A Murderous Procession (13 page)

“You do. A short one.”

In fact, nobody noticed her. The abbey was in uproar: two important guests killed while under its aegis; people to be told, messages sent; funerals to be arranged; special services to be held; and, with it all, the holy hours to be kept. Monks scurried anxiously in from the rain and out again, cowls dripping, heads bent in an effort to keep their sandaled feet out of puddles. She could have made her way through them and been paid no attention if she’d been clashing two cymbals together as she went.

The Lady Chapel stood by itself an adjunct of the abbey’s church, and possibly its oldest building. The figure waiting for her was taller than its carved, chevroned porch.

“You took your time,” it said. He twisted the handle ring and flung one of the door’s leaves open with a crash.

Immediately Adelia smelled incense, beeswax, and death. Inside the only light came from two tall candles on stanchions at the head and base of the catafalque where Sir Nicholas lay Two monks knelt on either side.

The only sound in the silence was the
plink-plink
of rainwater seeping through a leak in the roof and into a bucket that was lost in the shadows.

Rowley said: “Thank you, brothers, you may leave. I’ll watch over my friend for a while.”

They were glad to go and rose at once. Rubbing their poor knees, they bowed to the corpse, the altar, then to the Bishop of Saint Albans before gliding out.

Rowley banged the door shut behind them and bolted it. “Now, then, come and look at this.”

The body had been wrapped in a silk winding sheet. Usually, the face was left exposed, but not this time. Adelia might have been looking down on an Egyptian mummy.

Together and with difficulty—Sir Nicholas had been a heavy man—she and Rowley labored to unwind it from its cocoon.

When at last the corpse was exposed, she saw why the face had been covered; there was a jagged gap where one of the eyes should have been.

“What happened?”

“Young Aubrey found him first and began calling the ‘Found.’ Jesus, it was a fiasco, that hunt. Raining, dark as the Pit, too many men scattered among too many sodding trees, not knowing where one another was, me trying to round them up.”

Rowley took off his cap to claw his fingers through his hair, and she saw that his face was pinched by tiredness and grief.

“Anyway,” he said, “I heard Aubreys horn and spurred toward it. The boy … he’d unhitched Nicholas’s foot from its stirrup and put the body on the ground. He was crying over it. There was this great splinter in poor old Nicholas’s eye, so we reckoned his horse had bolted and crashed him into a branch and that’s what killed him.”

“But you don’t think so now?”

“Well … there was Ivo, Nicholas, no time to think anything. But when I was sitting by Ivo, trying to make sense of it all, it came to me that if it was the branch splinter that killed Nicholas, there should have been a lot of blood—and there wasn’t. Dead men don’t bleed; you taught me that.”

“Something else killed him first?”

“That’s what you’re here for. And get on with it, they’ll be bringing Ivo here soon.”

Adelia pushed back her cowl. For a moment, as she always did, she knelt by the body asking its forgiveness for her handling of it. The soul that had occupied it was absolved; the dead were sinless—also they were her business.

Whoever had done the laying out of the corpse had made a rushed job of washing it; there were green smears on the skin where the knight’s clothes had been torn as he’d been dragged through grass. Stones and brambles had left long lacerations in the flesh.

“Give me more light.”

Hot wax dripped onto unfolded layers of the winding sheet as Rowley picked up one of the stanchions and held it nearer. From behind her, in the darkness, came the regular, musical drip of water into its bucket.

“Hmmm.”

“What?”

“This.” Her fingers had found a flap of torn, corrugated skin on the upper left back and, beneath it, a hole. This was what had bled—and profusely; the negligent layers-out had left crusts of blood around it.

“Here.” Adelia’s fingers investigated deeper. “Something’s embedded itself. I can feel wood.”

She looked up. “Rowley I think it’s a spear shaft, very thin but, yes, I’m sure it’s some sort of shaft, certainly a dart of some kind. It snapped off when he was dragged but this is what killed him; he was speared.”

His voice shocked the quiet.
“Fucking poachers.”
His fingers went through his hair again, and he said more gently: “Jesus God, such an end for a man like this.”

“What will you do?”

