flirting, rainbow splashes.

Again, her surroundings insisted that all was right with the world, especially here-that Emma, Pippy, and Roetger must have survived in such a glorious landscape, that a great and ancient king could have chosen nowhere better for his last resting place.

She wished she could believe it. How nice to discount human wickedness, to be able to fall in with the nature around her, to discount evidence and allow that the mutilated bones in the hut were indeed those of Arthur and Guinevere, killed in a legendary battle in such an ancient past that its shrieks and blows had ameliorated into nothing more than the puff of a story-laden breeze.

But those shrieks, those blows, had been less than a generation ago. She had a duty to the dead; she was who she was.

She felt the little pier vibrate as somebody joined her on it. Beside her were the long, white, sandaled feet of Abbot Sigward.

“We have been searching for you, my child. Will you come and take some food before we go?”

She squinted up at him, shading her eyes. “How did your son die?” she asked.

For a moment he was as still as death. She continued to look at him.

“So you are Nemesis,” he said.

She nodded.

Then the abbot’s face changed, quite beautifully, as if the sun shining on it was reflected back by an inner light. “I have been awaiting that question for twenty years.” He stretched his arms sideways to embrace the view, like a cormorant holding out its wings to dry in the warmth. “See what a perfect day the Lord has chosen for it. He has even supplied a bishop for my confession.” He smiled down at her. “Stay there, my child, while I fetch the others.”

He strode off toward the kitchen, then stopped to turn around.

“I killed him,” he said.

LATER, WHEN ADELIA looked back on the journey to Lazarus, it was the incongruity of it that never failed to jolt her. It should have been made in darkness, or at least cast a shadow that withered everything they passed. Instead, as Godwyn smoothly poled the punt containing Sigward, Adelia, Rowley, and Hilda along, the sun shone on them as if on a jolly outing.

At one point, the abbot even paused in his confession and uncovered a basket that had been put up for him by Brother Titus before they left, exposing a jug of mead and cakes of oatmeal and honey, and passing them around. “Eat, drink,” he urged them.

He was exalted. Sitting on the punt’s middle thwart, facing the bishop of Saint Albans, he unburdened himself of his sin almost joyously, sometimes in Latin, sometimes in English, as if fearing that Adelia, his nemesis, sitting in the stern behind Rowley, would not understand him.

Hilda-he’d insisted she should accompany them-crouched in the bottom of the punt, quiet now, her head on his knee like an exhausted dog’s.

His story-and it was as much story as confession-was of a cleaving. Of a young man hacked in two. Of an earthquake that had not only opened rifts in the ground but had separated the Sigward, lord of great estates, from the Sigward who’d become a lowly monk of Glastonbury Abbey and then its abbot.

He spoke of them as two different people. “Lord Sigward was a man assured of his righteousness,” he said. “He gave to the poor, he built churches and oratories so that God should be reminded of his virtue. He ruled his little kingdom justly with a Bible in his hands, knowing he obeyed its precepts. He bathed in the admiration of his neighbors. His servants had cause to love him…” Absentmindedly, Abbot Sigward patted Hilda’s shoulder. “At least those he kept by him, for he was quick to punish and rid himself of the ones who did not.”

Wishing she didn’t have to listen, Adelia kept her eyes on the river, trailing her fingers and watching their wake in the water. A moorhen hurried her chicks away from the ripple.

“Lord Sigward chose his wife carefully, but she was a disappointment; he did not understand why she was afraid of him. She bore him a son, and she died doing it. No matter, Lord Sigward had his heir and held a great feast so that he could boast of him to Somerset’s nobility. But the boy, too, was a disappointment; he was weak, like his mother. He cowered when his father spoke to him; he failed in the tiltyard, he was an inept huntsman. Like some clerk, he preferred books to pursuing the manly arts.”

Adelia glanced at Rowley’s rigid back; he’d averted his face from the man opposite him, as he would have done in the privacy of a confessional. There had been no moment to warn him before they set off. When the abbot, crossing himself, had spoken the formula-“Hear and bless me, Father, for I have greatly sinned”-she’d seen her lover draw away as if in protest.

He always hated hearing confessions. “Who am I to pronounce on sin?” Like Thomas à Becket before him, he’d been appointed by his king, not the Church, and had been made a priest literally overnight-ordained one day, installed into the bishop’s chair the next.

The punt surged and slowed as Godwyn dug its pole effortlessly into the riverbed and lifted it again, his face without expression. The words issuing from the mouth of the man who’d been his master might have been no more than the chirp of the buntings hidden in the reeds.

