Grave Goods aka Relics of the Dead

THIRTEEN

GODWYN 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.”

The champion was her greatest worry; if Emma was thin, he was emaciated. Adelia hadn’t yet seen him put his injured foot to the ground and suspected he couldn’t. Worse, though he refused to complain, he was breathing with a difficulty that suggested he’d developed a constriction of the lungs. “Do hurry,” she begged Rowley.

“I’m going as fast as I can, woman,” he puffed. “I haven’t poled a punt since I was a boy.”

Actually, he did well. It seemed to Adelia that they had left and were returning on two different days but, when at last Glastonbury’s landing place was in sight, the sun was only just leaving its zenith.

Emma put up a fight when she saw that she was being taken to the Pilgrim. “Not there. We’re not going back there.”

“Yes, you are,” Adelia said. “Master Roetger can’t go on. Look at him.”

Emma looked, and her outburst dissipated into panic. “You’ve got to save him, ’Delia. He was our mainstay. Those brigands on the road would have killed us all if it hadn’t been for him. I can’t… oh, ’Delia, I can’t do without him.”

“Let’s put him into a bed and you won’t have to,” Adelia said, hoping that it was true. Getting her patients up the slope to the inn was hard enough, and it was a relief to see Millie at its door, shading her eyes as she looked in alarm from one to the other.

There was no time to answer questions even if the maidservant had been able to ask them, but Millie, intelligent girl that she was, realized that beds were needed and hurried upstairs to prepare them.

“And you,” Adelia told Godwyn. “I’m sorry, I’m very sorry, but these people must have food. And if you’ve got wine, warm it. Hurry.”

The man was still dazed, but being in accustomed surroundings seemed to rally him and he went off toward the kitchen, nodding.

Emma refused to take nourishment; she wanted only to sit by Roetger’s bedside and weep over him. Adelia hauled her back downstairs to the dining room, where Pippy was tucking into broth.

“Eat something,” she told her, “and I’ll organize a bath for you.”

A bath would be restorative; both Pippy and his mother needed one badly. Come to that, Adelia thought, I could do with one myself.

Hilda had boasted that the inn possessed a bath-“the nobility is set on it,” she’d said-but Adelia, not able to remember seeing one, went in search of it. She found an enormous tub lined with canvas in the barn, where, during the time that the Pilgrim lacked noble guests, it had been transferred so that Hilda could do her laundry in it.

Water was boiled, and Millie set to the task of carrying buckets of it across the courtyard.

“And you,” Adelia told Rowley, “will please give Roetger a bed bath. If I do it, he’ll be embarrassed.”

The bishop looked alarmed. “How do you do that?”

Sudden, sheer happiness filled her, making her laugh. He’d been so nearly dead, and now he wasn’t. She wanted to tell him how the tunnel had changed the perspective of everything she saw, that she’d accept him on any terms as long as he’d have her-and just keep breathing in and out.

However, this bustling house and time held no moment for romance. Later, when they were alone, she would give herself up to him. She must be arranged for it, beautiful.

A clean cloth, another bucket-this time filled with cool water to help bring down the patient’s fever-were carried upstairs and instructions given.

And by late afternoon, all that could be done was done. A clean mother and son were asleep in one room and a gray-faced champion was propped up on pillows next door looking no better than he had, and breathing worse.

Adelia put down the spoon of linctus she’d been trying to get him to take. “I don’t know, Rowley,” she said. “The crisis is coming and… I just don’t know.”

“I’d wait with you,” Rowley said, “but I must go to the abbey. The brothers have to be told.”

“An accident?”

“That’s what I’ll say. Why add to their agony, or anybody else’s? The king must know, of course, but Abbot Sigward will be mourned throughout England and beyond. No point in broadcasting that the man chose to go to hell.”

“Is that where he is?”

“Suicide is an offense against God,” the bishop told her shortly, and went out.

Was it? Or had it been the only free choice for a man who’d tried so hard for so long to exculpate an even greater sin?

And he’d taken Hilda with him; only Godwyn mourned her. Yet what would have become of her if he had not? At best, incarceration with other madwomen. Was that why he did it? Had the woman been in a condition to know it?

