She looked for the steps; they were behind her.
Then a shadow blocked out the light above and black earth engulfed her again, coming down in rhythmic, vicious plunges. They were being buried alive.
“Help us.” Screaming, she scrabbled at the side of the pit like a spider trying for a hold against a sudden rush of rain. “Help us, God help us.”
The coffin lid was closing on them.
She heard Mansur start to shout and then choke as earth entered his mouth. But still he held her up.
She shouted for him. “No.” And tried kicking out a space round his head so that he could breathe, but her legs could move only a few inches against the constraining earth. His grip weakened and she fell sideways, her lower body pinioned against his shoulders.
Wrenching her back, she squirmed so that she could get to him. One of his hands was still visible, its fingers outstretched. There was a patch of white, the top of his headdress, and she began digging round it, frantic, yelling, not knowing she was yelling, scooping earth, baling it away from that beloved face. “No, no, no!”
He was sinking, dear Christ, he was sinking, they were both sinking, and she couldn’t dig fast enough against the soil that trickled through her hands.
She felt her body arch as something tugged at the waist of her gown and began dragging her up. She thrashed against it; Mansur was choking; he must breathe—O God in Heaven, let her help him to breathe.
A voice shouted, “Keep still, damn you. I’ll pull you up.”
“No. Mansur. Mansur’s dying.”
“I can’t get to him until you’re out of the way, you stupid bitch. Keep still.”
She was too terrified to put a name to it, but it was a voice she’d once known, a loved voice she’d trusted. Even so, letting herself dangle as she was pulled upward was the most unwilling thing she’d ever done. Tears poured out of her eyes, and she kept screaming for Mansur.
The hand attached to her was in turn attached to a man with his feet planted on one of the steps. His other hand was holding that of a second man lying down on the pit edge, his arm extended as far as it would go.
She was hauled in like a fish that flapped in the sunlight trying to return to water. “Mansur, Mansur. It’s Mansur down there.”
“I’m getting him, aren’t I?” The snapping voice, unacknowledged but still familiar, addressed itself elsewhere. “Jesus, she’s got a rope round her. Get it off her quick.”
It took time, it took time. She was disentangled from the rope, knots were tied, things were done, but she was blind to everything except the thought of nostrils and throat blocked with soil; he’d be unconscious by now, beyond recovery in … how long, how long to suffocate?
She crawled to the edge and saw his fingers, a little picket fence sticking out of the blackness. Saw a hand grasp them. Heard the voice: “Pull. Again. Christ, I can’t get purchase.”
More time. A scrabbling as the rescuer heaved earth from round Mansur’s head and shoulders. One arm was free. A rope was looped round it. “Now pull, Walt, pull as you’ve never fucking pulled.”
The man at the top pulled, the man in the middle pulled, and slowly, like Lazarus from the dead, Mansur rose from the pit.
They laid him on the sweetgrass. He wasn’t breathing. Adelia fell on him, picking soil from his nostrils. She cleared his mouth and then puffed her own breath into it.
And felt his chest rise and fall. And crouched back on her knees to give thanks in three languages, to God, to Allah, to her foster father’s Jehovah, for the grace they had accorded her in letting this man live.
Somebody had fetched a ewer of water, and she used it to wash the rest of the earth from the Arab’s face and head. His kaffiyeh had come off in the struggle to leave the pit, and she, who had never seen him bareheaded, saw that he was becoming bald.
“His headdress,” she said. “Find his headdress.” He would be shamed without it; she couldn’t have him shamed.
Somehow it was produced. Shaking the earth from it and tenderly raising his head, she put it on him, arranging its folds as he would want.
He opened his eyes and she looked into them. “Do you know who I am, dear friend?”
“My sun and my moon,” he said.
She sat back and rested against the man who knelt behind her.
