The Serpent's Tale

  Some tapers clipped into their holders were strewn among the rushes of the floor. Lighting them from the lantern, Rowley, Adelia, and Walt took one each and began the ascent of the bare staircase running upward around the wall.

  They found the tower to be one circular room placed on another, like a tube of apothecary’s pills wrapped in stiff paper and set upright, the door to each reached by a curving flight and a tiny landing. The second they came to was as utilitarian as the first, its empty racks, some dropped strands of polishing horsetail, and the smell of beeswax suggesting an overlarge cleaning cupboard.

  Above that, the maids’ room: four wooden beds and little else. All the beds were stripped of palliasse and covering.

  Each room was deserted. Each was marginally less uncomfortable than the one below. A sewing room—looted, for the most part, but the bench tables set under each arrow slit to catch the light carried torn strips of material and an errant pincushion. A plaster dummy had been smashed to the floor, and shards of it were seemingly kicked onto the landing.

  “They hated her,” said Adelia, peering in through the arched doorway.

  “Who?”

  “The servants.”

  “Hated who?” The bishop was beginning to puff. “Rosamund,” Adelia told him. “Or Dame Dakers.”

  “With these stairs? I don’t blame ’em.”

  She grinned at his laboring back. “You’ve been eating too many episcopal dinners.”

  “As you say, mistress.” He was unoffended. It was a rebuff; in the old days, he’d have been indignant.

  I must remember, she thought. We are no longer intimate; we keep our distance.

  The fourth room—or was it the fifth?—had not been looted, though it was starker than any. A truckle bed, its gray, knitted bedspread rigidly tucked in. A deal table on which stood ewer and basin. A stool. A plain chest with a few bits of women’s clothing, equally plain and neatly folded.

  “Dakers’s room,” Adelia said. She was beginning to get the feel of the housekeeper, and was daunted by it.

  “Nobody’s here. Leave it.”

  But Adelia was interested. Here, the looters had desisted. Here, she was sure, Dragon Dakers had stood on the stairs, as frightening as Bertha described her, and stopped them from going farther.

  Rosamund’s escutcheon was carved into the eastern section of the west wall above Dakers’s bed; it had been painted and gilded so that it dominated the gray room. Raising her candle to look at it, Adelia heard an intake of breath from Rowley in the doorway that wasn’t due to exertion.

  “God’s teeth,” he said, “that’s madness.”

  A carved outer shield showed three leopards and the fleur-de-lis, which every man and woman in England now recognized as the arms of their Angevin Plantagenet king. Inside it was a smaller shield, checkered, with one quarter containing a serpent, the other a rose.

  Even Adelia’s scanty knowledge of heraldry was enough to know that she was looking at the escutcheon of a man and his wife.

  The bishop, staring, joined her. “Henry. In the name of God, Henry, what were you doing to allow this? It’s madness.” A motto had been carved into the wall beneath the escutcheon. Like most armorial mottos, it was a pun. Rosa Mundi.

  Rose of all the world.

  “Oh, dear,” Adelia said.

  “Jesus have mercy,” Rowley breathed. “If the queen saw this ...”

  Together, motto and escutcheon made the taunt of all taunts: He prefers me to you. I am his wife in all but name, the true queen of his heart.

  The bishop’s mind was leaping ahead. “Damnation. Whether Eleanor’s seen it or not is irrelevant. It’s enough for others to assume that she knows of it and had Rosamund killed because of it. It’s a reason to kill. It’s flaunting usurpation.”

  “It’s a bit of stone with patterns on it put up by a silly woman,” Adelia protested. “Does it matter so much?”

  Apparently, it did—and would. Pride mattered to a queen. Her enemies knew it; so did the enemies of the king.

  “I’ll kill the bitch if she isn’t dead already,” said the man of God. “I’ll burn the place down, and her in it. This is an invitation to war.”

  She was puzzled. “You’ve been here before, I’d expect you to have seen it already.”

  He shook his head. “We met in the garden; she was taking the air. We gave thanks to God for her recovery, and then Dakers led me back through the Wyrm. Where is Dakers?”

