Grave Goods aka Relics of the Dead

THREE

AS THE CAVALCADE left Cambridgeshire and passed the old Roman milestone indicating that they were in the county of Hertfordshire, Emma, Lady Wolvercote, relaxed. “Being in the company of a wanted criminal was, well, somewhat exciting,” she said.

They smiled at each other. “You still are,” Adelia told her. “I imagine the authority of a bishop’s court doesn’t halt at boundaries.”

“I hope it may when one knows the bishop.” Emma said it tentatively. Adelia had once known the man who was now bishop of Saint Albans too well, having borne him a child.

“He’s a man of God now,” Adelia said. “I doubt he could break the rules for me. Or would.”

Her tone suggested that the subject be dropped. Which Emma did, though dying to know more; she was, after all, in debt to this woman, who had made King Henry promise not to sell her, Emma, into a second marriage-her first having been forced on her by abduction and rape. The Baron of Wolvercote was dead now, God rot him, and his death had left her with estates and with a son who, somewhat to her surprise, considering the circumstances of his conception, she adored.

Ordinarily, the widow of one of his nobles was in the gift of the king to be conferred on, or sold to, whomever he wished. Also, because her husband had joined a rebellion against Henry Plantagenet, the land he’d left Emma could well have been forfeited to the royal treasury.

That neither eventuality had come about was due to Adelia. Wolvercote had been hanged not because he was a rebel-Henry II found it better to bring such men to heel by making peace with them once they’d surrendered-but because he’d secretly murdered the young man Emma had preferred to him. It was Adelia who’d uncovered the crime and brought it to the king’s attention. For that, bless her, she’d demanded payment, not for herself but for Emma’s peace of mind. Henry-usually the least generous of monarchs where money was concerned-had granted the boon to the one he called his “mistress of the art of death” because she’d asked for it.

Looking at her as they rode side by side, Emma marveled at this woman who hobnobbed with kings and had, once, more than hobnobbed with a future bishop. She looked so… dowdy. Emma, who delighted in fine clothes, longed to drag off the unattractive cap covering Adelia’s dark blond hair and dress her in a style to show off the slim figure that at the moment was hidden under a brown and shapeless garment better suited to the lesser clergy.

Adelia, as she knew, preferred not to stand out in a crowd, but garbed like that, Emma thought, she wouldn’t stand out in a clump of trees. It was like being accompanied by a servant-in fact, the Wolvercote servants in their bright livery were better dressed than this extraordinary female.

“Aren’t you hot in that?” Emma asked, for the sun was exceptional, even for late May.

“Yes,” Adelia said, and left it there.

But perhaps it was as well that the eyes of everybody they passed turned to Emma on her pretty white palfrey and not toward the small, brown-clad woman on the small brown pony. When he’d seen them off, Prior Geoffrey had insisted Adelia be hidden inside Emma’s traveling cart until they were over the county border-and Mansur, too; that exotic and fearsome figure in Arab robes and headdress was too well known not to give the game away, for he was never far away from Adelia’s side.

Now, however, and justified or not, tension evaporated in the Hertfordshire sunlight, and both Mansur and Adelia had emerged into it to take their places on horseback.

It was still a small group considering the danger on the roads from robbers, though that was better under Plantagenet rule than it had been. Emma traveled with her child’s nurse, a serving woman, two grooms, a confessor, and a knight with his squire-such a knight, an enormous man, taller even than Mansur, with an air that left no doubt he could use the sword in the scabbard at his waist to effect, his nasaled helmet giving ferocity to a face that was otherwise gentle.

“Master Roetger,” Emma had said, introducing him. “He’s German. My champion.” She meant it literally, for Emma was touring the estates her husband had left, ensuring that their tenants acknowledged her two-year-old son as heir to the property-not always successfully. Her forced marriage to Wolvercote had been abrupt and had so few witnesses that in the complicated system of feudal landholding, more than one lord was disputing the claim of Baby Philip, the new Baron Wolvercote, to the income from the land they’d held from his father. An elderly cousin, for instance, had refused to give up the rents from a thousand Yorkshire acres to a child he’d called a bastard and a usurper.

“The God of Battles told him whose land it was,” Emma said with vengeful satisfaction. “Master Roetger had his champion disabled in twenty minutes.”

It was the way things were done in England, Adelia the foreigner had learned. Trial by combat. A judicium Dei. Since Almighty God knew to whom disputed land truly belonged, the disputants-or more often, their champions-fought a judicial battle under His invisible but all-seeing eye, leaving it to Him to show which party had the right of it according to which contestant He let win.

“God is on our side,” Emma said, “and will be again in Aylesbury.”

“Another combat?”

“There was a married sister,” Emma said-she never named her late husband if she could help it. “A widow whose children died before she did, so she inherited a nice property near Tring, which, by rights, is my boy’s. Her brother-in-law is contesting our claim, but he’s a miserable, cheeseparing creature, Sir Gerald. I doubt he will spend much in acquiring their champion.”

“Master Roetger being expensive?” Adelia asked.

“Indeed. I had to send to Germany for him. We needed the best.”

“That’s hardly leaving the decision to God, is it?”

