The Serpent's Tale

“He’s afraid.” Adelia’s own voice vibrated. “He thinks Henry’s coming. And he could, Mansur, the king could—his men could skate upriver and get here.” She had another thought: “I suppose Wolvercote could even skate his men down to Oxford and join the other rebels. Why hasn’t he?”

  “The man Schwyz thought of it. He is the better tactician,” Mansur said. “He asked Fitchet if it could be done. But further down, the Thames is deeper and has more tributaries, its ice does not hold and cannot be risked. Nobody can go or come that way.” Mansur spread his hands in apology to Adelia for disappointing her. “Local knowledge. No one moves until the snow melts.”

  “And close them bloody shutters,” Gyltha said. “You want this baby to freeze?” Suddenly gentle, she added, “Nobody in the outside world don’t know we’re here, my duck.”

  “The woman is right,” Mansur said.

  They’ve lost hope, she thought. They’ve given Rowley up for dead at last. Godstow festered like an unsuspected bubo in the world’s white flesh, waiting to spread its poison. Only the birds overhead could know that it flew the pennant of a rebel queen—and birds weren’t likely to tell anybody.

  But today, against all evidence, hope told Adelia that there was something beyond these shutters. At least there were steps leading to the river, and the river, however treacherous, led to the outside world. It was sunny, and there was an indefinable feeling in the air.

  She’d been afraid too long, besieged too long, threatened too long, shut in dark rooms during daylight like a hostage—they all had.

  Hearing talk and laughter, she gave the shutters a push that threw them back against the wall and leaned out again.

  Farther along, the convent gates were opening and a crowd of chattering men and women were assembling outside them. In their center was a slim, elegant figure dressed in furs with a sheen that glowed in the sun.

  “The queen’s going skating,” Adelia said. She turned round. “And so are we. All of us. Allie, too.” Everybody did. It was, after all, Saint Stephen’s Day, which, by tradition, belonged to the servants, whom, since they could not go home to their villages, had to enjoy it in situ. Tonight it would be their privilege to have their own private feast on last night’s leftovers.

  Almost every worker in the abbey tumbled out onto the ice, some without skates but all carrying the traditional clay box that they rattled invitingly under the noses of the guests.

  Having made her contribution, Adelia turned to delighting her daughter by attaching her belt to the cradle and skimming the child in it over the ice as she skated. Others on skates similarly obliged those who had none, so that the wide sweep of the Thames became a whirl of sledges and trays, of puffed jokes and pink cheeks, through which a smiling queen sailed, swanlike, with her courtiers gaggling after her.

  The nuns joined them after Lauds, the younger ones shrieking happily and vying with Sister Havis, who, while making it seem stately, outraced them all.

  A brazier was placed on the ice near the bank and a chair carried to it so that Mother Edyve could sit by its warmth in company with the walking wounded that Sister Jennet had brought from the infirmary. Ward, whose attempts to scrabble along behind Adelia kept ending with his legs splaying into a quadrant, gave up the battle and settled down to sulk on the piece of carpet under the abbess’s chair.

  Adelia saw her patient and skated over to him, dragging the cradle behind her. “Are you progressing well?”

  Poyns’s young face was abeam. “Right nicely, mistress, I thank ee. And the abbess is giving me a job, assistant gatekeeper to Master Fitchet. Don’t need two arms in gatekeepin’.”

  Adelia smiled back at him. What a nice abbey this was.

  “And thank Master Man ... Manum ... thank the doctor for me; God and the saints bless him.”

  “I will.”

  Tables appeared bearing some remnants of the Christmas feast.

  Sitting on somebody’s homemade sledge on the far bank where Ward joined them, Adelia and Gyltha masticated Allie’s dinner for her and ate their own, ignoring the child’s persistent “Bor, bor,” asking to be taken onto the ice again.

  “She means ‘more,’” Adelia said proudly. “That’s her first word.”

  “Them’s her first orders,” Gyltha said. “Who’s a little tyrant, then?” She abandoned her lamb chop to Ward, picked up the belt, and skated off with the cradle, throwing up a spray of ice behind her.

