Grave Goods Page 5

  She became irritated, as if she expected Adelia to answer a question she had not put. Going briskly ahead, she said over her shoulder, “Somebody one couldn’t marry, even if one wanted to, because his occupation and birth would bring social obloquy on one … and one’s child. Suppose that.”

  Adelia tried to. Ahead of her, Emma’s figure was that of an elegant ghost in the moonlight, a pale shade that flicked petals from the roses it passed as if it disdained them.

  Walking behind, Adelia attempted to follow the circumlocution that Emma had used to pose her question. What was it her poor friend wanted from her? No marriage, never marriage. No children, never more children. A life without physical love, yet a heart, such a sad heart, longing for the tenderness of a man … an unsuitable man …

  Then understanding came. Adelia castigated herself. What a fool I am. Of course. I should have known. That’s it.

  She quickened her pace, caught Emma by the arm, and led her to a seat in an alcove of roses, made her sit down, and sat down herself.

  “Did I ever tell you my theory on how it is possible to avoid conception?” she asked, as if she was raising a different subject.

  “No,” Emma said, as if she, too, found the matter a new one. “No, I don’t believe you did.”

  “It’s my foster parents’ theory, in fact,” Adelia said. “They are an extraordinary couple, I think I’ve told you. They refuse to be bound by their differing religions—he’s a Jew, she’s a Christian, but their minds are free, so free, of laws, prejudices, superstition, imprisoned thinking …” She paused, overwhelmed by longing to see them again and by gratitude for the upbringing they had given her.

  “Really?” Emma said politely.

  “Yes. And they traveled, you see. To gain medical knowledge. They asked questions of different races, tribes, other histories, customs, and my foster mother, bless her, went to the women, especially the women.”

  “Yes?” Emma said, and again it seemed of little interest to her.

  “Yes. And by the time she returned to Salerno, she had gathered, first, that women through the ages have tried to have control over their own bodies—and the methods they’ve used.”

  “Goodness gracious,” Emma said lightly.

  “Yes,” Adelia said. And because she was Adelia, to whom the dissemination of knowledge was essential and must be as fascinating to the listener as it was to her, she went into detailed account of the different ways, in different ages, in which men and women had attempted to achieve the dignity of choosing for themselves how many children they could cope with. First she spoke of “receptacles,” sheaths for the penis that various peoples made from sheepskin, or snakeskin, sometimes soaked in vinegar or lemon juice. “Effective, my mother said, but many men do not like to wear them.”

  Then came the subject of coitus interruptus, the biblical sin of Onan, who, forced by Jewish law to marry his brother’s wife, had “spilled his seed upon the ground” rather than let it impregnate her. “But again, most men do not wish to do that.”

  The nightingale continued its ethereal song while Adelia labored on through earthy, human truths. “There are plant remedies, of course, pennyroyal, asafetida, et cetera,” she said, “but Mother was wary of those; so many are poisonous and in any case do not work.”

  She paused for a moment, hoping for a response. There was none. Whether Emma, sitting so silently, was listening to her or to the blasted nightingale it was difficult to know.

  “And then there are the pessaries,” Adelia said. She enlarged on their history, speaking of Outremer women who placed sponges soaked in crocodile dung and lemon juice in the vulva, of an Arab tribe that used the same method, this time favoring a mixture of honey and camel droppings beaten into a paste with wine vinegar. She spoke of similar advice found in ancient writings, Egyptian hieroglyphics, Greek and Latin …

  Emma shifted, and Adelia realized she was losing her audience. She took in a breath. “What Mother found was that among all these recipes, when they worked, was what she called ‘acidus,’ a constant theme of the sour—lemon juice, vinegar. She was sure that it was that which killed sperm.”

  At the word “killed,” Emma stiffened. “And what has God had to say of these ways to murder?”

  “Not murder,” Adelia said. “Prevention. According to the priests, God condemns them, but priests are men who overlook the death of too many women through the imposition of too much childbearing.” Adelia thought of the murdered baby and its grave in the fens. “Or families struggling in poverty because they have too many mouths to feed.”

