Grave Goods (29 page)

In the east, the sky was beginning to lighten. Somewhere a thrush was attempting its first song of the day.

It would be dawn soon, and if a merciful God could again extend His munificence and allow the three souls on Lazarus Island to be found alive and well, she, Vesuvia Adelia Rachel Ortese Aguilar, would be forever in His debt.

A figure netting trout from the stew by the light of a lantern gave a hail and came stalking toward her.

Brother Peter appeared friendlier than on their previous meetings. “Here,” he said, “that darky wizard’s a proper marvel, in’t he? Done a good job for”—he paused to wink—”you know who. Think he’d like some of me pumpkins? They’ve come on wonderful well with all this sun, if the storm ain’t ruined ’em.”

Yes, Adelia told him, sighing, the lord Mansur would be pleased to be rewarded with pumpkins for having saved Will and the tithing.

He lingered. “Heard as there was a right to-do last night. What were you and the bishop doin’ down that bloody hole?”

“Not enjoying ourselves, I can tell you that,” she said.

“Mad as May butter, that Hilda. Allus was. Never could reckon as how poor old Godwyn put up with her.”

Adelia had a thought. “Could you do me a favor, Brother Peter?”

They went to the site of the tunnel, its lid still lying on one side. Adelia couldn’t bear to look into the hole, but, on her instructions, the lay brother clambered down happily enough and emerged with the box and sword left on its steps. They were dry; the water hadn’t reached them—indeed, it had retreated. “What’s these doin’ down there?” he asked.

“Can I borrow your lantern?”

When he gave it to her, she merely thanked him and turned away before he could ask more questions.

. . .

T
HE BOX INTRIGUED
A
DELIA;
to have been placed so deep in the tunnel suggested that its contents were of value. Or incriminating. Or both. Emma’s jewels, probably. In which case, what happiness—if Emma were still alive—to return them to someone who had been suffering all the privations of a castaway as an earnest that she was to be restored to her former life.

Then, like Pandora before her, Adelia thought,
To hell, I just want to know what’s in the thing.

There was time to open it before the rescue began, and no need to wake the people in the kitchen before then, which she undoubtedly would if she went there—a noisy business if the box’s hasp continued to prove as obdurate as it had.

She took lantern, sword, and box to the only place where there was both privacy and a table.

Despite the poverty of their resting place and the drenching the storm had inflicted on the cloths that covered them, the forms of Arthur and Guinevere retained the dignity accorded to all the dead in silent immobility.

It was disturbed as Adelia, apologizing to them, shoved the covering away from Arthur’s feet and placed the lantern between them before committing the same indignity on Guinevere by positioning the box between hers.

She left the door open to add what natural light there was to that of the lantern.

It
was
a noisy business. Inserting the sword tip under the hasp was difficult and caused much scratching and, on Adelia’s part, much swearing under her puffing breath.

At last the hasp yielded its grip on the prong. Adelia put the sword down and lifted the box’s lid.

Not jewels. Bones. Pelvic bones.

Behind her, somebody coughed.

Adelia swung round like someone guilty, hiding the box with her body.

Godwyn stood in the doorway. Godwyn the good thing, to whom she owed her life and Rowley’s and, perhaps, Emma’s. Godwyn the bad thing, who had permitted an uncontrollable wife to try to silence those who’d incommoded her. Godwyn, who had done nothing to stop Millie being beaten.

“What do you want?” she snapped. She was being interrupted on the brink of discovery, and she did not want him to see the box; it might be his, but its contents most certainly were not.

Anyway, there was a terrible patience to the man, which made her nerves twang. He didn’t move, face impassive; only his eyes showed the resignation of an ox awaiting the fall of the poleax.

“You’ll speak for her, lady, won’t ee?” he said. “The bishop do think high of you; you’ll tell him as she ain’t in charge of what she does. Iffen she’s taken to court, a word from his lordship to the judges . . . make a mort of difference that would …”

Adelia shook her head, not in negation but to clear it. After all, she supposed she had a duty to listen to this man who had given back the lives that the woman he was pleading for had tried to take away.

