A Murderous Procession (35 page)

Allie would love them.

Whether she could afford more of the Irishman’s money to buy both for her daughter was the problem.

“One though, eh, Donnell?” she asked the baby, whose eyes were fixated on the bouncing puppets. “The camel? The mule?”

That was when somebody pushed something between Donnell’s shawl and her hand.

Automatically feeling to see if the purse at her belt was still there, she whipped round to see the back of a dowdy-looking man disappearing quickly into the crowd.

“What is it, missus?”

It was a piece of paper—a substance still virtually unknown in England—sealed with two drops of unstamped sealing wax.

“To Mistress Adelia from her friend, Blanche of Poitiers, greetings,” she read
out.
“Be at the Sign of Jerusalem in the Street of Silversmiths within the hour.”

The script was looped and cursive. “I didn’t think Blanche could write,” Adelia said.

“She can’t,” Ulf said immediately “That’s Scarry, that is. Lurin’ you to your death, that’s what he’s doing.”

Ulf was suspicious of all males who looked at them sideways and kept his hand constantly on the hilt of his sword—another gift from the O’Donnell.

“He wouldn’t have found us this quickly. I’d better go; Joanna may need me.”

“At a bloody tavern?”

“You do not go without me,” Mansur said.

“Nor me.”

“Nor me.”

Adelia looked at Boggart. “We can hardly take the baby.”

“Well, I ain’t leaving him, and I ain’t leaving you.” She added: “And we ain’t leaving Ward on his own here, neither.”

Ah, well …

The Sign of Jerusalem stood, or rather leaned, end-on to the silversmiths’ street down an alley deserted except for a vulture energetically pecking at the carcass of a dead cat. It didn’t look like a tavern, more a shack due for demolition; the crusader cross on its sign was barely visible under peeling paint, and its shutters were barred up.

Mansur’s hand went to the dagger at his belt. Ulf drew his sword. “Don’t reckon this place gets much custom,” he said.

Ward made a halfhearted attempt to scare off the vulture but gave up when it ignored him.

The man who opened the door to Mansur’s rap wasn’t a landlord either, to judge from his tabard, which was embroidered with two golden lions bringing down two golden camels, the arms of Sicily’s kings ever since their conquest of the Moslems.

He stood well back to bow them in. “Mistress Adelia?”

“Yes.”

He picked up a lit lantern from a dusty table and opened his other hand to show Adelia a ring.

She nodded and turned to the others. “It’s Blanche’s.”

“And who are you?” Ulf wanted to know.

“I am your guide. Be good enough to follow me.” The man spoke Norman French with a Sicilian accent. He indicated an open trapdoor with a short flight of steps leading downward into darkness.

“We ain’t going nowhere less’n we know where,” Ulf told him.

“Really? It was understood that Mistress Adelia has an enemy and it were better her whereabouts were not known. Follow me, please.”

The steps were slippery. Ulf, still carrying his sword, went first, followed by Mansur, to whom Adelia passed down Baby Donnell before giving a hand to Boggart. They had to wait while Ward made an ungainly descent.

“Exciting this, ain’t it, missus?” Boggart said nervously.

The bravest of the brave, that girl. Adelia could only pray she wasn’t leading her into more trouble; this passage might be out of
One Thousand and One Nights,
but it could lead to a sultan angry at being given a damaged bride.

It was a long tunnel that led eventually to steps up into a garden and a grilled gate in a wall guarded by fearsome, turbaned, baggytrousered guards with scimitars.

Mistress Blanche was waiting for them, trembling with nerves. “He says he’ll see you, Delia. I haven’t told him, only that you saved her life. He remembers your father well. If you explain, tell him, then, perhaps …”

“Explain?”

Blanche grabbed Adelia’s neck with two hands as if she would shake it. Instead, she hissed into her ear. “The scar, woman, the scar. Persuade him, beg him, tell him how lovely she really is.”

“She is lovely”

“In our eyes, but he’s expecting perfection.” She fell back, crossing herself. “I can’t bear her to be rejected. Mary, Mother of God, let him understand.”

