“A mule’s a mule,” Brother Aelwyn said waspishly. “Who can distinguish between the brutes?”

Not me, thought Adelia, who had difficulty telling a charger from a palfrey. But Allie can.

She’d taken her daughter up to the pasture with Mansur and Gyltha and listened as the child pointed out the marks that, to her, set a grumpy-looking quadruped apart from all other horseflesh-and had been convinced Emma and the others had been attacked, their goods taken and sold.

“We’ve got to find them,” Adelia said. “We’ve got to find them.”

She couldn’t rid herself of the feeling that they were somewhere near and in terrible need. The call of a blackbird was the voice of Emma pleading for her life; the faraway eeyah, eeyah shriek of a hen harrier quartering the marsh was the scream of young Pippy.

Coming back down, she’d challenged the monks emerging from holy offices, demanding to know where they’d acquired the beast.

It was possible, of course-as the abbot pointed out-that Emma had sold her mule train before settling down somewhere in the vicinity.

Adelia didn’t believe it. Her friend had certainly not settled down at Wolvercote Manor if the dowager Lady Wolvercote was to be believed. Also, the arrival of a grand lady like Emma in the neighborhood would surely have caused a stir among the locals, yet none of them-here in Glastonbury, at least-seemed to have heard of it.

“Brother Peter will know,” Abbot Sigward said, relieved to see the man approaching. “He’ll clear the matter up.”

Brother Peter was another shock. He wore the habit of a lay brother that showed him to be basically a monastic laborer, but his height, coloring, and features were those of the man Adelia had seen baking bread in the kitchen of Wolvercote Manor only yesterday.

After a moment, she knew he couldn’t be-the baker hadn’t had this one’s tonsure, though the hair was otherwise the same-but he was his twin, she was sure of that.

Interrogated, he became defensive. “What I done wrong now, then? I says to you, Abbot, as we needed summat to pull a plough and harrow. Get it, says you, but get it cheap.”

“So I did, so I did,” Abbot Sigward said. “Nobody is blaming you, my son. But where did you get it?”

“Street. Where else? There ain’t a market here no more. Bought him at Street. Picked that un acause he’s strong for all he’s got rain rot.”

“Seaweed,” Allie piped up. “That’s the thing for rain rot.”

“Oh, yes,” Brother Peter said sarcastically, regarding the child with the same truculence he was according everybody else. “I got a lot o’ time to poultice a mule’s rump with blasted seaweed, o’course I have.”

“But who sold it to you?” Adelia asked.

It was no good. A mule seller, a man who went from market to market and turned up at Street’s every couple of months. Brother Peter had bargained with him, bringing the animal’s price down to what the abbey could afford. “Didn’t know I had to ask its blasted ancestors, did I?”

“When was this?”

“Near a month ago,” Brother Peter said. “Saint Boniface Day. And now, if there ain’t no more questions, I got hay to cut.”

Abbot Sigward looked inquiringly at Adelia, who shook her head, and Brother Peter stumped off.

“A rough diamond, I’m afraid,” the abbot said, “but a good Christian and a hard worker.”

SHE WAS GOING to have to speak to the man alone. She was going to have to do a lot of things-and do them quietly. Innocence had departed from this sunny day. The abbey’s people, the gibbering Brother James, Aelwyn with his antagonism, the obese Titus, even Hilda, even the lovely abbot, had suddenly become sinister. She remembered Captain Bolt: “Something’s gone out of this place and something else has come in.”

Gathering herself, she said, “The lord Mansur requires more time before he can make any decision about the bones.” Then she bowed to the abbot and walked away.

AT FIRST she couldn’t eat her dinner, though Godwyn had stewed venison with wine and mushrooms until it fell off the bone.

Where to go for help? To the county sheriff? But would he give her concern for Emma any more credence than the monks had? Unlikely. Not until she had more evidence. He would take the line that Emma had a perfect right to have changed her mind about their rendezvous and sell her mules.

Rowley?

No. Please, God, don’t force me to that. We are severed, and it nearly killed me. Days can go by now-well, hours anyway-when I’m not thinking about him. He probably doesn’t think of me at all.

Blast the man, would it have hurt him at least to see Allie while we were in Wales?

She felt a familiar rush of fury and, with it, the accompanying, equally infuriating, recognition that it was unfounded. On several occasions he’d broken their agreement that they have nothing to do with each other by sending her money and a present for Allie on her saint’s day, but those had been so reminiscent of condescension to a kept woman and her bastard that-though she knew they were not-she’d sent them back.

Damn him anyway.

It was almost a relief to remember that there were still some days before he was due to arrive in Somerset so that, even if she needed his help, she couldn’t ask for it.

How to get evidence? How to get evidence?

There was no reason to suspect the monks-the mule had obviously been bought in good faith-yet an instinct she couldn’t account for was telling her to learn more about all of them.

Well, while she and Mansur were studying the skeletons, she was in a good position to do it. And she could set Gyltha on to Brother Peter… Yes, that’s what she’d do; Gyltha could get stones to talk.

Most imperative, though, was to scour the neighborhood for information. She discounted herself; despite all she could do to get rid of it, she still spoke with a trace of a foreign accent-and the English distrusted foreigners.

Gyltha again? No, if people were disappearing in the vicinity, they weren’t going to include Gyltha or Allie.

The sound of slurping intruded itself on her attention. It was coming from the bottom of the table, where Rhys the bard was spooning venison stew into his mouth with an energy that spattered it onto his clothes.

Rhys.

Adelia picked up her own spoon and began to eat.

…

“A VANISHED LADY, IS IT?” Rhys said, his protuberant eyes becoming misty. “There’s a subject, now. O lost dove, you are a cause for tears, lifeless we are without you…”

“Stop him,” hissed Adelia.

Mansur grabbed the harp from the man’s hand just in time.

Adelia closed her eyes and then opened them. “We don’t want you to lament her, Rhys,” she said. “We want you to find her.”

For privacy, they had taken him to Allie’s and her bedroom, a large, elm-floored chamber with a little window overlooking the road.

Rhys rubbed his head where Mansur had slapped it. “A quest, is it?”

“Exactly.”

“How do I do that, then?”

“We told you, boy,” Gyltha said patiently, wiping stew off his shirt. “All you got to do is go round the local markets, singing your songs like a… what is it?”

“A jongleur,” Adelia said.

“Like one of them. Listen to the talk, let people talk to you. See, Lady Emma and her people disappeared round here somewheres. Dirty work, we reckon, but a party that large must’ve left a trace behind it-stands to reason as somebody knows something.”

“A bard, I am, the finest of the Beirdd yr Uchelwyr, not a bawling street musician,” Rhys said with dignity. “Haven’t I sung in the greatest halls in Christendom?”

Mansur expired with force. “Let me kill him.”

But Adelia was interested. “You get invited into houses?”

“I have sung the prowess of lords in Dinefwr, in Brycheiniog…”

“Could you get invited into Wolvercote Hall?”

“Inhospitable lady, that one. Said we wasn’t to go back, didn’t she?”

“She did. But she didn’t see you with us. You’d just be an innocent traveling jongleur, as far as she’s concerned.”