And pray God we’re not too late.
Adelia took off her ruined, water-distorted, ashy shoes and sat down so that her toes could reach into the river and send up flirting, rainbow splashes.
Again, her surroundings insisted that all was right with the world, especially here-that Emma, Pippy, and Roetger must have survived in such a glorious landscape, that a great and ancient king could have chosen nowhere better for his last resting place.
She wished she could believe it. How nice to discount human wickedness, to be able to fall in with the nature around her, to discount evidence and allow that the mutilated bones in the hut were indeed those of Arthur and Guinevere, killed in a legendary battle in such an ancient past that its shrieks and blows had ameliorated into nothing more than the puff of a story-laden breeze.
But those shrieks, those blows, had been less than a generation ago. She had a duty to the dead; she was who she was.
She felt the little pier vibrate as somebody joined her on it. Beside her were the long, white, sandaled feet of Abbot Sigward.
“We have been searching for you, my child. Will you come and take some food before we go?”
She squinted up at him, shading her eyes. “How did your son die?” she asked.
For a moment he was as still as death. She continued to look at him.
“So you are Nemesis,” he said.
She nodded.
Then the abbot’s face changed, quite beautifully, as if the sun shining on it was reflected back by an inner light. “I have been awaiting that question for twenty years.” He stretched his arms sideways to embrace the view, like a cormorant holding out its wings to dry in the warmth. “See what a perfect day the Lord has chosen for it. He has even supplied a bishop for my confession.” He smiled down at her. “Stay there, my child, while I fetch the others.”
He strode off toward the kitchen, then stopped to turn around.
“I killed him,” he said.
LATER, WHEN ADELIA looked back on the journey to Lazarus, it was the incongruity of it that never failed to jolt her. It should have been made in darkness, or at least cast a shadow that withered everything they passed. Instead, as Godwyn smoothly poled the punt containing Sigward, Adelia, Rowley, and Hilda along, the sun shone on them as if on a jolly outing.
At one point, the abbot even paused in his confession and uncovered a basket that had been put up for him by Brother Titus before they left, exposing a jug of mead and cakes of oatmeal and honey, and passing them around. “Eat, drink,” he urged them.
He was exalted. Sitting on the punt’s middle thwart, facing the bishop of Saint Albans, he unburdened himself of his sin almost joyously, sometimes in Latin, sometimes in English, as if fearing that Adelia, his nemesis, sitting in the stern behind Rowley, would not understand him.
Hilda-he’d insisted she should accompany them-crouched in the bottom of the punt, quiet now, her head on his knee like an exhausted dog’s.
His story-and it was as much story as confession-was of a cleaving. Of a young man hacked in two. Of an earthquake that had not only opened rifts in the ground but had separated the Sigward, lord of great estates, from the Sigward who’d become a lowly monk of Glastonbury Abbey and then its abbot.
He spoke of them as two different people. “Lord Sigward was a man assured of his righteousness,” he said. “He gave to the poor, he built churches and oratories so that God should be reminded of his virtue. He ruled his little kingdom justly with a Bible in his hands, knowing he obeyed its precepts. He bathed in the admiration of his neighbors. His servants had cause to love him…” Absentmindedly, Abbot Sigward patted Hilda’s shoulder. “At least those he kept by him, for he was quick to punish and rid himself of the ones who did not.”
Wishing she didn’t have to listen, Adelia kept her eyes on the river, trailing her fingers and watching their wake in the water. A moorhen hurried her chicks away from the ripple.
“Lord Sigward chose his wife carefully, but she was a disappointment; he did not understand why she was afraid of him. She bore him a son, and she died doing it. No matter, Lord Sigward had his heir and held a great feast so that he could boast of him to Somerset’s nobility. But the boy, too, was a disappointment; he was weak, like his mother. He cowered when his father spoke to him; he failed in the tiltyard, he was an inept huntsman. Like some clerk, he preferred books to pursuing the manly arts.”
Adelia glanced at Rowley’s rigid back; he’d averted his face from the man opposite him, as he would have done in the privacy of a confessional. There had been no moment to warn him before they set off. When the abbot, crossing himself, had spoken the formula-“Hear and bless me, Father, for I have greatly sinned”-she’d seen her lover draw away as if in protest.
He always hated hearing confessions. “Who am I to pronounce on sin?” Like Thomas à Becket before him, he’d been appointed by his king, not the Church, and had been made a priest literally overnight-ordained one day, installed into the bishop’s chair the next.
The punt surged and slowed as Godwyn dug its pole effortlessly into the riverbed and lifted it again, his face without expression. The words issuing from the mouth of the man who’d been his master might have been no more than the chirp of the buntings hidden in the reeds.
“When the boy was sixteen, it seemed necessary to Lord Sigward that he should regain the admiration of the county and get credit with Almighty God by sending his son on crusade. He fitted him out lavishly with weapons, equipment, gave him a fine destrier to ride… which was too big for him.” For the first time the abbot’s voice had faltered, then, with an indrawn breath, it regained its rhythm. “A farewell feast for the county to wish the son well and praise the father who, though wallowing in his pride, also resented the boy’s obvious happiness in leaving him.”
A dragonfly skimmed the water and landed on the punt’s gunwale like an iridescent jewel before taking off again.
“Four years went by without a word. Other fathers received news of their offspring from those returning from the Holy Land, sometimes that they were alive and well, sometimes that they were dead. The Lord Sigward, however, heard nothing and began to think that his boy, too, had died, perhaps in the battle for the fortress of Ascalon, where so many Christian knights were slaughtered during its recapture from the Saracen. If so, it would be an excuse for him to hold another feast, this time a valedictory one-what honor to Lord Sigward that his child had given his life in the attempt to return the Holy Land to God.”
Adelia watched a kingfisher that had been perching on an alder twig suddenly turn into a rainbowed arrow as it dived into the water, coming up with a frog in its beak.
It was getting hot. Abbot Sigward threw back his cowl to let the air play on his tonsured head. The exaltation was still with him, but his fingers were showing white where he clasped them in his lap-he was coming to the crux.
Adelia tried to distance the clear voice ringing over the marshes into that of just another storyteller in a market. Twenty years ago, she told herself. They have been dead these twenty years. This man is not the same man who kitted them.
But he was.
It had been the evening before the Feast of Saint Stephen 1154, the abbot said, a blustery night.
Christmas festivities were over. Lord Sigward, being the kindly master he was, had already allowed his servants to set off on their annual visit to the villages they came from.
“Apart from Hilda”-the abbot patted the head of the woman crouching beside him-“who refused to leave him, and Godwyn”-he smiled up at the man poling the punt-“who refused to leave her, there was no one in the house.”
So Lord Sigward was dining alone in his hall when Godwyn, acting as a doorkeeper, heard a loud knocking and went to answer it. Two young men were ushered in, and Lord Sigward found himself being embraced by his son, whose dripping rain cloak put wet marks on the silk of his father’s robe. Laughing and exclaiming, the boy introduced his magnificently tall friend. “We have been on the road from Outremer for three months, Father, and we are very, very hungry.”