The Serpent's Tale

  “Get her used to it,” Gyltha said. “Her’ll see plenty of hangings as she grows. My pa took me to my first when I were three year old. Enjoyed it, too, I did.”

  “I don’t want her to enjoy it.”

  Getting the bodies up wasn’t going to be easy; they were weighted by accumulated ice, and the rope holding them was stretched so tightly over the balustrade that it had frozen to it.

  Walt joined Adelia. “Prioress says we ain’t to help; they got to do it theyselves, seemingly.”

  Sister Havis considered for a moment and then gave her orders. While one used Fitchet’s knife to scrape the ice from the ropes, the tallest of the nuns, the cellaress, leaned over, stretching her arm to grasp the hair of one of the hanging men. She lifted, giving the rope some slack.

  A seagull that had been pecking at the man’s eyes flew off, yelping, into the clear sky. Allie watched it go.

  “Haul, my sisters.” The prioress’s voice rang after it. “Haul for the mercy of Mary.”

  A row of black backsides bent over the balustrade. They hauled, their breath streaming upward like smoke.

  “What in hell are you women doing?”

  Lord Wolvercote was on the bridge, to be no more regarded by the sisters than the seagull. He stepped forward, hand on his sword. Fitchet and Walt and some other men rolled up their sleeves. Wolvercote looked round. His sentry’s helpless shrug told him he would get no help against God’s female battalion. He was outnumbered. He shouted instead, “Leave them. This is my land, my half of the bridge, and villains shall hang from it as and when I see fit.”

  “It’s our bridge, my lord, as you well know.” This was Fitchet, loud but weary with the repetition of an old argument. “And Mother Abbess don’t want it decorated with no corpses.”

  One body was up now, too stiff to bend, so the sisters were having to lift it vertically over the balustrade, its cocked head angled inquiringly toward the man who had sentenced it to death.

  The nuns laid him on the cart, then returned to the balustrade to raise his fellow.

  The dispute had brought the miller’s family to their windows, and faces lined the sills to watch the puffs of air issuing like dragons’ breath from the two arguing men.

  “They were rogues, you dolt. Thieves. In possession of stolen property, and I made an example of them, as I have a right to do by infangthief. Leave them alone.”

  He was tall, dark-complexioned, age about thirty or so, and would have been handsome if his thin face hadn’t settled into lines of contempt that at the moment were emphasized by fury. Emma had talked joyously of her future husband’s poetry, but Adelia saw no poetry here. Only stupidity. He had made an example of the two thieves; they’d been hanging here for two days, and the river’s lack of traffic meant that anybody who was going to see them had already done it. A more sensible man would have bowed to the inevitable, given his blessing, and walked away.

  Wolvercote can’t, Adelia thought. He sees the sisters as undermining his authority, and it frightens him; he must be cock of the heap or he is nothing.

  Infangthief. She searched her memory—one of the English customary laws; Rowley had once mentioned it, told her, “Infangthief? Well, it’s a sort of legal franchise that certain lords of the manor hold by ancient right to pass the death penalty on thieves caught on their property. The king hates it. He says it means the buggers can hang anybody they’ve a mind to.”

  “Why doesn’t he get rid of it, then?”

  But ancient rights, apparently, were not to be discarded without resentment, even rebellion, by those who held them. “He will—in time.”

  The second corpse had been retrieved, and sacking was laid over both. The nuns were beginning to push their loaded cart back across the bridge, their feet slipping on the ice.

  “See, my duck,” Gyltha said to Allie. “That were fun, weren’t it?”

  Sister Havis stopped as they passed Wolvercote, and her voice was colder than the dead men. “What were their names?”

  “Names? What do you want their names for?”

  “For their graves.”

  “They didn’t have names, for God’s sake. They’d have gone on to take the chalice off your own damned altar if I hadn’t stopped them. They were thieves, woman.”

  “So were the two crucified with Our Lord; I don’t remember Him withholding mercy from them.” The prioress turned and followed her sisters.

  He couldn’t leave it. He called after her, “You’re an interfering old bitch, Havis. No wonder you never got a man.”

