A Murderous Procession

  Even Henry I I’s fondness for Adelia would not outlive that.

  Blanche, however, was unlikely to keep silent. She struggled between Scylla and Charybdis, the two monstrous, crushing rocks between which she had placed herself. Her grief and self-condemnation were heaped on Adelia’s head as the two of them kept their vigil beside Joanna’s bed. Sometimes it was: “You have killed her.” At other times: “Better I had let her die than bring her to you.”

  Even when Joanna’s fever began to abate, the outpourings continued—though always where the girl couldn’t hear them: “What is she now? Dear Mary, Mother of God, you have ruined her.”

  The scar was undoubtedly terrible; Adelia was no needlewoman; on the seventh day, when she took out the stitches, it remained a violent, puckered obscenity on otherwise pearl-colored young flesh.

  Adelia said nothing in her own defense. She was too humbled. For her, the scar represented only the amazing endurance of the human body, the quick healing of young flesh, and a loving God who had forgiven the temerity of the one who’d inflicted it by granting a miracle.

  THOUGH THE O’Donnell was impatient to begin the long sail down the coast of Italy, Adelia insisted that Joanna recuperate for another week after the removal of the stitches. The child did well, though when, on the third day—the tenth after the operation—she was allowed to begin walks around the bailey, Mistress Blanche pointed out angrily that the princess did so with a certain stiffness.

  More days, then, to help the muscles recover, days to discover what a nice child she was. Without the enterprise of Eleanor, and with none of Henry’s command, she had a gentle charm all her own. An intimacy grew between them all that allowed the princess to discard royal aloofness and be lighthearted in their company Ulf told her bloodcurdling stories of Hereward the Wake, which delighted her, even though most of that fenland gentleman’s exploits had been directed against her great-great-grandfather, William the Conqueror. There were more bloodcurdling pirate tales from O’Donnell, while Mansur, for whom she’d developed a great regard, improved her chess.

  She was captivated by Boggart’s baby and the curl of his fingers round hers. She wanted to know if giving birth hurt—“Mama said it didn’t much”—and Boggart tactfully said: “No more’n is natural.”

  But it was Adelia who most intrigued her. Like all practicing physicians, Dr. Arnulf had taught the princess that medicine was an occult secret to which he alone held the key; that it should be a science which even a woman could practice was a concept she found difficult to comprehend.

  “But if God ordained that I should die, wasn’t it a sin to go against Him?”

  “Why should God make an ordinance against knowledge? It is there, a resource that only He could have put into the world for us to use. Deliberate ignorance is the sin. Obviously He did not mean you to die. Mistress Blanche knew that.”

  “It was a miracle, then?”

  Oh, dear. She didn’t want the child to believe she was a saint. “In the sense that Nature is a miracle. Nature has secrets that God wishes us to learn. If He didn’t, a swordsmith wouldn’t know how to forge steel, nor an herbalist how to extract the health-giving properties of plants. I am not a witch nor a miracle worker, just a mechanic, no more, no less, trained by a school that believes in discovering what things God has created in order to relieve His people’s suffering. Like all mechanisms, your operation could have gone wrong; that it didn’t is a privilege for which I send up prayers of gratitude every day.”

  Joanna smiled. “So do I.” She became royal. “My father will ever be in your debt; so will my husband.”

  Husband. She was still only eleven years old—there had been a birthday celebrated at Saint Gilles.

  They became friends. Every night, when her wound was being checked, she wanted to hear about Adelia’s upbringing, which she thought exotic. She especially liked tales of Allie. “Mama loves animals, too; they should get on well.” She was suddenly wistful: “What fun to be Allie.”

  Adelia wanted to spirit her off so much just then that, on impulse, she said: “We could always ask the O’Donnell to sail us into the blue ... run away”

  “And be a pirate?” Joanna was amused. “How funny that would be. Why should I run away?”

  “Well . . . just suppose you don’t like Sicily”

  “But I shall like it. It’s my duty, I shall be queen of it.”