Lord, judgments are too hard, I can’t think about it now.

As the light began to go, Roetger broke into a sweat and his breathing became easier. Adelia sent up her gratitude for the endurance of the human body, made him comfortable, and went to fetch Millie to sit with the patient.

On the way, she took the girl into the parlor and to the table that had become their mutual slate board. “See,” she mouthed, tracing stick figures in its dust. “There’s the abbot, that’s meant to be his hat. And that’s poor Hilda.” She drew a wavy line over both heads. “And that’s the sea. Damn it, there must be some way of teaching you to read.”

Millie, glancing from Adelia’s face to the table with concern, pointed in the direction of the marshes and then toward the hatch that led to the kitchen where Godwyn sat weeping.

“Yes. She’s gone, Millie. No more beatings.”

The two women crossed themselves and, again, Adelia wondered whether or not Hilda had been willing to go into the quicksand with the man she worshipped and had been prepared to kill for.

God, she was sick of death; it was as if she herself generated it, infecting those she met. She wanted to be clean of it, she wanted life, she wanted Rowley, she wanted a bath.

Once she’d lugged more hot water to the tub in the barn, and collected a candle, a towel, and some soapwort from the patch kept growing in the shade of the inn’s outer wall, she took one, luxuriating in sweet-smelling suds, letting her overtired brain rest on matters such as where to find clean clothes and whether she could flick a bubble as far as the hay fork hanging on the opposite wall.

The barn door crashed open, making her yelp, but it was Rowley. “Well, that’s done.”

Damn. She’d wanted to be pretty for him, not squatted in an outsize wooden bucket with her hair tied on top of her head with string.

All at once embarrassed, she reached for a towel to cover what she could and tried to be businesslike. “How did they receive the news?”

“Badly. But I told them it was an accident.”

“Did you tell them he killed Arthur and Guinevere?”

“Of course not. I just said they’d been proved to be the skeletons of two men, not how they died nor at whose hand. They’re going to re-bury them quietly.”

“And Hilda?”

“An accident, an accident.” Then, as if in answer to a protest she hadn’t made, he said, “For the Lord’s sake, Adelia, they’ve lost enough.”

She supposed they had: their abbey, their abbot. And the truth would cost the Church even more; it was the bishop of Saint Albans’s job to defend it, to weigh Sigward’s twenty years of penance and goodness against an appalling crime.

How she felt about that she didn’t know. It was her job to uncover the truth. She couldn’t control what men did with it.

Perhaps he was right; perhaps there was enough ugliness in the world without exposing people to more.

“Move over,” Rowley said. He began stripping off.

“For goodness sake,” she said, “this isn’t big enough for both of us.”

“Do you mean the tub or my manhood? In either case, the answer’s yes, it is.”

He was right. For a while the two of them forgot everything except each other, and the Pilgrim’s courtyard was treated to the sound of splashing and delighted feminine gurgles.

Later, in her bed, he said, “I’m not letting you loose again. Rescuing you from the holes you keep falling into is becoming boring.”

“I know, my love. I can’t live without you, either. Not anymore. The king can go hang; let him find some other mistress of the art of death. But what can we do?”

She’d been slaked with him, but this naked, energetic lover was also an anointed bishop, marriage forbidden to him, a man of God.

Her fault, of course. She had feared the restrictions of being a wife to an ambitious man would have sublimated her skills as a doctor and anatomist under rounds of household care and entertaining for which she was unfit and which, in the end, would have held him back, making them both unhappy.

And the thing was that ever since the day that Henry, pouncing on the opportunity to thrust a trusted man into a position of power in a hostile Church, had given him the post, he’d excelled in it. He was less judgmental, more truly Christian, than the prelates who terrified their flocks with threats of damnation while living lives just as sinful.

But by loving her, Rowley was aware of his own hypocrisy; he made light of it, but it dismayed him.

Now he was saying, “I’m going to set you and Allie up somewhere, a place where I can come and go without anybody knowing, a secret place like Henry found for his Rosamund.” He winked and nudged her. “Don’t fancy Lazarus Island, I suppose?”

She laughed, but afterward the two of them fell silent.

