Ariana Franklin - Grave Goods aka Relics of the Dead

“I mean Emma, Lady Wolvercote,” Adelia persisted.

“I know of no such person.”

Adelia tried to be patient; the woman still wore mourning for her son, though her black silk bliaut allowed a scarlet underdress to peep through at the neck and skirt, echoing the colors of the Wolvercote battle flags.

“She sent you a letter… a sweet letter, I saw it… from Aylesbury. To say she would be coming.”

Lady Wolvercote inclined her head. “A letter arrived a while ago from a creature claiming to be my son’s wife-some whore, no doubt, trying to extract money.”

“No,” Adelia said, quietly, “she was not. She was bringing your grandson to meet you.”

“Then she would have wasted her breath. I receive no bastards in this house.”

The woman used the words “whore” and “bastard” without anger, as if she was merely stating facts. At no point did her expression change to wrinkle the excellent skin of her pale face, nor did her bejeweled folded hands make any gesture; her voice was as level as if she was giving everyday instructions to a servant. It was like exchanging remarks with a speaking statue. When she turned her head to look at Allie, who was making another attempt on the settle, Gyltha hurried forward in rescue, as if afraid the gaze would petrify the child into stone.

“Are you telling me that you didn’t receive her?” Adelia asked. “When was this?”

“Am I not making myself clear?” Lady Wolvercote said. “There has been no encounter between me and the female you mention.”

“She didn’t come? Didn’t arrive at all?”

“I have said so.”

“Then where is she?”

“I do not know,” Lady Wolvercote said. “Nor do I care.” She went to a table and rang the small brass bell that stood on it.

Immediately, the steward was in the room. “My lady?”

“Take these people to the kitchen, John. See they receive the usual sustenance before they go. Also, you may carry food and ale to the creatures at the gate, but do not allow them inside-I will have none of the Plantagenet’s rabble in this house.”

She turned to go.

This was frightening. “But… but she must have turned up,” Adelia said in desperation. “She was on her way here. Where is she?”

The only answer was the brisk tap of Lady Wolvercote’s shoes on the risers of the staircase as she went up them.

As the door of the solar shut quietly behind its mistress, the steward stepped forward. “If you would come this way…”

“To the kitchen?” Gyltha shouted at him, as if she was above such places. “We ain’t coming to no bloody kitchen. You can stuff-”

Adelia put out a hand to stop the inevitable invective; though deeply disturbed, she was trying to keep her head. “We would be grateful for a supper before we go,” she told the steward meekly, “and so would our men.”

As they followed the steward, Gyltha gave her a look worthy of the gorgon who’d just left them. “You toleratin’ this?”

“Yes. We may learn something.” The servants were likely to know what had happened. Refused entry, Emma would not have gone quietly; people must have heard the argument-that encounter between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law would have been a case of Greek meeting Greek, the only trouble being that the marble-faced Greek upstairs had the advantage of possession.

As they were led through the hall’s serving door and across a courtyard, Adelia asked Mansur quietly in Arabic, “What do you think happened?”

“A coldhearted bint that one, but why should she lie?”

That was what was so worrying: If Lady Wolvercote had thrown Emma out of her house, she would not, Adelia felt, have had any compunction in saying so. In which case, Emma had not reached Wolvercote Manor at all. It might be that she had delayed her visit for some reason-but for a month? Or, and this was the worst possible explanation, she and the others had been attacked somewhere on the road to Wells.

However shaming it was to be fed in the kitchen like a beggar, it would be an opportunity to ask questions, and Adelia was prepared to suffer humiliation if she could find out what had happened to her friends.

They crossed a courtyard to a square, pretty building in the same stone as the house and with an octagonal roof. The heat coming out of its open door was nearly enough to send its visitors teetering backward.

“Perhaps you would prefer to sit on the lawn and eat,” the steward suggested.

Gyltha said with energy that she would prefer to eat with the soldiers at the gate and marched off, pulling Allie along with her.

Adelia and Mansur braved the kitchen. A single aperture near the roof allowed more smoke out than light in, leaving two fires set into the walls to illuminate a scene like Vulcan’s forge. A man stripped to the waist, his skin gleaming with sweat, retrieved rounded loaves from an oven with the aid of an enormous spatula. Other figures were setting a table in the center of the room with a surprisingly dainty collation of carved chicken and ham, flaked trout, preserves, scones, butter, and honey.

A pewter jug held wine, another ale, but when Mansur shook his head at both and Adelia explained that alcohol was unacceptable to his religion, one of the servants was dispatched to fetch cooled barley water from a cellar.

Obviously, the immutable law of hospitality to travelers, however base, was one the descendant of Rollo the Ganger had trained her staff not to break. Which in itself was concerning because if Emma and her party had arrived on the Wolvercote threshold, the people in this kitchen would have known about it-and they didn’t.

Or they said they didn’t.

Adelia questioned them as a group and then individually. “Have you heard of or seen a lady traveling with attendants in the area? She is young and fair and has a two-year-old child with her. Did she come here?”

She was competing for their attention with Mansur, whose robe and kaffiyeh with its golden-roped agal around his head seemed to engross and almost frighten them, as if an angel or demon had sprung through the door. The brilliant whiteness of his clothes-how he kept them so clean while traveling, Adelia had never fathomed-was always noticeable, but in ports like Cambridge where the occasional Arab trader came and went, his appearance did not excite quite so much curiosity. Here in the depths of the country, they had never seen anything like him.

“A lady,” Adelia reiterated, “with a child. In a traveling cart. Horses, maids, grooms, a priest.”

For a moment, the man shoveling the loaves swiveled around to look at her and she went expectantly toward him, but he shook his head and turned back to his bread.

No, no, they had seen nobody like that. The boy turning a spit crossed his fingers while making his denial, and a maid was taken with hysterical giggles, but these responses Adelia, again, had to attribute to Mansur’s presence. She gave up.

She tried questioning the steward when he led the two of them to the gates. He shook his head. “No, mistress, we have received no one of that description.”

“I didn’t ask if she was received, I want to know if she came here.”

“No, mistress, I’m sorry.”

Yet there was something…

Captain Bolt and his men were sitting on the grass under the trees by the side of the lane, their horses casting long shadows against the setting sun. They had eaten and drunk well, but the captain was displeased; his mounts had barely been able to get enough water from the nearby stream, which the summer had reduced to a trickle. “Wouldn’t let us in through the gates to get to a trough. Somerset hospitality? I spit on it.”

He was unmoved by the fact that Emma and her party were missing.

“Couldn’t you send one of your lads into Wells?” Adelia pleaded. “They may be putting up at one of the inns there.”