Grave Goods Read Online Free PDF Page A

nurse lift Pippy out ofhis 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 toAylesbury 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.”
    “Have you never met her?”
    “No,” Emma said bitterly. “Mine was not a wedding to which relatives, or anybody else, was invited.”
    It would be a strange situation—a bride and mother-in-law who were strangers. Adelia experienced sympathy for the unknown woman; with Emma in this mood, the slightest infraction would see the poor lady uprooted from her home and sent to another.She said, “I am sure she will be too delighted at acquiring a grandson to be anything but pleasant.”
    There had been no children from Wolvercote’s previous marriage; his first wife had died only weeks after the wedding, leaving him her considerable dowry—circumstances that, knowing the man, Adelia had always thought to be suspicious.
    “She’d better be,” Emma said ominously.
     
    T HE A YLESBURY J UDGES sat on benches