  She didn’t look back.

  “They’re going to bury them,” Adelia said. “Oh, dear.”

  Jacques, nearby, grinned at her. “It’s a fairly usual custom with the dead,” he said.

  “Yes, but I didn’t look at their boots. And you,” she said to Gyltha. “Take that child home.” She hurried after the nuns and delayed the cart by standing in front of it. “Would you mind? Just a minute?”

  She knelt down in the snow so that her eyes were on a level with the legs of the corpses and raised the sacking.

  She was transferred to the bridge when she had first seen it, at nighttime, when the awful burden it carried and the footprints in its snow had told her the sequence of murder as clearly as if the two killers had confessed to it.

  She heard her own voice speaking to Rowley: “See? One wears hobnails, the other’s boots have bars across the soles, maybe clogs bound with strips. They arrived here on horseback and took their horses into those trees ... They ate as they waited ...”

  Facing her was a pair of stout hobnailed boots. The other corpse had lost the footwear from its right foot, but the clog on its left had been retained by the tight bands of leather passing under the sole and cross-gartered around the lower leg.

  Carefully, she replaced the sacking and stood up. “Thank you.”

  Nonplussed, the nuns with the cart continued on their way. Sister Havis’s eyes met Adelia’s for a moment. “Were they the ones?”

  “Yes.”

  Walt overheard. “Here, is these the buggers as done for that poor horse?”

  Adelia smiled at him. “And the traveler. Yes, I think so.” She turned and found that Wolvercote had approached to see what she’d been up to. The crowd of abbey people waited to hear the exchange.

  “Do you know where they came from?” she asked him.

  “What do you care where they came from? I found them robbing my house; they had a silver cup, my silver cup, and that’s all I needed to know.” He turned to the porter. “Who is this female? What’s she doing here?”

  “Came with the bishop,” Fitchet told him shortly. Walt piped up, proprietorially: “She’s with the darky doctor. She can tell things, she can. Looks at things and knows what happened.”

  It was badly phrased. Adelia hunched as she waited for the inevitable.

  Wolvercote looked at her. “A witch, then,” he said.

  The word dropped into the air like ink into pristine water, discoloring it, webbing it with black, spiky traces before graying it forever.

  Just as the allusion to Havis as a frustrated virgin would be a label that stuck to her, so the surrounding people hearing the name “witch” applied to Adelia would always remember it. The word that had stoned and set fire to women. There was no appeal against it. It tinged the faces of the men and women listening. Even Jacques’s and Walt’s showed a new doubt.

  She castigated herself. Lord, what a fool; why didn’t I wait? She could have found some other opportunity to look at the men’s boots before they were buried. But no, she’d had to make sure immediately. Thoughtless, thoughtless.

  “Damn it,” she said. “Damn.” She looked back. Lord Wolvercote had gone, but everybody else was looking in her direction; she could hear the murmurs. The damage had been done.

  Breathily, Jacques came loping up to her. “I don’t think you’re a witch, mistress. Just stay in your room, eh? Out of sight, out of mind. Like Saint Matthew says: ‘Sufficient unto the da
y is the evil thereof.’” But the day was not gone yet. As they passed through the gates of the convent, a fat man, wildeyed, emerged out of the church door farther along. He gestured at Jacques. “You,” he shouted, “fetch the infirmaress.”

  The messenger went running. The fat man turned and rushed back into the church.

  Adelia teetered outside. “Sufficient unto the day ...” There’s been enough evil, and you’ve brought some of it on yourself. Whatever this is, it is not for you.

  But the sounds coming from inside the building were of distress.

  She went in.

  The sunshine was managing poorly within the large church, where, by day, candles were unlit. Glacial shafts of sun were lancing into the dark interior from the high, narrow windows above the clerestory, splashing a pillar here and there and cutting across the nave in thin stripes that avoided the middle, where the distress was centered.

  Until her eyes adjusted to the contrast, Adelia couldn’t make out what was happening. Slowly, it took shape. There was a catafalque, and two burly figures, a male and a female, were trying to drag something off it.

