Immediately, Lord Sigward felt anger; if his son had sent word ahead, he could have invited his neighbors to welcome the boy as a hero. He kept his patience, however, and called for Hilda to bring food and drink.
As he watched the young men eat, he became angrier.
“He should have been pleased,” the abbot said. “His son had become the man he’d wished him to be. The years in the Holy Land had given the boy belief in himself. He looked Lord Sigward in the eye. He was no longer afraid; he was Lord Sigward’s equal-and Lord Sigward resented it.”
Also, there was a sweetness in the son’s smile when it was directed at the friend that was missing when he addressed the father.
Both youths had pale, cruciform patches on their tunics where the crusader’s cross had been stripped off. When Lord Sigward inquired why this was so, he was able to find justification for his anger with the two of them. “They denigrated the sanctity of crusade, they poured scorn on the holy purpose of driving the Saracen from the land Jesus had walked on. They had seen too much death, they said; Islam was merely being inflamed. What purpose in killing Muslim men, women, and children if each corpse added a hundred living people to the number hating Christianity? Was that following the teaching of Our Lord?”
Too furious to speak, Lord Sigward had left the hall and retired to his chamber. He couldn’t sleep for thinking of the shame his son’s impiety would cast on his name. In the middle of the night, he got up and went to the boy’s room to argue with him.
“He found his son and the friend in bed together,” the abbot said. “They were naked and performing a homosexual act.”
Hubris had descended on Lord Sigward then. Quietly, he closed the door on the two lovers and went to fetch an ax.
The abbot said, “He… No, I must not think of myself in the third person… Me. I was that butcher. With the ax in my hand, I burst in on those two boys and hacked them to death where they lay in each other’s arms. I struck and struck and went on striking long after both were dead.”
The river was beginning to straggle through reeds now, and the punt nudged aside yellow water lilies as it went. Sandpipers called from the banks, a descant to the implacable human voice.
“I considered myself justified. Had I not followed the Lord’s action against Sodom and Gomorrah? Did not Leviticus say that a man who lies with a man as with a woman has committed a detestable act and should surely be put to death?”
Covered in blood, Lord Sigward went downstairs to sit at the table and stare at nothing.
Hilda had heard the shrieks and gone running to view the slaughterhouse. The dead boys were less important to her than her lord; nobody should know what the dear master had done.
She took over. Godwyn was sent to prepare a coffin while she swabbed and cleaned. The bodies were laid on a sheet; the bedding was burned.
“Not the least of my sins that night was that I involved my two good servants in it.” Abbot Sigward glanced up, but Godwyn kept his eyes on the river.
The corpses were put in their coffin, ready to be buried secretly somewhere on the estate…
And then the earthquake struck.
“The world tilted. The ground opened. Worst was the noise, as if God’s voice had come close and was blasting destruction through the clouds.” Abbot Sigward nodded to himself. “Which it was, which indeed it was. I heard Him. Is it for you to condemn, you murderer? Was it for this that I sent My Son to preach love and forgiveness? Who are you to set yourself up against Him? Two mothers’ sons you have killed, Sigward. In your arrogance and wickedness you have committed filicide twice over and the Son of Man has been crucified yet again.”
It was the voice that Saul heard on the Road to Damascus.
As it had to Saul, it showed Lord Sigward to himself. He cowered at what he saw, a creature of hatred, a vainglorious, pitiless upholder of all law except the one that mattered most, a murderer, not least of a gentle wife who had died loveless. He saw the Pit waiting for him, and it held no flames but was barren and empty, like his soul; he would be condemned to shiver in it alone through all eternity.
“I crawled, pleading for a mercy that would not be given me because I had shown none,” the abbot said. “The floor tossed beneath me in the cataclysm that was God’s condemnation.”
When at last the earth stopped quaking, it was another Sigward who rose to his feet, though he could barely stand upright for the horror of what he had done. He knew now that the boys he’d killed must not be buried in unsanctified ground; to placate a vengeful God, he would take their bodies to the nearest and holiest place he knew, Glastonbury Abbey.
“I was, of course, bargaining with my Lord, wicked creature that I was, leaving it to Him to say whether or not my crime should be discovered. If it were, I would take my punishment. If not, I promised Him that all my lands and possessions should go to Mother Church and I would spend the rest of my days in service of His loving Son.” Sigward turned to Adelia. “I told you, my lady, that I was a gambler. It was gambling.”
She nodded.
One thing he had not been able to do. “I could not let my son’s body go to its rest complete. In my fury, I had hacked it into three, throwing the sexual part onto the floor. Even now… Sweet Mary, what twisted madness… I would not bury it with him, as if I might still conceal what he was. Hilda saw to its disposal separately, another sin that she bore for me.”
Not Hilda, Adelia thought. It was Godwyn; tears were trickling down the man’s face. It was him-Lord, the wonderful strangeness of human nature. She wondered what he had done with that dreadful collop of flesh until it was skeletonized and he could give the bones a more decent interment because he’d loved and pitied the boy they’d belonged to.
That night the coffin containing the two lovers was put into a boat and rowed to the abbey’s landing stage. There was no one about-the monks were praying for deliverance up on the Tor.
Between them, Sigward, Hilda, and Godwyn hauled the coffin by ropes to the sanctity of the monks’ graveyard. “There was a fissure there, as if God with his earthquake had readied a burial place for our burden. We lowered the coffin into it and I prayed for mercy on those two souls, and mine. For the first time in my life, I wept…”
Adelia raised her head. “What was your son’s name?”
Rowley jerked round; he’d forgotten that she was there. The abbot had not; he smiled at her. “Arthur,” he said. “His name was Arthur.”
Of course it was. “And the other boy?” It seemed imperative to her to give him an identity.
“God forgive me,” Sigward said, “but if I ever knew it, I have forgotten it.” He stretched out a hand toward her. “Do you damn me?”
It wasn’t for her to do it. The man carried his own damnation with him. More important to Adelia was whether that one horrific sin, and its far-reaching consequences as Hilda attempted to conceal it, had damned three more people to death. How far to Lazarus? Each time they passed one of the marsh’s little islands, most of them uninhabited apart from cattle and sheep, she tensed with expectation-and was disappointed.
But the landscape was changing; its air was saltier, and reeds were beginning to give way here and there to marron grass where high tides had come inland, pushing in enough sand for it to grow on.
Adelia kept her eyes on a hump of ground still some way ahead that broke the dark blue, ruler-straight line of the horizon, hardly listening to the confession that went on and on, of which she had become weary.