The guide was gesturing to them to hurry. Blanche, it appeared, was going no farther. In that case, Adelia decided, neither were Boggart and the baby; whatever was coming, they must have no part in it. “Look after Boggart and Donnell for me,” she said. “And the dog.”

Blanche nodded and wrung Adelia’s hand as if sending her to war, then turned away, dabbing her eyes.

At a nod from the guide, the guards opened the gate and they were in a pillared walkway running beside a little tiled square, like an atrium, with a fountain playing in it.

Into a great and gilded chamber. More terrifying but obliging guards, more chambers, until the last—largest and most gilded of all—from which, even through the door, they could hear the noise, like a thousand birds twittering at once in a giant aviary.

Adelia’s eyes met Mansur’s. She knew what was beyond the door; the kings of Sicily might be Normans, but they had adopted—and obviously still kept—this most Arab of customs.

The door was opened. Inside was an enormous room full of women, some of them elderly, most of them young and olive-skinned, all beautiful and all in billowing silk, for though the night outside the filigree bars on the windows was cold, these were tropical birds and were kept warm by fifty or more chased lamps and braziers.

Some lay on divans, but most were playing games or dancing or wheeling in acrobatics. Their guide stopped; he was going no farther. He put out an arm to halt Ulf, whose mouth had sagged open as he looked in. “Not you,” he said.

Mansur patted Ulf on the head. “This is a harem,” he said, “and you are a whole man. Enter, and these guards will have to kill you.”

Ulf was drooling. “Be bloody worth it,” he said.

He was left behind, and the doors closed on him as Mansur and Adelia stepped in.

The room stilled for a moment at the sight of Mansur, as did the chatter, but then the kaleidoscope came to life again, reassured by the presence of one who’d been instantly identified as another eunuch.

In one corner of the room, some of the young women were working at silk looms; it looked an incongruous activity amongst all this recreation, though the owners of the slim hands shuttling back and forth seemed happily engrossed in what they were doing.

A tall eunuch, who’d been strumming a long-necked lute, put the instrument down and came toward them, touching his forehead and breast.
“As-salaam aleikum.”

“Wa aleikum
salaam,” returned Mansur.

The man relapsed into perfect Norman French. “Lord, Lady, I am Sabir, most humbly at your service. And now, Gracious Ones, if you would be good enough to follow me …” He gestured to one of the harem’s older women. “Rashidah shall chaperone the Lady Adelia.”

Adelia had begun to wonder whether the king was going to receive them in the chamber to which selected ladies from the harem were summoned for his sexual pleasure, but the room they entered had no samite drapes, no couches, no erotic pictures. A magnificent, claw-footed desk stood in its center. Books and scrolls lined three of the walls, and a superb tapestry depicting hunters in full cry through a forest in which peacocks wandered covered the fourth.

This was the office of a Norman king, not an Arabian sultan.

But it wasn’t a king sitting behind the desk; it was a frog. The hood of a burnous framed features with the smooth, greenish pallor of an amphibian. Either the princess’s kiss to her king had reversed the fairy story, or this was not the king.

The man stood up, showing that he was squat. He salaamed, gesturing for them to take the two chairs on the opposite side of the desk, and greeted them in Norman French that had a lisp to it.

“May I present myself? I am Jibril, emir secretary to the
Musta’iz,
the Gracious One, who will join us in a minute. Lord Mansur, you honor us. As for the Lady Adelia, you have been much missed from this kingdom. The King of England’s gain was our loss; it was with deep regret that seven years ago I signed the permission to send you to him, knowing we were losing a most accomplished doctor and that our esteemed Doctor Gershom would be losing a daughter.”

He bowed. His eyes were the only things about him that weren’t froglike. They directed themselves from beneath the pouched skin like skewers.

Adelia bowed back.
It was you, was it?

“May I hope that your return to us is permanent?”

“I’m afraid not. I have to go back, I have left my child behind.” She had a sudden fear that they weren’t going to let her leave.

But Jibril said: “So we understand. May you be happily and safely reunited with her.”

“Thank you.”
They have spies everywhere,
she thought,
they even know Allie’s sex.
Still,
she’d almost
forgotten
the
relief of being in a country where a female doctor was not an abhorrence.