  The something—she could see it now—was young Emma, very still, but her hands were gripping the far side of the catafalque so that her body could not be shifted away from the body that lay beneath her.

  “Leave un, girl. Come on up now. ’Tis shameful, this. Gor dang it, what be it with her?” The fat man’s voice.

  The woman’s was kinder but no less disturbed. “Yere, yere, don’t take on like this, my duck, you’m upsetting your pa. What’s this dead un to you? Come on up now.”

  The fat man looked around in desperation and caught sight of Adelia standing in the doorway, illuminated by the sun behind her. “Here, you, come and give us a hand. Reckon our girl’s fainted.”

  Adelia moved closer. Emma hadn’t fainted; her eyes were wide and stared at nothing. She had thrown herself so that she lay arched over the corpse under her. The knuckles of her gripping hands were like tiny white pebbles against the black wood of the catafalque beneath it.

  Going closer still, Adelia peered down.

  The nuns had put coins over the eyes, but the face was the face of the dead young man on the bridge, whom she and Rowley had lowered into the icehouse. This was Master Talbot of Kidlington. Only minutes before, she had been examining the boots of his murderers.

  She became aware that the fat man was blustering—though not at her. “Fine convent this is, leaving dead people round the place. It’s right upset our girl, and I don’t wonder. Is this what we pay our tithes for?”

  The infirmaress had come into the church, Jacques with her. Exclamation and exhortation created a hubbub that had an echo, Sister Jennet’s crisp pipe—“Now, now, child, this will not do”— interspersed with the bellows of the father, who was becoming outraged and looking for someone to blame, while the mother’s anxiety made a softer counterpoint to them both.

  Adelia touched Emma’s clawed hand, gently. The girl raised her head, but what she saw with those tormented eyes Adelia couldn’t tell. “Do you see what they’ve done? To him, to him?”

  The father and Sister Jennet were standing away now, openly quarreling. The mother had stopped attending to her daughter in order to join in.

  “Control yourself, Master Bloat. Where else should we have lain a body but in a church?” Sister Jennet did not add that as far as Godstow and bodies were concerned, they were running out of space.

  “Not where a man can fall over it; that’s not what we pay our tithes for.”

  “That’s right, Father, that’s right ...” This was Mistress Bloat. “We was just being shown round, wasn’t us? Our girl was showing us round.”

  Emma’s eyes still stared into Adelia’s as if into the Pit. “Do you see, oh, God, do you see?”

  “I see,” Adelia told her.

  And she did, wondering how she could have been so blind not to see it before. So that was why Talbot of Kidlington had been murdered.

  TEN

  W here were you going to elope to?”

  “Wales.”

  The girl sat on a stool in the corner of Adelia and Gyltha’s room. She’d torn the veil off her head, and long, white-blond hair swayed over her face as she rocked back and forth. Allie, upset by the manifestations of such grief, had begun to bawl and was being jiggled quiet again in her mother’s arms. Ward, also showing an unexpected commiseration, lay with his head on Emma’s boots.

  She’d fought to be there, literally. When at last they’d been able to prise her away from the body, she’d stretched her arms toward Adelia, saying, “I’ll go with her, her. She understands, she knows.”

  “Dang sight more’n I do,” Master Bloat had said, and Adelia had rather sympathized with him— until, that is, he’d tried to drag his daughter off, putting a hand over her mouth so that her noise would attract no more attention than it had.

  Emma had been his match, twisting and shrieking to beat him off. At last Sister Jennet had advised compliance. “Let her go with this lady for now. She has some medical knowledge and may be able to calm her.” They could do nothing else, but from the looks Master and Mistress Bloat gave her as she helped their daughter toward the guesthouse, Adelia was aware that she’d added two more to her growing list of enemies.

  She managed to persuade the girl to drink an infusion of lady’s slipper, and it calmed her enough that she could answer questions, though Gyltha, who was gently rubbing the back of Emma’s neck with rose oil, frowned at Adelia every time she asked one. A silent argument was going on between them.

  Leave the poor soul alone, for pity’s sake.

  I can’t.

  She’s breaking her heart.

  It’ll mend. Talbot’s won’t.