He continued to talk, had probably been pacing half the night preparing his speech of mitigation.

“Iffen you’d a seen her when she were a girl, hair like fire, full of chatter as a cricket . . . She were a sight then, my Hilda. Come as milkmaid to the master’s cows when she were eleven year old . . .”

Concentrate.
There was something here, some insight into why a pretty milkmaid had turned murderous.

“The master?” Adelia asked, to get things clear. “You mean Abbot Sigward?”

“Lord Sigward as he were then, abbot as is now. Me, I started off as his stable lad, do ee see, bound to his family like my father afore me and his father afore that. Good masters to us, all of ’em, so long as we did our jobs and served them proper. I got raised to chief stabler, and Hilda, she was made housekeeper.”

“Did you always love her?” The question was an impertinence. Adelia was taking advantage of someone who was her helpless supplicant, but she was impelled to ask it; in the relationship between this man and his wife had to be a clue to what had gone on.

He was puzzled, offended. If he hadn’t been begging for Adelia’s help, he would have walked away. “Fine worker, Hilda,” he said. It was the only answer he could give; love was a word restricted to the nobility and poets. He tried to smile. “Worth the wooing, she was. Took a bit of doing, mind. Her wouldn’t look at me for years.”

“Because she loved the master?” She was probing deep, but somewhere under her scalpel was the source of infection.

Godwyn was stung into indignation. “Never any uncleanness between em,” he said, “never. Half the time he didn’t know as she were there. Still don’t.”

No, he didn’t; Adelia had seen that for herself. Abbot Sigward’s kindness to his former housekeeper was that of a master to a pet hound. “But you went on serving him?”

Again, the man was puzzled. “He were my lord. Weren’t his fault, weren’t Hilda’s, weren’t mine. ’S how it was. Service, see. Good servant, good master, one loyal to t’other.”

“I see.” But Adelia knew she didn’t see. She had been brought up outside the feudal system and would never fathom that binding
between the classes, one ruling, one serving, in mutual acceptance, a tradition that spanned centuries, holding both in place, a system capable of dreadful abuse, yet at its best—as it had been in the household of Sigward before he left it to turn to God—a form of loving.

“And his son,” she asked. “Did you love him?”

Now she was causing pain. Godwyn’s teeth showed in an agonized grimace, and he tapped his clenched fist against them. But he was helpless; if the woman who stood before him was to save his wife, he had to submit to the turn of the screw.

“Sorry for un,” he said. “Sad little thing he was. Like his ma had been afore she died. Frit of everything. I put un on his first pony and he were afraid then. Not like his pa. Not frit of nothing, the master weren’t. But the boy were”—Godwyn searched for a description—”more fond of flowers like, painting and books and such. Never squealed, though, you got to give un that. He’d puke every time the master took un hunting, but he had to go an’ he went, no murmur.”

“As he had to go on crusade?”
Why am I persisting with this?
she wondered. But the volition for it seemed to come not just from within her but from behind her, as if the skeletons were urging her on.

She’d gone too far. Godwyn’s eyes searched for an escape.

Adelia reached for his hand. “I’ll speak for her, Godwyn. So will the bishop, I promise you that.” She could do no less for this imperfect, strangely wonderful man.

The landlord nodded, then took off his cap and held it to his breast in a gesture of subservience that made her want to weep. “I’ll go ready the boat, then,” he said.

She watched him walk away toward the landing stage, a stumpy, ordinary figure outlined against the pink and gold of a rising sun.

She turned back. There wasn’t much time and she had to know
now
. Even so, she spent a second or two on her knees beside Guinevere’s catafalque before, whipping off the cloth, she lifted the top half of the skeleton away from the bottom half, exposing the hideous gap where the pelvic girdle should have been. Working quickly, she began fitting the bones from the box into the space.

Some were badly splintered, but others had survived the onslaught almost untouched; the ball of the right femur, for example, went perfectly into the socket of the acetabulum.

The spine had been severed so neatly that the three fused lower vertebrae attached themselves to the rest of the sacrum without any question that they belonged together.

