The Serpent's Tale (32 page)

More songs, more games, until even Eleanor was tired. “To bed, good people. Go to bed.”

As he escorted Adelia home, Mansur was broody, chafed by his defeat at chess, of which he was himself a skilled exponent. “He is a fine player, that priest. I do not like him.”

“He had a hand in Rosamund’s death,” Adelia said, “I know it; he was taunting me with it.”

“He was not there.”

True, Eynsham had been across the Channel when Rosamund died. But there was
something.
…

“Who was the fat one with the pox?” Mansur asked. “He took me outside to show me. He wants a salve.”

“Montignard? Montignard has the pox? Serve him right.” Adelia was irritable with fatigue. It was nearly dawn. A Matins antiphon from the direction of the chapel accompanied them as they trudged.

Mansur raised the lantern to light her up the guesthouse steps. “Has the woman left the door unbarred for you?”

“I expect so.”

“She should not. It is not safe.”

“Then I’ll have to wake her, won’t I?” Adelia said, going up. “And her name’s Gyltha. Why don’t you ever say it?”
Damn it,
she thought,
they’re as good as married.

She stumbled over something large that rested on the top step, nearly sending it over the edge and down to the alley. “Oh, dear God. Mansur.
Mansur.
”

Together, they carried the cradle into the room; the child in it was still asleep and wrapped in her blankets. She seemed to have taken no harm from being left in the cold.

The candle had gone out. Gyltha sat unmoving in the chair on which she had been waiting for Adelia to come back. For an appalling moment, Adelia thought she’d been murdered—the woman’s hand was dangling over the place where the cradle always lay.

A snore reassured her.

The three of them sat in a huddled group around the cradle, watching Allie sleep, as if afraid she would evaporate.

“Someone come in here and stole her? Put her on the step?” Gyltha couldn’t get over it.

“Yes,” Adelia told her. One inch farther on the step, just one inch…In her mind she kept seeing the cradle turn in midair as it fell into the alley some twenty feet below.

“Someone come in here? And I never heard un? Put her out on the step?”

“Yes,
yes.
”

“Where’s the sense in it?”

“I don’t know.” But she did.

Mansur voiced it: “He is warning you.”

“I know.”

“You ask too many questions.”

“I know.”

“What questions?” Gyltha, in her panic, wasn’t keeping up. “
Who
don’t want you asking questions?”

“I don’t know.” If she had, she would have groveled to him, squirmed at his feet in supplication.
You’ve won. You’re cleverer than I am. Go free, I won’t interfere. But leave me Allie.

T
he instinct was to hide with Allie in the metaphorical long grass, like a hare and leveret in their form.

When the queen sent Jacques to inquire for her, Adelia sent back that she was ill and could not come.

The killer conversed with her in her head.

How submissive are you now?

Submissive, my lord. Totally submissive. I shall do nothing to displease you, just don’t hurt Allie.

She knew him now, not
who
he was but
what
he was. Even as he’d plucked Allie’s cradle from under the sleeping Gyltha’s hand and put it on the steps, he’d revealed himself.

Such a simple expedient to reduce his opponent to impotence. If she didn’t fear him so much, she could admire it—the audacity, the economy, the
imagination
of it.

And it had told her for which killings he had been responsible.

There had been two lots of murder, she knew that now, neither one having anything to do with the other; only the fact that she’d witnessed the corpses of both within a short time had given them a seeming relationship.

Talbot of Kidlington’s death was the most straightforward, because it had been for the oldest of reasons: gain.

Wolvercote had good reason to kill the boy; the elopement with Emma would have deprived him of a valuable bride.

Or
the inheritance Talbot had gained on his twenty-first birthday would have deprived his guardian of an income, for Master Warin could have been defrauding the boy—it wasn’t unknown for an heir to come into his estates only to find that they’d gone.

Or,
and this was a possibility Emma herself had raised while not believing it, Fitchet had alerted two friends to the fact that a young man would be arriving at the convent by night with money in his purse. After all, the gatekeeper had been acting as go-between for the two lovers—presumably for a fee—which indicated he was corruptible.

Or
—the least likely—the Bloats had discovered their daughter’s plan and had hired killers to prevent it.

Such was Talbot’s murder.

Yet not one on the list of his likely killers fitted the character of the man who’d crept into the guesthouse and put Allie’s cradle on the steps outside. The smell of him was different, it had none of the direct brutality with which Talbot had been eliminated.

No, this man was…what? Sophisticated? Professional?
I do not kill unless I must. I have given you a warning. I trust you will heed it.

