Page 32 of The Serpent's Tale


  “My dear, stop attributing the powers of Darkness to him, we’ve outmaneuvered the bugger.” He grimaced. “I suppose I’d better go up and search for my letters. If our Fair Rosamund kept one, she might have kept others. I told the fat bitch to burn them, but did she? Women are so unreliable.” He pointed at the bonfire. “Get that alight when the time comes. Some food first, I think, a nap, and then, when our amiable king arrives, we’ll be long gone, leaving a nice warm fire to greet him. Dakers.”

  He must know where she is, Adelia thought. The only life here is in the top room with the dead.

  “Up you go, then.” Schwyz turned away to give orders to his men, and then turned back. “What do you want done with the trollop?”

  “This trollop?” The abbot looked down at Adelia. “We’ll hang on to her until the last minute, I think, just in case. She can come up and help me look for the letters.”

  “Why? She’ll be better down here.” Schwyz was jealous.

  The abbot was patient with him. “Because I didn’t see any letters lying around when we were here last, but little Mistress Big Eyes had one, hadn’t you, my dear? If she found one, she can find the others. Bind her hands, if you like, but in front this time and not too tight; she’s looking wan.”

  Adelia’s hands were pinioned again—not gently, either.

  “Up, up.” The abbot pointed her toward the stairs. “Up, up, up.” To the mercenary, he said, “Tell the men to put their minds to my dinner. And Schwyz ...” The tone had changed.

  “What?”

  “Set a damn good watch on that river.”

  He’s frightened, Adelia thought suddenly. He, too, credits Henry with supernatural powers. Oh, dear God, let him be right.

  Going up the tiny, wedge-shaped, slippery, winding steps without the balancing use of hands was not easy, but Adelia did better than the abbot, who was grunting with effort before they reached the second landing. That was the stage where the tower cut them off from the noise at its base, imposing a silence in which the echo of their footsteps troubled the ears as if they disobeyed an ordinance from the dead. Go back. This is a tomb.

  Light that was hardly light at all came, sluggish, through the arrow slits onto the same broken mess that had littered the landings when she’d climbed up here with Rowley. Nobody had swept it away, nobody ever would.

  Up and up, past Rosamund’s apartments, empty of their carpets and gold ornaments now, looted by mercenaries, maybe even the Aquitanians, while Eleanor had kept her vigil over a corpse. Much good it had done them; loot and looters had gone to the bottom of the Thames.

  They were getting close to the top now.

  I don’t want to go in there. Why doesn’t it stop? It’s impossible I should die here. Why doesn’t somebody stop this?

  The last landing, the door a crack open but with its ornate key in the lock.

  Adelia stood back. “I’m not going in.”

  Gripping her shoulder, the abbot pushed her in front of him. “Dakers, my dame. Here’s the Abbot of Eynsham, your old friend, come to pay his respects to your mistress.”

  A smell like a blast of wind teetered him on the threshold.

  The room was furnished as Adelia had last seen it. No looting here—there hadn’t been time.

  Rosamund no longer sat at the writing table, but something lay on the bed with the frail curtains framing it and a cloak covering its upper half.

  There was no sign of Dakers, but, if she had wanted to preserve her mistress still, she had made the mistake of closing the windows and lighting funerary candles.

  “Dear God.” With a handkerchief to his nose, the abbot hurried around the room, blowing out candles and opening the windows. “Dear God, the whore stinks. Dear God.”

  Moist, gray air refreshed the chamber slightly. Eynsham came back to the bed, his eyes fascinated.

  “Leave her,” Adelia advised him.

  He whipped the cloak off the body and let it fall to the floor. “Aach.”

  Her lovely hair fanned out from the decomposing face onto a pillow, with another pillow propping her crown near the top of her head. The crossed hands on her breast were mercifully hidden by a prayer book. Feet bulged wetly out of the tiny gold slippers that peeped from under the graceful, carefully arranged folds of a gown as blue as a spring sky. Patches of ooze were staining its silk.

  “My, my,” said the abbot softly. “Sic transit Rosa Mundi. So the rose of all the world rots like any other ... Rosamund the Foul ...”