  He pushed past Jacques and Walt, who stood blinking in the doorway, and attacked the stairs, shouting for the housekeeper. Doors slammed open as he looked into the next room, dismissed it, and raced upward to the next.

  They hurried after him, the tower resounding with the crash of boots and the click of a dog’s paws on stone.

  Now they were climbing past Rosamund’s apartments. Dakers, if it was Dakers, had been able to preserve them in all their glory. Adelia, trying to keep up, was vouchsafed glimpses of spring and autumn come together. Persian carpets, Venetian goblets, damask divans, gold-rich icons and triptychs, arras, statuary: the spoils of an empire laid at the feet of an emperor’s mistress.

  Here were glazed windows, not the arrow slits of the rooms below. They were shuttered, but the taper’s light as Adelia passed reflected an image of itself in lattices of beautiful and expensive glass.

  And through the open doors came perfume, subtle but strong enough to delight a nose deadened by cold and the foul pelt of a dog.

  Adelia sniffed. Roses. He even captured roses for her.

  Above her, another door was flung against its jamb. A sharp exclamation from the bishop.

  “What is it, what is it?” She reached him on the last landing; there were no more stairs. Rowley was standing facing the open door, but the lit candle in his hand was down by his side, dripping wax onto the floor.

  “What is it?”

  “You were wrong,” Rowley said.

  The cold up here was extraordinary.

  “Was I?”

  “She’s alive. Rosamund. Alive after all.”

  The relief would have been immeasurable if it hadn’t been that he was so strange and there was no light in the room he was facing.

  Also, he was making no effort to enter.

  “She’s sitting there,” he said, and made the sign of the cross.

  Adelia went in, the dog following her.

  No perfume here, the cold obliterated scent.

  Each window—at least eight of them encircled the room—was open, its glazed lattice and accompanying shutter pushed outward to allow in air icy enough to kill. Adelia felt her face shrivel from it.

  Ward went ahead. She could hear him sniffing round the room, giving no sign that he encountered anybody. She went in a little farther.

  The glow of the taper fell on a bed against the northerly wall. Exquisite white lace swept from a gilded rondel in the ceiling to part over pillows and fall at either side of a gold-tasseled coverlet. It was a high and magnificent bed, with a tiny ivory set of steps placed so that its owner might be assisted to reach it.

  Nobody was in it.

  Its owner was sitting at a writing table opposite, facing a window, a pen in her hand.

  Adelia, her taper now vibrating a little, saw the glancing facets of a jeweled crown and ash-blond hair curling from it down the writer’s back.

  Go nearer. You have to. It can’t harm you. It can’t.

  She willed herself forward. As she passed the bed, she stepped on a fold of its lace lying on the floor, and the ice in it crunched under her boot.

  “Lady Rosamund?” It seemed polite to say it, even knowing what she knew.

  She took off her glove to touch the figure’s unexpectedly large shoulder and felt the chill of stone in what had once been flesh. She saw a white, white hand, its wrist braceleted with skin, like a baby’s. Thumb and forefinger were supporting a goose quill as if it had only seconds ago drawn the signature on the document on which they rested.

  Sighing, Adeli
a bent to look into the face. Open, blue eyes were slightly cast downward so that they appeared to be rereading what the hand had just written.

  But Fair Rosamund was very dead.

  And very fat.

  SIX

  Dakers,” Adelia said. “Dakers did this.”

  Only Dame Dakers could be refusing to let her dead mistress go to her grave. Rowley was recovering. “We’ll never get her in the coffin like that. For the love of God, do something. I’m not rowing back to Godstow with her sitting up and looking at me.”

  “Show some respect, blast you.” Banging the last window closed, Adelia turned on him. “You won’t be rowing, and she won’t be sitting.”

  Both were compensating in their own way for the impact of a scene that had unmanned him and unnerved her.

  Jacques was staring from the doorway, but Walt, having peered in, had retired downstairs in a hurry. Ward, unperturbed, was scratching himself.