  Gyltha might sorrow for the stricken one, but Adelia’s duty as she saw it was to Talbot of Kidlington, who had loved Emma Bloat and had ridden to the convent through snow to take her away and marry her, an elopement so financially disastrous to a third party—Adelia’s thoughts rested on the Lord of Wolvercote—that it had ordered his killing.

  Master Hobnails and Master Clogs hadn’t been waiting on an isolated bridge on a snowy night for any old traveler to come along; common scoundrels though they undoubtedly were, they weren’t brainless. They knew, because somebody had told them, that at a certain hour a certain man would ride up to the convent gates ... Kill him.

  They had killed him, and then they’d fled over the bridge to the village—to be killed themselves.

  By the very man who’d employed them in the first place?

  Oh, yes, Wolvercote fitted that particular bill nicely.

  Though perhaps not entirely. Adelia still puzzled over the lengths someone had gone to in order to make sure that the corpse was identified as Talbot’s. She supposed, if it was Wolvercote, he’d wanted Emma to know of her lover’s death as soon as possible, and that her hand—and her fortune—was now his again.

  Yes, but presumably, when Talbot didn’t turn up, that way would have been made open. Why did the corpse have to be put under her nose, as it were, right away? And why in circumstances that pointed the accusing finger so directly at Wolvercote himself?

  Do you see what they’ve done?

  Who were the “they” that Emma thought had done it?

  Adelia put Allie on the floor, gave her the teething ring that Mansur had carved for the child out of bone, and sat herself by Emma, smoothing back the long hair and mouthing “I have to” over her head at Gyltha.

  The girl was almost apathetic with shock. “Let me stay here with you.” She said it over and over. “I don’t want to see them, any of them. I can’t. You’ve loved a man, you had his child. You understand. They don’t.”

  “’Course you can stay,” Gyltha told her.

  “My love is dead.”

  So is mine, Adelia thought. The girl’s grief was her own. She forced it away. There’d been murder done, and death was her business. “You were going to Wales?” she asked. “In winter?”
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  “We’d had to wait, you see. Until he was twenty-one. To get his inheritance.” The sentences came in pieces with an abstracted dullness.

  To Talbot of Kidlington, That the Lord and His angels bless you on this Day that Enters you into Man’s estate.

  And on that day Talbot of Kidlington had set out to carry off Emma Bloat with, if Adelia remembered aright, the two silver marks that had been enclosed in Master Warin’s letter.

  “His inheritance was two silver marks?” Then she recalled that Emma didn’t know about the marks because she didn’t know about the letter.

  The girl barely noticed the interjection. “The land in Wales. His mother left it to him, Felin Fach ...” She said the name softly, as if it had been spoken often, a sweet thing held out to her in her lover’s voice. “‘Felin Fach,’ he used to say. ‘The vale of the Aêron, where salmon leap up to meet the rod and the very earth yields gold.’”

  “Gold?” Adelia looked a question at Gyltha. Is there gold in Wales?

  Gyltha shrugged.

  “He was going to take possession as soon as he gained his majority. It was part of his inheritance, you see. We were going there. Father Gwilym was waiting to marry us. ‘Funny little man, not a word of English ...’” She was quoting again, almost smiling. “‘Yet in Welsh he can tie as tight a marriage knot as any priest in the Vatican.’”

  This was dreadful; Gyltha was wiping her eyes. Adelia, too, was sorry, so sorry. To watch suffering like this was to be in pain oneself, but she had to have answers.

  “Emma, who knew you were going to elope?”

  “Nobody.” Now she did actually smile. “‘No cloak, or they’ll guess. I’ll have one for you. Fitchet will open the gate ...’”

  “Fitchet?”

  “Well, of course Fitchet knew about us; Talbot paid him.”

  Apparently, the gatekeeper counted as nobody in Emma’s reckoning.

  The girl’s face withered. “But he didn’t come. I waited in the gatehouse ... I waited ... I thought ... I thought ... oh, Sweet Jesus, show mercy to me, I blamed him ...” She began clawing the air. “Why did they kill him? Couldn’t they just take his purse? Why kill him?”