Grave Goods Page 11

  She heard its toll echoing through the mist. A male voice came from deep inside the cave: “Is it day?”

  Even in her dream, she knew from Rhys’s Arthurian songs that she must reply, “No, sleep on,” or she would awaken whatever or whoever was inside. But though she opened her mouth to give the answer, no sound came out. The mist swirled and darkened; someone was coming up the cave’s tunnel toward her.

  She managed, “Emma? Is that you, Emma?”

  But the same voice said, “I am Guinevere. Help me. I am hurt.”

  There was a scraping sound, and Adelia knew that only the top half of the thing calling itself Guinevere was dragging itself along the tunnel toward her and knew, too, that she couldn’t bear to see it. She began backing into the mist, away from it, still hearing its moans as it slithered.

  She woke up sweating.

  “A true dream, was it?” Gyltha asked with interest the next morning. “Like Jacob and the Ladder?”

  “No, it wasn’t like that. I just felt terror … and guilt. It was begging for help, whatever it was, and I ran away.”

  Adelia gave no credit to dreams, but she was still immersed in the awful reproach that this one had wrapped around her. She wasn’t seeing something she should be seeing; she wasn’t acting on something that had been shown to her.

  “The cheese, then,” Gyltha said firmly. “Shouldn’t eat cheese close to bedtime—gives you nightmares.”

  “I didn’t eat any cheese. Oh, God, Gyltha, we’ve got to find Emma.”

  “Doin’ our best, girl.”

  It was a relief to go out into the sunshine and trudge across to the abbey so that she could begin work on the bones. Godwyn was taking Gyltha and Allie onto the Brue in his boat to find them bog moss with which to plaster Polycarp’s rump.

  Rhys had been roused from his bed and pointed in the direction of Wells and Wolvercote Hall. He’d become suddenly fearful. “Dangerous road, that. Suppose brigands set on me and rob me?”

  “Rob him of what?” Mansur had wanted to know; the bard had been wearing the same clothes since Wales, despite Gyltha’s pleas to let her launder them. Apart from his harp, which he kept in a dirty satchel, there was nothing about him to tempt the most optimistic thief.

  Eventually, he was persuaded to go by the couple of pennies Adelia gave him to spend at Wells market.

  Hilda insisted on accompanying the two investigators to the abbey, seeming intent on monitoring any conversation they might have with Abbot Sigward—“my dear abbot,” as she constantly referred to him.

  Adelia wondered if Godwyn was jealous; Hilda glowed for the monk as she didn’t for anyone else, certainly not for her husband, to whom she was dictatorial—her raised voice in the kitchen could often be heard upstairs. Not that Godwyn seemed to mind; he appeared to be as devoted to his wife as she was to the abbot, perhaps because Hilda’s adoration, Adelia thought, wasn’t so much sexual as that of a worshipper at a holy shrine, feeding and protecting its frail flame.

  The woman admitted as much. “He’s a saint, my dear abbot,” she said as, carrying another basket with food for him, she accompanied Adelia and Mansur across the empty market. “I was his housekeeper in the old days, young as I was, and nobody don’t know how deep that man’s goodness goes. God’d snatch him from us if so be as I didn’t look after him.”

  “Was this before he became a monk?” Adelia asked.

  Hilda was suddenly aggressive. “What you want to know for?”

  Adelia shrugged; it had been a polite enough inquiry.

  After a pause, as if unable to let another opportunity for praise go by, the landlady said abruptly, “He was rich in them days. A nobleman, rich as a king. And I kept house for him—oh, yes, I did. See that island out there …” She pointed toward a large hump in the distant marshes. “Owned that, he did, and thousands of acres all over England. Gave the lot away, so he did, bless him. Gave it to God and took his vow of poverty like the holy man he is.”

  A Road to Damascus conversion? The abbot’s gentle face was that of a man whose soul had been purified by fire.

  “Did he have family?”

  Again, Hilda hesitated. Then she said shortly, “One son. Died on crusade.”

  That would account for it, then. Adelia could imagine no worse thing than losing a child, a loss that would turn you either to God for help or away from Him.

