Adelia, sitting on the ground with a crowing, pointing Allie against her knees, found herself enjoying it. It was doubtful if Noah would have recognized the species capering up this invisible gangplank into an invisible ark. The only real animal, the convent donkey, outperformed the rest of the cast by dropping a pungent criticism of their performance on the foot of a unicorn, played by Fitchet, making Gyltha laugh so hard that Mansur had to drag her away until she recovered.
For all their sophistication, Eleanor’s party couldn’t resist the applause accorded to such vulgarism. They joined in, dropping refinement and showing themselves to be clowns manqués as they appeared in startling wigs and skirts, faces painted with flour and madder.
What was it about some men that they must ape women, Adelia thought, even as she booed an irascible Mrs. Noah, played with brio by Montignard, belaboring Noah for being drunk.
Was that Jacques under the warts, straw hair, and extended bosom of Japhet’s wife? Surely that wasn’t the Abbot of Eynsham black-faced and whirling so fast on his toes that his petticoat flared in a blur?
Allie, still clutching her marrow bone, had fallen asleep again. It was time to go to bed before the manic hilarity of the night descended into brawling, as it almost inevitably would. Already Schwyz’s men and Wolvercote’s had separated into drunken coteries and were focusing blearily on one another in a way suggesting that the spirit of Christmas was on its last legs.
Wolvercote himself had already gone, taking Emma with him. The queen was thanking the abbess before departing, and Mother Edyve was signaling to her nuns. Master Warin had disappeared. The smith, clutching his throat, was being led away by his wife.
Adelia looked around for Gyltha and Mansur. Oh, dear, her beloved Arab-possibly the only sober person in the barn apart from herself-had been inveigled into doing his sword dance for the delight of some convent servants, and Gyltha was gyrating round him like an inebriated stoat. Not a drinker usually, Gyltha, but she could never resist alcohol when it was free.
Yawning, Adelia picked up Allie and took her to the corner in which they’d left the cradle, put the child in it, took away the marrow bone, gave it to Ward, covered up her daughter, and raised the cradle’s little leather hood, then settled down beside it to wait.
And fell asleep to dream a frenetic, rowdy dream that turned hideous when a bear picked her up and, clutching her to its pelt, began dragging her away into the forest. She heard growling as Ward attacked the bear and then a yelp as it kicked him away.
Struggling, almost smothered, her legs trailing, Adelia woke up fully. She was being pulled into the darkest corner under the hayloft in the arms of the Abbot of Eynsham. He slammed her so hard against the outer wall that bits of lathe and plaster showered them both, pushing his great body against her.
He was very, very drunk and whispering. “You’re his spy, you bitch. The bishop. I know you…pretending to be prim with me, you whore, I know…what you got up to. How’s he do it? Up the arse? In your mouth?”
Brandy fumes enveloped her as his blackened face came down onto hers.
She jerked her head away and brought up her knee as sharply as she could, but the ridiculous skirt he was wearing gave him protection and, though he grunted, his weight stayed on her.
The whispering went on and on. “…think you’re so clever…see it in your eyes, but you’re a stinking strumpet. A spy. I’m better than Saint Albans… I’m better.…” His hand had found herbreast and was squeezing it. “Look at me, I can do it…Love me, you bitch, love me…” He was licking her face.
Outside the suffocating cubicle she was trapped in, somebody was intervening, trying to pull the heaving, hissing awfulness off her. “Leave her, Rob, she’s not worth it.” It was Schwyz’s voice.
“Yes, she is. She looks at me like I’m shit…like she knows.”
There was the sound of a loud smack, then air and space. Relieved of weight, Adelia slid down the wall, gasping.
The abbot lay on the ground, onto which Mansur had flattened him. He was weeping. Beside him, Schwyz was on his knees, giving comfort like a mother. “Just a whore, Robert, you don’t want that.”
Mansur stood over them both, sucking his knuckles but impassive as ever. He turned and held out his hand to Adelia. She took it and got to her feet.
Together, they walked back to the cradle. Before they reached it, Adelia paused, wiping her face, smoothing her clothes. Even then, she couldn’t look down at her child. How impure they made you feel.
Behind her, Schwyz’s soothing went on, but the wail of the abbot rose high above it. “Why Saint Albans? Why not me?”
With Mansur carrying the cradle, they collected a staggering, singing Gyltha and walked back to the guesthouse through the welcome cold of the night.
Adelia was too deep in shock to be angry, though she knew she would be; after all, she had more regard for herself than women who, miserably, expected assault as the price for being women. But even while her body was shaking, her mind was trying to fathom the reason for what had happened. “I don’t understand,” she said, wailing. “I thought he was a different sort of enemy.”
“Allah punish him, but he would not have hurt you, I think,” Mansur said.
“What are you talking about? He did hurt me. He tried to rape me.”
“He is incapable, I think,” Mansur said. His own condition had made a judge of such things; he found the sexuality of so-called normal men interesting. Though castrated, unable to have children, he himself could still have sex with a woman, and there was lofty pity in his voice for one who could not.
“He seemed capable enough to me.” Sobbing, Adelia stopped and scooped up snow to rub over her face. “Why are you so tolerant?”
“He wants, but he cannot have. I think so. He is a talker, not a doer.”
Was that it? Inadequacy? Among all the filth, there had been a despairing appeal for love, sex, something.
Rowley had said of him, “Bastard. Clever. Got the ear of the Pope.”
And with all the cleverness, this friend of popes must, when drunk, plead for a despised woman’s regard like a child for somebody else’s toy.
Because she despised him?
And I do, she thought. If there was vulnerability, it made the abbot the more loathsome to her. Adelia preferred her enemies straightforwardly and wholeheartedly without humanity.
“I hate him,” she said-and now she was angry. “Mansur, I’m going to bring that man down.”
The Arab bent his head. “Let us pray that Allah wills it.”
“He’d better.”
Fury was cleansing to the mind. Nevertheless, as Mansur persuaded Gyltha to stop kissing him and go to sleep, Adelia washed herself all over in a bowl of icy water from the ewer. And felt better.
“I’ll bring him down,” she said again, “somehow.”
For a minute, which was all that could be borne of the cold, she opened one of the shutters to look out on the geometric shadows that the pitches of the abbey’s roofs were throwing onto the stretch of snow beyond its walls.
A blacker runnel scarred the moonlit whiteness where a new track had been dug to the river. They were linked now, the abbey and the Thames. For the first time, there was an escape route from this seething, overfilled cauldron of humanity where paragons and monsters fought the ultimate, yet never-ending, battle in suffocating collision.
At least one soul had taken it. Somewhere in that metallic wilderness, Dakers was risking her life not, Adelia knew, in order to disappear from her captors but to reach the thing she loved, though it was dead.