Time resumed. There was warmth and the smell of wildflowers and, above, a sky as blue as sailors’ trousers, the hum of bees, and—oh, God, how strange—the sound of plainsong coming from the ruins of a church where, unknowing, impervious holy men still celebrated the third hour of daylight, allowing the six-note hexagons of their song to bring order back to a universe in which, for her, there had been chaos.
Her eyes cleared. A little way away, a young man held the reins of three horses—he had a fluttering peregrine on his arm and was trying to soothe it. Looming over her with concern was a face she recognized. She smiled at Walt, an old friend, groom to the diocese of Saint Albans.
He smiled back. “A near thing, mistress.”
She rubbed the back of her head against the chest of the man holding her. “Hello, Rowley,” she said.
There was a huff of angry breath against her hair. “Don’t you hello me. In the name of Christ, how many more times have I got to rescue you from a pit? What in hell were you doing down there?”
“Just looking,” she said. “What are you doing here?”
“Paying an unofficial visit to the abbot of Glastonbury, ready to arrange a peace between him and the bishop of Wells, flying my hawk over his grounds while I waited for him to finish terce, hearing screams from a hole in the graveyard and finding a woman squirming round in it like a bloody worm. Usual sort of morning.”
How I love him. Let him cradle me forever.
Abruptly, he let her go and she fell back on the grass as he stood up. He was the bishop of Saint Albans now, a man of God; that he had touched her at all was merely because she’d been in extremis. He said, “We shall give thanks to our Savior, who directed our steps to the rescue of these two souls in peril,” he said.
While he prayed, she put her hand over Mansur’s heart and felt a strong beat. She looked round her. Rowley wore hunting clothes and was still furious. A curly-coated water dog sat at his feet. Latin floated over the wall that hid the church. “Pater noster, qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen tuum …” The service was nearly over.
When the monks emerged there was much exclaiming and concern over the accident. They wanted to take Mansur to the Abbot’s kitchen to wash and restore him, but he asked to be allowed to rest for a while, so they carried him into the shade of the church wall.
Adelia said she would stay with him.
Rowley frowned but had the sense to see that both of them needed a time of quiet. “There is much I need to discuss with Abbot Sigward,” he said, as if she’d said he should not.
“Then go and do it,” she told him.
“And I am engaged at Wells Cathedral this afternoon.”
She felt a flare of jealousy; God’s business must always supersede any care for her. With anger came recovery, and with recovery came the recall of another matter of importance. She said, coldly, “And while you’re about it, I should be obliged if you would make inquiries about Lady Emma Wolvercote.” Briefly, she told him the mystery of her friend’s disappearance, Allie’s recognition of the mule, her suspicion that there had been foul play. “It must have been somewhere round about.”
She could see he was not impressed.
“I doubt if a child of four can identify one mule from another,” he said. “Emma changed her mind about the meeting place. You should not take it amiss; she will be in touch when she’s ready.”
“Ask, will you?” Adelia spat at him. Her head ached.
“I shall.”
Yes, he will, she thought. She could trust him for that. She remembered that she owed him her life and Mansur’s, and changed her tone. “I am grateful, my lord bishop.”
He was so beautiful to he
r still, that was the trouble: the way he strode and talked, his nice hands, the eyes that could be easily amused—not bishop-like at all but lustworthy, blast him.
As he went, she heard him lecturing the abbot on the danger of keeping open pits in his ground, especially those with towers of earth beside them.
Mansur’s eyes were closed, and she shut her own, listening to him breathe. She had lost her hat somewhere in the pit and, vainly, she tried clawing some of the earth out of her dark blond hair. Her fingers encountered something substantial that had got entangled in it. With difficulty she retrieved it—a piece of wood that crumbled, as had the spar she had touched in the pit. It was proof, if she’d needed it, that her theory about Arthur and Guinevere’s coffin had been right.
It hadn’t been buried in the Dark Ages; wood from that time rotted in this earth. But the wood of Arthur and Guinevere’s coffin was much, much newer, which meant that the only time it could have reached sixteen feet down was during those few, so few, hours twenty years ago when the earthquake’s fissure had made such a depth available.