“Oh, God would have decided in our favor in any case.” Emma looked down at the velvet-lined pannier in which Baron Wolver-cote was traveling, sucking his thumb as he went. “Wouldn’t he, Pippy? Wouldn’t he, my darling? God always protects the innocent.”

He didn’t protect you, Adelia thought. Nobody could have been more innocent than the joyous young girl who was being brought up in the convent where Adelia had first met her, the same convent Wolvercote and his men had broken into to carry her off.

But Adelia didn’t point out the illogic in Emma’s argument-it would have done no good. Inevitably, the girl had been changed. Wolvercote hadn’t even wanted her for herself, only for the money chests she was inheriting from a father in the wine trade.

The Emma of today still had the poise that her father’s gold had given her, but she’d become obsessed with this sudden unforeseen ownership of land in various parts of the country, with manors, mills, rivers, pannages, meadows filled with cattle that her rapist had owned and that now, in her view, his son should have though the skies fell. There was a ferocity to her, a set to her young mouth, a carelessness for other people’s lives that almost mirrored those of the man who’d abused her.

Worse, her singing voice had fallen silent. It had been Adelia’s first introduction to her at Godstow Abbey, where Emma had been brought up-a pure soprano leading the responses of the choir nuns so gloriously that even Adelia, who had no musical ear, had been enchanted into thinking herself nearer to heaven for having heard it.

But now when she asked for a song, Emma refused to perform. “I have none left in me.”

Friends though they were, Adelia suspected that Emma hadn’t asked her to be a traveling companion solely out of affection. Young Pippy had been born prematurely and was still underweight for his age; his mother needed the company of the only doctor she trusted.

At the next wide verge on the road, they stopped to refresh themselves and let the horses rest. “Does he look pale to you?” Emma asked anxiously, watching the nurse lift Pippy out of his pannier so that he could run around with young Allie on the grass.

The child certainly looked less robust than Allie, even when the two-year difference in their ages was taken into account, but Adelia said, “It’s the healthiest thing you can do for him in this weather.” She set great store by fresh air and variety for children. Emma, after all, could afford the finest inns to stay at and, therefore, that other requisite for children-good food.

The travelers found both at Saint Albans.

Adelia had become increasingly nervous as they’d approached the town, but a private word with the landlord of its Pilgrims’ Rest reassured her that the bishop was abroad.

“Gone to help the king put down the damned Welsh, so they say,” the landlord told her. “He’s a fine fighter as well as a good shepherd is Bishop Rowley.”

Damn him, Adelia thought. I worry in case I might have to see him again and I worry when I don’t. A fine fighter; blast him. What’s he doing fighting?

Saint Albans was full of pilgrims come to worship at the tomb of England ’s first Christian martyr. The wealthiest of them, a party of twelve, were also staying at the Pilgrims’ Rest, intending to ensure the good of their souls by finishing off their pilgrimage at Glastonbury, oldest and holiest of England’s abbeys and, even more compelling, reputedly the site of Avalon.

They welcomed Emma’s request that she and her people join them on their way into the South West. “The more, the merrier,” their leader, a large burgher from Yorkshire, told her.

“And safer,” said a Cheshire abbess. She looked with appreciation at Master Roetger. “I trust your knight shall be coming with us?”

“As far as Wells,” Emma said, “but we shall be turning off to Aylesbury on the way for a day or two-Master Roetger is to uphold my son’s claim to an estate in a trial by combat.”

“A trial by combat?”

“Trial by combat?”

The inn’s dining table was enlivened; visiting the saints might ensure one’s place in heaven, but earth didn’t have much more to offer in the way of entertainment than seeing two champions trying to kill each other.

It was decided. The pilgrims would loyally accompany their new friend, Lady Wolvercote, on her diversion to the judicial battleground at the Buckinghamshire county town of Aylesbury.

As her party was to be accompanied by too many people for robbers to attack them as they went, Emma felt safe to employ one of her grooms to ride on ahead and take a letter to Wells, where her mother-in-law, Lady Wolvercote, now the dowager Lady Wolvercote, occupied another of the estates that young Pippy had inherited from his father. “It announces my coming,” she told Adelia. “It’s supposed to be the best of the properties, and if I like it, I shall settle there. Somerset is the nicest of all counties. There is a dower house attached to it, I’m told, so the old woman will have accommodation that she’s entitled to move into-that’s supposing that she and I get on together. If we don’t, she can have one of the other estates somewhere else-a smaller one, of course.”

“Have you never met her?”

“No,” Emma said bitterly. “Mine was not a wedding to which relatives, or anybody else, was invited.”

It would be a strange situation-a bride and mother-in-law who were strangers. Adelia experienced sympathy for the unknown woman; with Emma in this mood, the slightest infraction would see the poor lady uprooted from her home and sent to another. She said, “I am sure she will be too delighted at acquiring a grandson to be anything but pleasant.”

There had been no children from Wolvercote’s previous marriage; his first wife had died only weeks after the wedding, leaving him her considerable dowry-circumstances that, knowing the man, Adelia had always thought to be suspicious.

“She’d better be,” Emma said ominously.

THE AYLESBURY JUDGES sat on benches under an awning decked by flags. Another covered stand held the nonlegal rich and important. Lesser mortals, large numbers of them, braved the sun to line the spears that had been set in the middle of the field to mark off a sanded area, sixty feet square.