  Adelia never mentioned the subject again. If there was steel in Joanna’s gentle soul, it was stamped with the word duty; it could not occur to her that she was ill used or, if it did, she’d suppressed the idea. What she was aware of was the diplomacy involved; her father had arranged a most excellent marriage to a king, as he had arranged her sisters’. It was her destiny; she had no other.

  WHEN ADELIA JUDGED her patient fit enough to leave the Château de Salses, and before they were rowed out to the St. Patrick, the O’Donnell lectured her and her companions “privatim et seriatim,” as he said, on the necessity for watchfulness.

  “We don’t know which damned vessel Scarry’s on, if he’s on any,” he said. “We had to divide the household between three crafts. Most of the servants along with the horses are in my biggest cog, The Trinité, which set out at the same time as the Nostre Dame that’s got Richard aboard. Scarry could be on either, but he could be skulking aboard the Saint Patrick, in which case I’ll be too busy keeping an eye on wind and weather to see what he’s up to. For all any of us know, we’re taking our goose into the fox’s lair, as my old granny used to say.”

  He looked straight at Adelia. “You be afraid, now. Fear keeps you on the qui vive.”

  There was no sentiment in the way he said it, no fond glance; he could have been talking about a breakable piece of cargo that needed careful stowing in his ship’s hold. His declaration of love might never have been made, but it placed a burden on her, as it does on those who cannot love in return.

  If it hadn’t been that she’d met Rowley first, she could have loved this man, she thought. Bold, confident, amused and amusing, and, hidden beneath it all, an infinite kindness.

  But as he’d said, one had as little control over one’s heart as over the rise and fall of the sun—and she’d given hers to somebody else.

  She had kept faith with him and told nobody about what he’d said, not even Fabrisse, though, she realized now, the woman had known all along.

  Dear God, but she would miss Fabrisse, who had become her twin. When it was time for the two of them to say good-bye, they clung to each other, rendered almost inarticulate by a parting that would inevitably be permanent.

  At last Adelia tore herself away. “I owe you so much ... I can’t . . .”

  “Don’t.” Fabrisse wiped away tears. “To me, you have been ... I will never find . . .”

  “Fabrisse, take care, take care.”

  “You are the one ... you take care.”

  Yet, as the hopeful, yelping seagulls following their boat dotted Adelia’s view of the diminishing figure waving energetically from the castle seawall, it seemed to Adelia that the woman in greatest danger was not herself but the one who defied the Church by her loving shelter of Cathars. For a second, a bonfire flared in Adelia’s mind, and the person amidst its flames was not Ermengarde, but the Dowager Countess of Caronne.

  ON BOARD THE ST. PATRICK, Captain Bolt had been chafing badly at the absence of a princess he’d been ordered to protect and spat hard words at the O’Donnell for taking her away. Pleased as he was to see Adelia, his anger made him unapproachable and it wasn’t until a day or two later, when he’d calmed down somewhat, that she could tell him of Rankin’s defection.

  That didn’t please him, either. “Happy, is he? He’s no right to be happy, bloody deserter.”

  In fact, the reception to Adelia and the others was cold. The only welcome was to the princess. Even this, though made to appear ecstatic, was overdone, for underlying it was resentment that she had been content to recuperate among magicians and foreigners rather than in
sist on being returned to her own dear household.

  Joanna’s nurse’s reception was the most honest: “You naughty little widdershin, you. Why’n’t you take me along? What they been a-doing to you, so pale as you are. Still and all, my honeypot, you’re alive and that’s a mercy o’ God.”

  Blanche’s greeting from her two fellow ladies-in-waiting was chilly; she had broken ranks, not consulted, preferred a Saracen and a witch to the orthodoxy of Queen Eleanor’s own choice of physician.

  What they would say if and when they saw the scar on Joanna’s abdomen, Adelia didn’t like to think.

  The Bishop of Winchester lectured Blanche and the O’Donnell for their temerity in kidnapping the princess. In view of Joanna’s good spirits, his chiding was unheated, but it was noticeable that he did not include the names of Mansur and Adelia in his prayers of thanksgiving for his charge’s safe return.

  Father Guy took their reappearance hard and refused to speak to them.

