A Murderous Procession aka The Assassin Read online

  “Well, see, Scarry was there, he was Wolf’s lieutenant, like. Him and Wolf they was…”

  “Lovers. She told me that, too.”

  Will shifted again. “Yes, well, Scarry wouldn’t’ve taken kindly to her a-killin’ Wolf.”

  “That was two years ago, man. If he were going to take his revenge, why leave it for two years?”

  “Had to fly the county, maybe. The king, he weren’t best pleased at having outlaws in his forest. Cleaned it out proper, he did. Had‘em in bits hangin’ off the trees. We hoped as Scarry was one of ’em, but now we ain’t so sure acause if it ain’t Scarry, who is it? She’s well liked round here, our missus.”

  “And he’s trying to kill her?”

  “Don’t know so much about that. He’d a‘be wanting to frighten her to death first, that was more Scarry’s style. Me and Alf, we been watchin’ out for her, and we found an animal pit somebody dug along a path she takes often. Covered it was, but us filled un in. An’ then Godwyn, him as owns the Pilgrim and takes her out regular to Lazarus Island to tend the lepers, well, last week, his punt began to sink when they was halfway there and the both of ’em had to make their way back on foot across the marshes, the which is always chancy acause of the quicksand. Alf and me, we poled out later and raised that punt to look at her and found a neat hole in her bottom, like someone’d taken a gimlet to her. We reckon as whoever it was’d filled the hole with wax, like. And then there was…”

  But the Bishop of Saint Albans had left him and was striding toward Adelia’s house.

  Alf met him at the door. “’S all right, master, I checked the rooms afore she came. Ain’t nobody in there.”

  “Thank you, Alf. I’ll take over now.” And he would, Christ’s blood he would. How many times did he have to rescue the wench before she saw reason?

  The fear Rowley felt when Adelia was in danger always translated itself into fury against the woman herself. Why did she have to be what she was? (The fact that he might not have loved her if she hadn’t been was invariably set aside.)

  Why, when they’d been free to marry, had she refused him? Her fault… a babble about her independence… an insistence that she would fail as wife to an ambitious man… her damned fault.

  No, she’d had it her own way and Henry II had immediately pounced on him, insisting that he become a bishop-well, the king had needed one churchman to be on his side after the murder of Archbishop Becket-and he, in his resentment and agony, had acceded. He still blamed her for it.

  They’d been thrown together on investigations since and found that neither could live without the other-too late for marriage, though, celibate as he was supposed to be, so they’d finished up in this illicit relationship which gave him no rights over either her or the child.

  But this was the end of it. No more investigations for her, no more touching the sick, no more lepers-lepers, God Almighty. She must finish with it. And for the first time he had the means to see that she did.

  Raging though he was, Rowley had enough sense to consider how he would break it to her and stopped in the doorway to consider.

  The two Glastonbury lads were right; she should not be told that there was an assassin after her-but they were right for the wrong reason. Rowley knew his woman; an assassin wouldn’t scare her away from this country hole she’d dug herself into; she’d refuse to go. She’d spout her bloody duty to her bloody patients.

  No, though he had an iron fist, he’d put a velvet glove on it, give her King Henry’s orders as if they were inducements…

  But he was still very angry and he didn’t do it well. Going into her bedroom, he said: “Start packing. We’re leaving for Sarum in the morning.”

  Adelia had prepared herself for something else. She was awaiting him in bed and, apart from a strip of lace over her dark blond hair, she was naked, bathed, and scented. Her lover was able to visit her so rarely that their encounters in bed were still rapturous. In fact, she’d been surprised to see him arrive on a Saturday; usually he was preparing for the next day’s service in some far-flung church or another.

  In any case, he never shared her bed on Sundays-a ridiculous decision perhaps, and certainly hypocritical, but one which, knowing how it weighed on him to preach abstinence to his flock while not practicing it himself, Adelia was prepared to countenance… and, after all, it wasn’t midnight yet.

  So, bewildered, she said: “What?”

  “We’re leaving for Sarum in the morning. I came to tell you.”