  Emma stood up. “Well, I think it is disgusting. Worse, it’s vulgar.” She walked away.

  “And in the case of pessaries,” Adelia shouted after her, “Mother recommends the attachment of a silk thread so they can be pulled down afterward.”

  She heard the inn door slam closed and sighed. “Well, you did ask,” she said. “At least, I think you did.”

  She sat on for a while, listening to the nightingale.

  “You been a time,” Gyltha said when Adelia returned to their and Allie’s bedroom.

  “I was talking to Emma. Gyltha, I think, I think, she’s in love with Master Roetger but doesn’t feel she can marry him.”

  “Could’ve told you that,” Gyltha said. “Too high and mighty to look after him herself but jealous as a cat of them as do.”

  “Yes, I suppose that’s it. Poor girl, poor girl.”

  “And she thinks as how you fancy him yourself.”

  “Oh, Gyltha, she can’t.” To Adelia, the German was a patient. She saw him only as a broken arm, a ruptured Achilles heel, and a long-suffering nature.

  “Maybe she can’t, but she do.”

  The next morning, Emma tongue-lashed her people—the grooms for being tardy in saddling up, the nurse for dressing Pippy in the wrong clothes, even Father Septimus for an overlong grace at breakfast. Adelia and Master Roetger were ignored as if they did not exist.

  “An oh-be-joyful journey this is going to be,” Gyltha muttered as they set out.

  Adelia agreed with her. If the situation continued all the way to Wells, it would be intolerable.

  As it turned out, Adelia, Gyltha, Allie, and Mansur did not have to endure it long. The company had been on the road only an hour when the sound of galloping hooves alerted it to riders coming up fast from the rear.

  Master Roetger felt for the sword that he kept always by his side, though what, pinioned as he was, he could have done with it was uncertain.

  There were three of them, all with the Plantagenet blazon on their tunics, each one leading a remount. Like their horses, they were lathered with sweat from hard traveling. Their officer addressed Emma. “Are you Mistress Adelia, lady?”

  Adelia said, “I am.”

  “An’ is he the lord Mansur?”

  “He is.”

  The officer said, “We’ve been chasing you all the way from Cambridge, mistress. You’re to come along of us.”

  “Where? What for?”

  “To Wales, mistress. By order of Henry the King.”

  FOUR

  LOOK,” ALLIE SAID, pointing upward as they approached the castle. “Poppies. Lots of poppies. Big ones.”

  Against the setting sun, the severed heads decorating Caerleon’s crenellations bore a resemblance to wildly petaled flowers.

  “That damned savage,” Adelia said under her breath, and urged her horse forward up the incline so that they would reach the barbican more quickly and her daughter could be sheltered by its walls from the knowledge of what the “poppies” on the battlements were. “Barbarian. Pig. Just wait til I see the brute.”

  She was so tired that anger with Henry Plantagenet was the only thing keeping her in the saddle. All of them except Allie, who could sleep in the pannier attached to a horse, were exhausted—and by a journey Adelia had been loath to make.

  She’d refused to accompany the soldiers at first. “I am not going.” Twice now she had served the Plantagenet in her
capacity of investigator into unexplained deaths, and each time had nearly lost her own life doing it.

  Emma, bless her, their contretemps forgotten, had joined the protest.

  “I cannot spare this lady, she is—” Emma remembered in time that the title of doctor should not be applied to her friend. “She is attendant to my physician, the lord Mansur here.”

  “He comes, too.” The officer’s hand moved to his sword hilt as he said it, and Adelia knew he’d enforce his king’s order if he had to.

  Adelia had panicked. “Not without my child. I am not leaving my child.” They’d have to drag her to Wales, she’d throw herself off her horse, she’d fight and scream at every step, she’d…

  On that matter, however, the officer had been prepared to give way. “The king said as how you wouldn’t.”

  “And I’m coming, too,” Gyltha said.

  The officer had nodded wearily. “King said that an’ all.”

  They’d barely been given time to say good-bye. Concerned, Emma said, “If you can get away, I shall be at our manor with my mother-in-law. Ask for the dowager Wolvercote.”

