The Serpent's Tale

“As guilty, then.”

  “As if he shot the bolt himself, yes. He could have said he knew about the elopement and turned up at the abbey in order to stop it, thus explaining why he was so prompt on the scene. But he wouldn’t say that—I gave him the opportunity— because people would think he was in Wolvercote’s pocket, and he insists they never met. Actually, it wouldn’t condemn him if he said they had, but they conspired together to kill the boy, you see, and it’s warping his judgment. Guilt is making him distance himself from Wolvercote when he doesn’t need to.”

  “He betrayed his own kin, Allah spit on him. Can we prove it?”

  “We’ll try.” Adelia took Allie out of the sling and rubbed her cheek against her daughter’s downy head. How much more depressing was the banal ordinariness of a murderer like little Lawyer Warin than the brutality of a Wolvercote.

  There was a sudden push, and she was shoved to one side by Cross taking the place that Warin had left and bringing with him the chill of outside.

  “Move up there.” The mercenary began reaching for dishes like a starving man.

  “What have you been up to?” she asked.

  “What you think I been up to? Marching up and down outside that bloody lockup. And a waste of bloody time that was. She’s gone.”

  “Who’s gone?”

  “The demon. Abbot hisself told me she was a demon. Who’d you think?”

  “Dakers? Dakers has gone?” She was on her feet, startling Allie, who’d been sucking the marrow of a beef bone. “Oh, dear God, they’ve taken her.”

  Cross looked up at her, gravy dripping from his mouth. “What you on about? Nobody ain’t taken her. She’s vanished. That’s what demons do, they vanish.”

  Adelia sat down. “Tell me.”

  How it had been done, or even when, Cross couldn’t tell her, because he didn’t know; nobody knew. It hadn’t been discovered until a short while ago when, on instructions from the cellaress, a kitchen servant had brought a tray of Christmas food for its prisoner and Cross had used his key to open the lockup’s door.

  “’S on a ring, the key is, see,” he said. “Each guard passes it on to the next one as takes over. Oswald passed it to me when I went on duty, an’ Walt’d passed it to him when he went on duty, and they both swears they never opened that bloody door, an’ I know I didn’t, not til I unlocked it just now ...”

  There was a pause while he scooped beef into his mouth.

  “And?” Adelia asked, impatient.

  “An’ so I fits the key in the lock, turns it, opens the door, and the boy goes in with the basket, and there she was ... gone. Place as bare as a baby’s arse.”

  “Somebody must have let her out.” Adelia was still worried.

  “No, they bloody ain’t,” Cross said. “I tell you, nobody din’t open the bloody door til then. She’s vanished. ’S what demons do. Turned herself into a puff a smoke and out through one of the slits, that’s what she done.”

  He’d called for Schwyz to come to the lockup, he said, nodding toward the empty space on the upper table where the mercenary leader had been sitting. Sister Havis, too, had been summoned.

  “But, like I told ’em, you won’t find her a’cause she’s vanished, gone back to hell where she come from. What else you expect from a demon? Here he comes, look, shittin’ hisself six ways from Sunday.”

  A scowling Schwyz had entered the barn and was striding up to the table where the Abbot of Eynsham sat next to the queen. All the diners were too busy carousing and eating to pay him any attention, except those to whom he had to deliver the news. Adelia saw that Eleanor merely raised her eyebrows, but the abbot immediately got to his feet; he seemed to be shouting, though the noise in the barn was too great for Adelia to hear him.

  “He’s wanting the abbey searched,” Cross said, interpreting. “No bloody chance of that, though. Nobody ain’t leaving Yule food to go huntin’ a demon in the dark. I ain’t, I know that.” So much was obvious. The abbot was talking urgently to Lord Wolvercote, who was shrugging him off like a man who didn’t care. Now he was appealing to the abbess, whose response, while more courteous, showed a similar refusal to be of help.

  As she spread her hands to indicate the uselessness of interrupting the diners, Mother Edyve’s eyes rested for a moment without expression on Adelia’s across the room.

  After all, I have the keys to the lockup.

  “What you laughing at?” Cross asked.