It was a day out. There were little tents selling ale and sweetmeats. Jongleurs entertained the crowds with songs, legerdemain, and tumbling. Market women sold clothes-pegs and herbs. In the fields beyond, swallows flipped back and forth over the corn strips.

The judges’ herald blew a fanfare before introducing the two combatants in a voice that traveled. “Under the eye of Almighty God, Master Peter of Nottingham representing Sir Gerald L’Havre, and Master Roetger of Essen representing Lord Philip, Baron Wolvercote, shall this day prove which holds the Manor of Tring, with all its appurtenances, by true right.”

The trumpet brayed again. “Let the combatants come forth armed with scutis and bacculis, and swear to the justices that they have abjured all magic in this matter of trial, then let them fight until the God of Battles shall decide, or until the sun shall go down.”

The two champions emerged from a small pavilion near the judicial stand, knelt before the judges’ bench, and spoke in unison.

“Hear this, ye justices, that we have this day neither eaten, drunk, nor have upon our persons neither bone, stone, nor grass, nor any enchantment, sorcery, or witchcraft, whereby the law of God may be abused or the law of the devil exalted. So help us, God and His saints.”

Adelia was in the stands only because Emma had begged her to be; she’d rather have stayed behind at the inn with the children. She had no liking for fighting of any kind-it took too long to put people together again afterward, always supposing they were still alive to let her do it.

The two men strode into the arena. Both carried a shield and a stave. Each wore sleeveless hauberks, leaving the head and legs bare, and each was shod with red sandals-a tradition, apparently-that made them look vaguely ridiculous, like children who’d dressed up as knights without the proper footwear.

Adelia was relieved; staves were surely not as harmful as swords; less bloody, anyway. She said so to Emma.

“In Germany it is the sword,” she was told, “but Roetger is a master with both-and the proper name is ‘quarterstaff,’ my dear, not ‘stave.’ ”

Emma had become edgy; it didn’t seem as if the cheeseparing Sir Gerald had economized this time. His champion was an inch or two shorter and probably a little older than Roetger, but the muscles in his neck, arms, and legs were formidable. So was the sneer that showed confidence and dark yellow teeth.

By contrast the German looked the slighter of the two, and his face was expressionless. Not a man of words, but on the journey Adelia had come to like him, mainly because both children did, always pestering him: “Master Roger, Master Roger.” He had endless patience with them, making whistles from hazel twigs, showing them how to hoot like an owl by puffing into their clasped hands, tearing little pieces out of a folded leaf so that, unfolded, it had a face.

“Does he have children back in Germany?”

“I haven’t asked,” Emma said, with more energy than the question demanded. “He is here to fight; that’s all I’m interested in.”

There was another fanfare. Master Peter, representing the defendant, threw a mailed glove to the ground. Master Roetger, the prosecuting champion, picked it up.

“Let battle commence and God defend the right.”

The quarterstaffs were six feet long and made of oak. Each man grasped his in fighting mode, one hand clasping it in the middle, the other hand gripping it a quarter of the way down so that half the staff was free to do the belaboring.

Except that there wasn’t any belaboring-not at first. There was a lot of jumping as one man tried to take the legs out from under the other, skipping, grunting, loud cracks as stave met stave, but no smites on flesh.

Sitting next to Adelia, Father Septimus, Emma’s confessor, rubbed his hands. “Good, good, proper champions on both sides. We’re in for a fine contest; it will take hours before they tire.”

Hours? And what happened when they did tire and lost the agility to avoid the blows? Those were heavy staves.

The fight had hardly begun and she was sickened by it, by everything, the pavilions, the fanfares, the bunting, the judges, all the banal formality; everything here was tainted, including herself. She thought of Jesus and his plain, provincial humanity and how they were belittling His Father, as in all trials in which God was brought in to decide, diminishing Him to the status of a Caesar presiding over a bloodstained Colosseum, asked to stick up his thumb or turn it down.

She told Emma that she was going to answer a call of nature. Emma, twisting a kerchief in her hands and without taking her eyes off the arena, said, “Come back soon. Master Roetger may need you.”

People who drew in their knees as she passed along the row to the steps merely peered round her, tutting at her momentary obstruction of their view.

A latrine had been dug behind the stands for the occasion; its cloud of flies could be seen even above its wattle fencing. Adelia avoided it and climbed a stile leading to a path through trees, following its way to a stream, the noise of the crowd fading behind her. She seated herself on the grass under a willow tree, took off her boots, and let the water cool her feet.

What am I doing here?

In deserting the fens she’d cut herself off from everything that anchored her. It had been a grief to leave her patients, to say goodbye to Prior Geoffrey, and an even greater unhappiness to make that brief, loving farewell at Saint Augustine’s to Ulf, Gyltha’s grandson, no longer the urchin who’d been her companion but now, under the prior’s tuition, a young man intent on law. And, oh, she would miss Ward. The dog wasn’t welcomed by Emma, and Adelia had been persuaded to leave him in the prior’s care.

Without them all she was rootless, adrift, especially with her occupation gone. If she wasn’t a doctor, she was nothing; even Allie couldn’t fill the space. Where to go? What to do?