  “Don’t you dare,” Adelia shouted at him. If she’d had her hands free, she’d have hit him. “Don’t you dare mock her. You brought her to this, and, by God, this is what you’ll come to—your soul with it.”

  “Oof.” He stepped back like a child faced by a furious parent. “Well, it’s a horror ... admit it’s a horror.”

  “I don’t care. You treat her with respect.”

  For a moment he was wrong-footed by his own lapse in taste. Tentatively, standing well back from the bed, his hand traced a blessing in the air toward it. “Requiescat in pace.” After a moment, he said, “What is that white stuff growing out of her face?”

  “Grave wax,” Adelia told him. Actually, it was very interesting; she’d not seen it on a human flesh before, only on that of a sow at the death farm.

  For a moment she was a mistress in the art of death again, aware only of the phenomenon in front of her, vaguely irritated that lack of time and means were preventing her from examining it.

  It’s because she was fat, she thought. The sow in Salerno had been fat, and Gordinus had kept it in an airtight tin chest away from flies. “You see, my child? Bereft of insects, this white grease—I call it corpus adipatus—will accrete on plumper areas, cheeks, breasts, buttocks, et cetera, and hold back putrefaction, yes, actually delay it. Though whether it causes the delay or the delay causes it is yet to be determined.”

  Bless him, Gordinus had called it a marvel, which it was, and damn it that she was seeing it manifest on a human corpse only now.

  It was especially interesting that the room’s new warmth was, to judge from what was seeping through Rosamund’s gown, bringing on putrefaction at the selfsame time. That couldn’t be caused by flies—could it?—there were none at this time of year ... blast it, if her hands were free, she could find out what was breeding under the material ...

  “Oh, what?” she asked crossly. The abbot was pulling at her.

  “Where does she keep the letters?”

  “What letters?” This opportunity to advance knowledge might never come again. If it wasn’t flies ...

  He swung her round to face him. “Let me explain the position to you, my dear. In all this I have only been pursuing my Christian duty to bring down a king who had the good Saint Thomas murdered on the steps of his own cathedral. I intended a civil war that our gracious queen would win. Since that outcome now seems unlikely, I need to retrieve my position because, if Henry finds my letters, Henry will send them to the Pope. And will the Holy Father sanction what I have done to punish the wicked? Will he say, ‘Well done, thou good and faithful Robert of Eynsham, you have advanced our great cause’? He will not. He must pretend outrage, because a worthless whore was poisoned in the process. He will wash his Pilate’s hands. Will there be oak leaves? Reward? Ah, no.”

  He stopped savoring the sound of his own voice. “Find those letters for me, mistress, or when Henry comes he will discover in the ashes of his bordello the bones of not just one of his harlots but two.” He was diverted by a happy thought. “Together, in each other’s arms, perhaps. Yes, perhaps ...”

  He mustn’t see that she was afraid; he mustn’t see that she was afraid. “In that case, the letters will be burned, too,” she said.

  “Not if the bitch kept them in a metal box. Where are they? You had one, mistress, and were quick enough to show it around. Where did she keep the letters?”

  “On the table, I took it from the table.”

  “If she kept one, she kept more.” He sho
uted for the housekeeper again. “Dakers. She’ll know. Where is the hellhag?”

  And then Adelia knew where Dakers was.

  All the visits he’d made to this room, and he’d never known he was observed from a garderobe with a spy hole. He didn’t know now.

  Eynsham was examining the table, sweeping its writing implements aside, sending the ancient bowl in which Rosamund had kept sweetmeats onto the floor, where it broke. He bent to look under the table. There was a grunt of satisfaction. He came up holding a crumpled piece of vellum. “Is this all there was?”

  “How could I know?” It was the letter Rosamund had been writing to the queen, that Eleanor in her fury had thrown to the floor. Adelia had given the abbot’s template to poor Father Paton and, if she died for it, she wasn’t going to tell this man that there were others hidden in a box stool only inches from his right boot.

  Let him doubt, let there be a worm of worry for as long as he lives.

  Great God, he’s reading it.

