Adelia silently added her own requiem prayer: And may those who love you forgive me for what we do.
She went down the pit ahead of the body, joining Oswald and the bishop. A dreadful place, like the inside of an enormous brick egg insulated throughout by thick, netted straw over which more netting held the ice blocks. On their hooks, butchered sides of beef, lamb, venison, and pig, whitened by frost, hung so close together that she could not pass through without brushing her shoulders against them.
She found a space and straightened, to have her cap caught in the talons of game birds hanging from their own gallows.
Teeth chattering-and not just from the cold-she and the others guided the feet of the dead man as Aelwyn and Walt lowered him.
Together they laid him down under the birds, positioning him so that if there were drips, they would not fall on his face.
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” When the others had climbed out of the hole, she stayed by the dead man for a moment to make him a promise. “Whether we catch your killers or not, I will not leave you here for long.”
It was almost too long for her; she was so cold she couldn’t manage the ladder and Mansur had to hoist her out.
The abbess gave up her house to Rowley, saying it was a relief to do so; its steep steps to the front door had become difficult for her. In that he was her superior in God, she could do no less, although it gave him access to the inner courtyard with its cloister, chapel, refectory, and nuns’ dormitory, which were otherwise barred to men overnight. Having taken a look at Father Paton and deciding that he wasn’t a sexual threat, either, she put the secretary in with his master.
Jacques, Walt, Oswald, and Aelwyn were accommodated in the male servants’ quarters.
Mansur was given a pleasant room in the men’s guesthouse. Gyltha, Adelia, the baby, and the dog were accommodated just as pleasantly in the females’ wing next to the church. Angled outside steps led up to each guest’s private door, which, since they were on the top floor, gave the two women a view westward over the track to Oxford and the abbey’s fields where they sloped down to the Thames.
“Duck down,” said Gyltha, examining a large bed. “An’ no fleas.” She investigated further. “And some saint’s put hot bricks to warm it.”
Adelia wanted nothing so much as to lie down on it and sleep, and, for a while, all three of them did just that.
They were awakened by bells, one of them tolling as if in their ear and setting the water ewer shivering in its basin on the room’s table.
Ready to flee, Adelia picked up Allie where she lay between her and Gyltha. “Is it a fire?”
Gyltha listened. The massive strokes were coming from the church tower nearby, and with them came the chime of other bells, tinnier and much farther away. “It’s Sunday,” she said.
“Oh, to hell. It’s not, is it?”
However, courtesy and Adelia’s consciousness of their indebtedness to the abbess demanded that they attend the morning worship to which Godstow was summoning its people.
And more than just its own people. The church in the outer courtyard was open to everybody, lay and religious-though not, of course, to infidels and the smellier dogs, thus leaving Mansur and Ward still in their beds-and today everybody within walking range was struggling through snow to get to it. The village of Wolvercote came across the bridge en masse, since its own church had been allowed to fall into ruin by the lord of the manor.
The attraction was the bishop, of course; he was as miraculous as an angel descended. A view of his cope and miter alone was worth the tithes everybody had to pay; he might be able to cure the little un’s cough; for sure he could bless the winter sowing. Several poorly looking milch cows and one limping donkey were already tied up by the water trough outside, awaiting his attention.
The clergy entered by their own separate doorway to take their seats in the glorious stalls of the choir under the church’s equally glorious fan-vaulted roof.
By virtue of his tonsure, Father Paton sat next to the nuns’ chaplain, a little dormouse of a man, opposite the rows of nuns that included among their black ranks two young women in white veils who had a tendency to giggle; they found Father Paton funny.
Most bishops used their homilies to wag a finger at sin in general, often in Norman French, their mother tongue, or in Latin on the principle that the less the congregation understood, the more in awe it would be.
Rowley’s was different, and in an English his flock could understand. “There’s some buggers are saying poor Lady Rosamund has died at the Queen Eleanor’s hand, which it is a wickedness and a lie, and you’ll oblige our Lord by giving it no credit.”
He left the pulpit to stride up and down the church, lecturing, hectoring. He was here to discover what or who had caused Rosamund’s death, he said, “For I do know she was dearly loved in these parts. Maybe ’twas an accident, maybe ’twasn’t, but if it weren’t, both king and queen’ll see to it the villain be punished according to law. In the meantime, ’tis beholden on us all to keep our counsel and the precious peace of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
Then he kneeled down on the stones and straw to pray, and everyone in church kneeled with him.
They love him, Adelia thought. As quickly as that, they love him. Is it showmanship? No, it isn’t. He’s beyond that now. Beyond me, too.
When they rose, however, one man-the miller from across the bridge, judging from the spectral whiteness with which flour had ingrained his skin-raised a question. “Master, they say as how the queen be upsides with the king. Ain’t going to be no trouble twixt ’em, is there?”
He was backed by a murmur of anxiety. The civil war in which a king had fought a queen was only a generation in the past; nobody here wanted to see another.
Rowley turned on him. “Which is your missus?”
“This un.” The man jerked a thumb at the comfortable lady standing beside him.
“And a good choice you made there, Master Miller, as all can see. But tell me you ain’t been upsides with her along the years some’eres, or her ain’t been upsides with you, but you diddun start a war over it. Reckon as royalty ain’t no different.”
Amid laughter, he returned to his throne.
One of the white-veiled girls sang the responsory in honor of the bishop’s presence and sang it so exquisitely that Adelia, usually deaf to music, waited impatiently through the congregation’s answers until she sang again.
So it was nice to find the same young woman waiting for her in the great courtyard outside after the clergy had filed out. “May I come and see the baby? I love babies.”
“Of course. I must congratulate you on your voice; it is a joy to hear.”
“Thank you. I am Emma Bloat.”
“Adelia Aguilar.”
They fell into step, or, rather, Adelia stepped and Emma bounced. She was fifteen years old and in a state of exaltation over something. Adelia hoped it was not the bishop. “Are you an oblate?”
“Oh, no. Little Priscilla is the one taking the veil. I am to be married.”
“Good.”
“It is, isn’t it? Earthly love…” Emma twirled in sheer joie de vivre. “God must reckon it as high as heavenly love, mustn’t he, despite what Sister Mold says, or why does He make us feel like this?” She thumped the region of her heart.
“‘It is better to marry than to burn,’” quoted Adelia.
“Huh. What I say is, how did Saint Paul know? He didn’t do either.”