Adelia made up her mind. “The truth. They are both to blame.”
Once the incision had been neatly sewn up and the beard combed down over it, Na Roqua, Na Lizier, and the rest of the village were allowed into the hall.
“Auguste tells me that what happened was this,” Adelia said clearly. “You, Na Roqua, left the door to your carding room open last night… ”
“No, I didn’t,” Na Roqua shouted. “I never do.”
“You did last night, so Auguste says.”
The old woman sulked. “Well, I may have done.”
“And Auguste found his way in and began eating your sheep’s wool…”
“That wouldn’t kill him,” a Roqua son pointed out. “Auguste could eat anything.”
“He also ate at least one of the carding combs,” Adelia continued firmly “Its pointed pins stuck the ball of wool into his throat so that he couldn’t swallow it. In his distress he found his way out into the night air and then he stumbled into Na Lizier’s house-your door wasn’t on the latch, was it?”
Na Lizier shrugged. Nobody in Caronne bothered to secure their doors-who was there to secure them against?
“Again, gasping for air, he made his way up the stairs to the roof. The exertion drove the comb’s pins more firmly into his poor throat, blocking it up with the wool, so that, by the time he gained the roof he was dying. Auguste tells me that Na Lizier found him there dead when she got up this morning and, frightened that Na Roqua would suspect her of murdering him-as you did, Na Roqua-pitched his body into the alley He doesn’t blame you for that, Na Lizier, any more than he blames you, Na Roqua, for carelessly leaving the carding room door open. He wishes you both to be the friends you always were.”
Some of it was speculation, but some of it deduction; it was the best she could do.
There was silence in the hall, except for an onset of grizzling from the Count of Caronne, still tied to his mother’s back and wanting his next feed.
The suspense was awful.
Na Roqua’s walking stick rapped on the stone floor as she made her way over to where Na Lizier stood. “I am sorry,” she said.
“And I am sorry.”
The two old women embraced.
Under the wave of cheering, Fabrisse put her arm around Adelia. “Our savior,” she said.
Auguste was picked up once more by the Roqua sons and taken away for honorable burial.
Following them out, Na Roqua paused to stare into Adelia’s face. “Did Auguste happen to tell you whose body his soul will inhabit now?”
“Er, no. I’m afraid he didn’t.”
Na Roqua sighed. “You should have asked him.”
Solving the riddle of Auguste’s death had been an incident of little moment compared to other investigations Adelia had successfully pursued, but for the health of Caronne it had been important, and at the Christmas Eve feast that night, she was the heroine.
Grateful Roqua and Lizier men presented her and the other ex-prisoners with beautifully wrought sheepskin coats; she had to raise her beaker and drink in reply to the dozens of toasts that were made to her; a wreath of bay leaves was put on her head; and, finally, after three hours of eating, and leaning somewhat heavily on Mansur’s arm-the Arab, banned by his religion from alcohol, being the only sober person around-was put on a chair on a platform in the bailey to watch the village dance around the enormous bonfire that Ulf and Rankin had built for the purpose.
It wasn’t possible for the visitors to join in; the tapping, leaping steps of the dancers-men revolving around the fire, women and children forming little prancing rings of their own on the edges-were too complicated for the uninitiated to join in.
Music was being provided by panpipes, but all of a sudden there was a blast of sound as Prades, the local blacksmith, blew down a pipe he was holding into a fearsome-looking contraption that looked like nothing so much as an enormous pig’s bladder with some of its tubes still attached. The resultant wail was so loud that it could have been heard ten miles away Adelia found herself flinching. They’ll hear. They’ll come. She pulled herself together. This sound belongs to these mountains; why should anyone come?
“Oh, bloody hell,” Ulf said. “It’s the bagpipes.”
Rankin who’d been lolling on the platform, drunkenly nuzzling Thomassia’s cheek, was all at once on his feet. “D’ye ken that? By all that’s holy, it’s the peeps. The peeps. I’ve come home.” He aimed himself toward Prades like a thirsty man toward a fountain, clutching at the man’s arm, begging.