  Used to dead bodies as she was, Adelia had never feared one—until now. Consequently, she’d become angry. It was the corpse’s employment ... Rosamund hadn’t died in that position—if it were the mushrooms that had killed her, the end would have been too violent. No, Dakers had dragged the stillwarm carcass onto the Roman chair, arranged it, and then either waited for rigor mortis to set in or, if rigor had already passed, held it in place until the cold coming through the open windows had fixed head, trunk, and limbs as they were now, frozen in the attitude of writing.

  Adelia knew this as surely as if she’d seen it happen, but the impression that the dead woman had got up, walked to her table, sat down, and picked up a pen could not be shaken off.

  Rowley’s peevishness merely disguised the revulsion that had thrown him off balance, and Adelia, who felt the same, responded to it with irritation. “You didn’t tell me she was fat.”

  “Is it relevant?”

  No, it wasn’t, of course it wasn’t, but it was a sort of aftershock. The image Adelia had gained of Fair Rosamund by repute, from meeting Bertha, from tramping through the dreadful maze, from seeing the even more dreadful mantrap, had been of a beautiful woman with the indifference to human suffering of an Olympian goddess: physically lovely, pampered, aloof, cold as a reptile—but slim. Definitely slim.

  Instead, the face she’d bent down to peer into had looked back at her with the innocent chubbiness integral to the obese.

  It altered things. She wasn’t sure why, but it did. “How long has she been dead?” Rowley demanded.

  “What?” Adelia’s mind had wandered into inconsequential questioning of the corpse. Why, with your weight, did you live at the top of this tower? How did you get down the stairs to meet Rowley in the garden? How did you get back up?

  “I said, how long has she been dead?”

  “Oh.” It was time to collect her wits and do the job she’d been brought here to do. “Impossible to be exact.”

  “Was it the mushrooms?”

  “How can I tell? Probably yes.”

  “Can you flatten her?”

  God’s rib, he was a crude man. “She’ll flatten herself,” Adelia said, shortly, “just get some heat into this damned room.” Then she asked, “Why did Dakers want her to be seen writing, do you suppose?”

  But the bishop was on the landing, shouting to Walt to bring braziers, kindling, firewood, candles, pushing Jacques into descending and helping the groom, then going down himself on another search for the housekeeper, taking energy with him and leaving the chamber to the quiet of the dead.

  Adelia’s thoughts rested wistfully on the man whose calm assistance and reassurance had always been her rock during difficult investigations—for never was one likely to be more difficult than this. Mansur, however, was on the barge bringing Rosamund’s coffin upriver and, even supposing he had arrived at the landing place that served Wormhold Tower a quarter of a mile away, he, Oswald, and the men with them had been told to stay there until the messenger fetched them.

  Which could not be tonight. Nobody was going to face the maze of the Wyrm again tonight.

  She had only one light; Rowley had taken his taper with him. She put hers on the writing table as near to the corpse’s hand as possible without burning it—a minuscule start to the thawing out of the body that not only would take time but would be messy.

  Adelia brought to mind the pigs on which she had studied decomposition at the farm in the hills above Salerno, kept for the purpose by Gordinus, her teacher of the process of mortification. From the various carcasses, her memory went to those frozen in the icehouse he’d had built deep into rock. She calculated weights, times; she envisaged needles of ice crystals solidifying muscle and tissue ... and the resultant juices as they melted.

  Poor Rosamund. She would be exposed to the outrages of corruption when everything in her chamber spoke of a being who’d loved elegance.

  Poor Dakers, who had, undoubtedly, loved her mistress to the point of madness.

  Who had also put a crown on her mistress’s head. A real crown, not a fashionable circlet, not a chaplet, not a coronal, but an ancient thing of thick gold with four prongs that rose in the shape of fleur-de-lis from a jeweled brim—the crown of a royal consort. This, Dakers was saying, is a queen.

  Yet the same hand had brushed the lovely hair so that it hung untrammeled over the corpse’s shoulders and down its back in the style of a virgin.

  Oh, get to it, Adelia told herself. She was not here to be fascinated by the unplumbable depths of human obsession but to find out why someone had found it good that this woman should die and, thereby, who that someone was.

