The Serpent's Tale

  “Where did she get a belt from, I wonder?” Adelia asked herself out loud, putting it over her shoulder.

  “Dunno, she never had no belt,” Peg said. That’s right. She hadn’t. Adelia walked slowly to the far end of the cowshed, kicking up wisps of hay as she went to see if they hid anything.

  Behind her came the swish of milk as it went into the pail and Peg’s reflective voice: “Poor thing, I can’t think what come to her. ’Course, she were a bit of a looby, but even so ...”

  “Did she say anything to you?”

  “Said a lot, always muttering away up the other end there, enough to give you goose bumps, but I paid her no mind.”

  Adelia reached the stall that Bertha had occupied. It was dark here. She balanced the lantern on top of a partition and went down on her knees to start sifting the straw, feeling through it to the hard-packed earth underneath.

  She heard Peg address her cow, “You’re done then, madam,” and the friendly slap on its rump as the milkmaid left it to go on to the next, and the sound of footfalls as some new person entered the shed, and Peg’s voice again: “And a good morning to you, Master Jacques.”

  “Good morning to you, Mistress Peg.”

  There was flirtation in both voices that brought a lightness to the day. Jacques, Adelia thought, despite his sticking-out ears and breathy overeagerness, had made a conquest.

  He came hurrying up the aisle and paused to watch Adelia as she scrabbled. “I buried it, mistress.”

  “What? Oh, good.”

  “Can I help whatever it is you’re doing, mistress?” He was becoming used to her eccentricities.

  “No.”

  Because she’d found it. Her fingers had encountered the harsh thread of metal, little and broken—the cross was held by the fastening, but farther along, the links had snapped.

  God help us all. This, then, was where it had happened. In this dark stall, Bertha had torn at her own neck in an attempt to dislodge the necklet with which strong hands were strangling her.

  Oh, the poor child.

  Adelia again saw Bertha crawling toward her, sniffing, telling her what the old woman in the forest, who had given her the mushrooms for Rosamund, had smelled like.

  “Purty. Like you.”

  The memory was unbearable. The short, sad little life ending in violence ... Why? Who?

  “Mistress?” Jacques was becoming troubled by her stillness.

  Adelia picked herself up. Gripping the necklet, she walked with the messenger down to where Peg was pouring her full pail of foaming milk into a bigger bucket, her backside giving a provocative wiggle at Jacques’s approach.

  The milking stool. She knew now that Bertha had been murdered, but there was just one more proof ...

  As Peg went to collect the stool to take it to the next cow, Adelia was ahead of her. “May I have this for a moment?”

  Peg and Jacques stared as she took the stool and placed it directly under the hook in the beam. She unwound the length of cord from her hand and pushed it toward Jacques. “Measure me.”

  “Measure you, mistress?”

  “Yes.” She was becoming irritable. “From my crown to my feet.”

  Shrugging, he held one end of the cord to the top of Adelia’s head and let it drop. He stooped and pinched the place where it touched the ground. “There. You’re not very tall, mistress.”

  She tried to smile at him—his own lack of height bothered him; without his raised boots, he wouldn’t be much higher than she was. Looking at the cord where he held it, she saw that it extended a little way from the knot she had made when she’d measured the corpse on the catafalque. She was nearly two inches taller than Bertha had been.

  Now to see.

  Peg said, “She got excited yesterday, round about evening milkin’, now I come to think on it.”

  “Who did? Bertha?”

  “Said she’d got summat to tell the lady with the cross and went rushin’ out. That’s what she’d call a nun, I suppose, on account of she didn’t know better.”

  No, Adelia thought, it was me. I was the lady with the cross. “Where did she go?”

  “Can’t have been far,” Peg said, “for she were soon back and takin’ on like she’d seen the devil stinkin’ of sulphur. Summat about acres.”

  “Dakers?” Jacques asked.

  “Could’ve been.”

  “Must’ve seen Dame Dakers,” Jacques said. “She was mortal afraid of that woman.”

  Adelia asked, “She didn’t say what it was she wanted to tell the nun?”

  “Kept mutterin’ something about wasn’t her, ’twas him.”