  Dr. Arnulf tried squirming his way back into royal favor. An unfortunate episode, but one he was prepared to overlook; however, had the dear princess stayed under his supervision, she would not be so pallid nor show that slight stiffness when she walked.

  Joanna was having none of it. She owed her life to Adelia and knew it, though she upheld the fiction that it was to Lord Mansur to whom her recovery should be attributed. Both had to be treated with honor in her presence. Mistress Adelia was even promoted to sharing the royal cabin—and, yes, the dog with her. (Ward, like her new friend, Ulf, made Joanna laugh.)

  The fact of the scar seemed to concern the princess not at all. Perhaps she thought it would never be seen; nudity was infra dig for noble-women; they usually wore a light shift even in the bath. Adelia was afraid that the girl didn’t realize she would have to strip naked in front of her husband, or even if she was fully aware of the sexual side of marriage.

  And when would that be imposed on her? What sort of man was William of Sicily?

  When the nurse Edeva, in a rare burst of confidence, confessed to Adelia that she had never seen “my lambkin so blithe as aboard this here ship,” Adelia hoped that this time spent on board the St. Patrick wouldn’t turn out to be the most carefree of Joanna’s life.

  It was a cold voyage but one made under a clear sky. The O’Donnell took advantage of a bitter northerly wind and crammed on all sail, sending St. Patrick bowling along at a rate which was fast but which, now that Joanna and the others had gained their sea legs, upset nobody’s stomach. For Adelia, there was a reassuring sense of freedom that convinced her Scarry was not on board.

  She spent what time she could on the quarterdeck with Mansur and Ulf, watching Italy go by and wondering whether the traffic on the coast roads that she could see in the distance included one particular rider heading for Sicily.

  After two days, her captain took pity on her. “If it’s Saint Albans you’re looking for, he’ll be long farther south by now.”

  “If he hasn’t been held up in Lombardy,” she said, adding uncomfortably”

  “Ah, now, a little thing like international relations shouldn’t stop him from keeping an appointment with you in Palermo.” The Irishman’s mouth twisted. “It wouldn’t stop me.”

  Adelia winced. She said quickly: “Will we catch up with Duke Richard?”

  “Overtake him, at this rate. Nostre Dame’s not got the speed of Saint Patrick. The Dame’s a lumberer, and she needs to set in for forage and water from time to time, so I had to allocate Locusta to her captain for his advice on the friendliest ports.”

  Somebody else was missing from St. Patrick’s complement. “It was an odd thing,” the O‘Donnell said, “but embarking at Saint Gilles, our good chaplain, Father Adalburt, who is not the idiot he looks, was taken by a sudden determination to sail on Nostre Dame with Duke Richard. Now why would the man desert his princess and bishop like that, d’ye think?”

  Adelia shrugged. “I suppose Richard’s religious views accord more closely with his own.”

  “‘F you ask me,” Ulf cut in, gloomily, “he reckons he’s got better prospects under the duke. He can go crusadin’ with him. He’ll probably end up Bishop of Jerusalem.”

  “God help the Holy Places,” O’Donnell said, and Adelia laughed.

  The Irishman had a thought and turned to Ulf. “A wooden cross, was it?” He used his hands. “So big by so big?”

  “Yes.” Ulf had never left off bewailing the taking of his cross; not just because he was afraid to face Henry II and tell him he’d lost it—though he was—but because he was tortured by the thought of great Arthur’s Excalibur in dirty hands.

  “Well, I’ll tell you,” O’Donnell said, “I’ve not remembered until now, but I saw a wooden cross being taken aboard Nostre Dame at Saint Gilles. I remarked it because it was so rough a thing, not at all like the jeweled crucifixes that went on with it.”

  Ulf’s hands clenched. “Who was carrying it?”

  The Irishman shrugged. “One of the crew, I think.”

  Ulf looked at Adelia. “Scarry I told you, I told you, that was Scarry in the cowshed.”

  “Dear God. I’m sorry, my dear, so sorry”

  “What’re you sorry for? You said Richard’d want it and now he’s got it, that murdering bastard’s sold it to him.”

  The St. Patrick yawed slightly and the O’Donnell went aft to shout at his tillerman to keep his eye on the wind.

