Grave Goods Read online

  “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 arme
d 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. T
here 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 …”