The dark trout in the stream were as aimless as she was, and she became weary of watching them. She leaned her head back against the tree.

Damn it, she’d go back to Salerno. Introduce Allie and Gyltha to her beloved foster parents-they’d written to say they longed to see their grandchild. That’s what she’d do. She could earn her living again. Her old tutor, Gordinus, might take her back as his assistant, or she’d become a lecturer in dissection.

Yes, when she’d completed her obligation to Emma, she’d go home. Allie would receive a better education in Salerno than her mother could give her here-though, Adelia thought with pride, the child was already reading some Latin.

“And this time, Henry,” she said out loud, “I’ll make you let me go.”

So far the king had always refused her a passport. “The dead talk to you, mistress,” he’d told her, “and I need to know what some of the poor buggers are saying.”

If the king remained obdurate? Well, there were other ways of getting out of the country-fenland boatmen who were both friends and smugglers would sail her to Flanders.

With her eyes on the thin willow leaves above her, Adelia began to consider how she could pay her family’s way through France and across the Alps to the kingdom of Sicily… in a traveling medicine cart… attach herself to a pilgrimage as its herbalist…

She woke up, having dreamed that she was sitting in the Colosseum with the crowd around her delighting in gladiator blood and yelling for more. The scene before her was still peaceful, but the stream reflected the color of amber.

Dear God, the sun was beginning to go down, she’d been asleep for hours, and the howls of the crowd in the distance had become loud and shrill, indicating that somebody was hurt. She didn’t want to see it.

But she was a doctor.

Adelia got up, shaking off butterflies that had settled on her skirts. She put on her boots and hurried back up the path.

Nobody in the stand attended her return any more than they’d noticed her going. The kerchief in Emma’s hands was in shreds, her face white.

The two champions had faded from what they were; the sand had stuck to sweating skin and hair and darkened them so that in the failing light, the silvery hauberks almost seemed to move by themselves-slowly, very slowly, as if through treacle. Both men were limping; Roetger held his staff in his right hand only; his left arm hung, useless, by his side. His opponent seemed to have trouble seeing, occasionally flailing his staff in front of him, like a blind man feeling for an obstruction.

The crowd’s cry of satisfaction that Adelia had heard was fracturing into impatience. It would be dark soon, and neither champion had battered the other to death. Most unsatisfactory. The judges could be seen consulting among themselves. The God of Battles was letting everybody down.

And then the scene in the arena flickered. There were two cracks, almost instantaneous but not quite; one of them was caused by Master Roetger’s quarterstaff connecting at speed with his opponent’s head, knocking it sideways, and the other by Master Peter’s staff slashing at Master Roetger’s legs.

With Sir Gerald’s champion toppled, Roetger hopped forward and pressed the end of his staff into the other’s neck, pushing him flat to the ground.

There was a silence. A voice croaked, “Say it.” It was Roetger’s.

A murmur, sobbing.

“Say it. Loud, you say it.”

“Craven.” A curious shriek, a submission, the end of everything for the creature that made it.

The crowd exhaled in a howl that was not so much a cheer for the winner as contempt for the loser.

Somewhere the trumpet brayed again. The judges were standing. Emma was on her knees, her head in her hands. Perhaps she was thanking her god.

Adelia took no notice of any of it, not even of the wounded Roetger, who was using his staff as a crutch to hop off the field. She was watching a creature crawl through the sand into the shadows. “What will happen to him?” she asked Father Septimus.

“Who? Oh, that one. He will be infamous, of course. He’s been publicly shamed; he has declared himself a coward.”

That, then, was what “craven” meant, personal annihilation. Master Peter would not die, yet the essence of him had. And the man had fought for five hours.

They had all been shamed.

MASTER ROETGER LAY on a table in the champion’s pavilion, his squire standing helplessly beside him. A doctor poked tentatively at limbs and raised his head as the women came in. “Fractures to the arm and ankle. I can apply a salve, a marvelous mixture of my own from toads’ blood gathered at the full moon and…”

Adelia nudged Emma, who said, “Thank you, Doctor, that will not be necessary. We have salves of our own.”

“Not as efficacious as mine, I assure you, dear lady. And cheap, very cheap-only sixpence for the first application, three for any thereafter.”

“No, thank you, Doctor.”

While Emma ushered the man out, Adelia set about her own examination of the patient. Roetger bit into his lip but made no sound.

The humerus of the left arm was undoubtedly broken, but the other injury was not to the ankle. What she’d heard when Master Peter’s quarterstaff connected with Master Roetger’s foot hadn’t been the crack of a bone, more a “pop,” like something being pulled apart-not a noise she’d heard before but one she’d been told about at the School of Medicine. And the blow had been to the back of the leg

Sure enough, when she took his right foot in her hand, it flopped to the touch; she was able to bend it until the toes touched the lower shin.

“This is not a broken ankle,” she said. She looked at Roetger and then at Emma. “I’m afraid it’s the heel, the Achilles tendon.”

“What is that?”

“It’s… well, it’s like a piece of string attached to the muscles of the calf.” She was seeing it as displayed in a dissected leg on the great marble table where her foster father had carried out autopsies.

