Ariana Franklin - Grave Goods aka Relics of the Dead

It was sad; it was horrifying. Adelia shook her head over it. “But what’s done is done. Emma is our priority now, and all this has nothing to do with her.”

“Dunno so much,” Gyltha said. “There’s summat shifty about that Brother Peter. He ain’t telling me all of it.”

…

THIS TIME ADELIA stood in a gleaming golden hall. Silver-clad knights held the fingertips of beautiful ladies and moved with grace to the tune of an unseen harpist. King Arthur saw her and approached, bending his crowned head in a greeting. He offered his hand. “Dance with me, mistress.” His voice was as big and handsome as his figure.

“I can’t dance in a dream,” Adelia told him.

“There’s stupid you are,” Arthur said.

He turned away from her and walked to the throne at the end of the hall where his queen was sitting. He bowed and Guinevere got up, put her hand into the king’s, and joined him on the floor. Her dress was of pure white feathers that fluttered as she moved. Whichever way she and Arthur turned, her face was hidden from Adelia, who saw only that a red stain was beginning to sully the feathers at the back of the queen’s waist. Soon blood was dripping in pools onto the floor, but she danced on…

“Stop it, stop it,” Adelia shouted, and was grateful to be woken up.

There’d been a noise.

Still shaking, Adelia lit a candle, wrapped herself in a shawl, checked that Allie was safely asleep, and went out onto the landing.

It was a hot night, and a grilled window above the stairs had been left unshuttered to provide a draft.

Her toe stubbed against something soft. Looking down, she saw the maid Millie curled up on a mat on the floor, her big eyes staring up in terror.

Adelia had been frightened as well, and her “What are you doing here?” was sharper than she meant it to be, until she realized the poor child couldn’t hear it anyway, and realized, too, that she’d disturbed the girl’s sleep.

“Don’t they give you a bed?” she asked uselessly. Servants as low-graded as Millie had to bed down wherever they could, mostly in the kitchen, but on a night like this the Pilgrim’s kitchen would still be intolerably hot from the cooking fires over which Godwyn sweated, its windows closed against robbers. Millie had sought out the only coolness she could find-and even that was forbidden by the injunction that, unless she was cleaning them, she should not be seen near the guests’ rooms.

“We’ll have to do better than this, won’t we?” Adelia gestured for the girl to come into her own room, where there was an extra truckle bed and another open window. She put her two hands against her cheek, indicating sleep, but Millie refused to move, her eyes more frightened than ever. It wasn’t allowed.

“Lord’s sake,” Adelia said crossly. She went to her bed, snatched up a pillow and a discarded quilt, took them to the landing, and arranged them on the floor. Even then, the girl had to be persuaded and, eventually, pulled onto them.

There were still sounds from the courtyard as if some animal was barging blindly around it, but when Adelia started to descend the staircase, Millie put out a hand to stop her, violently shaking her head.

“You don’t want me to go?” Adelia asked her. What awful thing went on in the Pilgrim at night that this sad creature didn’t want her to see?

Whatever it was, it would be better than returning to the haunting of a dream. Adelia gave a nod of what she hoped was reassurance and continued down the stairs. After all, robbers wouldn’t be calling attention to themselves this loudly.

Godwyn was crouching, listening, by the inn’s side door when Adelia reached it. “Who’s out there?” she asked him.

“Don’t know, mistress, and I don’t want to.”

They both heard a bleat as something bumped against the other side of the door.

“Sheep?” Godwyn said. “Where’s bloody sheep come from?”

Then she knew. “Open the door,” she said. “It’s Rhys.”

Godwyn was unpersuaded, so she had to pull back the bolts herself and was sent backward as the door flew inward with the pressure of the bard’s body falling against it.

“Oh, Lord, he’s hurt.” He’d been set on by the robbers on that dangerous road, pummeled, knifed, and it was her fault-she shouldn’t have sent him out on it.

Godwyn sniffed at the squirming bundle at his feet. “He ain’t hurt, mistress, he’s drunk.”

And so he was. That he’d managed to stumble his way home directionless and unnoticed by predators was witness to a God who smiled on the inebriated.

Godwyn was sent back to bed, and for the next hour Adelia supported the bard as she made him walk on tottering legs round and round the courtyard’s wellhead, twice pushing him toward a pile of straw onto which he could vomit, filling a beaker from water in the well’s bucket and making him drink it every time he opened his mouth to try and sing.

Eventually, both of them exhausted, she guided him into the barn and sat him on a hay bale to get out of him what information she could.

He seemed most proud of having returned at all. “Not to be late back, you said,” he told her, “I remembered. So back, back I came and yere I am. Robbers, yach, I spit on them; they don’t frighten Rhys ap Griffudd ap Owein ap Gwilym. I flew, like Hermes the messenger, patron of poets.” He’d also crawled. The knees of his robe had been worn through and, like his hands, were stuck with horse manure-the least unpleasant smell about him.

Actually, he’d done very well when, finally, Adelia managed to piece together an incoherent story. He’d inveigled himself into not only the servants’ hall of Wolvercote Manor but also the affections of its gatekeeper’s daughter, who had succumbed to his mysterious charm and with whom he had later passed a pleasing and energetic hour in a field haystack-“Lovely girl, Maggie, oh, lovely she was, very loving.”

“But did she tell you anything?”

“She did, oh, yes.”

What the gatekeeper’s daughter had told him in the haystack was that a month or more ago, a lady with an entourage had appeared at Wolvercote Manor’s lodge gates late at night, expecting to be let in and claiming that she was Lady Wolvercote come to visit.

“But the gatekeeper, he didn’t know her, so he called his Lady Wolvercote to the gates and there was a quarrel, though Maggie didn’t hear all of it, see, because her Lady Wolvercote sent her dada up to the house to get men-at-arms to bar entrance to that Lady Wolvercote.”

“Emma did go there, I knew it, I knew it. But what happened then?”

“Ah, well, there’s a mystery. See, Maggie said her dada seemed shamed for days after because of something that happened when our poor Emma was sent away.”

“Ashamed? Oh, dear God, the men-at-arms didn’t kill her?”

“No, no, don’t think so. What would they have done with the corpses? No corpses at Wolvercote, see. Maggie would’ve known.”

“But something happened. What was it?”

Rhys shifted; he was beginning to wilt. “Well, see, Maggie and me, we were interrupted then.”

In fact, at that point, Wolvercote’s hayward had been seen crossing the field in which the haystack stood and, since the hayward was affianced to young Maggie, the girl had advised Rhys to make a swift withdrawal-in more senses than one. Which he had, going back, fortunately unseen, to the hall’s kitchen, where he’d again entertained the dowager Lady Wolvercote’s servants, this time with some of his bawdier songs, his appreciative audience lubricating his voice with pints of the dowager’s ale until he’d been turfed out into the night by the dowager’s steward, a man lacking any appreciation of music, especially when it reached his bedroom window and woke him up.