Ariana Franklin: A Murderous Procession aka The Assassin

“You’ll be accompanying Joanna Plantagenet to her wedding, so Rowley says.” Seeing Adelia’s incomprehension, Emma blew out her cheeks. “Henry’s daughter? Marrying the King of Sicily? Lord, ‘Delia, even you must know that. We’re all being taxed for it, damn him.”

A king was entitled to tax his people to pay for his daughter’s wedding, but it didn’t make him popular.

Adelia, whose few accounts were handled by Mansur and who listened to her patients’ physical complaints rather than their excise grumbles, didn’t know it.

She paused for a moment. “Joanna? She’s just a baby”

“Ten, I believe.”

“Poor little devil.” The thought of another poor little devil to be groomed for a good marriage broke Adelia’s anger and she sat down on her bed, almost weeping. “I’ll not forgive him, Em, he’s taking her away from me, and me away from her. Putting her in prison. And it is a prison, in more ways than one. My little one, my little one.”

“Rowley has his reasons, I’m sure.” Emma knew what they were-she’d heard them from the bishop himself only a few minutes ago.

“Oh, yes, marvelous reasons. He wants Eleanor to turn her into a… a prinking doll, drain her of all initiative.”

Amused, Emma sat down beside her friend. She smoothed the silk of her gown over her swelling stomach. “My dear, whatever we think of a queen who fomented a rebellion against her king, we cannot accuse her of lacking initiative. Yet with it all, Eleanor keeps her femininity. She can teach Almeison a great deal.”

“What, for instance?”

“To keep her fingernails clean, for one thing. Courtesy, poetry, music. These things are not unimportant. I yield to nobody in my admiration for your daughter, but… I have to say it, ‘Delia… she is becoming farouche.”

“Farouche?”

“She spends too much time with animals. During the football game, she punched one of the Martlake boys so hard he lost a tooth. A baby tooth, I grant you, but…”

“He blacked her eye,” Adelia said, defensively

“Yes, but… my dear, you’re limiting her, don’t you see?” This was a lecture Emma had been meaning to make for some time; now she settled down to it. “It may be that when Allie’s older, she will want to marry well. The fact that she can deliver a punch is not recommended in politer families. Children must be prepared for their adult position. In a year or two, Pippywill have to leave me to become a page to the De Lucis and learn the skills of a knight. I shall miss him, miss him terribly, but it must be done if he is to take his place in society”

“It isn’t the same,” Adelia said. When young Lord Philip grew up, he would have the choice to explore his gifts, lead the life he wanted; his wife would have none.

Emma was fortunate in that this, her second marriage, was happy-her first had been enforced-but legally Roetger, as her husband, controlled the wealth she’d brought to it. Again legally, he could turn her out without a penny, was entitled to beat her-as long as he used only reasonable force-take her children away, and there would be nothing she could do about it. That Roetger wouldn’t do any of these things rested solely on the fact that he was a decent man.

And while Emma’s life of household management and entertaining suited her, it wouldn’t suit Adelia. Nor, she knew, would it suit her daughter.

“We’re helpless, we women,” she said, defeated.

Emma, who didn’t feel helpless at all, patted her. “It’s only for a year, then you can be reunited-Rowley has agreed to that.” She stood up, brisk. “Now there’s just time to furnish you decently for the journey. I’m going to pack some of my own clothes for you in a proper traveling box. My dear, you’ll be voyaging with a princess of England in the company of very important people. We don’t want to appear shabby, do we?”

So it was that at midday Adelia, looking elegant for once, and her daughter, considerably less so but with clean fingernails, rode out from Wolvercote Manor with an escort of Plantagenet soldiers, Gyltha, Mansur, and a lover to whom she still wasn’t speaking.

Emma, standing with Roetger at the great gates to wave her off, was beset by a sudden qualm. “Pray God in His mercy send them safe.”

In the lane outside, watching the departure, two Glastonbury men heard her prayer.

“Amen to that,” Will said, crossing himself.

SCARRY IS RIDING along the same road that Adelia Aguilar is taking at that moment, though well ahead of her. Unlike her, he is not heading for Sarum but for Southampton, where he will join the company that she, too, must join before they take ship for Normandy.

Scarry hates that company, as he has hated his father, his mother, the prior of his seminary, everybody who hated him in turn for not being an ordinary mortal and taught him to hide it under his brilliance. Once more, he must mop and mow and play the idiot. Once more, he will know the constriction of assumed piety.

But for the moment, he is smiling because he is passing the spot where he first encountered his Wolf. His Road to Damascus, this road between Glastonbury and Wells. Then he’d been going the other way, on a dreary pilgrimage with his prior and other dreary souls to worship Glastonbury’s saints. As always he was concealing his hatred like a shameful, tumescent pustule, while a worm nibbled his brain, and the voice in his head chanted other, profane words to the hymns they sang as they went.

Yes, my lord prior, no, my lord prior, let us kneel before each wayside shrine as we go, praising a Deity that undoubtedly exists but not in the form you say he does; a God who knows only how to condemn, whose loving word is a lie.

They had been benighted, the road longer than they’d reckoned; they’d been afraid of the dark forest around them and were reciting Psalm 91 to avert the terror by night, as if regurgitating falsehoods however beautiful, however reassuring, could protect the credulous. when had their God ever shown the mercy He promised?

Then, out of the dark trees had come the terror, not blackness but light in the form of capering, semi-naked men, outlaws bearing torches and swords, laughing as they robbed and killed.

In recollection, Scarry laughs with them. Some of his fellow pilgrims had got away but he’d stood still, bemused, not so much terrified as amazed by the killers’ liberation from the restraint that Christianity demanded.

Their leader-Wolf, my darling, my zest-had stuck his sword into the prior’s belly and, as he stripped the jeweled cross from the neck, had looked up, grinning, into Scarry’s eyes.

Recognition had leaped between them, two souls connected since long before the Great Pretender had been crucified, a lightning bolt that had burst the pustule and released Scarry from its pain.

The demand had been made. Scarry can no longer recall whether it issued from Wolf’s mouth or was spoken by this new God manifesting Himself in the mingled shrieks of mirth and terror of that moment.

Come with me and I shall set you free. What blasphemy, what a glorious overthrowing. What liberation.

And he, Scarry, had answered the call. With his eyes fixed on those of this wild and marvelous creature, he had lifted his knee and stamped his boot down hard into the face of his whimpering prior, silencing the old fool and his God forever.

Then he and Wolf had danced away, the others following with the booty, leaving the road for a scented, untracked forest where they could suck the honey from each other’s body, and where no law ran except their own, no rites but those due to the satanic leaf green, goatlike God they worshipped. Male maenads they had been, ad gloriam, horned beasts of a horned deity, rending living animals and humans into pieces, raping, robbing, unstopped, unstoppable, feared and unfettered, their psalms the shrieks of the dying, their altar a butcher’s block.