Ariana Franklin - Grave Goods aka Relics of the Dead

Blast the man, would it have hurt him at least to see Allie while we were in Wales?

She felt a familiar rush of fury and, with it, the accompanying, equally infuriating, recognition that it was unfounded. On several occasions he’d broken their agreement that they have nothing to do with each other by sending her money and a present for Allie on her saint’s day, but those had been so reminiscent of condescension to a kept woman and her bastard that-though she knew they were not-she’d sent them back.

Damn him anyway.

It was almost a relief to remember that there were still some days before he was due to arrive in Somerset so that, even if she needed his help, she couldn’t ask for it.

How to get evidence? How to get evidence?

There was no reason to suspect the monks-the mule had obviously been bought in good faith-yet an instinct she couldn’t account for was telling her to learn more about all of them.

Well, while she and Mansur were studying the skeletons, she was in a good position to do it. And she could set Gyltha on to Brother Peter… Yes, that’s what she’d do; Gyltha could get stones to talk.

Most imperative, though, was to scour the neighborhood for information. She discounted herself; despite all she could do to get rid of it, she still spoke with a trace of a foreign accent-and the English distrusted foreigners.

Gyltha again? No, if people were disappearing in the vicinity, they weren’t going to include Gyltha or Allie.

The sound of slurping intruded itself on her attention. It was coming from the bottom of the table, where Rhys the bard was spooning venison stew into his mouth with an energy that spattered it onto his clothes.

Rhys.

Adelia picked up her own spoon and began to eat.

…

“A VANISHED LADY, IS IT?” Rhys said, his protuberant eyes becoming misty. “There’s a subject, now. O lost dove, you are a cause for tears, lifeless we are without you…”

“Stop him,” hissed Adelia.

Mansur grabbed the harp from the man’s hand just in time.

Adelia closed her eyes and then opened them. “We don’t want you to lament her, Rhys,” she said. “We want you to find her.”

For privacy, they had taken him to Allie’s and her bedroom, a large, elm-floored chamber with a little window overlooking the road.

Rhys rubbed his head where Mansur had slapped it. “A quest, is it?”

“Exactly.”

“How do I do that, then?”

“We told you, boy,” Gyltha said patiently, wiping stew off his shirt. “All you got to do is go round the local markets, singing your songs like a… what is it?”

“A jongleur,” Adelia said.

“Like one of them. Listen to the talk, let people talk to you. See, Lady Emma and her people disappeared round here somewheres. Dirty work, we reckon, but a party that large must’ve left a trace behind it-stands to reason as somebody knows something.”

“A bard, I am, the finest of the Beirdd yr Uchelwyr, not a bawling street musician,” Rhys said with dignity. “Haven’t I sung in the greatest halls in Christendom?”

Mansur expired with force. “Let me kill him.”

But Adelia was interested. “You get invited into houses?”

“I have sung the prowess of lords in Dinefwr, in Brycheiniog…”

“Could you get invited into Wolvercote Hall?”

“Inhospitable lady, that one. Said we wasn’t to go back, didn’t she?”

“She did. But she didn’t see you with us. You’d just be an innocent traveling jongleur, as far as she’s concerned.”

“Maybe I could, then.”

“You must. It was where Lady Emma was heading. The dowager said she didn’t arrive, but I think the woman knows more than she’s telling; her servants are sure to have been a party to whatever it was.”

They began to describe the appearance of the missing. Rhys listened without comment to a description of the servants, the child, Master Roetger, but when he learned of Emma’s fair hair, her youth and beauty, and, especially, the wonderful voice that she had let fall silent, he was fired with a sudden passion.

“The lady has made a leap into my heart, like sun through glass,” he said, throwing his arms wide. “I am Fair Emma’s champion and defender from this day forth. I shall find her, and I shall feed the ravens with the corpses of her enemies.”

“Get on with it, then,” Gyltha said. “There’s a good lad.”

Suddenly she barged across the room, flinging open its door and peering around the narrow passage that served it and the adjacent chambers. “Nosy bloody woman,” she shouted into it.

“Was it Hilda listening?” Adelia asked, startled.

“Didn’t see her,” Gyltha admitted, closing the door. “Nobody there now, but some bugger set the floorboards a-creaking. Who else would it be? Wants to know too much of our business, she does.” Gyltha’s relationship with the landlady of the Pilgrim had not improved.

“Ghost, p’raps,” Rhys said. “Haunted, this place is. I feel it.”

“Nonsense,” Adelia said. She hated talk like that.

But there was no doubt that it was an inn of inexplicable noises: footfalls on dark, twisting staircases that nobody was climbing, a moan in a windless chimney, whispers from empty rooms. Had it been busy, as in the days before the fire, these things would not have been noticeable, but with only five guests, there was no doubt the Pilgrim could be eerie, especially at night.

The maidservant, Millie, a wraith of a girl, did not improve matters. She’d been born stone-deaf and went about her work so silently that in the shadows, one tumbled over her.

Her eyes radiated misery, and a pitying Adelia wondered what it was like to see incomprehensible mouths moving without hearing what came out of them. There must, she thought, be some method of communicating with the girl-and she had put finding out what it could be on her list of things to do.

That night Rhys, sitting late in the inn’s courtyard, began composing a new song. “I would walk the dew or a bitter desert to find you, O white phantom of my dreams…”

“Emma’s not a phantom,” Adelia interrupted, pausing to listen before going upstairs.

“Like Guinevere, she is,” Rhys said. “Nobody don’t know what happened to Arthur’s queen, either. There’s those say she was torn in pieces by wild horses for her adultery. Some think she disappeared into the mists of Avalon. White phantom, white owl, that’s what the name Guinevere do mean, see. Night spirit lost in the darkness.”

“Well, Emma definitely didn’t commit adultery,” said Adelia, and then thought how stupid she sounded. “Don’t be late back now. Promise.”

WHETHER IT WAS RHYS, the worry about Emma, or the skeletons, this was the night that the dreams began.

Adelia was not a dreamer usually, keeping herself so busy by day that in bed she slept the sleep of the just. But this night she found herself standing halfway up the Tor above Glastonbury Abbey, outside a cave.

It was misty. A bell hung on the branches of a hawthorn tree just beside the entrance. Unbidden, her hand reached out to the bell and touched it so that it rang.

She heard its toll echoing through the mist. A male voice came from deep inside the cave: “Is it day?”

Even in her dream, she knew from Rhys’s Arthurian songs that she must reply, “No, sleep on,” or she would awaken whatever or whoever was inside. But though she opened her mouth to give the answer, no sound came out. The mist swirled and darkened; someone was coming up the cave’s tunnel toward her.

She managed, “Emma? Is that you, Emma?”

But the same voice said, “I am Guinevere. Help me. I am hurt.”

There was a scraping sound, and Adelia knew that only the top half of the thing calling itself Guinevere was dragging itself along the tunnel toward her and knew, too, that she couldn’t bear to see it. She began backing into the mist, away from it, still hearing its moans as it slithered.