“When the boy was sixteen, it seemed necessary to Lord Sigward that he should regain the admiration of the county and get credit with Almighty God by sending his son on crusade. He fitted him out lavishly with weapons, equipment, gave him a fine destrier to ride… which was too big for him.” For the first time the abbot’s voice had faltered, then, with an indrawn breath, it regained its rhythm. “A farewell feast for the county to wish the son well and praise the father who, though wallowing in his pride, also resented the boy’s obvious happiness in leaving him.”

A dragonfly skimmed the water and landed on the punt’s gunwale like an iridescent jewel before taking off again.

“Four years went by without a word. Other fathers received news of their offspring from those returning from the Holy Land, sometimes that they were alive and well, sometimes that they were dead. The Lord Sigward, however, heard nothing and began to think that his boy, too, had died, perhaps in the battle for the fortress of Ascalon, where so many Christian knights were slaughtered during its recapture from the Saracen. If so, it would be an excuse for him to hold another feast, this time a valedictory one-what honor to Lord Sigward that his child had given his life in the attempt to return the Holy Land to God.”

Adelia watched a kingfisher that had been perching on an alder twig suddenly turn into a rainbowed arrow as it dived into the water, coming up with a frog in its beak.

It was getting hot. Abbot Sigward threw back his cowl to let the air play on his tonsured head. The exaltation was still with him, but his fingers were showing white where he clasped them in his lap-he was coming to the crux.

Adelia tried to distance the clear voice ringing over the marshes into that of just another storyteller in a market. Twenty years ago, she told herself. They have been dead these twenty years. This man is not the same man who kitted them.

But he was.

It had been the evening before the Feast of Saint Stephen 1154, the abbot said, a blustery night.

Christmas festivities were over. Lord Sigward, being the kindly master he was, had already allowed his servants to set off on their annual visit to the villages they came from.

“Apart from Hilda”-the abbot patted the head of the woman crouching beside him-“who refused to leave him, and Godwyn”-he smiled up at the man poling the punt-“who refused to leave her, there was no one in the house.”

So Lord Sigward was dining alone in his hall when Godwyn, acting as a doorkeeper, heard a loud knocking and went to answer it. Two young men were ushered in, and Lord Sigward found himself being embraced by his son, whose dripping rain cloak put wet marks on the silk of his father’s robe. Laughing and exclaiming, the boy introduced his magnificently tall friend. “We have been on the road from Outremer for three months, Father, and we are very, very hungry.”

Immediately, Lord Sigward felt anger; if his son had sent word ahead, he could have invited his neighbors to welcome the boy as a hero. He kept his patience, however, and called for Hilda to bring food and drink.

As he watched the young men eat, he became angrier.

“He should have been pleased,” the abbot said. “His son had become the man he’d wished him to be. The years in the Holy Land had given the boy belief in himself. He looked Lord Sigward in the eye. He was no longer afraid; he was Lord Sigward’s equal-and Lord Sigward resented it.”

Also, there was a sweetness in the son’s smile when it was directed at the friend that was missing when he addressed the father.

Both youths had pale, cruciform patches on their tunics where the crusader’s cross had been stripped off. When Lord Sigward inquired why this was so, he was able to find justification for his anger with the two of them. “They denigrated the sanctity of crusade, they poured scorn on the holy purpose of driving the Saracen from the land Jesus had walked on. They had seen too much death, they said; Islam was merely being inflamed. What purpose in killing Muslim men, women, and children if each corpse added a hundred living people to the number hating Christianity? Was that following the teaching of Our Lord?”

Too furious to speak, Lord Sigward had left the hall and retired to his chamber. He couldn’t sleep for thinking of the shame his son’s impiety would cast on his name. In the middle of the night, he got up and went to the boy’s room to argue with him.

“He found his son and the friend in bed together,” the abbot said. “They were naked and performing a homosexual act.”

Hubris had descended on Lord Sigward then. Quietly, he closed the door on the two lovers and went to fetch an ax.

The abbot said, “He… No, I must not think of myself in the third person… Me. I was that butcher. With the ax in my hand, I burst in on those two boys and hacked them to death where they lay in each other’s arms. I struck and struck and went on striking long after both were dead.”

The river was beginning to straggle through reeds now, and the punt nudged aside yellow water lilies as it went. Sandpipers called from the banks, a descant to the implacable human voice.

“I considered myself justified. Had I not followed the Lord’s action against Sodom and Gomorrah? Did not Leviticus say that a man who lies with a man as with a woman has committed a detestable act and should surely be put to death?”

Covered in blood, Lord Sigward went downstairs to sit at the table and stare at nothing.

