Read Online Grave Goods by Ariana Franklin - Free Book Online Page A

and graceless woman, you know.”
    “Yes, my lord, I’m sorry, my lord.” She looked at the king’s armon which the soft, vividly pale-green flower heads of sphagnum moss were held in place by a bandage. “How’s your wound?”
    “Better. Ready for some employment now?”
    “I suppose so, my lord.”
    “See that fellow there?” The king jerked a thumb at the harpist. “Name’s Rhys something-or-other. He’s a bard. Comes from an unpronounceable bloody hole on the coast.” He might have been introducing an interesting breed of hound. “Stand up, Rhys, and greet the lord Mansur and Mistress Aguilar.” To Adelia, he said, “He started this business, so he’s going to accompany you to Glastonbury.”
    Rhys rose and bowed vaguely in Adelia and Mansur’s direction.
    “Glastonbury?” Adelia was shrill. “My lord, I was already
going
to Glastonbury, or at least nearby. Lady Emma of Wolvercote and I were on our way to Wells. You could have sent a messenger and saved yourself trouble.”
    And me God knows how many bone-shaking miles
, she thought.
What business?
    “Master Rhys is going to tell you a story, aren’t you, Rhys?” Henry said, his attention still on the bard as if about to make him do a trick for the visitors. “And in the name of God, don’t
sing
it.” To Adelia and Mansur, he said, “The bugger keeps
singing.”
    “About Uncle Caradoc, is it?” Rhys asked.
    “Of course it is, you clown. What else are you here for? Tell them.”
    The bard stepped forward. A thin, droop-shouldered man with protruding teeth, he put Adelia in mind of an elongated rabbit. Despite the king’s injunction, his hand kept straying to his harp before he remembered and took it away again. Even so, his speaking voice, which belied his looks by being a pleasing tenor, had a lilt that was very nearly song, though the scribe at the table was unmoved by it and the bard’s tale was told against the scratchingof a quill, as well as the sound of soldierly activity coming through the open window from the bailey below.
    So, in semi-song, Adelia and Mansur were taken back twenty years ago to when Rhys had been an adolescent at Glastonbury Abbey. “Never suited to the monastic life, me,” he said. “No opportunity for true poetry.”
    He told them of the earthquake that had struck the Somerset Levels in which Glastonbury stood. “Terrible, terrible it was, like the last trump trembling the heavens… .” A hiss from the king moved him on. “And my good uncle Caradoc, dying he was, had a waking dream …”
    “A vision,” the king said.
    “Three hooded lords, see, bearing a coffin to the graveyard and burying it.”
    “Between the two pyramids,” the king prompted.
    “Two pyramids there are in the Glastonbury graveyard, very ancient, and Uncle Caradoc, he says to me, ‘Look, bach, look down there in the fissure. They are showing me where Arthur takes his long rest, and by God’s grace I have been witness to it. Now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace.’ And He did, for beautiful,
beautiful
was my uncle Caradoc’s ending. …”
    “God rest him,” Henry said, “and get on with it.”
    “And the next morning we buried that good old uncle of mine, but no sign of another coffin, only disturbed earth all over the graveyard—result of the earthquake, see. Terrible, terrible, that earthquake, like the last days.…”
    Tapping his foot, the king said, “But you didn’t pass on what Uncle Caradoc had seen, did you?”
    “No, oh, no.”
    “We had to beat it out of him,” Henry said, looking at Adelia. “He’s been keeping it secret for twenty years. Only person he toldwas his mother.” He turned back to Rhys. “And
why
did you keep it a secret?”
    “Well, there.” Rhys’s large, vague eyes became sly. “There’s some would believe…”
    “And you’re one of them, you little bastard,” the king interrupted.
    “…believe as it couldn’t have been the burial of King Arthur that my uncle Caradoc