A Murderous Procession (17 page)

“She was murdered.”
Adelia got up. “I’m going to see the seneschal and tell him what happened.”

Mansur didn’t move. “No.” It was said quietly.

Adelia turned round to stare. “You can’t stop me.”

“I shall say that you are mistaken. The woman drowned by accident. I am the doctor, Rowley is the bishop. We will speak against you.”

The betrayal took her breath away; this man had looked after and defended her all her life, he’d never refuted her. He would do that? Rowley would do it? She could stand on the highest tower in the palace to shout “Murder” and be deemed insane because Rowley and Mansur, the only authority she had, would deny it?

By submitting to the superstition that others would lay against her door, these two men, her two men, had joined themselves to the great enemy killing everything that was rational, allowing fallacy to win. It
had
won. Without them, her testimony would be the mere squawk of a madwoman and result in nothing but hubris.

She felt a terrible grief for Brune, for the science of reason that always lost to unreason.

Mansur, knowing her, said: “It is for my sake, too. A Saracen is always a witch. If Gyltha were here, she would say the same.”

She couldn’t bear his presence anymore and went away from him to weep and rage in the shadows, circling the garden like a lost soul.

Still on his bench, Mansur had begun talking in English to Boggart, talking endlessly, it seemed, explaining the fact of himself and her mistress, what they did, what they had done, and why.

The sound meant no more to Adelia than the stridulation of a cricket. She kept on walking. She had never felt lonelier.

After awhile, a hand touched her sleeve. “Let’s go up, mistress, you need your sleep.”

“Do
you
think I’m a witch, Boggart?”

“Well . . .” Boggart eyes were still swiveling from the information about Adelia’s history and profession that Mansur had given her, and she was incapable of being less than honest. “Maybe, mistress, but I reckon as you’re a white one.”

It was too late to go to the house by the river; the palace gates were shut for the night. Unnoticed, the two women returned to the great hall and the stairs that led to the ladies’ apartments.

In the gloom, squires and servants were setting out the pallet mattresses in the niches of the walls where they slept. By the light of a single flambeau stuck in a bracket in the center of the floor, a group of thirty or more knights and courtiers were drinking and playing dice.

As Adelia reached the top of the staircase and started toward her room, one of the players let out a whoop at a lucky roll.
“Mirabile dictu,”
he cried.

Adelia stopped still. They were the very words screamed with the very exultation in the very voice she’d once heard in a forest between Glastonbury and Wells when two of its outlaws, capering and dressed in leaves, had threatened to rape and tear her apart. Excalibur had killed one—no,
she
had killed one.

The other?

Boggart was at her side, concerned. “What is it, mistress?”

No, it couldn’t be. Captain Bolt and his men had subsequently cleared the forest, quartering every man jack in it and hanging the pieces from its trees.

“What is it, mistress?”

“I thought . . . A man called Scarry …” She pulled herself together. “But it wasn’t him, he’s dead.”

AT
FIRST
, it was a subdued train that left Poitiers to set out once more on its journey. For Joanna, her ladies-in-waiting, her knights, bishops, and servants, it was expulsion from the Garden of Eden, even though Richard and his knights were to accompany them the rest of the way to Sicily.

For Adelia, it was the most dreadful thing she had ever done. She wasn’t leaving Paradise; she was deserting the dead. At Brune’s funeral, everybody else had watched a coffin lowered into the palace’s graveyard; Adelia had seen only a woman being murdered over and over again; she’d cowered at the laundress’s shriek of “Betrayer” dinning into her ears. It overrode the voices of Mansur and Rowley when they tried to talk to her so that she barely heard them, or wanted to.

Nor had she noticed the looks, some frightened, some accusatory, directed at her and Mansur as they were left to stand by themselves at the funeral service.

But as, under a crystalline sky, the procession began following the Vienne, loveliest of rivers, gradually the general mood lifted. Otters slid into the waters, making V-shaped ripples as they swam. Herons stood still, elongated sculptures, waiting for the moment to spear an unsuspecting, sinuous trout. Overhead, squadrons of cranes flew south to their winter quarters, oblivious of the long train of people and animals lumbering along below them.