… come and go without anybody knowing, a secret place like Henry found for his Rosamund… secret… without anybody knowing.

A permanent arrangement: she a kept woman, Rowley experiencing guilt every time he opened his mouth to preach.

We’re not that sort of people, Adelia thought. Any honor either of us has will be gone. Both of us constantly aware he’s betraying his God, as he’s betraying Him now, snatching furtive moments together such as this like a couple of adulterers; it will tarnish us both. Could I bear it? Could he? Can we bear not to?

Then she considered the dead of these past days, the moment in the tunnel when she thought that this man had joined them.

“Yes,” she said.

Surprised, he came up on one elbow to look at her. “Really?”

“Yes. As long as Gyltha and Mansur come with us.”

“I’ll be away on circuit a good deal, you know that?”

“Do you want me or not?”

He kissed her hard and settled back comfortably. “If you’re a good girl, I’ll try and bring you a corpse or two to play with.”

A home, a father for Allie, security, love… I am tired of independence.

Yet even as she dwelled restfully and with pleasure on these things, she knew that some wisp of… What was it?… Virtue?… No, not virtue, she didn’t care about that… A constituent, like sea salt, that had been in her since she’d been born would no longer be hers.

CAPTAIN BOLT and an escort came to the inn the next morning to say that the traveling courts of the assize were arriving in the town of Wells and the bishop of Saint Albans was royally commanded to attend as one of their justices.

“The king’s been in Anjou, but he’ll be coming to England shortly,” the captain said-an announcement calculated to instill a frisson of fear in everyone who heard it, and invariably did. “And the lord Mansur’s to write a report for him about what’s been happenin’ here in Glastonbury-the skeletons and that.”

Henry wasn’t going to be pleased.

Aloud, Adelia said, “Then ask my lord Mansur to return, bringing parchment and ink with him-and my daughter and Gyltha.”

She would be losing Rowley but gaining those she loved as much.

Supping ale with his men in the sunny courtyard, Bolt added, “Don’t you be going near the forest tomorrow; we’re to clear it out. Henry ain’t pleased at the trouble disturbin’ the peace of the King’s Highway.” He scratched his head to remember the wording of his orders: “If the dispute between Wells and Glastonbury be not resolved by them, they shall expect the Crown to intervene. Le roi le veut. Yep, that’s it. We’re comin’ down on them forest brigands like terriers on a rats’ nest.”

That would settle the tithing’s fear of Scarry. She wondered how to get a message to them telling them to stay clear. The lay brother Peter, she thought-she’d send word to Will and the others through him.

She told Bolt about the attack on Emma’s cavalcade and the resultant graves in the forest, giving directions to their position as best she could. “Lady Emma will want the bodies taken up for decent burial.”

“We’ll see to it,” Bolt told her, and she knew he would.

She watched the soldiers ride off, taking her lover with them.

GRASS WAS GROWING through the abbey’s cinders. Valerian and wild honeysuckle sprouted from between fallen stones. Swallows disappeared into the niches of the nave’s one standing wall, fed their nesting young, and flew out again in the perpetual work of parenting.

Nature was singing of life, the monks in the ruined choir were singing of death, both of them doing it beautifully.

Kneeling beside the catafalques in the hut of withies, Adelia listened.

“In paradisum deducant te Angeli; in tuo adventu suscipiant te martyres…”

And when will they plead for you to be conducted into Paradise? she asked the skeletons. Will you also be received among the martyrs? Or will you return to your grave unknown and unmourned?

Perhaps, she thought, it doesn’t matter as long as you’re together.

In her untuneful voice, she sang to them in time to the monks’ voices. “May choirs of angels receive thee; may you have eternal rest.”

She got up and went out to stand in the shadow of the nave’s remaining wall.

After a while Brother Peter emerged, wiping his eyes. “Can’t stand no more of that; they’ll be at it all day.” He showed no surprise at finding her there. “What’d he do it for? What’d he do it for? Accident, the bishop says, but he knew them marshes. Hilda, too.”

Adelia shook her head in sympathy without answering; the man’s questions were rhetorical. “Brother Peter, I want you to warn Will and the others not to go poaching in the forest tomorrow.”

