Ariana Franklin - Grave Goods aka Relics of the Dead

“I cannot spare this lady, she is-” Emma remembered in time that the title of doctor should not be applied to her friend. “She is attendant to my physician, the lord Mansur here.”

“He comes, too.” The officer’s hand moved to his sword hilt as he said it, and Adelia knew he’d enforce his king’s order if he had to.

Adelia had panicked. “Not without my child. I am not leaving my child.” They’d have to drag her to Wales, she’d throw herself off her horse, she’d fight and scream at every step, she’d…

On that matter, however, the officer had been prepared to give way. “The king said as how you wouldn’t.”

“And I’m coming, too,” Gyltha said.

The officer had nodded wearily. “King said that an’ all.”

They’d barely been given time to say good-bye. Concerned, Emma said, “If you can get away, I shall be at our manor with my mother-in-law. Ask for the dowager Wolvercote.”

Adelia waved as one of the soldiers led her horse into a trot.

“Halfway between Wells and Glastonbury,” Emma shouted.

Adelia would have waved again, but she was now at a gallop and had to hold on with both hands.

The galloping proceeded, it seemed, for days. There was no planning for overnight stops such as Emma had made. When it was too dark to go on, they put up at whatever hostelry was available.

Their first night had been spent at a miserable tavern on the way to the Severn Estuary. It was little more than a shack where everyone slept together on one raised platform covered in straw. The next morning they were infested with fleas and Adelia found that, in their haste, the pack with her clean clothes in it had been left behind with Emma. The officer-his name was Bolt, which, Gyltha pointed out, “suits the bastard”-refused to divert to the local market where she could have purchased some sort of raiment. “Sorry, mistress. You’ll have to grin and bear it.”

“King’s orders, I suppose,” she said viciously. It was a phrase she was already sick of, and she knew she’d hear it a great deal more.

“ ’S right.” It wasn’t that the man was unkind, but his lord king had insisted on speed, a requirement that literally overrode all others.

On reaching the Severn they’d transferred to a boat and disembarked at Cardiff Castle on the Welsh coast, their destination, only to discover that Henry had moved on with his troops.

“Been another rebellion,” Bolt told them after making inquiries. “Young Geoffrey’s holding out at Caerleon ’gainst another Welsh attack. The king’s gone to relieve him.”

“We’ll have to wait here, then,” Adelia had said, relieved by the thought of a rest.

“No, mistress. We’d better get on.”

“Into a battle? You can’t take us into danger.”

Bolt was astonished by her lack of faith in Henry Plantagenet. “There won’t be no battle by the time we gets there. The king’ll have mopped up that load of bloody Taffies quicker’n sixpence.”

And so he had, if the heads on the battlements and the quiet, darkened countryside all around were anything to go by.

Having quelled the revolt, Henry was establishing the peace-not that there was any sign of it in barbican or bailey, both in a commotion as soldiers tried to pack up weaponry against a counterflow of clerks unpacking chests of documents, all this among braying mules, frightened, scattering hens and pigs, and a cracked voice from a high window shouting orders to those below. “Where are those bloody maps? I need more ink up here. For the love of God, will you bastards hurry.”

The place stank of urine and manure, nor did the smell improve as Adelia and the others were rushed up staircases and past arrow slits where archers had stood day and night repelling an encircling enemy.

The king was striding up and down a slightly less noisome though just as turbulent chamber, dictating the terms of two different treaties with two different and defeated rebel Welsh lords to two different scribes, occasionally shouting instructions out the window, while a fusty little man ran alongside him, trying to apply leeches to a bare and inflamed-looking royal arm. In a corner, a young man whom Adelia recognized as the king’s illegitimate son and general-in-chief, Geoffrey, was talking to several tired-looking insigniaed men in heavy fur mantles, presumably Welsh chieftains. Pages were laying out food on a table, kicking away sniffing hounds as they did it. A line of hawks on perches were screeching and flapping their wings. Incongruously, a limp-looking man in another corner was playing a small harp and singing to it, though what it was was impossible to hear.

Captain Bolt announced the newcomers in a shout that only just penetrated the noise: “The lord Mansur, Mistress Adelia, and…” He looked despairingly at Gyltha, who was holding Allie. “And company.”

Henry glanced up. “You took your damn time. Sit down somewhere until I’ve finished…”

“No,” Adelia said clearly.

Everybody stopped what they were doing, except the harpist, who went on quietly singing to himself.

Past caring, itching with fleas and fury, Adelia told him, “The Lord Mansur and company require a bath and a rest. And they need them now.”

All eyes looked in her direction and then, in one slow movement, were turned on the king. Henry’s temper when he was flouted was renowned-Thomas à Becket had died from it.

He blew out a breath. “Geoffrey.”

“Yes, my lord?”

“Is there a bath in the castle?”

“I don’t know, my lord.” The young man’s mouth twitched. “A bath wasn’t, er, part of our armory.”

“Better find one. And some beds.”

“And clean clothes,” Adelia said. “Women’s.”

The king sighed again. “Samite? Lace? Any particular size?”

Adelia ignored the sarcasm. “Clean will do,” she said.

At the door she turned and addressed the little doctor: “And if you’re supposed to be treating that wound, get those leeches off it and put on some bog moss-there’s plenty of the bloody stuff in the valleys; we’ve been squelching through it for two days.”

THE BATH TURNED OUT to be a washtub of enormous proportions, and the soldiers who hauled it up to the two rooms allocated to their guests at the top of a tower, along with great ewers of hot water, were out of breath and resentful when they got it there.

An inexorable Adelia sent them back down for soap and towels.

The beds, when they arrived, were rickety, but the straw and blankets that came with them were clean.

After a long night’s sleep, Adelia woke up feeling better, if chastened by the memory of her behavior toward a king whose empire stretched from the borders of Scotland to the Pyrenees. Apparently, though, it was even yet having its effect, for a polite knock on the door heralded the entrance of the emperor’s bastard son, Geoffrey, still amused.

He was carrying an armful of women’s clothing. “We, er, liberated these from one of the Welsh chieftain’s wives,” he said. “Don’t worry, she has others, though I’m afraid the lady favors rather more avoirdupois than you do, but it was that or a mail shirt.”

Adelia clutched her blanket more closely about her-last night she’d thrown everything she’d been wearing out the window. Luckily, Allie’s extra clothes had been included in Gyltha’s pack, along with Mansur’s, and were fit for them to wear. “I’m grateful, my lord.”

“Was the breakfast to your satisfaction? The cook’s Welsh as well.”

“Congratulate him for me,” she said. Skewered lamb, the tastiest she’d ever eaten, along with buttermilk and a form of cake called bara brith so rich that even Mansur hadn’t been able to finish all of it.

“Then when you’re dressed, my lord king would be happy to receive you and my lord Mansur. Only when you are ready, of course.” The young man went to the door and then turned back. “Oh, and one of our lads carved this for the little one.” He knelt to put his face on a level with Allie’s and handed her a wooden doll.