  She wished there was some noise from downstairs to ameliorate the deathly quiet of this room. Perhaps it was too high up for sound to reach it.

  Adelia turned her attention to the writing table, an eerie business with the shuttered glass on the other side of it acting on it like the silvering of a looking glass, so that she and the corpse were reflected darkly.

  A pretty table, highly polished. Near the dead woman’s left hand, as if her fingers could dip into it easily, was a bowl of candied plums.

  The bowl was a black-and-red pot figured with athletes like the one her foster father had found in Greece, so ancient and precious that he allowed no one to touch it but himself. Rosamund kept sweetmeats in hers.

  A glass inkwell encased in gold filigree. A smart leather holder for quills, and a little ivory-and-steel knife to sharpen them. Two pages of the best vellum, both closely written, lying side by side, one under the right hand. A sand shaker, also glass, in gold filigree matching the inkwell, its sand nearly used up. A tiny burner for melting the wax that lay by it in two red sticks, one shorter than the other.

  Adelia looked for a seal and found none, but there was a great gold ring on one of the dead fingers. She picked up the taper and held it close to the ring. Its round face was a matrix that when pressed into softened wax would embed the two letters RR.

  Rosamund Regina?

  Hmm.

  It had mattered to Dakers that Rosamund be recognized as literate—no mean accomplishment in England, even among high-born women. Why else had she been petrified like this? Obviously, she had been literate. The table’s implements showed heavy use; Rosamund had written a lot.

  Was Dakers merely proud that you could write? Or is there some other significance that I’m not seeing?

  Adelia turned her attention to the two pieces of vellum. She picked up the one directly in front of the corpse—and found it indecipherable in this light; Rosamund’s literacy had not extended to good calligraphy—here was a cramped scrawl.

  She wondered where Rowley was with more candles, blast him. It was taking the bishop a long time to return. For just a second, Adelia registered the fact, then found that by extending the parchment above her head with one hand, putting the taper dangerously close underneath it with the other, and squinting, it was just possible to make out a superscription. What she held was a letter.

  “To the Lady Eleanor, Duchess of Aquitaine
and supposed Queen of England, greetings from the true and very Queen of this country, Rosamund the Fair.”

  Adelia’s jaw dropped. So, very nearly, did the letter. This wasn’t lèse-majesté, it was outright, combative treason. It was a challenge.

  It was stupid.

  “Were you insane?” The whisper was absorbed by the room’s silence.

  Rosamund was sending a challenge to Eleanor’s authority, and must have known it was one the queen would have to respond to or be forever humiliated.

  “You were taking a risk,” Adelia whispered. Wormhold Tower might be difficult to seize, but it wasn’t impregnable; it couldn’t withstand the sort of force that an infuriated queen would send against it.

  The deadness of the corpse whispered back, Ah, but instead did the queen send an old woman with poisoned mushrooms?

  None of the above, Adelia thought to herself, because Eleanor didn’t receive the letter. Most likely, Rosamund had never intended to send it; isolated in this awful tower, she’d merely amused herself by scribbling fantasies of queenship onto vellum.

  What else had she written?

  Adelia replaced the letter on the table and picked up its companion document. In the dimness, she made out another superscription. Another letter, then. Again, it had to be held up so that the taper shone upward onto it. This one was easier to read.

  “To the Lady Eleanor, Duchess of Aquitaine and supposed Queen of England, greetings from the true and very Queen of this country, Rosamund the Fair.”

  The wording was exactly the same. And it was more decipherable only because somebody else had written it. This hand was very different from Rosamund’s scrawl; it was the legible, sloping calligraphy of a scholar.

  Rosamund had copied her letter from this one.

  Ward gave a low growl, but Adelia, caught up in the mystery, paid him no attention.

  It’s here. I am on the brink of it.

  Waving the parchment gently, she thought it out, then saw in the mirror of the window that she was, in fact, tapping Rosamund’s head with it.

  And stopped, she and the corpse each as rigid as the other. Ward had tried to warn her that someone else had entered the tower room; she’d paid no notice.