  The abbot had lumbered to the open window and was holding the parchment to the light. “Such an appalling hand the trollop had,” he said. “Still, it’s amazing she could write at all.”

  And let Dakers doubt him. No wonder the housekeeper had laughed as they were taken to the boats that night; she’d seen Eynsham, who had always been Rosamund’s friend and, therefore, would be a friend to her.

  If she was listening now, if she could be got to switch sides ...

  Adelia raised her voice. “Why did you make Rosamund write letters to Eleanor?”

  The abbot lowered the parchment, partly exasperated, partly amused. “Listen to the creature. Why does she ask a question when her brain cannot possibly encompass the answer? What use to tell you? How can you even approach in understanding the exigencies that we, God’s agents, are put to in order to keep His world on its course, the descent we must make into the scum, the instruments we must use—harlots like that one on the bed, cutthroats, all the sweepings of the cesspit, to achieve a sacred aim.”

  He was telling her anyway. A wordy man. A man needing the reassurance of his own voice and, even more, the sanctification of what he had done.

  And still hopeful. It surprised her. That he was having to abandon his great game as a lost cause and desert his championship of Eleanor was stimulating him, as if certain he could retrieve the situation with charm, tactics, a murder here or there, using the false urbanity, his common-man-with-learning, all the air in the balloon that had bounced him into the halls of popes and royalty ...

  A mountebank, really, Adelia thought.

  Also a virgin. Mansur had seen it, told her, but Mansur, with the superiority of a man who could hold an erection, had discounted the agony of supposed failure turned to malevolence. Another churchman might bless a condition that ensured his chastity, but not this one; he wanted, lusted after, that most natural and commonplace gift that he was denied.

  Perhaps he was making the world pay for it, meddling with brilliance in high politics, pushing men and women round his chessboard, discarding this one, moving that one, compensating himself for the appalling curiosity that kept him outside their Garden of Eden as he jumped up and down in an effort to see inside it.

  “To stimulate war, my dear,” he was saying. “Can you understand that? Of course you can’t—you are the clay from which you were made and the clay to which you will return. A war to cleanse the land of a barbarous and unclean king. To avenge poor Becket. To return England to God’s writ.”

  “Rosamund’s letters would do all that?” she asked.

  He looked up. “Yes, as a matter of fact. A wronged and vengeful woman, and believe me, nobody is more vengeful than our gracious Eleanor, will escape any bonds, climb any mountains, cross all oceans to wreak havoc on the wrongdoer. And thus she did.”

  “Then why did you have Rosamund poisoned?”

  “Who says I did?” Very sharp.

  “Your assassin.”

  “The merry Jacques has been chattering, has he?

  I must set Schwyz onto that young man.”

  “People will think the queen did it.”

  “The king does, as was intended,” he said vaguely.

  “Barbarians, my dear, are easily manipulated.” He turned back to the letter and continued to read. “Excellent, oh excellent,” he said. “I’d forgotten ... To the ‘supposed Queen of England ... from the true and very Queen of this country, Rosamund the Fair.’ What I had to endure to persuade that tedious wench to this ... Robert, Robert, such a subtle fellow you are ... ”

  A draft twitched at Adelia’s cloak. The hanging behind Rosamund’s bed had lifted. As air came up the corbel of the hidden garderobe and into the room, it brought a different, a commoner stench to counter that of the poor corpse on the bed. It was cut off as the hanging dropped back.

  Adelia walked across to the window. The abbot was still holding the letter to the light, reading it. She took up a position where, if he looked up, he would see her and not the figure creeping down the side of the bed. It had no knife in its hand, but it was still death—this time, its own.

  Dakers was dying; Adelia had seen that yellowish skin and receded eyes too often not to know what they meant. The fact that the woman was walking at all was a miracle, but she was. And silently.

  Help me, Adelia willed her. Do something. Without moving, she used her eyes in appeal. Help me.

  But Dakers didn’t look at her, nor at the abbot. All her energy was bent on reaching the staircase.

  Adelia watched the woman slip between the partially open door and its frame without touching either and disappear. She felt a tearing resentment. You could have hit him with something.