Not that
lumber
was the appropriate word. Duke Richard kept a brisk pace, and, on such a fine, dry day, the princess and ladies-in-waiting had abandoned their palanquin for horseback in order to ride with him, surrounded by a bright crowd of his knights with harness bells jingling, their songs, shouts, and laughter sending affronted, cawing rooks scattering from elms into the air.

Even the Bishop of Winchester was seen to smile as he bumped along on a horse too big for him.

Adelia, still cross with them, did not want to talk to the only two people, Mansur and Rowley who would have talked to her.

As usual, Sir Guillaume had urged his horse toward hers and was singing at her:

bq.

bq.

I am with my beautiful beneath the flowers,

until our sentry from the tower cries: “Lovers, get up!”

for I clearly see the sunrise and the day.

“Oh, shut up,” she told him and rode down the procession to ride alongside Ulf, a Gyltha substitute, the only person apart from God to whom she could unburden herself.

He wasn’t sympathetic. “They was right,” he said of Mansur and Rowley

“In the name of Heaven, boy, how were they right? They caused me to sin against everything I believe in; they cut out my tongue. They made me fail in my duty to the dead.”

Ulf was unshaken. “Seems to me your duty’s to the king and his daughter, see her safe. That’s what you took on, ain’t it?”

“I could have seen Joanna safe and still done what I ought.”

“No, you bloody couldn’t. There’s mutterings already. You got to be careful. Iffen you’d done your duty by that old besom, you’d’ve got more attention to yourself than you have already.” He frowned; he, like Mansur, heard things that Adelia didn’t. “You’re feared by some parties. There’s them as’d like to see you left behind, or worse. There’s some as is even blaming you for Young Henry not comin’ with us. Ain’t that right, Boggart?”

He was speaking English, and Boggart, from her mule, replied: “I’m afeared it is, mistress. There’s them as think you got
powers.”

“Somebody’s
got powers,” Ulf said. “I reckon as
somebody
round here’s got it in for you. Somebody poisoned that bloody horse deliberate, somebody done old Brune deliberate, all to make you look bad.” He had a sudden idea: “Here, suppose that’s why old Sir Nicholas got speared?”

“For God’s sake,” Adelia said wearily “You’re being stupid.”

“I ain’t so sure. You got a particular enemy amongst this lot? You done anyone wrong lately?”

“I deserted Brune.”

The three rode together in silence for a while, the two mules occasionally having to be restrained from taking a bite out of Adelia’s palomino palfrey a little horse of gold-dusted hide with flaxen mane and tail, as if they resented its beauty Rowley had secretly bought it for her at Poitiers and, in memory of their time there in a dusty bed, had called it Sneeze.

The name had made Adelia laugh. Still did, despite herself. And it was a lovely day And Ulf, with his truculence,
did
so remind her of his grandmother, even to the slight, downy dark hair that had begun to show on his upper lip.

Cheered, she changed the subject. “I never told you how I found Excalibur, did I?”

“Ain’t seen you since.”

So she told him about the discovery of a little cave on Glastonbury Tor, the skeleton within it, and the unprepossessing weapon with its dull patina that her daughter had fished out of the cave’s pool. Of how she’d given it to Emma’s Roetger and how, when he’d cleaned it, they’d found the name
Arturus
set into its fuller. Of how Roetger, dear man, had given it back to her and, eventually she had given it to Henry the king.

But, inevitably under Ulf’s questioning, the story—she shouldn’t have started on it—led on to the darkness of a forest glade, and what had happened there.

“And all you and Mansur and Rowley are doing,” she finished, “is making me imagine vain things. The night before last I even thought I heard Scarry shouting out at a dice table, so you’ve got to stop …”

But Ulf had dug his heels into his mule’s side and was riding off toward the front of the column, the wooden cross bumping wildly on his saddle as he went.

Minutes later, two horses were beside hers, one bearing the Bishop of Saint Albans, the other Captain Bolt. Rowley was angry: “You heard Scarry’s voice and didn’t tell me?”

“I imagined a voice that
sounded
like Scarry’s,” Adelia told him. “Stop all this fuss.”

“And did you go to look, see if it
was
him?”