  Adelia and her dog sat on. From here she had a panorama of the convent walls. There were now two of Wolvercote’s men patrolling, both of them keeping their eyes on the trees behind her. A figure stood at one of the windows in the men’s guesthouse—she thought it was Master Warin.

  No sign of the abbot, thanks be to God; he’d become dreadful to her, as, with her rejection, she must have become dreadful to him—and would be punished for it.

  The bridge had been closed; she could tell that because some Wolvercote villagers were crowding the far side of it, wistfully watching the merrymakers on ice. Others were digging their own path down to the river.

  Behind her, in the forest that she’d hoped would be hiding Henry Plantagenet and his army, she could hear the shouts of the younger convent men as, careless of wolves, they scoured the undergrowth in the hunt for a wren, their noise indicating that they were not encountering anything larger.

  She looked back to see their figures running through the trees, faces blackened with soot, as tradition demanded they should be. Why it was necessary to catch a wren at all on Saint Stephen’s Day she did not understand; she could never fathom English customs. Pagan, most of them.

  She returned to watching the scene on the ice.

  Wolvercote was talking to Eleanor at the food table. Where was Emma?

  Adelia wondered what it was that had stirred the man into setting a watch now, when he had neglected any precaution for so long. Perhaps he’d sensed the same alertness in the air that so invigorated herself—or had just glimpsed another opportunity to assert his control. Either way, he was a fool as well as a brute; what point was there in guarding the abbey and, apparently, readying it in case of siege when nearly all its occupants were capering outside its walls, any one of whom could carry news of his presence in it to his enemy?

  She was glad of it—the liberation. If it hadn’t meant leaving her nearest and dearest behind, she’d have been tempted to skate off and find Henry for herself.

  But Schywz had just come out of the abbey gates and was viewing the indisciplined joyousness below him like a man who could organize things better. And, damn him, he was going to organize them better. Descending the steps, approaching Wolvercote, berating ...

  Within minutes he’d stationed his mercenaries at each end of the river’s bend. Nobody would get away now. He was actually scolding Eleanor, pointing her toward the convent gate ... She was shaking her head, having too much fun, skating away from him.

  They’d have to go in soon; the sun was getting low, withdrawing brightness and such warmth as it had bestowed. At last, Eleanor’s clear diction was heard thanking Mother Edyve for the entertainment. “So refreshing ...” People were beginning to climb the steps of the track.

  “Mistress,” said a crisp voice behind Adelia. It was Father Paton.

  Rowley’s little secretary looked incongruous on skates, but he balanced on them neatly, his mittened, inky hands crossed on his chest as if protecting himself from the unworthy. “I have it,” he said.

  She stared at him. “You ... found it? I can’t believe ...

  it was such a long shot.” She had to pull herself together. “And is it the same?”

  “Yes,” he said, “I regret to say that the similarity with the one you gave me is undeniable.”

  “It would stand up in a court of law?”

  “Yes. There are peculiarities common to each that even the illiterate would recognize. I have it here, I have them both ...” He began unbuckling the large scrip hanging from his belt.

  Adelia stopped him. “No, n
o, I don’t want them. You keep them, and my affidavit. Keep them very safe until the time comes ... and in the name of Jesus, tell nobody you have them.”

  Father Paton pursed his lips. “I have written my own account of this affair, explaining to whomsoever it may concern that I have done what I have done because I believe it to be the will of my master, the late Bishop of Saint Albans ...”

  There was a swirl of ice as the bishop’s messenger encircled them and came to a sliding stop.

  Jacques’s face was ruddy with exercise; he looked almost handsome, though his bishop would not have approved of the elaborate, hand-twirling, very Aquitanian bow he gave Adelia. “It’s done, mistress. With good fortune, they’re meeting in the church at Vespers. You and this gentleman should take your positions early.”

  “What nonsense is this?” Father Paton disapproved of Jacques only slightly less than he did of Adelia.

  “Jacques has been delivering two invitations that I’ve written, Father,” she told him. “We are going to eavesdrop; we are going to prove who contrived the death of Talbot of Kidlington.”

  “I will have nothing to do with all your supposed killings. You expect me to eavesdrop? Preposterous. I refuse.”

