The Serpent's Tale (37 page)

“I’m not telling you again,” Cross said. “The chief says inside, so get bloody inside.”

Jacques obeyed. Adelia lingered.

“Come on, now, missis. ’S getting chilly.” The mercenary took her arm, not unkindly. “See, you’re shaking.”

“I don’t want to go in,” she said. The convent walls would imprison her and the killer together again; she was being dragged back into a cage that held a monster with blood on its fangs.

“You ain’t staying here all night.” As he pulled her over the ice, Cross shouted over his shoulder at the wren hunters in the trees. “Time to go in, lads.”

When they reached the steps, he had to haul Adelia up them like an executioner assisting a prisoner to the gallows.

Behind them, a crowd of men emerged from the trees of the far bank, shouting in triumph over a small cage twisted from withies in which fluttered a frightened wren. They were hooded, covered in snow, their black faces rendering them unrecognizable.

And if, whooping and capering with the rest, there was one more figure going in through the convent gates than had left them, nobody noticed it.

T
he convent carpenter had laid boards across the end rafters of the church’s Saint Mary side chapel in order to facilitate the removal and replacement of struts that showed signs of rotting, creating a temporary and partial little loft in which the two people now hiding in it could listen but not see. Adelia and Father Paton were, quite literally, eavesdroppers.

It had taken considerable urging to get the priest to accompany her into the rafters. He’d protested at the subterfuge, the risk, the indignity.

Adelia hadn’t liked it, either. This wasn’t her way of doing things, it was arbitrary, unscientific. Worse, the fear she felt at being once more in the abbey sapped her energy, leaving her with a deadening feeling of futility.

But coming in through the chapel’s door, a draft had wavered the candles burning on the Virgin’s altar, one of them lit by Emma for Talbot of Kidlington, and so she had bullied, shamed, and cajoled. “We have a duty to the dead, Father.” It was the bedrock of her faith, as fundamental to her as the Athanasian Creed to Western liturgy, and perhaps the priest had recognized its virtue, for he had stopped arguing and climbed the ladder Jacques set for them.

Now Vespers had chimed, the faint chanting from the cloisters had stopped. The church was empty—ever since the mercenaries had proved troublesome, the nuns had transferred the vigil for their dead to their own chapel.

Somewhere a dog barked. Fitchet’s mongrel, probably—a bristled terror at whose every approach Ward, not renowned for his courage, lay down and rolled over.

They were too far back in the loft to see anything below. Only a glow from the altar candles in the church proper reached them so that they could, at least, make out the wagon roof above them. It gave Adelia the impression that she and the priest were lying on the thwarts of an upended boat. Uncomfortably.

Fierce little beads that were the eyes of the bats hanging from the lathes overhead glared down at her.

A scamper nearby caused Father Paton to squeak. “I abhor rats.”

“Be quiet,” she told him.

“This is foolishness.”

Perhaps it was, but they couldn’t alter it now—Jacques had taken the ladder away, replacing it in the bell tower next door from whence it had come, perching himself in the shadows at the tower’s top.

A latch clicked. The unoiled hinges of the chapel’s side door protested with a screech. Somebody hissed at the noise. The door closed. Silence.

Warin. It would be the lawyer; Wolvercote wouldn’t creep as this one crept.

Adelia felt a curious despair. It was one thing to theorize about a man’s guilt, another to have it confirmed. Somewhere below her stood a creature who’d betrayed the only relative he had, a boy in his care, a boy who’d trusted him and had been sent to his death.

A rasp of hinges again, this time accompanied by the stamp of boots. There was a vibration of energy.

“Did you send me this?” Wolvercote’s voice. Furious. If Master Warin protested, the listeners did not hear him because Wolvercote continued without pause. “Yes you did, you whoreson, you puling pot of pus, you stinking spittle, you’ll not tax me for more, you crapulous bit of crud….”

The tirade, its wonderful alliteration unsuspected from such a source, was accompanied by slaps, presumably across Master Warin’s face, that resounded against the walls like whip cracks—each one making Father Paton jump so that Adelia, lying beside him in the rafters, flinched in unison.

The lawyer was keeping his head, though it had to be buzzing. “Look, look, my lord. In the name of Christ,
look.
” The onslaught stopped.

He’s showing
his
letter.

Apart from giving the time and place of the suggested meeting, the message she’d written to each man had been short:
We are discovered.

There was a long pause while Wolvercote—not a reading man—deciphered the note sent to Warin. The lawyer said quietly, “It’s a trap. Somebody’s here.”

There were hurried, soft footfalls as Warin searched, the opening of cupboards—a thump of hassocks falling to the floor as they were dislodged. “Somebody’s
here.
”

“
Who’s
here?
What
trap?” Wolvercote was staying where he was, shouting after Warin as the little man went into the body of the church to search that, too. “Didn’t
you
send me this?”

“What’s up there?” Master Warin had come back. “We should look up there.”

He’s looking upward. The impression that the man’s eyes could see through the boards tensed Adelia’s muscles. Father Paton didn’t move.

“Nobody’s up there. How could anybody get up there?
What
trap?”

“My lord, somebody knows.” Master Warin had calmed himself a little. “My lord, you shouldn’t have hanged the knaves. It looked badly. I’d promised them money to leave the country.”

So
you
supplied the killers.

“Of course I hanged the dogs.” Wolvercote was still shouting. “Who knew if they would keep their mouths shut. God curse you, Warin, if this is a ploy for more payment….”

“It is not, my lord, though Sweet Mary knows it was a great service I rendered you….”

“Yes.” Wolvercote’s tone had become quieter, more considering. “I am beginning to wonder why.”

