They were beyond the village now, with a view of the far-off sea. The tide was coming in, refreshing the marshes and the air as if it wanted to wipe their memory of what they’d seen and smelled.
Let there be one good thing in this world, Adelia thought. Let Emma and Pippy be alive. Roetger, too. “Where are they?”
Godwyn pointed ahead to where a grove of low trees sheltered a shepherd’s hut. “Didn’t want ’em near the lepers, did I?” he said.
Adelia broke into a run, scattering sheep as she went. Thank God, thank God, a thin filament of smoke was rising from a cooking fire.
There was a stream and a small, dirty child in rags building a dam across it with twigs. Adelia jumped the stream and scooped him up as she ran, covering him with kisses.
A scarecrow of a woman appeared at the door of the hut, shading her eyes, then dropped to her knees like a puppet whose strings were suddenly cut.
Adelia scooped her up, too, nearly squashing Pippy in the process. “It’s all right now, Em, my dear, my dear girl. It’s going to be all right.”
OF THE THREE CASTAWAYS, Roetger was in the worst condition, emaciated and with a fever. “He’s been so brave, ’Delia,” Emma said, crying. “We would have died without him.”
He had to be supported on the journey back to the landing stage, using a crutch under one shoulder and Rowley on the other side. Godwyn offered to help, but Emma spat at him. “Don’t you come near, don’t you come near us.”
“Godwyn saved your lives,” Adelia told her gently.
“I don’t care. Keep him away.”
What the landlord was able to do was steer them around the village so that they could approach the punt from another side and avoid the sights of the main street. They were taking a track that led past the backs of cottages when a scream came from the direction of the landing stage.
More shouts. Godwyn began running. Hampered as they were-Adelia was still carrying Pippy-they couldn’t keep up with him.
The bell in the church began ringing slow, single tolls that marked a death.
Now they could see the punt. It was empty. Godwyn was on the landing stage, struggling in the arms of two men holding him back. He was howling and crying.
Bewildered, Adelia looked to where people were pointing in distress.
Rowley said, “Sweet Mary save us.”
The tall figure of Abbot Sigward, reduced by distance, was striding out into the marsh. He had his arm around Hilda, who was clinging to him as he encouraged her along. Their feet sent up splashes of incoming tide.
Rowley turned on one of the men nearby. “Can we go after them?”
“Dursn’t,” the man said-he was crying. “Quicksand. God have mercy on ’em.”
Nothing to do but watch. The bell went on tolling. The two figures were up to their knees in water, but still the abbot surged forward, almost carrying the woman flopped against him.
As if something had suddenly clamped their legs, they became still and then, slowly, began to sink until only their shoulders showed above the rising, rippling tide. The abbot hoisted the woman so that her head was level with his and for a minute or two-it seemed forever-that’s how they stayed.
At the last, the abbot’s arm came up to be outlined against a speedwell-blue sky, and they heard his voice echoing over the water.
“Lord Jesus, Son of God, have mercy on us.”
THIRTEEN
GODWYN HAD to be prevented from following his wife, as if he could still drag her back. After a long, screaming struggle, he collapsed into inertia and drooped in the hands of his captors, his eyes never leaving the spot on the water where Hilda and the abbot had disappeared.
Everybody was in shock, the lepers bewildered. “But he were happy,” one of the men kept saying to Rowley of Abbot Sigward. “Give us Communion and blessed us. Saintly as ever, he was. Why’d he do that for?”
A woman moaned. “What we goin’ to do now? What’ll us do without un?”
“It was an accident,” Rowley told them, making Adelia start. “An accident. He, er, took the woman for a walk; she’d been upset. He forgot there was quicksand out there.”
It was a ludicrous explanation, but Rowley kept on giving it and, because it was the kindest, the lepers repeated it to themselves as they wept for their saint, preferring it to the evidence of their own eyes.
That’s what he’ll say when we get back, Adelia thought, and perhaps he’s right.
She grieved for Godwyn, grieved for the two souls who had gone to such an end, grieved for the lepers, but her care had to be for the three castaways who needed it as soon as possible. Long before it was decent, she was urging them into the punt, but it was some time before the bishop of Saint Albans could be persuaded to leave the distressed people on the quay; he had a priestly duty to the bereaved, and promises to make that they would not be abandoned.
Godwyn was heaved down into the boat. He sank onto the place his wife had occupied and stayed there, silent and helpless. It was the bishop of Saint Albans who poled them all back to Glastonbury.
With Adelia’s arm around her, Emma fell asleep where she sat, as if, having held up for her son’s and Roetger’s sake until now, she could pass the responsibility on to somebody else and rest at last. She was horribly thin; she and Roetger had seen to it that Pippy was fed as well as possible on the meager supplies Godwyn had smuggled to them on his trips. That, however, had meant going with-out themselves. The lepers, apparently, had been kind and offered to bring them food, but Emma had refused to accept anything from their hands and screamed at them to keep away.
Apart from being extremely dirty, young Lord Wolvercote was in comparatively good fettle; Adelia had clutched him to her so that he shouldn’t see the tragedy as it occurred and, though he’d been upset by the screams, his youth kept him from dwelling on it. His only fear was that they were taking him back to the Pilgrim to be locked into its tunnel. “Don’t want to go to the black place,” he said. “That nasty woman frightened Mama.”
“No more tunnels for you, young man. The nasty woman’s gone,” Rowley told him, but he glanced inquiringly at Adelia.
She grimaced in return. “It has to be the inn,” she said in Latin. “They’re none of them fit to travel any farther. Roetger certainly isn’t.”
The champion was her greatest worry; if Emma was thin, he was emaciated. Adelia hadn’t yet seen him put his injured foot to the ground and suspected he couldn’t. Worse, though he refused to complain, he was breathing with a difficulty that suggested he’d developed a constriction of the lungs. “Do hurry,” she begged Rowley.
“I’m going as fast as I can, woman,” he puffed. “I haven’t poled a punt since I was a boy.”
Actually, he did well. It seemed to Adelia that they had left and were returning on two different days but, when at last Glastonbury’s landing place was in sight, the sun was only just leaving its zenith.
Emma put up a fight when she saw that she was being taken to the Pilgrim. “Not there. We’re not going back there.”
“Yes, you are,” Adelia said. “Master Roetger can’t go on. Look at him.”
Emma looked, and her outburst dissipated into panic. “You’ve got to save him, ’Delia. He was our mainstay. Those brigands on the road would have killed us all if it hadn’t been for him. I can’t… oh, ’Delia, I can’t do without him.”
“Let’s put him into a bed and you won’t have to,” Adelia said, hoping that it was true. Getting her patients up the slope to the inn was hard enough, and it was a relief to see Millie at its door, shading her eyes as she looked in alarm from one to the other.
There was no time to answer questions even if the maidservant had been able to ask them, but Millie, intelligent girl that she was, realized that beds were needed and hurried upstairs to prepare them.