“He’s not, is he?” Ulf moaned. “Yes, he bloody is. He’s going to get himself some peeps. We’re doomed.”
And for the first time in a long time, Adelia laughed.
THE SNOW THAT Adelia dreaded might stop the O‘Donnell coming for them did not arrive, but neither did the O’Donnell. Instead a Cathar perfect arrived to spread his faith in the village.
“Oh, God,” Adelia said, when she heard. “He’ll put you in danger.” The “you” was becoming as important to her as the “us.”
“Will you stop it?” Fabrisse said wearily. “We have posted lookouts for strangers. Brother Pierre is known to us, a good man. He is at Na Roqua’s if you want to go and hear him.”
Adelia consulted the others.
“We should go,” Mansur said. “He may have news of Sister Aelith.” The thought of the hunted, motherless girl disturbed them all.
They didn’t see the perfect, not that day; they were precluded by the number of bodies crammed into Na Roqua’s house, and by those sitting outside it, listening to Brother Pierre’s voice issuing through the windows. He was reading from the Cathar bible in the Catalan patois the villagers could understand, speaking Christ’s words in their own language rather than in the Latin spouted by the priests.
Adelia knew by now that, if Caronne’s villagers were illiterate, they were at least masters of debate, especially on theological matters, and that questions and answers would extend deep into the night.
Leaving the others to listen, she walked back to the castle, followed by Ward, and braved the cold wind for a while on its bridge to look toward the ice-capped peaks of the Pyrenees.
They were a climate gauge; they played Grandmother’s Footsteps; sometimes, as now, their clarity augured a fine day; when they jumped forward, so near that they seemed only a mile or so away, they foretold bad weather. She had come to love them, imagining them as a refuge where misfits like herself could live free on those tree-crammed, bear-haunted, wildlife-infested slopes. I could settle there, she thought. Allie and Gyltha and Mansur and Boggart and Ulf and I, we could be safe. Henry Plantagenet couldn’t find me and send me on any more missions ever again.
A voice in her head asked: And Rowley?
Suddenly she wanted him very, very badly He can come, too.
There was a nudge on her ankles; Ward was getting cold. She patted his head, and they went together into the castle.
“Were you never tempted to become a Cathar?” Adelia asked of Fabrisse, who was putting the Count of Caronne into his cradle.
“No.” Fabrisse bent down to kiss the count’s cheek. “When this one was born, he was ill, so ill. We didn’t think we would save him. That paifaít back there, he came to me and said I shouldn’t feed my child, to allow him to suffer the Cathar endura and let him die. He would administer the consolamentum, he said, so as to ensure that little Raymond would be an angel of God in Heaven. But I would not do it. How could I withhold my milk from my own flesh and blood? We fought for him, Thomassia and I, and he lived.”
It was in accord with what Sister Ermengarde had said. Adelia shook her head in amazement at the way every established religion she knew of, even this one, tried to pervert simple, human love out of its natural course.
HALFWAY THROUGH THE next morning, little Bérenger Pons, who’d been sitting, shivering, in the church’s high window, watching the track that led eventually to Carcassonne, snatched up the hand-bell that lay beside him and began clanging it
even as he scrambled down his ladder. Still ringing, he ran up the village street, shouting at the top of his squeaky voice: “The bayle. The bayle is coming.”
Immediately, women emerged from their houses and hurried to the communal barn that stored the grain sacks. Men dropped what they were doing in the fields and ran to the sheep pens. Na Roqua came out of her doorway, pulling with her the Cathar perfect who’d spent the night in her downstairs room. As if he were a horse, she gave him a slap on his rump to set him galloping toward the castle.
In the castle itself, Fabrisse pushed the priest out of her bed and rushed out to look down on young Bérenger as he arrived in the hall still gasping his message. “How long before he gets here?”
“Thirty paternosters, maybe thirty-two.” Having no clocks, Caronne people didn’t reckon time in minutes.