  “What supposed killings?” Jacques asked, puzzled.

  “We shall be there,” Adelia told the priest. She cut off his protests. “Yes, you shall. We need an independent witness. God in Heaven, Father, a young man was put to death.”

  A rough figure with an even rougher voice had come up to them. “Get inside, you lot, and quick about it.” Cross had his arms held wide to scoop the three of them toward the steps.

  Glad to go, Father Paton skated off.

  “Can he help us with Bertha’s death?” Jacques asked.

  “I’m not telling you again,” Cross said. “The chief says inside, so get bloody inside.”

  Jacques obeyed. Adelia lingered.

  “Come on, now, missis. ’S getting chilly.” The mercenary took her arm, not unkindly. “See, you’re shaking.”

  “I don’t want to go in,” she said. The convent walls would imprison her and the killer together again; she was being dragged back into a cage that held a monster with blood on its fangs.

  “You ain’t staying here all night.” As he pulled her over the ice, Cross shouted over his shoulder at the wren hunters in the trees, “Time to go in, lads.” When they reached the steps, he had to haul Adelia up them like an executioner assisting a prisoner to the gallows.

  Behind them, a crowd of men emerged from the trees of the far bank, shouting in triumph over a small cage twisted from withies in which fluttered a frightened wren. They were hooded, covered in snow, their black faces rendering them unrecognizable.

  And if, whooping and capering with the rest, there was one more figure going in through the convent gates than had left them, nobody noticed it.

  The convent carpenter had laid boards across the end rafters of the church’s Saint Mary side chapel in order to facilitate the removal and replacement of struts that showed signs of rotting, creating a temporary and partial little loft in which the two people now hiding in it could listen but not see. Adelia and Father Paton were, quite literally, eavesdroppers.

  It had taken considerable urging to get the priest to accompany her into the rafters. He’d protested at the subterfuge, the risk, the indignity.

  Adelia hadn’t liked it, either. This wasn’t her way of doing things, it was arbitrary, unscientific. Worse, the fear she felt at being once more in the abbey sapped her energy, leaving her with a deadening feeling of futility.

  But coming in through the chapel’s door, a draft had wavered the candles burning on the Virgin’s altar, one of them lit by Emma for Talbot of Kidlington, and so she had bullied, shamed, and cajoled. “We have a duty to the dead, Father.” It was the bedrock of her faith, as fundamental to her as the Athanasian Creed to Western liturgy, and perhaps the priest had recognized its virtue, for he had stopped arguing and climbed the ladder Jacques set for them.

  Now Vespers had chimed, the faint chanting from the cloisters had stopped. The church was empty—ever since the mercenaries had proved troublesome, the nuns had transferred the vigil for their dead to their own chapel.

  Somewhere a dog barked. Fitchet’s mongrel, probably—a bristled terror at whose every approach Ward, not renowned for his courage, lay down and rolled over.

  They were too far back in the loft to see anything below. Only a glow from the altar candles in the church proper reached them so that they could, at least, make out the wagon roof above them. It gave Adelia the impression that she and the priest were lying on the thwarts of an upended boat. Uncomfortably.

  Fierce little beads that were the eyes of the bats hanging from the lathes overhead glared down at her.

  A scamper nearby caused Father Paton to squeak. “I abhor rats.”

  “Be quiet,” she told him.

  “This is foolishness.”

  Perhaps it was, but they couldn’t alter it now— Jacques had taken the ladder away, replacing it in the bell tower next door from whence it had come, perching himself in the shadows at the tower’s top.

  A latch clicked. The unoiled hinges of the chapel’s side door protested with a screech. Somebody hissed at the noise. The door closed. Silence.

  Warin. It would be the lawyer; Wolvercote wouldn’t creep as this one crept.

  Adelia felt a curious despair. It was one thing to theorize about a man’s guilt, another to have it confirmed. Somewhere below her stood a creature who’d betrayed the only relative he had, a boy in his care, a boy who’d trusted him and had been sent to his death.

  A rasp of hinges again, this time accompanied by the stamp of boots. There was a vibration of energy.

