The Serpent's Tale

Wolvercote had good reason to kill the boy; the elopement with Emma would have deprived him of a valuable bride.

  Or the inheritance Talbot had gained on his twenty-first birthday would have deprived his guardian of an income, for Master Warin could have been defrauding the boy—it wasn’t unknown for an heir to come into his estates only to find that they’d gone.

  Or, and this was a possibility Emma herself had raised while not believing it, Fitchet had alerted two friends to the fact that a young man would be arriving at the convent by night with money in his purse. After all, the gatekeeper had been acting as go-between for the two lovers—presumably for a fee—which indicated he was corruptible.

  Or—the least likely—the Bloats had discovered their daughter’s plan and had hired killers to prevent it.

  Such was Talbot’s murder.

  Yet not one on the list of his likely killers fitted the character of the man who’d crept into the guesthouse and put Allie’s cradle on the steps outside. The smell of him was different, it had none of the direct brutality with which Talbot had been eliminated.

  No, this man was ... what? Sophisticated? Professional? I do not kill unless I must. I have given you a warning. I trust you will heed it.

  He was the murderer of Rosamund and Bertha.

  There was more snow. The sides of the track that had been dug down to the Thames fell in under it.

  It was left to Gyltha to fetch their meals from the kitchen, to empty their chamber pots in the latrine, and to gather firing from the woodpile.

  “Ain’t we ever a’going to take that poor baby for some air?” she wanted to know.

  “No.”

  I am outside, watching. How submissive are you?

  Totally submissive, my lord. Don’t hurt my child.

  “Nobody can’t snatch her, not with that old Arab along of us.”

  “No.”

  “We stay here, then, with the door barred?” “Yes.”

  But of course, they couldn’t ...

  The first alarm came at night. Somewhere a handbell was ringing and people were shouting.

  Gyltha leaned out of the window to the alley. “They’re yellin’ fire,” she said. “I can smell smoke. Oh, dear Lord, preserve us.”

  Bundling Allie into her furs, they dressed themselves, snatching up what belongings they could before carrying her down the steps.

  Fire, that greatest of threats, had brought out everybody on this side of the abbey. Fitchet came running from the gates carrying two buckets; men were emerging out of the guesthouse: Mansur, Master Warin.

  “Where is it? Where is it?”

  The ringing and hubbub was coming from the direction of the pond.

  “Barn?”

  “Lockup, sounds like.”

  “Oh, God,” Adelia said. “Dakers.” She handed Allie to Gyltha and began running.

  Between the pond and the lockup, Peg was swinging a bell as if she were thwacking an unruly cow with it. She’d seen the flames on her way to the milking. “Up there.” She pointed with the bell toward the narrow slit that allowed air into the little beehive building of stone that was the convent lockup.

  Volunteers, already forming a line, shouted to hasten the smith as he hammered an iron spar into the pond to gain water for their pails.

  Mansur came up beside Adelia. “I smell no fire.” “Neither do I.” There was a slight smitch in the air, nothing more, and no flames apparent in the lockup’s slit.

  “Well, there damn was,” Peg said.

  The door to the lockup opened and a bad-tempered sentry came out. “Oh, get on home,” he shouted. “No need for this rumpus. Straw caught fire, is all. I stamped it out.” It was Cross. He locked the door behind him and gestured at the crowd with his spear. “Go on. Get off with you.”

  Relieved, grumbling, people began to disperse. Adelia stayed where she was.

  “What is it?” Mansur asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  Cross leveled his spear at her as she came up to him from the shadows. “Get back there, nothing to see. Go home ... oh, it’s you, is it?”

  “Is she all right?”

  “Old Mother Midnight? She’s all right. Hollered a bit, but she’s dandy in there now, bloody sight dandier than it is out here. Warm. Gets her meals regular. What about the poor buggers got to guard her, that’s what I say.”

  “What started the fire?”

  Cross looked shifty. “Reckon as she kicked the brazier over.”

  “I want to see her.”

  “That you don’t. Captain Schwyz told me: ‘No bugger talks to her. No bugger to go near ’cept to bring her meals. And keep the bloody door locked.’”