  Adelia steadied herself against a stall’s stanchion, grasping it hard. “Could it have been: ‘It wasn’t a her, it was a him’?”

  “Could’ve been.”

  “Hmmm.” She wanted to think about it, but the cows farther up the line were lowing with discomfort, and Peg was becoming restive at the annexation of her milking stool.

  Adelia slipped the belt into its buckle and put it round her neck, pulling it close. Stepping up on the stool, she tried extending the free piece of the belt to the hook, managing only to make the end of the leather touch it, leaving a gap between hook and rivet. She stood on tiptoe; rivet and hook still didn’t meet—and she was taller than Bertha had been.

  “It’s too short,” she said. “The belt’s too short.” That was what had bothered her. The sight of the dangling body had been too shocking to take in at the time, but her mind had registered it—Bertha’s feet could not have reached the stool to kick it away.

  She began choking, struggling to get the buckle undone before unseen arms could lift her up and attach the belt to the hook; she couldn’t breathe.

  Jacques’s hands fumbled at her neck and she fought them, as Bertha had fought those of her killer. “All right, mistress,” he said. “Steady. Steady now.” When he’d got the belt off, he held her arm and stroked her back as if soothing a frightened cat. “Steady now. Steady.”

  Peg was watching them as if at the capering insane. Jacques nodded at her, indicating the stool, and with relief she took it up and went back to her cows.

  Adelia stood where she was, listening as Peg’s capable, cold-chapped hands squeezed and relaxed on the cow’s teats, sending milk into the pail with the regularity of a soft drumbeat.

  “It wasn’t a her, it was a him.”

  Jacques’s eyes questioned her; he, at least, had understood what she’d been about.

  “Well,” Adelia said, “at least now Bertha can be buried in consecrated ground.”

  “Not suicide?”

  “No. She was murdered.”

  She saw again how his young face could age.

  “Dakers,” he said.

  NINE

  T he nuns thought the same.

  “Let me understand you,” Mother Edyve said. “You are saying that Dame Dakers hanged that poor child?”

  They were in the chapter house; the abbess was in conclave with her senior nuns.

  They had not welcomed Adelia. After all, they had serious matters to mull over: Their abbey had been as good as invaded; dangerous mercenaries occupied it; there were bodies hanging from their bridge; if the snow continued, they would soon run out of supplies. They did not want to listen to the outlandish, unsettling report of a murder— murder?—in their midst.

  However, Adelia had done one thing right: She had brought Mansur along. Gyltha had persuaded her. “They won’t pay you no mind,” she’d said, “but they might attend to that old Arab.” And after a few hours’ sleep, Adelia had decided she was right. Mansur had been recommended to the nuns by their bishop, he looked impressive, he stood high in the estimation of their infirmaress; above all, he was a man, and as such, even though a foreigner, he carried more weight than she did.

  It had been difficult to get a hearing until the chapter meeting was over, but Adelia had refused to wait. “This is the king’s business,” she’d said. For so it was; murder, wherever it occurred, c
ame under royal jurisdiction. The lord Mansur, she told them, was skilled in uncovering crimes, had originally been called to England by Henry II’s warrant to look into the deaths of some Cambridgeshire children—well, so he had, in a way—and the killer had been found.

  Apologizing for Mansur’s insufficiency in their language, she had pretended to interpret for him. She’d begged them to examine for themselves the marks on Bertha’s neck, had shown them the evidence by which she proved murder ... and heard her voice scrabbling at them as uselessly as Bertha’s fingers had scrabbled at the necklet strangling her.

  She answered Mother Edyve, “The lord Mansur is not accusing Dame Dakers. He is saying that somebody hanged Bertha. She did not hang herself.”

  It was too gruesome for them. Here, in their familiar, wooden-crucked English chapter house, stood a towering figure in outlandish clothing—a heathen, king’s warrant or not—telling them what they did not want to hear through the medium of a woman with a dubious reputation.

  They didn’t have investigative minds. It seemed as if none of them, not even their canny old abbess, possessed the ferocious curiosity that drove Adelia herself, nor any curiosity at all. All questions had been answered for them by the resurrection of Jesus Christ and the rule instituted by Saint Benedict.