Rhys’s Uncle Caradoc hadn’t been vouchsafed a vision; he had seen an actual event.
Misery overtook her. For all her hardheaded search for the truth, something in Adelia had been touched by the golden rays of Arthur. Not so much by the legend itself as the fact that so strong a legend must mean that in the swirling mists of Britain’s darkest time, one man had ensured that the essence of what it was to be British, its very matter, stayed alive through his courage—and that she had been privileged to look on what remained of him.
A greater misery was for the disenchantment and blighted hope of those to whom Arthur’s magic was their life’s blood.
She gritted her teeth. Magic was ephemeral—you couldn’t and shouldn’t depend on it.
So now that she had dispelled it, what was she left with? Something uncomfortable …
From beside her, Mansur said, “They tried to kill us, Adelia.”
She looked at him. His eyes were still closed in exhaustion. “Kill us?”
“The earth did not come down on its own. The mound has stood for many weeks; why should it tip now?”
Dear Father Almighty.
In the relief of being rescued, her joy that Mansur had survived, and seeing Rowley again, she had not questioned that it had been an accident. Now, mentally, she went back into the pit, looking up, experiencing again the terror of that cascading earth.
It had stopped at one point; there had been a pause in the fall. And then it had started again—yes, as if somebody had been dissatisfled with the original push that tumbled the mound on top of them. Whoever it was had then begun shoveling or kicking the residue into the hole to fill it up completely.
Who could hate us that much?
Only Rowley’s appearance on the scene had stopped a murder that, if it had been successful, would have remained undiscovered. She and Mansur could have been blotted out. People would have seen merely that the mound had overtipped.
There was no time to absorb the shock. She was on her feet and running to the abbot’s kitchen.
The bishop of Saint Albans and Abbot Sigward were in conclave at the table; she didn’t notice anybody else.
“Who was there?” she demanded of Rowley. “Somebody tried to bury us. Who was it?”
“Eh?”
“When you rode up. Somebody was at the top of the pit.” She danced from foot to foot in agitation. “They pushed the mound over so that it would bury Mansur and me.”
“I didn’t see anybody.”
“You must have. Somebody was there, Rowley. They kept on… . The earth came and came… .”
“I swear to you, mistress.” He looked around. “Walt? Did you see anybody by the pit when we came up?”
“I didn’t, my lord.”
“Gervase?”
The young man with the hawk shook his head. “Nobody, my lord.”
Rowley got up from his stool, suddenly full of compassion for her. “It was dreadful for you, my child… . For God’s sake, one of you, give this lady some brandy, a restorative. I should not have left her alone… .”
“I’m not mad, Rowley,” she said.
“Of course you’re not, but it was too much for you. It was an accident, mistress, a fearful accident.”
They tried to get her to sit down, to drink something, to rest—and their faces all had the same look, not just concern but pity for a woman so unnerved that she had lost her wits.
“Damn you,” she shouted at them. “There was a pause, and then it started again.”
For heaven’s sake, why couldn’t she put into words what she had so clearly seen, tell them what it meant? There must have been somebody… .
She stopped short. But there had been another pause. While she’d been struggling to free Mansur’s face, there had been no descent of earth—because whoever it was had seen or heard the approach of Rowley and had run away.
Eventually it was decided that Mansur must be questioned, men being less hysterical than women in the face of adversity.
With irritating gentleness, still offering her various remedies, they escorted her across to the church and rounded its far wall.
Mansur wasn’t there.
Adelia stared at the empty patch of grass on which he’d been lying.
Shouting, they wandered in search of him.
“He’s gone back to the inn,” Rowley said.
They took her to the Pilgrim. He wasn’t there. There were long explanations to the landlord and his wife, and to Gyltha, during which time Adelia watched Gyltha’s face go gray.