  Adelia waved as one of the soldiers led her horse into a trot.

  “Halfway between Wells and Glastonbury,” Emma shouted.

  Adelia would have waved again, but she was now at a gallop and had to hold on with both hands.

  The galloping proceeded, it seemed, for days. There was no planning for overnight stops such as Emma had made. When it was too dark to go on, they put up at whatever hostelry was available.

  Their first night had been spent at a miserable tavern on the way to the Severn Estuary. It was little more than a shack where everyone slept together on one raised platform covered in straw. The next morning they were infested with fleas and Adelia found that, in their haste, the pack with her clean clothes in it had been left behind with Emma. The officer—his name was Bolt, which, Gyltha pointed out, “suits the bastard”—refused to divert to the local market where she could have purchased some sort of raiment. “Sorry, mistress. You’ll have to grin and bear it.”

  “King’s orders, I suppose,” she said viciously. It was a phrase she was already sick of, and she knew she’d hear it a great deal more.

  “ ’S right.” It wasn’t that the man was unkind, but his lord king had insisted on speed, a requirement that literally overrode all others.

  On reaching the Severn they’d transferred to a boat and disembarked at Cardiff Castle on the Welsh coast, their destination, only to discover that Henry had moved on with his troops.

  “Been another rebellion,” Bolt told them after making inquiries. “Young Geoffrey’s holding out at Caerleon ’gainst another Welsh attack. The king’s gone to relieve him.”

  “We’ll have to wait here, then,” Adelia had said, relieved by the thought of a rest.

  “No, mistress. We’d better get on.”

  “Into a battle? You can’t take us into danger.”

  Bolt was astonished by her lack of faith in Henry Plantagenet. “There won’t be no battle by the time we gets there. The king’ll have mopped up that load of bloody Taffies quicker’n sixpence.”

  And so he had, if the heads on the battlements and the quiet, darkened countryside all around were anything to go by.

  Having quelled the revolt, Henry was establishing the peace—not that there was any sign of it in barbican or bailey, both in a commotion as soldiers tried to pack up weaponry against a counterflow of clerks unpacking chests of documents, all this among braying mules, frightened, scattering hens and pigs, and a cracked voice from a high window shouting orders to those below. “Where are those bloody maps? I need more ink up here. For the love of God, will you bastards hurry.”

  The place stank of urine and manure, nor did the smell improve as Adelia and the others were rushed up staircases and past arrow slits where archers had stood day and night repelling an encircling enemy.

  The king was striding up and down a slightly less noisome though just as turbulent chamber, dictating the terms of two different treaties with two different and defeated rebel Welsh lords to two different scribes, occasionally shouting instructions out the window, while a fusty little man ran alongside him, trying to apply leeches to a bare and inflamed-looking royal arm. In a corner, a young man whom Adelia recognized as the king’s illegitimate son and general-in-chief, Geoffrey, was talking to several tired-looking insigniaed men in heavy fur mantles, presumably Welsh chieftains. Pages were laying out food on a table, kicking away sniffing hounds as they did it. A line of hawks on perches were screeching and flapping their wings. Incongruously, a limp-looking man in another corner was playing a small harp and singing to it, though what it was was impossible to hear.

  Captain Bolt announced the newcomers in a shout that only just penetrated the noise: “The lord Mansur, Mistress Adelia, and …” He looked despairingly at Gyltha, who was holding Allie. “And company.”

  Henry glanced up. “You took your damn time. Sit down somewhere until I’ve finished… .”

  “No,” Adelia said clearly.

  Everybody stopped what they were doing, except the harpist, who went on quietly singing to himself.

  Past caring, itching with fleas and fury, Adelia told him, “The Lord Mansur and company require a bath and a rest. And they need them now.”

  All eyes looked in her direction and then, in one slow movement, were turned on the king. Henry’s temper when he was flouted was renowned—Thomas à Becket had died from it.

  He blew out a breath. “Geoffrey.”

  “Yes, my lord?”

  “Is there a bath in the castle?”