She would have liked to tell them about it, how marvelous it was, the thickest and strongest tendon in the body, which seemed to enable the foot to push downward in a run or jump. And why it was named after Achilles, whose only weak point it had been because his mother had held him by the heel when she made every other part of the hero invulnerable to injury by dipping him into the River Styx. But neither Emma nor poor Roetger would be interested in a dissertation at this moment.

“It’s ruptured, you see,” she said. “That last blow must have been tremendous.”

The champion made an effort: “How long?”

“Do we just strap it up?” Emma asked.

“We do, yes.” Adelia turned to Roetger. “We must ensure you don’t move it at all. As for how long it will take to heal…” She searched her memory for what the school’s lecturer on limbs had said-she herself had never treated this particular injury. “It may be a very long time, longer than the break in your arm… perhaps six months…”

Roetger’s eyes went wide with shock.

Aghast, Emma said, “Six months?”

Adelia grabbed her by the arm and took her outside the tent. “You can’t abandon him. What would he do? How could he return to Germany on one foot?”

Emma was indignant. “I don’t intend to abandon him. He was injured in my service. Of course I’ll care for him.”

Adelia sighed with relief. The gentle Emma of old still survived under the harsher surface of the new.

“But he’ll have to travel with us,” the newer Emma said sharply. “I may have a use for him after we get to Wells.”

“Not for six months, you won’t.” Adelia began making a list. “The whole lower leg will have to be splinted. A decoction of willow bark for the pain. And comfrey, we’ll need comfrey, but that grows everywhere, and we must hope it works on tendons as well as broken bones.” She started off toward where the traders were dismantling their pavilions to beg some struts for a splint.

Emma called after her: “Is he in much pain?”

“Agony.”

AT LAST IN BED at the Aylesbury inn at which they were all staying, Adelia worried about the heel most of the night. She had put on a rough splint for the time being, but that wouldn’t be good enough, not if it was to endure the rigors of travel over rutted roads and prevent its owner from being tempted to put his foot to the ground, something that had to be avoided at all costs.

At dawn she was in the inn’s stable yard, making inquiries to a sleepy ostler as to where she might gather comfrey. Since every county had its own name for the plant, he and she were at crosspurposes for a while until, finally enlightened, the man said, “Oh, you’re a-meaning knit-bone,” and directed her to an untidy patch of ground beyond a vegetable garden where clusters of young lance-shaped leaves and new yellow flowers were becoming visible in the dark green crowns of the old plants.

It was mostly comfrey roots that Adelia wanted, and she dug for them with her trowel, wishing she’d worn gloves-the hairy leaves were an irritant to the skin.

Carrying her spoils back to the inn, she found the pilgrims at breakfast and in shock. They’d received appalling news.

“ Glastonbury is burned down,” the Yorkshireman told her. “Aye, we had it from two separate peddlers last night. Burned down. Glastonbury. Glastonbury. Reckon the heart’s gone out of England.”

It was a heart that had been beating for more centuries than anybody could remember, empowered by the holiest of the holy-Saint Joseph of Arimathea, Saint Patrick of Ireland, Saint Bride, Saint Columba, Saint David of Wales, Saint Gildas… And now it had stopped.

There was puzzlement in the room, as well as shock. A glove maker from Chester expressed it: “You’d have thought with all those saints, at least one of ’em would’ve put the damned fire out.”

“King Arthur should have,” said somebody else. “How could he sleep through that?”

There was a feeling that the blessed dead of Glastonbury had not pulled their weight.

Emma entered the room to be told of the calamity and was aghast. “ Glastonbury?”

“Aye. Never have thought it, would thee?” the Yorkshire burgher said. “And a right conflagration it were, so it’s said; noothing left, not noothing, sooch a pity. And I were looking forward to a blessing from Joseph of Arimathea.” He shook his head. “Should’ve set out earlier.”

The Cheshire abbess was less upset. “I said all along we ought to be making for Canterbury. With Saint Thomas we are assured of even stronger sanctity, his being the latest martyrdom. Ah, who would have thought such a blessed saint would be killed by his king…”

The Yorkshireman cut her off in mid-flow; her companions had heard the abbess’s strictures on Henry Plantagenet’s perfidy in crying for the death of his obstructive archbishop many times before. He said, “Aye, well, that’s where we’re a-going now-to Canterbury.” There was no virtue to be had from Glastonbury ’s bones and relics now that they had been reduced to ashes, whereas there was much to be gained from the vials of Saint Thomas à Becket’s blood that were on sale in the cathedral where he’d died.

Bills paid, packing done, the pilgrims congratulated Emma on her triumph in the trial by combat, which, they said, they had much enjoyed, and bade her farewell. The man from Yorkshire kissed her hand. “Right sorry we are to be leaving your coompany, my lady.”

“I’m sorry, too.” Emma meant it. Without the pilgrims, and with Master Roetger disabled, the journey to Wells would be considerably less safe.

Adelia didn’t stay to wave good-bye; she was already at work to ensure the immobilization of a heel.