“Please, not that again. I don’t believe he was in Somerset and I
certainly
don’t believe he’s here. How could an outlaw insinuate himself into …”

Rowley turned to Bolt. “Did you hang
all
the cutthroats in that bloody forest, captain?”

“Thought as we did,” Bolt said. “Many as we could lay our hands on.”

“You see?” The bishop leaned over to take the reins of Adelia’s horse and halt it. “Will and Alf were probably right; Scarry could have escaped. What did he look like, this dice player?”

“I’ve no idea, I didn’t bother to go and see.”

“What did
Scarry
look like?”

“I don’t know that, either,” she shouted back. “He was … he and Wolf were out of a nightmare … dressed in leaves … it was dark … their faces were painted.”

“Think.”

She was reluctant. Shaking her head, she said: “Educated, I suppose, he spoke Latin.” The lament as the man had taken his dead lover in his arms rang in her brain once more:
“Come back, my Lupus. Te amo! Te amo!”

Rowley nodded. “Educated. What else? What age? What height?”

“I don’t know. I
don’t know.”
The two men had been creatures emerging from a different age, as tall as trees. “This is silly Rowley he can’t be here. How could he be here?”

“Think, will you?”

She tried. “Well … oh yes, he was dark. I remember his arms, black hair … but that may just have been shadow.”

“Dark,” Rowley said bitterly. “Very helpful.” Nevertheless, he and Bolt and Ulf began listing the black-haired men in the company. Father Guy, Father Adalburt, knights, squires, servants who were swarthy Captain Bolt’s men, Bolt himself Rankin the Scot, young Locusta, the O’Donnell … it went on and on.

“And any one of them could have been at that dice game,” Rowley pointed out. “It’s an eclectic group.”

“Oh, go away,” Adelia told him. It was difficult enough believing that Scarry was the one who’d been after her in Somerset; impossible to think that a painted outlaw could have joined Joanna’s company and pursued her across the Channel, however good his Latin.

She refused to dwell on it.

FROM
HALF
A
MILE
down the column, it was possible to see that something was wrong, causing Adelia and Mansur to urge their horses into a canter that took them to its head, where Joanna and her principals were gathered about a figure that overtopped them all.

Duke Richard was in gleaming mail; under his arm he held a helmet encircled by a gold, ducal coronet. His face was set, exalted, and he was paying no attention to a distracted Captain Bolt and Bishop of Winchester.

Rowley detached himself from the group to approach Mansur and Adelia. “Richard’s leaving us,” he said bitterly, in Arabic.

“Where’s he going?”

“To war.”

“He can’t do that.”

“Actually, I think he has to. There’s a galloper just come with news. Angouleme is in revolt; the duke can’t allow that, though if you ask me it’s his fault the bloody place revolted in the first place.”

Angouleme. Angouleme. From what Adelia could remember of Locusta’s map, the county was due south of them. “We have to go back? Oh God, Rowley how long will a war hold us up?”

“We’re skirting round it. We can’t afford to lose more time, and the duke’s convinced he can defeat Vulgrin of Angouleme within days. He’s called for reinforcements.”

“And can he defeat him?”

“Oh, yes. He’s no favorite of mine, Richard, but he’s a superb general. If I were Count Vulgrin, I’d start running now.”

Adelia looked toward Joanna. “Poor love,” she said.

“Poor Locusta, he’s near tears. We’ll be departing from his precious route; he’ll have to arrange a new one, which, where we’re going, won’t be easy”

But Adelia’s sympathy was for a princess deserted by one brother and now another.

Joanna, however, appeared concerned but not alarmed.

She’s used to it,
Adelia thought. The girl’s young life had been spent watching her parents put down rebellion somewhere or another in their empire; she had seen her mother and brothers rise up against her father. Her world was sown with Hydra’s teeth; for her, revolt and battle were the natural order of things.
And so they are, except in England and Sicily.

The knights and their squires were leaving immediately An extempore service was held in a grove beneath the high, gaunt branches of a chestnut tree to bless and speed their war.

A troubled Bishop of Winchester stumbled in his office, but Duke Richard showed no sign of restlessness as his impatient father would have done; he drank in the prayers, praise, and blessings. God’s goodwill meant much to him.