“Poaching?” He might never have heard the word before.

She nodded. “Poaching. But not in the forest. Not tomorrow.”

The lay brother stared at her, narrowing his eyes. “Here, I saw as there was soldiers at the inn. Goin’ after Wolf and his gang, are they?”

“I can’t say.” Perhaps she’d said too much; perhaps he was well enough in with the brigands to warn them. At least his brother had not told him that Wolf was dead.

The man looked relieved. “ ’Bout time that Wolf got his comeuppance. Proper terror, he’s been, God rot him.”

“And you’ll warn Will?”

He shrugged. “Daresay I might.”

She received no thanks for her trouble and expected none. Peter was as surly as his brother; they were like the fenmen she knew in East Anglia-gratitude was shown in actions, not words.

It must be something to do with living in marshes, she thought.

“Here,” he said, when she would have walked away, “Will and the lads is summoned to the assize to answer for Eustace settin’ the fire-the which he didn’t. So you get that darky doctor of yourn to be there and tell the judges as how he didn’t do it.”

“Daresay I might,” she said.

UNDER ESCORT, Allie, Gyltha, and Mansur made a joyful return to the Pilgrim the next morning, bringing with them Rhys the bard.

On the way, they’d glimpsed Captain Bolt and at least forty king’s men, all fully armed, go galloping into the forest and heard the sound of distant clashes coming out of it. The purification had begun.

“Mansur said they were killing snakes,” Allie piped, “but snakes don’t scream, do they, Mama?”

Adelia hugged her. “I think those do.”

Gyltha said, coldly, “An’ while we’re about it, what’s all this Rowley’s been tellin’ us? Gettin’ rid of us like that, I’ve a good mind to tan your arse for you.”

“You do not do that again,” Mansur told Adelia quietly in his boy’s voice. “I am your protector or I am nothing.”

By tricking them into going to Wells, she had humiliated them, the Arab’s pride especially. Adelia tried explaining that Allie’s presence at the inn had made them all vulnerable in the same way that Emma and Roetger had been forced to obey Hilda because, with Pippy in her arms, the madwoman had threatened to cut his throat. “And I knew you wouldn’t go without me,” she pleaded. “You wouldn’t have, would you?”

Gyltha snorted.

She snorted again when Rhys was introduced to Emma and immediately fell in love.

“Did you hear my songs to you, lady?” he asked, sweeping off his cap. “Was they what called you back from that lonely peak of exile?”

Emma looked bewildered.

Adelia said, “It wasn’t a peak. No, they didn’t. And her affections are elsewhere.”

It was useless. Lady Emma was the lost white bird regained. Missing, she had been the subject of his laments, and now, here in the flesh, pale, thin, beautiful, she was perfection-a being so ethereal, so far above him, that he could safely be her troubadour of a passion never to be requited. Even as he moaned, he began tuning the harp.

“Look at him,” Gyltha said in disgust. “Happy as a pig in shit now he’s miserable.”

The well had its cover put in place so that the two reunited children wouldn’t fall down it while they played in the courtyard. The adults went indoors to sit around the dining table and listen to Adelia tell the full story of the past two days and nights.

Only Roetger was absent. He wasn’t making the recovery Adelia had hoped for him, too weak to leave his bed, with no interest in food nor anything else and embarrassed by the fact that either Adelia or Millie had to help him onto the pot-he refused to let Emma do it.

Here, like Mansur, was another who’d been humiliated by his inability to protect his lady. It gnawed at him. “What champion was I for her?” he asked Adelia at one point.

Emma wouldn’t have it. “I keep telling him. What could he do? That hag, that Hilda, kept a knife to Pippy’s throat; we had to obey her. And his bravery when we were attacked on the road… you should have seen him. Injured, but fighting like a tiger. Pip and I would be dead if it weren’t for him. Oh, ’Delia, I don’t care what people think anymore, I want to marry him. Do you think the king will let me?”

“I’m sure he will.” In truth, she wasn’t sure. Emma was valuable property, and in the king’s gift to be wed how he commanded. Because Adelia’s last investigation had been successful, she had been able, as a reward, to persuade Henry not to marry Emma off against her will.

