“Maybe I could, then.”

“You must. It was where Lady Emma was heading. The dowager said she didn’t arrive, but I think the woman knows more than she’s telling; her servants are sure to have been a party to whatever it was.”

They began to describe the appearance of the missing. Rhys listened without comment to a description of the servants, the child, Master Roetger, but when he learned of Emma’s fair hair, her youth and beauty, and, especially, the wonderful voice that she had let fall silent, he was fired with a sudden passion.

“The lady has made a leap into my heart, like sun through glass,” he said, throwing his arms wide. “I am Fair Emma’s champion and defender from this day forth. I shall find her, and I shall feed the ravens with the corpses of her enemies.”

“Get on with it, then,” Gyltha said. “There’s a good lad.”

Suddenly she barged across the room, flinging open its door and peering around the narrow passage that served it and the adjacent chambers. “Nosy bloody woman,” she shouted into it.

“Was it Hilda listening?” Adelia asked, startled.

“Didn’t see her,” Gyltha admitted, closing the door. “Nobody there now, but some bugger set the floorboards a-creaking. Who else would it be? Wants to know too much of our business, she does.” Gyltha’s relationship with the landlady of the Pilgrim had not improved.

“Ghost, p’raps,” Rhys said. “Haunted, this place is. I feel it.”

“Nonsense,” Adelia said. She hated talk like that.

But there was no doubt that it was an inn of inexplicable noises: footfalls on dark, twisting staircases that nobody was climbing, a moan in a windless chimney, whispers from empty rooms. Had it been busy, as in the days before the fire, these things would not have been noticeable, but with only five guests, there was no doubt the Pilgrim could be eerie, especially at night.

The maidservant, Millie, a wraith of a girl, did not improve matters. She’d been born stone-deaf and went about her work so silently that in the shadows, one tumbled over her.

Her eyes radiated misery, and a pitying Adelia wondered what it was like to see incomprehensible mouths moving without hearing what came out of them. There must, she thought, be some method of communicating with the girl-and she had put finding out what it could be on her list of things to do.

That night Rhys, sitting late in the inn’s courtyard, began composing a new song. “I would walk the dew or a bitter desert to find you, O white phantom of my dreams…”

“Emma’s not a phantom,” Adelia interrupted, pausing to listen before going upstairs.

“Like Guinevere, she is,” Rhys said. “Nobody don’t know what happened to Arthur’s queen, either. There’s those say she was torn in pieces by wild horses for her adultery. Some think she disappeared into the mists of Avalon. White phantom, white owl, that’s what the name Guinevere do mean, see. Night spirit lost in the darkness.”

“Well, Emma definitely didn’t commit adultery,” said Adelia, and then thought how stupid she sounded. “Don’t be late back now. Promise.”

WHETHER IT WAS RHYS, the worry about Emma, or the skeletons, this was the night that the dreams began.

Adelia was not a dreamer usually, keeping herself so busy by day that in bed she slept the sleep of the just. But this night she found herself standing halfway up the Tor above Glastonbury Abbey, outside a cave.

It was misty. A bell hung on the branches of a hawthorn tree just beside the entrance. Unbidden, her hand reached out to the bell and touched it so that it rang.

She heard its toll echoing through the mist. A male voice came from deep inside the cave: “Is it day?”

Even in her dream, she knew from Rhys’s Arthurian songs that she must reply, “No, sleep on,” or she would awaken whatever or whoever was inside. But though she opened her mouth to give the answer, no sound came out. The mist swirled and darkened; someone was coming up the cave’s tunnel toward her.

She managed, “Emma? Is that you, Emma?”

But the same voice said, “I am Guinevere. Help me. I am hurt.”

There was a scraping sound, and Adelia knew that only the top half of the thing calling itself Guinevere was dragging itself along the tunnel toward her and knew, too, that she couldn’t bear to see it. She began backing into the mist, away from it, still hearing its moans as it slithered.

She woke up sweating.

“A true dream, was it?” Gyltha asked with interest the next morning. “Like Jacob and the Ladder?”

“No, it wasn’t like that. I just felt terror… and guilt. It was begging for help, whatever it was, and I ran away.”

Adelia gave no credit to dreams, but she was still immersed in the awful reproach that this one had wrapped around her. She wasn’t seeing something she should be seeing; she wasn’t acting on something that had been shown to her.

“The cheese, then,” Gyltha said firmly. “Shouldn’t eat cheese close to bedtime-gives you nightmares.”

“I didn’t eat any cheese. Oh, God, Gyltha, we’ve got to find Emma.”

“Doin’ our best, girl.”

It was a relief to go out into the sunshine and trudge across to the abbey so that she could begin work on the bones. Godwyn was taking Gyltha and Allie onto the Brue in his boat to find them bog moss with which to plaster Polycarp’s rump.

Rhys had been roused from his bed and pointed in the direction of Wells and Wolvercote Hall. He’d become suddenly fearful. “Dangerous road, that. Suppose brigands set on me and rob me?”

“Rob him of what?” Mansur had wanted to know; the bard had been wearing the same clothes since Wales, despite Gyltha’s pleas to let her launder them. Apart from his harp, which he kept in a dirty satchel, there was nothing about him to tempt the most optimistic thief.

Eventually, he was persuaded to go by the couple of pennies Adelia gave him to spend at Wells market.

Hilda insisted on accompanying the two investigators to the abbey, seeming intent on monitoring any conversation they might have with Abbot Sigward-“my dear abbot,” as she constantly referred to him.

Adelia wondered if Godwyn was jealous; Hilda glowed for the monk as she didn’t for anyone else, certainly not for her husband, to whom she was dictatorial-her raised voice in the kitchen could often be heard upstairs. Not that Godwyn seemed to mind; he appeared to be as devoted to his wife as she was to the abbot, perhaps because Hilda’s adoration, Adelia thought, wasn’t so much sexual as that of a worshipper at a holy shrine, feeding and protecting its frail flame.

The woman admitted as much. “He’s a saint, my dear abbot,” she said as, carrying another basket with food for him, she accompanied Adelia and Mansur across the empty market. “I was his housekeeper in the old days, young as I was, and nobody don’t know how deep that man’s goodness goes. God’d snatch him from us if so be as I didn’t look after him.”

“Was this before he became a monk?” Adelia asked.

Hilda was suddenly aggressive. “What you want to know for?”

Adelia shrugged; it had been a polite enough inquiry.

After a pause, as if unable to let another opportunity for praise go by, the landlady said abruptly, “He was rich in them days. A nobleman, rich as a king. And I kept house for him-oh, yes, I did. See that island out there…” She pointed toward a large hump in the distant marshes. “Owned that, he did, and thousands of acres all over England. Gave the lot away, so he did, bless him. Gave it to God and took his vow of poverty like the holy man he is.”

A Road to Damascus conversion? The abbot’s gentle face was that of a man whose soul had been purified by fire.

“Did he have family?”

Again, Hilda hesitated. Then she said shortly, “One son. Died on crusade.”

That would account for it, then. Adelia could imagine no worse thing than losing a child, a loss that would turn you either to God for help or away from Him.