“Good boy. Thomassia.” She rushed to raise the rest of her household. “Quick, quick. The bishop’s tax inspector is coming. Follow Thomassia.”
Scrambling into their clothes as they went, Adelia, Boggart, Mansur, Rankin, and Ulf made their way down to the hall, Fabrisse’s priest with them.
Thomassia was already there, heading out of the entrance, waving her arms to spur the fugitives into a run. There was a momentary constriction at the end of the bridge as they were joined by the Cathar perfect while the Christian priest, still buttoning himself up, pushed past him to gallop down the hill toward his church. Then they were on a path that wound round the back of the castle and headed down toward the forest. On other tracks, they could see shepherds urging their flocks in the same direction, their huge white-coated Pyrenean dogs snapping at the animals’ heels to make them go faster.
Adelia picked Ward up-the shepherd dogs terrified him-and kept running. Ulf, Rankin, and Mansur brought up the rear, helping a lumbering Boggart to keep going.
The forest enfolded them, but Thomassia, holding her chest with the effort, kept on, eventually veering away from the track to wade through dead bracken until she came to a full stop facing an outcrop of rock draped with overhanging ivy. She pulled the thick fronds aside to reveal a cave and ushered them in. “Stay.”
Backing out, she arranged the ivy so that it recovered the entrance.
In the dimness, the deep voice of the Cathar perfect said: “She will return to the castle, brushing out our tracks as she goes. A good woman, Thomassia.”
Of them all, he was the least out of breath; he’d run with an easy lope, thin brown legs showing beneath the robe he’d tucked up into his belt. Stooping to try and get rid of the stitch in her side, Adelia gasped: “I suppose you’re used to this.”
“It has not been unknown.” He sounded amused. He gave a bow.
Adelia introduced herself and the others.
“What’s them people who live in caves. Troglodytes. That’s what we’re becoming,” Ulf grumbled. “Bloody troglodytes. Well, I suppose it gives us a day off work.”
It was a point and, like the peasants they were turning into, he and Rankin, Mansur, and Boggart used the time to doze.
Adelia, the only one with reasonable Catalan at her command, felt that she should be entertaining the perfect with conversation, but kept quiet, hoping the man wouldn’t raise a matter she dreaded.
He did. “You were at Aveyron with Ermengarde when she died,” he said.
“Yes.”
He surprised her. “I saw you. I was there also, a witness, hidden in the crowd. I sent up prayers for her soul, not that she needed them, the good, good woman. And I prayed for you and yours. I rejoice in your escape.”
Adelia said shortly: “You were brave to be there.” She changed the subject. “Have you any news of Sister Aelith?”
“We have sent her into the Pyrenees until she has recovered her courage to come back and resume her mission.”
“I hope she doesn’t.”
“She will. She is her mother’s daughter. She, too, was at Aveyron.”
“Oh, my God, tell me she wasn’t watching.”
“No. She stayed in one of our friends’ houses near the palace gates, but she wished to be in the vicinity, as close to her mother as possible.”
Adelia nodded. She could understand that.
Brother Pierre continued to talk.
“I’m sorry” Adelia roused herself from thoughts of the girl’s agony. “I didn’t catch that.”
“I said there was another one of Princess Joanna’s party there; Aelith saw him when he was going through the palace gates. Another witness to pray for Ermengarde, perhaps.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Someone she had seen with you, when you and the people who were sick arrived at her and Ermengarde’s cottage in the hills. I think that was what she said.”
“No,” Adelia said, “there wouldn’t have been anyone else we knew.”
“Oh, yes,” Brother Pierre said. “Aelith recognized him.”
Adelia felt the blood drain from around her mouth. Somebody they knew had watched Ermengarde burn. Somebody had seen them in chains-and had not reported back, had done nothing about it.
“What…?” She couldn’t get the words out. She tried again: “What did he look like?”
“Who?” The perfect had reverted to other matters.
“The man Aelith saw. What did he look like?”
Brother Pierre shrugged. “She did not say”
But she’d recognized him as one of their own.