  “At a man hoist with his own petard.”

  However the abbess had managed the escape, whichever of Dakers’s guards had been commanded to turn a blind eye, the Abbot of Eynsham could neither accuse nor punish. He was the one who, in locking her up, had demonized Rosamund’s house-keeper; he could not now complain if, as Cross said, she had done what demons did.

  Still grinning, Adelia leaned forward to tell Gyltha, who was on the Arab’s other side, what had happened.

  “Good luck to the old gargoyle.” Gyltha took another swig from her beaker; she’d been imbibing with energy for some time.

  Mansur said in Arabic, “Convent men have been digging a path through the snow down to the river. The abbess ordered it. I overheard the man Fitchet say it was so that the queen could go skating on the ice. Now I think that they have been making an escapeway for Rosamund’s woman.”

  “They’ve let her leave? In this weather?” It wasn’t funny anymore. “I thought they’d hide her somewhere in the abbey.”

  Mansur shook his head. “It is too crowded, she would be found. She will survive if Allah wills it. It is not far to Oxford.”

  “She won’t go to Oxford.”

  There was only one place Dame Dakers would be making for.

  For the rest of the meal and as the tables were put aside to clear the barn for dancing, Adelia thought of the river and the woman who would be following its course northward. Would the ice hold her? Could she survive the cold? Had the abbot, who would know where she was heading, sent men and dogs after her?

  Mansur, looking at her, said, “Allah protects the insane. He will decide whether the woman lives or dies.”

  But it was because Dakers was insane and friendless and knew too much that Adelia’s shoulders were bowed by responsibility for her.

  Allah, God, whoever You are, look out for her.

  However, in seeing to young Allie, who, having fed and slept and now woken up again, needing to be wiped top and bottom and to have her clouts changed, and demanding entertainment, Adelia was forced to dwell on what was immediate.

  There was entertainment in plenty. The troubadours had gathered in the hayloft and were now playing with a force and rhythm that couldn’t be denied; the queen and her court danced to the music with toe-pointing, hand-arching elegance at one end of the barn while, at the other, the English jounced in swinging, noisy rings.

  A convent pensioner was juggling apples with a dexterity that belied his years, and the smith, against the advice of his wife, was swallowing a sword.

  Activity and grunts from under the hayloft eventually produced a wild assortment of figures that proceeded to put on an impromptu and scatological version of Noah’s flood so exuberantly that the dancers paused to become its audience.

  Adelia, sitting on the ground with a crowing, pointing Allie against her knees, found herself enjoying it. It was doubtful if Noah would have recognized the species capering up this invisible gangplank into an invisible ark. The only real animal, the convent donkey, outperformed the rest of the cast by dropping a pungent criticism of their performance on the foot of a unicorn, played by Fitchet, making Gyltha laugh so hard that Mansur had to drag her away until she recovered.

  For all their sophistication, Eleanor’s party couldn’t resist the applause accorded to such vulgarism. They joined in, dropping refinement and showing themselves to be clowns manqués as they appeared in startling wigs and skirts, faces painted with flour and madder.

  What was it about some men that they must ape women, Adelia thought, even as she booed an ir
ascible Mrs. Noah, played with brio by Montignard, belaboring Noah for being drunk.

  Was that Jacques under the warts, straw hair, and extended bosom of Japhet’s wife? Surely that wasn’t the Abbot of Eynsham black-faced and whirling so fast on his toes that his petticoat flared in a blur?

  Allie, still clutching her marrow bone, had fallen asleep again. It was time to go to bed before the manic hilarity of the night descended into brawling, as it almost inevitably would. Already Schwyz’s men and Wolvercote’s had separated into drunken coteries and were focusing blearily on one another in a way suggesting that the spirit of Christmas was on its last legs.

  Wolvercote himself had already gone, taking Emma with him. The queen was thanking the abbess before departing, and Mother Edyve was signaling to her nuns. Master Warin had disappeared. The smith, clutching his throat, was being led away by his wife.