  Nor were they too concerned with earthly justice. The murderer, if a murderer there was, would be sentenced more terribly when he faced the Great Judge, to whom all sins were known, than by any human court.

  The belt, the broken chain, and the measuring cord lay snaked on the table before them, but they kept their eyes away.

  Well, yes, they said, but was the lack of distance between Bertha’s feet and the milking stool significant? Surely that poor misguided girl could have somehow climbed onto one of the cowshed stalls with the belt round her neck and jumped? Who knew what strength was given to the desperate? Certainly, Bertha had been in fear of what Dame Dakers might do to her, but did not that in itself argue felo-de-se?

  Rowley, if only you were here ...

  “It was murder,” Adelia insisted. “Lord Mansur has proved it was murder.”

  Mother Edyve considered the matter. “I would not have credited Dakers with the strength.”

  Adelia despaired. It was like being on a toasting fork—whichever side was presented, it was flipped over so that the other faced the fire. If Bertha had been murdered, then Dakers, revenging Rosamund’s death, had been the murderer—who else could it have been? If Dakers wasn’t the murderer, then Bertha had not been murdered.

  “Perhaps one of the Flemings did it, Wolvercote’s or Schwyz’s,” Sister Bullard, the cellaress, said. “They are lustful, violent men, especially in liquor. Which reminds me, Mother, we must set a guard on the cellars. They are already stealing our wine.”

  That opened a floodgate of complaint: “Mother, how are we to feed them all?”

  “Mother, the mercenaries ... I fear for our young women.”

  “And our people—look how they beat the poor miller.”

  “The courtiers are worse, Mother. The lewd songs they sing ...”

  Adelia was sorry for them. On top of their worries, here were two strange persons, who had arrived at Godstow in company with a murdered body from the bridge, now suggesting that another killer was at large within the abbey’s very walls.

  The sisters did not—indeed, could not—blame them for either death, but Adelia knew from some sideways looks from under the nuns’ veils that she and Mansur had acquired the taint of carrion.

  “Even if what Lord Mansur says is true, Mother,” said Sister Gregoria, the almoner, “what can be done about it? We are snowed up; we cannot send for the sheriff’s coroner until the thaw.”

  “And while the snow lasts, King Henry cannot rescue us,” Sister Bullard pointed out. “Until he can, our abbey, our very existence, is in peril.”

  That was what mattered to them. Their abbey had survived one conflict between warring monarchs; it might not survive another. If the queen should oust the king, she would necessarily reward the blackguard Wolvercote, who had secured her victory—and Lord Wolvercote had long desired Godstow and its lands. The nuns could envisage a future in which they begged for their bread in the streets.

  “Allow Lord Mansur to continue his inquiries,” Adelia pleaded. “At least do not bury Bertha in unconsecrated ground until all the facts are known.”

  Mother Edyve nodded. “Please tell Lord Mansur we are grateful for his interest,” she said in her fluting, emotionless voice. “You may leave us to question Dame Dakers. After that, we shall pray for guidance in the matter.”

  It was a dismissal. Mansur and Adelia had to bow and leave.

  Discussion broke out behind them almost before they’d reached the door—but it was not about Bertha. “Yes, but where is the king? How may he come to our aid if he doesn’t even know we are in need of it? We cannot trust that Bishop Rowley reached him—I fear for his death.”

  As the two went out of the chapter house door, Mansur said, “The women are frightened. They will not help us search for the killer.”

  “I haven’t even persuaded them there is a killer,” Adelia said.

  They were skirting the infirmary when, behind them, a voice called Adelia’s name. It was the prioress. She came up, puffing. “A word, if I may, mistress.” Adelia nodded, bowed a farewell to Mansur, and turned back.

  For a while, the two women went in silence.

  Sister Havis, Adelia realized, had not spoken a word during the discussion in the chapter house. She was aware, too, that the nun did not like her. To walk with her was like accompanying the apotheosis of the cold that gripped the abbey, a figure denuded of warmth, as frozen as the icicles spiking the edge of every roof.

