Ariana Franklin - Grave Goods aka Relics of the Dead

“Not for six months, you won’t.” Adelia began making a list. “The whole lower leg will have to be splinted. A decoction of willow bark for the pain. And comfrey, we’ll need comfrey, but that grows everywhere, and we must hope it works on tendons as well as broken bones.” She started off toward where the traders were dismantling their pavilions to beg some struts for a splint.

Emma called after her: “Is he in much pain?”

“Agony.”

AT LAST IN BED at the Aylesbury inn at which they were all staying, Adelia worried about the heel most of the night. She had put on a rough splint for the time being, but that wouldn’t be good enough, not if it was to endure the rigors of travel over rutted roads and prevent its owner from being tempted to put his foot to the ground, something that had to be avoided at all costs.

At dawn she was in the inn’s stable yard, making inquiries to a sleepy ostler as to where she might gather comfrey. Since every county had its own name for the plant, he and she were at crosspurposes for a while until, finally enlightened, the man said, “Oh, you’re a-meaning knit-bone,” and directed her to an untidy patch of ground beyond a vegetable garden where clusters of young lance-shaped leaves and new yellow flowers were becoming visible in the dark green crowns of the old plants.

It was mostly comfrey roots that Adelia wanted, and she dug for them with her trowel, wishing she’d worn gloves-the hairy leaves were an irritant to the skin.

Carrying her spoils back to the inn, she found the pilgrims at breakfast and in shock. They’d received appalling news.

“ Glastonbury is burned down,” the Yorkshireman told her. “Aye, we had it from two separate peddlers last night. Burned down. Glastonbury. Glastonbury. Reckon the heart’s gone out of England.”

It was a heart that had been beating for more centuries than anybody could remember, empowered by the holiest of the holy-Saint Joseph of Arimathea, Saint Patrick of Ireland, Saint Bride, Saint Columba, Saint David of Wales, Saint Gildas… And now it had stopped.

There was puzzlement in the room, as well as shock. A glove maker from Chester expressed it: “You’d have thought with all those saints, at least one of ’em would’ve put the damned fire out.”

“King Arthur should have,” said somebody else. “How could he sleep through that?”

There was a feeling that the blessed dead of Glastonbury had not pulled their weight.

Emma entered the room to be told of the calamity and was aghast. “ Glastonbury?”

“Aye. Never have thought it, would thee?” the Yorkshire burgher said. “And a right conflagration it were, so it’s said; noothing left, not noothing, sooch a pity. And I were looking forward to a blessing from Joseph of Arimathea.” He shook his head. “Should’ve set out earlier.”

The Cheshire abbess was less upset. “I said all along we ought to be making for Canterbury. With Saint Thomas we are assured of even stronger sanctity, his being the latest martyrdom. Ah, who would have thought such a blessed saint would be killed by his king…”

The Yorkshireman cut her off in mid-flow; her companions had heard the abbess’s strictures on Henry Plantagenet’s perfidy in crying for the death of his obstructive archbishop many times before. He said, “Aye, well, that’s where we’re a-going now-to Canterbury.” There was no virtue to be had from Glastonbury ’s bones and relics now that they had been reduced to ashes, whereas there was much to be gained from the vials of Saint Thomas à Becket’s blood that were on sale in the cathedral where he’d died.

Bills paid, packing done, the pilgrims congratulated Emma on her triumph in the trial by combat, which, they said, they had much enjoyed, and bade her farewell. The man from Yorkshire kissed her hand. “Right sorry we are to be leaving your coompany, my lady.”

“I’m sorry, too.” Emma meant it. Without the pilgrims, and with Master Roetger disabled, the journey to Wells would be considerably less safe.

Adelia didn’t stay to wave good-bye; she was already at work to ensure the immobilization of a heel.

Gyltha was ordered to the kitchen to begin pounding the pile of comfrey roots to a mash in the largest mortar the inn could provide, while Mansur, armed with an ax, a whittling knife, and instructions, was sent off to find an ash tree and a willow. Adelia herself impounded the services of Emma’s most experienced groom, Alan, and both were to be seen in the stable yard drawing diagrams in its dust.

To facilitate matters, Master Roetger was carried to the cart and put on its cushions with his legs dangling over the tailboard until the bad one, which was bare, could be placed with care across a sawing horse. It was a maneuver causing excitement among the inn servants, who forgathered under the impression that they were to watch a Saracen doctor-Mansur’s assumed role-perform an amputation.

Instead, they saw Gyltha hold some of the comfrey leaves to the heel while Adelia gently plastered them into place with the unpleasant-smelling green-black paste from the mortar, eventually encasing the entire foot, including the sole, and lower shin with it.

Under the lash of the innkeeper’s tongue, his staff returned to work-it was, after all, only the usual home remedy of comfrey being applied to a breakage by a couple of women.

When the foot was done, the broken arm was treated to the same procedure. Pain compressed the patient’s mouth into a straight line and sweat glistened in the furrows of his forehead, but he tried to show interest.

“In my country this plant we also eat,” he said. “Schwarzwurz, we call it. Fried in batter, it is good.”

Adelia was interested. England ’s peasantry ate boiled comfrey, as they did nettles, as a vegetable. To put the leaves in egg, flour, and milk argued a higher standard of living.

“And now we’re batterin’ you,” Gyltha told him, making him smile.

Finished, Adelia stood back. “There. How does that feel?”

“Six months, truly?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“But I walk again?”

“Yes,” she told him, hoping to God she was right, “you will.”

Leaving the patient as he was while the plaster dried in the sun, she and Gyltha repaired to the horse trough to wash the stuff off their hands. Emma, who’d been watching, came up to them. “How long is this going to take?”

Adelia began explaining that there was more to do, but Emma, exclaiming, walked away.

“Temper, temper,” Gyltha said. “What’s up with her?”

“I don’t know.”

There was a lot more to be done. Adelia, the groom, and Mansur worked all morning weaving a cage of withies they’d devised for the leg. It had a base of wood that Mansur had whittled into a bowl that should, if Roetger accidentally put his foot to the ground, keep most of the pressure off his heel.

Occasionally, Emma came to the window of her room to watch them and huff with impatience, but Adelia took no notice-this was an injury new to her, and she was determined to mend it.

It was after noon by the time the comfrey plaster had dried rock-hard and the cage could be strung around it. Even then, Adelia delayed the start of the journey until she had attached the front of the cage by string to a hook in the edge of the cart’s roof so that the champion’s foot was gimballed and any jolt in traveling would merely sway it in the air.

“He looks ridiculous,” Emma said.

For the first time, Roetger complained. “I am like trussed chicken.”

But Adelia was adamant. “You stay trussed,” she said. After Aylesbury, they would be turning southwest onto minor roads that were unlikely to have been kept in good repair.

Nor were they. During the early spring rains, the wheels of farm vehicles had scored ruts as deep as ditches into surfaces that nobody had subsequently filled in, leaving them to dry as hard as cement.