“Tell the abbot he’s a bloody disgrace, letting poachers roam his purlieus shooting anything that moves.” He went stamping around in the darkness, casting verbal damnation on villains who went out to kill other men’s game, describing in detail the unpretty end of this one if Rowley Picot got hold of him.

Adelia heard the bucket kicked to Kingdom Come and go rolling across the tiles. She’d been hoping to wash her hands in its water.

She let him rave. There was something particularly terrible about death by mistake, and it was difficult to see what else this could be … darkness, rain; a peasant—hungry perhaps—concealed and waiting in the undergrowth, listening for the sound of animal movement; hearing the rush of something big; then the expert and very lucky throw of a homemade spear …

Nor was it uncommon. Her knowledge of English history was uncertain, but hadn’t one of the Conqueror’s sons, what was his name, been accidentally killed in similar circumstances? In the New Forest, that had been. Rufus, that was it. William Rufus. A king, no less.

When Rowley had quieted, she asked: “Do you want me to get the spearhead out? I’d have to go for my knives.”

“No. Let’s give him back his decency” He came back to help her.

When the last wrap was in place, she stayed on her knees awhile longer.

She looked up to find Rowley staring at her and was suddenly aware that her hair was tumbled about her shoulders and that she was beautiful, because she always was beautiful in his eyes.

“God help me, girl,” he said, and his voice was raw, “but I’d tip this poor devil off his catafalque, throw you on it, and take you here and now. The hell with my immortal soul—and yours.”

“I’d let you,” she said.

But there wasn’t time; even now they could hear feet sloshing through rain and voices chanting: “...
every tear from their eyes; Death will be no more …”

Rowley had the door unbolted in an instant, and the procession came in, carrying Lord Ivo on its shoulders. “...
and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.”

Adelia covered her head and stood by the door to let the monks go by, then slipped away unnoticed.

THE
ABBOT
HAD
a bad time of it. While his bailiffs rounded up for questioning every man on his estates capable of throwing a well-aimed spear, he had to consult with the two bishops as to what should be done with the corpses. Sent home or buried
in situ?

In the end, their hearts were cut out and placed in lead-lined caskets for their squires and servants to take back to the families. A messenger went galloping to Henry Plantagenet to inform him that he had lost two of his most trusted men.

The interment of the rest of the flesh was conducted in pouring rain in the Saint Benoit graveyard, where Princess Joanna wept for her knights.

As Sir Nicholas was lowered into his grave, Father Guy and Dr. Arnulf looked toward where Adelia was standing. The chaplain was heard to say: “I hope that female is happy now, for was she not the one who cursed this good man?”

WHEN
THE
PROCESSION
finally set off again, now reduced by twenty or so servants, the absence of Lord Ivo and Sir Nicholas was palpable. There was a sense of unease, less laughter. For all Sir Nicholas’s funny ways, he and Lord Ivo had radiated the stability and authority of their king and the lack made everyone else feel less safe.

The Bishop of Winchester was the most affected. He was noticeably more nervous than he had been; the Young King had failed the princess, and nowhere was tragedy come upon them. Echoing the words of his erstwhile host, he said:
“Surely, we are accursed,”
and confided to his intimates that he was beginning to believe that God was displeased with their enterprise.

This was passed along the line, where ill-wishers like Father Guy, the princess’s nurse, Edeva, and the head laundress, Brune, pointed out that of
course
God was displeased. Were they not sheltering in their company not only one of His avowed enemies, a Saracen, but his woman, who seemed to have the power to bring destruction on such men and animals who crossed her?

THE
PROCESSION
WAS
now entering Aquitaine, the duchy named for its waters that had been Eleanor’s and which, after her marriage, had been passed to Henry Plantagenet, and which, since her imprisonment, was under the governorship of their second son, Duke Richard.

The weather cleared so that the sun shone, as if it could do no less for the daughter of the land’s beloved duchess.

Even the Bishop of Winchester cheered up. “We shall be safe now. The lionhearted duke meets us at Poitiers.”

There would be no lack of knights with Richard escorting his sister to Sicily he kept hundreds by him—not for the pretend war of tournaments, like his brother, but so that one day he could lead them to the real thing, crusade.