Out again. Some to go calling up the empty village street, others to search the abbey grounds more diligently.
Walt forestalled Adelia from going down into the pit again by using the rope to go down himself, but it was obvious—even to Adelia, frantically peering down from the edge—that its earth had swallowed no one since she and Mansur had been lifted out of it.
The bishop of Saint Albans missed whatever appointment it was that he had in Wells in order to ride up into the hills with his men, calling, always calling, so that the sky resounded with the Arab’s name. Until it got too dark to see anything—except the fact that Mansur had disappeared.
Like Emma.
“I’LL BE BACK in the morning,” Rowley said. “As soon as it’s light.”
She nodded. She was holding Gyltha close to her.
“Confusion,” Rowley said. “He was confused after the accident, and who could blame him? He’s just wandered off, but he can’t have gone far. And it’s a warm night, he’ll take no harm. Not Mansur.”
She nodded again.
Desperately, he said, “I have to go back, you do see that?”
She saw that. The diocese of Wells expected it; he was one of the most important men in England, and a busy one, God’s representative for thousands of square miles. What the diocese of Wells did not expect was that he should spend the night at an inn with a woman.
“I promise you, mistress,” Rowley said, trying to smile. “This time the earth has not swallowed him up.”
Hadn’t she told him about Emma, whom the earth had swallowed up? She couldn’t remember whether she had or not; fear seemed to be rendering her dumb. “Emma,” she mumbled.
“I’ll attend to it. God bless you, then, mistress. I shall see you in the morning.”
Hilda’s concern for her guests, though no doubt meant kindly, was bothersome. Adelia and Gyltha were offered everything that the landlady thought might raise their spirits, from Godwyn’s calf’s-foot jelly to her own specific against melancholy, a thick herbal concoction that they drank to satisfy her before escaping to Adelia’s bedroom. Gyltha, to keep herself busy, insisted on washing Adelia’s hair and finding fresh clothes for her. Then she sat down and, holding on to Adelia’s hand, rocked back and forth in anxiety.
“Silly old bugger, where’s he got to? Can’t hardly find his own arse in the dark, so why’s he go wandering off? What’s
happening to us, ’Delia? First Emma, now him. Where’s he gone? Who’s got him? Why didn’t he stay close, silly old bugger?”
The lament went on and on until Hilda’s specific took hold and Gyltha was persuaded to lie down on the bed where she fell into a whimpering doze.
Watching her, Adelia thought how ironic it was that Gyltha was the one person who would have believed that somebody had sent the mound of earth crashing into the grave deliberately, and yet was the one person who must not be told. That a murderer was abroad … no, she mustn’t be made aware of that, not until Mansur was found. If he ever was.
It was stiflingly hot. Disengaging her hand from the sleeping woman’s, Adelia went to the window to breathe.
Twenty years ago, she thought. Twenty years ago a crime had been committed. Twenty years ago it had been necessary to bury the bodies of a man and a woman so that they should never be found. And now, when they had been found, it was vital to whoever had buried them that the skeletons should not be identified and the crime brought home.
The Year of Our Lord 1154. The day after Saint Stephen’s Day, when, by tradition, servants were allowed to leave their employer and return to their family for a while.
Was that significant? Possibly. People not usually free to travel would have been on the loose. Also, heads of households, for once, had been left to look after themselves—without servants to watch them.
But the greatest suspicion must fall on the abbey itself, the only place where it was known that a convenient hole had opened up and was ready to receive bodies.
Who had been in situ on that day? Nearly a hundred monks, all but four of them now scattered around England and France, broadcasting the plight that had befallen Glastonbury.
No, Abbot Sigward must be excluded—he’d still been holding sway as a great landlord on his island, perhaps mourning the son who’d fallen on crusade.
For a moment, Adelia thought of the shining goodness that had propelled Sigward from the position of a novitiate to that of abbot over the heads of monks who had served their abbey much longer.