  “One of his islands is a leper colony now,” Hilda said, still pointing seaward. “That’s how good he is. Bought the Pilgrim for Godwyn and me, and gave an estate over to lepers. Lazarus Island, we call it. Godwyn do row him over so’s he can give them communion and take supplies.”

  Mansur shuddered. “Allah commend the good man,” he said in Arabic. “I could not do that.”

  Adelia commended him, too. She did not share Mansur’s horror for sufferers of a disease that her foster father had taught her was not as infectious as popular revulsion accorded it, though it was terrible enough in its slow and creeping death from the tips of the limbs to the whole body, but she could understand why the law was strict in segregating them in order to protect the healthy. For once, it was the Christian Church—an institution with which she was usually at odds—that she admired for its provision of leprosaria, refuges where patients received medical and spiritual help, even respect, since they were suffering for their sins while living and would, therefore, find quick redemption in heaven.

  So Abbot Sigward was one of those who treated lepers generously, was he? Adelia found herself liking the man more and more.

  For one thing, he was prepared to give Mansur and herself facility in their investigation that his fellow monks would have denied them.

  “Against some opposition from my brothers, I have kept open the grave where we found the skeletons,” he said, greeting them. “Do you wish to examine it? And the coffin?”

  “Let the dead rest, Father,” Hilda pleaded, interrupting. “Them’s Arthur’s and Guinevere’s bones, you know it. Let ’em rest in peace.”

  The abbot patted her on the shoulder but kept his eyes on Adelia, who, after pretending to consult the Arab, said, “Dr. Mansur is grateful to you, my lord, and will be glad to look at those things in the goodness of time, but first he will concentrate on the skeletons.”

  “And what can they tell him?”

  Again, Adelia spoke to Mansur in Arabic, and again received a reply. “Not much, he fears,” she told Sigward honestly. “Putting a date to bones may be difficult.”

  “Even to eliminating the possibility that they are not Arthur’s and Guinevere’s?” The abbot winked. “That is the doctor’s purpose, is it not? And the king’s?”

  Adelia smiled back at him. “It’s a gamble, my lord.”

  “Ah, gambling.” The abbot’s face creased into that of a tortured man. “Gambling was one of my sins when I was in the world, and still is, though pride was a greater—and one I pray that a merciful God will forgive me. By the way, there is no need to address me as ‘my lord’; I am a servant now.”

  “He shines, that one,” Mansur said, watching Sigward walk away, gently propelling Hilda with him.

  “He does,” Adelia agreed.

  They went into the hut and stared at the two skeletons. The damage to that of the female reminded Adelia horribly of her nightmare.

  “What do we do?” asked Mansur.

  “I don’t know. If we could find out how old they are … perhaps comparing them to bones we know to be old would help.”

  “The graveyard?”

  “The graveyard.”

  After peering to see if anyone was about, they crossed the ruined nave of the great church and scrambled over the tumbled stones of its southern wall, a part of which was tall enough to hide what lay on the other side.

  Neither the fire nor, yet, Brother Peter’s scythe had touched the abbey’s burial place. The gravestones had the pleasant higgledy-piggledy untidiness of a country churchyard. Being in the full path of the early sun, butterflies were adding to the color of i
ts wildflowers, and bees were at work among some bluebells growing in the shade of a young oak leaning over the small wall that marked the graveyard’s southern boundary.

  What made the place different, what skewed its bucolic restfulness into something alien, were the pyramids. Adelia had thought that the word must refer to conical gravestones, but these were pyramids—much smaller versions of the ones her foster father had drawn during his visit to Egypt and shown to her, but still too large and belonging to a more savage environment and a hotter sun than this; they were un-English, disturbing.

  They didn’t match, either—another attack on the eye. The tallest was more than twenty-five feet high, and stepped to its peak in five courses of stone; the other stood about eighteen feet, consisting of four stories. Each was covered in writing that Adelia couldn’t decipher—more like runes than script, messages from a darker age.

  Between them stood another pyramid, this time a teetering mountain of earth that had been displaced from the yawning hole beside it.

