“Death of an ancestor?” asked Adelia, confused.

“You ain’t heard of it? Oh, mistress, you got to know about Morte d’Ancestor; magical Morte d’Ancestor is.” He looked around and saw a niche in which they could all stand while he explained the magical writ. He seemed unruffled by the presence of Mansur and included both him and Millie in his talk, using English on the presumption that they didn’t speak Latin. His admiration was for Henry Plantagenet, something Adelia had noticed before among native, lower-born Englishmen, who had a greater regard for their king than the Norman nobility, having benefited from his laws and, if they were intelligent, promotion to posts formerly reserved for sons of the nobility.

“Ooh, but he’s crafty is our King Henry,” Dickon said. “See, he’s not a lover of Roman law, and I ain’t, either-too much inquisition, too stuck with them old Byzantines, too many delays. What he’s doing, see, is using Anglo-Saxon law, what our great-granddads was accustomed to. He’s like a baker, if you understand me, using good English dough and trimmin’ it, kneadin’ it, reshapin’ it, and flourin’ it with a touch of genius. One of these days every court in the land’ll be using it.”

“And Morte dAncestor?” Adelia asked, not seeing where all this was going, nor sure she wanted to.

“Ah, Morte dAncestor.” In Master Dickon’s mouth it was an incantation. “It’s the latest of the king’s writs. He’s given us the writ of Right and Praecipe and Novel Dissiesin and now”-he saw Adelia’s mystification-“see, they’re all ways of bypassing the other courts and giving a plaintiff the right to royal justice, not in the lords’ or the sheriffs’ or the manors’ but straight to the king’s. A law available to everybody, see. You purchase a writ that suits your case.”

“How much did the writ cost you?” the king had asked Mistress Hackthorn.

In her disenchantment, Adelia asked, “So you have to buy justice?” How typical of Henry, she thought.

Master Dickon frowned. “On a sliding scale, what you can afford, like. But it ain’t so much a matter of buying justice as purchasing the king’s aid in getting it quick. Using the old way, decisions can take years. Now, in the case of Lord Wolvercote versus the dowager Lady Wolvercote, your Lady Wolvercote’s purchased Morte d’Ancestor for her lad. Well, I advised her o’course, her being a woman and Lord Wolvercote being a minor.”

“She did?” Adelia had heard nothing from Emma and Roetger since their departure for Wells; now here they were-Emma, at any rate-with a case, a writ, and a lawyer. “Not a trial by battle?”

“Mistress.” Dickon was pained. “That’s Dark Ages, that is. I don’t take on trials by battle, too chancy. This is a writ.”

A stripling with a clerk’s cap flapping about his ears was tugging at Master Dickon’s sleeve. “They’re a-coming, master.”

“Oops, oops. Better hurry. Judges are coming in.”

At a smart pace, they were made to follow the stripling, Adelia wondering if the boy’s mother knew her child was a lawyer’s clerk.

The case of Lord Philip of Wolvercote versus the dowager Lady Wolvercote, being of considerable local interest, had attracted nearly as large a crowd as a trial by battle; an usher had to clear the way through to what, in its way, was another arena. A scalloped awning sheltered the high dais of the judges at that moment taking their seats. On the grass before them, several yards apart but facing each other, had been set two ornamented chairs. Pippy, having bowed to the judges, was in one, his short legs dangling. In the other sat his grandmother.

A hand grasped Adelia’s arm. “I didn’t want to tell you until it was decided; it was to be a nice surprise if we won. And it’s been such a rush. But I’m so glad you’re here.” Emma’s eyes never left her son. “Look at him, he’s behaving beautifully. Isn’t he sweet?”

He was. But if this was a battle of sorts, the child looking happily around was outclassed by the woman opposite him; the dowager had all the dignity. With her pale, immobile face set round by its black wimple, she might have been a statue of contrasting marble. She also had more lawyers standing beside her, men who looked like lawyers in contrast to Master Dickon, now taking his place beside Pippy.

A voice spoke from the dais in the flat, thin timber of age that nevertheless traveled to the spectators and beyond. “Sheriff, has Philip of Wolvercote given you security for prosecuting his claim?”

“That’s Richard De Luci,” Emma breathed. “The Chief Justiciar himself. Oh, dear, this is so weighty. Should I be putting Pippy through it?”

The sheriff of Somerset, a florid, harassed-looking man in robes as scalloped as the awning over his separate bench, stood up. “He has, my lord.”

“And have you summoned by good summoners twelve free and lawful men from the neighborhood of Wolvercote Manor ready to declare on oath whether Lord Ralph of Wolvercote, father of the aforesaid Philip, was seized of his fee of the aforesaid manor on the day he died?”

“I have, my lord.” The sheriff waved toward a box nearby into which twelve men had been crammed like milk churns into a cart.

“Who speaks for them?”

One of the men extricated himself sufficiently to stand up. “I do, my lord. Richard de Mayne, knight, holding twelve virgates in the parish of Martlake. My land marches with Wolvercote’s on the north.”

“Have you and the others viewed the manor in this case?” The Chief Justiciar of England, like his voice, was thin. His head, which resembled a snake’s, moved slowly in the direction of his questions, giving the impression that it would strike at a lie like an adder at a frog.

“We have, my lord, and of our own knowledge we can say that Lord Wolvercote was receiving the rents and services. He died elsewhere, but we are in accord that he owned the manor at the time and that after his death his mother took possession of it, having previously occupied a dower house in the parish of Shepton.”

“That’s one answered,” Emma said. At Adelia’s look, she explained. “Two questions. Morte d’Ancestor asks just two questions… I can’t stand this, I swear I’m going to faint.”

Suddenly a new voice, a contralto, floated across the field, as unimpassioned as De Luci’s but considerably more beautiful. “My son was unlawfully hanged for treason by the king you serve.”

The Justiciar’s head turned by inches toward the dowager’s chair. “My understanding is that your son was hanged for murder, madam, not treason. However, that matter is not in question here. Nor, as a woman, are you permitted to speak in this court. Address your remarks through your counselor.”

The intervention had caused a flurry among the lawyers surrounding the dowager’s chair, the eldest among them speaking urgently into her ear. He put a warning hand on her shoulder, but, with one white finger, the dowager flicked it away.

The Chief Justiciar hadn’t finished. “Master Thomas, your client has been summoned three times to attend before us, and only now has she appeared.”

“I do not recognize the authority of this court.” Again, the dowager’s voice rang out.

This time Master Thomas’s hand clamped on the woman’s shoulder and would not be removed. “My lord, my client begs your mercy. The procedure is new to her, as indeed it is to us all. Her age confuses her.”

There was a murmur of sympathy from the crowd; liked or not, the dowager was a woman of Somerset, a county that regarded even the adjoining Devonshire as a foreign land. “What you at?” somebody cried out, “comin’ down from Lunnon to bully that poor old soul.”

De Luci ignored the shout. “And now, Sir Richard…”

“Dear God, here it comes.” Emma’s grip on Adelia’s arm became painful. “The second question.”

“… can you attest that the plaintiff is the heir to Lord Ralph of Wolvercote?”

There was a shifting among the jurors in the box.