He was the murderer of Rosamund and Bertha.

T
here was more snow. The sides of the track that had been dug down to the Thames fell in under it.

It was left to Gyltha to fetch their meals from the kitchen, to empty their chamber pots in the latrine, and to gather firing from the woodpile.

“Ain’t we ever a’going to take that poor baby for some air?” she wanted to know.

“No.”

I am outside, watching. How submissive are you?

Totally submissive, my lord. Don’t hurt my child.

“Nobody can’t snatch her, not with that old Arab along of us.”

“No.”

“We stay here, then, with the door barred?”

“Yes.”

But of course, they couldn’t….

T
he first alarm came at night. Somewhere a handbell was ringing and people were shouting.

Gyltha leaned out of the window to the alley. “They’re yellin’ fire,” she said. “I can smell smoke. Oh, dear Lord, preserve us.”

Bundling Allie into her furs, they dressed themselves, snatching up what belongings they could before carrying her down the steps.

Fire, that greatest of threats, had brought out everybody on this side of the abbey. Fitchet came running from the gates carrying two buckets; men were emerging out of the guesthouse: Mansur, Master Warin.

“Where is it? Where is it?”

The ringing and hubbub was coming from the direction of the pond.

“Barn?”

“Lockup, sounds like.”

“Oh, God,” Adelia said.
“Dakers.”
She handed Allie to Gyltha and began running.

Between the pond and the lockup, Peg was swinging a bell as if she were thwacking an unruly cow with it. She’d seen the flames on her way to the milking. “Up there.” She pointed with the bell toward the narrow slit that allowed air into the little beehive building of stone that was the convent lockup.

Volunteers, already forming a line, shouted to hasten the smith as he hammered an iron spar into the pond to gain water for their pails.

Mansur came up beside Adelia. “I smell no fire.”

“Neither do I.” There was a slight smitch in the air, nothing more, and no flames apparent in the lockup’s slit.

“Well, there damn was,” Peg said.

The door to the lockup opened and a bad-tempered sentry came out. “Oh, get on home,” he shouted. “No need for this rumpus. Straw caught fire, is all. I stamped it out.” It was Cross. He locked the door behind him and gestured at the crowd with his spear. “Go on. Get off with you.”

Relieved, grumbling, people began to disperse.

Adelia stayed where she was.

“What is it?” Mansur asked.

“I don’t know.”

Cross leveled his spear at her as she came up to him from the shadows. “Get back there, nothing to see. Go home…oh, it’s you, is it?”

“Is she all right?”

“Old Mother Midnight? She’s all right. Hollered a bit, but she’s dandy in there now, bloody sight dandier than it is out here. Warm. Gets her meals regular. What about the poor buggers got to guard her, that’s what I say.”

“What started the fire?”

Cross looked shifty. “Reckon as she kicked the brazier over.”

“I want to see her.”

“That you don’t. Captain Schwyz told me: ‘No bugger talks to her. No bugger to go near ’cept to bring her meals. And keep the bloody door locked.’”

“And who told Schwyz? The abbot?”

Cross shrugged.

“I want to see her,” Adelia said again.

Mansur reached out and took the spear from the mercenary’s hand with the ease of pulling up a weed.

Blowing out his cheeks, Cross unlatched an enormous key from his belt and put it in the lock. “Just a peep, mind. Captain’s bound to be here in a minute; he’ll have heard the rumpus. Bloody peasants, bloody rumpus.”

It
was
only a peep. Mansur had to lift Adelia up so that she could see over the mercenary’s shoulder as he blocked the door to stop them from going in.

What light there was inside came from burning logs in a brazier. Except for an ashy patch on one side, a deep ring of straw circled the curve of the stone walls. Something moved in it.

Adelia was reminded of Bertha. For a moment, a pair of eyes in the straw reflected the glow from the brazier and then disappeared.

Boots could be heard crunching the ice as their owner came toward them. Cross tore his spear away from Mansur. “Captain’s coming. Get away, for God’s sake.”

They got away.

“Yes?” Mansur asked as they walked.

“Somebody tried to burn her to death,” Adelia said. “The slit’s up on the back wall, on the opposite side from the entrance. I think somebody tossed a lighted rag through it. If Cross was guarding the door, he wouldn’t have seen who it was. But he knows it happened.”

“The Fleming said the brazier tipped over.”

“No. It’s bolted to the floor. There was no sign that a brand fell out of it. Somebody wanted to kill her, and it wasn’t Cross.”