  “What’re we going to do?” Ulf demanded.

  “I don’t know. Nothing we can do.” Except despair at the perfidy of men in their lust for power.

  EVERYBODY WAS ON DECK to stare at Vesuvius on the evening that they sailed past the Bay of Naples. The volcano looked flat-topped and disappointingly undistinguished.

  Father Guy took the opportunity for an extempore sermon, explaining that the eruption that Pliny the Younger described had been God’s punishment on Pompeii’s and Herculaneum’s citizens for their wickedness in not being Christians. “Just as our Lord destroyed the Cities of the Plains.”

  Joanna interrupted him. “Mistress Adelia was found on the slopes of Vesuvius, weren’t you, ‘Delia?”

  “I was.”

  “How romantic,” Lady Petronilla said, acidly “Like baby Moses in his basket. Only drier.”

  “So if we miss Sicily and sail into Egypt, we’ve got somebody to lead us out of it,” said Lady Beatrix.

  It was getting chilly. Everybody except Adelia and the watchful Mansur deserted the quarterdeck for the warmth of the lower deck.

  We’ll be passing Salerno soon. Past the two best people in the world. I don’t even know if they’re still alive. Dear Lord, let them be alive so that, perhaps, on the way back, I may see them again.

  A hand touched her shoulder, making her jump.

  It was Blanche. “We’re only days from Sicily. What are we going to do? Mother of God, what are we going to do?”

  “I don’t know,” Adelia told her. “But I was just thinking about my foster father. Some years ago, he was called to Palermo to attend on King William. He’s a great doctor, you see.”

  “William?”

  “My foster father.”

  “And he cured the king? What of?”

  “I didn’t ask. He wouldn’t have told me, a patient’s complaint is confidential.”

  Blanche was stuttering with hope. “Perhaps ... perhaps he took a worm thing out of William as well. Do you think the king’s got a scar like Joanna’s?”

  “I have no idea. Probably not.”

  “Your father might have influence with the king, he could plead with him for Joanna’s sake.”

  Adelia was irritated. “Why should anyone plead for her? William’s lucky—he’s getting a sweet-tempered bride instead of a dead one.”

  But Blanche had seen a life raft in what she was certain would be the wreckage of Joanna’s marriage. Within minutes, she was begging the O’Donnell to put the St. Patrick into Salerno and haul Dr. Gershom aboard.

  Impatient though he wa
s with any further delay, the Irishman agreed, mainly because of Adelia’s joy at the thought of seeing her parents so soon.

  It was not to be. As the St. Patrick rounded Punta Campanella, the wind of a typical Mediterranean storm veered them helplessly westward. By the time it released its grip and returned to its former direction, St. Patrick’s position was due north of Sicily and the ship could only make a straight run to the port of Cefalù.

  It was there that Princess Joanna asked for the assurance that Adelia would put off the return to England long enough to see her married. “Promise me. Promise.”

  “I promise.”

  IN THE DARK hold of the Nostre Dame, an exchange is made between Scarry and Duke Richard’s secretary; a rough wooden cross for a purse of gold.

  But the duke is not as pleased as he should be and summons Scarry to him. “They say you are ill.”

  “No, my lord. It is merely that being at sea does not agree with me. I am well enough.” And indeed Scarry does feel better than he did, though every now and then, when he is alone, he unscrews his head in order to relieve it.

  “They say you talk to yourself.”

  “Not to myself, my lord, I pray to my God.”

  For, truly, he does pray to Satan. And, to Wolf, he has to give constant reassurance: “she will be in Sicily. There she was ordered, and there she shall die.”

  Sometimes Wolf believes him and sometimes he doesn’t, which is when their arguments attract attention.

  “It is good to talk to the Almighty,” the duke said. “But see to yourself, you are covered in grime. I have no use for the deranged.”

  Scarry, who has moments of wonderful clarity, knows in that moment that Richard has forgotten the service that he, Scarry, who is now expendable, has rendered him. Scarry knows that the duke believes the sword has been willed miraculously to him, as if God’s arm has pierced the clouds with it and put it into his hand to be used for God’s almighty purpose.