The Serpent's Tale (40 page)

And he was gone, refusing to take his place in the harness. “My good fellow, I am not an ox.”

Not human, either
, she thought, a
lusus naturae
, a tool, no more culpable for what it did than an artifact, as blameless as a weapon stuck on a wall and admired by the owner for its beautiful functionality.

The lingering trail of his perfume was obliterated by a smell of sweat and damp dirt from the next man who crawled under the tarpaulin to fall asleep and snore.

The abbot had taken position on the step behind her, but instead of helping to propel the sledge along, he became a passenger, his weight slowing the men pulling it to a stumping crawl that threatened their balance. They were complaining. At an order from Schwyz, they removed their skates and, to give them better purchase, continued in their boots.

Which, Adelia saw, were splashing. The sledge had begun to send up spray as it traveled. There were no stars now, and the vague moon had an even more vague penumbra. Schwyz had lit a torch and was holding it high as he skated.

It was thawing.

From over her head came a fruity boom: “I don’t wish to complain, my dear Schwyz, but any more of this and we’ll be marching on the river bottom. How much further?”

“Not far now.”

Not far to where?
Having been asleep and not knowing for how long, she couldn’t estimate how far they’d come. The banks were still their featureless, untidy conglomeration of reed and snow.

It was even colder now; the chill of increasing damp had something to do with it, but so had fear. Eynsham would be reassured by their unpursued and uninterrupted passage up the river. Once he was in safe territory, he could rid himself of the burden he’d carried to it.

“Up ahead,” Schwyz called.

There was nothing up ahead except a dim twinkle in the eastern sky like a lone star bright enough to penetrate the mist that hid the others. A castle showing only one light? A turret?

Now they were approaching a landing stage, white edged and familiar.

Then she knew.

Rosamund had been waiting for her.

A
delia had remembered Wormhold as a place of jagged, shocking flashes of color where men and women walked and talked in madness.

Now, through the dawn mist, the tower returned to what it was—a mausoleum. Architectural innuendo had gone. And the maze, for those who dragged the sledge through slush into it, was merely a straight and dreary tunnel of gray bushes leading to a monument like a giant’s tombstone against a drearier sky.

The door above its steps stood open, sagging now. The unlit bonfire remained untouched in the hall where a mound of broken furniture, like the walls, shone with gathering damp in Schwyz’s torchlight.

As they went in, a scuttle from escaping rats accentuated the hall’s silence, as did the abbot’s attempt to raise the housekeeper. “Dakers. Where are you, little dear? ’Tis your old friend come to call. Robert of Eynsham.”

He turned to Schwyz as the echo faded. “She doesn’t know it was me as had her locked up, does she?”

Schwyz shook his head. “We fooled her, Rob.”

“Good, then I’m still her ally. Where
is
the old crow? We need our dinner.
Dakers.
”

Schwyz said, “We can’t stay long, Rob. That bastard’ll be after us.”

“My dear, stop attributing the powers of Darkness to him, we’ve outmaneuvered the bugger.” He grimaced. “I suppose I’d better go up and search for my letters. If our Fair Rosamund kept one, she might have kept others. I
told
the fat bitch to burn them, but did she? Women are
so
unreliable.” He pointed at the bonfire. “Get that alight when the time comes. Some food first, I think, a nap, and then, when our amiable king arrives, we’ll be long gone, leaving a nice warm fire to greet him.
Dakers.
”

He must know where she is,
Adelia thought. The only life here is in the top room with the dead.

“Up you go, then.” Schwyz turned away to give orders to his men, and then turned back. “What do you want done with the trollop?”

“
This
trollop?” The abbot looked down at Adelia. “We’ll hang on to her until the last minute, I think, just in case. She can come up and help me look for the letters.”

“Why? She’ll be better down here.” Schwyz was jealous.

The abbot was patient with him. “Because I didn’t see any letters lying around when we were here last, but little Mistress Big Eyes had one, hadn’t you, my dear? If she found one, she can find the others. Bind her hands, if you like, but in front this time and not too tight; she’s looking wan.”

Adelia’s hands were pinioned again—not gently, either.

“Up, up.” The abbot pointed her toward the stairs. “Up, up, up.” To the mercenary, he said, “Tell the men to put their minds to my dinner. And Schwyz…” The tone had changed.

“What?”

“Set a damn good watch on that river.”

He’s frightened
, Adelia thought suddenly.
He, too, credits Henry with supernatural powers. Oh, dear God, let him be right.

Going up the tiny, wedge-shaped, slippery, winding steps without the balancing use of hands was not easy, but Adelia did better than the abbot, who was grunting with effort before they reached the second landing. That was the stage where the tower cut them off from the noise at its base, imposing a silence in which the echo of their footsteps troubled the ears as if they disobeyed an ordinance from the dead.
Go back. This is a tomb.

Light that was hardly light at all came, sluggish, through the arrow slits onto the same broken mess that had littered the landings when she’d climbed up here with Rowley. Nobody had swept it away, nobody ever would.

Up and up, past Rosamund’s apartments, empty of their carpets and gold ornaments now, looted by mercenaries, maybe even the Aquitanians, while Eleanor had kept her vigil over a corpse. Much good it had done them; loot and looters had gone to the bottom of the Thames.

They were getting close to the top now.

I don’t want to go in there. Why doesn’t it stop? It’s impossible I should die here. Why doesn’t somebody stop this?

The last landing, the door a crack open but with its ornate key in the lock.

Adelia stood back. “I’m not going in.”

