Free Grave Goods by Ariana Franklin Page A

Lord Mansur, his female assistant and interpreter, her child, and a nurse,
in luxury,
for as long as the investigation lasts. At my expense.” The king was pleased with himself. “What do you say to that?”
    Adelia summoned up her courage. “I don’t think it can be done, my lord.”
    “Why not?”
    “Skeletons are merely… skeletons. I doubt it’s possible to say how old they are.” She steeled herself. “Unless there’s some other identification in that coffin, I cannot name those bones as Arthur’s and Guinevere’s. I’m sorry.”
    The room seemed to hunch in anticipation of the king’s fury—in the past, when crossed, he’d been known to roll on the floor, biting its rushes.
    But he was older now, and the anger that had caused the death of Thomas à Becket was contained—for today, at least. He nodded quietly. “I was afraid of that,” he said. “Then we’ll try another tactic. You’ll go to Glastonbury and make sure no living person can say that those bones are
not
Arthur’s.”
    She was puzzled. “I don’t understand you, my lord.”
    “Yes, you do. If Glastonbury broadcasts news of this wondrous discovery, I don’t want some bugger popping up to say it’s their Uncle Cedric and Aunt Priscilla in that bloody coffin. You’re to find out whether anybody can refute the abbey’s claim.”
    “How can I possibly do that?”
    “I don’t know, do I?” The king was exasperated. “That’s why I’m employing you, for God’s sake. You’ve got a nose for it; you can detect a puzzle like a hound sniffing the scent of boar—and solve it. I’ve seen you do it. You’re a tracker. What I want you to do is ensure there
isn’t
any scent, that there’s no boar hiding in the undergrowth.”
    Now she understood. “You mean that as long as nobody can say those skeletons are
not
Arthur’s and Guinevere’s, they will be
declared
as Arthur’s and Guinevere’s, whether they are or aren’t?”
    Henry took her arm again and returned her to the window. Outside, soldiers were filling the trenches dug by the castle’s besiegers; one of them was whistling as he worked. A thrush in a rowan tree was whistling back. From a fast-running stream came the jeweled flash of a diving kingfisher.
    The king’s voice was gentle. “You haven’t ever visited Glastonbury, have you, Adelia?”
    “No.”
    “Then wait until you do. Of all abbeys, here or abroad, it is the holiest and most sacred; its very air is hallowed by a worship that goes back to the beginnings of Christianity and possibly beyond—it tingles with mystery. If Avalon is anywhere, it is there. If Arthur is anywhere, he is there. It has a vibration that sends you to your knees.” The king paused, his eyes on the river. “And it’s been kind to me. Abbot Sigward was one of the few churchmen not calling for my head after… the business at Canterbury.”
    He never spoke the name of the man who’d been his friend but who, having been appointed Archbishop of Canterbury, had turned against him, opposing every reasonable reform he’d tried to make, and whose murder had brought Christendom’s vilification on his head and been the excuse for his jealous wife and his even more jealous eldest son to rise against him.
    It had sullied his name forever, and he knew it; history would remember him as the king who’d martyred Saint Thomas à Becket.
    Not for the first time, Adelia was aware of the depth of suffering that underlay this Plantagenet’s energetic exterior—it was like being reminded that beyond a briskly choppy inlet was a turbulent ocean. His remorse at calling for Becket’s death, that it was his knights who, with their own reasons for hating the archbishop, had ridden off to Canterbury and spilled the man’s brains onto the floor of the cathedral, had been terrible—and the Church had made sure he displayed every ounce of it in public. His penance had been to walk barefoot to Canterbury and present his naked back to its monks to be