  Adelia looked around for Gyltha and Mansur. Oh, dear, her beloved Arab—possibly the only sober person in the barn apart from herself—had been inveigled into doing his sword dance for the delight of some convent servants, and Gyltha was gyrating round him like an inebriated stoat. Not a drinker usually, Gyltha, but she could never resist alcohol when it was free.

  Yawning, Adelia picked up Allie and took her to the corner in which they’d left the cradle, put the child in it, took away the marrow bone, gave it to Ward, covered up her daughter, and raised the cradle’s little leather hood, then settled down beside it to wait.

  And fell asleep to dream a frenetic, rowdy dream that turned hideous when a bear picked her up and, clutching her to its pelt, began dragging her away into the forest. She heard growling as Ward attacked the bear and then a yelp as it kicked him away.

  Struggling, almost smothered, her legs trailing, Adelia woke up fully. She was being pulled into the darkest corner under the hayloft in the arms of the Abbot of Eynsham. He slammed her so hard against the outer wall that bits of lathe and plaster showered them both, pushing his great body against her.

  He was very, very drunk and whispering. “You’re his spy, you bitch. The bishop. I know you ... pretending to be prim with me, you whore, I know ... what you got up to. How’s he do it? Up the arse? In your mouth?”

  Brandy fumes enveloped her as his blackened face came down onto hers.

  She jerked her head away and brought up her knee as sharply as she could, but the ridiculous skirt he was wearing gave him protection and, though he grunted, his weight stayed on her.

  The whispering went on and on. “... think you’re so clever ... see it in your eyes, but you’re a stinking strumpet. A spy. I’m better than Saint Albans ... I’m better ...” His hand had found her breast and was squeezing it. “Look at me, I can do it ... Love me, you bitch, love me ...” He was licking her face.

  Outside the suffocating cubicle she was trapped in, somebody was intervening, trying to pull the heaving, hissing awfulness off her. “Leave her, Rob, she’s not worth it.” It was Schwyz’s voice.

  “Yes, she is. She looks at me like I’m shit ... like she knows.”

  There was the sound of a loud smack, then air and space. Relieved of weight, Adelia slid down the wall, gasping.

  The abbot lay on the ground, onto which Mansur had flattened him. He was weeping. Beside him, Schwyz was on his knees, giving comfort like a mother. “Just a whore, Robert, you don’t want that.”

  Mansur stood over them both, sucking his knuckles but impassive as ever. He turned and held out his hand to Adelia. She took it and got to her feet.

  Together, they walked back to the cradle. Before they reached it, Adelia paused, wiping her face, smoothing her clothes. Even then, she couldn’t look down at her child. How impure they made you feel.

  Behind her, Schwyz’s soothing went on, but the wail of the abbot rose high above it. “Why Saint Albans? Why not me?”

  With Mansur carrying the cradle, they collected a staggering, singing Gyltha and walked back to the guesthouse through the welcome cold of the night.

  Adelia was too deep in shock to be angry, though she knew she would be; after all, she had more regard for herself than women who, miserably, expected assault as the price for being women. But even while her body was shaking, her mind was trying to fathom the reason for what had happened. “I don’t understand,” she said, wailing. “I thought he was a different sort of enemy.”

  “Allah punish him, but he would not have hurt you, I think,” Mansur said.

  “What are you talking about? He did hurt me. He tried to rape me.”

  “He is incapable, I think,” Mansur said. His own condition had made a judge of such things; he found the sexuality of so-called normal men interesting. Though castrated, unable to have children, he himself could still have sex with a woman, and there was lofty pity in his voice for one who could not.

  “He seemed capable enough to me.” Sobbing, Adelia stopped and scooped up snow to rub over her face. “Why are you so tolerant?”

  “He wants, but he cannot have. I think so. He is a talker, not a doer.”

  Was that it? Inadequacy? Among all the filth, there had been a despairing appeal for love, sex, something.

  Rowley had said of him, “Bastard. Clever. Got the ear of the Pope.”

  And with all the cleverness, this friend of popes must, when drunk, plead for a despised woman’s regard like a child for somebody else’s toy.

  Because she despised him?

  And I do, she thought. If there was vulnerability, it made the abbot the more loathsome to her. Adelia preferred her enemies straightforwardly and wholeheartedly without humanity.

