But the Lord Chief Justiciar of England had gone.

Master Dickon came struggling through the press to Emma and Adelia. Emma turned and kissed him on both cheeks. Roetger came hauling himself to her; she kissed him, too, before running onto the field to pick up her son and hold him high. “We’ve won, Pippy Oh, you were so good.”

Master Dickon wiped the sweat off his brow. “Nasty moment or two there,” he said, “but the dowager saying she didn’t recognize the court did it for us. I knew we was home; judges don’t like that.”

“Is that it?” Adelia asked him. “Emma’s won? She can move into the manor?”

“Any time she likes,” the young man told her. “Better take bailiffs with her, of course. But no, that ain’t it. The dowager will appeal, for sure, contesting the marriage and the lad’s legitimacy. All to be seen to later. More work for us.” Master Dickon rubbed his hands in anticipation of the fees he’d earn.

“Then I don’t understand.”

“Don’t you, mistress?” Dickon flung out an arm in the direction of the field from which people were departing and where only the dowager sat, staring over the heads of her clustering lawyers as if they were midges. “No blood on that grass, is there? Lady ’Em didn’t have to use force to get her son’s rights, nor didn’t the dowager use force to defend what she thinks is hers. No battling. No wounds. Just a writ from the king. A temporary measure so’s the apparent heir can be in possession of his property while the arguments over it can be sorted out legally. To keep the peace, d’you see?”

“I see.”

“Barons don’t like it, of course-takes authority away from their courts and makes a common law available to everybody, but they ain’t prepared to go to war over it, Lord be thanked. Oooh, he’s a cunning old lawmaker is Henry.”

“Yes,” Adelia said, and then paused. “Master Dickon, could you provide me with pen and ink? I must write a letter to the king.”

ON THEIR WAY to view Pippy’s new property, Emma’s pure soprano soared into the blue sky accompanied by birdsong, her bard’s harp, her son’s tremolo, Roetger’s basso profundo, and the trot of their horses’ hooves.

“Come lasses and lads, take leave of your dads, and away to the maypole hie.”

Adelia swayed in her saddle to the tune while Millie, behind her, smiled at a jollity she couldn’t hear.

Emma broke off to lean over and touch her lover’s knee. “I didn’t consent to him, dearest, ever.”

Roetger took her hand and kissed it. “I know you did not, brave girl.”

“There ev’ry he has got him a she, and the minstrel’s standing by…

Emma broke off again. “So really, we have gained by an old priest’s lie.”

“That worries me not at all,” Roetger told her.

“God’s justice to womankind,” Adelia said.

“For Willy shall dance with Jane, and Stephen has got his Joan…”

And Rowley has got his Adelia, Adelia thought happily. Except that it doesn’t scan.

“To trip it, trip it, trip it, trip it, to trip it up and down.”

Coming toward them was a procession. Seeing it, Rhys laid his hand flat on the harp’s strings to quiet them. Everybody fell silent and pulled to the side of the road to let it go past as if it were a funeral.

The dowager sat easily and upright on a splendid bay, her eyes on the road ahead. Behind her came draft horses pulling two great carts piled with furniture, out of which stuck the scarlet and silver battle flags of Wolvercote. Behind those were straggled servants, some on horses, some on mules, some walking, driving cows and geese before them, all burdened with belongings, like refugees.

Which, Adelia supposed, they were. And she was sorry for all of them except the murderess in front.

Emma, however, rode out to meet her mother-in-law. “You could have stayed longer,” she said, quietly. “Where are you going?”

She might have been a piece of detritus dropped on the road. The dowager’s eyes didn’t flicker; her horse walked round the obstruction and continued on its way.

“Oh, dear,” Emma said, looking after it.

Rhys struck up again. “No ‘Oh, dear’ about it,” he said. “Sing again, lady.”

“Some walked and some did run, some loitered on the way. And bound themselves by kisses twelve, to meet next holiday.”

Adelia imagined the voices traveling joyously through the warm air to reach the ears of the woman who had just passed, and what agony they would cause her. Not enough recompense for six bodies that had once lain in a forest grave and were now buried decently in the Wells churchyard. But some.

They saw the quiver in the sky, like a heat haze over Wolvercote Manor, long before they reached it. By the time they had urged their horses into a canter and gained the gates, the quiver had been replaced by black smoke.

The manor was in flames. Its roof had already fallen in; some men with buckets were scurrying to and from the moat in an effort to save the outbuildings. In the air, pigeons wheeled unhappily, unable to land in the bonfire that had been their cote. A hay barn had gone up like tinder and revealed the church standing behind it, so far untouched.

There was nothing to be done. Buckets of water wouldn’t extinguish that inferno. The riders could only stay where they were and watch.

“The hag,” Roetger said. “She set a torch to it before she went.”

Adelia felt grief for a house that had been so lovely and so old. It had been like a seashell, allowing all to listen to hear the waves of its history. Now it was going and the waves would be silenced forever.

The men with buckets were standing back, giving up the battle.

“Dear, dear,” said Rhys. “Oh, there’s a pity, now. Such a pity.”

Emma said determinedly, “No, Rhys, it is not a pity at all.”

She turned to Roetger, smiling. “I would have torn it down in any case. I could never live where he’d lived. Nor her.”

“We will rebuild it,” Roetger said.

“Yes, new and twice as beautiful. Won’t we, Pippy? Everything new.”

After a while, taking Millie with her, Adelia left them and rode on toward Glastonbury.

There was definitely newness about. No corpses polluted the air today, because the trees that had held them were gone. Instead, a wide verge of timber-strewn grass ran between road and forest edge. Women were picking up fallen branches in their aprons and carrying them to their men to be chopped up for firewood. As Adelia and Millie went by, waving, they looked up and smiled.

At the top of the turning to Glastonbury high road, Adelia and Millie dismounted. Adelia bent down to pick up a fallen leaf and pressed it into Millie’s hand. “For Gyltha.” She enunciated it carefully, sticking it out her tongue at the “th.” It was a word Millie had learned by watching Adelia say it while patting Gyltha on the shoulder. Adelia hoped to teach her others. But how to indicate she wouldn’t be long? She pointed to the sun and moved her finger a fraction to the west, then blew a kiss to an imaginary child by her knee. “My love to Allie. Tell her I’ll be with her soon.”

Millie nodded and started off down the hill. At its bottom, Godwyn was sweeping dust out of the Pilgrim’s front door. He looked up, saw Millie coming toward him, and smiled for the first time since the marshes.

Good, Adelia thought. That will work out very well.

The abbey was silent, but there was life down the high street, where men were shifting the rubble that had been their houses, ready to rebuild them. Although he didn’t see her, she saw Alf expertly wielding an adze on a freshly cut beam.

Better than Noah, Adelia thought, and was happy.

Yes, there was newness in the air today.

Remounting, she rode on along the lane between the abbey wall and the foot of the Tor.

Up the hill, some men on horseback, their hands shading their eyes, were straining their necks to watch a peregrine falcon circling the sky. A hound barked, causing a cluster of pigeons to go flapping up into the air out of a copse of trees. The bird above them took on the shape of a bow notched with an arrow-and dived. The pigeons separated, and one of them, perhaps realizing its danger, flew low, but the falcon coming for it was a missile; talons out, it took the pigeon in midair with an impact that sheared off its head.