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.”
“In her feed at night, you reckon?” Martin asked.
“Could be, could be,” Master Tom said. “She’d not likely’ve touched it while it was growing . . .”
“But that loses its taste when it’s dried,” Martin finished for him.
“Still and all, what bastard would do that to a horse?”
“What can be done for her?” Adelia begged. Inattentive as she was to the equine world generally, she and the mare had gone this far on the journey together and it was painful to see the animal in such distress. Allie would know what to do, she thought.
Master Tom shrugged. “Nothing. Not with ragwort poison. Put her out of her misery. Nothin’ else to do.”
Juno was led into woodland and her life ended by a quick and expert slash across the throat. The Bishop of Saint Albans immediately began an inquiry—as it turned out, an unsuccessful inquiry—to find out who was responsible for what must have been systematic poisoning of the horse in its nightly stable over the course of several days, something that inevitably pointed to a person belonging to the princess’s train.
“The poor beast,” Lady Petronilla said loudly to Adelia across the dinner table that evening. “You must feel dreadful now that you were so cross with her when you tumbled off her the other day.”
“I was cross with myself, not the horse.”
It was no use pointing out, as Captain Bolt and Rowley did, that Mistress Adelia invariably handed over her horse to the grooms to stable when the cavalcade reached its destination for the night, and was thereby absolved from feeding it ragwort. The company was left with the impression that she had cursed her horse and that, alone among all the other horses, it had subsequently died.
As SCARRY TELLS Wolf that night: “it begins.”
ADELIA WAS FINALLY vouchsafed an explanation of the “Sir Nicholas and the shoes” mystery when there was another disturbance at night, this time at the Abbey of Saint-Sauveur de Redon on the approach to Aquitaine, the duchy that had once belonged to Queen Eleanor and had passed to Henry Plantagenet on their marriage.
Again, she and the ladies-in-waiting, in their sleep, heard an alarmed feminine shout and male activity coming from somewhere beyond their room.
On this occasion, however, they were roused by their door crashing open and Lady Petronilla’s maid, Marie, rushing through it, whimpering.
“In the name of God, Marie,” said Lady Beatrix, querulously “What is it?” She glanced at the hours candle on the bedside table to see that only half its length had burned down. “It’s the middle of the blasted night.”
“He done it to me this time, m’lady,” Marie sobbed. “Terrible frit he gave me. And look what he done.” She lifted her leg to display the fact that one of her feet was without its shoe.
“Who did? And where have you been?” (The maids slept on palliasses in the same room as their mistresses.)
“There was this noise in the passage outside, m‘lady, and I got up to open it, thinking as one of the dogs had got shut out, and there weren’t nothing there so I went down the passage a bit, and, oh m’lady, it weren’t a dog at all, it were Sir Nicholas.”
“Oh, dear,” said Lady Petronilla. “Well, never mind. And you, mistress, stay here, it’s nothing for you to concern yourself with.”
But Adelia had already wrapped herself in a cloak and gone outside to see what was to be seen, leaving Boggart, whom the Last Trump could not have disturbed, to sleep on.
The Bishop of Saint Albans was outside the door, watching a strange procession wending its way toward a turret stair that led down to the men’s guest quarters.
Two men-at-arms, one of them Captain Bolt, were supporting a staggering Sir Nicholas Baicer while, in front of them, the knight’s squire, Aubrey, was walking backward holding what looked like Marie’s shoe in front of his master’s nose as another man might tempt a dog into following him with a biscuit.
Adelia shut the bedroom door quietly behind her so that the ladies-in-waiting should not hear and turned to her lover. “Well?”
“It’s young Aubrey’s fault, he’s supposed to measure how much Nicholas drinks at our feasts.” Rowley was finding the occasion amusing.
“What has he done?”
It appeared that there was a fine line, only a cup or two of wine, to be drawn between a pleasantly tipsy Sir Nicholas and a Sir Nicholas who was overtaken by a lust that directed itself at feminine feet.
“Any woman,” explained Rowley, still amused, “as long as she has such extremities on the end
of her legs, is in danger of having a drink-sodden Sir Nicholas throwing himself at her boots and applying his tongue to their leather.”
“And that’s what happened to Marie?”