Clutching her head, Adelia tried to reconstruct the events of the day when the dysentery had struck. Ulf had been taken ill on the road, others had started to fall, Locusta had gone looking for somewhere to take them…
He’d come back with Sister Aelith, yes, that’s right; she remembered him and the little Cathar coming down the hill, the offer of the cowshed as a hospital. And then… what happened then? There’d been a discussion, Dr. Arnulf saying it was the plague… who else had been there in the road that Aelith had seen?
The perfect was becoming concerned for her: “Are you unwell, my child?”
Adelia got up and ran to where Ulf was sleeping. She shook him. “Who else was there?”
“Eh?”
“On the road, that day… the dysentery… when we first met Aelith… who else was there?”
“What’re you talking about?”
Adelia told him.
Ulf took in a deep breath of satisfaction. “What did I say? Didn’t I say there’s been a snake in the grass all along?”
“But who is it?” She shook him. “Who was there that morning?”
The others were awake now.
“She wouldn’t have seen Joanna or the other ladies, they were ahead,” Mansur said.
“No, this was a man.”
Boggart chimed in. “There was Bishop Rowley…”
“We can discount him.”
“… Captain Bolt.”
“It wasn’t him. Who else? Bishop of Winchester, of course, but he’s unlikely…”
“Admiral O’Donnell.”
“Yes.”
“That pesky doctor…”
“Arnulf yes. Go on.”
“Them two chaplains, the silly one and the other. Never liked either of ’em.”
“Might it have been one of our patients?” Mansur suggested. “There were plenty of them.”
“God help us,” Adelia said, “I don’t know. I don’t know.”
“It was Scarry,” Ulf said. “Been him all along. Ain’t he clever? Murderin’ and poisoning everybody’s mind against you so that they was glad to abandon you to Aveyron, and us, too.”
She gave a moan and stumbled away from them. She felt ill.
She knew that she’d been afraid, and had been all along, to believe that a malignant being was after her; it put her at the center of everything, a protagonist in a Greek tragedy pursued by a revenging Fury.
It’s not me, it’s not me.
But it was her, she could see it now; she, and only she, had been the reason why so many had died in the pursuit. Blunderin
g, stupid, deliberately blind, she might as well have been a Medea leaving the bodies of slaughtered children behind her.
Somebody had wanted to destroy her, had inflicted the persona of “witch” upon her so that the people she’d traveled with had been prepared to let her and four beloved people suffer at Aveyron.
Facing it now was like being slammed against a wall. I can’t think about it.
But this was where avoidance stopped. You have to think about it.
After a while she sat down and began to consider in the only way she was capable of-as a doctor diagnosing a sickness by its symptoms and history
When had it begun? The horse, oh yes, the horse. It had been poisoned.
What next? Brune, poor Brune. No, first there had been Sir Nicholas, whom she’d cursed and who’d been killed because of it.
The death of a horse, the theft of her cross, the murder of two innocent people, betrayal to the Cathar-hunting Aveyron and its result-not that, not that, but of course that-another murder, a woman dying in flames. Oh, God, she had led him to Ermengarde.
All this engineered by a mind so careful, so skilled in its cunning, so disordered that Adelia’s reasoning brain couldn’t encompass all that it had done, let alone why it had done it. Only that it was insane.
And then she thought: But it didn’t begin in Normandy…
It had started in England, in that faraway happiness on Emma’s estate with Allie, with sane men and women and a football match. The poison had been there.
And then she thought again: But it didn’t begin there, either…
Its beginning, for her, was in a Somerset forest, where two outlaws had pranced out from the trees; green-and-black, fantastical pagan bodies that had rustled with the leaves they wore, and she had killed one to save her own life and that of the men she was with, and earned the lasting hatred of the other.
The dimness of this cave with its filtered light was not unlike that of the glade where Wolf had skewered himself and Scarry had keened for him in Latin.
And this is where he has brought me; all the wayfrom there to here.
She heard a light snoring; the perfect had gone to sleep. The three men were talking quietly…
A Murderous Procession aka The Assassin Page 23