On her bottom, investigating with her feet, she managed to hump herself down the steps. When she heard Rowley join her, she spread her arms so that she could feel the rough texture of the tunnel wall on either side and began to wade down the incline they had come up.

And she was wading. Water surrounded her knees. She went on. It was up to her waist.

Stupidly, she wondered if she’d started down a wrong branch of the tunnel into some massive drain. But there’d been no branching off…

Somebody said, “There’s water coming in, Rowley.”

Somebody else said, “So there is, my love. We’d better go back.”

She felt a hand against her face work its way down to her shoulder, guiding her backward until they reached the steps, then helping her up to the landing at the top.

She clung onto him. “Where’s the water coming from? What’s happening?”

“I’ll tell you what’s happening…” And from the sound of his voice, Adelia envisaged him spitting the words from between his teeth. “Our noble landlord has opened the chute in the cellar. Taken the fucking hatch off. This is floodwater.”

“Floodwater?”

“In case you didn’t notice, it was raining outside. Still is, presumably. It’s coming down that bloody chute. It’s filled the cellar and now it’s flooding the sodding tunnel.”

“But… that would take hours.”

“Sweetheart, we’ve been down here for hours.”

In her mind’s eye, Adelia saw the hills around. Glastonbury Sheeting rain, unable to soak into the drought-baked, rock-hard earth, would be funneling down their sides into the High Street like rivers in full spate. The Pilgrim’s courtyard had already been an overflowing sink when she’d last seen it. With the plug hole of the barrel hatch removed, water would be pouring down the chute…

“One thing,” Rowley’s voice said. “It’ll ruin the bastard’s ale.”

“Will it reach us up here?”

Her answer was another ear-wounding clang. He was bashing the sword hilt against the iron hood again.

A stupid question; how could he know? It would depend on whether the rain stopped in time. And then, she thought, whether it does or not, we’re dead. They were in a diminishing space formed by brick, iron, and rising water, all of them impermeable. The air would go bad. In Salerno, she’d once worked on a corpse her foster father had bought for her to practice on, that of a man who’d fallen into a large, empty wine vat, his flailing arm catching its lid and bringing it down on top of him.

“Asphyxiation,” she’d said, finishing the examination.

“Correct,” he’d said. “It is what happens when people are enclosed like that.”

“I know,” she’d said, “but why? It was an enormous vat, why couldn’t he go on breathing? What causes people to asphyxiate in confined spaces?”

“Air hunger,” he’d said. “Our breathing uses it up or poisons it, I don’t know how.”

They would die, like the man in the vat.

“Allie.” Again, it was a cry of agony that seemed to come from somebody else.

The clanging stopped and was replaced by Rowley’s voice: “She’ll be provided for. I’ve made a will.”

“Allie.” A document couldn’t pick a child up or kiss a scratch better or cure the need for a mother who wasn’t there.

Another clang, the last, and she was rocked as he miscalculated where she sat and his body thumped against her before it found its place at her side. “Goddamn you, woman.” Hot breath fanned her ear. “This is your fault. Why in hell didn’t you marry me?”

She didn’t know anymore. Why hadn’t she?

“Nice little castle,” the breath said. “We could have brought her up together. You stitching away at your tapestry in the solar, me on the practice ground teaching her swordplay.”

It was meant to make her laugh and, oddly, it almost did, but beneath his courage she heard fury for a life missed.

My fault, she thought, my most grievous fault. What price independence when I could have chosen happiness, his, Allie’s, mine? Too high. “I wouldn’t do it again,” she said.

“Bit bloody late now.” Again, her skin felt his breath. “You’ve sent me to hell, you realize that? My soul is doomed. I’ve sinned at prime, at matins, at lauds; I’ve lifted the host to the Lord, and what I was lifting was your skinny body. I’d think, What do I see in her? But you were all I saw.” Another sigh. “I have offended against my sweet Lord. Saint Peter’s not likely to give me passage through the gate after that.”

“It won’t be hell for me if I’m with you,” she said, feeling for him with her arms. “We’ll fry on the griddle together.”

Voices speaking love into the darkness. Tiny flames guttering out.

It was becoming difficult to breathe.

After a while his head fell hard against her neck, and when she spoke to him again, he didn’t reply.

“No,” she begged him. “Wait for me. Don’t go without me.”

There was a deep grinding sound, and the lid above their heads lifted, slowly, as if a cautious cook was peering into a pan.

The foulness of the death chamber rushed upward-she felt its passing, like a wind-to be replaced by damp fresh air.

“God pray we’re in time,” somebody said.

Dizzily, still clutching Rowley’s body to her, she looked upward. The abbot of Glastonbury ’s face was staring down on her, Godwyn’s beside it, both of them anxious.

Behind them, Hilda struggling. “Leave ’em,” she was screaming, “leave em.” Only Brother Titus’s large arms were holding the woman back from hindering the resurrection of the couple she’d condemned to death.

A DELIA MADE THEM lift Rowley out first. It took the added help of brothers James and Aelwyn to do it; Brother Titus was fully occupied in restraining the howling, kicking Hilda.

When it was Adelia’s turn, she found herself rising through a wide hole and into the rubble of what had once been the house of Glastonbury ’s abbots, near the abbey’s landing stage.

The monks wanted to take them both to the Abbot’s kitchen immediately, but Adelia refused to let them move Rowley. She knelt beside him, begging him to come back from wherever he’d gone, until she saw air going easily in and out of his nostrils. He opened his eyes-they had sense in them-and said her name, at which point she sat back, allowing a prayer of such thankfulness to leave her as must have lanced upward through the ragged clouds that crossed and recrossed a pale, indifferent moon, up and up until it reached the God of mercy who had granted yet another resurrection.

Between them, Aelwyn and James supported Rowley across the charred grass to the kitchen, Titus carrying the still-shrieking Hilda after them. Adelia followed behind, leaning heavily on the abbot’s arm.

“No, no,” he said, as she tried to thank him. “You owe your lives to this good man.” He laid his hand on the shoulder of Godwyn, walking silently beside them. “We would never have known otherwise. Indeed, I had forgotten there was a tunnel. Built by one of my ancient predecessors, perhaps, in the time of the Danish invasions, and its hatch rusted these many years. It was when Godwyn found he couldn’t open it alone that he came running to us for help, did you not, my son?” When the landlord didn’t answer, he added, “I fear there are questions to answer, but we shall leave them until you and our good bishop are recovered.”

She was cold and couldn’t stop trembling. Her dripping skirt was chilly against her legs. Heat had gone with the storm, leaving cool air scenting a reviving countryside, and, her mind numbed, she could do nothing but breathe it in. Being freed from the danger she and Rowley had shared hadn’t lessened the intensity of its last moments; the people around her, even Hilda and her noise, were wraiths on the edges of it. Certainly there must be questions to answer, a thousand of them, but at the moment they fluttered like moths beyond her grasp.