“Mad for it,” Rowley said of him, grimacing; he was no enthusiast for crusading, nor for Richard himself. “But first he’s got to pacify southern Aquitaine—and serve him right, he stirred it up in the first place. He thought its barons were being loyal to him when he led them against his father. In fact, of course, it was their chance to grab more land for themselves, and they see no reason to stop doing it now that Richard and Henry have come to terms.”

“It looks peaceful enough,” Adelia said, regarding the countryside with pleasure, “and so beautiful.”

“Mistress, it is not beautiful in Limoges or Taillebourg or Gascony,” said Locusta who, with Admiral O’Donnell and Deniz, had come alongside. “Duke Richard has subdued those at least and I saw what was left of them on my way through the country We will avoid them as we go—what was done is not fit for ladies’ eyes.
Bella, horrida bella.”

“Savagery?” asked Rowley

“Atrocity”

Rowley nodded. “He has that about him. His father believes in treating with rebels once he’s defeated them—anything else is sowing dragon’s teeth—but I doubt Richard sees the sense of it; the boy has the touch of the butcher in him.”

“The lad’s yet young,” the O’Donnell said. “Didn’t we all have the butcher in us when we were young?
Experto credite.”

What butchery had the O’Donnell committed in his youth?
Adelia wondered.

Rowley spurred his horse forward, away from the group; the admiral was not to his taste. Ulf didn’t like the man either, but, as Locusta also rode off, Adelia was left with him.

“And where would the Lord Mansur be today?” he wanted to know.

“Occupied.”

In fact, Mansur had stayed behind with Boggart at their last overnight stop in order to teach the girl how to wash, dry, iron, and fold clothes. This should have been the job of the laundresses, who were given special dispensation by Winchester’s bishop to do their work on Sundays, the day when the column obeyed the Tenth Commandment to rest and stayed where it was. More and more often, however, Adelia’s washing and Mansur’s white robes were being returned to them still showing travel stains.

“Just carelessness,” Adelia had said, to pacify Mansur, though she didn’t think it was; Brune’s hostility to the Arab and even herself was becoming increasingly blatant.

She’d added, hastily: “We won’t say anything.” The chief laundress was daunting and so, when he was roused, was Mansur; a quarrel between them would not be pretty.

But even in the past, when they’d traveled with Gyltha, Mansur had always done his own laundry; he was particular about it. Now, as
Lord
Mansur, he could not be seen attending to anything so menial, and was therefore making this attempt to transfer his skills to the slow-learning Boggart and taking it amiss that the chief laundress, whose duty it was, forced him to do it.

While Adelia was at the back of the line with the pilgrims, attending to a case of foot rot, he came cantering up to her, Boggart riding pillion with one of Adelia’s cloaks under her arm.

Dismounting, Mansur took the cloak and shook it out in display “It is still stained. I told the ugly bint to use fuller’s earth on it. She has not.”

“Oh, dear.” Adelia put the pilgrim’s boot back on with the instruction to keep the area between his toes clean and, above all, dry

“I have reprimanded her.”

“In English? Now this is a tincture of myrrh and marigold. No, you don’t drink it, you apply it to the affected skin twice a day”

“I used sign language,” Mansur told her.

“Oh, dear.”

“It is time to complain of that fat camel to the bishop. She used sign language back. It was not polite.”

“Oh,
dear.”

As they rode back up the line, Brune was waiting for them. She’d got down from her cart to stand in the middle of the road, red-faced, arms akimbo, with an expectant group of fellow servants round her.

“You, mistress,” she shouted at Adelia. “Yes, you. I got a bone to pick with you.” She turned dramatically to her audience while pointing at Adelia. “Know what she done? She only sends that big heathen to complain about her laundry, that’s what she done. Babbling away in that squeak of his, he was, shakin’ his black finger at me like I was dirt. Well, I ain’t putting up with it, not from them as don’t believe in our Lord Savior.”

It went on and on, an outpouring of righteousness that Adelia, taken aback, could see had been in preparation for some time. Brune was enjoying it.

Adelia’s friend Martin tried to intervene. “All right, missus, that’s enough….”