  “And who told Schwyz? The abbot?”

  Cross shrugged.

  “I want to see her,” Adelia said again.

  Mansur reached out and took the spear from the mercenary’s hand with the ease of pulling up a weed.

  Blowing out his cheeks, Cross unlatched an enormous key from his belt and put it in the lock. “Just a peep, mind. Captain’s bound to be here in a minute; he’ll have heard the rumpus. Bloody peasants, bloody rumpus.”

  It was only a peep. Mansur had to lift Adelia up so that she could see over the mercenary’s shoulder as he blocked the door to stop them from going in.

  What light there was inside came from burning logs in a brazier. Except for an ashy patch on one side, a deep ring of straw circled the curve of the stone walls. Something moved in it.

  Adelia was reminded of Bertha. For a moment, a pair of eyes in the straw reflected the glow from the brazier and then disappeared.

  Boots could be heard crunching the ice as their owner came toward them. Cross tore his spear away from Mansur. “Captain’s coming. Get away, for God’s sake.”

  They got away.

  “Yes?” Mansur asked as they walked.

  “Somebody tried to burn her to death,” Adelia said. “The slit’s up on the back wall, on the opposite side from the entrance. I think somebody tossed a lighted rag through it. If Cross was guarding the door, he wouldn’t have seen who it was. But he knows it happened.”

  “The Fleming said the brazier tipped over.” “No. It’s bolted to the floor. There was no sign that a brand fell out of it. Somebody wanted to kill her, and it wasn’t Cross.”

  “She is a sad, mad bint. Perhaps she tried to burn herself.”

  “No.” It was a natural progression. Rosamund, Bertha, Dakers. All three had known—in Dakers’s case, still did—something they should not.

  If it hadn’t been for Cross’s quick reaction in putting the fire out, the last of them would have been silenced.

  Early the next morning, armed mercenaries broke into the chapel where the nuns were at prayer and carried off Emma Bloat.

  Adelia, sleeping in, heard of it when Gyltha came scurrying back from the kitchen where she’d been to fetch their breakfast. “Poor thing, poor thing. Terrible to-do ’twas. Prioress tried to stop ’em and they knocked her down. In her own chapel. Knocked her down.”

  Adelia was already dressing. “Where did they take Emma?”

  “Village. Wolvercote it was, and his bloody Flemings. Carried her to his manor. Screaming, so they said, poor thing, poor thing.”

  “Can’t they get her back?”

  “The nuns is gone after her, but what can they do?”

  By the time Adelia reached the gates, the rescue party of nuns was returning across the bridge, empty-handed.

  “Can nothing be done?” Adelia asked as they went by.

  Sister Havis was white-faced and had a cut below her eye. “We were turned back at spearpoint. One of his men laughed at us. He said it was legal because they had a priest.” She shook her head.

  “What sort of priest I don’t know.”

  Adelia went to the queen.

  Eleanor had just been acquainted with the news herself and was raging at her courtiers. “Do I command savages? The girl was under my protection. Did I or did I not tell Wolvercote to give her time
?”

  “You did, lady.”

  “She must be fetched back. Tell Schwyz—where is Schwyz?—tell him to gather his men ...” She looked around. Nobody had moved. “Well?”

  “Lady, I fear the ... um ... damage is done.” This was the Abbot of Eynsham. “It appears that Wolvercote keeps a hedge priest in the village. The words were said.”

  “Not by the girl, I’ll warrant, not under those circumstances. Were her parents present?”

  “Apparently not.”

  “Then it is abduction.” Eleanor’s voice was shrill with the desperation of a ruler losing control of the ruled. “Are my orders to be ignored in such a fashion? Are we living in the caves of brute beasts?”

  Apart from Adelia’s, the queen’s was the only anger in the room. Others, the men, anyway, were disturbed, displeased, but also faintly, very faintly, amused. A woman, as long as it wasn’t their own, carried off and bedded was broad comedy.

  There was an embryonic wink in the abbot’s eye as he said, “I fear our lord Wolvercote has taken the Roman attitude towards our poor Sabine.”

  There was nothing to be done. Words had been said by a priest; Emma Bloat was married. Like it or not, she had been deflowered and—as it was in every male mind—probably enjoyed it.

