Adelia, as she knew, preferred not to stand out in a crowd, but garbed like that, Emma thought, she wouldn’t stand out in a clump of trees. It was like being accompanied by a servant-in fact, the Wolvercote servants in their bright livery were better dressed than this extraordinary female.

“Aren’t you hot in that?” Emma asked, for the sun was exceptional, even for late May.

“Yes,” Adelia said, and left it there.

But perhaps it was as well that the eyes of everybody they passed turned to Emma on her pretty white palfrey and not toward the small, brown-clad woman on the small brown pony. When he’d seen them off, Prior Geoffrey had insisted Adelia be hidden inside Emma’s traveling cart until they were over the county border-and Mansur, too; that exotic and fearsome figure in Arab robes and headdress was too well known not to give the game away, for he was never far away from Adelia’s side.

Now, however, and justified or not, tension evaporated in the Hertfordshire sunlight, and both Mansur and Adelia had emerged into it to take their places on horseback.

It was still a small group considering the danger on the roads from robbers, though that was better under Plantagenet rule than it had been. Emma traveled with her child’s nurse, a serving woman, two grooms, a confessor, and a knight with his squire-such a knight, an enormous man, taller even than Mansur, with an air that left no doubt he could use the sword in the scabbard at his waist to effect, his nasaled helmet giving ferocity to a face that was otherwise gentle.

“Master Roetger,” Emma had said, introducing him. “He’s German. My champion.” She meant it literally, for Emma was touring the estates her husband had left, ensuring that their tenants acknowledged her two-year-old son as heir to the property-not always successfully. Her forced marriage to Wolvercote had been abrupt and had so few witnesses that in the complicated system of feudal landholding, more than one lord was disputing the claim of Baby Philip, the new Baron Wolvercote, to the income from the land they’d held from his father. An elderly cousin, for instance, had refused to give up the rents from a thousand Yorkshire acres to a child he’d called a bastard and a usurper.

“The God of Battles told him whose land it was,” Emma said with vengeful satisfaction. “Master Roetger had his champion disabled in twenty minutes.”

It was the way things were done in England, Adelia the foreigner had learned. Trial by combat. A judicium Dei. Since Almighty God knew to whom disputed land truly belonged, the disputants-or more often, their champions-fought a judicial battle under His invisible but all-seeing eye, leaving it to Him to show which party had the right of it according to which contestant He let win.

“God is on our side,” Emma said, “and will be again in Aylesbury.”

“Another combat?”

“There was a married sister,” Emma said-she never named her late husband if she could help it. “A widow whose children died before she did, so she inherited a nice property near Tring, which, by rights, is my boy’s. Her brother-in-law is contesting our claim, but he’s a miserable, cheeseparing creature, Sir Gerald. I doubt he will spend much in acquiring their champion.”

“Master Roetger being expensive?” Adelia asked.

“Indeed. I had to send to Germany for him. We needed the best.”

“That’s hardly leaving the decision to God, is it?”

“Oh, God would have decided in our favor in any case.” Emma looked down at the velvet-lined pannier in which Baron Wolver-cote was traveling, sucking his thumb as he went. “Wouldn’t he, Pippy? Wouldn’t he, my darling? God always protects the innocent.”

He didn’t protect you, Adelia thought. Nobody could have been more innocent than the joyous young girl who was being brought up in the convent where Adelia had first met her, the same convent Wolvercote and his men had broken into to carry her off.

But Adelia didn’t point out the illogic in Emma’s argument-it would have done no good. Inevitably, the girl had been changed. Wolvercote hadn’t even wanted her for herself, only for the money chests she was inheriting from a father in the wine trade.

The Emma of today still had the poise that her father’s gold had given her, but she’d become obsessed with this sudden unforeseen ownership of land in various parts of the country, with manors, mills, rivers, pannages, meadows filled with cattle that her rapist had owned and that now, in her view, his son should have though the skies fell. There was a ferocity to her, a set to her young mouth, a carelessness for other people’s lives that almost mirrored those of the man who’d abused her.

Worse, her singing voice had fallen silent. It had been Adelia’s first introduction to her at Godstow Abbey, where Emma had been brought up-a pure soprano leading the responses of the choir nuns so gloriously that even Adelia, who had no musical ear, had been enchanted into thinking herself nearer to heaven for having heard it.

But now when she asked for a song, Emma refused to perform. “I have none left in me.”

Friends though they were, Adelia suspected that Emma hadn’t asked her to be a traveling companion solely out of affection. Young Pippy had been born prematurely and was still underweight for his age; his mother needed the company of the only doctor she trusted.

At the next wide verge on the road, they stopped to refresh themselves and let the horses rest. “Does he look pale to you?” Emma asked anxiously, watching the nurse lift Pippy out of his pannier so that he could run around with young Allie on the grass.

The child certainly looked less robust than Allie, even when the two-year difference in their ages was taken into account, but Adelia said, “It’s the healthiest thing you can do for him in this weather.” She set great store by fresh air and variety for children. Emma, after all, could afford the finest inns to stay at and, therefore, that other requisite for children-good food.

The travelers found both at Saint Albans.

Adelia had become increasingly nervous as they’d approached the town, but a private word with the landlord of its Pilgrims’ Rest reassured her that the bishop was abroad.

“Gone to help the king put down the damned Welsh, so they say,” the landlord told her. “He’s a fine fighter as well as a good shepherd is Bishop Rowley.”

Damn him, Adelia thought. I worry in case I might have to see him again and I worry when I don’t. A fine fighter; blast him. What’s he doing fighting?

Saint Albans was full of pilgrims come to worship at the tomb of England ’s first Christian martyr. The wealthiest of them, a party of twelve, were also staying at the Pilgrims’ Rest, intending to ensure the good of their souls by finishing off their pilgrimage at Glastonbury, oldest and holiest of England’s abbeys and, even more compelling, reputedly the site of Avalon.

They welcomed Emma’s request that she and her people join them on their way into the South West. “The more, the merrier,” their leader, a large burgher from Yorkshire, told her.

“And safer,” said a Cheshire abbess. She looked with appreciation at Master Roetger. “I trust your knight shall be coming with us?”

“As far as Wells,” Emma said, “but we shall be turning off to Aylesbury on the way for a day or two-Master Roetger is to uphold my son’s claim to an estate in a trial by combat.”

“A trial by combat?”

“Trial by combat?”

The inn’s dining table was enlivened; visiting the saints might ensure one’s place in heaven, but earth didn’t have much more to offer in the way of entertainment than seeing two champions trying to kill each other.

It was decided. The pilgrims would loyally accompany their new friend, Lady Wolvercote, on her diversion to the judicial battleground at the Buckinghamshire county town of Aylesbury.

As her party was to be accompanied by too many people for robbers to attack them as they went, Emma felt safe to employ one of her grooms to ride on ahead and take a letter to Wells, where her mother-in-law, Lady Wolvercote, now the dowager Lady Wolvercote, occupied another of the estates that young Pippy had inherited from his father. “It announces my coming,” she told Adelia. “It’s supposed to be the best of the properties, and if I like it, I shall settle there. Somerset is the nicest of all counties. There is a dower house attached to it, I’m told, so the old woman will have accommodation that she’s entitled to move into-that’s supposing that she and I get on together. If we don’t, she can have one of the other estates somewhere else-a smaller one, of course.”