A Murderous Procession (9 page)

“I think you’re justified in speaking ill of the Young King this time,” an impatient Adelia told him.

The conference lasted another day On the seventh, it came to a decision. Another messenger was sent to the Young King at Rouen to tell him that Princess Joanna and her train were finding it necessary to set off for Aquitaine immediately in the expectation that her brother and his train would catch up with her en route.

So the next morning the citizens of Caen lined the road to the southern gate to cheer and wave off the marriage cavalcade, partly to honor it and partly in relief that it was going. After all, it numbered nearly one hundred and fifty people who, with their animals, the city had been forced to accommodate and feed at its own expense.

Riding with Mansur near the head of the column, Adelia glanced back at the long, long line following behind her, and was encouraged; nobles, clerks, musicians and squires, personal servants, laundresses, grooms, luggage, and treasure, all were accommodated in carts or on mule- and horseback, a luxury that required nobody to walk, thereby speeding the journey

As the procession reached the countryside and began passing through isolated little villages, their inhabitants came out to marvel at something to be seen once in a lifetime; the golden princess and ladies in their gilded palanquin, riders cloaked in crimson cloth or silk, horses in their rainbow caparisons, the shine of armor—like a jeweled dragon come glittering out of the age of myth to prance its way along the muddy high streets.

Captain Bolt’s practiced eye, however, saw it differently Pausing beside Adelia as he rode up and down the line to make sure his soldiers kept their posts along it, he cursed Young Henry and his lack of duty

“Aren’t we better off without him?” she asked.

“Maybe. But my men’ve got a princess with a mort of treasure to guard and, if so be it comes to an attack, we’re mightily overstretched.”

“
THE
JOURNEY
BEGINS
to be unlucky for them; Young Henry has deserted us. That great fool, the Bishop of Winchester, complains of it,
mala tempora currunt,
yet I see in it our Great Master’s hand. We are being shown the way, Lupus mine. Send us more misfortune,
O deo certe,
that I may contrive to have the blame for it heaped on the head of the woman we are to bring down.”

IT
WAS
ADELIA’S
CONTENTION
from personal experience that riding sidesaddle was bad for the back. Not a good horsewoman, she also thought it dangerous to be hanging on at a twisted angle should one’s mount shy or bolt. Yet riding astride was denounced everywhere as unladylike, a style for peasants, especially by the exalted company in which she now found herself.

If King Henry’s strictures to the three ladies-in-waiting had been properly observed, she should have traveled in the
de luxe
cushioned cart in which they and Joanna passed the journey by teasing their perfumed lapdogs, playing cards, and watching the scenery they could see through its gilded and ornamented bars. Adelia’s only experience in it, however, was her last.

It wasn’t that the little princess herself was unfriendly merely withdrawn. Lady Beatrix, Lady Petronilla, and Mistress Blanche, on the other hand, had a curve to their lips as they questioned her about her “Saracen friend.” (“Do tell us, dear—is his skin naturally that color or is it against his religion to wash?”) And inquired after her new maid. (“We hope so much that the Boggart is proving satisfactory, how nice that she’s taken to your
interesting
little dog.”)

After a morning of it, Adelia reverted to the sidesaddle on the palfrey allotted to her. It was a pretty but very hard wooden
sambue
, a contraption resembling a three-sided box with a pommel that allowed her right leg to curve gracefully over her left, both of her boots fitting above each other into stirrups of disparate heights. At an amble the posture it demanded was uncomfortable; trotting was torture.

Bumping along on it beside Mansur, Adelia found her mind dwelling with admiration on the Empress Matilda, Henry I I’s mother, who had ignored opprobrium by riding astride during her war with her cousin, Stephen, for England’s throne. “The Plantagenets would never have won if she’d had to go sidesaddle,” she grumbled in Arabic.

“It gives elegance to a woman,” Mansur said, approvingly

“It gives her curvature of the damned spine.”

“And modesty”

That was it, she supposed. Men didn’t like women to have their legs apart unless they were in bed; yet how much more fittingly the female frame had been designed to ride astride than that of the male, with its protruding dangly bits.