“I told you, my lord. I would not have you wronged by one of my own family; when I heard what the boy intended…”

“And no benefit to you? Then why in hell did you come here? What brought you galloping to the abbey to see if he was dead?”

They were moving off into the nave of the church, their voices trailing into unintelligible exchanges of animosity and complaint.

After a long time, they came back, only footsteps giving an indication of their return. The door scraped open. Boots stamped through it as loudly as they had come.

Father Paton shifted, but Adelia clamped his arm.
Wait.
They won’t want to be seen together. Wolvercote has left first.

Silence again. A quiet little man, the lawyer.

Now he was going. She waited until she heard the fall of the latch, then wriggled forward to peer over the boards.

The chapel was empty.

“Respectable men, a baron of the realm, ogres, ogres.” Father Paton’s horror was tinged with excitement. “The sheriff shall be told, I must write it down, yes, write it down. I am witness to conspiracy and murder. The sheriff will need a full affidavit. I am an important deponent, yes, I would not have believed…a baron of the realm.”

He could hardly wait for Jacques to bring the ladder. Even as he descended it, he was questioning the messenger on what had been said in the church.

For a moment, Adelia lay where she was, immobile. It didn’t matter what else had been said; two murderers condemned themselves out of their own mouths, as careless of the life they had conspired to take as of a piece of grass.

Oh, Emma.

She thought of the bolt buried in the young man’s chest, stopping that most wonderful organ, the heart, from beating, the indifference of the bowman who’d loosed it into the infinite complexity of vein and muscle, as indifferent as the cousin who had ordered it to be loosed, as the lord who’d paid him to do it.

Emma, Emma.

Father Paton scuttled back to the warming room—he wanted to write out his deposition right away.

There was a bright, cold moon, no necessity for a lantern. As Jacques escorted her home, he told her what he’d managed to hear in the church. Mostly it had been repetition of the exchanges in the chapel. “By the time they left,” he said, “they were deciding it was a trick played on them. Lord Wolvercote did, anyway, he suspects his mercenaries. Lawyer Warin was still atremble, I’ll wager he leaves the country if he can.”

They said good-bye at the foot of the guesthouse steps.

Unbelievably tired, Adelia dragged herself up, taking the last rise gingerly as she always did, now with the memory of an event that hadn’t happened but in which, constantly, she watched a cradle tumble over the edge.

She stopped. The door was slightly open, and it was dark inside. Even if her little household had gone to sleep, a taper was always left burning for her—and the door was never left open.

She was reassured by Ward coming to greet her, the energetic wag of his tail releasing more odor than usual. She went in.

The door was shut behind her. An arm encircled her chest, a hand clamped itself across her mouth. “Quietly now,” somebody whispered. “Guess who.”

She didn’t need to guess. Frantically, she wriggled around in the imprisoning arms until she faced the man, the only man.

“You
bastard
,” she said.

“True, to an extent,” he said, picking her up. He chucked her onto the nearest bed and planted himself on top of her. “Ma and pa married eventually, I remember exactly, I was there.”

There wasn’t time to laugh—though, with his mouth clamped onto hers, she did.

Not dead—deliciously living, the smell of him so right, he was rightness,
everything
was right now that he was here. He moved her to the very soul and very,
very
much to her innards, which turned liquid at his touch. She’d been parched for too long.

Their bodies pumping like huge wings took them higher and higher on a flight into cataclysmic air and then folded into the long, pulsing drop to a truckle bed in a dark, cold room.

When the earth stopped rocking and settled, she wriggled from underneath him and sat up.

“I knew you were nearby,” she said. “Somehow, I knew.”

He grunted.

She was energized, as if he had been a marvelous infusion bringing her body back to life.

She wondered if there would be another baby, and the thought made her happy.

Her lover had relapsed into postcoital inertia. She jabbed a finger into his back. “Where’s Allie? Where are Gyltha and Mansur?”

“I sent them to the kitchens, the servants are having a revel.” He sighed. “I shouldn’t have done that.”

So that she could look at him, she got up and stumbled for the table, felt around, pinched some tinder out of its box, struck a flint, and lit a taper at its flame.

He was thin, oh, bless him, but beautiful. In trousers—now down around his hocks—like a peasant, his face smeared with what looked like tree bark.

“A wren hunter,” she said, delighted. “You came in with the wren hunters. Has Henry come?”

“Had to get in somehow. Thank God it’s Saint Stephen’s Day, or I’d have had to climb the bloody wall.”

“How did you know we’d be at Godstow?”

“With the river freezing? Where else would you be?”

He wasn’t responding properly. “We could be dead,” she pointed out. “We nearly were.”

He sat up. “I was in the trees,” he said, “watched you skating. Very graceful, a little shaky on the turns, perhaps…By the saints, that’s a bonny baby, isn’t she?”

Our baby,
Adelia thought.
She’s
our
bonny baby.

She punched his shoulder, not altogether playfully. “Damn you, Rowley. I suffered, I thought you were dead.”

“I knew that bit of the Thames,” he said, “that’s why I got off, belongs to Henry, part of Woodstock forest; there’s a river keeper close by—I’d baptized his child for him. I made for his cottage, wasn’t easy but I got there.” He sat up, suddenly. “Now then…what’s to do here?”

“Rowley, I
suffered.
”

“No need. The keeper took me to Oxford—we used snow shoes. Bloody place was teeming with rebels, every bastard that had fought for Stephen and suffered for it was in arms and flying Eleanor’s standard or Young Henry’s. We had to bypass the town and make for Wallingford instead. Always a royal stronghold, Wallingford. The FitzCounts held it for the empress during the war. I knew the king’d go there first.” He wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. “Jesus save me, but it was hard going.”