“So it seems. He must have outmaneuvered his squire. Last time it was one of the laundresses.” He caught sight of Adelia’s face. “No harm done. He’ll snuggle down in bed with the maid’s shoe and be off to sleep like a lamb. He won’t remember in the morning.”
“No harm done? The girl was frightened.”
“Nonsense. It’s one way of getting her boots clean. Now, then . . .” Rowley pulled Adelia toward him. “... since you’re here ...”
But if he intended an embrace, it was preempted by the Bishop of Winchester in his nightcap coming up the stairs to see what the fuss was about.
Rowleybowed to Adelia, said a polite “God’s blessing on you, lady,” and took himself and his fellow bishop off to their beds.
The male attitude toward Sir Nicholas’s lapses pertained even among the ladies-in-waiting. Adelia, returning to the bedroom, heard Lady Petronilla lecturing her maid. “You must remember that all wellborn men have their eccentricities, Marie. We have to overlook them.”
There was sleepy agreement from Lady Beatrix. “And, after all, Sir Nicholas’s ancestors did fight alongside William the Conqueror in subduing the English.”
Leaving a trail of well-liched feminine boots in their wake, no doubt. Adelia shook her head before laying it and the rest of herself alongside Lady Petronilla and going wonderingly back to sleep.
The next morning, apparently unaware of the night before, Sir Nicholas was his usual jovial self, whilst Aubrey the squire attended on Marie the maid with an apology, her missing shoe, and a silver piece from a supply of monies with which he’d been entrusted for such eventualities.
THE MONASTERIES AND PRIORIES they stayed at every night blended into one—the same welcome from the abbot/prior, the service, a feast, everybody taking care to show pleasure at entertaining their king’s daughter. All of them were rich, mostly very rich; providing for so many people during such a stay could cost nearly as much as a year’s income, though all of it would undoubtedly be passed on in extra tithes to their feudal underlings.
At first, while in Upper Normandy, the marriage cavalcade had kept to a disciplined and carefully planned procession. Outriders at the front, the princess’s palanquin next, flanked by Sir Nicholas Baicer and Lord Ivo splendid in mail and helmets, alongside squires, bishops, and their chaplains plus a platoon of Captain Bolt’s men, followed by more soldiers around the treasure-carrying mules with their stout iron boxes, then the higher servants, then the sumpter wagons, and, finally, the pilgrims.
But now, as day followed day without any untoward happenings, there was a relaxation. Pressing deeper into fine hunting country, more people, even some of the servants, gave way to the passion of the chase and followed either Lord Ivo or Sir Nicholas into the forests.
Captain Bolt might frown and forbid his men to follow them, but a general complaisance had overtaken the rest which, since the Bishop of Winchester smiled at it, he was powerless to halt.
Father Adalburt, a new convert, joined in the hunts on his rouncey but frequently got lost and, more than once, had to be searched for and kindly led back to the road.
Time and again, while Adelia itched with impatience, the entire cavalcade stopped in order to watch Princess Joanna fly her hawk and applaud its kill.
Inevitably, gradually, among the lesser servants, friendships were formed and enmities broke out, so that the procession thinned in some places and gained bulges in others, as if an otherwise smooth snake had swallowed, and was digesting, its lunch.
There was always a crowd surrounding the musicians, while the cart containing the master blacksmith and his equipment was left to travel alone, he being surly to every living thing except horses.
Bantering, flirting soldiers gathered around the laundresses’ and maids’ section. Even Captain Bolt permitted this as long as the patrols were kept up, the treasure carts guarded, and the rear protected. Most of his men were mercenaries, he said, and had to find feminine comfort where they could.
The chief laundress, however, a large woman with warts and an evangelical approach to religion—she affected to shrink back in holy indignation and mutter her prayers if Mansur was in the offing—swiped the men away and made sure of her charges’ chastity by accompanying them into the woods during the stops for calls of nature.
An Englishwoman by the name of Brune, she’d been doing Eleanor’s laundry for many years and had become a close friend of Joanna’s nurse—a length of service and royal connection that gave her a good opinion of herself. “My girls shall keep their virginity for the good Lord’s sake,” she was heard to say unctuously to an approving Father Guy. “Like I kept mine.”
“As if,” Captain Bolt said, “anybody’d try to take it off her.”