Gyltha was ordered to the kitchen to begin pounding the pile of comfrey roots to a mash in the largest mortar the inn could provide, while Mansur, armed with an ax, a whittling knife, and instructions, was sent off to find an ash tree and a willow. Adelia herself impounded the services of Emma’s most experienced groom, Alan, and both were to be seen in the stable yard drawing diagrams in its dust.

To facilitate matters, Master Roetger was carried to the cart and put on its cushions with his legs dangling over the tailboard until the bad one, which was bare, could be placed with care across a sawing horse. It was a maneuver causing excitement among the inn servants, who forgathered under the impression that they were to watch a Saracen doctor-Mansur’s assumed role-perform an amputation.

Instead, they saw Gyltha hold some of the comfrey leaves to the heel while Adelia gently plastered them into place with the unpleasant-smelling green-black paste from the mortar, eventually encasing the entire foot, including the sole, and lower shin with it.

Under the lash of the innkeeper’s tongue, his staff returned to work-it was, after all, only the usual home remedy of comfrey being applied to a breakage by a couple of women.

When the foot was done, the broken arm was treated to the same procedure. Pain compressed the patient’s mouth into a straight line and sweat glistened in the furrows of his forehead, but he tried to show interest.

“In my country this plant we also eat,” he said. “Schwarzwurz, we call it. Fried in batter, it is good.”

Adelia was interested. England ’s peasantry ate boiled comfrey, as they did nettles, as a vegetable. To put the leaves in egg, flour, and milk argued a higher standard of living.

“And now we’re batterin’ you,” Gyltha told him, making him smile.

Finished, Adelia stood back. “There. How does that feel?”

“Six months, truly?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“But I walk again?”

“Yes,” she told him, hoping to God she was right, “you will.”

Leaving the patient as he was while the plaster dried in the sun, she and Gyltha repaired to the horse trough to wash the stuff off their hands. Emma, who’d been watching, came up to them. “How long is this going to take?”

Adelia began explaining that there was more to do, but Emma, exclaiming, walked away.

“Temper, temper,” Gyltha said. “What’s up with her?”

“I don’t know.”

There was a lot more to be done. Adelia, the groom, and Mansur worked all morning weaving a cage of withies they’d devised for the leg. It had a base of wood that Mansur had whittled into a bowl that should, if Roetger accidentally put his foot to the ground, keep most of the pressure off his heel.

Occasionally, Emma came to the window of her room to watch them and huff with impatience, but Adelia took no notice-this was an injury new to her, and she was determined to mend it.

It was after noon by the time the comfrey plaster had dried rock-hard and the cage could be strung around it. Even then, Adelia delayed the start of the journey until she had attached the front of the cage by string to a hook in the edge of the cart’s roof so that the champion’s foot was gimballed and any jolt in traveling would merely sway it in the air.

“He looks ridiculous,” Emma said.

For the first time, Roetger complained. “I am like trussed chicken.”

But Adelia was adamant. “You stay trussed,” she said. After Aylesbury, they would be turning southwest onto minor roads that were unlikely to have been kept in good repair.

Nor were they. During the early spring rains, the wheels of farm vehicles had scored ruts as deep as ditches into surfaces that nobody had subsequently filled in, leaving them to dry as hard as cement.

Time and again, the company had to pause while the grooms saw to a wheel in danger of coming off the cart, though Adelia preened herself on the fact that Roetger’s leg had merely been swung from side to side in its cage and taken no harm. At each overnight stop, Emma summoned the local reeve and berated him for his village’s lack of duty in repairing the section of road for which it was responsible, though whether her lecture did any good was doubtful-highway upkeep was expensive and time-consuming.

Apart from rough traveling, it was a lovely journey. The air was filled with the call of the cuckoo and the scent of the bluebells that paved every wood as far as the eye could see into the trees.

The risk of robbery was lessened by the amount of innocent traffic on the roads or crisscrossing them, brought out by the good weather: falconers, market people, bird nesters, families paying visits, groups of vengeful gamekeepers after foxes and pine martens. The cavalcade exchanged greetings and news with all of them. True, Master Roetger suffered as they passed through villages where rude boys mistook his chained and recumbent position for that of a felon being taken to prison and threw stones at him, but the going through increasingly lush countryside was good, and Adelia would have enjoyed it if it hadn’t been for Emma’s behavior and, surprisingly, that of her own daughter.

A strong character, Allie, despite her lack of years. At first her mother had thought the child was following her own footsteps in being fascinated by anatomy. Which, in a sense, she was-but only in that of animals. If it didn’t have scales, four legs, fur, or fins, Allie wasn’t interested in it. All living fauna delighted her, and should the subject be dead, she wanted to know why it had delighted her, why it flew, crawled, swam, or galloped. By the age of three, she had wept over the death of the jackdaw trained to perch on her shoulder-and then dissected it. By four, thanks to a local hunter, she was familiar with the muscles that made a deer run, the bones in the shoveling arms of a mole-a creature trapped mercilessly in the fens because its runs weakened the dikes that held back floods.

At the beginning of the journey Allie had been charmed by her two-year-old playmate. Yet, loving the train’s horses and mules as she did, she wanted to be the center of attention to their grooms-a breed she’d always got on well with. But the grooms were employed by Emma and, by extension, young Pippy, who, if there was a ride to be had at the head of the cavalcade, came first. Little Lord Wolvercote was fussed over not only by his mother and servants but by Gyltha and Adelia as well, and the green-eyed monster of jealousy began to show in Allie’s eyes and in the hits and pushes that sent the little boy to the ground. It came to the point at which the adults couldn’t turn their backs without a wail from Pip as Allie attacked him again.

