He was forcing life into Eleanor; her color had come back. “Yes,” she said, “yes. A pronged attack. But have we the men? Here in England, I mean? Schwyz has so few with him.”
“Wolvercote, my beauty. Lord Wolvercote’s camped at Oxford awaiting us with a force a thousand strong.”
“Wolvercote,” repeated Eleanor. “Yes, of course.” Despondency began to leave her as she climbed the ladder of hope the abbot held for her.
“Of course of course. A thousand men. And with you at their head, another ten thousand to join us. All them as the Plantagenet has trampled and beggered, they’ll come flocking from the Midlands. Then we march, and oh what joy in Heaven.”
“Got to get to fuck Oxford first,” Schwyz said, “and quick, for fuck’s sake. It’s going to snow, and we’ll be stuck in this fuck tower like fuck Aunt Sallies. At Woodstock, I told the stupid bitch it couldn’t be defended. Let’s go straight to Oxford, I said. I can defend you there. But she knew better.” His voice rose from basso to falsetto. “Oh, no, Schwyz, the roads are too bad for pursuit, Henry can’t follow us here.” The tone reverted. “Henry fuck can, I know the bastard.”
In a way, it was the strangest moment of the night. Eleanor’s expression, something between doubt and exaltation, didn’t change. Still kneeling by her side, the abbot did not turn round.
Didn’t they hear him?
Did I?
For Adelia had been taken back to the lower Alps of the Graubünden, to which, every year, she and her foster parents had made the long but beautiful journey in order to avoid the heat of a Salerno summer. There, in a villa lent to them by the Bishop of Chur, a grateful patient of Dr. Gershom’s, little Adelia had gone picking herbs and wildflowers with the goatherd’s flaxen-haired children, listening to their chat and that of the adults-all of them unaware that little Adelia could absorb languages like blotting paper.
A strange language it had been, a guttural mixture of Latin and the dialect of the Germanic tribes from which those alpine people were descended.
She’d just heard it again.
Schwyz had spoken in Romansh.
Without looking round, the abbot was giving the queen a loose translation. “Schwyz is saying as how, with your favor on our sleeve, this is a war we’ll win. When he do speak from his heart, he reverts to his own patter, but old Schwyz is your man to his soul.”
“I know he is.” Eleanor smiled at Schwyz. Schwyz nodded back.
“Only he can smell snow, he says, and wants to be at Oxford. An’ I’ll be happier in my bowels to have Wolvercote’s men around us. Can ee manage the journey, sweeting? Not too tired? Then let you go down to the kitchens with Monty and get some hot grub inside ee. It’ll be a cold going.”
“My dear, dear abbot,” Eleanor said fondly, rising, “how we needed your presence. You help us to remember God’s plain goodness; you bring with you the scent of fields and all natural things. You bring us courage.”
“I hope I do, my dear. I hope I do.” As the queen and Montignard disappeared down the stairs, he turned and looked at Adelia, who knew, without knowing how she knew, that he had been aware of her all along. “Who’s this, then?”
Schwyz said, “Some drab of Saint Albans’s. He brought her with him. She was in the room when the madwoman attacked Nelly and managed to trip her up. Nelly thinks she saved her life.” He shrugged. “Maybe she did.”
“Did she now?” Two strides brought the abbot close to Adelia. A surprisingly well-manicured hand went under her chin to tip her head back. “A queen owes you her life, does she, girl?”
Adelia kept her face blank, as blank as the abbot’s, staring into it.
“Lucky, then, aren’t you?” he said.
He took his hand away and turned to leave. “Come on, my lad, let us get this festa stultorum on its way.”
“What about her?” Schywz jerked a thumb toward the writing table.
“Leave her to burn.”
“And her?” The thumb indicated Adelia.
The abbot’s shrug suggested that Adelia could leave or burn as she pleased.
She was left alone in the room. Ward, seeing his chance, came back in and directed his nose at the tray with its unfinished veal pie.
Adelia was listening to Rowley’s voice in her mind. “Civil war…Stephen and Matilda will be nothing to it…the Horsemen of the Apocalypse…I can hear the sound of their hooves.”
They’ve come, Rowley. They’re here. I’ve just seen three of them.
From the writing table came a soft sound as Rosamund’s melting body slithered forward onto it.
SEVEN
By going against the advice of its commander and dragging her small force with her to Wormhold Tower, Eleanor had delayed its objective-which was to join up with the greater rebel army awaiting her at Oxford.
Now, with the weather worsening, Schwyz was frantic to get the queen to the meeting place-armies tended to disperse when kept idle too long, especially in the cold-and there was only one sure route that would take her there quickly: the river. The Thames ran more or less directly north to south through the seven or so miles of countryside that lay between Wormhold and Oxford.
Since the queen and her servants had ridden from their last encampment, accompanied by Schwyz and his men on foot, boats must be found. And had been. A few. Of a sort. Enough to transport the most important members of the royal party and a contingent of Schwyz’s men but not all of either. The lesser servants and most of the soldiers were going to have to journey to Oxford via the towpath-a considerably slower and more difficult journey than by boat. Also, to do so, they were going to have to use the horses and mules that the royal party had brought with them.
All this Adelia gathered as she emerged into the tower’s bottom room, where shouted commands and explanations were compounding chaos.
A soldier was pouring oil onto a great pile of broken furniture while servants, rushing around, screamed at him to wait before applying the flame as they removed chests, packing cases, and boxes that had been carried into the guardroom only hours before. Eleanor traveled heavy.
Schwyz was yelling at them to leave everything; neither those who were to be accommodated in the few boats nor those who would make the trek overland to Oxford could be allowed to carry baggage with them.
Either they didn’t hear him or he was ignored. He was being maddened further by Eleanor’s insistence that she could not proceed without this servant or that and, even when agreement was reached, by the favored ones’ refusal to stand still and be counted. Part of the trouble seemed to be that the Aquitanians doubted the honesty of their military allies; Eleanor’s personal maid shrieked that the royal wardrobe could not be entrusted to “sales mercenaries,” and a man declaring himself to be the sergeant cook was refusing to leave a single pan behind for the soldiers to steal. So outside the tower, soldiers struggled with frozen harnesses to ready the horses and mules, and the queen’s Aquitanians argued and ran back and forth to fetch more baggage, none of which could be accommodated.
There and then Adelia decided that whatever else happened, she herself would make for the towpath if she could-and quickly. Among this amount of disorganization, nobody would see her go and, with luck and the Lord’s good grace, she could walk to the nunnery.