But that was when she’d been successful…

It grieved the German particularly that he’d lost his sword, symbol of everything he’d once been, which Hilda had made him lay down and was now nowhere to be found. “She could not sell it,” he said. “It was too fine. No, she has thrown it away. Why not me, also? I am without use.”

Until now, Adelia had left Emma in ignorance of her mother-in-law’s attempt to have her killed, waiting for the poor girl to be stronger. Yet she had to be told, and when, round the table, that part of the tale was reached, she waited for the fury she herself felt.

Wolf and dowager, two murderers.

She was disappointed. Emma had, after all, suffered terribly: the attack on the road by Wolf and his brigands, the assumption that she had found safety when they reached the Pilgrim Inn being taken away by a madwoman, the tunnel, forced exile on a leper island… Her spirit had been wrecked.

Gyltha cried out in disbelief at the news. Mansur swore horribly in Arabic.

Emma just wept for her dead servants.

“Can it be proved?” Mansur asked.

“I don’t know.” Adelia hadn’t thought about that yet. “At the very least, the woman should be turned out of Wolvercote Manor, bag and baggage.”

Emma shook her head. “There’s nothing to be done. I’m not sending Roetger into another trial by combat. I’ll lose Wolvercote… God knows I wanted it for Pippy… but I’ll not see my man wounded again.”

“Bugger trial by combat,” Gyltha said. “That harpy’s got to hang.”

Emma continued to weep.

It wasn’t the moment to tell her that Roetger would never be able to fight again; his foot was now too badly damaged.

Adelia didn’t tell the champion, either, but his listlessness that evening as she tried to make him take food suggested that he guessed.

When Millie relieved her, Adelia went back to her own room and took the sword from the hill out of the chest where she kept it wrapped in a sheet. She sat on the bed to study it.

Mansur’s objection to taking it had evaporated when he’d learned the sword had saved Adelia’s life. “Thus Allah looked down from Paradise and saw you in need of a weapon. He gave you the warrior’s.”

That’s one explanation for grave robbing, she thought.

What she could hardly admit to herself, and certainly not to anybody else, was that, in one desperate moment in a forest, the sword had lived. It had killed for her protection as if the function for which it was made had suddenly energized it.

The trouble was that it had enjoyed it.

Or was it me? Did I enjoy it?

She knew she had not. Wolf had been a disease, had killed, would have killed Alf, killed her, would have gone on killing. Arbitrarily, the occasion and means to stop him had fallen to her. She, whose job it was to preserve life, regretted it and always would, but, as Rowley’d said, there was nothing else she could have done.

The question was whether the sword now belonged to her. She felt that it did; its leap in her defense had passed ownership from the dead man in the cave to her living hand. Loathing weapons of destruction, this thing with its encrusted pommel as warty as Allie’s toad was the exception; she felt safer in its presence-not just safer, bolder-she could defy the world with it, challenge her enemies. You dare not touch me now.

She thought, And that is how wars begin.

Keep me, the sword said. Though you are a woman, you shall be a warrior defending all frail women.

Its voice was high and sweet, like Rhys’s harp.

And then she knew that this was Glastonbury magic; she was being entwined by legends, holy springs, dreams, ghosts, swords that came alive… all of them delusion. The Salerno masters who had trained Adelia in hard truth frowned down on her, ashamed.

She came to a decision. You are an artifact, she told the sword. You belonged to a warrior who has no further use for you-but I am a doctor, and I have a patient who has.

The next morning, having told him its story, she gave the sword to Roetger.

“An ugly old thing,” she said, finding the words an effort, “but until you get a better one…”

He was intrigued by it, brightening more than she’d seen him since the rescue from Lazarus, as if she’d given him back his manhood. “So,” he said, caressing the blade. “Old-fashioned, but ugly, no. You shall see when it is again polished. I am grateful.”

Millie was sent to the kitchen for cleaning equipment, and Adelia left her patient with his new medicine to go down to the parlor and write the report that the king had demanded. She couldn’t put it off any longer-the next day Captain Bolt was coming to collect it.

It was a list of disasters unlikely to put a sparkle in the royal blue eyes.