Mortified, Gyltha lectured, without effect.

“Don’t like him,” Allie said, explaining why she’d pulled a switch from a tree and beaten Lord Wolvercote’s bottom with it.

“She’s a spoiled little madam,” Gyltha said to Adelia, having taken the switch from Allie’s hand and whacked the child’s behind in turn. “She won’t say sorry. You got to do something.”

Secretly, Adelia admired her daughter’s defiance in the face of condemnation and whipping, but Gyltha was right-something had to be done to correct her. She tried an indirect approach and made a doll out of sticks and bandages on which she drew a hideous face, calling it Puncho. She gave it to her daughter. “You are not winning friends with behavior like this, Allie, so when you feel like hitting Pippy, hit Puncho instead.”

Allie regarded the monstrosity with favor and tucked it under her arm. “I like Puncho,” she said. “Don’t like Pippy.” And she continued the assaults until it was impossible, during rests on the road, to allow both children to run around on the verge together.

Incurring Adelia’s gratitude, Emma was tolerant about the situation, though she made sure her son was kept out of Allie’s way. “I know how the child feels. At the convent, I used to pinch little Sister Priscilla when I thought Mother Edyve was favoring her over me.”

Yet she, too, was behaving badly. Adelia failed to realize why Emma, so understanding of Allie, showed resentment at the care lavished on Master Roetger, for whom she seemed to lack all sympathy. “Does he really need to be cooed over?” she would ask, as Gyltha and Adelia attended to their patient. She clucked with irritation when the grooms had to carry Roetger into the trees to help him with his calls of nature, and at the lengthy arrangements that had to be made for him on the ground floor of every inn at which they passed the night-Adelia refused to allow him to be carried upstairs in case his foot should encounter an obstruction in the process.

It was as if Emma’s champion’s needs embarrassed her as much as they did him.

Enlightenment eventually dawned during a rare moment of intimacy when, having reached Marlborough and seen the children to bed, Emma and Adelia were drawn by a lovely evening into the rose garden of their inn-one of the richest they had stayed at so far.

As they walked, Emma’s voice came to her companion out of a scented dusk. “Should you like more children, ’Delia?”

“Yes. Very much, but I’m unlikely to have them now.”

“You might marry.”

“No.” Having kept her independence by refusing marriage to Rowley, she wasn’t going to surrender it now. She said, lightly, “For one thing, any respectable man would regard me as spoiled goods.”

Emma didn’t disagree. They walked on. After a while, Emma said, “I don’t want more children. Another son, for instance, might complicate Pippy’s inheritance.”

Adelia didn’t see how it could; the laws of succession were strict, though she merely asked, “So you won’t marry again?”

“No.” Emma was sharp about it. “And thanks to you, I don’t have to. But…”

It was a lingering conjunction. Adelia waited to hear what it led to.

Suddenly, there was an outburst of anguish. “They talk about the joys of the marriage bed, but I never knew them-not with him, he did things to me… I was forced… I fought… I never consented, never…”

“I know.” Adelia took her friend’s arm. “I know.”

“Yet there must be joys,” Emma said desperately. “You knew them with Rowley. There must be gentler men, loving men.”

“Yes,” Adelia told her with authority, “there are. You may meet one, Emmy. You could marry again, this time by your own choosing.”

“No.” It was almost a scream. “I don’t trust… I shall not be subject again… You of all people should understand that.”

Nearby, a nightingale began to sing, its cadences refreshing the garden like silvery drops of water. The two women stopped to listen.

More quietly, Emma went on. “I am seventeen years old, ’Delia. If I live to be ancient, I shall never have known pleasure with a man.”

Adelia waited. This outpouring was heading somewhere; she didn’t know where. Emma was expecting something from her, but she didn’t know what that was, either.

“But suppose,” Emma said desperately, “suppose, for the sake of argument, one set one’s heart on a man, an unsuitable man, someone… oh, I don’t know, of a status below one’s own.”

She became irritated, as if she expected Adelia to answer a question she had not put. Going briskly ahead, she said over her shoulder, “Somebody one couldn’t marry, even if one wanted to, because his occupation and birth would bring social obloquy on one… and one’s child. Suppose that.”

Adelia tried to. Ahead of her, Emma’s figure was that of an elegant ghost in the moonlight, a pale shade that flicked petals from the roses it passed as if it disdained them.

Walking behind, Adelia attempted to follow the circumlocution that Emma had used to pose her question. What was it her poor friend wanted from her? No marriage, never marriage. No children, never more children. A life without physical love, yet a heart, such a sad heart, longing for the tenderness of a man… an unsuitable man…

Then understanding came. Adelia castigated herself. What a fool I am. Of course. I should have known. That’s it.

She quickened her pace, caught Emma by the arm, and led her to a seat in an alcove of roses, made her sit down, and sat down herself.

“Did I ever tell you my theory on how it is possible to avoid conception?” she asked, as if she was raising a different subject.

