Somewhere a dog barked. Fitchet’s mongrel, probably-a bristled terror at whose every approach Ward, not renowned for his courage, lay down and rolled over.
They were too far back in the loft to see anything below. Only a glow from the altar candles in the church proper reached them so that they could, at least, make out the wagon roof above them. It gave Adelia the impression that she and the priest were lying on the thwarts of an upended boat. Uncomfortably.
Fierce little beads that were the eyes of the bats hanging from the lathes overhead glared down at her.
A scamper nearby caused Father Paton to squeak. “I abhor rats.”
“Be quiet,” she told him.
“This is foolishness.”
Perhaps it was, but they couldn’t alter it now-Jacques had taken the ladder away, replacing it in the bell tower next door from whence it had come, perching himself in the shadows at the tower’s top.
A latch clicked. The unoiled hinges of the chapel’s side door protested with a screech. Somebody hissed at the noise. The door closed. Silence.
Warin. It would be the lawyer; Wolvercote wouldn’t creep as this one crept.
Adelia felt a curious despair. It was one thing to theorize about a man’s guilt, another to have it confirmed. Somewhere below her stood a creature who’d betrayed the only relative he had, a boy in his care, a boy who’d trusted him and had been sent to his death.
A rasp of hinges again, this time accompanied by the stamp of boots. There was a vibration of energy.
“Did you send me this?” Wolvercote’s voice. Furious. If Master Warin protested, the listeners did not hear him because Wolvercote continued without pause. “Yes you did, you whoreson, you puling pot of pus, you stinking spittle, you’ll not tax me for more, you crapulous bit of crud…”
The tirade, its wonderful alliteration unsuspected from such a source, was accompanied by slaps, presumably across Master Warin’s face, that resounded against the walls like whip cracks-each one making Father Paton jump so that Adelia, lying beside him in the rafters, flinched in unison.
The lawyer was keeping his head, though it had to be buzzing. “Look, look, my lord. In the name of Christ, look.” The onslaught stopped.
He’s showing his letter.
Apart from giving the time and place of the suggested meeting, the message she’d written to each man had been short: We are discovered.
There was a long pause while Wolvercote-not a reading man-deciphered the note sent to Warin. The lawyer said quietly, “It’s a trap. Somebody’s here.”
There were hurried, soft footfalls as Warin searched, the opening of cupboards-a thump of hassocks falling to the floor as they were dislodged. “Somebody’s here.”
“Who’s here? What trap?” Wolvercote was staying where he was, shouting after Warin as the little man went into the body of the church to search that, too. “Didn’t you send me this?”
“What’s up there?” Master Warin had come back. “We should look up there.”
He’s looking upward. The impression that the man’s eyes could see through the boards tensed Adelia’s muscles. Father Paton didn’t move.
“Nobody’s up there. How could anybody get up there? What trap?”
“My lord, somebody knows.” Master Warin had calmed himself a little. “My lord, you shouldn’t have hanged the knaves. It looked badly. I’d promised them money to leave the country.”
So you supplied the killers.
“Of course I hanged the dogs.” Wolvercote was still shouting. “Who knew if they would keep their mouths shut. God curse you, Warin, if this is a ploy for more payment…”
“It is not, my lord, though Sweet Mary knows it was a great service I rendered you…”
“Yes.” Wolvercote’s tone had become quieter, more considering. “I am beginning to wonder why.”
“I told you, my lord. I would not have you wronged by one of my own family; when I heard what the boy intended…”
“And no benefit to you? Then why in hell did you come here? What brought you galloping to the abbey to see if he was dead?”
They were moving off into the nave of the church, their voices trailing into unintelligible exchanges of animosity and complaint.
After a long time, they came back, only footsteps giving an indication of their return. The door scraped open. Boots stamped through it as loudly as they had come.
Father Paton shifted, but Adelia clamped his arm. Wait. They won’t want to be seen together. Wolvercote has left first.
Silence again. A quiet little man, the lawyer.
Now he was going. She waited until she heard the fall of the latch, then wriggled forward to peer over the boards.
The chapel was empty.
“Respectable men, a baron of the realm, ogres, ogres.” Father Paton’s horror was tinged with excitement. “The sheriff shall be told, I must write it down, yes, write it down. I am witness to conspiracy and murder. The sheriff will need a full affidavit. I am an important deponent, yes, I would not have believed…a baron of the realm.”
He could hardly wait for Jacques to bring the ladder. Even as he descended it, he was questioning the messenger on what had been said in the church.
For a moment, Adelia lay where she was, immobile. It didn’t matter what else had been said; two murderers condemned themselves out of their own mouths, as careless of the life they had conspired to take as of a piece of grass.
Oh, Emma.
She thought of the bolt buried in the young man’s chest, stopping that most wonderful organ, the heart, from beating, the indifference of the bowman who’d loosed it into the infinite complexity of vein and muscle, as indifferent as the cousin who had ordered it to be loosed, as the lord who’d paid him to do it.
Emma, Emma.
Father Paton scuttled back to the warming room-he wanted to write out his deposition right away.
There was a bright, cold moon, no necessity for a lantern. As Jacques escorted her home, he told her what he’d managed to hear in the church. Mostly it had been repetition of the exchanges in the chapel. “By the time they left,” he said, “they were deciding it was a trick played on them. Lord Wolvercote did, anyway, he suspects his mercenaries. Lawyer Warin was still atremble, I’ll wager he leaves the country if he can.”
They said good-bye at the foot of the guesthouse steps.
Unbelievably tired, Adelia dragged herself up, taking the last rise gingerly as she always did, now with the memory of an event that hadn’t happened but in which, constantly, she watched a cradle tumble over the edge.
She stopped. The door was slightly open, and it was dark inside. Even if her little household had gone to sleep, a taper was always left burning for her-and the door was never left open.
She was reassured by Ward coming to greet her, the energetic wag of his tail releasing more odor than usual. She went in.
The door was shut behind her. An arm encircled her chest, a hand clamped itself across her mouth. “Quietly now,” somebody whispered. “Guess who.”
She didn’t need to guess. Frantically, she wriggled around in the imprisoning arms until she faced the man, the only man.
“You bastard,” she said.
“True, to an extent,” he said, picking her up. He chucked her onto the nearest bed and planted himself on top of her. “Ma and pa married eventually, I remember exactly, I was there.”
There wasn’t time to laugh-though, with his mouth clamped onto hers, she did.
Not dead-deliciously living, the smell of him so right, he was rightness, everything was right now that he was here. He moved her to the very soul and very, very much to her innards, which turned liquid at his touch. She’d been parched for too long.