  “Oh, did you?” Not for love, then. “What for? And anyway, I can’t. I’ve got a patient over in Street who needs me.”

  “We’re going.”

  “Rowley, I am not.” She began to grope for her clothes; he was making her feel foolish without them.

  “Captain Bolt is coming to escort us. The king wishes it.”

  “Not again, oh God, not again.” Le roi le veult. For Adelia, the four most doom-laden words in any language; there was no appeal against them.

  Drearily, she poked her head through her smock and looked at him. “What does he want this time?”

  “He’s sending us to Sicily”

  Ah, now that was different… “Sicily? Rowley, how wonderful. I shall see my parents. They can meet you and Allie.”

  “Almeison will not be coming with us.”

  “Of course she will, of course she will. I won’t leave her behind.”

  “No. Henry’s keeping her here to make sure you come back to him.”

  “But, Sicily… we could be away for a year or more. I can’t leave her that long.”

  “She’ll be well looked after. She can have Gyltha with her, I’ve seen to that. They’ll be lodged with the queen at Sarum.” This was both suggestio falsi and suppressio veri on Rowley’s part. Henry Plantagenet would have been perfectly content for Allie to stay where she was, at Wolvercote in the care of Emma. It had been Rowley who’d begged him to allow the child to move in with Eleanor, and then got the queen to agree.

  It was the only thing king and queen did agree on. Since Eleanor of Aquitaine had joined the rebellion-the failed rebellion-of the two older Plantagenet princes against their father, things had, to put it mildly, been strained between royal husband and wife.

  Adelia put her finger on it. “Allie can’t stay with Eleanor, the queen’s in prison.”

  “It’s a prison anyone would be happy to be in; she’s denied nothing.”

  “Except freedom.” There was something terrible here; he was frightening her. Panic restricted her throat and she went to the open window to breathe.

  When she’d got her voice under control, she turned around. “What is this, Rowley? If I have to go… if I must leave Allie, she can stay here with Gyltha and Mansur. She’s settled, she’s happy here, she has her animals… she has an affinity with animals.”

  “My point exactly.”

  “She has an instinct, a genius… Old Marly called her in the other day when his hens got ill; she cured Emma’s palfrey of the stifle when Cerdic couldn’t. What do you mean… ‘my point exactly’?”

  “I mean I want my daughter to have the feminine arts that Eleanor can teach her. I want her to become a lady, not a misfit.”

  “What you’re saying is that you don’t want her to grow up like me.”

  In his fear and anger and love, that was what it came down to. Adelia escaped him, she always had; there must be something of his that wouldn’t get away

  “No, I don’t, if you want to know. And she’s not going to. I have a responsibility for her.”

  “Responsibility? You can’t even publicly acknowledge her.”

  “That doesn’t mean I don’t care for her future. Look at you, look at what you wear…” Adelia was now fully clothed. “Peasant dress. She’s a beautiful child, why hide her light under that dowdy bushel? Half the time she goes about barefoot.”

  It was true that Adelia was in homespun; she had agreed to become the bishop’s mistress but, when it came to it, she’d drawn the
line at being his whore. Though he urged money on her, she wouldn’t take it and dressed herself out of her small earnings as a doctor. She hadn’t realized until now how much that irritated him.

  This wasn’t about Allie, this was about her.

  But she fought on the ground that he’d chosen, their daughter. “Education? And what sort of education would she get with Eleanor? Needlework? Strumming a lyre? Gossiping? Courtly blasted love?”

  “She’d be a lady; I’m leaving her money; she can make a good marriage. I’ve already begun looking around for suitable husbands.”

  “An arranged marriage?”

  “Suitable, I said. And only if she’s willing.”

  She stared at him. They had loved each other desperately and still did; she thought she knew him, thought he knew her-now it appeared they understood each other not at all.

  She tried to explain. “Allie has a gift,” she said. “We couldn’t exist without animals, to plough, to ride, pull our carriages, feed us. If she can find cures for what makes them ill…”

  “An animal doctor. What life is that for a woman, for God’s sake?”