  Outside the nuns’ chapel, the prioress stopped. She kept her face averted from Adelia, and her voice was hard. “I cannot approve of you,” she said. “I did not approve of Rosamund. The tolerance that Mother Abbess extends to sins of the flesh is not mine.”

  “If that’s all you have to say ...” Adelia said, walking away.

  Sister Havis strode after her. “It is not, but it has to be spoken.” She withdrew a mittened hand from under her scapular and held it out to bar Adelia’s progress. In it were the broken necklet, the measuring cord, and the belt. She said, “I intend to use these objects as you have done, in investigation. I shall go to the cowshed. Whatever your weaknesses, mistress, I recognize an analytical soul.”

  Adelia stopped.

  The prioress kept her thin face turned away. “I travel,” she said. “Mine is the work to administer our lands around the country, in consequence of which I see more of the dung heap of humanity than do my sisters. I see it in its iniquity and error, its disregard for the flames of hell which await it.”

  Adelia was still. This was not just a lecture on sin; Sister Havis had something to tell her.

  “Yet,” the prioress went on, “there is greater evil. I was present at Rosamund Clifford’s bedside; I witnessed her terrible end. For all that she was adulterous, the woman should not have died as she did.”

  Adelia went on waiting.

  “Our bishop had visited her a day or two before;

  he questioned her servants and went away again. Rosamund was still well then, but he believed from what he’d been told that there had been a deliberate attempt to poison her, which, as you and I know, subsequently succeeded.” Suddenly, the prioress’s head turned and she was glaring into Adelia’s eyes. “Is that what he told you?”

  “Yes,” Adelia said. “It was why he brought us here. He knew the blame would fall on the queen. He wanted to uncover the real killer and avert a war.”

  “He set great store by you, then, mistress.” It was a sneer.

  “Yes, he did,” Adelia hissed back at her. Her feet were numb with standing, and her grief for Rowley was undoing her. “Tell me whatever you want to tell me, or let me go. In God’s name, are we discussing Rosamund, Bertha, or the bishop?”

  The p
rioress blinked; she had not expected anger.

  “Bertha,” she said, with something like conciliation. “We are discussing Bertha. It may interest you to know, mistress, that I took charge of Dame Dakers yesterday. The female is deranged, and I did not want her roaming the abbey. Just before Vespers I locked her in the warming room for the night.”

  Adelia’s head went up. “What time is evening milking?”

  “After Vespers.”

  They had begun walking in step. “Bertha was still alive then,” Adelia said. “The milkmaid saw her.”

  “Yes, I have talked to Peg.”

  “I knew it wasn’t Dakers.”

  The prioress nodded. “Not unless the wretched female can walk through a thick and bolted door. Which, I may say, most of my sisters are prepared to believe that she can.”

  “You may say, you may say.” Adelia stopped, furious. “Why didn’t you say all this in chapter?”

  The prioress faced her. “You were making yourself busy proving to us that Bertha was murdered. I happened to know Dakers could not have killed her. The question then arose, who did? And why? It was not a wolf I wanted to loose amongst sisters who are troubled and frightened enough already.”

  Ah. At last, Adelia thought, a logical mind. Hostile, cold as winter to me, but brave. Here, beside her, was a woman prepared to follow terrible events to their terrible conclusion.

  She said, “Bertha had some knowledge about the person who gave her the mushrooms in the forest. She didn’t know she had it. It came to her yesterday, and I think, I think, that she left the cowshed to come and tell me. Something, or perhaps it was someone, stopped her, and she went back again. To be strangled and then hanged.”

  “Not a random killing?”

  “I don’t believe so. Nor was there any sexual interference, as far as I can tell. It wasn’t robbery, either; the chain was not stolen.”

  Unconsciously, they had begun pacing up and down together outside the chapel. Adelia said, “What she told Peg was that it wasn’t a her, it was a him.”

  “Meaning the person in the forest?”

  “I think so. I think, I think, Bertha remembered something, something about the old woman who gave her the mushrooms for Rosamund. I think it came to her that it wasn’t an old woman at all—her description always sounded ... I don’t know, odd.”