  Helpless, Adelia left the room, unable to bear its company.

  In the cloister walk, one of Eleanor’s young men, lost to everything about him, was blocking the way as he walked up and down, strumming a viol and trying out a new song.

  Adelia gave him a push that sent him staggering. The door of the abbey chapel at the end of the cloister beckoned to her, and she marched in, only knowing, on finding it blessedly empty, that she was wild for a solace that—and she knew this, too— could not be granted.

  She went to her knees in the nave.

  Dear Mother of God, protect and comfort her.

  The icy, incense-laden air held only the reply: She is cattle as you are cattle. Put up with it.

  Adelia pummeled the stones and made her accusation out loud. “Rosamund dead, Bertha dead. Emma raped. Why do You allow it?”

  The reply came: “There will be medicine for our complaint eventually, my child. You of all people, with your mastery of healing, should know that.”

  The voice was a real one, dry and seemingly without human propulsion, as if it rustled out of the mouth on its own wings to flutter down from the tiny choir to the nave.

  Mother Edyve was so small, she was almost hidden in the stall in which she sat, her hands folded on her walking stick, her chin on her hands.

  Adelia got up. She said, “I have intruded, Mother. I’ll go.”

  The voice alighted on her as she made for the door. “Emma was nine years old when she came to Godstow, bringing joy to us all.”

  Adelia turned back. “No joy now, not for her, not for you,” she said.

  Unexpectedly, Mother Edyve asked, “How is Queen Eleanor taking the news?”

  “With fury.” Because she was sour with a fury of her own, Adelia said, “Angry because Wolvercote has flaunted her, I suppose.”

  “Yes.” Mother Edyve rubbed her chin against her folded hands. “You are unjust, I think.”

  “To Eleanor? What can she do except rant? What can any of us do? Your joyful child’s enslaved for life to a pig, and even the Queen of England is helpless.”

  “I have been listening to the songs they sing to her, to the queen,” Mother Edyve said. “The viol and the young men’s voices—I have been sitting here and thinking about them.”

  Adelia raised her eyebrows.

  “What is it they sing of?” Mother Edyve asked.

  “Cortez amors?”

  “Courtly love. A Provençal phrase. Provençal fawning and sentimental rubbish.”

  “Courtly love, yes. A serenade to the unattainable lady. It is most interesting—earthly love as ennoblement. We could say, could we not, that what those young men yearn for is a reflected essence of the Holy Mary.”

  Silly old soul, thought Adelia, savagely. “What those young men yearn for, Abbess, is not holiness. This song will end in a high-flown description of the secret arcade. It’s their name for the vagina.”

  “Sex, of course,” said the abbess, amazingly, “but with a gentler longing than I have ever heard ascribed to it. Oh, yes, basically, they are singing to more than they know; they sing to God the Mother.”

  “God the Mother?”

  “God is both our father and our mother. How could it be otherwise? To create two sexes yet favor only one would be lopsided parentage, though Father Egbert chides me for saying so.”

  No wonder Father Egbert chided; it was a wonder he didn’t excommunicate. God masculine and feminine?

  Adelia, who considered herself a modern thinker, was confounded by a perception of an Almighty who, in every religion she knew of, had created weak and sinful woman for man’s pleasure, human ovens in which to bake his seed. A devout Jew thanked God daily that he had not been born female. Yet this little nun was plucking the beard from God’s chin and providing Him not only with the breasts but also with the mind of a female.

  It was a philosophy of most profound rebellion. But now that Adelia came to consider her, Mother Edyve was a rebel, or she would not have been prepared to flout the Church by giving space in her graveyard to the body of a king’s whore. Only independence of mind could at the same time be extending charitable thought to a queen who had brought nothing but turbulence into the abbey with her.

  “Yes,” the birdlike voice went on, “we grieve for the lopsidedness of the world as the Almighty Feminine must grieve for it. Yet God’s time is not our time, we are told; an age is but a blink of an eye to one who is Alpha and Omega.”

  “Ye-es.” Frowning, Adelia moved nearer and sat sideways on the chancel steps, hugging her knees, staring at the still figure in the stall.

