Free Grave Goods by Ariana Franklin Page B

whipped.
    “And whip him they did,” Prior Geoffrey, who’d been present, had told Adelia. “With enjoyment. Their scourges bit deep into his flesh, so that those of us who witnessed it were amazed he didnot cry out. He stayed silent, though he will bear the stripes on his back forever.”
    By humiliating himself, the king had saved England from a worse punishment, appeasing an angry Pope Gregory, who had otherwise threatened to lay the country under interdict: a closure of its churches, a refusal to bless marriages, christen babies, hear confessions, anoint the sick and dying—in effect, the excommunication of an entire nation.
    Yes, Adelia thought with pity, Henry Plantagenet had paid for his temper so that his people didn’t have to.
    He became brisk. “In turn, I must be kind to Glastonbury—it’s got to be rebuilt. When I can spare him, I’ll send Ralph Fitz-Stephen—he’s my chamberlain—to see what needs a-doing. It’ll be costly, you can swear to that; God knows how much I’ll have to spend. Unless…”
    “Unless the pilgrims go flooding back in their thousands to visit Arthur’s tomb,” Adelia said, and smiled. Oh, he was a canny king.
    “Exactly.”
    She thought about it. Almost Henry was asking the impossible—but not quite. While she would not be able to date the skeletons, the coffin was another matter. “When was Arthur supposed to have lived?” she asked.
    The king turned to the table. “When was it, Robert?”
    The scribe laid down his pen and pursed his lips. “The Welsh cleric Nennius tells us in
Historia Brittonum
that Arthur’s last battle was at Mons Badonicus, where he single-handedly slew nine hundred and sixty men. Saint Gildas, who, as we know, lies in Glastonbury Abbey, informs us that this battle took place in the year of his birth, which, we believe, was either in the Year of Our Lord494 or 506, though the
Annales Cambriae
places it somewhat later, while the …”
    “All right,
all right.”
The king turned back to Adelia. “Somewhere early in the sixth century—do you want the day of the month?”
    “Hmm.”
A coffin found sixteen feet deep in the earth would likely be very ancient. “Does Glastonbury earth consist of peat?”
    “How in hell would I know?”
    The scribe intervened. “I believe it may, my lord. It is surrounded by marshland, which would indicate…”
    “It’s peat,” the king said. “What’s that got to do with the price of fish?”
    Nothing, but it did have to do with the preservation of wood. In the Cambridgeshire fens, which were all of peat, a piece of bog oak would occasionally surface in an area where no oaks grew. According to fenland belief, the number of rings apparent in the wood of the trunk when it was cut indicated the years during which the tree had stood when it was growing. By that system of accounting, some pieces had proved so old as to have flourished in the long distant past.
    “Is the coffin of oak, do you know?”
    “No, I
don’t.”
The king was becoming impatient.
    If it was, and if her fenlanders were right, she might be able to gain a rough,
very
rough, idea of when the coffin had been interred, perhaps as long ago as Arthur’s time—and therefore beyond anybody’s knowledge as to whom it contained.
    She considered. The king was assigning her a task that, for once, had no risk to it and would enable her, Mansur, Allie, and Gyltha to be sustained until she could decide what to do with the rest of her life.
    Actually, Adelia was intrigued, not so much by the search foran ancient and mystical king—though that, too—but as to why a woman had been put to rest in a monastic graveyard.
    “Very well,” she said. “I will try and ensure that the skeletons are old enough to be beyond identification, but further than that I cannot go. I will not say they are Arthur’s and Guinevere’s, because I doubt if anybody can. I won’t lie for you, Henry.”
    “Or
to
me?”
    She smiled at him. “Never that.”
    “I