Arthur and Guinevere not Arthur and Guinevere but two male lovers. A favorite abbot both a killer and a suicide, taking a madwoman with him to a terrible death. The Glastonbury fire due to the carelessness of one of its own monks. A forest in which travelers on the King’s Highway lay slaughtered. One of his nobility, a Somerset dowager, a would-be murderess.

And above all, as far as Henry would read it-and rage-no proof that King Arthur was dead.

Sucking the end of her quill, Adelia wondered if the king’s sympathy would be evoked by her own brushes with death. It was unlikely-he was not a sympathetic man.

But this is the last time you employ me, Henry Plantagenet. Henceforth, I am to be a bishop’s mistress.

A mistress, she thought, still idling, a courtesan. Her mind dwelt on the few houris she’d seen being carried through the streets of Salerno, painted and veiled, trailing light silks and heavy perfume.

It made her smile.

Still, she thought, Rowley will have to decently clothe his indecent woman. Since, at the moment, both she and Emma were in garments that Millie had purchased for them from a seamstress in Street’s market, where, it had to be said, the standard of couture leaned more heavily on durability than style, the idea was not totally displeasing.

Again, though, she was aware of an essence that had been Vesuvia Adelia Rachel Ortese Aguilar leaching out of her. And again, she told herself it was a small price to pay for love.

From the courtyard, the mellifluous voice of Rhys was being directed toward Emma’s window.

“Lay down your weapons, lady, or you kill me. Let me not see that curling hair, those fine eyes That spear the heart of all true men…”

Adelia sighed and returned to her report to the king.

Putting her two and only triumphs on the parchment showed them up as weak. What matter to Henry, lord of a great empire, that Eustace, a common drunkard, had been proved innocent of a crime? How much would he rejoice at Lady Emma and young Lord Wolvercote’s rescue when he hadn’t known they’d been abducted in the first place?

Oh, dear.

Gritting her teeth, Adelia dipped her quill into the inkpot and pressed on, returning to the matter that concerned her most at the moment-the dowager’s perfidy.

“You, who prize justice above all things, my dear lord, will know how to right the great wrong committed by this woman according to the wish of your most devoted servant, Adelia Aguilar.”

Then, in case one of the king’s unknowing clerks might read the letter to him, she scratched out her signature and replaced it with that of Mansur.

She was searching for sealing wax when Allie flung the door open, ablaze with excitement. “Come and see, Mama, come and see.”

Adelia followed her daughter into the courtyard, where Pippy was staring at something that had been tied to the wellhead by a bit of string around its neck.

“What’s that, in the name of God?”

“It’s a puppy.” Allie was ecstatic. “It’s mine.”

Whatever it was, it was the untidiest animal Adelia had ever seen; very young and wobbly on long, thin legs, with a rough coat and eyebrows that curled upward like an old man’s.

“Bad,” Mansur said, “a sight hound.”

“A lurcher,” Gyltha said. “An’ it’s forbidden. Verderers see that in the forest and they’ll lame un, take out the ball of its foot. Bring down deer, lurchers do; bring down anything.”

Allie put her arms round the animal’s neck. “They’re not going to lame Eustace,” she said. The dog licked her face.

“Who?”

“Some men came and gave it to me. They said his name was Eustace. Look at his lovely brown eyes, Mama, he’s very intelligent.”

Adelia thought how typical it was of Will and the tithing to bring her a present that was illegal. But the damage was done; Allie had given her heart to the thing.

“Well,” she said, weakly, “we’ll just have to keep Eustace out of the forest.”

HANDING OVER THE SCROLL to Captain Bolt the next morning, Adelia asked if the king had arrived in England.

“Not yet, mistress. Somewhere between here and Normandy, I reckon.” He waved the report. “Yet he’s so eager for this, we may have to send it by boat-he’ll be glad to get it.”

“No, captain,” Adelia said sadly, “he won’t.”

TWO DAYS LATER, Roetger hitched himself down the stairs, and Adelia was asked to attend to him and Emma in the dining room.

On the table in front of them lay the dead warrior’s sword in a wooden scabbard that Roetger had made for it.