  The quarrel degenerated. When Mansur and Gyltha entered the house, it reverberated with the yells of two people verbally disemboweling each other.

  “… I have a right to say how my household should behave…”

  “… It’s not your household, you hypocrite. The Church is your household. When are you ever here?”

  “I’m here now and tomorrow we go to Sarum and Allie comes, too… The king’s ordered it…”

  “… You made him do that? You’d give her into slavery…?”

  Gyltha hurried to Allie’s room in case the child should be listening. Eustace, the lurcher, lifted his shaggy head as she came in, but Allie was sleeping the sleep of the innocent and unknowing.

  Gyltha sat by her bed just in case and glanced with despair at Mansur, shaking his head in the doorway

  “… I’ll never forgive you. Never.”

  “… Why? You want her to end up hilling a man like you did?”

  If he’d been in his senses, Rowley would not have said it. When the outlaw called Wolf had tried to kill her and she’d been forced to kill him instead, it had hung a millstone around Adelia’s neck; time and again Rowley had reassured her that the monster was better dead; she had saved Alf’s life as well as her own, there was nothing else she could have done, but still it weighed on her that she, who was sworn to preserve life, had taken one.

  After that the voices stopped.

  Gyltha and Mansur heard the bishop clump down the stairs to make up a bed for himself on a settle. Distressed beyond measure, they went to bed themselves. There was nothing to be done now.

  The last revelers in the barn went home. Emma and Roetger returned to the manor house, their servants scattered to their various sleeping places.

  Silence descended on Wolvercote.

  ON A WATER BUTT outside Adelia’s window where it has been crouching in shadow, a figure stretches its cloaked arms so that, for a second, it resembles a bat unfolding leather wings ready to fly. Noiselessly it jumps to the ground, overjoyed with what it has heard.

  His God-and Scarry’s god is not the Christians’ God-has just granted him the boon of boons, as Scarry was sure He would, sooner or later. He has poured the elixir of opportunity into Scarry’s hands.

  For Scarry’s hatred of the woman Adelia is infinite. During two years’ enforced exile from England, he has prayed to be shown the means of her destruction. Now, at last, the stink of his loathing has reached Satan’s nostrils and its incense has been rewarded.

  Once, in a Somerset forest not too far from here, the woman killed Scarry’s joy, his life, his love, his mate, his Wolf. And Scarry has come back, with Wolf howling him on in his head, to rend her to pieces. How stupidly he has done it; how ineffectual. Arrows, pits, attempts to frighten her; she hasn’t even noticed; the two oafs who watch over her have seen to that.

  Unworthy of an educated man, which is what Scarry is. A way of passing the time, really, until the true and only God should show him the way. Which he has, he has. Dominus illuminatio mea.

  Wolf never killed a female until she was squirming in terror and pain-the only state in which Wolf, or he himself, could have sexual congress with the creatures. Timor mortis morte pejor.

  “But now, Lord, in Your infinite wisdom, you have manifested to me all that I need to hear and see and learn that Your will and Wolf’s may triumph. The woman shall be reduced by slow torture, so much more satisfying, chop, chop, piece by piece, a capite ad calcem.”

  At this point Scarry is out of the view of the house, and he twirls as the shimmering, hot night enfolds him.

  How curious that she didn’t ask her lover why the king was sending her to Sicily.

  But he, Scarry, knows. By a great coincidence-no, not coincidence but, manifestly, by the workings of the Horned God in whose hand he rests-Scarry is intimately cognizant of the journey the woman is about to take.

  And will be going with her.

  Two

  EMMA STOOD IN ADELIA’S room wincing as she watched her friend furiously bundle clothes into a saddlebag. “My dear, you can’t go in rags like those.”

  “I don’t want to go at all,” Adelia shouted. “I’ll never forgive him, never.” A veil tore on a buckle as it was pushed in with the rest.

  “But you do realize where you’re going?”

  “Sicily, apparently. And without Allie.”

  “And why you’re going?”