“She is a sad, mad
bint.
Perhaps she tried to burn herself.”

“No.” It was a natural progression. Rosamund, Bertha, Dakers. All three had known—in Dakers’s case, still did—something they should not.

If it hadn’t been for Cross’s quick reaction in putting the fire out, the last of them would have been silenced.

E
arly the next morning, armed mercenaries broke into the chapel where the nuns were at prayer and carried off Emma Bloat.

Adelia, sleeping in, heard of it when Gyltha came scurrying back from the kitchen where she’d been to fetch their breakfast. “Poor thing, poor thing. Terrible to-do ’twas. Prioress tried to stop ’em and they knocked her down. In her own chapel.
Knocked her down.
”

Adelia was already dressing. “Where did they take Emma?”

“Village. Wolvercote it was, and his bloody Flemings. Carried her to his manor. Screaming, so they said, poor thing, poor thing.”

“Can’t they get her back?”

“The nuns is gone after her, but what can they do?”

By the time Adelia reached the gates, the rescue party of nuns was returning across the bridge, empty-handed.

“Can nothing be done?” Adelia asked as they went by.

Sister Havis was white-faced and had a cut below her eye. “We were turned back at spearpoint. One of his men laughed at us. He said it was legal because they had a priest.” She shook her head. “What sort of priest I don’t know.”

Adelia went to the queen.

Eleanor had just been acquainted with the news herself and was raging at her courtiers. “Do I command savages? The girl was under my protection. Did I or did I not tell Wolvercote to give her time?”

“You did, lady.”

“She must be fetched back. Tell Schwyz—where is Schwyz?—tell him to gather his men….” She looked around. Nobody hadmoved.
“Well?”

“Lady, I fear the…
um
…damage is done.” This was the Abbot of Eynsham. “It appears that Wolvercote keeps a hedge priest in the village. The words were said.”

“Not by the girl, I’ll warrant, not under those circumstances. Were her parents present?”

“Apparently not.”

“Then it is abduction.” Eleanor’s voice was shrill with the desperation of a ruler losing control of the ruled. “Are my orders to be ignored in such a fashion? Are we living in the caves of brute beasts?”

Apart from Adelia’s, the queen’s was the only anger in the room. Others, the men, anyway, were disturbed, displeased, but also faintly, very faintly, amused. A woman, as long as it wasn’t their own, carried off and bedded was broad comedy.

There was an embryonic wink in the abbot’s eye as he said, “I fear our lord Wolvercote has taken the Roman attitude towards our poor Sabine.”

There was nothing to be done. Words had been said by a priest; Emma Bloat was married. Like it or not, she had been deflowered and—as it was in every male mind—probably enjoyed it.

Helpless, Adelia left the room, unable to bear its company.

In the cloister walk, one of Eleanor’s young men, lost to everything about him, was blocking the way as he walked up and down, strumming a viol and trying out a new song.

Adelia gave him a push that sent him staggering. The door of the abbey chapel at the end of the cloister beckoned to her, and she marched in, only knowing, on finding it blessedly empty, that she was wild for a solace that—and she knew this, too—could not be granted.

She went to her knees in the nave.

Dear Mother of God, protect and comfort her.

The icy, incense-laden air held only the reply:
She is cattle as you are cattle. Put up with it.

Adelia pummeled the stones and made her accusation out loud. “Rosamund dead, Bertha dead. Emma raped. Why do You allow it?”

The reply came: “There will be medicine for our complaint eventually, my child. You of all people, with your mastery of healing, should know that.”

The voice was a real one, dry and seemingly without human propulsion, as if it rustled out of the mouth on its own wings to flutter down from the tiny choir to the nave.

Mother Edyve was so small, she was almost hidden in the stall in which she sat, her hands folded on her walking stick, her chin on her hands.

Adelia got up. She said, “I have intruded, Mother. I’ll go.”

The voice alighted on her as she made for the door. “Emma was nine years old when she came to Godstow, bringing joy to us all.”

Adelia turned back. “No joy now, not for her, not for you,” she said.

Unexpectedly, Mother Edyve asked, “How is Queen Eleanor taking the news?”

“With fury.” Because she was sour with a fury of her own, Adelia said, “Angry because Wolvercote has flaunted her, I suppose.”

“Yes.” Mother Edyve rubbed her chin against her folded hands. “You are unjust, I think.”

“To Eleanor? What can she do except rant? What can any of us do? Your joyful child’s enslaved for life to a pig, and even the Queen of England is helpless.”