At night, Mansur and Adelia joined Dr. Arnulf in the princess’s room to make the regular assessment of her health by checking the royal pulse and examining phials of the royal urine. By day, however, they rode farther down the line, away from the leading party, where Ward could trot along at their horses’ heels without both him and Adelia attracting taunts from the ladies-in-waiting, nor the Arab having to endure the viciousness of the Saracen-hating chaplain, Father Guy
Their new position at least made them popular with such of the rank and file who felt unwell or had sustained minor injuries and found Dr. Arnulf too lofty to attend to them.
“Cap’n Bolt said I was to come to the darkie doctor,” James the wheelwright told Adelia as she splinted his crushed finger. “That other’n, he don’t care for the poor. Bugger wanted a fee.”
For Adelia the greatest happiness of being farther down the cavalcade was that, from time to time, Rowley could pause beside her as he rode up and down the line to see that all was well; precious, stolen moments for them both as he chatted ostensibly to Mansur in Arabic.
When he could spare the time, Locusta rode with them, apparently preferring their company to that of any other, and talking about Sicily
So did Ulf Other pilgrims were making friends among the royal servants and leaving the group to talk to them. Why shouldn’t he?
So, too, when he wasn’t hunting, did Father Adalburt, which was a surprise—and a not-unalloyed pleasure. The man was a fool. Because he spoke Latin and English, the latter being his native tongue, and was rarely in the company of those who couldn’t, he showed astonishment when foreigners didn’t understand him. He insisted on speaking to Mansur in a slow shout and being bewildered when he received no reply
Every new thing amazed him. On passing a plantation of cork trees and requesting to know what they were, he refuted the answer with: “But there are no corks,” as if expecting the branches to be laden with fully formed bottle tops.
“Why does the donkey not keep alongside his bishop?” Mansur asked, irritated. “Why does he plague us?”
Probably, Adelia thought, because the Bishop of Winchester was happy to get rid of him. Adalburt was amiable enough, his mouth always lolling in a smile, but how he had achieved his position was difficult to see.
“Because he’s the bishop’s bloody cousin, or something,” Ulf, who’d done some research, said bitterly. “Been living as an anchorite for two years Scarfell Pike way, seemingly, and got a reputation for holiness. Told me he preached to the sheep. If he bored them as much as he does me, I’m sorry for’em.”
LOCUSTA AND HIS uncle had carefully chosen only accommodations capable of providing the enormous stabling and grazing necessary for the company and its horseflesh, good food, beds a-plenty without fleas—even baths. Establishments that didn’t have the latter reckoned without Mesdames Beatrix, Petronilla, and Blanche ...
The Abbot of Redon, a somewhat smaller establishment than the retinue was used to, looked hopelessly into three beautiful, formidable faces. “But in this house, my daughters, we do not take baths except at Easte
r and Christmas, as advised by Saint Benedict—even then it is in the river.”
The three looked for a withering moment toward the hapless Locusta. No baths?
He wrung his hands. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, ladies. But to go on farther, or to have stopped earlier ...”
The ladies didn’t care about the difficulties of calculating a route.
“The river, though,” Father Adalburt interposed brightly “Is it not an example of God’s bounty that He sent a river to flow past every great town that Man has built?”
The ladies didn’t care about God’s bounty, either. They turned back to the abbot.
“All very commendable, my lord,” Lady Petronilla said, “but our princess is not Saint Benedict. She is a lady of the blood royal.”
“From Aquitaine,” Lady Beatrix pointed out. “And she has traveled through dust all day.” She forbore to mention that, as well as dust, sweat was ruinous to robes that took a phalanx of embroideresses a year to adorn.
“Washing tubs will do,” compromised Mistress Blanche. “My lord, you surely have washing tubs in your laundry?”
The poor man supposed that he had.
“Good,” said Lady Petronilla. “Then please have all of them carried to our room. With lots of hot water.”
Lady Beatrix patted the abbot’s hand kindly: “We provide our own soap and towels.”
In a steam-filled upper room—the abbot’s was the only one large enough—Adelia watched the indistinct forms of maids come and go like ghostly water sprites as she rested her body in warm suds. It had been an unusually long journey of forty miles from their last stop to this.
From the dining room below rose the sound of tipsy men still at table singing a rousing chorus of the immemorial drinking song “Gaudeamus igitur.” She could hear Rowleys voice among them. This was Calvados country; the abbey made it from its own apples and served it in place of ale, despite what the ascetic Saint Benedict would have said.