  “Did you send me this?” Wolvercote’s voice. Furious. If Master Warin protested, the listeners did not hear him because Wolvercote continued without pause. “Yes you did, you whoreson, you puling pot of pus, you stinking spittle, you’ll not tax me for more, you crapulous bit of crud ...”

  The tirade, its wonderful alliteration unsuspected from such a source, was accompanied by slaps, presumably across Master Warin’s face, that resounded against the walls like whip cracks—each one making Father Paton jump so that Adelia, lying beside him in the rafters, flinched in unison.

  The lawyer was keeping his head, though it had to be buzzing. “Look, look, my lord. In the name of Christ, look.” The onslaught stopped.

  He’s showing his letter.

  Apart from giving the time and place of the suggested meeting, the message she’d written to each man had been short: We are discovered.

  There was a long pause while Wolvercote—not a reading man—deciphered the note sent to Warin. The lawyer said quietly, “It’s a trap. Somebody’s here.”

  There were hurried, soft footfalls as Warin searched, the opening of cupboards—a thump of hassocks falling to the floor as they were dislodged. “Somebody’s here.”

  “Who’s here? What trap?” Wolvercote was staying where he was, shouting after Warin as the little man went into the body of the church to search that, too. “Didn’t you send me this?”

  “What’s up there?” Master Warin had come back. “We should look up there.”

  He looked upward. The impression that the man’s eyes could see through the boards tensed Adelia’s muscles. Father Paton didn’t move.

  “Nobody’s up there. How could anybody get up there? What trap?”

  “My lord, somebody knows.” Master Warin had calmed himself a little. “My lord, you shouldn’t have hanged the knaves. It looked badly. I’d promised them money to leave the country.”

  So you supplied the killers.

  “Of course I hanged the dogs.” Wolvercote was still shouting. “Who knew if they would keep their mouths shut. God curse you, Warin, if this is a ploy for more payment ...”

  “It is not, my lord, though Sweet Mary knows it was a great service I rendered you ...”

  “Yes.” Wolvercote’s
tone had become quieter, more considering. “I am beginning to wonder why.”

  “I told you, my lord. I would not have you wronged by one of my own family; when I heard what the boy intended ...”

  “And no benefit to you? Then why in hell did you come here? What brought you galloping to the abbey to see if he was dead?”

  They were moving off into the nave of the church, their voices trailing into unintelligible exchanges of animosity and complaint.

  After a long time, they came back, only footsteps giving an indication of their return. The door scraped open. Boots stamped through it as loudly as they had come.

  Father Paton shifted, but Adelia clamped his arm. Wait. They won’t want to be seen together. Wolvercote has left first.

  Silence again. A quiet little man, the lawyer. Now he was going. She waited until she heard the fall of the latch, then wriggled forward to peer over the boards.

  The chapel was empty.

  “Respectable men, a baron of the realm, ogres, ogres.” Father Paton’s horror was tinged with excitement. “The sheriff shall be told, I must write it down, yes, write it down. I am witness to conspiracy and murder. The sheriff will need a full affidavit. I am an important deponent, yes, I would not have believed ... a baron of the realm.”

  He could hardly wait for Jacques to bring the ladder. Even as he descended it, he was questioning the messenger on what had been said in the church.

  For a moment, Adelia lay where she was, immobile. It didn’t matter what else had been said; two murderers condemned themselves out of their own mouths, as careless of the life they had conspired to take as of a piece of grass.

  Oh, Emma.

  She thought of the bolt buried in the young man’s chest, stopping that most wonderful organ, the heart, from beating, the indifference of the bowman who’d loosed it into the infinite complexity of vein and muscle, as indifferent as the cousin who had ordered it to be loosed, as the lord who’d paid him to do it.

  Emma, Emma.

  Father Paton scuttled back to the warming room—he wanted to write out his deposition right away.

  There was a bright, cold moon, no necessity for a lantern. As Jacques escorted her home, he told her what he’d managed to hear in the church. Mostly it had been repetition of the exchanges in the chapel. “By the time they left,” he said, “they were deciding it was a trick played on them. Lord Wolvercote did, anyway, he suspects his mercenaries. Lawyer Warin was still atremble, I’ll wager he leaves the country if he can.”