“She won’t tell you even if she could,” Rowley said. “She’ll protect her employers.”
“I don’t think so, they beat her. Oh, look . . .”
For comprehension had come into Millie’s eyes. She was nodding, her finger tracing a line under Adelia’s drawing, standing up, beckoning. They followed her to the back door, where she drew the bolts, cowered for a moment at the swamping rain, and ran for the stables. Adelia and Rowley ran after her.
The storm had covered the sound of Rowley’s arrival. Before he’d done anything, he’d stabled and attended to his horse, now kicking in its stall, scared by the thunder.
Rowley went to its head and soothed it. “All right, old boy, all right, it’s only noise,” but his eyes were on Millie, who had gone to a woodpile by the door and was throwing logs aside to reach something underneath.
Nodding emphatically, she dragged a curved, broken section of wood from others that were similar and watched Adelia as she handed it to her.
“What is it?” Rowley asked.
It was an elaborately fretted piece of oak. “A bit of the hoop from Emma’s cart,” Adelia said. “It held up the canvas. It’s all here. They smashed it up for firewood.”
Dont weep, she told herself. You knew.
But despite everything, she had hoped to be wrong.
“For Jesus’ sake, why?” Rowley was becoming convinced. “Why would they kill them?”
“For gain. Dear Heaven, Rowley, that little boy. Emma loved him so much.”
Millie was still looking up, curving her right hand over three extended fingers of the other to make sure she understood. Three people in a covered cart.
Adelia nodded and shaped the question “Where are they?”
There was ferocity in Millie’s face. What had been done was wrong, wrong; now she could expose it. She got up, dragging Adelia back to the inn. Rowley followed, splashing through ankle-high water. If anything, the rain was intensifying; the courtyard’s drain couldn’t cope with it.
Millie made for the kitchen. She pointed to a large vat in one corner and then began tugging at it. It was too heavy for her.
Rowley put down the lantern and went to help. The vat moved, but its bottom hoop caught on something and they had to tip and roll it before it was free of the obstruction.
Underneath was a handle set into one of the kitchen’s flagstones.
“Shit,” Rowley said.
Millie held up three fingers again, her teeth bared as if in despair, then pointed. “God help them,” Adelia said, quietly. “They’re down there.” As lightning flashed again, so did hope. “Lift it, quick, quick. They might still be alive, prisoners.”
It was a heavy slab. With effort, Rowley hoisted it up and slid it to one side. A dank smell mixed with that of liquor came rushing out of the hole—but not the stink of corruption Adelia had been dreading.
Rowley knelt. “Halloo, there. Emma? Halloo.” He turned his head sideways, but there was only the beat of rain and a crack of thunder that shook the kitchen walls. “There are steps here,” he said.
“Well, there would be, it’s a cellar,” Adelia said. “Give me the lantern.”
“Reinforcement is required first, I think.” Still kneeling, Rowley produced his flask, offering it to Millie, who drank and handed it on to Adelia, who, shaking her head in impatience, gave it back to him.
He took a hefty swig. He was reluctant to go into the hole, she realized—he’d never liked enclosed spaces.
She took up the lantern, ready to shove him aside, but he grabbed it off her—“I’m going, I’m going”—and began to descend the steps.
“Be careful, Rowley,” she called to him, frightened, “Godwyn might be hiding down there.” She turned to Millie, shaking her head and putting up a hand to keep her back in case there was violence. “Stay here.”
Rowley’s voice came up to her with an echo. “Nobody here, but it’s not just a cellar, there’s a tunnel leading out of it. Watch your step, woman, it’s slimy.” Carefully, she followed him down. He was right; the steps were slippery, and very steep.
She was in a cellar, a big one, part of it a storeroom for extra tables and benches, some awaiting repair. Most of it housed ale barrels, and she wondered how they’d been carried up and down the steps before she saw a chute leading to a hatch in, presumably, the edge of the courtyard for ease of delivery by a brewer’s dray.