  “I have been thinking that in Eleanor we are witnessing a blink,” it said.

  “Eh?”

  “Yes, for the first time to my knowledge, we have a queen who has raised her voice for the dignity of women.”

  “Eh?”

  “Listen,” the abbess said.

  The trouvère in the cloister had finished composing his song. Now he was singing it, the lovely tenor of his voice flowing into the gray chapel like honey. “Las! einssi ay de ma mort exemplaire, mais la doleur qu’il me convendra traire, douce seroit, se un tel espoir avoie ...”

  If the singer was dying of love, he’d chosen to set his pain to a melody as pretty as springtime. Despite herself, Adelia smiled; the combination ought to win him his lady, all right.

  “... Dame, et se ja mes cuers riens entreprent, don mes corps ait honneur n’avancement, De vous venracom loneins que vos soie ...”

  So if his heart ever undertook anything that would bring him honor, it would come from the beloved, however far away she was.

  The music that attended Eleanor wherever she went had, to Adelia’s indiscriminatory ear, been another of her affectations, the incipient background of a woman with every frailty ascribed to the feminine nature: vain, jealous, flighty, one who, in order to assert herself, had chosen to go to war to challenge a man greater than she was.

  Yet the abbess was attending to it as if to holy script.

  Attending to it with her, Adelia reconsidered. She’d dismissed the elaborate, sighing poetry of the male courtiers, their interest in dress, their perfumed curls, because she judged them by the standard of rough masculinity set by a rough male world. Was regard for gentleness and beauty decadent? Rowley, she thought, with a tearing rush of fondness, would say that it was—he loathed femininity in men; he equated his messenger’s liking for scent with the worst excesses of the Emperor Caligula.

  Eleanor’s version, though, could hardly be decadence, because it was new. Adelia sat up. By God, it was new. The abbess was right; deliberately or not, the queen was carrying into the uncultured farmyard of her domains an image of women demanding respect, people to be considered a
nd cherished for their personal value rather than as marketable goods. It demanded that men deserve women.

  For a moment back there in the queen’s apartment, Eleanor had held Wolvercote up to her courtiers, not as a powerful male gaining what was his but as a brute beast dragging its prey into the forest to be gnawed.

  “I suppose you’re right,” she said, almost reluctantly.

  “... vous que j’aim très loyaument ... Ne sans amours, emprendre nel saroie.”

  “But it’s a pretense, it’s artificial,” Adelia protested. “Love, honor, respect. When are they ever extended to everyday women? I doubt if that boy actually practices what he’s singing. It’s ... it’s a pleasant hypocrisy.”

  “Oh, I have a high regard for hypocrisy,” the little nun said. “It pays lip service to an ideal which must, therefore, exist. It recognizes that there is a Good. In its own way, it is a token of civilization. You don’t find hypocrisy among the beasts of the field. Nor in Lord Wolvercote.”

  “What good does the Good do if it is not adhered to?”

  “That is what I have been wondering,” Mother Edyve said calmly. “And I have come to the conclusion that perhaps the early Christians wondered it, too, and perhaps that Eleanor, in her fashion, has made a start by setting a brick in a foundation on which, with God’s help, our daughters’ daughters can begin to build a new and better Jerusalem.”

  “Not in time for Emma,” Adelia said.

  “No.”

  Perhaps, Adelia thought drearily, it was only a very old woman who could look hopefully on a single brick laid in a wasteland.

  They sat a while longer, listening. The singer had changed his tune and his theme. “I would hold thee naked in my arms at eve, that we might be in ecstasy, my head against thy breast ...”

  “That, too, is love of a sort, nevertheless,” Mother Edyve said, “and perhaps all one to our Great Parent, who made our bodies as they are.” Adelia smiled at her, thinking of being in bed with Rowley. “I have been convinced that it is.”

  “So have I, which speaks well for the men we have loved.” There was a reflective sigh. “But don’t tell Father Egbert.”

  The abbess got up with difficulty and tested her legs.

  Warmed, Adelia went to help her settle her cloak. “Mother,” she said on impulse, “I am afraid for Dame Dakers’s safety.”