She groaned. “A thousand miles of modesty, I’ll never survive it.”

“Then return to the royal cart.”

“With those three harpies? I’m hardly welcome there.”

At least this way, she didn’t have to restrain herself from punching ladies of the nobility in the mouth. Also, she could ride farther back in the procession among the lesser members of the household and occasionally give advice on their health problems, ostensibly through Mansur’s pronouncements.

Their arrival at the great Benedictine abbey of Mont-Saint-Michel was to set the tone for what, Locusta hoped, would be their reception at every stop on the journey He had gone ahead with a servant to alert the abbot of their coming and then returned to lead them on. “Thank God the tide’s out,” he said, as they approached the island causeway. “It took all my mathematics to time our coming exactly. I was afraid our delay would miss us another eight hours.”

“Let us hope the tide stays out,” the O’Donnell said. “For I’m told it comes in with the rush of a galloping horse.”

In fact, water was beginning to swirl around wheels and hooves as they crossed to the strange mount on which monks had been laboring for one thousand years to complete an edifice that the Archangel Michael had instructed their first bishop to build.

They hadn’t labored in vain. From a distance the top of the mount gave the impression that it had been set with enormous candles that had dripped wax into contorted and beautiful shapes.

It had been a hot day. August was going out with all the heat it could muster. The climb up the escalier street was hard on beasts and humans who’d already had a long and sweaty journey of it, but the prospect of rest in the cool of the lovely building above them spurred them on, as did the dizzying glimpses of the bay with a breeze coming off it, and the Normandy coast under the rise of a harvest moon.

Abbot and clergy waited to greet them; there would
always
be a crowd of clergy,
and
introductions
and,
invariably, a service of thanksgiving for Joanna’s safe arrival,
then
a banquet under vaulted ceilings
and
toasts, before the poor little princess and her yawning following were accommodated in their beds. Next morning she had to see the graceful cloisters, the gilded statue of Saint Michael, kneel before precious relics, until the time came to remount and set off again.

It was to be the pattern.

We’ll proceed by inches,
Adelia thought in despair.
Allie, oh Allie.

AT
THE
END
of the fourth day’s journey, while Mansur was helping her to dismount—a clumsy business at the best of times—her horse made a sudden movement and Adelia’s right foot became entangled in its stirrup; Mansur staggered under her unexpected weight, and for a moment she was sent topsy-turvy with her veil dragging in the dust.

Lady Beatrix, Lady Petronilla, and Mistress Blanche stepped down the little ladder attached to their cart and clustered about her with delighted sympathy. “Are you all right, you poor soul? My dear, how
embarrassing.”

It was. For an instant, before Mansur helped her up again, a small crowd of men, including Captain Bolt, Father Adalburt, Admiral O’Donnell, and the Bishop of Saint Albans, were treated to the sight of Adelia’s white thighs and a burst of good fenland invective against horse riding in general and sidesaddles in particular.

Next morning, limping out to the stable yard for another day’s suffering, she found Captain Bolt putting a different saddle on her palfrey. It was a small affair and cushioned in red leather, high at the rear in order to support the rider’s back.

He interrupted her explosions of gratitude. “Been made for a boy, I fear, mistress. You’ll have to go astride.”

“I don’t care. Where did you get it from?”

“Weren’t me. We passed a saddlery away back and somebody . . .” He lowered his voice; Bolt was an old friend of the bishop’s and Adelia’s, and aware of their situation. “...
somebody
found this as had been ordered for a young lord as’d never come for it. So he bought it for you.”

Rowley Oh, God bless him.

Tightening the cinch, the captain said: “And I’ll spread it about as Queen Eleanor herself did sometimes ride astride. I know as she did; that time she escaped from the king and I had to chase her to bring her back—God help us, I had trouble a-catching her.”

“Thank you. And please thank the somebody.”

Bolt heaved her up onto the palfrey “I was to say as it’s to stop you breaking your neck as well as the Third Commandment.” He shook his head in admiration. “Gor, lady, you can’t half swear when it comes to it.”