Hilda had heard the shrieks and gone running to view the slaughterhouse. The dead boys were less important to her than her lord; nobody should know what the dear master had done.

She took over. Godwyn was sent to prepare a coffin while she swabbed and cleaned. The bodies were laid on a sheet; the bedding was burned.

“Not the least of my sins that night was that I involved my two good servants in it.” Abbot Sigward glanced up, but Godwyn kept his eyes on the river.

The corpses were put in their coffin, ready to be buried secretly somewhere on the estate…

And then the earthquake struck.

“The world tilted. The ground opened. Worst was the noise, as if God’s voice had come close and was blasting destruction through the clouds.” Abbot Sigward nodded to himself. “Which it was, which indeed it was. I heard Him. Is it for you to condemn, you murderer? Was it for this that I sent My Son to preach love and forgiveness? Who are you to set yourself up against Him? Two mothers’ sons you have killed, Sigward. In your arrogance and wickedness you have committed filicide twice over and the Son of Man has been crucified yet again.”

It was the voice that Saul heard on the Road to Damascus.

As it had to Saul, it showed Lord Sigward to himself. He cowered at what he saw, a creature of hatred, a vainglorious, pitiless upholder of all law except the one that mattered most, a murderer, not least of a gentle wife who had died loveless. He saw the Pit waiting for him, and it held no flames but was barren and empty, like his soul; he would be condemned to shiver in it alone through all eternity.

“I crawled, pleading for a mercy that would not be given me because I had shown none,” the abbot said. “The floor tossed beneath me in the cataclysm that was God’s condemnation.”

When at last the earth stopped quaking, it was another Sigward who rose to his feet, though he could barely stand upright for the horror of what he had done. He knew now that the boys he’d killed must not be buried in unsanctified ground; to placate a vengeful God, he would take their bodies to the nearest and holiest place he knew, Glastonbury Abbey.

“I was, of course, bargaining with my Lord, wicked creature that I was, leaving it to Him to say whether or not my crime should be discovered. If it were, I would take my punishment. If not, I promised Him that all my lands and possessions should go to Mother Church and I would spend the rest of my days in service of His loving Son.” Sigward turned to Adelia. “I told you, my lady, that I was a gambler. It was gambling.”

She nodded.

One thing he had not been able to do. “I could not let my son’s body go to its rest complete. In my fury, I had hacked it into three, throwing the sexual part onto the floor. Even now… Sweet Mary, what twisted madness… I would not bury it with him, as if I might still conceal what he was. Hilda saw to its disposal separately, another sin that she bore for me.”

Not Hilda, Adelia thought. It was Godwyn; tears were trickling down the man’s face. It was him-Lord, the wonderful strangeness of human nature. She wondered what he had done with that dreadful collop of flesh until it was skeletonized and he could give the bones a more decent interment because he’d loved and pitied the boy they’d belonged to.

That night the coffin containing the two lovers was put into a boat and rowed to the abbey’s landing stage. There was no one about-the monks were praying for deliverance up on the Tor.

Between them, Sigward, Hilda, and Godwyn hauled the coffin by ropes to the sanctity of the monks’ graveyard. “There was a fissure there, as if God with his earthquake had readied a burial place for our burden. We lowered the coffin into it and I prayed for mercy on those two souls, and mine. For the first time in my life, I wept…”

Adelia raised her head. “What was your son’s name?”

Rowley jerked round; he’d forgotten that she was there. The abbot had not; he smiled at her. “Arthur,” he said. “His name was Arthur.”

Of course it was. “And the other boy?” It seemed imperative to her to give him an identity.

“God forgive me,” Sigward said, “but if I ever knew it, I have forgotten it.” He stretched out a hand toward her. “Do you damn me?”

It wasn’t for her to do it. The man carried his own damnation with him. More important to Adelia was whether that one horrific sin, and its far-reaching consequences as Hilda attempted to conceal it, had damned three more people to death. How far to Lazarus? Each time they passed one of the marsh’s little islands, most of them uninhabited apart from cattle and sheep, she tensed with expectation-and was disappointed.

But the landscape was changing; its air was saltier, and reeds were beginning to give way here and there to marron grass where high tides had come inland, pushing in enough sand for it to grow on.

Adelia kept her eyes on a hump of ground still some way ahead that broke the dark blue, ruler-straight line of the horizon, hardly listening to the confession that went on and on, of which she had become weary.

Once he’d taken on a monk’s habit, the abbot said, he lived a life of penitence and rigid self-denial… “Even then, sinful as I was, I could not admit to anyone what I had done, though I confessed to God and begged His mercy every day.”

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.”

OF 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.”