  “God only knows, some scheme of Henry’s. I tell you, Em, if I could take Allie, I’d stay there and never come back. Holding a child hostage… that’s what they’re doing, king and bloody bishop. I’ll never…”

  “You’ll be accompanying Joanna Plantagenet to her wedding, so Rowley says.” Seeing Adelia’s incomprehension, Emma blew out her cheeks. “Henry’s daughter? Marrying the King of Sicily? Lord, ‘Delia, even you must know that. We’re all being taxed for it, damn him.”

  A king was entitled to tax his people to pay for his daughter’s wedding, but it didn’t make him popular.

  Adelia, whose few accounts were handled by Mansur and who listened to her patients’ physical complaints rather than their excise grumbles, didn’t know it.

  She paused for a moment. “Joanna? She’s just a baby”

  “Ten, I believe.”

  “Poor little devil.” The thought of another poor little devil to be groomed for a good marriage broke Adelia’s anger and she sat down on her bed, almost weeping. “I’ll not forgive him, Em, he’s taking her away from me, and me away from her. Putting her in prison. And it is a prison, in more ways than one. My little one, my little one.”

  “Rowley has his reasons, I’m sure.” Emma knew what they were-she’d heard them from the bishop himself only a few minutes ago.

  “Oh, yes, marvelous reasons. He wants Eleanor to turn her into a… a prinking doll, drain her of all initiative.”

  Amused, Emma sat down beside her friend. She smoothed the silk of her gown over her swelling stomach. “My dear, whatever we think of a queen who fomented a rebellion against her king, we cannot accuse her of lacking initiative. Yet with it all, Eleanor keeps her femininity. She can teach Almeison a great deal.”

  “What, for instance?”

  “To keep her fingernails clean, for one thing. Courtesy, poetry, music. These things are not unimportant. I yield to nobody in my admiration for your daughter, but… I have to say it, ‘Delia… she is becoming farouche.”

  “Farouche?”

  “She spends too much time with animals. During the football game, she punched one of the Martlake boys so hard he lost a tooth. A baby tooth, I grant you, but…”

  “He blacked her eye,” Adelia said, defensively

  “Yes, but… my dear, you’re limiting her, don’t you see?” This was a lecture Emma had been meaning to make for some time; now she settled down to it. “It may be that when Allie’s older, she will
want to marry well. The fact that she can deliver a punch is not recommended in politer families. Children must be prepared for their adult position. In a year or two, Pippywill have to leave me to become a page to the De Lucis and learn the skills of a knight. I shall miss him, miss him terribly, but it must be done if he is to take his place in society”

  “It isn’t the same,” Adelia said. When young Lord Philip grew up, he would have the choice to explore his gifts, lead the life he wanted; his wife would have none.

  Emma was fortunate in that this, her second marriage, was happy-her first had been enforced-but legally Roetger, as her husband, controlled the wealth she’d brought to it. Again legally, he could turn her out without a penny, was entitled to beat her-as long as he used only reasonable force-take her children away, and there would be nothing she could do about it. That Roetger wouldn’t do any of these things rested solely on the fact that he was a decent man.

  And while Emma’s life of household management and entertaining suited her, it wouldn’t suit Adelia. Nor, she knew, would it suit her daughter.

  “We’re helpless, we women,” she said, defeated.

  Emma, who didn’t feel helpless at all, patted her. “It’s only for a year, then you can be reunited-Rowley has agreed to that.” She stood up, brisk. “Now there’s just time to furnish you decently for the journey. I’m going to pack some of my own clothes for you in a proper traveling box. My dear, you’ll be voyaging with a princess of England in the company of very important people. We don’t want to appear shabby, do we?”

  So it was that at midday Adelia, looking elegant for once, and her daughter, considerably less so but with clean fingernails, rode out from Wolvercote Manor with an escort of Plantagenet soldiers, Gyltha, Mansur, and a lover to whom she still wasn’t speaking.

  Emma, standing with Roetger at the great gates to wave her off, was beset by a sudden qualm. “Pray God in His mercy send them safe.”

  In the lane outside, watching the departure, two Glastonbury men heard her prayer.

  “Amen to that,” Will said, crossing himself.