It had sullied his name forever, and he knew it; history would remember him as the king who’d martyred Saint Thomas à Becket.
Not for the first time, Adelia was aware of the depth of suffering that underlay this Plantagenet’s energetic exterior-it was like being reminded that beyond a briskly choppy inlet was a turbulent ocean. His remorse at calling for Becket’s death, that it was his knights who, with their own reasons for hating the archbishop, had ridden off to Canterbury and spilled the man’s brains onto the floor of the cathedral, had been terrible-and the Church had made sure he displayed every ounce of it in public. His penance had been to walk barefoot to Canterbury and present his naked back to its monks to be whipped.
“And whip him they did,” Prior Geoffrey, who’d been present, had told Adelia. “With enjoyment. Their scourges bit deep into his flesh, so that those of us who witnessed it were amazed he did not cry out. He stayed silent, though he will bear the stripes on his back forever.”
By humiliating himself, the king had saved England from a worse punishment, appeasing an angry Pope Gregory, who had otherwise threatened to lay the country under interdict: a closure of its churches, a refusal to bless marriages, christen babies, hear confessions, anoint the sick and dying-in effect, the excommunication of an entire nation.
Yes, Adelia thought with pity, Henry Plantagenet had paid for his temper so that his people didn’t have to.
He became brisk. “In turn, I must be kind to Glastonbury -it’s got to be rebuilt. When I can spare him, I’ll send Ralph Fitz-Stephen-he’s my chamberlain-to see what needs a-doing. It’ll be costly, you can swear to that; God knows how much I’ll have to spend. Unless…”
“Unless the pilgrims go flooding back in their thousands to visit Arthur’s tomb,” Adelia said, and smiled. Oh, he was a canny king.
“Exactly.”
She thought about it. Almost Henry was asking the impossible-but not quite. While she would not be able to date the skeletons, the coffin was another matter. “When was Arthur supposed to have lived?” she asked.
The king turned to the table. “When was it, Robert?”
The scribe laid down his pen and pursed his lips. “The Welsh cleric Nennius tells us in Historia Brittonum that Arthur’s last battle was at Mons Badonicus, where he single-handedly slew nine hundred and sixty men. Saint Gildas, who, as we know, lies in Glastonbury Abbey, informs us that this battle took place in the year of his birth, which, we believe, was either in the Year of Our Lord 494 or 506, though the Annales Cambriae places it somewhat later, while the…”
“All right, all right.” The king turned back to Adelia. “Somewhere early in the sixth century-do you want the day of the month?”
“Hmm.” A coffin found sixteen feet deep in the earth would likely be very ancient. “Does Glastonbury earth consist of peat?”
“How in hell would I know?”
The scribe intervened. “I believe it may, my lord. It is surrounded by marshland, which would indicate…”
“It’s peat,” the king said. “What’s that got to do with the price of fish?”
Nothing, but it did have to do with the preservation of wood. In the Cambridgeshire fens, which were all of peat, a piece of bog oak would occasionally surface in an area where no oaks grew. According to fenland belief, the number of rings apparent in the wood of the trunk when it was cut indicated the years during which the tree had stood when it was growing. By that system of accounting, some pieces had proved so old as to have flourished in the long distant past.
“Is the coffin of oak, do you know?”
“No, I don’t.” The king was becoming impatient.
If it was, and if her fenlanders were right, she might be able to gain a rough, very rough, idea of when the coffin had been interred, perhaps as long ago as Arthur’s time-and therefore beyond anybody’s knowledge as to whom it contained.
She considered. The king was assigning her a task that, for once, had no risk to it and would enable her, Mansur, Allie, and Gyltha to be sustained until she could decide what to do with the rest of her life.
Actually, Adelia was intrigued, not so much by the search for an ancient and mystical king-though that, too-but as to why a woman had been put to rest in a monastic graveyard.
“Very well,” she said. “I will try and ensure that the skeletons are old enough to be beyond identification, but further than that I cannot go. I will not say they are Arthur’s and Guinevere’s, because I doubt if anybody can. I won’t lie for you, Henry.”
“Or to me?”
She smiled at him. “Never that.”
“I know,” he said. “One of the few.” If Henry Plantagenet hadn’t been who he was, Adelia might have suspected that the sudden blur in the royal blue eyes came from tears.
He rallied. She was given a royal kiss on the cheek and a royal slap on the back. Robert the scribe was set to writing a warrant investing “my best beloved Lord Mansur and his interpreter, Mistress Adelia Aguilar” with almost enough power to raise an army and invade France.
But as always when he thought he was being overgenerous to her, the king made her pay for it.
“By the way,” he said, dangerously casual. “ Glastonbury and the bishopric of Wells have always been at daggers drawn-and now Glastonbury is saying that Wells bribed some poacher to set the fire. If I don’t intervene, the Pope will-and I’m not putting up with an interfering Vatican. Bloody prelates, more trouble than they’re worth. I’m sending a peacemaker down to get both of the buggers to kneel to me and promise to be good.” The blue eyes became wicked. “Guess who the peacemaker’s going to be. Go on, guess.”
“The bishop of Saint Albans,” she said dully.
“The very same.” Henry, who had no more chastity than a tomcat, reveled in his favorite bishop’s sexual dilemma.
Don’t, she thought. Leave us alone; we have come to terms. Rowley must serve God, I must serve medicine, and the two are incompatible.
Not getting a rise out of her, Henry persisted. “I expect you’ll meet.”
“No, my lord,” she said, “we won’t.”
“Still keeping to his oath of chastity, is he?”
She didn’t answer, and he had to let her go.
On the way back up the staircase, she realized that neither she nor the king had consulted Mansur on an investigation in which, to all intents and purposes, he was to play the leading part. Not that there had been any choice in the matter-the king was the king.
“What is your opinion, my dear friend?”
“You answered wisely,” he said. “Truth is the salt of mankind; we cannot proffer sand.”
“I don’t intend to. But about the vision…?”
“There are true visions,” Mansur said. “Did not Khadija, the Pure One, may the peace and blessings of Allah be upon her, see an angel guarding the Prophet with its wings?”
“Did she?”
Then who was Adelia to doubt the testimony of a monk from Glastonbury and Mohammed’s first wife?
FIVE
THEY REINED IN their horses at a bridge outside the gates that led to Wolvercote Manor and stayed there for some minutes, looking beyond its lodge to the house.
Somerset had displayed richness of countryside and property from the moment they’d crossed its border but nothing, so far, quite as pleasing to the eye as this place in which Emma had said she intended to make her home. It was like coming upon Arcadia.
A rectangular house of yellow stone tucked among stables and barns and trees with the tower of a domestic church rising beyond jumbled roofs of tiny slates, its wide-mouthed, chevroned doorway and mullioned windows smiled out across a moat in which it was exactly reflected. Against the setting sun, pigeons exited and landed in the little arched entrances of a cote built in the shape of a pepper pot.