  Adelia went to the edge.

  The pit was a rectangle, at least sixteen feet deep and wide enough to accommodate the steps cut into one of its sides. The monks had gone down a long way to find Arthur’s coffin.

  “They must have dug like badgers,” Adelia said, peering into it. She stepped back quickly; the pit smelled of contaminated earth.

  Mansur was already on his way down, examining the sides as he went. Bits of bone stuck out where the diggers had cut through the earth, showing that for one thousand years succeeding generations of dead monks had been buried on top of one another.

  “Also, there is wood,” he called up. “Some were in coffins, some were wrapped in just a winding sheet, I think. What do you want?”

  Suddenly, she didn’t want anything. “Mansur, we’re grave robbing.”

  Her foster father, she knew, had bought dubiously acquired skeletons from dubious men in order to teach his students anatomy, but what was she advancing by desecrating these dead? Not science, not medical knowledge, merely a chance for an abbey to acquire riches and a king to get his dead Arthur.

  “We shouldn’t do this,” she called down, and she heard Mansur spit in disgust at her vacillation.

  He began climbing up again, but as he reached the top of the steps he held out his hand. On its palm was a small knobble of bone.

  “It must be old because it was at the bottom,” he said. “A bit of a foot, I think. Use it.”

  It was actually the distal phalanx of a second toe, and Adelia stared at it for some time, tapping her teeth in indecision before finally snatching it. “We can always stick it back on,” she said.

  After all, if she could find a method for dating bones, it would be a contribution to the world’s knowledge.

  Nevertheless, guilt followed her back to the hut, and when, two hours later, Brother James surprised the two of them at work and stared at the mess they’d made as if they had committed an obscene act, Adelia blustered an innocence she didn’t feel. “We’ve said prayers… . Abbot Sigward gave the doctor license … The king requires … ”

  But apparently Brother James underwent periods of calm, and this was one of them. He merely looked sad. “May God forgive you for what you do,” he said.

  “I hope He will.”

  In fact, the bone had been useless. Adelia had shaved a sliver off it and an exactly similar slice off Arthur’s toe—neither had displayed an interior any different to the other.

  She and Mansur had pounded each sliver to dust and put it in the bowl of the tiny scales she’d brought with her—proving only that they weighed the same. They’d poured parts of the two sets of dust into water, then vinegar, with no reaction from either. Both were the same age or, as she’d feared, there was no way of gaining a comparison.

  “You see,” Brother James said, still lingering, still sad, “people need King Arthur, they need the dream of him. I need him.”

  “Why?” Adelia asked. “Why do you need him?”

  “He flew his banner in the battle against savagery,” Brother James said, “but he must come back to win the war. There is still savagery in this world. Nobody knows that better than I do.”

  He wandered off.

  “It is as good a reason as any,” said Mansur, watching him go. “All should battle against evil. Islam still fights under the Prophet’s flag, Allah cherish it.”

  “It isn’t good enough,” Adelia said. “A dream isn’t enough. Hard truth is the only flag to fight under.”

  “BROTHER JAMES?” Hilda said when they returned, dispirited, to dinner at the inn. “Pursued by demons he is, poor fellow, but my dear abbot has managed to cast most of ’em out of him.”

  “What demons?”

  Hilda didn’t know. “Come to the abbey afore the abbot and me had anything to do with it. Screaming, he was, so they say.”

  Gyltha was more informative once Hilda had left the room. She and Allie had spent a productive morning being rowed around the marshes by Godwyn, and an even more productive afternoon talking to the lay brother Peter in the pasture where Polycarp the mule now sported a poultice of sphagnum moss on his rump.

  Brother Peter’s Christianity, she reported, didn’t stretch to speaking kindly of his superior brethren.

  “He don’t like any of ’em much,” Gyltha reported. “Says they don’t treat him right—all except the abbot. Says the abbot do give him respect.”

  Brother James, according to the gospel of Brother Peter, was as mad as a ferret. “Story goes he came running to the abbey for sanctuary for cutting his cousin’s arm off in a quarrel.”