Gripping her shoulder, the abbot pushed her in front of him. “Dakers, my dame. Here’s the Abbot of Eynsham, your old friend, come to pay his respects to your mistress.”

A smell like a blast of wind teetered him on the threshold.

The room was furnished as Adelia had last seen it. No looting here—there hadn’t been time.

Rosamund no longer sat at the writing table, but something lay on the bed with the frail curtains framing it and a cloak covering its upper half.

There was no sign of Dakers, but, if she had wanted to preserve her mistress still, she had made the mistake of closing the windows and lighting funerary candles.

“Dear God.” With a handkerchief to his nose, the abbot hurried around the room, blowing out candles and opening the windows. “Dear God, the whore
stinks.
Dear God.”

Moist, gray air refreshed the chamber slightly.

Eynsham came back to the bed, his eyes fascinated.

“Leave her,” Adelia advised him.

He whipped the cloak off the body and let it fall to the floor.

“Aach.”

Her lovely hair fanned out from the decomposing face onto a pillow, with another pillow propping her crown near the top of her head. The crossed hands on her breast were mercifully hidden by a prayer book. Feet bulged wetly out of the tiny gold slippers that peeped from under the graceful, carefully arranged folds of a gown as blue as a spring sky. Patches of ooze were staining its silk.

“My, my,” said the abbot, softly. “
Sic transit Rosa Mundi.
So the rose of all the world rots like any other…Rosamund the Foul…”

“Don’t you dare,”
Adelia shouted at him. If she’d had her hands free, she’d have hit him. “Don’t you
dare
mock her. You brought her to this, and, by God, this is what you’ll come to—your soul with it.”

“Oof.”
He stepped back like a child faced by a furious parent. “Well, it’s a horror…admit it’s a horror.”

“I don’t care. You treat her with respect.”

For a moment he was wrong-footed by his own lapse in taste. Tentatively, standing well back from the bed, his hand traced a blessing in the air toward it.
“Requiescat in pace.”
After a moment, he said, “What
is
that white stuff growing out of her face?”

“Grave wax,” Adelia told him. Actually, it was very interesting; she’d not seen it on a human flesh before, only on that of a sow at the death farm.

For a moment she was a mistress in the art of death again, aware only of the phenomenon in front of her, vaguely irritated that lack of time and means were preventing her from examining it.

It’s because she was fat,
she thought. The sow in Salerno had been fat, and Gordinus had kept it in an airtight tin chest away from flies.
“You see, my child? Bereft of insects, this white grease—I call it
corpus adipatus
—will accrete on plumper areas, cheeks, breasts, buttocks, et cetera, and hold back putrefaction, yes, actually delay it. Though whether it causes the delay or the delay causes it is yet to be determined.”

Bless him,
Gordinus had called it a marvel, which it was, and
damn it
that she was seeing it manifest on a human corpse only now.

It was especially interesting that the room’s new warmth was, to judge from what was seeping through Rosamund’s gown, bringing on putrefaction at the selfsame time. That couldn’t be caused by flies—could it?—there were none at this time of year…blast it, if her hands were free, she could find out what was breeding under the material….

“Oh, what?” she asked, crossly. The abbot was pulling at her.

“Where does she keep the letters?”

“What letters?” This opportunity to advance knowledge might never come again. If it wasn’t flies…

He swung her round to face him. “Let me explain the position to you, my dear. In all this I have only been pursuing my Christian duty to bring down a king who had the good Saint Thomas murdered on the steps of his own cathedral. I intended a civil war that our gracious queen would win. Since that outcome now seems unlikely, I need to retrieve my position because, if Henry finds my letters, Henry will send them to the Pope. And will the Holy Father sanction what I have done to punish the wicked? Will he say, ‘Well done, thou good and faithful Robert of Eynsham, you have advanced our great cause’? He will not. He must pretend outrage, because a worthless whore was poisoned in the process. He will wash his Pilate’s hands. Will there be oak leaves? Reward? Ah, no.”

He stopped savoring the sound of his own voice. “Find those letters for me, mistress, or when Henry comes he will discover in the ashes of his bordello the bones of not just one of his harlots but two.” He was diverted by a happy thought. “Together, in each other’s arms, perhaps. Yes, perhaps…”

He mustn’t see that she was afraid; he
mustn’t
see that she was afraid. “In that case, the letters will be burned, too,” she said.

“Not if the bitch kept them in a metal box. Where are they? You had one, mistress, and were quick enough to show it around.

Where did she keep the letters?
”

“On the table, I took it from the table.”

“If she kept one, she kept more.” He shouted for the housekeeper again. “
Dakers.
She’ll know. Where is the hellhag?”

And then Adelia knew where Dakers was.

All the visits he’d made to this room, and he’d never known he was observed from a garderobe with a spy hole. He didn’t know now.

Eynsham was examining the table, sweeping its writing implements aside, sending the ancient bowl in which Rosamund had kept sweetmeats onto the floor, where it broke. He bent to look under the table. There was a grunt of satisfaction. He came up holding a crumpled piece of vellum. “Is this all there was?”

“How could I know?” It was the letter Rosamund had been writing to the queen, that Eleanor in her fury had thrown to the floor. Adelia had given the abbot’s template to poor Father Paton and, if she died for it, she wasn’t going to tell this man that there were others hidden in a box stool only inches from his right boot.

Let him doubt, let there be a worm of worry for as long as he lives.

Great God, he’s reading it.

The abbot had lumbered to the open window and was holding the parchment to the light. “Such an appalling hand the trollop had,” he said. “Still, it’s amazing she could write at all.”