“We fear the journey from England has been a difficult one. We learn from the Lord O’Donnell that you have been pursued by a malevolence that wishes you harm. The Glorious One wishes me to tell you that, should he be discovered here in Palermo, that being shall be hunted down and killed like the dog he is.”

“Thank you, but I don’t think that’s what this meeting is about, is it? You want to discuss the Princess Joanna.”
Let’s get it over with.

Jibril’s lips made a horizontal stretch; presumably he was smiling. “You have adopted English directness, lady Allow me to do the same. The Lady Blanche tells us the princess was taken ill as she boarded ship at Saint Gilles and that drastic measures had to be taken by you to save her life. Would you be good enough to inform us of what they were?”

She took a deep breath. “I was forced to operate.” She went into the explanation of the appendix, its putrefaction, etc.

“The procedure has left a scar, of course. Lady Blanche worries that it may displease the king but I am certain that, as a man of sense, he would prefer a scarred bride to a dead one. I can assure you that it makes no difference to the princess’s beauty or disposition, which is of the sweetest.”

The secretary’s lips stretched wider. “Already, so much is obvious. We are all charmed by this jewel of England. The scarring is of no moment if it saved the dear one’s life; a diamond with a flaw can be more beautiful than one without. That is not our concern….”

It isn’t? Thank God, thank God. Then what are you worried about?

“What we would wish to know is whether this operation has had any other ill effect? On her future and that of her marriage?”

It was Mansur who caught on. He said in English: “He wants to know if Joanna can still have children.”

Adelia blew an “oh” of relief. Was that it? Of course that was it. She and Blanche had been worrying over the wrong cause. Scarred or not, Joanna’s function was to give William sons. An heir was vital if Sicily was to remain in the hands of the Hautevilles. Childlessness in a king was not just a personal tragedy, it meant the sweeping away of his entire administration; possibly civil war as differing claimants jostled to take his throne.

“I assure you, my lord, that as far as I know, Joanna is capable of having as many babies as God and the king give her.”

The little skewers that were Jibril’s eyes had become mercilessly sharp, like his voice: “And that is the truth?”

“The woman is incapable of speaking anything else,” Mansur told him.

“The cecum is nowhere near the womb,” Adelia said. “I can draw you a diagram, if you like.”

For the first time the secretary’s smile was genuine. “Spare me that. And forgive me.” He was a different man. “We need a son and heir, you see. We are surrounded by enemies who will take Sicily over the brink if there is no succession.”

“Aha.”
Here was an opportunity

Adelia said: “My lord, the King of England entrusted us with bringing King William a gift; next to his daughter it is the greatest he could bestow. To be used against a mutual enemy, he said. He’s sent him Excalibur.”

Excalibur.
The beacon of light that sprang into every eye at the mention of the name was lit even in this Arab’s. The Normans had brought the story of Arthur with them when they came, and it had taken root; there was a strong Sicilian legend that Arthur roamed Mount Etna.

Jibril leaned forward; he knew the sword’s value to whoever owned it. For the first time, he was abrupt. “Where is it?”

If Richard had it, and Adelia was almost certain that he did—Henry had as good as warned her—then now was the time to betray him. Though carefully.

She explained how the sword had been hidden in a cross and given to Ulf to carry “It was lost when my companions and I … fell into some difficulty that separated us from Princess Joanna and her company for a while, but we have a hope that Duke Richard may have found it. It—or certainly the cross that contained it—was seen being carried aboard the
Nostre Dame,
just before she set sail from Saint Gilles.”

She looked into Jibril’s eyes and knew they saw everything; this man would have spies scattered through every country in the known world; was probably more aware than she was of Richard’s ambition.

“If Duke Richard has taken it into his keeping,” she went on, “it may be that he wishes to give it to King William himself and, I am sure, will present it when he feels the moment has come.”

“I am sure he will,” Jibril said.

That was enough; the word was out. Subtly, it would be made known to Richard that William was aware of Henry’s intention to give him the sword and had every expectation of receiving it.

She could do no more.

“‘To be used against a mutual enemy.’
That is King Henry’s message?”

“Yes, my lord.”

“Which one, I wonder; we have so many” But Jibril was a happier man. “Name your reward, my dears.”