At the far end, Rowley stood, sword in one hand, lantern in the other, peering at an opening in the wall. He came back to her, pausing to examine a rack at the foot of the steps that was filled with different sizes of wine bottles. “Glass bottles,” he said, marveling and extracting one of them. “The Pilgrim does its guests well.”
When it wasn’t killing them. But, so far at least, there was no sign that murder had been done.
Adelia turned to look up at Millie peering anxiously down at her. She indicated to the girl that she and Rowley were going to proceed farther.
There was a crack, this time not of lightning, less loud but still vicious. Millie’s eyes went blank, and her body fell over the hole. Adelia started up the steps to go to her. She saw an arm drag Millie away by her hair before the flagstone at the stairhead’s entrance was slammed into place.
“Rowley. Oh, God, Rowley, they’ve killed Millie. They’re blocking us in.”
There was a smash as a bottle he’d been holding hit the floor. He pushed Adelia out of the way, gave her the lantern, and clambered up the steps to try to heave the slab up.
They both heard the scrape of the barrel being put back over it.
He heaved again. “Fuck it, I can’t shift the thing.” He came back down. “That way. We’ll get out by the chute.” He began clawing his way up the slide to dislodge the courtyard hatch at its top.
Again, they heard the scrape of something heavy being pulled across. Cursing, yelling, Rowley pushed at the hatch, pushed again and again. It didn’t budge.
After a while, he allowed himself to slide back. For a moment, he lay, face downward, on the chute. Then, picking himself up, he smiled at her. “Well, my love, we’re going to have to investigate the tunnel—and quick, before the bastards block the other exit.”
Taking the lantern, he ushered her toward the hole in the cellar’s wall, talking all the time. “That’s the nice thing about tunnels—they’ve got two ends. Not surprised to find one here. Sure as Adam and Eve it’ll come out somewhere in the abbey grounds. Abbots have always liked an escape route from invaders, or their own damned monks. And I’ll wager Brother Titus has nipped along this one a fair few times to sample some ale. …”
“It was Hilda who hit Millie,” Adelia said. “I saw her sleeve.”
“Nothing we can do about that yet.” Pulling her behind him, he entered the tunnel.
It was a large entrance, but if Brother Titus had used its passage to go to and fro, his bulk must have been mightily squeezed, for almost immediately the walls narrowed and lowered, enclosing them in a space little more than four feet square that, as far as they could see, went on and on. They were forced to bend double—Rowley was almost crawling, and Adelia had to take the lantern, maneuvering past him into the lead. Every thirty yards or so the tunnel widened into niches, vital for allowing a strained back to gain respite. Rowley ignored them. “Get on, get on, woman. Go faster.” He was panting. So was she.
Whoever had built the tunnel had been a craftsman; arched stones enclosed them on either side. Head bent, Adelia saw little except the mud of the floor as her boots squelched through it.
How far? Jesus, how far now? She’d lost all sense of direction and time. She was choking on her own breath. She gasped for the fresh air that was somewhere above her, the heavens impervious to the poor mice scuttling along their underground tube.
At one point, she thought she heard footsteps and imagined they were Godwyn’s or Hilda’s, running to block the other end of the tunnel against them. It was the thud of her own heart in her ears. We’re too far down to h
ear anything else, she thought, and began to choke again. She slowed, and Rowley’s head butted into her, the jolt nearly sending the lantern out of her hand so that she had to clasp it with the other to stop it from falling, burning her fingers on it. Oh, God, to be down here without light . . .
At the next niche she stopped and sat down to gain some breath, straightening her back and sucking her scorched fingers. Rowley peered at her. “Move, woman, move.”
“You go on,” she said. “I’ve got to rest.”
He collapsed beside her—the tunnel’s lack of height had made it harder going for him even than for her. He was looking at the lantern’s candle that had burned hideously low, then shifted with discomfort. “Hello, what’s this?”
He produced what he’d sat on—a plain deal box secured by a prong through a hasp. “I think we’ve discovered where our innkeeper and wife keep their treasures.”