  “I don’t know, my lord.” The young man’s mouth twitched. “A bath wasn’t, er, part of our armory.”

  “Better find one. And some beds.”

  “And clean clothes,” Adelia said. “Women’s.”

  The king sighed again. “Samite? Lace? Any particular size?”

  Adelia ignored the sarcasm. “Clean will do,” she said.

  At the door she turned and addressed the little doctor: “And if you’re supposed to be treating that wound, get those leeches off it and put on some bog moss—there’s plenty of the bloody stuff in the valleys; we’ve been squelching through it for two days.”

  THE BATH TURNED OUT to be a washtub of enormous proportions, and the soldiers who hauled it up to the two rooms allocated to their guests at the top of a tower, along with great ewers of hot water, were out of breath and resentful when they got it there.

  An inexorable Adelia sent them back down for soap and towels.

  The beds, when they arrived, were rickety, but the straw and blankets that came with them were clean.

  After a long night’s sleep, Adelia woke up feeling better, if chastened by the memory of her behavior toward a king whose empire stretched from the borders of Scotland to the Pyrenees. Apparently, though, it was even yet having its effect, for a polite knock on the door heralded the entrance of the emperor’s bastard son, Geoffrey, still amused.

  He was carrying an armful of women’s clothing. “We, er, liberated these from one of the Welsh chieftain’s wives,” he said. “Don’t worry, she has others, though I’m afraid the lady favors rather more avoirdupois than you do, but it was that or a mail shirt.”

  Adelia clutched her blanket more closely about her—last night she’d thrown everything she’d been wearing out the window. Luckily, Allie’s extra clothes had been included in Gyltha’s pack, along with Mansur’s, and were fit for them to wear. “I’m grateful, my lord.”

  “Was the breakfast to your satisfaction? The cook’s Welsh as well.”

  “Congratulate him for me,” she said. Skewered lamb, the tastiest she’d ever eaten, along with buttermilk and a form of cake called bara brith so rich that even Mansur hadn’t been able to finish all of it.

  “Then when you’re dressed, my lord king would be happy to receive you and my lord Mansur. Only when you are ready, of course.” The young man went to the door and then turn
ed back. “Oh, and one of our lads carved this for the little one.” He knelt to put his face on a level with Allie’s and handed her a wooden doll.

  Allie curtsied nicely. “I’ll call him Poppy, like the ones on the roof.”

  “Poppies?”

  “She’s referring to the flowers decorating the battlements,” Adelia said, getting angry again. “The ones separated from their stalks.”

  “Ah, yes.” The young man’s eyes were on Allie, but he spoke to Adelia. “You see, little one, they were already picked. The king doesn’t take the heads off poppies unless they’re dead.” As he turned to leave, and Allie began playing with her doll, he added, “Hangs a few, of course, to encourage the others, but on the whole he’s magnanimous to his flowers.”

  “Nice lad that,” Gyltha said, when Geoffrey had gone. She began unfolding the clothes he’d brought. “Gawd help us.”

  With Mansur behind her, Adelia waded down the stairs in a skirt and bodice that had been pinned up and belted to enable her to keep them on. Since, at her age, it wasn’t respectable to go bareheaded, she also wore the Welshwoman’s headdress, an elaborate affair with something like curtaining on either side, which rested heavily on her ears.

  Casually, to the page who was leading the way, she asked, “Is the bishop of Saint Albans in the castle?”

  “He was, mistress, but he’s gone to Saint David’s to treat with the Welsh bishop.”

  The king’s chamber had been cleared of chieftains and servants but retained the king, a scribe writing at the table, dogs, hawks, and the softly singing harpist. The page ushered them in, announced them, and then stood at attention with his back to the door.

  Still dictating, Henry Plantagenet stumped up and down on legs that were becoming bandy from days of traveling his empire on horseback. As usual, he was dressed hardly better than one of his grooms, but, again as usual, he generated a power that sent out an almost palpable energy.

  Mansur salaamed, and Henry nodded at him, then walked round Adelia, studying her swamping attire. “Can you hear me in there?”