“No,” Emma said, as if she, too, found the matter a new one. “No, I don’t believe you did.”

“It’s my foster parents’ theory, in fact,” Adelia said. “They are an extraordinary couple, I think I’ve told you. They refuse to be bound by their differing religions-he’s a Jew, she’s a Christian, but their minds are free, so free, of laws, prejudices, superstition, imprisoned thinking…” She paused, overwhelmed by longing to see them again and by gratitude for the upbringing they had given her.

“Really?” Emma said politely.

“Yes. And they traveled, you see. To gain medical knowledge. They asked questions of different races, tribes, other histories, customs, and my foster mother, bless her, went to the women, especially the women.”

“Yes?” Emma said, and again it seemed of little interest to her.

“Yes. And by the time she returned to Salerno, she had gathered, first, that women through the ages have tried to have control over their own bodies-and the methods they’ve used.”

“Goodness gracious,” Emma said lightly.

“Yes,” Adelia said. And because she was Adelia, to whom the dissemination of knowledge was essential and must be as fascinating to the listener as it was to her, she went into detailed account of the different ways, in different ages, in which men and women had attempted to achieve the dignity of choosing for themselves how many children they could cope with. First she spoke of “receptacles,” sheaths for the penis that various peoples made from sheepskin, or snakeskin, sometimes soaked in vinegar or lemon juice. “Effective, my mother said, but many men do not like to wear them.”

Then came the subject of coitus interruptus, the biblical sin of Onan, who, forced by Jewish law to marry his brother’s wife, had “spilled his seed upon the ground” rather than let it impregnate her. “But again, most men do not wish to do that.”

The nightingale continued its ethereal song while Adelia labored on through earthy, human truths. “There are plant remedies, of course, pennyroyal, asafetida, et cetera,” she said, “but Mother was wary of those; so many are poisonous and in any case do not work.”

She paused for a moment, hoping for a response. There was none. Whether Emma, sitting so silently, was listening to her or to the blasted nightingale it was difficult to know.

“And then there are the pessaries,” Adelia said. She enlarged on their history, speaking of Outremer women who placed sponges soaked in crocodile dung and lemon juice in the vulva, of an Arab tribe that used the same method, this time favoring a mixture of honey and camel droppings beaten into a paste with wine vinegar. She spoke of similar advice found in ancient writings, Egyptian hieroglyphics, Greek and Latin…

Emma shifted, and Adelia realized she was losing her audience. She took in a breath. “What Mother found was that among all these recipes, when they worked, was what she called ‘acidus,’ a constant theme of the sour-lemon juice, vinegar. She was sure that it was that which killed sperm.”

At the word “killed,” Emma stiffened. “And what has God had to say of these ways to murder?”

“Not murder,” Adelia said. “Prevention. According to the priests, God condemns them, but priests are men who overlook the death of too many women through the imposition of too much childbearing.” Adelia thought of the murdered baby and its grave in the fens. “Or families struggling in poverty because they have too many mouths to feed.”

Emma stood up. “Well, I think it is disgusting. Worse, it’s vulgar.” She walked away.

“And in the case of pessaries,” Adelia shouted after her, “Mother recommends the attachment of a silk thread so they can be pulled down afterward.”

She heard the inn door slam closed and sighed. “Well, you did ask,” she said. “At least, I think you did.”

She sat on for a while, listening to the nightingale.

“You been a time,” Gyltha said when Adelia returned to their and Allie’s bedroom.

“I was talking to Emma. Gyltha, I think, I think, she’s in love with Master Roetger but doesn’t feel she can marry him.”

“Could’ve told you that,” Gyltha said. “Too high and mighty to look after him herself but jealous as a cat of them as do.”

“Yes, I suppose that’s it. Poor girl, poor girl.”

“And she thinks as how you fancy him yourself.”

“Oh, Gyltha, she can’t.” To Adelia, the German was a patient. She saw him only as a broken arm, a ruptured Achilles heel, and a long-suffering nature.

“Maybe she can’t, but she do.”

The next morning, Emma tongue-lashed her people-the grooms for being tardy in saddling up, the nurse for dressing Pippy in the wrong clothes, even Father Septimus for an overlong grace at breakfast. Adelia and Master Roetger were ignored as if they did not exist.

“An oh-be-joyful journey this is going to be,” Gyltha muttered as they set out.

Adelia agreed with her. If the situation continued all the way to Wells, it would be intolerable.

As it turned out, Adelia, Gyltha, Allie, and Mansur did not have to endure it long. The company had been on the road only an hour when the sound of galloping hooves alerted it to riders coming up fast from the rear.

Master Roetger felt for the sword that he kept always by his side, though what, pinioned as he was, he could have done with it was uncertain.

There were three of them, all with the Plantagenet blazon on their tunics, each one leading a remount. Like their horses, they were lathered with sweat from hard traveling. Their officer addressed Emma. “Are you Mistress Adelia, lady?”

Adelia said, “I am.”

“An’ is he the lord Mansur?”

“He is.”

The officer said, “We’ve been chasing you all the way from Cambridge, mistress. You’re to come along of us.”

“Where? What for?”

“To Wales, mistress. By order of Henry the King.”