She tried to stay calm. “Why are you doing this?”
“You speak the darky’s jabber, don’t you? Can’t understand a bloody word he says.”
Mansur. They were taking her to Mansur, who was pretending he didn’t speak English, so he was in desperate straits or he would have tried to stop them from fetching her. At least it meant they were demanding her services and not her body.
Adelia’s heart rate slowed down a little. “What do you want?”
“You’ll see.”
“Not with this damned blindfold on, I won’t. Take it off.”
“Feisty, ain’t she?” There was more sniggering, but with another tug on her hair, the rag’s knot was undone.
Moonlight shone on trees and undergrowth and, as she looked round, a steep slope that fell away to a valley and the marshes. Which of the hills that reared up around Glastonbury they were on she couldn’t tell. “Where are we?”
“Never you mind.”
Wherever it was, it was their destination. She was lifted down from what she now saw was a donkey-they were all on donkeys, five men as shaggy-looking and as evil-smelling as the mounts they were tying to a stake.
Somebody lit a lantern. She was pushed, stumbling, over rough ground until, by the lantern’s light, she saw that they stood outside an outcrop, almost like an oriel window set into the hill, curtained from above by the trailing fronds of an alder fed by a spring that trickled down one side-a sylvan scene, its loveliness spoiled by a smell that Adelia knew too well.
The branches were pushed aside. Sitting in the entrance to a cave were three men, Mansur, a guard holding a knife on him-and Rhys the bard.
Adelia had forgotten that Rhys hadn’t come back to the inn; in all the upheaval, she’d even forgotten he existed. Her eyes were only for the Arab, and she fell on him, jabbering in Arabic. “Are you all right? Have they hurt you? We’ve been desperate…”
He was angry, though not with their captors. He gestured toward Rhys. “That son of a whore and a he-camel. I did not show that I understood them. I did not know he would tell them where to find you. May shaitan use his skull as a pisspot…”
Adelia had never heard Mansur swear like this, though she was relieved that he had the energy to do it. Of the two of them, Rhys, the betrayer, was the worse for wear, battered, on the edge of tears. “Taken my harp, they have,” he said. “You tell them they got to give me back my harp.”
It was a plea for a lost limb, and automatically Adelia said, “I will,” though her attention was for Mansur. “Have they hurt you?”
“I am well. They are ignorant fellahin, yet I think they mean no harm.”
“What do they want of us?”
One of the men had stepped between the two of them. “Stop your jabber.” A dirty finger was directed toward Mansur. “He’s a Merlin, ain’t he? A wizard? Talks to the dead, don’t he? An’ they talk back?”
“Er, up to a point,” Adelia told him cautiously.
“Tell him to chat with this un, then.” The man pushed past them to go farther into the cave, and with a tug removed a screen of withies that had been blocking its interior.
The stink of mortification intensified. The lamp was held higher so that she could see what lay inside. It was a skeleton.
“Chat to it?”
“ ’At’s right. Ask him where he’s been, what he was a-doing of afore he got dead.”
Great God, was that why Mansur had been kidnapped? A misinterpretation of his reputation? Did these men truly think that he, that anybody, could converse with a corpse?
In wonderment at the infinite credulity of the ignorant, Adelia raised her head to stare at the man. The beginning of dawn fell on a face that lamplight had merely disguised with shadows. She recognized it.
“You’re the baker,” she said. “You were at Wolvercote Manor.” She got to her feet in excitement. “Emma. The lady who went there. My friend. You know what happened to her. I saw you know it.”
Happenings were beginning to relate to each other. Rhys had found the man, talked to him, and, it seemed, given more information than he’d received.
“Never you mind who I am. Get that bloody wizard to work.”
“Tell me about Lady Emma. What happened to her?”
“Him first.” The baker nodded toward the object in the cave. “Then maybe I will.”
It was at least admission that the man had information. She asked, “What do you want to know?”
“What happened to him. What killed the poor bugger. ’Cos we don’t think as he did what they say he did.”
“What was he supposed to have done?”
The baker brandished a knife at her. “Ask him, I’m telling you, aren’t I? Afore I cut all three of you into pig meat.”
“Ask him what?”
But Mansur had not been wasting his time; supposedly unable to understand English, he had accrued a great deal of information by listening as his captors talked among themselves. In Arabic, he said, “The dead man is the Eustace who is supposed to have set the abbey fire.”
“And what is he to them?” Adelia asked in the same language.
“They have to answer for his crime. Already four of their number are in gaol awaiting the coming assize in Wells. These others expect that they may be arrested at any moment and brought to book for arson. They are Eustace’s”-Mansur paused because he had to say the next word in English, there being no Arabic equivalent for it-“frankpledge.”
The baker was startled at hearing the word. “Here, how’d that black bugger know about our frankpledge?”
“Oh, be quiet,” Adelia said crossly. The man was getting on her nerves. “I expect Eustace told him.”
There was a new respect in the eyes of the men standing around her. “He’s good, ain’t he?” one of them said.
Frankpledge. An English legal system to keep order-an alien concept to Adelia when she’d arrived in the country. It was a way of enforcing the law and policing the common people-upper classes were exempt-by grouping every male over the age of twelve into a unit of ten, known as a tithing, that was responsible for a misdemeanor or felony committed by any of the others.
Periodically and with rigid efficiency, the courts held a “view of frankpledge” all over the country, during which each member of a tithing had to reaffirm his oath that he would bring to the bar of justice any of his nine fellows who had committed an offense, that he was answerable for their behavior as well as his own, that he would pursue them if they fled their crime. The penalty was a fine in accordance with the severity of the offense.
It was an old law, rooted in Anglo-Saxon custom, and Adelia, who had seen innocent men lose their homes through the wrongdoing of one of their tithing, thought it unfair. She’d questioned Prior Geoffrey about it, but he had shrugged his shoulders. “Mostly it works,” he’d said.
Obviously, it was working here. These five men-nine if you counted the four who’d been remanded-were responsible in law for the corpse in the cave. If they couldn’t prove it innocent of destroying the biggest abbey in England, their punishment didn’t bear thinking about.
That they had committed the crime of kidnapping in pursuit of that laudable aim didn’t seem to have occurred to them.
“Why do you believe your friend didn’t start the fire?” she asked.
The baker apparently thought that this was another matter the late Master Eustace could settle. But a younger man who’d been employing his time with his hand up the skirt of his tunic, nervously scratching his testicles, answered for him. “See, Useless never took a light into the abbey when he needed a drink. Like a fox, Useless was; he could see in the dark.”
“ ’S right,” said another, even younger. “Maybe he’d filch a bit here or there, swig of wine, p’raps…”
The baker hit him. “Don’t tell her that, Alf, you fucking booby.”
“But he wouldn’t never start a fire,” Alf insisted.