She took the box. It rattled. Something of Emma’s might be hidden inside. But prong and hasp were so rusted together that she couldn’t open it.
Rowley grew impatient. “Let’s sit here and examine the contents, shall we? Come on.”
Clutching the box, she followed him, like Eurydice hastening after Orpheus, remembering that, at the last, Eurydice had been condemned to stay in the Underworld, never to see daylight again.
It was taking too long; if there was an end to this bestial tunnel, Godwyn and Hilda had reached it first and entombed them in it as they had Emma, Pippy and Roetger.
“What is it?” In front of her, Rowley was cursing.
“I left my bloody sword in that bloody cellar. I put it down to pick up a bottle.”
“I’ve got mine.” She’d been tempted to throw it away; the damn thing attached to the string round her waist kept bumping against her legs.
“Lot of good that bloody rusty thing is.”
It killed a man, she thought. God, don’t let me think about that now.
So far, at least, there was no sign that three prisoners had ever been down here. Had Millie tricked them? No. Or if she had, she’d suffered for it—the girl hadn’t feigned unconsciousness; there’d been no trickery there. She’d been felled by that madwoman like a sapling under the ax.
A madwoman. Up there. Shutting them in.
Adelia began to pray in time to her shuffling, splashing feet, “Almighty Lord, save us. Save us, O Almighty Lord, of Thy great mercy, save us,” to a God Who, for her, automatically encompassed the Judaism and Christianity of her foster parents and something of Mansur’s Allah.
It had come naturally to her as a child that the faith of three beloved worshippers must reach the same deity with the accord that they gave one another. She could do no less now as she stumbled and ached and sobbed for breath. Theology was beyond her; so, almost, was thought, only a plea for help that went lancing upward through the earth to the stars: “Save us.”
All light had diminished except for the lantern that dragged along the ground in Rowley’s hand ahead of her. Help was restricted to the edge of his cloak, where she clutched it. All at once, the image of his naked body in bed came to her so strongly that she was stabbed with lust and, if that was profanity at this desperate moment, she couldn’t help it because here, in extremis, it was too sweet to surrender. I have loved him, he has loved me, and that is something, dear God, it is something.
As if the thought had power, the ceiling began to rise so that her man could stand up straight, and she with him.
Now the tunnel was sloping upward, culminating in steps that led to a ceiling. Rowley took them at a run that pulled his cloak out of her grasp.
Adelia went up more heavily, realizing for the first time that her skirts were weighing her down. In the relief of reaching the tunnel’s end, the significance of the fact that, for the last few upward yards, she had been wading through ankle-deep water escaped her.
Above her, the lantern’s candle guttered. For a tremulous second she watched it flutter like a moth before it went out.
The darkness then was like no other. A moonless night always held some reflection that the eye could adjust to; this was the negation of light, an absence of everything. Adelia heard the useless echo of her whimper tremble into it as if it came from somebody else.
There was a scratching and tinny sound, followed by a blast of profanity from the bishop of Saint Albans. “What are you doing?” she screamed at him.
“There’s metal up here. A hatch or whatever it is, it’s metal. What do you think I’m doing? I’m trying to open the bastard.”
“Try feeling for a catch.”
“Oh, thank you, Doctor. I’ve done that. There isn’t one. Either the bugger’s locked in place or there’s some sort of cantilever on the other side that lifts it. I’m hitting it—somebody might hear us.”
Nobody would hear that. Adelia struggled to untangle the sword hanging from her waist and then held it up until it found Rowley’s boot. “Try this.”
She felt a fumbling hand take the weapon from her. There was a reverberating clang as metal hit against metal. That was better. But who was up there to hear? Only the couple who’d buried them—and they weren’t going to lift anything.
Adelia covered her ears as clang after clang made her head rock. Between every clash, Rowley shouted halloos and curses until she thought he’d go mad—or she would. Feeling each step with her hands, she climbed up until she touched his leg. “Let me try.”