  The abbot had sat himself in Rosamund’s chair as he read, still muttering bits of the letter out loud. “‘... and I did please the king in bed as you never did, so he told me ...’ I’ll wager you did, girl. Sucking and licking, I’ll wager you did. ‘... he did moan with delight ...’ I’ll wager he did, you filthy trollop ...”

  He’s exciting himself with his own words.

  As Adelia thought it, he glanced up—into her eyes. His face gorged. “What are you looking at?”

  “Nothing,” she told him. “I am looking at you and seeing nothing.” Schwyz was calling from the stairs, but his voice was drowned in Eynsham’s scream: “You judge me? You, a whore ... judge me?”

  He got up, a gigantic wave rising, and engulfed her. He clutched her to his chest and carried her so that her feet trailed between his knees. Blinded, she thought he was going to drop her out of the window, but he turned her round, holding her high by the scruff of the neck and her belt. For a second, she glimpsed the bed, heard the grunt as she was thrown down onto what lay on it.

  As Adelia’s body landed on the corpse, its belly expelled its gases with a whistle.

  The abbot was screaming. “Kiss her. Kiss, kiss, kiss ... suck, lick, you bitches.” He pushed her face into Rosamund’s. He was twisting Adelia’s head like a piece of fruit, pressing it down into the grease. “Sniff, suck, lick ...”

  She was suffocating in decomposing flesh.

  “Rob. Rob.”

  The pressure on her head lessened slightly, and she managed to turn her smeared face sideways and breathe.

  “Rob. Rob. There’s a horse in the stable.”

  It stopped. It had stopped.

  “No rider,” Schwyz said. “Can’t find a rider, but there’s somebody here.”

  “What sort of horse?”

  “Destrier. A good one.”

  “Is it his? He can’t be here. Jesus save us, is he here?”

  The slam of the door cut off their voices.

  Adelia rolled off the bed and groped her way across the floor to one of the windows, her tied hands searching outside the sill for its remnant of snow. She found some and shoved it into her mouth. Another window, more snow into the mouth, scrubbing her teeth with it, spitting. More, for the face, nostrils, eyes, hair.

  She went from window to windo
w. There wasn’t enough snow in the world, not enough clean, numbing ice ...

  Drenched, shaking, she slumped into Rosamund’s chair, and with her pinioned hands still scrubbing at her neck, she laid her head on the table and gave herself up to heaving, gasping sobs. Uninhibited, like a baby, she wept for herself, for Rosamund, Eleanor, Emma, Allie, all women everywhere and what was done to them.

  “What are you bawling for?” a male voice said, aggrieved. “You think that’s bad? Try spending time cooped up in a shithole with Dakers for company.”

  A knife ripped the rope away from round her hands. A handkerchief was pushed against her cheek. It smelled of horse liniment. It smelled beautiful.

  With infinite care, she turned her head so that her cheek rested on the handkerchief and she could squint at him.

  “Have you been in there all the time?” she asked.

  “All the time,” the king told her.

  Still with her head on the table, she watched him walk over to the bed, pick up his cloak, and replace it carefully over the corpse. He went to the door to try its latch. It didn’t move. He bent down to peer through the keyhole.

  “Locked,” he said, as if it was a comfort.

  The ruler of an empire that stretched from the border of Scotland to the Pyrenees was in worn hunting leathers—she’d never seen him in anything else; few people did. He walked with the rolling bandiness of a man who spent more time in the saddle than out of it. Not tall, not handsome, nothing to distinguish him except an energy that drew the eye. When Henry Plantagenet was in the room, nobody looked anywhere else.

  Deeper lines ran from his nose to the corners of his mouth than when she’d last seen him, there was a new dullness in his eyes, and his red hair was dimmer; something had gone out of him and not been replaced.

  Relief brought a manic tendency to giggle. Adelia began rubbing her wrists. “Where are your men, my lord?”

  “Ah, well there ...” Grimacing, he came back from the door and edged round the table to peer cautiously out. “They’re on their way, only a few, mind, but picked men, fine men. I had a look at the situation in Oxford and left young Geoffrey to take it before he moves on to Godstow.”