AT
THE
NEXT
MONASTERY
there was a kerfuffle in the middle of the night; a woman screamed, men’s voices were raised, there was movement in the inner courtyard. The sounds incorporated themselves into part of a dream Adelia was having and, being exhausted from that day’s journey, she didn’t wake up but, like the three ladies-in-waiting with whom she shared a bed, merely groaned and stirred in her sleep.

Yet it was obvious next morning that something had occurred; Lady Beatrix, Lady Petronilla, and Mistress Blanche in their cart were to be seen in conversation more earnest than was usual with them while, all down the line, there was a frisson of talk, head-shaking, and, among some of the men, laughter.

“Do you know what’s happened?” Adelia asked Mansur. Thinking the Arab did not understand them, people were looser with their talk in his presence than hers.

“It has something to do with the Sir Nicholas Baicer and shoes, but I can gather no more than that.”

“Shoes?”

Isolated as she was from the general gossip, Adelia appealed to Captain Bolt as he rode past her on one of his checks up and down the procession.

He was uninformative, even defensive. “Nothing for you to worry about, missus. He’s a fine soldier, Sir Nicholas, I’ve served with him.”

She, too, liked what she knew of the man
and
Lord Ivo. Both knights were courteous whenever their paths crossed hers; they paid attention to all well-being, not just that of the higher echelons, Lord Ivo with gravitas while Sir Nicholas had a more hail-fellow-well-met approach and would talk to anybody about his family in England and Normandy with as much affection as he did about his hounds. Both men were lovers of the chase; indeed, one would occasionally veer away from the procession with his dogs and other enthusiastic hunters to pursue a stag through a forest, but always leaving the other by the princess’s side. Like Captain Bolt, they inspired a confidence that, militarily, everybody was in safe hands.

Boggart who, being Adelia’s maid, was still as
persona non grata
in this closely knit traveling community as she was, could gather little more than her mistress, except that it was “summat to do with Sir Nicholas and shoes.”

And with that, since there was no opportunity to talk to Rowley on anything but a passing and polite level, Adelia had to be content.

IT
HAPPENED
WHEN
they were passing through the
Bocage,
that woody and rich farming area of southwest Normandy where cows grazed knee-deep in grass behind high hedges dotted like sprigged muslin with rose hips and light green hazelnuts.

Adelia, who’d been riding high and comfortably on her new saddle, had her attention diverted from lichened cottages and tiny, towerless churches by her horse. The horse had been acting bizarrelyfor the last two days, staggering occasionally and yawning. Now, the palfrey kept stopping to rub her head against any fence post they passed.

“I think Juno’s ill,” she said.

Mansur beckoned to the nearest groom, who came up.

Adelia dismounted so that the man could examine the mare. “Is she tired? Have I been riding her too hard?”

“Not you, mistress—you ain’t but a puff of wind on her back.” His name was Martin, and he liked Adelia, who’d successfully treated a toe damaged when a horse had stepped on it. He walked around the mare, running his hands down flanks that had been becoming thinner, then took her head between his hands.

“Hello, hello, what’s this here?” He pointed to the bare patches around the eyes and nostrils where the skin appeared inflamed.

Adelia peered with him. “It looks like sunburn. How can that be?” She’d never heard of a horse getting sunburned.

“It do look like sunburn,” Martin said, and called for the head groom. “Here, Master Tom, what d’you make of this?”

There was a good deal of head scratching by both men, more questioning of Adelia about the horse’s behavior, more examination during which the animal remained listless.

“You thinking what I’m thinking, Master Tom?” Martin asked.

The head groom sucked his teeth. “Ragwort.”

“That’s what I reckon.”

Master Tom turned on Adelia. “You been letting this poor beast graze on the verges while you been on her back?”

“No, well, not much. Not where there’s ragwort.” She knew the plant; the ubiquitous bright yellow weed had to be avoided by humans and, it seemed, by horses as well. “I certainly wouldn’t have let her eat it if I’d seen it.”

“Well, some bugger’s been givin’ it to her—and lots of it over a fair old time for her to get into this state. She was fit as a flea when we left Caen.”