He hauled her up beside him and she realized she was still clutching the box from the niche. She threw it down and raised her arms, encountering metal. She traced it with her fingertips—a shallow, inverted dome of iron. It was completely smooth, no protuberance that suggested a catch on this side of it.
“See?” Rowley gave her a push aside and resumed his assault. But that was it; she couldn’t see. Eyes were useless; there was only touch and hearing—and terror.
After an age of noise, she couldn’t bear it anymore. She reached out for his arm, found it, and held it. “Let’s go back to the cellar.”
The thought of a return battling through darkness . . . but there’d be space there, and comforting, normal things like barrels … it might be that Millie wasn’t dead and could let them out . . . something.
She said, remembering, “The hatch on the barrel chute was made of wood, perhaps we can hack our way up through it and shift whatever was on it.”
“Or at least drink ourselves to death.”
That he’d stopped howling and now sounded merely disgruntled was balm to her. She could bear up if he could, but only if he could.
On her bottom, investigating with her feet, she managed to hump herself down the steps. When she heard Rowley join her, she spread her arms so that she could feel the rough texture of the tunnel wall on either side and began to wade down the incline they had come up.
And she was wading. Water surrounded her knees. She went on. It was up to her waist.
Stupidly, she wondered if she’d started down a wrong branch of the tunnel into some massive drain. But there’d been no branching off. . . .
Somebody said, “There’s water coming in, Rowley.”
Somebody else said, “So there is, my love. We’d better go back.”
She felt a hand against her face work its way down to her shoulder, guiding her backward until they reached the steps, then helping her up to the landing at the top.
She clung onto him. “Where’s the water coming from? What’s happening?”
“I’ll tell you what’s happening. . . .” And from the sound of his voice, Adelia envisaged him spitting the words from between his teeth. “Our noble landlord has opened the chute in the cellar. Taken the fucking hatch off. This is floodwater.”
“Floodwater?”
“In case you didn’t notice, it was raining outside. Still is, presumably. It’s coming down that bloody chute. It’s filled the cellar and now it’s flooding the sodding tunnel.”
“But . . . that would take hours.”
“Sweetheart,
we’ve been down here for hours.”
In her mind’s eye, Adelia saw the hills around. Glastonbury Sheeting rain, unable to soak into the drought-baked, rock-hard earth, would be funneling down their sides into the High Street like rivers in full spate. The Pilgrim’s courtyard had already been an overflowing sink when she’d last seen it. With the plug hole of the barrel hatch removed, water would be pouring down the chute. . . .
“One thing,” Rowley’s voice said. “It’ll ruin the bastard’s ale.”
“Will it reach us up here?”
Her answer was another ear-wounding clang. He was bashing the sword hilt against the iron hood again.
A stupid question; how could he know? It would depend on whether the rain stopped in time. And then, she thought, whether it does or not, we’re dead. They were in a diminishing space formed by brick, iron, and rising water, all of them impermeable. The air would go bad. In Salerno, she’d once worked on a corpse her foster father had bought for her to practice on, that of a man who’d fallen into a large, empty wine vat, his flailing arm catching its lid and bringing it down on top of him.
“Asphyxiation,” she’d said, finishing the examination.
“Correct,” he’d said. “It is what happens when people are enclosed like that.”
“I know,” she’d said, “but why? It was an enormous vat, why couldn’t he go on breathing? What causes people to asphyxiate in confined spaces?”
“Air hunger,” he’d said. “Our breathing uses it up or poisons it, I don’t know how.”
They would die, like the man in the vat.
“Allie.” Again, it was a cry of agony that seemed to come from somebody else.
The clanging stopped and was replaced by Rowley’s voice: “She’ll be provided for. I’ve made a will.”
“Allie.” A document couldn’t pick a child up or kiss a scratch better or cure the need for a mother who wasn’t there.
Another clang, the last, and she was rocked as he miscalculated where she sat and his body thumped against her before it found its place at her side. “Goddamn you, woman.” Hot breath fanned her ear. “This is your fault. Why in hell didn’t you marry me?”
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