  “I hate him,” she said—and now she was angry. “Mansur, I’m going to bring that man down.”

  The Arab bent his head. “Let us pray that Allah wills it.”

  “He’d better.”

  Fury was cleansing to the mind. Nevertheless, as Mansur persuaded Gyltha to stop kissing him and go to sleep, Adelia washed herself all over in a bowl of icy water from the ewer. And felt better.

  “I’ll bring him down,” she said again, “somehow.” For a minute, which was all that could be borne of the cold, she opened one of the shutters to look out on the geometric shadows that the pitches of the abbey’s roofs were throwing onto the stretch of snow beyond its walls.

  A blacker runnel scarred the moonlit whiteness where a new track had been dug to the river. They were linked now, the abbey and the Thames. For the first time, there was an escape route from this seething, overfilled cauldron of humanity where paragons and monsters fought the ultimate, yet never-ending, battle in suffocating collision.

  At least one soul had taken it. Somewhere in that metallic wilderness, Dakers was risking her life not, Adelia knew, in order to disappear from her captors but to reach the thing she loved, though it was dead.

  TWELVE

  W hen, early next morning, Adelia opened the shutters on Saint Stephen’s Day, it was to find that something had happened to the view from the guesthouse. Yes, of course, a new path was leading down to the bank— they’d cut rough steps in it—but it was more than that; the sense of isolation was gone, and expectation had taken its place.

  It was difficult to see why; dawn was blessing the deserted countryside with its usual ephemeral touch of apricot. The snow was as solid as it had been and contained no human footprints as far as the eye stretched.

  Yet the white forest across the river was, somehow, less rigid ...

  “They’re here.”

  Mansur joined her at the window. “I see nothing.”

  “I thought I saw something in those trees.” They stood looking. Adelia’s excitement trickled away; the expectation was in her, not in the view.

  “Wolves, most like,” said Gyltha, who was skulking at the rear of the room, avoiding the light. “I heard them last night, horrid close they was.”

  “Was that when you were vomiting into the chamber pot?” Adelia asked interestedly.

  Gyltha ignored her. “Right up to the walls, they were. I reckon they found young
Talbot’s horse as was left in the woods.”

  Adelia hadn’t heard them—it had been bears that prowled her sleep. But Gyltha was probably right; it would be wolves among the trees—less frightening than those inside the walls.

  Yet the leap of hope that Rowley was alive and had brought the king and his men to them had been so volcanic that she couldn’t relinquish it altogether. “There could be an army hiding out there,” she said. “It wouldn’t attack without knowing the strength of the force inside the abbey—the sisters might get hurt. He’d wait, Henry would wait.”

  “What for?” Mansur asked.

  “Yes, what for?” Gyltha was being determinedly talkative to show that she wasn’t suffering. “He wouldn’t need an army to take this place—me and little Allie could storm it by ourselves. And how’d the king get here? No, old Wolf knows he’s safe til the snow melts. He ain’t even posted lookouts.”

  “He has now,” Mansur said.

  Adelia leaned out. Gyltha joined her. Immediately below, a man in Wolvercote scarlet and black was patrolling the walkway running along the hopelessly inadequate castellations of the convent wall, his morning shadow falling rhythmically on the merlons as he passed and disappearing at each crenel. He had a pike in one hand and a rattle in the other.

  “What’s he guarding us from?” Gyltha asked. “Magpies? There ain’t no army out there. Nobody don’t fight in winter.”

  “Henry does,” Adelia said. She was hearing Rowley’s voice, vibrating from the nearincredulous pleasure with which he’d spoken of his king’s exploits, recounting the tale of the young Plantagenet when, fighting for his mother’s right to the throne of England against his uncle Stephen, he’d crossed the Channel with a small army in a bitter Christmas gale, catching his enemies hibernating—and beating them.

  Until now, Wolvercote had been relying on an English winter to keep his enemy as powerless to move as he was. But whether it was because the umbilical path through the snow now connected the convent to the outside world, or whether there was something in the air today, Saint Stephen’s Day, he had set a guard ...