He was animated, eager for Adelia to sit down. He remained standing, his back to the window, leaning on a crutch. He began explaining how he had gone about cleaning the sword.

“We take great care, do we not?” he said to Emma.

She nodded. The two of them used “we” and “us” a great deal now.

“Horsetail from the kitchen first,” he said. “Millie gave it.”

It was Adelia’s turn to nod. The plant was an invaluable pot scourer; dairymaids polished their milk pails with it.

“No good,” Roetger said, shaking his head. “So we try vinegar. No good.”

“Do you know what did it in the end?” Emma asked. She couldn’t wait; she was as excited as the German. “You’ll never guess. Godwyn’s apple-and-plum preserve.”

“Preserve?”

Emma seemed to have forgiven the landlord now that he’d restored the sword. “He won’t tell us what’s in it apart from apples and plums, but it was miraculous.”

“Apple-and-plum preserve?”

“A cleanser most excellent,” Roetger said.

“Ye-es,” Adelia said encouragingly. She could see little of the sword with the champion’s great frame blocking the light from the window.

Roetger went on at length about how each polishing had revealed more and more of what lay beneath the thick patina. “It is old, so old.”

He moved aside so that light shone on the pommel.

Adelia gasped. What had once been warts were now inset stones gleaming like the sun. “What are those jewels?”

“Topaz,” Emma said smugly.

Roetger nodded. “From my own Saxony, I think. It is the stone of strength.”

“And it can make its wearer invisible if he needs to be,” parroted Emma, “and it changes color in the presence of poison, doesn’t it, Roetger? And it can cure anything, including piles.”

Her champion frowned at her. “It has great power.”

“Ye-es,” Adelia said.

Still, Roetger didn’t take the sword out of its scabbard. He talked of tang, fuller, weight, balance, how the hilt was attached to the blade, the “lifestone” set into the hilt, edges so perfectly formed that they might have been fashioned with a file rather than hammered in a forge.

“This weapon a god makes,” he said. “Wayland the Smith himself, maybe.”

“What’s that little ring thing there, at the bottom of the hilt?”

“Ach now,” Roetger said in the tone Adelia’s foster father had used when she’d asked an intelligent question. “It is the oath ring, the ring of a great chieftain.”

“You see,” Emma chipped in, “Roetger says-he knows everything about the history of swords-he says that when one of a chieftain’s or king’s men took an oath of allegiance, he knelt and kissed that ring.”

Rhys the bard had sung of a sword. “One among them finest of all, A ring on the hilt, valor in the blade, and fear on the point…”

“Ye-es.”

“Look, then,” Roetger said. He laid aside his crutch to pick up the sword as if he must be straight to handle the thing. He asked Adelia to stand up. Flicking the sword free of its scabbard, he held it out to her.

It was a rebirth. Apart from where it had been nicked, the blade gleamed as if new from the smithy.

Rhys had sung: “Tempered in blood of many a battle, Never in fight did it fail the hand that drew it, Daring the perils of war, the rush of the foe, Not the first time, then, its edge ventured on valiant deeds.”

“But look, look,” Roetger insisted. “See the fuller.”

Adelia, who knew nothing of weaponry, supposed the fuller to be the grooved bit running down the blade. She went nearer and saw a design like curling water. “What’s that?” Letters had been etched into the pattern.

“Look closer,” Roetger said.

Adelia squinted. “Is that an A?… R, T…”

“Arturus,” the champion said.

There was silence.

A chill over her skin rose goose bumps along Adelia’s arms and up her back. She couldn’t speak.

Emma was bouncing in her chair, squeaking with joy like a child.

“Excalibur.” In his reverence, Roetger began to sob. “What else? Where else? Are we not in Avalon?”

“But…” Adelia stared from face to face. “But that means… the body on the hill…”

“Yes,” Roetger said simply.

Emma, too, was sobbing. “The once and future king,” she said.

Roetger flung up his hand so that the weapon in it glowed amber in the light. Then he held it out to Adelia on his palms. Tears still fell, but he was smiling. “Mansur says it was passed to you. I am not worthy; it belonged to a great heart, and to a great heart it must go.”

“He wants you to have it,” Emma said. “You have the greatest heart we know.”