  “Dear God.”

  “So Peter says. And Brother Aelwyn is sour as crab apples, wicked tongue, nothing ever right for him. Got something in his past an’ all, but Peter don’t know what it is. And Brother Titus is a fat and lazy pig.”

  Oh, dear. Even allowing that these were the strictures of a resentful, overworked fellow, such a comparatively small collection of men confined together under a severe discipline with its demand of chastity were bound to get on one another’s nerves.

  Why did they do it? What drove them to accept it?

  Everybody assumed that most nuns and monks submitted themselves to the holy rule because they’d heard a call from God, and perhaps some of them had, but, obviously, for others it was an escape from unendurable troubles in the outside world. Perhaps for Brother Titus its rigors were still easier than earning a living.

  So Brother James had attacked his cousin, had he? Had he also taken an ax to Guinevere?

  Rhys had not returned by nightfall, an absence making Mansur angry. “He is in some woman’s bed, useless philanderer.”

  That reminded Adelia of something. “Did Brother Peter tell you anything about Useless Eustace that Hilda complains of?” she asked Gyltha. “Did he start the fire? Who is he?”

  “Ah, I forgot him. Peter don’t think he done it, but the rest all blame Eustace for the fire. Even the abbot blames him, though he thinks it was an accident—but he would, wouldn’t he? Ain’t got a bad word for anybody, that man.”

  “Is there any evidence this fellow started the fire? Didn’t the monks bring in the county sheriff?”

  “They did, but they reckon the sheriff’s in the bishop of Wells’s pocket and that the bishop was mighty pleased Glastonbury burnt down—the two of them have always quarreled over land, hate each other—might even have paid Eustace to set the blaze.”

  This was what Hilda had said. It was difficult for Adelia to believe.

  “Well, see, Eustace was the bishop’s falconer,” Gyltha told her. “Lost his job on account of he drank, and came to Glastonbury begging his bread. The which he got, though even the abbot had to let him go after a bit—he kept raiding the crypt where they keep the communion wine. Went and lived wild in the hills after that, but they reckon he still got into the grounds o’ nights because the wine vat kept going down. An’ it was in the crypt where the fire started. An’ Brother Titus saw Eustace running from t
he crypt that night.”

  Gyltha shook her head in wonder. “Terrible thing, in’t it? Deliberate or not, one man do bring down a great abbey and a good little town. And one of the monks died, you know. Trying to put out the flames in the crypt, he was, along of Brother Titus—but died of burns, poor soul.”

  It was sad; it was horrifying. Adelia shook her head over it. “But what’s done is done. Emma is our priority now, and all this has nothing to do with her.”

  “Dunno so much,” Gyltha said. “There’s summat shifty about that Brother Peter. He ain’t telling me all of it.”

  . . .

  THIS TIME ADELIA stood in a gleaming golden hall. Silver-clad knights held the fingertips of beautiful ladies and moved with grace to the tune of an unseen harpist. King Arthur saw her and approached, bending his crowned head in a greeting. He offered his hand. “Dance with me, mistress.” His voice was as big and handsome as his figure.

  “I can’t dance in a dream,” Adelia told him.

  “There’s stupid you are,” Arthur said.

  He turned away from her and walked to the throne at the end of the hall where his queen was sitting. He bowed and Guinevere got up, put her hand into the king’s, and joined him on the floor. Her dress was of pure white feathers that fluttered as she moved. Whichever way she and Arthur turned, her face was hidden from Adelia, who saw only that a red stain was beginning to sully the feathers at the back of the queen’s waist. Soon blood was dripping in pools onto the floor, but she danced on… .

  “Stop it, stop it,” Adelia shouted, and was grateful to be woken up.

  There’d been a noise.

  Still shaking, Adelia lit a candle, wrapped herself in a shawl, checked that Allie was safely asleep, and went out onto the landing.

  It was a hot night, and a grilled window above the stairs had been left unshuttered to provide a draft.

  Her toe stubbed against something soft. Looking down, she saw the maid Millie curled up on a mat on the floor, her big eyes staring up in terror.