For a second, because her mind was directed only at reaching her daughter, Adelia thought, It doesn’t matter, there are enough of us to dig a path…
And then, “Dear Lord, where are they?” she said. “All those people?”
The sun went on shining beautifully, unfairly, pitilessly, on an empty river where, perhaps, in its upper reaches men and women sat in their boats as unmoving as Giorgio sat in this one, where, perhaps, corpses rolled in sparkling water.
And what of the riders? Where were they, God help them? Where was Rowley?
The answering silence was terrible because it was the only answer. It trapped the oaths and grunts of effort from the barge as if in a bell jar, so that they echoed back in an otherwise soundless air.
The men on board it labored on, plunging poles through the shallow, thickening water until they found purchase on the river bottom and could push the barge another yard, another…
After a while, the bell jar filled with sounds like the cracks of whips-they were encountering surface sheet ice and having to break through it.
They inched past the point of the river where it divided and a stream turned off toward the mill and the bridge. There was no noise from the millrace, where a fall of water hung in shining stillness.
And, oh, God Almighty save our souls, in all this wonder, somebody had used the bridge as a gibbet; two glistening, distorted figures hung from it by the neck-Adelia, looking up, glimpsed two dead faces looking quizzically sideways and down at her, saw two pairs of pointing feet, as if their owners had been frozen in a neat little dancing jump.
Nobody else seemed to notice, or care. Walt and Jacques were using the oars to pole the rowing boat along so that it didn’t drag on the barge. Dakers sat next to her now, her hood over her face; somebody had placed the sail around the two of them to keep them warm.
They inched past the bridge and into an even wider bend where the Thames ran along a Godstow meadow-which, astonishingly, still was a meadow. Some freak of the wind had scoured it of snow so that a great expanse of frosted grass and earth provided the only color in a white world.
And here the barge stopped because the ice had become too thick to proceed farther. It didn’t matter, it didn’t matter-there was a scar leading down the rise from the convent to the shore and, at the bottom of it, convent men with shovels were shouting and waving, and everybody in the two boats was shouting and waving back as if it were they who were marooned and had glimpsed a rescuing sail coming toward them…
Only then did Adelia realize that she had been sustained through the night on borrowed energy and it was now being debited out of her body so quickly that she was close to the languor that comes with death. It had been a very near thing.
They had to disembark onto ice and cross it to reach land. Ward’s paws slipped and he went down, sliding, until he could scrabble resentfully up again. An arm went round Adelia’s waist to help her along and she looked up into the face of Mansur. “Allah is merciful,” he said.
“Somebody is,” she said. “I was so frightened for you. Mansur, we’ve lost Rowley.”
Half-carried, she stumbled across the ice beside him and then across the flattened grass of the meadow.
Among the small crowd ahead, she glimpsed Eleanor’s upright figure before it disappeared into the tunnel that led up to the convent gates, a steep, thin pathway with walls twice head height on either side. It had been dug to take Rosamund’s coffin; instead, it received a litter made out of oars and wrapped around with sailcloth, under which rested the contorted body of a mercenary soldier.
A beautiful tunnel, though. At its top stood an elderly woman, her studied impassivity displaying her relief. “You took your time.”
As Adelia fell, babbling, into her arms, Gyltha said, “A’course she’s well. Fat and fit as a flea. Think as I can’t look after her? Gor dang, girl, you only left her yesterday.”
EIGHT
If her heart sank at the prospect of feeding and housing the forty or so exhausted, bedraggled, frostbitten men, women, and dogs shambling through her gates, Mother Edyve gave no sign of it, though it must have sunk further when she saw that they included the Queen of England and the Abbot of Eynsham, neither of them friends to Godstow, to say nothing of a troop of mercenary soldiers.
It didn’t occur to her that she was welcoming a force of occupation.
She ordered hot possets for her guests. She surrendered her house to Queen Eleanor and her maids, lodged the abbot and Montignard in the men’s guesthouse with their and the queen’s male servants, and quartered Schwyz on the gatekeeper. She put the queen’s dogs and hawks in her own kennels and mews, distributing the other mercenaries as widely as she could, billeting one on the smith, another in the bakery, and the rest among individual-and aged-retainers and pensioners in the houses that formed a small village within the convent walls.
“So’s they’m split up and not one of ’em where there’s girls,” Gyltha said approvingly. “She’s a wily one, that Ma Edyve.”
It was Gyltha who had carried the report of the events at Wormhold to the abbess. Adelia was too tired and, anyway, hadn’t been able to face telling her of Rowley’s death.
“She don’t believe it,” Gyltha said on her return. “No more don’t I. Now, then, let’s be seeing to you two.”
Mansur hated fuss and kept declaring that he was well, but he had been exposed to the open cold while poling the barge as Adelia, Jacques, and Walt had not, and she and Gyltha were worried about him.
“Look what you done to your hands, you great gawk,” Gyltha said-her disquiet always took the form of anger. Mansur’s palms were bleeding where his mittens, and then his skin, had worn through against the wood of the pole.
Adelia was concerned more for his fingers, which were white and shiny where they emerged from the wrecked mittens. “Frostbite.”
“They cause me no pain,” Mansur said stolidly.
“They will in a minute,” Adelia promised.
Gyltha ran to Mansur’s lodging to get him a dry gown and cloak, and brought back with her a bucket of hot water from the kitchen and would have plunged her lover’s hands into it, but Adelia stopped her. “Wait til it cools a little.”
She also prevented Gyltha from hooking the brazier nearer to him. The condition of frostbite had interested her foster father after he’d seen the effects of it during their holidays in the Alps-he had actually braved a winter there to study it-and his conclusion had been that the warming must be gradual.
Young Allie, always deprived of burning herself on the brazier-it was kept within a guard-turned her attention to trying to pull the bucket over her head. Adelia would have enjoyed watching the resulting tussle between Gyltha and that remarkable child if her own toes hadn’t ached agonizingly with the return of blood to frozen muscle and bone.
She estimated the worth of dosing herself and Mansur with willow-bark decoction for the pain and then rejected it; each of them was a stoic, and the fact that her toes and his fingers were turning red without blistering indicated that the affliction was mild-better to keep the drug for those in whom it might be worse.
She crawled onto the bed to suffer in comfort. Ward leaped on after her, and she had neither the energy nor will to turn him off. The dog had shared his body heat with her on the boat-what were a few fleas if she shared hers with him?
“What did you do with Dakers?” she asked.
“Oh, her.” Gyltha had not taken to the walking skeleton that Adelia had dragged, unaware that she was dragging it, through the convent gates, but had seen, because Adelia was dragging it, that there was a necessity to keep it alive. “I give her to Sister Havis, and she give her to Sister Jennet in the infirmary. She’s all right, ugly thing.”