Adelia stood back from her work and stared at it. Undoubtedly, Guinevere had been made whole. The bones fit. This was the right pelvis in the right place at last.

Also the wrong one.

She measured, using the sword as a ruler by marking lines in the black patina of its blade; she considered the ilia, broken as they were, but still displaying unmistakable flanges. Without apology this time, she pushed Arthur’s cloth away and made more measurements, comparing his pubic arch with the one she’d taken from the box.

Back to Guinevere.

Eventually, she was sure; there could be no mistake. “So that’s what you’ve been trying to tell me,” she said gently.

Guinevere was male.

She covered the skeletons and sat down on the ground, resting her head against Arthur’s catafalque.

Two men. Buried together. Both killed, one viciously maimed in his sexual parts. Twenty years ago.

Nuances, sentences, dreams, clues from these past days that she should have taken notice of came fluttering into her mind, settling in it to form a recognizable mosaic.

So that was the answer—love. Love could be the only connection between the living and the dead concentrated in that poor pattern of bones. Love in its many manifestations—destructive, sexual, beautiful, protective, possessive—was the link. It was love of a sort that had nearly killed Rowley and herself; in another form, it had brought the couple they called Arthur and Guinevere to their grave.

The pity of it.

Adelia went out, softly closing the door of the hut behind her.

A warm, early sun was sucking moisture from the drenched ground in the form of a mist so that the great tors rose as if out of nothing to stand against a pellucid sky, a mist into which swallows vanished as they flicked down into it to catch insects and then reappeared.

Whether or not Glastonbury was the omphalos Mansur had recognized, it was magical this morning, telling her that if Avalon was anywhere it was here, spell casting, able to raise an unquiet spirit that had haunted her, nagged her, into showing the truth about itself.

This was the place for it, so easy to have common sense undermined by breathtaking natural geographical beauty.

Adelia, practical scientist that she was, fought against its seduction. To believe that the Guinevere nightmares had come from outside rather than from unrecognized doubts that she’d had from the first, a formless guilt at assuming a skeleton was female because everybody said it was . . .

“I won’t have it,” she said out loud. It was almost a snarl.

But still she walked through the Glastonbury mist on invisible feet.

S
HE MADE FOR
the landing place. It was quiet there except for the yelps of seagulls and the cheeps of marsh birds attending to their young among reeds and tussock sedge. The river had been energized by last night’s rainfall and flowed faster than she’d ever seen it, a dark blue ribbon winding around islands toward the sea. A little way along its right bank where the boathouse was, she could see Godwyn loading supplies into a boat, this time a large punt that was to take them to Lazarus, and the three castaways on it.

And pray God we’re not too late.

Adelia took off her ruined, water-distorted, ashy shoes and sat down so that her toes could reach into the river and send up flirting, rainbow splashes.

Again, her surroundings insisted that all was right with the world, especially here—that Emma, Pippy, and Roetger
must
have survived in such a glorious landscape, that a great and ancient king could have chosen nowhere better for his last resting place.

She wished she could believe it. How nice to discount human wickedness, to be able to fall in with the nature around her, to discount evidence and allow that the mutilated bones in the hut were indeed those of Arthur and Guinevere, killed in a legendary battle in such an ancient past that its shrieks and blows had ameliorated into nothing more than the puff of a story-laden breeze.

But those shrieks, those blows, had been less than a generation ago. She had a duty to the dead; she was who she was.

She felt the little pier vibrate as somebody joined her on it. Beside her were the long, white, sandaled feet of Abbot Sigward.

“We have been searching for you, my child. Will you come and take some food before we go?”

She squinted up at him, shading her eyes. “How did your son die?” she asked.

For a moment he was as still as death. She continued to look at him.

“So you are Nemesis,” he said.

She nodded.

Then the abbot’s face changed, quite beautifully, as if the sun shining on it was reflected back by an inner light. “I have been awaiting that question for twenty years.” He stretched his arms sideways to embrace the view, like a cormorant holding out its wings to dry in the warmth. “See what a perfect day the Lord has chosen for it. He has even supplied a bishop for my confession.” He smiled down at her. “Stay there, my child, while I fetch the others.”